The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by Brian Stableford

  The door of the house had previously been boarded up, rather comprehensively, but the boards had been recently stripped away. The lock on the door had been broken, and the only thing securing it shut at present was a timber prop.

  “Someone has clearly got here ahead of us,” I remarked, exercising my gift for understatement.

  Dupin did not answer, but removed the prop and made his way inside. Just inside the threshold, in a narrow vestibule, he took a candle from his pocket, and a flat tray with a small spike on which to mount it, but he had to ask me to make use of my tinder-box in order to light it. I obliged, and we went into the hallway. The foot of the staircase was directly ahead of us, no more than a few feet away. There was a single door to our left, which apparently gave access to all the ground floor rooms.

  The footprints in the dust suggested that I had been correct to use the singular. Someone had got here ahead of us. I watched Dupin compare the size of his own footprint with that of our recent predecessor. His feet were unusually small, for a man’s, but they were still larger than those of our adversary. Dupin’s careful or she echoed in my consciousness once more...but I could not remember, having only seen them briefly during a curtain-call, whether Monsieur Bazailles or Monsieur Soulié might have had unusually small feet for a man. I was confident that the actor playing the Mephistophelean manifestation of the Devil in La Cantate du Diable could not have made those footprints, but that was the only elimination of which I felt certain.

  “Can you tell when the footprints were made?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” he said, “but not tonight, I think—which means that the treasure-seeker did know where Zann lived before going to see Clamart, and presumably searched the whole of this building before searching the coffin. He is undoubtedly methodical.”

  So saying, he went through the door to investigate the ground-floor rooms. The stranger had been there before us, apparently going back and forth several times.

  “The stove has not been lit recently,” Dupin observed, as we peered into the kitchen, “but there is fire-wood in the bunker that certainly has not been lying there for years.

  “The person with the small feet intends to come back, then?” I suggested.

  “Almost certainly,” Dupin agreed, “and perhaps to stay for some little while. The Prefect will need to post spies to watch the house.”

  After consulting the footsteps in the corridor again, Dupin went up the stairs. He did not pause, however, on any of the three intermediate floors, going straight up to the topmost one. In doing that, he ignored all the side-tracks that our predecessor had followed, so he was evidently impatient to investigate the room in which Erich Zann had died.

  Once he had opened the door to Zann’s apartment, Dupin went straight to the window overlooking the precipice, the stream, the warehouse roofs, the Seine and the city. Then he knelt down to examine the footprints there, lowering his candle so as to shine the light on every speck of dust and cobweb.

  “No,” he said, ruminatively. “There’s no evidence that the seeker spent an unusually long time here, staring out of the window. Does that imply that he did not know the significance of the window, or merely that he did not feel any need to stand in contemplation?”

  In the meantime, I looked around the room carefully. There was no longer a bed there—presumably it had been sturdy enough to be sold, although it must have had a bolted iron frame in order to be transported downstairs. There was, however, a battered wooden writing-desk still in place against one wall, together with a stool hewn from similarly well-seasoned wood. There was also a small side-table, badly marked on the surface, set against the opposite wall, and a moth-eaten armchair beside the fireplace. Abandoned in a corner was a folding music-stand, now straitened into a clumsy, rusty javelin, devoid of any proper functionality.

  The mantelpiece bore an ill-assorted collection of candle-trays and candlesticks, together with—surely the most significant items of all—a dozen new wax candles and a tinder-box. They had not been there very long; when our predecessor returned, he—or she—evidently intended to use this garret for some purpose, if not as a bedroom.

  Dupin took the time to do what the earlier visitor had apparently not bothered to do. He stood before the window-sill for an unusually long interval, staring out. The ill-glazed window had been closed and shuttered, but our predecessor had thrown back the shutters and opened the leaded casement, perhaps to let light into the room rather than to expose the view. While Dupin stood stock still, I moved forward to join him, letting the door swing to behind me, borne by its own weight, until it stood ajar.

