Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology

by Paul Kane

  “I’m real sorry, Mr. Dupin,” I muttered.

  “About what?” Dupin demanded.

  “All this. Dying in a ditch is a poor sort of a way for your day of sightseeing to end. And I’m the native guide here. I should have headed this off before you got too far into it. Mind you,” I added, “I didn’t know you were going to be accusing Boss Tweed himself of multiple counts of homicide.”

  “Je vous en prie,” Dupin demurred, and since I had no clue what that meant, the conversation ended there.

  The paddy wagon slowed to a halt. We heard Driscoll and Flood jump down from the driver’s seat, and a second later the doors were hauled open. Driscoll had a pistol leveled at us, and Flood had some kind of a sap—shorter than his nightstick, but just as lethal-looking.

  “Last stop, my buckos,” the constable said cheerfully.

  We climbed down out of the wagon into a desolate landscape. We were only a few miles outside the city limits, but there wasn’t a building in sight. The sun was touching the horizon, and there was a sharp wind getting up, making the leafless trees lean over like they were hunching down against the cold.

  Sergeant Driscoll chucked me on the chin with the barrel of the pistol, as though to coax a smile out of me. “Any last words, Mr. Nast?” he asked mildly. “A prayer, perhaps? Or a confession? We’re not in any hurry.”

  It was a thoughtful offer in the circumstances, but I couldn’t think of anything either reverential or splenetic that was worth detaining him with. I’d sort of resigned myself to death, now, and I just wanted to get the unpleasant business over with. I shook my head.

  Dupin seemed even more detached. He wandered over to a flowering bush and prodded it with his cane. Flood stood over him, sap in hand, guarding him until it was his turn to be dispatched.

  “Right then,” Driscoll said. “May the good Lord have mercy. I can speak for my shooting, so your only worry’s what happens afterward.”

  He took aim at my forehead, and I braced myself for the world to come.

  At that point, Constable Flood gave a sudden, constricted gasp and sank to his knees. Driscoll turned, astonished.

  “What’s the matter with you, you idiot?” he demanded.

  Flood opened his mouth, but nothing came out of it except a thin trickle of blood. He pitched forward onto his face.

  Dupin swished the sword that had appeared from nowhere in his hand. “Direct your thoughts, monsieur,” he suggested, “to what happens afterward.”

  Driscoll was as fast as a snake, a trait I believe I’ve remarked on earlier in this narrative. He swung the pistol round in the blink of an eye, but Dupin’s arm dipped and rose and intersected the other man’s at some significant point in its arc. The gun went flying away through the air and Driscoll started back with a cry, nursing his hand.

  The sword flashed again and the sergeant’s legs buckled under him. A spurt of crimson from his severed throat splashed my sleeve as he fell. I stared at it stupidly, only decoding its meaning when Dupin slid the slender blade back into its housing in his cane. “Voilà,” he said.

  “Y-You had...” I stammered. “You were...”

  “Armed,” Dupin agreed. “The truth is all very well, but sometimes one needs a little more. Come, Monsieur Nast. We have a carriage and horses, but not much daylight left. It would be a good idea, I think, to get back to the city before night is fully upon us.”

  In fact, he left me at the edge of town. He purposed to hire a boat or a berth at the tiny harbor on Spuyten Duyvil Creek, rather than risk buying a ticket home anywhere in New York City itself. He had a shrewd suspicion that Boss Tweed might be looking for him, once he realized that his two spudpicker assassins had misfired. The haulage men at Spuyten Duyvil would take him on up the coast to Bridgeport or Westhaven, and he could continue on his travels from there.

  “My survival, Monsieur Nast,” the Frenchman assured me, “will be the earnest and guarantor of yours. Tweed and his associates will want you dead, but they will not dare to move against you so long as I am free and able to speak of what I know. I cannot, of course, prove that he was involved in these murders, but I can embarrass and clog the machine of which he is a part. And I will do so, if he defies me.”

  We shook hands and parted company. Dupin rode away northwards and I hiked down to Morningside. There, I was able to prevail on a fisherman to give me a lift on the back of his cart when he took his day’s catch down to Peck Slip, and I was home only an hour or so after sunset.

  Dupin, I learned later, had put pen to paper before he embarked from Spuyten Duyvil. Whatever it was he wrote to Tweed, the Tammany machine rescinded its writs and remands against the Roebling family and their great construction project and withdrew any and all accusations of unsafe working practices. A warrant was issued for the arrest of the foreman, O’Reilly, on twenty counts of murder, but his room in a seedy boarding house at Red Hook was found to have been emptied of all moveable items. Verbal descriptions were issued, along with a promise of reward, but O’Reilly never turned up again, and I doubt he will now—not until the last trump brings the dead up out of their graves.

  Dupin wrote to me, too, enclosing a letter for Mrs. Emily Roebling, but also a few lines for my own edification. Your Mr. Tweed, he wrote, trades very strongly on the appearance of invulnerability. If you wish to harm him, you must first encourage the perception that he is susceptible to harm. I mention this, my dear friend, because your own trade of cartooning seems to me to be very admirably suited to this purpose. You asked me a question when we first met: what is your motive and your métier? What is the singular thing that you pursue? I ask you now to consider this very question yourself. I believe that your answer will be the same as mine—that you are a servant of truth. And you will know to what I am referring when I say she arms her servants well.

