My Clockwork Muse (20 page)

"Oh, Eddy, don't say that!"

"Worse, I might even be a murderer." When I
realized that what I said was true, I clamped my eyes shut and
began to work my throbbing temples with my fingers. "My God, what's
happening to me?"

"Eddy, not again..."

"I awoke from a horrible nightmare—and look
at me." I indicated my trousers and my general dishevelment. I knew
I made a frightful appearance.

"You were walking in your sleep again,"
Olimpia said hopefully. "Father has diagnosed your malady as some
form of somnambulism, has he not?"

"This was no dream, Olimpia. It was a bullet
from my gun that killed the cat, for one thing. However real they
seem at the time, dream-bullets do not kill, my dear. Oh, God! If
only it
were
a dream!" I dared not tell her of Virginia, or
she really would believe me mad. I knew I could not bear the look
of pity or horror in her eyes if she knew the whole terrifying
truth of my experience.

Instead, I began emptying my pockets. I
showed her the laudanum vial. I showed her my L's and how they
resembled those on the label. I dug deep into my pocket and
produced the matching half of the torn label. My hand trembled as I
laid it into the jagged edge of the one that still clung to the
vial. It fit as neatly as the piece of a puzzle.

"It condemns me," I said at last.

Olimpia collected the items I had lain on the
seat of the coach and pressed them into my palm. "It does no such
thing, Eddy," she declared decisively. "You said yourself that this
policeman is framing you. What effort is required to duplicate your
handwriting—and inexpertly at that? Who could not have then torn
the label and planted the matching half in your desk drawer? In
your own words, Eddy, it is the policeman!"

"Gessler, yes. That is what I believed. But
now ... I don't know..."

"Oh, but I
do
know!" Olimpia asserted
boldly. "Maybe not this Gessler perhaps, since your certainty on
the issue wavers. But
someone
has taken pains to ensnare you
in whatever crimes have been committed. An obvious and rather
clumsy attempt, if you ask me. I have seen nothing that convicts
you, Eddy. You shouldn't be so quick to convict yourself."

"But you have not seen everything." With a
rising sense of despair, I produced the little wooden box from my
pocket. Olimpia reached for it, but I held it tight, and she
withdrew her hands. I looked at her sheepishly. "My most recent
tale," I began my confession, "involves a man who—well, to be
concise—a man who becomes obsessed with the ... the
teeth
of
his beloved." Oh, how strange the words sounded! I paused for
Olimpia's reaction. Expecting revulsion or censure, I saw neither
in her unblinking gaze. She was bound to be brave in the face of my
weakness and I determined to forge ahead. "Beautiful, perfect white
teeth they were. The man suffered from a malady similar to my own,
in a way. Only his disease manifests itself as a monomania, which
had become transfixed on his beloved's teeth. When Berenice dies
and is laid in her grave, this man, in a delirium, disinters her
and .. and ..."

"And what, Eddy?" Olimpia urged when she saw
that I struggled with the words. "And what? You can say it."

"And extracts her teeth!"
I blurted
out all at once. "God help me!"

Olimpia twittered a little nervous laugh.
"Certainly, it is a horrifying tale, Eddy. But—"

Without looking at her, I offered up the box.
She took it gently from my hands and I winced when I heard the lid
open. I expected next to hear her scream, to cry out to Dansby to
come protect her from the madman who sat beside her, a man clearly
capable of the most heinous acts. But the sound of horses' clopping
was undisturbed by either.

"I awoke with this in my bedroom," I
explained in case the significance of what she held in her hands
was not clear to her, "with no knowledge of how it had come to be
there. And my manner of dress—"

Her laugh cut me off.

"It is no different than the vial, Eddy." She
handed the box back to me as if it were an irrelevant trifle. "You
don't remember how it came to be in your room because you had no
hand in putting it there. Of course you don't remember it. Your
policeman could have gotten these teeth from a dentist or some
medical laboratory. Who knows? You said yourself that he had a
dentist help to identify the corpse in the wall."

The corpse in the wall. I couldn't help
shuddering. "He did, yes."

"Perhaps the same dentist who has now
provided him with these teeth."

