The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by Brian Stableford

  “There will be no need for intemperate action, Monsieur,” Lestrade put in. “The house has only one exit. If anyone goes in, even if they are a dozen strong, they will be caught in a trap, and we shall have all the time in the world to gather them in as we please when they come out again.”

  “Again, you must not act intemperately,” Dupin insisted. “If anyone comes out after going in, have them followed and watched rather than arrested—don’t make a move unless and until there is manifest danger.”

  “Very well,” the Prefect conceded, with a readiness that no longer surprised me. “Let us hope, then, that the villain—or villains, if they do turn out to be a dozen strong—sticks to his plan, and returns to the scene of poor Zann’s demise, bringing the Stradivarius with him.”

  “Yes,” said Dupin, not very enthusiastically. “Let us hope that he does.”

  “I’ll be sure to let you know of any developments, Dupin,” Monsieur Groix promised. “With luck, you’ll be in on the climax of the hunt.”

  Having made that promise—which, I had taken note, made no mention of me—the Prefect of the Paris Police, the one remaining sharer of Erich Zann’s dire secret, scrupulously delivered me to my home, in advance of delivering Dupin to his—and then, presumably, went on to his own, in order to bear the brunt of his own insomnia.

  9.

  I suspected as soon as I had closed the door of the vestibule behind me that there was someone in the house—someone waiting patiently for my return—but I did not trust the sensation, for I thought that it was probably a product of my own overexcited imagination. I was tempted to call out to the sergent de ville who was stationed under the arch of the coaching-entrance, but the thought of looking foolish if he helped me to search the house and we found nothing urged me to compromise with my fear—with the result that, although I did not call for help, I did not replace my swordstick in the umbrella-stand in the hallway or take off my overcoat.

  I went into the gloomy sitting-room where Dupin and I had spent the evening, and immediately went to stoke up the fire, which I had fed and bedded down before leaving, but which was on the point of going out nevertheless. There was enough life in the embers to ignite a handful of kindling, and I added two substantial logs before turning my attention to the candles. I had left three of them burning in trays on the mantelpiece, but two had burned all the way down and expired—hence the gloominess of the room. I used the sole survivor to light two fresh candles—good-quality wax candles, like those we had found on the mantelpiece of Erich Zann’s old room—and then turned round to survey the illuminated room.

  My hope and rational expectation was that I would find it empty, so that I might pick up one of the candle-trays by its looped handle and carry it methodically from room to room, searching the ground floor first, then the first floor, and finally the third—satisfying myself, by that process, that I really was alone in the house. Alas, the chair in which Dupin had been sitting a few hours earlier was now occupied by another man, who had been sitting so very still, shaded by the wings of the chair, that he had been virtually invisible until the renewed candlelight set the shadows to flight.

  My acquaintance with Dupin had served to train my habits. The first thing I looked at, once the frisson of terror had died down sufficiently to liberate my thoughts, was his boots, which were neatly placed on the rug in front of the chair rather than extended over the rim of the fore-surround. They were larger than my own, and could not possibly have left the footprints I had recently seen in the house at the summit of the Rue d’Auseuil.

  Then I looked at his face, although I took note, as my gaze shifted, of the fact that his legs were long and his torso broad. I did not recognize the face, which was that of a man in his forties, pale and clean-shaven, with odd, pencil-thin eyebrows.

  I was tempted to draw the blade of my swordstick and menace him with it, although he seemed to be unarmed, and his hands were relaxed, resting in plain view on the arms of the chair. I resisted the temptation, but I kept a firm grip of the stick, ready to bring the blade into play at a moment’s notice. I was almost prepared to believe that the intruder was one of Groix’s multitudinous agents, commissioned to watch over me at close quarters, until he spoke—in English.

  “There’s no need for alarm, old chap” he said. “We have no intention of hurting you.”

  The significant word in that small speech was, of course, we—but I did not focus on it immediately, for I was too taken up by the fact that I recognized his baritone voice.

