by Louis Bayard
“Unless you’re still tired from the other day,” I said. “I’ll certainly understand if you are.”
What choice did he have now? He laid his hat on the ground, rubbed his hands together, gave me a frowning nod, and said, “Ready.”
Being small, he could cleave to the icehouse’s stone surface rather well, and he slipped only once, as he was climbing onto the cornice. But his right foot held fast, and soon he was drawing himself up and over. Half a minute later, he was crouched like a gargoyle on the crest.
“Can you see me from where you are?” I called up.
Kssst.
“Sorry. Can’t hear you, Mr. Poe.”
“ Yes.” A hissing whisper.
“You needn’t worry. We’re quite alone for the time being, and if anyone hears me, they’ll just write me off as insane, which—sorry, what was that, Mr. Poe?”
“Please tell me why I’m up here.”
“Oh, yes! What you’re looking at is the scene of the crime.” With my feet, I sketched out an area roughly twenty yards square. “The second crime,” I corrected myself. “This is where Leroy Fry’s heart was removed.”
I was standing now just north and a little northeast of the icehouse door. To the northwest lay the officers’ quarters, to the west the cadet barracks, to the south the Academies, and to the east the guard post at Fort Clinton. A very sensible choice our man had made: he’d found the one spot where he might be assured of carrying out his work unseen.
“Funny thing,” I said. “I’ve searched all round this icehouse. Crawled on my hands and knees, got at least two pairs of trousers dirty. It never occurred to me until now to try a—a different vantage point.”
His vantage point, I meant. The man who’d cut through Leroy Fry’s flesh and bone, soaked his hands in the drip and stench of a once-living body.
“Mr. Poe, can you hear me?”
“ Yes.”
“Very good. I’d like you to look down now, to where I’m standing, and tell me, please, if you see any—any gaps in the ground cover. By that I mean, any places where the grass or the soil seems to be broken. Where a rock or a stick might have been driven into the ground.”
There was a long pause. Long enough that I was on the verge of repeating myself when I heard a long hiss.
“Sorry, Mr. Poe, I can’t—”
“By your left foot.”
“By my left . . . by my . . . yes. Yes, I see it.”
A small indentation, maybe three inches round. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out a shiny white stone—I’d collected a mess of them by the river that morning—pressed it into the crevice and stepped away.
“There you are,” I said. “Maybe now you can see the value, Mr. Poe, of a God’s-eye view. I doubt I would ever have caught that with my—my mortal eyes. Now, if you can just tell me where else you see gaps. Of roughly the same size and shape.”
It was a halting business. He needed at least five minutes before he could begin in earnest. Between sightings, still more time elapsed, and on several occasions he changed his mind and had me remove the stone marker I had just set down. And because he insisted on whispering everything, the task of following his directions was a bit like groping down an alley with only a firefly as a guide.
He fell silent again. And then sent me scurrying in an unforeseen direction, some three yards away from the area I’d sketched out for him.
“We’re leaving the crime scene, Mr. Poe.”
But he insisted I put a stone there. And kept insisting and kept pushing the perimeter outward until it no longer made any sense whatsoever. I felt the stock of stones in my pocket dwindling, and a dismal feeling came over me as I saw the terrain I’d limned so neatly in my head popping its borders.
“Are there any more, Mr. Poe?” I called out wearily.
A good half an hour had passed by this point, and my little gargoyle declared that there was one more. Which was, for strange reasons, the hardest to find of all. Three paces north . . . five paces east . . . no, six paces east . . . no, you passed it . . . there . . . no, not there, there! His scratching whisper trailed me the whole time like a gnat . . . until at last the gap was found and the marker inserted, and I could hear the relief in my voice as I said:
“You may come to earth now, Mr. Poe.”
Scrambling down, he jumped the last six feet and landed on his knees in the grass. Then melted once again into the blackness of the icehouse’s interior.
“You mentioned the other day, Mr. Poe, how the nature of this crime— the taking of Leroy Fry’s heart—drew you back to the Bible. I must admit I was already moving in the same direction. Not to the Bible, exactly—there’s not much that would make me do that—but I couldn’t help wondering if there weren’t something in this business that smacked of religion.”
His hands flashed in the darkness.
“Well, really, the whole business smacks of it,” I said. “Leroy Fry falls in with a ‘bad bunch’ a couple of summers back and then does what? Runs straight to the prayer squad. Thayer sees Fry’s body and thinks of what?
A religious fanatic. So then, let’s take religion as our starting premise, and let’s ask ourselves, might there be some traces left of the original act? Some signs of a rite—I mean, a ceremony. Stones or—or candles or some such, placed in an intentional way?”
Poe’s hands were folded together now: soft, priestly hands.
“Well, then,” I went on, “if such objects were used, it stands to reason our man would have removed them the moment he was done. No sense leaving evidence. But what of the—the impressions made by the objects? Those would have taken much longer to erase, and there was precious little time as it was, what with the search party already on its way. Not to mention, our man had a heart that needed seeing to. Very well, then, he takes away the objects, but he doesn’t likely stay to fill the holes the objects made.” I smiled at those hands in the icehouse. “That’s what we’re doing today, Mr. Poe. We’re finding the holes he left behind.”
