Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (27 page)

“I tried to ask him
why,
but could barely manage to gurgle as the life seeped out of my body. Yet he understood me well enough, smiling that distant, cold, inhuman smile of his as he replied, ‘You may call it madness, but I do not. It
is
the greatest pleasure.’”

If it is true that the mesmerized can channel the voices of the dead, and if I truly spoke to the spirit of a murdered man, still I must ask: can the dead lie? Is his story true, or could it be some nightmare experienced by the soul in Limbo, no more to be believed than the mad visions that fill my own head every night?

There is no doubt in my mind that De La Roche met Dupin, for when I heard the altered voice of the medium describe his “distant, cold, inhuman smile,” I could see it myself, with my inward eye, recalling how Dupin, in the grip of his analytical passion, would become frigid and abstract, his expression vacantly staring, his voice rising to a higher tone as if (I sometimes fancied) he was possessed of a bi-part soul, his body inhabited in turn by one of two distinctly different personalities. But never did I for a moment imagine that one of those two selves might be evil incarnate; I always knew Dupin for a prodigy and a wonder, not a monster.

I broke my promise to the rest of the audience and did not satisfy their curiosity by translating the conversation I’d had with the dead French doctor. Instead, I pleaded an attack of the megrims, and staggered out of the house just as soon as young Miss W— was restored to her natural self. The fortunate girl retained no recollection whatsoever of anything that had transpired during her trance, and no one else could enlighten her on the subject of what the Frenchman had said.

I do not want to believe that my old friend has become a killer. But I sense no trickery, and can think of no reason why someone should wish to fool me, or to blacken the name of C. Auguste Dupin.

Perhaps the most terrible thing is that although I do not want to believe it, neither can I wholly disbelieve. Knowing him as I did, I can imagine how his own curiosity and reliance on rationality could have been his undoing. The lack of any
reason
for the series of murders in his last case always preyed upon his mind. However repugnant and absurd, the explanation given by Reclus for his own actions could not be dismissed. The idea of murder as a pleasure might have become a maggot in Dupin’s brain, eating away at him until he was finally driven to test the matter for himself.

Once having killed... But here my chain of reasoning breaks down, for I cannot believe that the man I knew, even at his most coldly analytical, could perform such a ghastly experiment. Surely he would not murder a helpless, harmless young woman simply to
test a theory
?

Even if he killed in self-defense, or to save someone else, killing someone who deserved to die... if, in so doing, he had tasted something of the intoxicating pleasure Reclus had promised, might he not have become addicted, driven to kill again?

But no, the idea is too repulsive. It is madness. Only a madman could conceive the notion of murder as “the greatest pleasure.” Reclus was mad.

And Dupin?

Dupin, if he has become a killer, must be mad, in the same, seemingly rational way as the man he sent to the guillotine, the man who infected him with his terrible, repulsive idea.

Already, in the day and night that have passed since the mesmeric
séance
of which I have written, fresh reports have reached New York of still more killings in France: two sisters, this time, their throats savagely chewed by an unknown creature.

Yet how can I tell the police what I know? More importantly, how can I convince them? A letter is easily dismissed, and if I made the effort of traveling to France to speak to the people in power there, I should probably find myself locked up. I can imagine how Dupin would respond, with a mocking, pitying smile: “A dead man told you I had killed him? And do you often converse with the dead? This is common in America? My dear friend, I fear you are suffering from a fever of the brain...”

Dupin has the ear of the French police, as I do not, but I have something else. I have the ear of the public, in this country and abroad. My readers will not like this story as much as they liked “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” I admit, I do not like it so much myself. Yet it must be told. I must beg my readers to supply the necessary ending.

By

My Dear Lestrade

I doubt you expected a further package from me for Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, given that last time you heard from me I was at death’s door. But the chill in my bones has passed and my doctor, a brusque devil, with none of the bedside manner of Watson, has told me to get air in my lungs and sun on my face. Whilst in that endeavor this afternoon, I experienced to my alarm something which brought back vividly to life one of the strange cases I investigated with the remarkable C. Auguste Dupin, long cloistered in fusty memory.