  “Mr. Hood,” I said. “I did not know you immediately, since you are not made up as Mephistopheles, with your widow’s-peak wig, your goatee and your jet-black eyebrows.”

  “Actors,” he said, “are required to be masters of disguise. I hope you will forgive me for taking the liberty of sitting down by your fire, but I have been waiting here for a long time, and it’s a cold night. I did not want to poke the fire or relight the candles that had gone out, for fear of alarming the policeman outside.”

  “I could call out to him, and have you arrested,” I observed. I also observed that, although he had not dared to disturb the fire or the candles, he had had no such qualms about the brandy decanter I kept on the sideboard. There was an empty glass on the little table beside the armchair, and I judged from the level of the decanter that it must have been emptied at least three times over.

  “Of course you could,” Mr. Hood replied, “but in that case, neither of us would learn anything—and I think that we are both willing victims of the disease of curiosity.”

  Only actors, I thought, talk in such colorful terms—and they only do it because they are the puppets of fanciful writers. Aloud, I said: “If you have been waiting here for a long time, I take it that you did not murder Paul Palaiseau?”

  It was a shrewd gibe. His pathetically thin eyebrows rose, and his eyes widened. “Palaiseau is dead?” he queried. “Are you sure?”

  “I have the word of the Prefect of the Parisian Police himself,” I told him, loftily.

  “Ah yes,” he murmured. “The Prefect of Police. That is a most unwelcome complication. We do not like that at all. A dire inconvenience. If you do not intend to call for help, or attack me, perhaps you ought to sit down.”

  I sat down, not because he wanted me to but because I was weary, and my legs were stiff with the cold. Luxurious as the Prefect’s carriage was, it was still bitterly cold in the early hours of a winter morning. When I extended my feet toward the fire the actor did likewise, as if given tacit permission. The flames were becoming more excited now that the logs had caught; the resin leaking from the heartwood was sizzling and sputtering.

  “What do you want from me, Mr. Hood?” I asked.

  He did not seem to be in any hurry to tell me—or, indeed, to do anything at all. His attitude was odd. There was nothing of the automaton or marionette about his speech or posture, but I had never seen a man so utterly devoid of self-alertness. The normal state of human consciousness has a certain ineffable anxiety about it; while we are awake, we are always slightly on our guard, watchful of our surroundings and ourselves, intent on making a good impression even when we are not manifestly under scrutiny. Mr. Hood was not. I wondered briefly whether it might be a simple effect of over-relaxation from playing a role on stage, but I decided almost immediately that I was, in fact, confronted by a somnambulist, who was also a somniloquist. This was not the murderer, but it was his instrument.

  “Speak of the Devil, and you see the tip of his tail,” I murmured, remembering that there is many a true word spoken in jest.

  “That is not how the Devil is costumed, nowadays,” the actor told me. “In Medieval miracle plays, I suppose, he wore shaggy leggings with a tail sewn on to their arse, not to mention horns glued to his forehead—but fashions change. Mephistopheles is civilized now—more so, in most respects, than his victims.”

  “Urbanity and civilization are not the same,” I replied.

  He smiled wanly. “Do you believe in
the Devil?” he asked, almost as if he were genuinely interested to hear the answer.

  “Not the Devil represented in miracle plays,” I told him, “enthroned in a fiery Hell and wielding a culinary trident. I believe in sin, though, and temptation.”

  The actor nodded his head. “So do I,” he said. “These Frenchmen have a nice phrase: la beauté du diable. They use it often to refer to the glamour and seductive magnetism that pubescent girls acquire: the appeal of lust. The theater trades on it to an inordinate extent. There is a sense, though, in which all beauty is the Devil’s beauty—that beauty itself is pure, unalloyed temptation. Especially the beauty of music.”

  “The Devil is reputed to have all the best tunes,” I remarked.

  “The point is,” he told me, “that the Devil has all the tunes. Music itself is the Devil’s work—perhaps his finest work.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I told him. “Nor do I believe that ecstasy and sublimity are intrinsically diabolical, or even intrinsically horrific. I have never read the Harmonies de l’Enfer, admittedly, but I’m not the kind of person who is easily swayed by textual rhetoric. Were you really sent here to discuss theodicy, Mr. Hood? With me?”