  Well, I chewed that over a while, and I saw clear enough that he was right. So I took up my sword (it was shaped somewhat like a Woodson & Penwick number 1 black sable paintbrush) and I went to war.

  * * *

  ADDENDUM: From 1870 to 1873, Thomas Nast’s editorial cartoons mercilessly lampooned the corrupt activities of the Tammany Ring, and its formidable front man, William “Boss” Tweed. Harper’s Weekly rallied behind him, and one by one the other New York newspapers joined the crusade. In 1873, Tweed was arrested on multiple charges of fraud and racketeering. He died in prison five years later, having been convicted on all counts.

  THE UNFATHOMED DARKNESS

  By

  SIMON CLARK

  ...the Lucifugus demons are eminently malicious and mischievous, for these, said he, not merely impair men’s intellect, by phantasms and illusions, but destroy them with the same alacrity as we would destroy the most savage wild beast.

  MICHAEL PSELLUS’S DIALOGUE ON THE OPERATION OF DEMONS, 1050 AD

  Books! Books! Books! I always considered them to be the sole reason to continue to live upon our dreary Earth. Books, however, were on this November night, very nearly the death of me, and my friend, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin.

  I am writing this account just hours after the extraordinary events that nearly led to our destruction. I confess that as well as smoking pipe after pipe of strong tobacco I have drunk several invigorating glasses of absinthe. My friend, Dupin, slumbers in his bedchamber, but I am in such a state of profound excitement that I am far from the shores of sleep— so, by the light of candles, and with the heat of that powerful spirit of wormwood putting fire in my belly, I am attempting to exorcise the ghost of what I experienced tonight by writing down all that I saw, heard, and felt.

  And it all began with our addiction to books that drove us out into the snowy night, where we heard the terrible sound of a woman’s scream.

  * * *

  Dupin had received a letter informing him that a sailor would sell him a cache of tomes acquired on his travels of the Eastern Mediterranean. One of these is a sublime rarity, entitled Dialogue on the Operation of Demons, penned by that Byzantine philosophe
r and educator of princes, Michael Psellus. Dupin has little in the way of money, yet the purse put aside for food was hastily retrieved from beneath the boards of his study; thereafter, we lit a lantern apiece and hurried out into the Parisian night. Snow had fallen steadily all evening, veiling the ground with a pristine shroud. The footprints and cart tracks left by the sparse midnight traffic soon vanished entirely as we headed out amongst the open fields beyond Montmartre.

  “Books, books, books!” panted Dupin. “The word hurtles through your head like a musket ball through its barrel.”

  “I know your tricks by now,” I replied. “You saw me mouthing the word to myself.”

  “No, absolutely not. You are obsessed with books. I hear you at night chanting the word over and over in your sleep. You covet books, you crave books, monsieur. You sit at a table and curl your arms over a book, like a hawk protecting its freshly killed prey, so no other creature can steal it.”

  “Is that so? Then I am morbidly diseased by my love of the printed page. My soul must be liquefying into printer’s ink.”

  “Ha!” His teeth flashed in the light of our lanterns as he smiled. “I am gripped by the same contagion bibliotheque. The reading germ nests snugly in both our brains.”

  We continued to chatter thus as our feet crunched on freshly fallen snow. A distant church clock struck the half hour after midnight, and although the bitterly cold air wormed its way through our cloaks to shiver our skin we were so eager to hold that eight hundred-year-old book of Psellus’ in our hands that we almost ran along the deserted lane, our lamps throwing out splashes of light.

  It was as the lane cut through broad, flat meadows that we heard the scream.

  “A woman is being murdered!” I cried.

  “Not being murdered,” Dupin corrected. “That’s the sound of grief, despair, and a heart-breaking realization of loss—the woman has found the lifeless body of someone she loves.” He stood absolutely still; the lamp was held high, as he carefully and precisely stored the sound away in that remarkable brain of his. Chevalier Dupin is a man who methodically preserves memories of the sights, sounds, and odors produced by the horrors of this world, as I would methodically place books on my library shelves. He is the consummate archivist of the accouterments of tragedy.

  The woman screamed again, this time the sound being much fainter, suggestive of increased distance, rather than her becoming weaker, or overcome in some way. Dupin and I hurried through dense bushes that lined the track. Within moments, we found ourselves in a broad meadow that possessed a smooth covering of snow. Our lanterns shone across that pristine shroud of white. Nothing had disturbed the snow—neither birds, animals, nor people. We scrunched onwards, searching for the distressed female. From the dark sky above, a lazy snowflake or two descended. We heard no sound. The woman had fallen silent.

  “Perhaps there was no woman?” I suggested as the search revealed nothing but a winter’s meadow. “Might the cry have been made by a fox?”

  “That was no fox, monsieur. You know as well as I.” Dupin raised the lamp higher, endeavoring to push back the darkness. “That was a lady in distress. Ha!” He pointed. “Now do you see what caused said distress?”

