The Port-Wine Stain

by Norman Lock

  “I ruined my eyes to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table,” she grumbled.

  I nodded without taking mine from the manuscript.

  “What is that you’ve got on your lap, Edward?” she said, putting her sewing on hers.

  “It’s a new story by Edgar Poe.”

  “I don’t like you going around with that man,” she complained. “I do believe he’s a worse influence than the men your brother associates with, and the Lord knows what shiftless idlers and roughnecks they are. Miss Paulson, who is so very refined and plays the organ at First Methodist, says Poe’s stories are scandalous and unfit to be in a Christian house. For God’s sake, Edward, burn it on the grate and shame the devil! On second thought, it probably contains enough foul wickedness to call up the devil in the smoke. I don’t know what you see in him to admire, Edward!”

  I kept quiet, knowing that her indignation would soon sputter and go out.

  “Well, if you’re going to sit there and read all night, I might as well go to bed before your brother comes home and upsets the furniture.”

  She folded the sewing—a little white First Communion dress—and, having put it in her basket, she went upstairs.

  After she’d shut the bedroom door behind her, my ears rang as silence was abruptly restored to the house. Not having grasped the pages that I’d tried to read during her nattering, I turned to the beginning of the manuscript and began again.

  The Port-Wine Stain;

  A Tale by Edgar A. Poe

  For E.A. Fenzil

  For I do not agree with those who have recently begun to argue that soul and body perish at the same time, and that all things are destroyed by death.

  —Cicero, Laelius de Amicitia

  A man is bound to his double, even should he never learn of its existence, by the umbilical of an ancient grudge.

  —Sir Launcelot Canning, The Mad Trist

  I

  In the City of London, at that gallery famous for its lifelike grotesques, Edward F------, a resident of Philadelphia, beheld his visage in the waxen face of a murderer.

  [Poe struck out that first sentence and began his tale anew.]

  In London, at that gallery famous for its lifelike grotesques in wax, I saw my face reflected—as it might have been by a mirror into which I had casually glanced—by the face of a murderer. I had arrived in that ancient city, three days earlier, from Philadelphia, where I was, by profession, a teacher of ethics at one of its universities. My purpose in coming to London was to read Super Ethica, by Albertus Magnus, in the Opera Omnia edition, published in Lyon in 1651, and, at the time of my visit, residing in the rare book collection of the British Library. My first transatlantic crossing was to have been a pilgrimage, in that this supreme work of moral philosophy had long been a touchstone (if I may be permitted an allusion to Magnus’s alchemical studies) of the philosophical literature of friendship. I was interested, especially, in his notion of the consensiom, the movement within the human spirit that produces, like a sympathetic vibration, a harmony between things divine and human. It is the moral goodness that Cicero believed to be the very essence of friendship.*

  [Poe added a footnote here, stating, “Magnus affirmed three types of friendship: the first is founded on usefulness (amicitia utilis), the second on pleasure (amicitia delectabilis), the third and finest on unqualified goodness (amicitia honesti, amicitia quae fundatur super honestum).” The tale continues.]

  Earlier in my career, I had been struck by the similarity of Magnus’s consensiom and Mesmer’s notion of an “imponderable fluid,” which transmits influences among beings and objects in the universe. By this ethereal machinery, angels inspire men and devils incite them, the moon affects the tides and the womb and the brain the movement of the hand. And by its invisible workings, two persons are conjoined in that most perfect of harmonies: friendship. Logically, the inverse must also be the case: Disharmony will produce enmity transmitted by Mesmer’s fluid, which is everywhere present in the universe, including the microcosm that is a man, a woman, or a beast. If we agree with Cicero, and the faithful of every religious belief, that the soul persists after its “house” has been destroyed, we must conclude that the soul does not cease to exert, in death, an influence—for good or ill—on an animate body to which it is joined by virtue of an extraordinary affinity. This thesis, which, on face value, appears to be no more than the stuff of Gothic fiction, is, in actuality, an evolution of the idea of the dop-pelgänger, and neither more nor less strange than encountering one’s double alive in the world.

