“Always between midnight and 3 a.m. It’s something unearthly, trust me. First time I didn’t notice, but now there’s a pattern.”
“A poltergeist?” I foolishly considered, aloud. Dupin scalded me almost instantaneously as the words left my lips.
“Rubbish. A ghost that walks the streets of Paris, selectively thieving from watchmakers? That’s a ludicrous notion.”
“I wasn’t suggesting it was a ghost, just attempting to fill in the words for Monsieur Zacharius, here,” I said indignantly. Usually, I wouldn’t allow anyone to speak to me in such an arrogant manner but Dupin’s response seemed reasonable and logical. The master watchmaker disagreed.
“You haven’t heard the things I’ve heard! Weird noises in the night, footprints appearing on the floor. Devilish sounds that I’ve never encountered in my whole life. There’s something evil at work.”
“I seriously doubt that,” frowned Dupin, pointing his forefinger in the air. “Here, sensation takes the place of common sense. Assume that we’re dealing with a person, a person who knows how to shroud him entirely during his criminal activity. It is shroud, gentlemen, which we must discover and ultimately unveil.”
Dupin stood up and encouraged me to do the same. As I buttoned my coat, I glanced down at the center of the table and pointed at a strange mark burnt into the surface of the wood.
“What’s this?”
Zacharius raised his weary head. “It appeared overnight, just as all these confounded events began.”
“It looks like something hot has been placed upon it,” I suggested.
“Odd, isn’t it?” Dupin mused. “I noticed it as I entered the room, too. Have these markings been seen at the other crime scenes, Sergeant?”
I quickly produced my notebook and found the relevant pages, revealing that such markings had indeed been noted at several other burglaries. Dupin gave a wry smile.
“Intriguing,” he said, before turning to Zacharius. “I urge you to get some rest, Monsieur. We shall return tonight to continue our investigations. In the meantime, retire and get some sleep.”
I seriously doubt if he took the advice. As I closed the shop door when we departed, I observed him assuming his vigil behind the counter again, his eyes wide, staring vacantly in the desperation of catching sight of his spectral adversary.
“I asked the driver to pick us up at 4 p.m. He’s late,” Dupin muttered.
“He’s down there,” I said, noticing the carriage rattling up the road. We made towards it partway down Verdain Street. “Might as well meet him half-way.”
As I approached the carriage, something on the street grabbed my ankle. It was the grip of a filthy tramp, and a drunken one at that. I latched onto Dupin’s arm to support myself and we both came to an abrupt stop. I shook loose the vagrant’s grip, thankfully, and was about to make off when he made a comment that cut deeply into my soul.
“I’ve seen it. That ghost–the old man with white hair. The one that walks from the shop…”
“What?” I snapped, “What have you seen?”
The fool burst into laugher and turned away from me, groaning under his breath. Dupin pulled me towards to carriage.
“Forget him,” he said. “Get inside. We’ll find out for ourselves tonight.”
Dupin had arranged for me to meet with him again on Verdain Street at 8 p.m. Thankfully, this gave me time enough to change my clothes and have a meal at home before rendezvousing with him outside Maître Zacharius - Horloger. Dupin had requested that I bring some form of restraint, such as handcuffs. That was all.
When I arrived, Dupin was waiting for me inside the shop. He stepped outside to meet me.
“You feel sure the thief will return tonight?” I asked Dupin as I stepped from the carriage, my boots crunching the fresh snow on the pavement.
“I do and we shall be there to catch him in the act.”
His optimism surprised me. We entered into the welcoming warmth of the shop and I passed my coat to Zacharius.
“You’ll be pleased to hear that Monsieur Zacharius has prepared our lodgings for the evening,” Dupin said firmly, walking towards the parlor. The thought of sleeping in the little parlor was far from comforting and I considered my own empty bed waiting for me in my apartment.
“The box has been cleared of its contents and I’ve put a cushion inside for you,” Dupin continued, indicating the big mahogany chest in the parlor.
