The Pale Blue Eye

by Louis Bayard

  “Young man,” he said. “Would you do me the favor of removing your hat?”

  With some hesitation, Poe took the leather pot off his head and set it on the Brussels carpet.

  “This won’t hurt in the least,” said the professor.

  Were I meeting Pawpaw for the first time, I might have doubted. He had the trembling hands of a man pulling up his very first petticoat as he wound a length of string round the densest part of Poe’s skull.

  “Twenty-three inches. Not so large as I would have guessed. Clearly it is the proportions that are so shocking. Mr. Poe, how much do you weigh?”

  “One hundred forty-three pounds.”

  “And your height?”

  “Five feet eight. And one half.”

  “Oh, one half, is it? Now, young man, I wish to feel your head. Don’t look like that. There will be no pain, unless rendering up your soul through the medium of fingers be agony. You need only remain still, can you do that?”

  Too cowed even to nod, Poe merely blinked. The professor drew in two draughts of air and suffered his twitching fingers to merge with that virgin scalp. A sigh, the barest breath of air, emerged from his gray lips.

  “Amativeness,” intoned Pawpaw. “Moderate.”

  He lowered his ear to Poe’s cranium, like a farmer sounding for gophers, while his fingers threshed through the matted black hair.

  “Inhabitiveness,” said the professor, more loudly. “Small. Adhesiveness: full. Intellectual faculties: large—no, very large.” A smile from Poe there. “Love of approbation: full.” A smile from me. “Philoprogenitiveness: very small.”

  On it went, Reader. Cautiousness, benevolence, hope: trait by trait, that skull was forced to yield up its secrets. Yield them to the world, I should say, for the professor roared out each finding like an auctioneer; only when his dark-grained baritone began to taper away did I know he was coming to a close.

  “Mr. Poe, you have the bumps of a rootless disposition. The portion of your skull devoted purely to animal propensities—by which I mean the lower posterior and the lower lateral—that area is somewhat less developed. However, secretiveness and combativeness are both highly developed. I discern in your character a violent and almost certainly fatal division.”

  “Mr. Landor,” said Poe, quailing a little. “You never told me the professor was a seer.”

  “Repeat that!” barked Pawpaw.

  “You . . . you never . . .”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Told me the—”

  “Richmond!” cried Pawpaw.

  Pinned to his chair, Poe began to stammer. “That’s—that’s true, I am . . .”

  “And if I’m not mistaken,” I put in, “he spent a few years in England.”

  Poe’s eyes were fanned wide now.

  “The Reverend John Bransby of Stoke Newington,” I explained. “That noted authority on spelling.”

  Pawpaw clapped his hands. “Ah, very good. Excellent, Landor! The British overtone chimes so easily with the woodland notes of the South. Let me see now, what else can we say about this young man? He is an artist. With those hands, he can be nothing else.”

  “An artist of sorts,” said Poe, blushing.

  “He is also . . .” A moment of suspension before Pawpaw thrust his index finger into the young man’s face and cried, “An orphan!”

  “That is also true,” said Poe quietly. “My parents—my real parents— died in a fire. The Richmond theater fire of eighteen-eleven.”

  “And what business did they have going to the theater?” growled Pawpaw.

  “They were actors,” said Poe. “Very fine actors. Renowned.”

  “Ah, renowned,” said the professor, turning away in disgust.

  Some awkwardness then. Poe in his chair, achy with resentment. The professor stalking the room, trying to blow all the pathos away. And me: waiting. Until the quiet had stretched so far and no more, at which point I said:

  “Professor, I was wondering if we might come to the business at hand.”

  “So be it,” he said, frowning.

  He made us tea first of all. It came in a warped silver pot and tasted like tar: spiky on the tongue, gluey in the throat. I drank three cups, one after another, like shots of whiskey. What choice did I have? Pawpaw kept no spirits here.

  “Now, then, Professor,” I said. “What are we to make of this?”

  I brought out the drawing Poe and I had made, of the triangle within the circle, and laid it on Pawpaw’s table, which was no more than a steamer trunk laid over with pressed tin.

  “Well,” said the professor, “it depends on whom you talk to. Summon an ancient Greek, an alchemist, and he would tell you the circle is an ourobouros, a symbol of eternal unity. Summon a medieval thinker”—his eyes swerved upward—“he would say it is both creation and the void toward which creation must always tend.” His eyes settled once more on the paper. “This, however—this can only be a magic circle.”

  Poe and I exchanged a look.

  “Yes, yes,” continued Pawpaw. “I remember seeing one in Le Véritable Dragon Rouge. If I recall aright, the magician would stand . . . there . . . in the triangle.”

  “The magician alone?” I asked.

  “Oh, he might have a group of assistants, all of them inside the triangle with him. Candles on either side, and in front—there, let us say—a brazier. Light everywhere, a festival of light.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to imagine it.