  I could hardly help remembering what Dupin and Palaiseau had said, in the course of their conversation, about there being something that he, the physician Fourmont and Monsieur Groix had seen, but that their co-conspirators had not. At first, I had assumed that the reference in question was to Erich Zann’s terror-stricken face, but had relaxed that assumption as time went by. Now I felt confirmed in the hypothesis that they had actually seen something through the window.

  “What is it that you’re looking for?” I asked Dupin.

  “Nothing,” he replied. “Mercifully, that is what I see—in the conventional sense of nothing significant. The barrier that separates our world from the dimensions that impinge upon it must be thin here—perhaps that is why the house was originally built in such a precarious situation, although I have to admit that it has withstood the ravages of wind, rain and lightning with surprising sternness, and has amply justified the faith of its builders—but the boundary remains in place, when there is no vibratory force to breach it.”

  “What boundary do you mean?” I asked.

  “The three dimensions of perceived space are a trifle illusory in their regularity,” Dupin told me. “The dream-dimensions have a physical presence of their own, which sometimes allows them to intrude through the walls of geometrical order almost as easily as they break the papery walls of sleep. Sometimes, the Crawling Chaos can be seen as well as felt. Here, as mapmakers were once wont to say, be dragons—but not tonight.”

  “Did you expect to see dragons?” I asked him.

  “No,” he replied. “Not at present.”

  “But you do remember seeing dragons—or monsters, or demons—once before: on the night when Erich Zann died?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I did see dragons, monsters, or demons. They were ghostly by then, for the substance lent to them temporarily by Zann’s playing had evaporated—but they were still lurking at the periphery of vision, and the echoes of their own ecstatic singing were still faintly audible, in my mind if not my ears.”

  “Were they sirens rather than dragons, then?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “Their voices had nothing seductive about them, and their singing was more akin to a series of long, slow notes sounded by a stringed instrument—not a violin, but something even lower in pitch than a bass cello—than it was to the livelier and more colorful notes produced by human vocal cords.”

  “What did these monsters look like?” I asked. “Had they wings? Were they serpentine? Were they the really dragons of legend, or something more akin to the Lernean Hydra, or the demons of Dante’s Inferno?”

  “Perhaps, had they still had material substance, they would have assumed some such form,” he told me, “but I can’t be sure. The witness who made the deposition did not describe them in those terms, but he saw them when they had barely begun to emerge, just as I saw them on the brink of disappearance, when they were similarly phantasmal. In his description, they had no shape at all; although the music Zann played, in combination with his own particular anxieties, had prompted him to imagine dancing satyrs engaged in a furious bacchanal, all that he actually saw was the blackness of infinite space itself, animated by, in his words, ‘chaos and pandemonium’. What he saw, I believe, was Nyarlathotep, not crawling, as is its habit, but roused to a state of uncommon excitement, stretching the very fabric of reality in its fervor, mightier by far than
any organizing divinity, insuppressible and indestructible. It seemed plural, of course, because it is the one thing in the universe that cannot be envisaged as a whole. It is the unwhole within the whole, which complements the whole by its negation of wholeness, and which is, in the purest and most absolute sense of the term, unwholesome.”

  I actually shivered in response to that bizarre description, vague as it was—but the shiver moved me to an immediate protest. “Such decadent terminology seems unnatural in your mouth,” I told him. “You are the great rationalist, the master of logic. Were you not unkind to Palaiseau just now, when he hinted at a supernatural explanation for his new-bound ability to play Zann’s Stradivarius?”

  “I suppose I was,” he admitted. “Not so much because I could not believe him, I must admit, as because I did not want to believe him, and I wanted to help him not to believe it. I have repressed the vision that I saw through this window for fifteen years, but standing on the spot brings it back to me with renewed force. Unlike the vehmgerichte, I cannot believe that Zann had made any literal pact with the Devil—but I heard him play, and knew by virtue of what I read to him from the Harmonies de l’Enfer what his ambition was. He was a reckless man, and his genius was capable of breaking the bounds of our self-imposed prison of reality.”