“What, you want me to sleep inside the box?” I blustered, shocked at the thought.
“Of course not. We can’t sleep, otherwise we’ll miss him. We’ll be watching the room from the holes in the front, Sergeant,” he smiled. “Master watchmaker, I suggest you lock up for tonight and make your way home. We’ll see you tomorrow morning, all being well.”
Zacharius agreed and said his good-byes, blowing out the candles in the shop-front and leaving the two of us alone. Dupin crossed to the tiny stove in the parlor.
“Just enough time for some coffee, and then we’ll get into position.”
The night passed slowly and uncomfortably. From the neat holes in the front of the chest, both Dupin and I could survey the whole room quite clearly, especially with the fire raging violently, basking the room in flickering orange patterns.
On the table, in the center of the parlor, Dupin had placed a cloth directly over the burn mark. Arranged on the workbench were boxes of watch parts and mechanisms; our bait, you might say. The trap was set, and all we had to do was wait.
Time passed. It must have been about 2 a.m., and just as I felt myself dozing, Dupin jabbed me violently. There was a strange rhythmic, pulsating sound, almost like a disorganized string section of an orchestra. It rang around the room for a moment.
“That’s it!” Dupin hissed, leaping from the chest like some sort of jack-in-the box. “Whoever it was, he’s been and gone!”
I clambered out of the chest, noticing that the boxes were absent from the workbench and that the parlor door was open. The room was deathly quiet, with only the crackling pops of the fire occasionally breaking the silence.
“That’s impossible, we’ve been watching this room all the time. We’d have seen him, or at least heard him.”
Dupin indicated several footprints on the floor. “Not impossible. This ‘ghost’ not only wears size ten boots but also came from the outside. He’s trailed in some snow from the street.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, stiff after the claustrophobic confines of the chest.
“So, you’re telling me that the thief walked in here, took the goods, then walked back out again without either of us noticing?”
“Yes and no,” Dupin answered, his brow pleated in concentration. “The man–for that is what I believe him to be with footprints like these–made his mark… again.”
Dupin waved me over to the table, where upon he identified a burn mark on the tablecloth. It was the tablecloth he’d placed there not five hours before.
“Whatever it was that made this mark, Sergeant, it is a tool that is essential to our malefactor’s routine. As well as entering the shop, walking past the chest, taking the items and departing again, he also put something here. Something important. Something he has to do every time. We can only assume it is this object that somehow conceals him from our gaze.”
I was having great difficulty in grasping what Dupin was surmising. Did he really believe that somebody could walk in front of us, invisible to our senses?
“If what you say is correct, how come neither of us saw the door open, nor heard his footsteps, or see the items move? They were there one minute, then gone the next.”
“In the blink of an eye… here today and gone tomorrow.”
“Exactly!” I snapped, feeling we weren’t getting anywhere at all by exchanging clichés. “So we’re dealing with a magician, then? Is that what you’re saying?”
Dupin’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be looking somewhere distant, turning the sequence of events over and over in his mind. “A magic
ian, no. A man of superior intellect, yes. We have encountered no observable process of change, merely experienced the disappearance of objects. As a magician may use a mirror to deceive and confuse his audience, I believe this man to be somehow abusing time to elude capture. Time, for us at least, has stood still while the man undertook his criminal tasks, undisturbed.”
Dupin stood there, starring at me. It was too much to take in; to believe that a man had somehow stopped time and walked into the room, stolen the parts and left. No wonder we hadn’t noticed. Usually, one would disregard such an idea as fanciful conjecture, but I failed to ascertain any other means of how the thief could have purloined the stock.
“That’s… incredible!” I said. “How?”
“By means of some device which is far beyond our comprehension. No doubt the intermittent sounds we heard were induced by the source of the machine’s function. It is the machine, or device, that is our criminal’s accomplice and shroud. Perhaps it emits heat, enough to scorch a surface like the table. It is a device that somehow pauses time,” he said, clicking his finger. “Just like that.”