I scanned the white stones studded like tiny grave markers amid the pale grass. From my coat pocket, I drew out a pencil and a notebook. Moving in a wave pattern, I began calibrating the distances between the stones, sketching as I went, until the paper held a lattice of dots.
“What have you found?” whispered Poe from the depths of the icehouse.
It was only when I handed him the page, I think, that I really saw what was there:
“A circle,” said Poe.
Circle it was. Fully ten feet in diameter, by my estimate. Considerably more space than Leroy Fry’s body would have consumed. Large enough to hold half a dozen Leroy Frys.
“But the pattern inside the circle,” said Poe, his face bending low over the paper, “I can’t get anywhere with that.”
We both stared at it a little longer, trying to connect the inner to the outer dots. Nothing worked. The harder I looked, the more the dots seemed to scatter . . . until I let my gaze settle on the stones themselves.
“Hmm,” I said. “It only stands to reason.”
“What?”
“If we missed some of the dots on the circle’s circumference—see?—I’d be willing to wager we missed some inside the circle as well. Let me just . . .”
I set the paper on top of the notebook and began drawing a line through the dots that were closest together, and then I kept going, barely aware of what I was doing, until I heard Poe say:
“Triangle.”
“Yes, indeed,” I said. “And from what they told me, I’m guessing that Leroy Fry was right inside that triangle. And our man was—he was . . .”
Where?
Years ago, the family of a farrier in the Five Points paid me (with several lifetimes’ worth of savings) to look into his death. The fellow had been cudgeled and branded with one of his own irons. On his forehead I found a raised U of flesh, as though a horse had stepped on him. I remember running my hand along that scar and wondering about the person who’d done it and then lookin
g up and seeing—no, I won’t say that—imagining the killer standing by the door with the iron still smoking in his hand, and in his eyes a look . . . rage and fear, I suppose, and a certain shyness, as though he doubted he was worthy of my notice. Well, the actual killer, when we found him, was very little as I’d pictured him, but the look in the eyes, that was the same. It stayed like that, too, all the way to the gallows.
That particular case made me a believer in, well, pictures. But that afternoon by the icehouse, Reader, there was no picture. No one looking back at me. Or maybe it’s better to say that whoever was there kept changing position and shape . . . multiplying.
“Well, this has been most helpful, Mr. Poe. You’ll need to go off to parade now, and I’m expected at Captain Hitchcock’s, so I’ll just—”
I turned to find him kneeling in the grass. His face tilted down. Muttering like a crow.
“What is it, Mr. Poe?”
“I saw them from the roof,” he said. “They didn’t fit, you see. So I didn’t . . .” His voice trailed off into more muttering.
“I’m not quite clear yet, Mr. Poe.”
“Scorch marks!” he cried. “Quickly, now!”
He tore a page from my notebook and spread it across the grass and began shading the page with the pencil, in brisk sweeping motions that soon filled the paper—or nearly filled it. For when he raised the paper to the light, we could see, like a message painted on a misty window:
“It looks like . . . SHJ,” read Poe. “Society of . . .”
Oh, yes, we ran through all the societies we could think of. Sororities. Schools, spaniels. An ungodly time we spent there, kneeling in the grass, combing our brains.
“Hold off,” Poe said suddenly.
He squinted at the paper and, in a low voice, said, “If the individual letters are reversed, mightn’t we then expect the whole message to be reversed?”
At once I tore off a new page and wrote out the letters in large, bold strokes so they filled the paper from end to end.
“Jesus Christ,” said Poe.
I tipped myself back into a sitting position and gave my knees a rub. Then I reached for some tobacco.
“Common enough inscription in the old days,” I said. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it written backward, though.”
“Unless,” said Poe, “someone other than Christ was being invoked. Someone directly opposite to Christ.”
I was sitting in the grass, chewing my plug. Poe was studying a train of clouds. A blackbird was whistling, and a tree toad was gargling. Everything was different.
“You know,” I said finally, “I’ve got a friend who might be of some use to us.”
Poe only half glanced at me. “Is that a fact?”
“Oh yes,” I said, “he’s quite the expert on symbols and . . . rituals and the like. He’s got an extensive collection of books pertaining to the—to the . . .”
“The occult,” Poe answered.
And after a few more seconds of chewing, I allowed as how occult probably was the right word for it.
“Fascinating fellow,” I said. “My friend, I mean. Name of Professor Pawpaw.”
“What an extraordinary name!”
I explained to Poe that Pawpaw was Indian by birth, or rather half Indian and, oh, a quarter French and God knows what else. And Poe asked me then if he was a genuine professor. And I said well he’s a scholar, no doubt about that, in great demand among society ladies. Mrs. Livingston once paid him twelve silver dollars for the pleasure of a single hour of his time.
Poe gave a negligent shrug. “I hope you have some means of paying him, then,” he said. “I’m in arrears myself, and Mr. Allan won’t even send me money for mathematical instruments.”