  And so it was that, in the year 18——, while on sabbatical in London, I fell under the evil persuasion of one William Boyle, lately of Crouch End, who, during the spring of that year, had murdered six young women living near the City of London. With nothing provable against their characters, they must be considered innocent victims of Boyle’s hatred—of what, if anything, we can only surmise. The brass plaque affixed to the plinth on which his wax effigy stands—in the gruesome pose of a strangler—informs the visitor to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, on the upper floor of Baker Street Bazaar, of the sensational, if brief, history of the figure’s original:

  WILLIAM BOYLE

  BORN 1799

  HANGED 1832

  DID MURDER, IN COLD BLOOD,

  SIX YOUNG WOMEN

  IN THE PARISH OF HORNSEY

  If ever a man or woman can be said to have fallen instantly in love or into a fit of madness, I fell under that dead man’s malign influence. I did not, at first, realize the effect he, or his blasted soul, had on me. (It was very like love, strange to say, and also like madness.) I was not visited, all at once, with a compulsion to murder, in emulation of him. Rather, the hold he had on me—unbreakable like the adamantine chains of gravity—made itself felt, to begin with, in a curiosity impossible to resist. What was the nature of this curiosity? Boyle presented to the eye an utterly faithful facsimile of myself, with the exception of a port-wine stain on his cheek, a stigma I had been spared by a more auspicious birth. I was not the only person to notice the uncanny likeness between our two selves, apparent, notably, in the face of each. Indeed, I was not the first one to observe it.

  I had been invited to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks by a man with whom I had a slight acquaintance, owing to a mutual interest in the Neoplatonism of Augustine of Hippo. We had enjoyed a pleasant and instructive correspondence for several years prior to my trip to England. Indeed, it was Frederick Z---------- who had made the arrangements for my first visit abroad. On an afternoon, conspicuous in my memory for its rain and general dreariness, he offered to show me a few of the city’s popular attractions and spectacles. (I confess to have been suffering, that day and the day before, from a surfeit of intellectual pleasure, amply provided by the library and the British Museum, and jumped eagerly at Frederick’s suggestion as a means to allay my ennui.)

  At quarter past two o’clock (after Welsh rarebit at the George and Vulture Inn, in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, a favorite of Mr. Pickwick’s), I found myself viewing, without haste or method, minutely painted replicas of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and our own Benjamin Franklin, in addition to assorted royalty, cutthroats, and their victims, including those who had lost their heads to the guillotine. (Their death masks had served Marie Tussaud, the waxwork’s artist and impresario, as models for the faces of her macabre figures.) I looked upon them with the interest a boy might take in a collection of butterflies: indifferent, or nearly so, to the colorful patterns on their wings but morbidly fascinated by the pin stuck through their abdomens. Still, I was glad to have escaped, for one afternoon, the library’s fusty reading room and happy to have my mind lie idle and adrift. I had just come ois-à-ois with the notorious poisoner of Glatz, with the accordion name of Sophie Charlotte Elisabeth Ursinus, when Frederick called to me in no little excitement.

  “Edward, come at once!”

  Disconcerted to hear my name shouted among a crowd of persons, famous and i
nfamous, in the grip of eternal inertia (eternal until the paraffin melts), I hurried to where my friend stood, mouth agape and finger pointing to the effigy of William Boyle, to whom the reader has already been introduced. A person of even meager sympathies will instantly apprehend the horror with which I beheld, in Boyle’s face, the image of my own, except that his countenance was marred by a port-wine stain (as I have stated already in my deposition). The horror of that recognition was not absolute, however; there was an alloy of fascination, even amour-propre, in the gaze which I cast on that vicious and degenerate soul. (One sees, in the inadvertent application of the word “soul” to my dead and accursed double, how—even at our first meeting—I acknowledged, albeit unconsciously, the totemic power of his waxen effigy over my immortal portion.) Like the mysterious movement of the spirit through a living body or of a Mesmeric transmission through the ether, the connection between us was imperceptible. (A distant commotion of midges above a river may sometimes be neither seen nor heard by humankind; the hungry trout rises to them, nonetheless.) At that electric moment inside the Chamber of Horrors, Boyle and I were bound as surely as the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, which are among the medical anomalies to be found in Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter’s collection, at Jefferson Medical College, in Philadelphia.

