The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Certainly I will want to rent living quarters in Seabrook, or even purchase property in this beautiful spot. At the present time, I move from place to place—like a hermit crab that occupies the empty shells of other sea creatures with no fixed home of its own. After acquiring an old, quasi-legendary mystery bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island, a few years ago, I lived in Providence for a while overseeing the store, until I could entrust a manager to oversee it; after acquiring a similar store in Westport, Connecticut, I lived there for a time; most recently I’ve been living in Boston, trying to revive a formerly prestigious mystery bookstore on Beacon Street. One would think that Beacon Street would be an excellent location for a quality mystery bookstore, and so it is—in theory; in reality, there is too much competition from other bookstores in the area. And of course there is too much competition from online sales, as from the damned, unspeakable Amazon.

  I would like to ask Aaron Neuhaus how he deals with book theft, the plague of my urban-area stores, but I know the answer would be dismaying—Neuhaus’s affluent customers hardly need to steal.

  When Aaron Neuhaus returns, having sent the young woman home, he graciously asks if I would like to see his office upstairs. And would I like a cup of cappuccino?

  “As you see, we don’t have a café here. People have suggested that a café would help book sales but I’ve resisted—I’m afraid I am just too old-fashioned. But for special customers, we do have coffee and cappuccino—and it’s very good, I can guarantee.”

  Of course, I am delighted. My pleasurable surprise at my host’s invitation is not feigned.

  In life, there are predators, and prey. A predator may require bait, and prey may mistake bait for sustenance.

  In my leather attaché case is an arsenal of subtle weaponry. It is a truism that the most skillful murder is one that isn’t detected as murder but simply natural death.

  To this end, I have cultivated toxins as the least cumbersome and showy of murder weapons, as they are, properly used, the most reliable. I am too fastidious for bloodshed, or for any sort of violence; it has always been my feeling that violence is vulgar. I abhor loud noises, and witnessing the death throes of an innocent person would be traumatic for me. Depending upon the toxin, I am nowhere near my prey when he (or she) is stricken by death, but miles away, and hours or even days later. There is never any apparent connection between the subject of my campaign and me—of course, I am far too shrewd to leave “clues” behind. In quasi-public places like bookstores, fingerprints are general and could never be identified or traced; but if necessary, I take time to wipe my prints with a cloth soaked in alcohol. I am certainly not obsessive or compulsive, but I am thorough. Since I began my (secret, surreptitious) campaign of eliminating rival booksellers in the New England area nine years ago, I have utilized poisoned hypodermic needles; poisoned candles; poisoned (Cuban) cigars; poisoned sherry, liqueur, and whiskey; poisoned macaroons; and poisoned chocolates—all with varying degrees of success.

  That is, in each case my campaign was successful. But several campaigns required more than one attempt and exacted a strain on nerves already strained by economic anxieties. In one unfortunate instance, after I’d managed to dispose of the bookseller, the man’s heirs refused to sell the property though I’d made them excellent offers . . . It is a sickening thing to think that one has expended so much energy in a futile project and that a wholly innocent party has died in vain; nor did I have the heart to return to that damned bookstore in Montclair, New Jersey, and take on the arrogant heirs as they deserved.

  The method I have selected to dispatch the proprietor of Mystery, Inc. is one that has worked well for me in the past: chocolate truffles injected with a rare poison extracted from a Central American flowering plant bearing small red fruits like cranberries. The juice of these berries is so highly toxic, you dare not touch the outside of the berries; if the juice gets onto your skin it will burn savagely, and if it gets into your eyes—the very iris is horribly burnt away, and total blindness follows. In preparing the chocolates, which I carefully injected with a hypodermic needle, I wore not one but two pairs of surgical gloves; the operation was executed in a deep sink in a basement that could then be flooded with disinfectant and hot water. About three-quarters of the luxury chocolates have been injected with poison and the others remain untouched in their original Lindt box, in case the bearer of the luxury chocolates is obliged to sample some portion of his gift.

