Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  Afterwards, when the half-dozen members of thesalon compare notes, none of them can agree on what, if anything, they saw while under Vauglais’s sway. One of them insists that nothing appeared. Three admit to what might have been a cloud of smoke, or a trick of the light. Of the remaining pair, one states flat-out that she saw the Devil. The other balks at any statement more elaborate than, “Monsieur Vauglais has shown me terrible joy.” Whatever they do or don’t see, it doesn’t last very long. The oil Prosper doused the skulls with has been consumed. The fire dies away; darkness rushes in to fill the gap. The trance in which Vauglais has held the salon breaks. There’s a sound like wind rushing, then quiet.

  A month after that expedition, Prosper disappeared from Paris. He had attempted to lead that same salon back into the catacombs for a second— well, whatever you’d call what he’d done. A summoning? (But what was he summoning?) Not surprisingly, the men and women of the salon declined his request. In a huff, Vauglais left them and tried to insert himself into a couple of even-less-disreputablesalons,attempting to use gossip about his former associates as his price of admission. But either the secrets he knew weren’t juicy enough—possible, but I suspect unlikely—or those other salons had heard about his underground investigations and decided they preferred the comfort of their drawing rooms. Then one of the men from that originalsalon raised questions about Prosper’s military service—he claimed to have found a sailor who swore that he and Vauglais had been on an extended debauch in Morocco at the very time he was supposed to have been marching towards Moscow. That’s the problem with being the flavor of the month: before you know it, the calendar’s turned, and no one can remember what they found so appealing about you in the first place. In short order, there’s talk about an official inquiry into Prosper’s service record—probably more rumor than fact, but it’s enough for Vauglais, and he departs Paris for parts unknown. No one sees him leave, just as no one saw him arrive. In the weeks that follow, there are reports of Prosper in Libya, Madagascar, but they don’t disturb a single eyebrow. Years—decades later, when Gauguin’s in Tahiti, he’ll hear a story about a strange white man who came to the island a long time ago and vanished into its interior, and Vauglais’s name will occur to him, but you can’t even call that a legend. It’s... a momentary association. Prosper Vauglais vanishes.

  Well, not all of him. That’s right: there’s the account he wrote of his discovery of the Abbey.

  I beg your pardon? Dead? Oh, right, yes. It’s interesting—apparently, Prosper permitted a physician connected to the firstsalon he frequented to conduct a pretty thorough examination of him. According to Dr. Zumachin, Vauglais’s skin was stubbornly pallid. No matter how much the doctor pinched or slapped it, Prosper’s flesh remained the same gray-white. Not only that, it was cold, cold and hard, as if it were packed with ice. Although Vauglais had to inhale in order to speak, his regular respiration was so slight as to be undetectable. It wouldn’t fog the doctor’s pocket mirror. And try as Zumachin might, he could not locate a pulse.

  Sure, Prosper could have paid him off; aside from his part in this story, there isn’t that much information on the good doctor. For what it’s worth, most of the people who met Vauglais commented on his skin, its pallor, and, if they touched it, its coldness. No one else noted his breathing, or lack thereof, but a couple of the members of that last salon described him as extraordinarily still.

  Okay, back to that book. Actually, wait. Before we do, let me bring this up on the screen...

  I know—talk about something completely different. No, it’s not a Rorschach test. It does look like it, though, doesn’t it? Now if my friends outside will oblige me... and there we go. Amazing what a sheet of blue plastic and a high-power lamp can do. We might as well be in the east room of Prospero’s Abbey.

  Yes, the blue light makes it appear deeper—it transforms it from ink-spill to opening. Prosper calls it “La Bouche,” the Mouth. Some mouth, eh?

  That’s where the design comes from, Vauglais’s book. The year after his disappearance, a small Parisian press whose biggest claim to fame was its unauthorized edition of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine publishes Prosper’s L’Histoire de Mes Aventures dans L’Etendu Russe,which translates something like, “The History of My Adventures in the Russian,” either “Wilderness” or “Vastness.” Not that anyone calls it by its title. The publisher, one Denis Prebend, binds Vauglais’s essay between covers the color of a bruise after three or four days. Yes, that sickly, yellowy-green. Of course that’s what catches everyone’s attention, not the less-than-inspired title, and it isn’t long before customers are asking for “le livre verte,” the green book. It’s funny—it’s one of those books that no one will admit to reading, but that goes through ten printings the first year after its appears.

  Some of those copies do find their way across the Atlantic, very good. In fact, within a couple of months of its publication, there are at least three pirated translations of the green book circulating the booksellers of London, and a month after that, they’re available in Boston, New York, and Baltimore.

  To return to the book itself for a moment—after that frustrating ending, there’s a blank page, which is followed by seven more pages, each showing a separate design. What’s above me on the screen is the first of them. The rest—well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Suffice it to say, the initial verdict was that something had gone awry in the printing process, with the result that the bouchehad become bouche, cloudy. A few scholars have even gone so far as to attempt to reconstruct what Prosper’s original images must have been. Prebend, though—the publisher—swore that he’d presented the book exactly as he had been instructed.

