My Clockwork Muse

by D. R. Erickson

  The foot traffic had grown considerably since I had arrived and now I looked in the direction Burton had gone. He had been wearing a brown fedora and I saw half-a-dozen or more identical chapeaus bobbing away from me amid the flowing mass of bodies that clogged the sidewalk. Dodging pedestrians, I ran to the first and then the second. Neither was Burton. Then I saw him.

  "Burton!" I cried, rushing towards him. "I thought that was you—and now I see that it is!"

  I grasped his shoulder and tried to spin him around so I could get a good look at him, but he jumped out from under my grasp. He leapt back with a start, raising his walking stick.

  "You, Poe!" he exclaimed when his shock had subsided. His jowls jiggled to a halt and he lowered his stick. "We have nothing to say to each other." He turned and began to walk away.

  I followed and grasped him once again by the shoulder.

  "Shall I summon the police, sir?"

  "I should like nothing more." He gave me a puzzled look and I saw in it that he was not totally opposed to hearing me out. I pulled him into the alleyway, out of the stream of humanity. I went on, "I need your help, Billy."

  "Really, Poe!"

  Though we had last parted having nearly come to blows, I could see him soften. We had worked closely enough in the past. I was heartened to see that he had not completely turned against me.

  "The police suspect me of murder." I found it hard to speak the words.

  Burton merely laughed. "Murder? Is this another one of your—"

  I grasped him by his lapels and thrust him up against the wall before he could say more. "You must help me, Billy. You must help me prove my innocence."

  "Okay, Poe, okay! See here now! Are you telling me that you're a wanted man?"

  "Wanted for murder," I said.

  A glimmer in his eye told me that he still did not believe me. His eyes searched my face and I saw that he wanted to make a joke of it. "And just who are you suspected of having murdered, Poe? Longfellow?"

  "You," I said, watching the mirth fade from his expression. "The police suspect me of having murdered you."

  Chapter 10

  "Hate to disappoint you, Poe, but I'm not dead."

  "That is why you must help me."

  Burton eyed me closely. "I suspect you of much: bitterness, defensiveness, jealousy, pettiness, envy, selfishness, dishonesty—"

  "Your point?" I interjected.

  "You are guilty of all of these things, of course, and more. But not murder," Burton concluded. "And especially not the murder of me. What can I do to help you?"

  "Come with me to the 'Rue Morgue'."

  Burton lifted an eyebrow and I explained the crime scene as shown to me by Gessler. He agreed to accompany me, understanding that, yes, to find exculpatory evidence was probably the best way at this point to prove my innocence. I was happy to have Burton back on my side. Despite his unjust view of 'Pym', I had never really liked the idea of my estrangement from him. My time working for Gentleman's was the most fruitful of my career, seeing the publication of what I thought was my finest work: 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and 'William Wilson', among others. And, though we had fallings out regarding money and the direction of the magazine, I had warm feelings for Billy Burton, despite his many grievous personal shortcomings.

  This put me in mind of 'Berenice', which was still in my pocket. Now that I was severed from Briggs' Journal, my story had no home and I showed it to Burton. Though Briggs had balked at its subject matter, Burton seemed pleased even when I warned him that it was one of the grimmest tales I had ever written. He sat back in the coach and scanned the first pages quickly, nodding his approval. He would indeed print it, he said—at the usual rate—in the next issue of the Gentleman's. This filled me with enthusiasm and I began to describe the plot to him. But no sooner had I begun and he had folded the pages neatly and put them in his jacket pocket than we arrived at the house of the 'Rue Morgue' murder.

  We got out of the cab. The driver cracked his long whip and the cab clip-clopped away, leaving us alone on the curb in front of the house.

  "Someone has been committing murders in the manner of my stories," I found myself repeating the premise of the crime to Burton as we stood outside the gate. The four-story Georgian house was set back from the street and seemed to exist in the perpetual shadow of the larger buildings surrounding it. I knew the place had stood empty since the murder and its emptiness gave it an ominous air. When I gazed up at the dark windows, they seemed to gaze back. As horrifying as I had found the scene, I had taken my first visit here lightly, supposing my presence to be the result of nothing more than a mere lark of the inspector's. Now, I knew better. I felt overcome with fear.