She had almost convinced me, except for one
thing. "But no one knows of this story, Olimpia. It is yet another
crime—"

"But what crime?" Olimpia interjected
passionately. "There is no crime in the possession of extracted
teeth!"

I ignored her and continued in a louder
voice. "Yet another
crime
—for what else can it be?—committed
after the fashion of one of my stories. Only this time no one but
me has ever seen the story." With each word, I felt a rising sense
of panic. Could my waking focus on the plot of 'Berenice' have led
me to re-enact it in a somnambulistic trance, in the same way that
any common event of the day becomes the fodder for dreams? In the
same way that Burton's walking stick found its way from my flesh
and blood hands during the day to John Allan's ethereal hands at
night? This I could believe more readily than the vast coincidence
of Gessler choosing out of whole cloth to torment me with a set of
freshly extracted teeth. Except, again, for one thing that played
upon my consciousness like a half-remembered dream. "No one but me
and ... Aha!" My finger shot up with the revelation of my memory.
"Gessler
did
read the story! He was reading it in my
absence. I remember now."

"I am not surprised in the least," Olimpia
said cheerfully. "There had to have been an explanation."

"But did he read the end?" I wondered. I
tried to visualize Gessler with the manuscript pages in his hands.
"Think, Poe! Think!"

"He must have," Olimpia urged helpfully.

I wracked my brain but could not conjure the
image of Gessler reading the conclusion of the story. He might have
... Then again, he might not ...

"But Billy Burton
could have!"
I cried
suddenly, remembering that the story was now in his possession and
had been since the previous day. Plenty of time for him to have
hatched the plan and carried it out while I slept.

Ah! Now this shed a whole new light on
matters. I quickly told Olimpia of my adventure at the 'Rue Morgue'
murder scene with Burton and of my masked assailant and how both
mask and stick had appeared in my dream that night and how John
Allan had chased me into the cemetery. But I stopped when I got to
the apparition of Virginia. Even in my excited babbling, I could
not get myself to admit to this phantasm. Not to Olimpia.

"Burton is Gessler's shambling ape!" I cried.
"I should have seen it."

"His what?"

"His Hop-Frog. Gessler is staging these
scenes—and who better than Burton to help him do it? Did anything I
showed him at the 'Rue Morgue' scene surprise him? Not in the
least. What a show he put on! It was perverseness on display, pure
and simple. It was no different than a character from one of my
stories pointing out to the police how well made was his wall,
while all the while it concealed the murder of his own wife. Burton
was daring me to uncover his crime. Flaunting his role in it, right
before my very eyes. He was not showing me how an ape might have
gained entry into the house and thus committed the murders—but how
he
did. Right before my eyes, daring me to see."

"And you say this Mr. Burton was an actor?"
Olimpia asked.

"A comic actor, yes."

"And something of an acrobat, you say?"

"A sportsman." The gears of my mind began
spinning as surely as Pluto's once must have.

"Surely a man who could imitate a corpse as
well as an ape. Don't you think, Eddy?"

"Yes..." I saw where she was heading.

"And one who could contort himself to crawl
inside walls as well as scale them."

Of course! I had assumed an actor had made
himself up to resemble Burton, failing to realize that Burton
himself was an actor. How could I have missed it?

"Go on," I urged when I saw that Olimpia
still had not finished.

With a long slender index finger, she tapped
her cheek softly, her knuckles curled under her delicate chin. With
her eyes closed in thought, she asked, "And where was this Mr.
Burton when you were attacked by the swordsman?"

The question took me off-guard. I had to
think for a moment. "Now that you mention it, he was gone by the
time the swordsman had appeared."

"And when he came back?"

"The fiend had already vanished." I smiled. I
wanted eagerly to believe it, to leave no nagging doubts. But I
could not and I shook my head. "Oh, but surely my masked assailant
was too short and slight to have been Burton. And the timing makes
the deed impossible in any case. No sooner had the murderer
vanished than Burton came rushing around the corner. It would take
not an actor to pull that off—but a magician!"