  “The people who performed these ceremonies,” said Poe. “Would they have been Christians?”

  “Often, yes. Magic was not solely the province of darkness. In your own drawing, as you can see, you have the Christian inscription—”

  His finger was resting now on the inverted JHS, and you might have thought the letters were speaking straight into his skin, for he snatched his hand away and rose to his feet and backed off two paces. A hard peevish cast came over his face.

  “Dear God, Landor, why did you let me go on? You think I have all day? Come!”

  Hard to describe the professor’s library to one who has never been there. It’s a small, windowless room, no more than a dozen feet in any direction, and all of it given over to books: folios, quartos, parchment-covered duodecimos, piled vertically, and horizontally, dangling off shelves, sprawled on the floor. Still open, many of them, to whatever page the professor was last reading.

  Pawpaw was already scaling the shelves. Within half a minute, he’d bagged his quarry and hauled it down to earth. A massive volume bound in black leather, with silver clasps. The professor gave it a pat, and a plume of dust rose through his fingers.

  “De Lancre,” he said. “Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges. Do you read French, Mr. Poe?”

  “Bien sûr.”

  Poe gently peeled away the first sheet of parchment. Cleared his throat, puffed out his chest. Prepared to recite.

  “Please,” said Pawpaw. “I cannot bear being read to. Kindly take your book to the corner and read in silence.”

  Of course, there was no furniture in the corner, or anywhere else. With a shy smile, Poe dropped onto a brocaded pillow, while the professor motioned me gravely to the floor. I chose instead to lean against the shelves as I pulled out a pigtail of tobacco.

  “Tell me about this de Lancre fellow,” I said.

  Wrapping his arms round his ankles, Pawpaw rested his chin on his knees. “Pierre de Lancre,” he said. “Redoubtable witch hunter. Found and executed six hundred Basque witches over a period of four months, and left behind the remarkable volume that Mr. Poe is now perusing. A pure delight. Oh, but wait! What sort of host am I?”

  And he was up on his feet and out the door, to return five minutes later with a platter of apples—the ones I’d seen roasting in the hearth. They were unknowable now: blistery and wounded, oozing sap. Pawpaw looked a bit offended when I declined.

  “As you like,” he sniffed, cramming one into his mouth. “Where were we? Yes, yes, de Lancre. Now, the book I
wish I had to give you, Landor, is Discours du Diable. Written by one Henri le Clerc, who exterminated seven hundred witches before he was done. What makes his story unusual is that he experienced a midlife conversion. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, except that le Clerc was moving in the other direction. To the dark side.”

  A line of apple sap had worked its way down his chin. He fingered it away.

  “Le Clerc was himself captured and burned at the stake in Caen in 1603. In his arms, it’s said, he held the aforementioned volume, clothed in wolf ’s skin. As the flames rose higher, he said a prayer to his—his lord, and cast the book into the fire. Onlookers swore that it vanished in a trice, as though someone had plucked it from the very heart of the furnace.”

  “Well, I can see why—”

  “The story is not finished, Landor. Word soon spread that le Clerc had left behind two or three other volumes identical to the one that was destroyed. None has ever been conclusively identified, but in the intervening centuries, the task of recovering these lost books has become the idée fixe of many an occult collector.”

  “One of them being you, Professor?”

  He grimaced. “I don’t especially covet the volume myself, though I can see why others might. It is said that le Clerc left behind instructions for curing incurable illnesses, and even for securing immortality.”

  Just then I felt the smallest of breezes on my hand. I looked down to find an ant crawling over my knuckles.

  “I think I will have one of those apples,” I said.

  And behold, it was good. The black crust tore away like paper, and the inside was a molten wonder, sweet and sticky-clean. I could see Pawpaw smiling at me, as if to say, You doubted?

  “Perhaps,” he said, “we should ascertain our young friend’s progress.”

  Only a few minutes had passed since we left him in the corner, but Poe was so still that a frond of dust had already settled across his shoulders. Even as we approached, he forbore to raise his head. I had to look over him to see what he was studying.

  It was an engraving, stretching across both pages: the portrait of a feast. Droopy-breasted hags astride great hairy rams. Winged demons dragging aloft the bodies of still-living babies. Bonneted skeletons and dancing fiends and, rising up in the center—in his golden chair—the master of the feast: a mannerly goat, with fire coming out of his horns.

  “Remarkable, isn’t it?” said Poe. “One can’t stop looking. Oh, Professor, might I have leave to read aloud from just one section?”

  “If you must.”

  “This is from de Lancre’s description of the sabbath ritual. Excuse my stumbling, I’m still translating. It is commonly known among the . . . fraternity of evil angels that the—the contents of a witches’ sabbath feast are confined to the following sundries—to wit, unclean animals such as are never eaten by Christian peoples . . .”

  I felt myself drawing closer.

  “. . . as well, the hearts of unbaptized children . . .”