  For those of us familiar with abstract art, I doubt there’s any great difficulty in seeing the black blot on the screen as a mouth. The effect—there used to be these books; they were full of what looked like random designs. If you held them the right distance from your face and let your eyes relax, almost to the point of going cross-eyed, all of sudden, a picture would leap out of the page at you. You know what I’m talking about? Good. I don’t know what the name for that effect is, but it’s the nearest analogue I can come up with for what happens when you look at the Mouth under blue light—except that the image doesn’t jump forward so much as sink back. The way it recedes—it’s as if it extends, not just through the screen, or the wall behind it, but beyond all that, to the very substratum of things.

  To tell the truth, I have no idea what’s responsible for the effect. If you find this impressive, however...

  Look at that: a new image and a fresh color. How’s that for coordination? Good work, nameless minions. Vauglais named this “LeGardien,” the Guardian. What’s that? I suppose you could make an octopus out of it; although aren’t there a few too many tentacles? True, it’s close enough; it’s certainly more octopus than squid. Do you notice... right. The tentacles, loops, whatever we call them, appear to be moving. Focus on any one in particular, and it stands still—but you can see movement out of the corner of your eye, can’t you? Try to take in the whole, and you swear its arms are performing an intricate dance.

  So the Mouth leads to the Guardian, which is waving its appendages in front of...

  That green is bright after the purple, isn’t it? Voila“Le Récif,” the Reef. Makes sense, a cuttlefish protecting a reef. I don’t know: it’s angular enough. Personally, I suspect this one is based on some kind of pun or word play. “Récif is one letter away from “récif,” story, and this reef comes to us as the result of a story; in some weird way, the reef may be the story. I realize that doesn’t make any sense; I’m still working through it.

  This image is a bit different from the previous two. Anyone notice how?

  Exactly: instead of the picture appearing to move, the light itself seems to—I like your word, “shimmer.” You could believe we’re gazing through water. It’s—not hypnotic, that’s too strong, but it is soothing. Don’t you think?

  I’ll take your
yawn as a “yes.” Very nice. What a way to preface a question. All right, all right. What is it that’s keeping you awake?

  Isn’t it obvious? Apparently not.

  Yes! Edgar read Prosper’s book!

  When? The best evidence is sometime in the early eighteen thirties, after he’d relocated to Baltimore. He mentions hearing about the green book from one of his fellow cadets at West Point, but he doesn’t secure his own copy until he literally stumbles upon one in a bookshop near Baltimore’s inner harbor. He wrote a fairly amusing account of it in a letter to Virginia. The store was this long, narrow space located halfway down an alley; its shelves were stuffed past capacity with all sizes of books jammed together with no regard for their subject. Occasionally, one of the shelves would disgorge its contents without warning. If you were underneath or to the side of it, you ran the risk of substantial injury. Not to mention, the single aisle snaking into the shop’s recesses was occupied at irregular intervals by stacks of books that looked as if a strong sneeze would send them tumbling down.

  It’s as he’s attempting to maneuver around an especially tall tower of books, simultaneously trying to avoid jostling a nearby shelf, that Edgar’s foot catches on a single volume he hadn’t seen, sending him—and all books in the immediate vicinity—to the floor. There’s a huge puff of dust; half a dozen books essentially disintegrate. Edgar’s sense of humor is such that he appreciates the comic aspect of a poet—as he styled himself—buried beneath a deluge of books. However, he insists on excavating the book that undid him.

  The copy of Vauglais’s essay he found was a fourth translation that had been done by a Boston publisher hoping to cash in on the popularity of the other editions. Unfortunately for him, the edition took longer to prepare than he’d anticipated—his translator was a Harvard professor who insisted on translating Prosper as accurately as he could. This meant an English version of Vauglais’s essay that was a model of fidelity to the original French, but that wasn’t ready until Prosper’s story was last week’s news. The publisher went ahead with what he titled The Green Book of M. Prosper Vauglais anyway, but he pretty much lost his shirt over the whole thing.

  Edgar was so struck at having fallen over this book that he bought it on the spot. He spent the next couple of days reading and re-reading it, puzzling over its contents. As we’ve seen in “The Gold Bug” and “The Purloined Letter,” this was a guy who liked a puzzle. He spent a good deal of time on the seven designs at the back of the book, convinced that their significance was right in front of him.

  Speaking of those pictures, let’s have another one. Assistants, if you please—

  Hey, it’s Halloween! Isn’t that what you associate orange with? And especially an orange like this—this is the sun spilling the last of its late light, right before all the gaudier colors, the violets and pinks, splash out. You don’t think of orange as dark, do you? I know I don’t. Yet it is, isn’t it? Is it the darkest of the bright colors? To be sure, it’s difficult to distinguish the design at its center; the orange is filmy, translucent. There are a few too many curves for it to be the symbol for infinity; at least, I think there are. I want to say I see a pair of snakes wrapped around one another, but the coils don’t connect in quite the right way. Vauglais’s name for this was “Le Coeur,” the Heart, and also the Core, as well as the Height or the Depth, depending on usage. Obviously, we’re cycling through the seven rooms from “The Masque of the Red Death;” obviously, too, I’m arguing that Edgar takes their colors from Prosper’s book. In that schema, orange is at the center, three colors to either side of it; in that sense, we have reached the heart, the core, the height or the depth. Of course, that core obscures the other one—or maybe not.