  “But he is dead now,” I reminded him. “Palaiseau might have learned to play the Stradivarius, but can he really play as Erich Zann played?”

  Dupin turned toward me, and smiled. “You’re right,” he said. “Zann is dead, and Palaiseau—even Palaiseau armed with the un-lost Stradivarius—is only a theater musician, fit for playing a caricature of Tartini’s dream, but not for breaching the walls of the world. If someone else believes he can do better...well, I remain to be convinced that he is anything more than a vain fool. Musicians of the ability of Erich Zann are rare, mercifully. I must not allow myself to be carried away by a surge of superstitious anxiety. We are here to gather evidence to help us identify a murderer, and that is all. We must focus our attention on the task in hand.”

  “Good,” I said, nodding in approval—but then I quivered again, even more profoundly than before. I had heard a noise.

  Dupin heard it too: the sound of soft footsteps ascending the stairs that we had recently climbed. In spite of the fact that the climber was obviously trying to be quiet, muffling his footfalls as best he could, there was no concealing his slow and ponderous tread. He was obviously a far heavier man than me, Dupin or our mysterious predecessor.

  I was rooted to the spot, but Dupin was magnificent. He simply strode to the door, candle in hand, and drew back the unfastened batten.

  “Bonsoir, Lestrade,” he said to the man on the staircase. “Should you not be guarding your master?”

  “I forbade him to come up here alone, as he urgently wished to do when he glimpsed the flicker of a candle in the high window,” the inspector told him, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that he had given himself away. “He guessed that it must be your light, but I persuaded him to wait in the carriage at the foot of the hill until I had made sure. The coachman is an experienced agent, armed with a brace of pistols, and he is skilled in their use, should any necessity arise. I’m glad to see that the Prefect’s instincts were sound, as usual—he felt sure that we would find you here, since you were not at Palaiseau’s. I assume that you were not in time to apprehend the person with the tiny feet.”

  “Did Palaiseau not tell you that we had come here?” Dupin asked, his voice suddenly taking on a new edge of anxiety.

  “Monsieur Palaiseau was unable to tell us anything,” the inspector reported, laconically. “He was dead when we arrived, with his head bashed in from behind, like Clamart’s. Monsieur Groix concluded that the murderer must have been waiting while you were interviewing Palaiseau, ready to make his move as soon as you departed.”

  “But Palaiseau should have been safe, at least for tonight!” Dupin exclaimed, in genuine distress. “Unless I have misjudged his motive badly, the murderer needs him to play the violin!”

  “The Stradivarius has been stolen,” Lestrade said, still with stolid equanimity. “Monsieur Groix assumes that its theft must have been the motive for Palaiseau’s murder—and presumably the other as well.”

  Dupin’s candlelit face was utterly distraught. “Whether it was or was not,” he declared, “I have made a serious error. The chain of my logic is broken; there is a complication in the scheme that I have not even glimpsed, as yet—and it has cost poor Palaiseau his life! What a dire and culpable fool I am! I expected the schemer to come after me, not even as a murderer, but as a trickster or a supplicant. Instead, he is playing with me, as a cat plays with a mouse. He is taunting me.”

  “Or she,” I said, automatically.

  “Oh, don’t be more of a fool than you can help!” Dupin exclaimed, intemperately. “This is not a woman’s work—I have been wrong about everything, including my estimate of possibilities, and I must make up the lost ground before any further tragedy occurs. Come on!” He set off down the stairs at a rapid pace.

  Lestrade and I followed him, but struggled to keep up. For once, Dupin was carried away, leaving all his native tranquility and indolence behind.

  “Is Palaiseau’s murder not a crime that a woman could have committed?” I asked him, when I eventually caught up—by which time we were outside the house. I was still somewhat aggrieved. “How, then, did the murderer gain access to Monsieur Palaiseau’s apartment, under the noses of the sergent de ville and the watchful Henriette? On whom, if not a woman he knew and trusted, would Palaiseau have turned his back when he knew what had happened to Clamart?”