  Poe stopped and, looking first at the professor, then at me, began to grin.

  “. . . and the hearts of hanged men.”

  Narrative of Gus Landor

  13

  November 3rd to November 6th

  We were silent, Poe and I, all the way back to the Point. It was only when he was dismounting, about a quarter mile short of the guard post, that he saw fit to speak again.

  “Mr. Landor,” he said. “I have been pondering where next we should direct our enquiries. It occurs to me that if we wish to locate a secret enclave of . . .” He hesitated but a second. “. . . Of Satanists, well, then, we should address ourselves to those who would be most sensitive to such an enclave’s presence. Their opposite number, as it were.”

  I gave it some thought.

  “Christians,” I said warily.

  “Christians, yes. Of the most devout flavor.”

  “You don’t mean the Reverend Zantzinger?” I asked.

  “Oh, Lord, no!” cried Poe. “Zantzinger wouldn’t know the Devil if it sneezed on his alb. No, I rather had in mind the prayer squad.”

  It made perfect sense, I recognized that straight off. This was the very squad that Leroy Fry had briefly joined, a voluntary association of cadets who found the West Point chapel too Episcopalian and wanted a straighter road to their God.

  Until today, of course, Poe had held this squad in nothing but contempt. “Now, Mr. Landor, I think we might put them to good use, if you would permit me.”

  “Of course. But how do you—”

  “Oh, you leave that to me,” he drawled. “In the meantime, you and I must find a better means of communicating. From my end, it’s relatively simple: I need but slip into your hotel and leave messages under your door. You, however, would be best advised not to leave any notes in my barracks quarters, as my roommates are the nosiest devils. I would suggest instead Kosciusko’s Garden, do you know the place? You’ll find a natural spring there and, on the southern perimeter of the spring, a loose rock—igneous, I believe—large enough to conceal any piece of paper, provided it’s sufficiently folded. Simply leave your missives there in the morning, and I shall take pains to retrieve them in the interval between—. What? Why are you chuckling, Mr. Landor?”

  In fact, I was feeling just a little vindicated. No spy of my acquaintance had ever taken to his work with such flair, and I couldn’t wait to sing his praises to someone—even if that someone was only Hitchcock. He and I duly gathered in Thayer’s parlor late the next day (Thayer, good deity that he was, absented himself ), and we drank coffee larded with lumpy cream, and ate dodger cakes and pickled oysters. The scent of Molly’s pot roast tickled the air, and Hitchcock talked about a book he was reading— Montholon’s Memoirs of Napoleon, I think—and it was all very light and full of grace, even if this grace came out of great compression. For the chief of engineers had just demanded a full accounting of my enquiries, and this was to be forwarded to the secretary of war, and it was said that the president himself had taken an interest in the matter—and when the president takes an interest, it can safely be said that things are teetering, and it will take some timely action to set them right again. That was what lay beneath all our pleasantness: a ticking, as pronounced as the clock in Thayer’s downstairs study, which at the five o’clock hour came chiming through the floor.

  I felt for Hitchcock, I did my level best for him. Told him what I knew and didn’t know and what I supposed. I even told him about Pawpaw, whose quirks are hardly the sort to warm the military mind. I lived up to every one of our terms, or so I thought, and then I saw Hitchcock rise and peer into a glass cabinet full of war totems, and I realized my job was just beginning.

  “So, Mr. Landor. By virtue of some—some holes in the ground, you are now persuaded that a diabolical—what should we call it, society?”

  “That would do.”

  “Society or—or cult is in play somewhere in the vicinity of West Point. Within the Academy’s own walls, very possibly.”

  “It’s possible, yes.”

  “And you’re further persuaded that this individual—”

  “Or group.”

  “—or group of individuals is under the sway of some medieval—I was going to call it twiddle-twaddle . . .”

  “Go right ahead, Captain.”

  “. . . and that consequent to this, Leroy Fry was killed and his heart removed, all to satisfy a bizarre devotional exercise. Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Mr. Landor?”

  “Now, Captain,” I said, smiling gently, “you know me better than that. Have you ever heard me say anything outright? All I can tell you is there’s now a chain of possibility. A series of markings at the crime scene that may have occult meaning, and a very specific set of directions—occult directions—that could pertain to our crime.”

  “And from this you deduce . . . ?”

  “I don’t deduce anything. I only say that Leroy Fry was killed in just such a way as to make his heart useful to a particular class of wor
shipper.”

  “ ‘Useful,’ ‘class of worshipper’—those are fine euphemisms, Mr. Landor.”

  “If you want to call them bloodthirsty demons, Captain, be my guest. It doesn’t bring us any closer to learning who they are. Or whether they are working toward larger ends.”

  “But if we’re to accept your—your ‘chain of possibility,’ Mr. Landor, then it seems increasingly likely that one party was behind both crimes.”