  While you try to decide, let’s return to Edgar. It’s an overstatement to say that Vauglais obsesses him. When his initial attempt at deciphering the designs fails, he puts the book aside. Remember, he’s a working writer at a time when the American economy really won’t support one—especially one with Edgar’s predilections—so there are always more things to be written in the effort to keep the wolf a safe distance from the door. Not to mention, he’s falling in love with the girl who will become his wife. At odd moments over the next decade, though, he retrieves Prosper’s essay and spends a few hours poring over it. He stares at its images until they’re grooved into the folds of his brain. During one long afternoon in 1840, he’s sitting with the book open to the Mouth, a glass of water on the table to his right. The sunlight streaming in the windows splinters on the water glass, throwing a rainbow across the page in front of him. The arc of the image that’s under the blue strip of the bow looks different; it’s as if that portion of the paper has sunk into the book— behind the book. A missing and apparently lost piece of the puzzle snaps into place, and Edgar starts up from the table, knocking over his chair in the process. He races through the house, searching for a piece of blue glass. The best he can do is a heavy blue jug, which he almost drops in his excitement. He returns to the book, angles the jug to catch the light, and watches as the Mouth opens. He doesn’t waste any time staring at it; shifting the jug to his right hand, he flips to the next image with his left, positions the glass jug over the Guardian, and... nothing. For a moment, he’s afraid he’s imagined the whole thing, had an especially vivid waking dream. But when he pages back to the Mouth and directs the blue light onto it, it clearly recedes. Edgar wonders if the effect he’s observed is unique to the first image, then his eye lights on the glass of water, still casting its rainbow. He sets the jug on the floor, turns the page, and slides the book closer to the glass.

  That’s how Edgar spends the rest of the afternoon, matching the designs in the back of Vauglais’s book to the colors that activate them. The first four come relatively quickly; the last three take longer. Once he has all seven, Edgar re-reads Prosper’s essay and reproaches himself as a dunce for not having hit on the colors sooner. It’s all there in Vauglais’s prose, he declares, plain as day. (He’s being much too hard on himself. I’ve read the green book a dozen times and I have yet to find the passage where Prosper hints at the colors.)

  How about a look at the most difficult designs? Gentlemen, if you please...

  There’s nothing there. I know—that’s what I said, the first time I saw the fifth image. “Le Silence,” the Silence. Compared to the designs that precede it, this one is so faint as to be barely detectable. And when you shine a bright, white light onto it, it practically disappears. There is something in there, though; you have to stare at it for a while. More so than with the previous images, what you see here varies dramatically from viewer to viewer.

  Edgar never records his response to the Silence, which is a pity. Having cracked the secret of Vauglais’s designs, he studies the essay more carefully, attempting to discern the use to which the images were to be put, the nature of Prosper’s Great Work, his Transumption. (There’s that word again. I never clarified its meaning vis a vis Vauglais’s ideas, did I?) The following year, when Edgar sits down to write “The Masque of the Red Death,” it is in no small part as an answer to the question of what Prosper was up to. That answer shares features with some of the stories he had written prior to his 1840 revelation; although, interestingly, they came after he had obtained his copy of the green book.

  From the looks on your faces, I’d say you’ve seen what the Silence contains. I don’t suppose anyone wants to share?

  I’ll take that as a “No.” It’s all right: what you find there can be rather... disconcerting.

  We’re almost at the end of our little display. What do you say we proceed to number six? Here we go...

  Violet’s such a nice color, isn’t it? You have to admit, some of those other colors are pretty intense. Not this one, though; even the image—”L’Arbre,” the Tree—looks more or less like a collection of lines trying to be a tree. Granted, if you study the design, you’ll notice that each individual line seems to fade and then re-inscribe itself, but compared to the effect of the prev
ious image, this is fairly benign. Does it remind you of anything? Anything we were discussing, say, in the last hour or so?

  Oh never mind, I’ll just tell you. Remember those trees Vauglais saw outside the Abbey? Remember the way that, when he tried to focus on any of them, he saw a mass of black lines? Hmmm. Maybe there’s more to this pleasant design than we’d thought. Maybe it’s, not the key to all this, but the key trope, or figure.

  I know: which means what, exactly? Let’s return to Edgar’s story. You have a group of people who are sequestered together, made to disguise their outer identities, encouraged to debauch themselves, to abandon their inner identities, all the while passing from one end of this color schema to the other. They put their selves aside, become a massive blank, a kind of psychic space. That opening allows what is otherwise an abstraction, a personification, to change states, to manifest itself physically. Of course, the Red Death doesn’t appear of its own volition; it’s called into being by Prince Prospero, who can’t stop thinking about the reason he’s retreated into his abbey.