  "The room is on the top floor," I said in a hushed tone. "Which makes the crime doubly perplexing."

  I stroked my chin thoughtfully, preparing to discuss the case at some length. I supposed he would want a detailed description of the crime scene as I had last seen it and my analysis of the evidence. But no sooner had I opened my mouth to expound on these issues than he pushed past me through the front gate.

  "So it's a monkey we're looking for, then?" he asked breezily. I cringed at his brusqueness, but, collecting myself, followed close on his heels. By the time I caught up with him, he had already clapped the knocker and was peering through cupped hands into the window at the side of the front door.

  "Not a monkey," I said, "but a lunatic, obsessed with my stories. At least, that is the official version. Now, the way I see it—"

  "There's nobody here," Burton declared, cutting me off. He gave the window sash a tug, finding it locked. Then he moved to the next window, tugging it also. "A lunatic, you say?"

  He moved briskly and I found myself struggling to keep up with him. "Yes. Now, what I think is—"

  "Let's try the back."

  I followed him around the side of the house. Our heels and the tip of his walking stick clacked on the pavement as we went.

  "Not so much a lunatic," I was saying, "as Gessler himself. That is," I added, as Burton rattled the knob on the back door, "inasmuch as he may or may not be a lunatic himself..."

  The door was locked, so Burton moved to the window. Finding that it opened easily, he exclaimed, "Ah! Look here! In we go, Poe. Me first."

  I watched as he hefted himself up to the open window and spilled headfirst over the sill like an acrobat. I was struck by the ease of his movements, remembering that in addition to being a man of letters—as misplaced as his pretensions were, in my opinion—and publishing entrepreneur, he was also a sporting man and had once been a comic actor of the stage, a vocation which had often called upon him to make elaborate pratfalls, not unlike the graceful jackknife through the window I had just witnessed. He had always been an athletic fellow, despite his girth. I recalled that he had once advised more exercise as a means to conquer the "foul fiend" of my melancholy—advice which, regrettably, I had never taken seriously.

  In the next instant, his head appeared in the window. "You're next, Poe," he called, extending a hand. With his help, I clambered up to the sill and he yanked me inside.

  I alighted on a carpeted floor at the foot of a deep cozy chair. A cold lamp on a table nearby would have glowed amber in happier times, and an abandoned volume lay supine under it, never to be resumed. It seemed an intimate setting and wrong for us to have intruded upon it without invitation—although, I suspected, it was not entirely reasonable to have expected an invitation from the dead.

  Burton strode to the door and flung it open and I could see the rest of the empty house beyond. Burton thrust his head through and looked around.

  "So this murder was done according to your story, then, right? Meaning it would have occurred ... where, now? Refresh my memory. In the bedroom?"

  "Yes. Upstairs," I said.

  It struck me that the body of the old woman would have plummeted past the very window through which we had just climbed, thrown from the fourth floor above to land, decapitated, on the pavement belo
w. A truly heinous crime.

  I led the way up the stairs, across landings and up more stairs, past ticking clocks on tables and corridors of closed doors. None of this had any bearing on the crime, I told Burton, because the killer had confined himself to the murder room alone.

  "The door was found locked from the inside," I said when we had arrived at our destination. "The killer had come and gone, apparently, through one of the windows."

  "Ah! Just as we had," Burton suggested with a sly smile.

  "No, no," I said. "One of these windows." I threw open the door and we could see the windows in question across the disheveled room.

  The room itself was just as I had last seen it. The police had left it as the killer had, in wild disorder. The bed had been thrown from its frame and the furniture lay broken and scattered upon the floor. I showed Burton the hearth and he bent over the cold ashes in the fireplace to have a look up into the chimney where one of the bodies had been found.