  He sighed. “No,” he admitted, “but I have been waiting here for quite some time, and what is a man to do when sitting in dim light beside a dwindling fire but turn to philosophy?”

  “Drink, apparently,” I said, dryly. “Doubtless the brandy helped to turn your philosophizing in a maudlin direction. What is it that you really want?”

  “Erich Zann’s manuscript,” he said, in a tone of voice that suggested no expectation of success. “The finest music of all—we hope.”

  “I don’t have it,” I told him. “Dupin says that he burned it, because it was too dangerous to be played, and I have no reason to doubt him. It’s gone.”

  Hood sighed again. “That’s what Clamart said.”

  “Were you there when Clamart was murdered?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he retorted. “I was on stage, as you know full well. You saw the play, did you not? You know what my role demands.”

  I nodded my head, slowly—and it occurred to me that in mentioning that Monsieur Bazailles was only required to present himself on stage for the final curtain-call, Palaiseau had called attention to an important detail. Of all the members of the cast of La Cantate du Diable, there was only one for whom the performance did not provide an alibi for the time of Clamart’s murder.

  “Do you really believe Monsieur Dupin when he says that he destroyed the sheet music?” Hood asked.

  It was an awkward question. “Yes,” I lied.

  “But he did hear it played, did he not?” the actor persisted. “And he must have read the scores before burning them, even if he really did burn them? The music is still engraved in his memory.”

  “A good memory is one that is adept in forgetting,” I told him. “It is a careful and judicious sieve, not a lumber-room or an Archive of State. Monsieur Dupin has an excellent memory.”

  He smiled, and once again, I saw the Mephistophelean play of his features, of which he had made such clever use on stage. “But he suffers far worse than you or I from the disease of curiosity. You might be surprised, my American friend, to discover how careless and injudicious the sieve of human memory becomes, in response to an expert Mesmerist.”

  Given that I had adapted three substantial accounts of my friend for publication in American periodicals, two of which were in print, I felt free to talk about my friend to Mr. Hood. The relevant information was, so to speak, already in the public domain. “Dupin is a master analyst,” I told him, “and a brilliant logician. He has studied Mesmerism himself, and I would back his knowledge of it against your master’s expertise in any circumstances whatsoever. He is little-known at present, even in Paris, but he will be very famous one day, and a cardinal exemplar to all men intent on solving the important puzzles of life. You cannot defeat him. If he holds the secret of the music of Erich Zann, you will never force or persuade him to release it”

  “The important puzzles of life,” the actor echoed. “I like that. I’ll be sure to mention the phrase to Monsieur Soulié—although the fellow seems to be diverting his attention away from the theater now, in order to concentrate his efforts on feuilleton serials. He was not always that manner of man, though, was he? Your Monsieur Dupin, that is, not Monsieur Soulié. He once had more...Romantic inclinations.”

  “I have not known him very long,” I said. “I have only known him as he is now—but I do know him, and I trust him implicitly. He is a great man.”

  Mr. Hood suddenly leaned forward, tempting me to draw my blade—but he did not raise his hands or threaten me in any way. He simply looked me in the eyes with his Mephistophelean gaze—whose power seemed tangibly diminished by the absence of the fake eyebrows that he employed in performance—and said: “He betrayed the trust of Erich Zann. He did not honor his legacy.”

  “I can’t agree with you,” I said. “On the basis of what I have learned tonight—in somewhat tangled fashion, I admit—my firm opinion is that that Monsieur Dupin has taken exceedingly good care of Erich Zann’s legacy, by guarding its secret very carefully. Much more carefully, it seems, than poor Paul Palaiseau.”

  “Palaiseau has been a great disappointment too,” Hood replied, a trifle distantly, although he was still leaning forward. “Perhaps that’s why he’s dead.”