“If that’s true, we’ll never be able to catch him. He’s untouchable.”
Dupin smiled, “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
That was last night. This time the room was arranged similarly as before, save for a few vital differences. The table now had a long tablecloth shrouding it from top to bottom, hiding the underside from view. The surface of the tabletop had been carefully voided in the center with a jigsaw. Hypothetically, if anything were to be placed on the tablecloth, it would drop through to the floor beneath. This was the masterstroke of Dupin’s plan. Beneath the table, directly under the void, was a bucket of water. Accompanying it was Zacharius, hunched around the bucket like a Buddha, ready to catch the mechanism in the bucket as it would fall.
I glanced at my watch again, angling it through the hole in the cramped confines of the chest. Enough firelight revealed that it was coming close to 3 a.m.
“He isn’t going to come,” I said, desperate to free myself of the infernal chest and stretch my legs.
“Just you stay right where you are!” spat Dupin irritably. “Maybe he saw us last night in the chest, maybe he didn’t. My guess is that he didn’t, in which case, he’ll return to the scene of the crime to siphon off as many parts as he can while the stock is plentiful–especially if he’s assembling a large contraption of some kind.”
I was just about to argue the case for my blood circulation when that odd, pulsating sound began to reverberate through the room as it did yesterday. I turned to look at Dupin, who glanced back at me and nodded. This was it, the sting we’d been waiting for. Whoever it was, we were about to catch him in the act.
There was a flash as something blazed beneath the table, illuminating the whole room. It took an instant for my eyes to adjust as Dupin pulled me up and out of our hiding place.
Standing in the room, looking almost as surprised to see us as I was to see him, was an old man with long white hair that stuck up in a curious wave at the top. He was wearing a black velvet frockcoat and was holding one of the boxes of parts we’d left as bait on the workbench.
The man seemed to be in shock and he glanced towards the table. Whatever had been placed on it wasn’t there now, as it had fallen through the hole into the bucket beneath. A dark blue smoke was rising in its place.
“The Temporal Rotor!” he screamed at nobody in particular. He seemed horrified, his expression the picture of alarm.
I took the opportunity to jump him, but moving like an insect he threw his box at me, sending me backwards into the open chest. He made for the door, but Dupin blocked his way.
“Get out of my way!” he screamed, raising a tight little fist to strike the sleuth. Fortunately, he didn’t have the chance as Zacharius, who had jumped from beneath the table, emerged from behind him and grabbed the old man by the arm, twisting it behind his back. He shrieked in discomfort, scrabbling around like an animal to get free. By this time, I was on my feet again, pulling the handcuffs from my pocket. I latched them around his wrists and pushed him across the room.
“Everybody well, I trust?” Dupin breathed in relief. I answered him with a nod as I forced the old man into a chair at the table. He was furious, muttering vulgarities under his breath.
“And what do we have here then?” I asked, regaining my breath after the exertion.
Dupin smiled. “Your serial burglar, Sergeant.”
Zacharius crossed the room and looked into the old man’s gaunt face.
“Doctor Omega? No, surely not!” burst out Zacharius in recognition. I turned on him, surprised at what I’d heard.
“You know this man?”
“Yes, why I sold him a magnetic compass not so long ago! …Wanted to use it for a ship or something. People say he’s a crackpot inventor.”
“No doubt he desired more parts for his private ventures, but wasn’t willing to pay the price, is that it, Doctor? Did you want more timepieces to complete some sort of fanciful science project?” probed Dupin, quite literally with his walking cane.
“I’ll say nothing!” snapped the old man. “Where is it, what have you done with it? Tell me!”
I glanced across at Zacharius. “For somebody who doesn’t say anything, he certainly asks a lot of questions…”
“The Temporal Rotor!” he sneered, squirming in the chair. “It was there!”
Dupin crossed the table and reached down into the cut-out hole, pulling out a heavy silver object dripping in water. It looked like a part of an engine or something very similar. Sections of it were blackened with soot from where it had clearly fused after coming into contact with the water. Zacharius was lucky not to have been blinded in the blast.