  Although I shuddered to think of the crime, I felt less trepidation than I supposed I would. While there were still real victims of murder to be mourned and pitied, this time I knew there was no real murderer. Everywhere I looked, I saw the evidence of a carefully staged hoax. My feelings were a mixture of admiration and amusement, with hardly a trace of the horror I had felt upon my first visit.

  On the other hand, I knew that this time it was me who was suspected of the crime, a fact which lent a certain gravity to our investigation.

  Burton was running his fingers along the inside of the window frame, looking for some sort of irregularity, I supposed. I almost wanted to laugh, knowing that there was nothing to find that was not already known.

  "So the victims were chosen completely at random, then?" Burton asked after a moment.

  "Oh, no," I said. "On the contrary. This crime was no random act."

  "But if I remember your story, Poe, it was the lack of motive that made the crime so truly perplexing, was it not?"

  "Yes—in the story. But these victims were chosen for a very specific reason."

  Burton raised his eyebrows. "What was it, then? Pray, tell!"

  "These people were murdered because they lived in a house that almost perfectly matches the one in my story. Hardly random."

  "Ah!" Burton exclaimed. "Of course! Foolish of me not to have considered that."

  "Look at these windows, for example."

  I moved towards the one and made to open it, but Burton, still standing at the other window, stopped me with a word. "Don't bother," he said. "This one has been nailed shut. The other has also. I can see the nail head from here."

  "You mean this?" I tugged at the head of the nail and it, along with about a quarter-inch of the shank, came out easily in my fingers.

  Burton laughed in astonishment. "How did you know that was there, Poe?"

  "Because that's how it was in my story, my dear man. The police have already determined that the nail had been sawn off prior to its insertion in the sash. A simple matter, as I had informed the oaf Gessler, of working backwards from my story—just as Dupin does."

  Burton laughed again, although I knew he did not understand the full importance of what I had just said.

  I held up the nail head between my thumb and forefinger. I could not keep the regret out of my voice. "This is what should have laid the plot bare to me."

  "The nail?"

  "I should have seen it. The police suspected me all along. The murderer—and I use that term loosely—was following my story exactly. Or, rather, I should say, was staging the scene to follow my story exactly. Gessler had no use for me. What good would Dupin do him when anyone with a copy of 'Rue Morgue' could have uncovered the particulars of the crime to the letter? Oh, no. It was not Dupin Gessler wanted, but Poe, and none other."

  "Who is Dupin?" Burton asked.

  "Bah!" I said, laughing at my foolishness. "No matter. Look here." I found the hidden spring-loaded mechanism Burton's fingers had failed to detect and opened the window easily. "Here is what finally condemned the women who occupied this house. These shutters." I reached out and pulled one closed so we could view it more clearly.

  Burton moved to inspect it. "What of it?"

  "This sort of shutter is very old-fashioned and very rare. See how the bottom half consists of an open trellis, this lattice-work here?"

  Burton nodded and I stood back, allowing him to lean out the window to have a closer look.

  "I told Gessler that he should investigate similar houses in and about the city and make inquiries as to any suspicious person hanging about or making unusually thorough investigations of the properties. These shutters are exactly the detail the murderer would have been looking for."

  "But what is their significance? Besides the fact that they are the same type as those that appear in your story, that is."

  "It is how the murderer got in and out of the window. If you look to your left, you'll find a lightning rod." I did not have to look to know it was there. Burton confirmed it to be true. "It is too far to reach from the window. But by grasping the open trellis at the base of the shutter, an intruder can easily swing from the window to the rod, and then use it to climb to the ground."

  "Like this?"

  Before I could utter another syllable, Burton had already climbed into the window. Swinging both legs over the sill, he grasped the base of the shutter and then lowered himself over the edge. When he disappeared from my view, I called out and rushed to look out. There I found him suspended thirty feet above the ground. He gave a little kick and swung in an arc towards the lightning rod. He grasped it with one hand and, planting the soles of both shoes firmly against the stone façade of the house, let go the shutter and commenced climbing up and down the rod, looking, I thought, a little like a monkey. Or, rather, given his size, a large, agile ape.

  "Is this how he did it, Poe?"