  “It is utterly fantastic!” exclaimed Frederick, polishing the lens of his spectacles on his sleeve. “How can one explain so singular a phenomenon?”

  I could not explain it, although I knew the concept of the doppelgänger from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Lord Byron’s unfinished work, The Deformed Transformed. While in London, I re-read Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus with especial dread, sensing in the doctor’s relation to his misbegotten creature a similarity to that of Boyle’s and my own. Until that instant, among the bizarreries of Madame Tussaud’s, however, I had never encountered a doppelgänger, in flesh or wax, much less one who could—with good reason—claim me as its own! Had Boyle’s painted likeness winked at me with a waxen lid, I could not have been more astonished!

  “It is strange,” I answered my friend with a deliberate, if unfelt, sangfroid.

  In truth, to say that I was alarmed would be as wide the mark as to call a hawk a lark. I was terrified! Had a thunderbolt smote the ground nearby, I could not have been more shaken. I am not sure what compelled me to pretend otherwise to Frederick; I can only guess that I wished to keep my excitement a secret from him and any others who might discover my resemblance to a creature who was known, in North London, as the “Devil’s Boil.” There was about my terror, which was real, an equal element of frisson. I was like a boy who climbs to the top of an ancient oak tree and surveys the neighborhood in fear and wonder—fear of falling from so great a height and wonder at his daring. I sensed, in my rencountre, a perilous outcome. In the tensed muscles of my legs, I felt the urge to run from William Boyle, but was rooted to the spot. (I would speak of him thereafter as if he had not been hanged at Newgate, but stalked yet the lanes and alleys of Hornsey.) It might have been my own house, afire, with a wife and children inside, that I was viewing, with horror and an irresistible fascination, instead of the wax sculpture of a hateful dead man.

  Frederick must have intuited something of the sort, because he laid a hand on my sleeve and—roughly, I thought—pulled me away from Boyle. He made an unconvincing show of amusement, and then he said, with an earnest fervor whose hidden import I could not mistake, “I’ve had enough of monsters! Let us visit the bears at Regent’s Zoo. They ought to be more amusing than these.” He waved his arm at what, in his mind, had assumed the status of an atrocity. “What do you say, Edward?”

  “Yes, I am feeling much provoked by this chance encounter with myself.”

  Clasping my hand like someone wishing to confirm a palpable reality amid phantasms of delirium, Frederick expostulated, “You are a gentleman scholar from Philadelphia and not a murdering villain from Hornsey!”

  We left Madame Tussaud’s theatre of illusion and, for all my friend knew, I would spend the remainder of my stay in London in the reading room of the British Library. I am certain he would not have wished to know the truth: Each day I returned to the Chamber of Horrors and stood—enraptured and with an uneasy conscience—staring into the face of William Boyle, who, though he had not yet spoken to me, had ensnared me.

  [There is, here, an interruption in the tale. The top third of the manuscript page has been ripped off, presumably by Poe himself, for what reason none will ever know, and the following clause struck out.]

  . . . with the unerring instinct of a homing pigeon whose hollow bones contain an imponderable fluid responsive to magnetic north.

  [The tale goes on from there.]