  “His murder was not part of the grand plan, then?” I queried. “Who made the plan, and who is changing it by the hour? Who killed Clamart, Palaiseau and Henriette?”

  “Henriette?” the actor countered, in seemingly-authentic bewilderment. “Who on Earth is Henriette?”

  “Palaiseau’s concierge,” I replied, impatiently.

  “The old crone? Why would he kill her?” Hood still seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “Who is he?” I asked again—in search of confirmation rather than revelation. It was obvious now, who he must be, however difficult it might be to believe.

  Hood settled back into his chair, ignoring the question. “Will you tell me where Dupin hid the Zann documents?” he asked, as if he felt obliged to ask in spite of knowing the answer.

  “He burned them,” I repeated.

  “You had best be careful about voicing that assertion,” the actor muttered. “True or not, it makes him angry. He’s beautiful when he’s angry—and terrible.”

  “Did he become angry more than once tonight?” I asked. “Is that why Palaiseau is dead?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” the actor said, his baritone voice becoming oddly plaintive.

  I knew that I ought to be patient, and to prolong the interview for as long as possible, in order to obtain as much information as possible, but I was very tired, and the blazing fire seemed impotent to soothe the cold that had crawled into my very bones. “I would like you to leave my house, now, Mr. Hood,” I said. “If you go quietly, I will let you leave without alerting the policeman at my door. If you will not go quietly, I’m sure that the Perfect of Police would be only too happy to accommodate you in the Conciergerie until we arrest the murderer whose accomplice you are.” To emphasize my threat, I separated the two halves of the swordstick and showed him the blade.

  “I’m afraid that you don’t quite understand the situation, old chap,” Hood murmured, quite unintimidated by the sight of the long and gleaming dagger. “I’m a sportsman, so I’ll give you one more chance. If you can tell me where the manuscript is, we might be able to end this without anyone else getting hurt. If you can do that, I’ll be glad to leave, quietly, and you’ll probably never see me again—not on the Parisian stage, at any rate.”

  “I have never seen the document to which you refer,” I relied, stonily, “and I have no reason to doubt my friend’s word regarding its fate. Now, I give you one more chance: either you leave immediately, or you can explain everything to the agents of the Sûreté.”

  I leaned a little further forward as I spoke
, in order to extend the tip of my blade toward his throat—which was undoubtedly a mistake, since it not only opened up the opportunity for him to grab my wrist, but gave the person who smashed a terra-cotta vase over my head more room to deliver what was, in any case, an awkward and clumsy blow. Absurdly, all I could think about, as I lurched further forward, trying in vain to turn my agonized head, was that Bernard Clamart had not been knocked unconscious by the first blow either; it had taken three to finish him off.

  Had I reacted more decisively, I suppose I might have been able to stab Mr. Hood through the heart. As things were, he parried my blow with the poker, which he had snatched up from the hearth in his right hand, and seized my wrist with his left, imposing an irresistibly stern grip that completed my helplessness. He forced the blade down, all the way to the carpet, and then he trapped it with his huge boot, to ensure that I could do him no harm. With slightly blurred vision, I saw blood drops appearing on the carpet and the polished blade, having dripped from my head.

  Eventually, however, I contrived to look behind me at the person who had hit me.

  It was a blond-haired boy: the Devil’s other half, in Monsieur Soulié’s play. He seemed, even at close range, to be no more than twelve years old—a mere child, not even adolescent.

  In a voice that did not seem at all angelic, at least for the moment, the seeming child said to his counterpart: “I got here as soon as I could. Palaiseau’s dead.”

  “I thought we needed him,” the English actor said. “In fact, I was under the impression that we couldn’t do anything further without him.”

  “We never needed him,” the soprano said. “I know exactly what we need to do, now.” He looked down at me, then, and said: “This is all Dupin’s fault. No one had to die, and you didn’t have to get hurt—but don’t worry. You might get out of this alive, if you behave yourself. Will you release the knife and come with us quietly, or do I have to break another of your precious ornaments?” He was being sarcastic; the vase had been valueless.