  Dupin shook his head, as if I were merely being silly—but he did pause to ask Lestrade what Henriette had had to say for herself.

  “Nothing,” reported the inspector. “She’s dead too—but not with a crushed skull. She was found in her armchair next to the fire, apparently having passed away peacefully in her sleep. She was very old.”

  “Apparently!” I repeated, suggestively. “And what about the sergent de ville? What had he to say.”

  “That he saw no one go in after you came out. He claimed that if the murderer really was waiting for you to leave before committing the crime, then he—or she—must have been waiting inside the house.” We clattered down a flight of wooden steps attached to the face of the butte, which shook so tremulously under our combined weight that I feared it might come away from the rocky wall.

  “Let us hope that it is so,” Dupin said, “since it is now too late to hope for any better eventuality. Poor Henriette! Poor Palaiseau!”

  “Why should we hope that the murderer was inside the house?” I wanted to know.

  “Because an eavesdropper would surely have heard me say that the document has been burned—and must, therefore, heard Palaiseau say that he believed me. On the other hand, he did go on to kill Palaiseau, and probably Henriette too. The sergent de ville is obviously untrustworthy, though. Since he did not see the murderer make his escape, he could just as easily have failed to see him make his entrance. We do not know for sure that the murderer overheard anything at all.”

  We finally reached the Prefect’s carriage, and Monsieur Groix seemed very glad to see us, although we were all panting for breath. “Thank the Lord!” he said. “I feared that he might have killed you too, and left your candle burning to guide us to you. I’ve doubled the guard on the Rue Dunôt, although I haven’t removed the sentry outside your house in the Faubourg, Monsieur—even so, I doubt that either of you will get much sleep tonight.”

  “On the contrary,” said Dupin. “I will sleep, because I must—but I shall certainly try to do so with one eye open, with a pistol under my pillow.”

  “You should stay with me in the town-house,” I told him.

  “Quite the contrary,” he said. “I should let you alone, in order not to expose you to any further danger. If the murderer wants me, I shall be pleased to deal with him man to man, in the hope that I might put an
end to this madness before any more innocents are hurt. Besides which, my own apartment has but one door, and it has a good lock. The windows are inaccessible from the ground, without the assistance of wings. I shall feel much safer there than I ever could in your draughty mansion, which has a dozen easy access-points for a determined burglar.”

  Whether the nobler reason or the baser one was the true motive for his insistence, I felt obliged to concede the point, although I could not be grateful to him for pointing out that a single sentry could not possibly serve to keep me safe from any intrusion, although two would surely be adequate to prevent the violation of his abode. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask the Prefect for more protection, but I refrained; he would only say that I was probably irrelevant to the murderer’s quest, whatever it might be, while Dupin must now be reckoned to be in greater danger than before.

  When the carriage got under way again, Dupin rapidly summarized what we had learned from Palaiseau for the Prefect’s benefit, and what we had deduced from the footprints in the house in the Rue d’Auseuil—but he never mentioned Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, or the Abbé Appolonius’ Harmonies de l’Enfer, or the possibility that the music of Erich Zann had been capable of opening the world to invasion by the ultimate horror of sublimity; nor did the Prefect mention any such possibility himself.

  “Perhaps, now that he has the violin, the criminal will desist from further atrocities,” Monsieur Groix suggested.

  “Perhaps he will,” Dupin agreed—but I could almost hear his voice adding, silently, for the sole benefit of his own calculating brain: And perhaps the worst of his atrocities is yet to come. I knew that he must be thinking furiously, recalculating every possibility.

  “You should post a guard on the house with the high window, Monsieur,” I told him. “The firewood and the candles suggest that the blackguard with the small feet intends to return.”

  “Yes,” said Dupin. “You must do that, Monsieur le Préfet—but your watchers must be discreet. At all costs, they must not act intemperately—especially if they hear music coming from that room.”