The local cinema is not a place I frequent often. I simply wanted somewhere to rest my feet, and can’t say I even took note of the film that was playing before I entered the gloom. What unfolded on screen I found both sordid and spectacular, at times a turgid melodrama, but punctuated with moments of the most lurid terror.

It slowly dawned on me as I saw that wretched underground lake, the abducted girl swept away in a gondola by the Phantom to his lair, that this was an adaptation of a novel I knew all too well. A beautiful soprano in love with a disfigured madman, a tepid variation on Beauty and the Beast: if only the truth, I thought, were as comforting in its roles of monster and victim. And when, in the Bal Masqué scene, the Phantom appeared as the Red Death from Poe’s story of that name, the irony tore an involuntary laugh from my throat, somewhat distracting some members of the audience, who hushed me with frowning sibilance.

The gross travesty of what really happened at the Paris Opera first appeared in the pages of
Le Gaulois
back in the first decade of this century, but now this motion picture, starring the renowned “Man of a Thousand Faces,” was spreading that fallacy to the world, projecting it in huge images, with organ accompaniment, for all to see. As I sat there watching the audience squirm and shriek at the monster’s unmasking, I thought: If only they knew the truth
...

You hold it in your hand, Inspector. Unmask it, if you dare. But I warn you, a decent man will be shaken by what he reads.

Holmes

* * *

Many mysteries came to the door of the man in the
Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête.
The district we lived in, the
Île de la Citée
, once thronged with thieves, whores, and murderers, but was now hemmed in by the gray edifice of the
Préfecture de Police
, law courts, and offices of civil servants, a bastion against the unrestrained and malevolent. Safe, but also strangely chill. He and I often yearned to stray into areas of the dissolute, vulgar, and unpredictable. At other times tales of the aberrant and profane beat a path, unbidden, to our door.

To relieve his inveterate boredom—and for the purpose of my further instruction in the science of “ratiocination”—Poe had set up a mirror at the window by which to observe the street below. When the brass bell rang unexpectedly at the
porte-cochère
on that particular April morning, echoing through the apartment, he asked me to report my observations in the short time it took for Le Bon to descend the stairs and return with our visitors.

“A man and a woman,” I began, squinting down at our guests. “She seems nervous, delicate, uncertain...”

“‘Seems’ is not a fact,” Poe interjected.

“Very well. I’d say from their relative ages he is her father. She wears a coat from
Le Bon Marché
and a black veil over her face, which indicates she is in mourning. I deduce therefore it is her husband who has died, mysteriously, and it is for that reason they have come. The man is around fifty-five years of age, rotund, and bears an uncanny resemblance to Balzac. Well-fed, and well off, by the cut of his jib. Overcoat worn over his shoulders in the manner of a Hussar. A definite military man. From his sallow skin tone and black hair there is Indian blood in his family tree, or Eurasian, possibly. And—hello?—a dash of red on his cravat. Blood? Good grief, perhaps the perpetrator of the deed is presenting himself to us with all the brazen aplomb of a murderer who thinks he is beyond the powers of detection...”

“Brilliant! That was truly instructive.” Poe jumped from his chair and combed his thin, paper-white hair in the mirror. “Instructive in how to arrive at an entirely erroneous conclusion. Remind me not to ask you to fetch me black peppercorns in a field of rabbit droppings.” I tried not to affect the disgruntlement of a schoolboy handed back homework that fell ruefully short of the mark. “That is not blood on his cuff, but strawberry conserve. To be exact, the one served with a
kipferl
at the
bijou boulangerie
on the Rue Bertrand Sluizer. Furthermore, he uses mustache wax by Marie Helene Rogeon, is a Corsican, has three brothers, lived in Avignon, the son of a shoe-mender, ran a ballet company, married a woman called Mathilde, and has five children. All girls. None married. Though one is the fiancée of a locomotive driver.”

“Heavens above!” My head was spinning. “How on earth...?”