  This particular toxin, though very potent, is said to have virtually no taste, and it has no color discernible to the naked eye. As soon as it enters the bloodstream and is taken to the brain, it begins a virulent and irrevocable assault upon the central nervous system: within minutes the subject will begin to experience tremors and mild paralysis; consciousness will fade to a comatose state; by degrees, over a period of several hours, the body’s organs cease to function; at first slowly, then rapidly, the lungs collapse and the heart ceases to beat; finally, the brain is struck blank and is annihilated. If there is an observer it will appear to him—or her—as though the afflicted one has had a heart attack or stroke; the skin is slightly clammy, not fevered; and there is no expression of pain or even discomfort, for the toxin is a paralytic, and thus merciful. There are no wrenching stomach pains, hideous vomiting as in the case of cyanide or poisons that affect the gastrointestinal organs; stomach contents, if autopsied, will yield no information. The predator can observe his prey ingesting the toxin and can escape well in time to avoid witnessing even mild discomfort; it is advised that the predator take away with him his poisoned gift, so that there will be no detection. (Though this particular poison is all but undetectable by coroners and pathologists. Only a chemist who knew exactly what he was testing for could discover and identify this rare poison.) The aromatic lavender poisoned candles I’d left with my single female victim, a gratingly flirtatious bookseller in New Hope, Pennsylvania, had to work their dark magic in my absence and may have sickened, or even killed, more victims than were required . . . No extra poisoned cigars should be left behind, of course; and poisoned alcoholic drinks should be borne prudently away. Though it isn’t likely that the poison would be discovered, there is no point in being careless.

  My gracious host Aaron Neuhaus takes me to the fourth floor of Mystery, Inc. in a small elevator at the rear of the store that moves with the antique slowness of a European elevator; by breathing deeply, and trying not to think of the terrible darkness of that long-ago closet in which my cruel brother locked me, I am able to withstand a mild onslaught of claustrophobia. Only a thin film of perspiration on my forehead might betray my physical distress, if Aaron Neuhaus were to take particular notice; but, in his affably entertaining way, he is telling me about the history of Mystery, Inc.—“Quite a fascinating history, in fact. Someday, I must write a memoir along the lines of the classic My Life in Crime.”

  On the fourth floor Aaron Neuhaus asks me if I can guess where his office door is—and I am baffled at first, staring from one wall to another, for there is no obvious sign of a door. Only by calculating where an extra room must be, in architectural terms, can I guess correctly: between reproductions of Goya’s Black Paintings, unobtrusively set in the wall, is a panel that exactly mimics the room’s white walls that Aaron Neuhaus pushes inward with a boyish smile.

  “Welcome to my sanctum sanctorum! There is another, purely utilitarian office downstairs, where the staff works. Very few visitors are invited here.”

  I feel a frisson of something like dread, and the deliciousness of dread, passing so close to Goya’s icons of Hell.

  But Aaron Neuhaus’s office is warmly lighted and beautifully furnished, like the drawing room of an English country gentleman; there is even a small fire blazing in a fireplace. Hardwood floor, partly covered in an old, well-worn yet still elegant Chinese carpet. One wall is solid books, but very special, well-preserved antiquarian books; other walls are covered in framed artworks including an
oil painting by Albert Pinkham Ryder that must have been a study for the artist’s famous The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse)—that dark-hued, ominous and yet beautiful oil painting by the most eccentric of nineteenth-century artists. A single high window overlooks, at a little distance, the rough waters of the Atlantic that appear in moonlight like shaken foil—the very view of the ocean I’d imagined Aaron Neuhaus might have.

  Neuhaus’s desk is made of dark, durable mahogany, with many drawers and pigeonholes; his chair is an old-fashioned swivel chair, with a well-worn crimson cushion. The desk top is comfortably cluttered with papers, letters, galleys, books; on it are a Tiffany lamp of exquisite colored glass and a life-sized carved ebony raven—no doubt a replica of Poe’s Raven. (On the wall above the desk is a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe looking pale-skinned and dissolute, with melancholy eyes and drooping mustache; the caption is Edgar Allan Poe Creator of C. Auguste Dupin 1841.)