I told him not to worry, I would take care of it. Then I bid him good day and watched his slender figure picking its way (with no great speed) down the Plain.
What I never got around to telling him was this (and didn’t the very thought of it make me laugh out loud as I walked back to the hotel?): I had already found the best possible compensation for Professor Pawpaw. I would bring him the head of Edgar A. Poe.
Narrative of Gus Landor
12
November 3rd
Professor Pawpaw’s cottage is only a league or so inland from mine, but it lies at the end of a steep climb, and the path is so overgrown you must, fifty yards short of the house, abandon your horse and hack your way through a lane of cedar bushes. You are rewarded then with a piazza wreathed in jasmine and sweet honeysuckle. Oh, and a dead pear tree, with a long cloak of bignonia blossoms and, dangling from every arm, wicker birdcages full of mockingbirds, orioles, bobolinks, and canaries, all of them singing from dusk to dawn without cease. No obvious harmony, but if you listen long enough, either the jangling will take on a pattern or (this is Pawpaw’s theory) you’ll give up on pattern altogether.
Now, if Poe had got his way, we’d have made the trip to Pawpaw’s that very night. I said we’d never find the place in the dark. Besides, I wanted to give the professor a bit of warning. That very night, an Academy messenger was dispatched with a note from me.
The next morning, Poe woke up, chewed a piece of chalk, and then presented his white tongue to Dr. Marquis, who sent him off with a fistful of calomel powders and a note excusing him from duties. Poe then squirmed through a loose fence board in the woodyard and met me just south of the guard post, where we mounted Horse and set off on the high road from Buttermilk Falls.
It was a chill, clouded morning. The only heat seemed to come from the trees, rearing up from pale granite ledges, and from the dead leaves that shone out of pools and glens and beds of spongy moss. The path rose quickly as we crept round bulging faces of stone, and Poe yammered in my ear about Tintern Abbey and Burke’s principle of the sublime, and Nature is America’s truest poet, Mr. Landor, and the more he talked the more I felt the dread wrapping me round. Here I was, smuggling a cadet off the reservation—knowing full well that Hitchcock and his officers made a point of inspecting barracks quarters every day. Woe to the cadet who reported himself “sick” and failed to answer the double knock on the door!
Well, rather than think about those consequences, I told Poe all I knew about Pawpaw.
His mother was a Huron squaw, his father a French-Canadian arms trader. At a young age he was taken in by a tribe of Wyandot Indians, who were massacred in short order by purposeful Iroquois. The lone survivor, Pawpaw was rescued by a Utica bone dealer who gave him a Christian name and raised him on strict terms: church twice a day; catechism and hymns before bed; seventy Bible verses a week. (In all respects, it was the same as my own upbringing, except that Pawpaw was allowed to play cards.) After six years, the bone dealer fell prey to scrofula. The boy then landed in the home of a charity-minded textile titan, who died soon after and left Pawpaw six thousand a year. Pawpaw promptly reclaimed his Indian name and removed himself to a Jersey-freestone house in Warren Street, where he issued monographs on alcoholism, manumission, henbane—and the reading of the human skull. Just as his fame was cresting, he removed himself again, this time to the Highlands. He communicates now mostly by post, bathes twice a year, and regards his past with a certain wryness. Once, upon being called a noble savage, Pawpaw was heard to say, “Why spoil it with the noble part?”
All that Sunday school, you see: he needs to shock people. Which was why, maybe, he’d prepared for our coming by hanging a dead rattlesnake over the door and strewing the front walk with frog bones. The bones crunched softly beneath our feet and stuck in the crevices of our boots so that we were still picking them out when Pawpaw appeared. Compact and heavy-chested, he stood in the doorway with an absent air, as though he’d come out simply to gauge the weather. We stared at him, for Pawpaw is made for staring—it’s his cause and his effect. The first time I came, he greeted me in full Indian regalia, waving a flint arrowhead. Today, for reasons beyond me or even him, he was dressed as an old Dutch farmer. Homespun coats and breeches, pewter buckles, and t
he most enormous shoes I have ever seen: you could have packed a man in them. The only things not quite in keeping were the eagle’s claw that dangled round his neck and the skinny line of indigo that ran from his right temple to the tip of his nose (a new touch).
Slowly, those handsome hazel eyes of his began to glimmer with understanding. “Ohh!” He cut straight for Poe. Grabbed him by the arm, hauled him over the doorsill. “You were right!” the professor shouted back to me. “He’s perfectly remarkable. Such an enlarged organ!”
By now, he and Poe were half running toward the parlor. Which gave me leave to stroll down the professor’s front hall, to see once again the bison rug and the stuffed screech owl, the flails and harnesses hanging on the walls like museum relics. By the time I reached the parlor, a row of apples was spluttering in the hearth, Poe had been flung into a Duncan Phyfe armchair, and over him stood Pawpaw, with his silver-copper skin and potato nose, rubbing his fingertips together and proffering, in lieu of a cordial, the gapped line of his own gray teeth.