Poe’s laugh was high and shrill as he slapped me on the shoulder. “My dear Holmes, forgive an old Southern gentleman his petty amusement! How could I resist teasing you when such an opportunity presented itself? I saw from the reflection that the man is Olivier Guédiguian, manager of the
Opéra de Paris.
The reason I know is very simply I have met him before, at the very
boulangerie
I mentioned: his habitual haunt for
petit dejeuner
. During our conversation he imparted a good deal about his life. At the time he was worried about a malignant superstition having a grip on his stage workers that some kind of, ahem,
specter
was causing damage and maladies of all descriptions. I was able to convince him that it was nothing but a series of accidents and coincidences, each perfectly explicable in its own right, but overall signifying nothing. And certainly nothing
supernatural
—the very word being a contradiction in terms. Metaphysics and philosophy! Why will people waste my time with trivialities!” We heard footsteps on the stair. “And by the way, the dress is from
La Samaritaine,
not
Le Bon Marché.”

I was speechless in the briefest pause before Poe’s negro servant opened the double doors and ushered Monsieur Guédiguian and his female companion—
veiled
companion—into our presence. A parrot called Griswold squawked a few bars of the “Marseillaise” before chewing on a ball of nuts. There is no brass name-plate with
Dupin
etched on it down below, but it is curious that those who need his assistance always find him, one way or another.

Guédiguian untied his scarf and rolled it in a ball.

“Monsieur Dupin?”

I have described elsewhere how Edgar Poe lived beyond the date chiseled on his gravestone in Baltimore. Far from being, as is popularly believed, the drunken victim of a “cooping” gang at the elections in October 1849, he encountered that night, by remarkable coincidence, his
doppelgänger,
complete with a one-way ticket to Europe, and sensing escape from the rigors of his former life, swapped clothes with the dying inebriate, abandoning his old identity for an unknown future. He made Paris his secret home, at first in self-imposed exile at the
Hôtel Pimedon,
aided by his friend and translator Charles Baudelaire, assuming—with typical playfulness and black humor—the name of his famous detective of “Rue Morgue” fame: Dupin, and occasionally, under that appellation, helping the French police with their more baffling investigations, as food for a brain no longer with an appetite for mere fiction.

“Monsieur Guédiguian. My pleasure, yet again.” As he shook his hand Poe saw our guest eyeing the thin young man standing at the window—myself. “This is my assistant, Monsieur Holmes. He speaks French like an Englishman, but is a master of discretion, as are all his countrymen. You may talk freely.”

I met Poe in the guise of “Dupin” when I first came to Paris in my early twenties
¹
, and once within the penumbra of his intellect, having succumbed to his alluring devotion to hisscience, was unwilling—
unable
—to leave until I had learned all I could from the great man’s unparalleled talent for deduction. Little did I know how that learning—or that friendship—would change my life forever.

“Allow me first to introduce Madame Anais Jolivet.” Guédiguian touched the woman in the veil lightly on the elbow as he led her gently forward. She shuddered with every step as if treading on broken glass, so much so that, had she not possessed a curvaceous and upright frame, I might have taken her for an old crone.

Poe, as was his custom, took her hand to kiss it, and I saw instantly that the hand was not only shivering, but bandaged. She quickly inserted it in her fur muff as Guédiguian guided her to a seat, puffing up a cushion before she settled in it.

Sitting on the arm of her chair, the man seemed exhausted merely from being in her presence, and I feared he would not find the wherewithal to speak. She certainly showed no willingness to do so. It seemed as though all her physical effort went into holding herself in one piece, and a gust of wind might make her tumble down before our eyes. I also realized that the dress I took to be black was in fact navy blue, with tiny embossed
fleurs-de-lis
that sparkled like stars in a summer night. And who, I asked myself, dresses in navy blue whilst in mourning?

“Tea?” enquired Poe as Madame L’Espanaye, the maid, entered with a pot of Darjeeling. “Or something stronger? A glass of Virville? Pernod?” He was a teetotaler since his resurrection, but did not begrudge the pleasures of others, and kept a moderate cellar.