  Unsurprisingly, Neuhaus uses fountain pens, not ballpoint; he has an array of colored pencils, and an old-fashioned eraser. There is even a brass letter-opener in the shape of a dagger. On such a desk, Neuhaus’s state-of-the-art console computer appears out of place as a sleek, synthetic monument in an historic graveyard.

  “Please sit, Charles! I will start the cappuccino machine and hope the damned thing will work. It is very Italian—temperamental.”

  I take a seat in a comfortable, well-worn leather chair facing Neuhaus’s desk and with a view of the fireplace. I have brought my attaché case with the brass initials CB, to rest on my knees. Neuhaus fusses with his cappuccino machine, which is on a table behind his desk; he prefers cappuccino made with Bolivian coffee and skim milk, he says. “I have to confess to a mild addiction. There’s a Starbucks in town but their cappuccino is nothing like mine.”

  Am I nervous? Pleasurably nervous? At the moment, I would prefer a glass of sherry to cappuccino!

  My smile feels strained, though I am sure Aaron Neuhaus finds it affable, innocent. It is one of my stratagems to ply a subject with questions, to deflect any possible suspicion away from me, and Neuhaus enjoys answering my questions which are intelligent and well-informed, yet not overly intelligent and well-informed. The bookseller has not the slightest suspicion that he is dealing with an ambitious rival.

  He is ruefully telling me that everyone who knew him, including an antiquarian bookseller uncle in Washington, D.C., thought it was a very naïve notion to try to sell works of art in a bookstore in New Hampshire—“But I thought I would give myself three or four years, as an experiment. And it has turned out surprisingly well, especially my online sales.”

  Online sales. These are the sales that particularly cut into my own. Politely, I ask Neuhaus how much of his business is now online?

  Neuhaus seems surprised by my question. Is it too personal? Too—professional? I am hoping he will attribute such a question to the naïveté of Charles Brockden.

  His reply is curious—“In useless, beautiful artworks, as in books, values wax and wane according to some unknown and unpredictable algorithm.”

  This is a striking if evasive remark. It is somehow familiar to me, and yet—I can’t recall why. I must be smiling inanely at Aaron Neuhaus, not knowing how to reply. Useless, beautiful . . . Algorithm . . .

  Waiting for the cappuccino to brew, Neuhaus adds another log to the fire and prods it with a poker. What a bizarre gargoyle, the handle of the poker! In tarnished brass, a peevish grinning imp. Neuhaus shows it to me with a smile—“I picked this up at an estate sale in Blue Hill, Maine, a few summers ago. Curious, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  I am wondering why Aaron Neuhaus has shown this demonic little face to me.

  Such envy I’ve been feeling in this cozy yet so beautifully furnished sanctum sanctorum! It is painful to recall my own business offices, such as they are, utilitarian and drab, with nothing sacred about them. Outdated computers, ubiquitous fluorescent lights, charmless furniture inherited from bygone tenants. Often in a bookstore of mine the business office is also a storage room crammed with filing cabinets, packing crates, even brooms and mops, plastic buckets and stepladders, and a lavatory in a corner. Everywhere, stacks of books rising from the floor like stalagmites. How ashamed I would be if Aaron Neuhaus were to see one of those!

  I am thinking—I will change nothing in this beautiful place. The very fountain pens on his desk will be mine. I will simply move in.

  Seeing that he has a very admiring and very curious visitor, Aaron Neuhaus is happy to chat about his possessions. The bookseller’s pride in the privileged circumstances of his life is almost without ego—as one might take pleasure in any natural setting, like the ocean outside his window. Beside the large, stark daguerreotype of Poe are smaller photographs by the surrealist photographer Man Ray, of nude female figures in odd, awkward poses. Some of them are nude torsos lacking heads—very pale, marmoreal as sculpted forms. The viewer wonders uneasily: are these human beings, or mannequins? Are they human female corpses? Neuhaus tells me that the Man Ray photographs are taken from the photographer’s Tresor interdite series of the 1930s—“Most of the work is inaccessible, in private collections, and never lent to museums.” Beside the elegantly sinister Man Ray photographs, and very different from them, are crudely sensational crime photographs by the American photographer Weegee, taken in the 1930s and 1940s: stark portraits of men and women in the crises of their lives, beaten, bleeding, arrested and handcuffed, shot down in the street to lie sprawled, like one well-dressed mobster, facedown in their own blood.