  By my fourth visit to Madame Tussaud’s, I had attracted the notice of a man dressed to impersonate Antoine Louis, inventor of the guillotine. (Although his name is eponymous with the instrument of execution favored by the French, it was M. Louis, and not Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who conceived it.) The task of the impersonator, in powdered wig, cravat, and breeches, was to serve as the waxwork’s cicerone, ushering visitors among the historical facsimiles, as if he himself had only recently been galvanized into life, in order to satisfy curiosity about their originals. His courtesy did not conceal his suspicion, which I could not fault, since my attention, during each of my later visits to the “chamber,” had been paid exclusively to William Boyle. It was my habit to arrive, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, at his replica, given pride of place between two contemporaneous villains, both Bavarian: Andrew Bechel, fortune-teller and fetishist, and Anna Maria Zwanziger, who referred to arsenic poison as “her truest friend.” Sitting on an ingenious contraption, combining a walking stick and a stool (known as “a museum chair”), I would give myself up to the contemplation of Boyle.

  “Pardon me, sir,” said “M. Louis,” who had drawn up beside me and spoken before I had been made aware of him.

  I looked at the man without comprehension, so enthralled was I to an alien power, one both secret and undeniable. “What is it?”

  “I have seen you sitting here, by the hour, on four afternoons. . . .”

  “Yes?” I asked irritably, wishing him gone about his business.

  “I only meant to inquire whether or not you are in need of information,” he said, giving me a sidelong glance.

  “What kind of information?” I demanded.

  He must have been inured to the vexation of visitors, for he continued affably. “I have made a study of William Boyle’s crimes and will gladly tell you all I know of them.”

  I already knew a great deal about William Boyle. The reader will hardly credit me when I say that I had begun to receive, through the etheric currents that passed between my waxen double and myself, his thoughts and memories. (I say “waxen,” but, in truth, it was Boyle, the man himself, who stood before me.)

  The cicerone did not stir from my side. He grew restless. I knew then what he wished to ask me, but was too polite to say. I said it for him.

  “No doubt, you have noticed the resemblance between us.”

  He took off his tri-cornered hat and mopped his brow, with a sudden nervousness that betrayed his ulterior purpose in having accosted me. “I have, sir.”

  “Strange, is it not?” I was enjoying his discomfiture.

  “It is very strange,” he agreed, stealing another look at me.

  “It is this likeness which has brought me here these three afternoons since my first encounter with it. You can, perhaps, imagine my curiosity . . . my fascination.”

  He nodded in the affirmative, and I suddenly grasped an additional, more urgent, reason for my visits there: to purchase the plaster death mask from which Boyle’s face had been cast in wax.*

  [Poe inserted a second footnote here: “Sub conservatione formæ specificæ salva anima.” How is your Latin, Moran? If I remember mine, the epigram translates: “The soul is saved by the preservation of the specific form.” To continue Poe’s ta
le.]

  “I should like to speak to Madame Tussaud,” I said, drawing myself up to my full height, which, however, was not imposing. I attempted a supercilious manner and said again, “I should like to speak to her now.”

  Without another word, he escorted me to her atelier, knocked once upon the door, and went his own way, with what I imagined was a feeling of relief.

  “Excuse me, Madame,” I said, when she opened the door to me. “I wish a word with you.”

  “What is it you want?” she asked, after having resumed her place behind an armature, on which a lump of wax was waiting to be transformed into the head of a Roman emperor.

  “I want to buy the death mask of William Boyle,” I said, hoping my voice would not reveal emotions that were, at once, complex, poignant, and fearful. “I will pay anything within reason. I am not a wealthy man; I am only a scholar.”

  “The masks are not for sale!” she said sharply, but in a moment, she relented. “However, in your case, Mister---------- “

  I gave her a false name.

  “I will give you the mask.”

  “Give it to me?” This sudden turn of events had caused the wind to spill from my sail, so to speak, and I was, momentarily, becalmed. She knew, of course, why I wanted it. She was an artist and did not need to see Boyle and me standing side by side to realize that we were twins, in all but the stain on his cheek. She must have sensed, in my request, an urgency well beyond that of a mundane business proposition. “Why would you be kind—more than kind, munificent—to a stranger?”

  “It pleases me.”