“You fools!” the Doctor screamed. “Look at what you’ve done! You’ve destroyed it!”
I leaned forward to take a closer look at the object, momentarily diverted by its glistening, alien appearance. It was at that moment when the old man took his chance, springing from the chair and kicking the table into Dupin and Zacharius. The last glimpse I had was a flash of his coattails flapping past the doorframe of the shop-front, his hands still cuffed behind his back. I made out into the store and onto the street, but he was gone.
“We’ve lost him,” I declared flatly, entering the parlor.
“No matter, Sergeant,” smiled Dupin, casually lifting the odd contraption before Zacharius. “Without this, he has nothing.”
“Monsieur Zacharius, do you know where he lives?” I asked desperately.
“Yes, about two miles from here, I believe.”
“Then, we must head there immediately,” I said, about the leave the room. Dupin stopped me.
“He’ll be long gone now, Sergeant, probably making for the coast. From there, no doubt he’ll complete the venture he started here. Quite what that is, we can scarcely guess at. One thing we can be sure of, though, is that he’ll have to do without one of these for a while.”
With that Dupin held aloft the Temporal Rotor, still smoldering a blue smoke. The device which, at one stage, stopped time for all but the man who operated it. Now, its spell was broken and the Doctor’s veil had been compromised. The object was quite easily the strangest contraption I’d ever seen. However, in context of the events of the past few days, it seemed rather acceptable in its ridiculousness. Under the circumstances I’d come to accept, the once implausible had turned into the possible, but how was I going to explain my findings to my superiors? I couldn’t.
When I returned to the station, I marked the case as:
CLOSED – UNSOLVED
After all, Dupin was right. The robberies ceased that night and the mysterious Doctor Omega was nowhere to be found. And in honesty, who on Earth, save Dupin and Maître Zacharius, would have believed the true events that took place on those nights in Verdain Street?
Dupin makes a return appearance in John Peel’s contribution. John is a renowned YA writer, known to many for his wond
erful Doctor Who books, often featuring the Daleks. This story, however, showcases a lesser known side of John’s fiction: the detective and the swashbuckler, as Edgar Allan Poe’s sleuth teams up with another legendary hero to fight crime and rescue a damsel in distress…
John Peel: The Kind-Hearted Torturer
Paris, 1842
I have had occasion in the past to note down one or two of the singular affairs that my good friend C. Auguste Dupin has resolved, thanks to his strict interpretation and application of logical thinking. I have never considered myself a dull-witted man–nor have I been so thought by my acquaintances–but if I were to compare myself with Dupin, I should certainly appear almost Neanderthal in my thinking. He was frequently of great use to the official police, but there was one occasion when he was unable to help them solve a case.
We had been out smoking pipes and imbibing a moderate quantity of a rather fine Madeira and were on our way back to our rooms at an early hour of the morning. As is generally the case with Paris, we were far from alone on the city streets. In fact, due to the press of the crowds on the main routes, we slipped from them and into a maze of the back streets that Dupin somehow knew so well. I knew only that we were in the region of the église Ste-Mathilde–I could see her spire about the roofs ahead of us–but Dupin led the way without hesitation or doubt.
As we drew closer to the church, a figure turned from around the corner ahead of us. He was ambling rather than walking, but still almost collided with us. His hand flashed to the brim of his hat, and he nodded slightly. “I do beg your pardon,” he said, in English. Then, he added: “Pardonnez-moi.” I was quite impressed with the Englishman’s attempt at French–very few of them ever manage to get their tongues around the Gallic consonants correctly, and he had almost succeeded. I nodded back politely, noting that he was well dressed in expensive evening clothes, though without gloves, and carried a walking stick in his right hand of some dark wood, topped with a silver fleur-de-lys. He touched his hat again, and then walked on.
Tales of the Shadowmen 1: The Modern Babylon Page 22