  He gazed at me humorously as he clambered up and down the rod. It was exactly as I had envisioned it. I was surprised, however, to see the task accomplished so easily. I had had my doubts when writing the story, but I could see now that it was possible, even for a creature as large as an orangutan, or, for that matter, one the size of Billy Burton.

  "Come back inside," I commanded. I saw a man in the street look up. And then another. Soon a little knot of onlookers had gathered and bystanders began pointing out the crazy man hanging from the shutter. I had a sinking feeling. I reached out my hand to help Burton back to the window. "You're creating a scene," I warned.

  Burton didn't seem to care. Two of the bystanders were, in fact, now running across the street towards the house. "Get back, Poe. Now, we'll see how your man got in. Up the rod he goes. And then, grasping the shutter, propels himself towards the window, thusly." He kicked his legs and swung back towards the wall of the house. Hooking an elbow over the sill, he hoisted himself up until I saw his face appear framed in the opening. "Assuming he could open the window from the outside, as you say. Which—" he lifted himself over the sill and plunged headfirst into the room "—I think you've amply illustrated with the broken nail."

  Hurriedly, I helped him to his feet. "Very good, Burton. So now we know the deed was possible." I glanced down at the men running towards the house. "I'm afraid now we must leave, though. At once, in fact."

  "Right!" Burton said. "Out the way we came in, then."

  He turned and danced past the broken furniture and dashed through the door by which we had entered. I stumbled and staggered over the obstructions. By the time I reached the door, I just barely caught sight of the hem of his frock coat as it disappeared around the corner at the end of the corridor. That way lay the stairs, I knew, and I hastened after him.

  Down one flight and turning again, I found that I had now lost sight of him completely. I heard only my own labored breathing. The corridor before me was empty. Then I heard what I believed were the sounds of his footfalls coming from behind a door to my left.

  "Burton?" I called, but there was no reply.

/>   Thinking he must have found a short-cut out of the house, I turned in the direction of the sound and, opening the door, slammed directly into a man as un-Burtonlike as any you could ask for. The man's face seemed to be cast in shadow and in my shock I reeled backward.

  "So you have returned to finish what you had begun." The man spoke barely above a whisper and his voice was muffled, as though by a cloth. I could not tell if it were high or low, man or woman. "

  "I had begun nothing," I assured the phantom, supposing he was one of the bystanders, come to accuse me. When I looked up, I was shocked by the man's appearance, for this was clearly no bystander from the street but a menacing brigand, a bandit come not to hurl accusations of a crime, but to commit one. Wearing a blue velvet cape and a red sash begirt about his waist, I might have taken him for some kind of eccentric squatter in an otherwise empty house, but for the black silk mask that covered the entirety of his face, and—especially!—the rapier he held point-down at his side. I barely had time to comprehend what I was seeing when he abruptly adopted the en guard posture, threatening me with the tip of his sword.

  I could not believe my eyes. Was I to be run through in cold blood?

  I pressed myself against the wall, still unconvinced that it was the villain's intention to see me spitted on his blade. My mind feverishly catalogued all those who might have been harboring grievances against me. I could think of no one who would consider murder just compensation for whatever harm I had done them. Then I remembered Gessler. This was no doubt one of his. Of course! This was the shambling Hop-Frog I had been expecting. I almost wanted to laugh—right up to the very instant that the masked fiend lunged at me.

  I spun aside and the tip of the rapier plunged deeply into the wall. My mirth vanished. This was not one of Gessler's lackeys, I decided instantly, but a maniac bent on murder.

  "Henceforward art thou also dead," the fiend hissed. "Dead to the world!"

  He yanked his blade out of the plaster and turned towards me. Without even holes for eyes or mouth, I could see nothing of the fiend's face but the black veil. He seemed implacable, remorseless, not quite human. Just as he was preparing to renew his attack, I spied something hidden in the shadows at the base of the wall behind me, a walking stick. I saw it as my salvation and lunged for it. Whisking it from the floor, I whirled and thrust it above my head, parrying a slash intended for my face.