"No doubt an associate of his," Olimpia said,
undeterred. "It's a funny place to lose one's walking stick, don't
you think, Eddy? What a coincidence that Mr. Burton's stick should
appear at the very spot of your ambush."

"You think he and the swordsman are
associates, then?"

"Perhaps fencing partners. He is a sporting
man, after all."

With an expanding grin, I gave Olimpia a long
look. A blush began to redden her cheeks. "Olimpia, you astonish
me!" I exclaimed at last. "The world thinks I am the master of
ratiocination. But look at you. Why, you would make a fine
Dupin!"

Olimpia smiled demurely, and then said, "It
is simple deductive reasoning, Eddy. Once you eliminate the
impossible, the rest falls into place."

I was intrigued. "And what is the impossible
in this case?"

"That you are guilty," she said.

~ * * * ~

"He has thought of everything," I said with a
feeling almost of admiration once I began putting it all together.
"He even staged the scene witnessed by the boarding house cook that
had
me
dragging Fortunato to the basement door." I shook my
head in amazement. Then I suddenly remembered that the entire
object of my returning to the cottage had been to retrieve the
laudanum vial. I excitedly fished it out of my pocket and held it
up with a flourish. "But this!" I exclaimed, admiring the rainbow
sheen of the hardened liquid that had solidified in its base. "This
is how I shall catch him!"

I stuck my head out the window and called up
to Dansby. "Dansby!" I cried. "Change of plan!" And I gave him the
address of the chemist's shop in the city.

Settling back into the seat, I contentedly
spent the next few minutes examining the vial, knowing by faith
alone that it would be my salvation.

"But how will you link it to Mr. Burton?"
Olimpia asked, breaking my happy reverie.

Until that moment, simply identifying the
substance had dominated my thinking. I had failed to devise a firm
plan for what exactly I meant to do with the information once
obtained.

I did not want to appear indecisive, however,
so I said in a tone of greater certainty than I felt, "If it can be
shown to bear some unique characteristics, I can then compare it to
something similar known to belong to Burton."

"Ahhh..."

Olimpia seemed unconvinced. I went on, "While
he may be plotting against me, he does not yet know that I suspect
him. Until he becomes aware of it, I can use the charade of our
friendship against him."

Just how I would do that, I did not yet know.
Olimpia's skepticism gave me an uneasy feeling, however. I felt as
if my investigation had entered a new phase, a phase that extended
beyond my initial plans and into a dreadful unknown.

I felt even more uneasy when we arrived at
the chemist's shop and I saw the look the man gave me. It was a
look of recognition, to be sure. But it was more than that. I
thought I detected fear in the man's eyes. I suddenly became very
nervous.

"I will be right with you, sir," he called
over the shoulder of a patron for whom he was putting something in
a little paper bag. As his female customer fished a few coins from
her purse, the chemist kept glancing fretfully over her shoulder at
me, forcing a smile. I glanced at Olimpia and she frowned in
puzzlement.

The lady bid the chemist good day and pushed
past us out the door.

"Now, what can I do for you, Mr. D-D-Dupin?"
the chemist asked, lowering his head to gaze at me over his
pince-nez eyeglasses.

"
Inspector
Dupin," I corrected him,
adopting the officious tone of my last visit. As I spoke, the
chemist, behind the sales counter, began sliding sideways towards
the door to the back room. The door stood open a crack and letters
set in frosted glass read: "A.G. Witherspoon, proprietor." Having
refreshed my memory as to the man's name, I used it now. "Mr.
Witherspoon, I have brought you a sample of the substance we spoke
of yesterday, if you recall."

"Ah!" Witherspoon exclaimed with a tremulous,
long-toothed smile. His Adam's apple rose and fell nervously in his
throat. I believed the man was sweating. As he continued to
side-step his way towards the door, I noticed that his
hairy-knuckled hands were trembling. "V-v-very good, sir ... That
is ... I mean to say ...
Inspector
..."

All at once he lunged for the open door. But
my suspicions had been aroused and I thrust my foot between the
jamb and the door before he could close it against me. Pain shot
through the arch of my foot, but it subsided almost immediately. I
tried to break in, but the weight of the chemist, leaning on the
door, prevented my entry.