  “Weegee is the crudest of artists, but he is an artist. What is notable in such ‘journalistic’ art is the absence of the photographer from his work. You can’t comprehend what, if anything, the photographer is thinking about these doomed people . . .”

  Man Ray, yes. Weegee, no. I detest crudeness, in art as in life; but of course I don’t indicate this to Aaron Neuhaus, whom I don’t want to offend. The man is so boyishly enthusiastic, showing off his treasures to a potential customer.

  Prominent in one of Neuhaus’s glass-fronted cabinets is a complete set of the many volumes of the famous British criminologist William Roughead—“Each volume signed by Roughead”; also bound copies of the American detective pulps Dime Detective, Black Mask, and a copy of The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. These were magazines in which such greats as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler published stories, Neuhaus tells me, as if I didn’t know.

  In fact, I am more interested in Neuhaus’s collection of great works of the “Golden Era of Mystery”—signed first editions by John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, and S. S. Van Dine, among others. (Some of these must be worth more than $5,000 apiece, I would think.) Neuhaus confesses that he would be very reluctant to sell his 1888 first edition of A Study in Scarlet in its original paper covers (priced at $100,000), or a signed first edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes (priced at $35,000); more reluctantly, his first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles, inscribed and signed, with handsome illustrations of Holmes and Watson (priced at $65,000). He shows me one of his “priceless” possessions—a bound copy of the February 1827 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine containing Thomas de Quincey’s infamous essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Yet more impressively, he has the complete four volumes of the first edition (1794) of Mysteries of Udolpho (priced at $10,000). But the jewel of his collection, which he will never sell, he says, unless he is absolutely desperate for money, is the 1853 first edition, in original cloth with “sepia cabinet photograph of author” of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (priced at $75,000), signed by Dickens in his strong, assured hand, in ink that has scarcely faded!

  “But this is something that would particularly interest you, ‘Charles Brockden’”—Neuhaus chuckles, carefully taking from a shelf a very old book, encased in plastic, with a loose, faded binding and badly yellowed pages—Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or
The Transformation: An American Tale, 1798.

  This is extraordinary! One would expect to see such a rare book under lock and key in the special collections of a great university library, like Harvard.

  For a moment I can’t think how to reply. Neuhaus seems almost to be teasing me. It was a careless choice of a name, I suppose—“Charles Brockden.” If I’d thought about it, of course I would have realized that a bookseller would be reminded of Charles Brockden Brown.

  To disguise my confusion, I ask Aaron Neuhaus how much he is asking for this rare book, and Neuhaus says, “‘Asking’—? I am not ‘asking’ any sum at all. It is not for sale.”

  Again, I’m not sure how to reply. Is Neuhaus laughing at me? Has he seen through my fictitious name, as through my disguise? I don’t think that this is so, for his demeanor is good-natured; but the way in which he smiles at me, as if we are sharing a joke, makes me uneasy.

  It’s a relief when Neuhaus returns the book to its shelf, and locks up the glass-fronted cabinets. At last, the cappuccino is ready!

  All this while, the fire has been making me warm—over-warm.

  The ginger-colored whiskers that cover my jaws have begun to itch.

  The heavy black plastic glasses, so much more cumbersome than my preferred wire-rim glasses, are leaving red marks on the bridge of my nose. Ah, I am looking forward to tearing both whiskers and glasses from my face with a cry of relief and victory in an hour—or ninety minutes—when I am departing Seabrook in my vehicle, south along the ocean road . . .