  The light revealed a figure lying face down in the midst of the snowy landscape. I immediately began to hurry closer. However, Dupin stopped me by gripping my arm. “No, do not move. Not a single step. Something is wrong here... profoundly wrong.”

  “Of course there is—a man lies dead. I can see his corpse with my own eyes.”

  “Yes, you see the body... What is it that you don’t see?”

  “He’s not wearing a coat or hat. See, he’s dressed in a cotton shirt and breeches.”

  “What else don’t you see?” demanded Dupin. His manner wasn’t terse or annoyed; on the contrary, his eyes glittered with excitement. My friend detested the mundane routines of everyday life—this was anything but mundane.

  I attempted to put myself inside Dupin’s remarkable mind, and apply his unique talent for observation, which he’d used to explain so many mysterious crimes. “Fifty paces from us, there is the body of a young man, wearing indoor garments,” I said, “but we must be four hundred meters from the nearest farmhouse. It’s a bitterly cold night, so he wouldn’t have been out walking when he was attacked.”

  “Yes.”

  “He must have been killed elsewhere and carried or dragged here.”

  “No.”

  “Then, Monsieur Dupin, what is it that I am not seeing?”

  “Imagine the marks in the snow are our beloved hieroglyphics —decipher them, interpret them, extract information from every dot, swirl, and line.”

  Not for the first time did I wonder if madness had taken root in my companion’s brain. “There are no marks in the snow,” I pointed out.

  “Exactly.” Dupin extended his free hand to indicate the unblemished whiteness. “The body lies face down, his arms outstretched like a fallen bird. There are no marks in the snow. Not one within forty paces. He has only been here a short while, because he lies on top of freshly fallen snow, there is none on the cadaver. There are no footprints near the body to suggest that attackers approached him and struck him down there on that spot.”

  I stared in astonishment. “What is even more inexplicable is how the man arrived in this meadow. He hasn’t left any footprints.”

  “Carried by angels?” Dupin’s eyes gleamed with impish delight—a veritable witch-fire blazed there. The mystery enthralled him. “Or was the gentleman thrust from beneath the ground by the Devil? So, monsieur. From above? From below? What is it to be?”

  I stood there in the forbidding snowfield that might have been conjured here from some Arctic wasteland. The cold air put its icy claws on my throat. The darkness grew even thicker... denser... the darkness of a tomb that imprisoned children’s ghosts. Listen to them cry, I thought, listen to their sorrow. The despairing sobs of tiny children, who had been cast lifeless and forgotten into the grave-pit, came a-creeping through my flesh to chill my blood, until shiver upon shiver poured through me, and I longed to run from that evil place that no longer seemed part of the natural world.

  Dupin spoke in a low, hollow voice, as if his words, too, came ghosting from some melancholy realm of the dead: “To your right. Forty paces from us. See those indentations in the snow?”

  He moved in the direction of which he spoke. Presently, I saw footprints, which I counted quickly. There were twelve of them; however, they were scuffed and elongated, suggesting that the person had moved with strange haste. The footsteps had simply appeared in the midst of that whiteness then stopped again. Yet where the footsteps ended there were a series of broken lines in the snowfall that created a series of dashes like so: - - - - - - These ran for perhaps fifty paces in all before they, too, simply vanished.

  “I do not understand,” I confessed. “A corpse lies in a field. There is an impossibility about the manner of its arriving. No footprints led to the corpse, none led away. Then there is a smattering of footprints—impossible footprints!—as they suddenly appear from nowhere in the middle of a meadow before vanishing again... In addition, there is a line of marks in the snow that abruptly end. This is the mystery of all mysteries, Dupin. A mystery that must surely contain the supernatural at the center of its dark heart. There is no other explanation that I can see, other than witchcraft.”

  “The mystery does not embody magic in any form whatsoever. This enigma can be traced back to the French name of Montgolfier.” He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “I would prefer to savor the mystery. To peel back its exquisite layers one by one, and reveal its solution to you in a languid manner over many glasses of amontillado. But there is no time, my friend. Lives are at stake.” With a sudden impetuousness he rushed toward the corpse. “The snow is fifteen centimeters deep. This young gentleman has been thrust down through it with great force. His bones are broken. Death arrived in a single second. He had no time to writhe or struggle.” He
swung the lantern round, casting its glow over the winter shroud. “No footprints, so he did not walk here to the place of his death, nor was he carried.”

  “You spoke the name Montgolfier. Are you suggesting this individual fell from a balloon?”

  “Fell, pushed, cast out, jettisoned!”

  “But who would ascend in a balloon in this dreadful weather?”

  The excited man spoke faster—ever faster. “Since Montgolfier rose over French soil—this French soil—undertaking the first manned balloon flight over half a century ago, there have been hundreds of astonishing ventures into the sky. In 1841, Charles Green ascended to a height of eight kilometers above the Earth. The temperature on that summer’s day dropped to twenty-seven degrees below freezing. Ice formed on the balloon’s rigging, and the sky turned from blue to black. Soon, another English gentleman by the name of Monck Mason intends to travel through the atmosphere all the way to America. It is recorded historical fact that many extraordinary voyages have taken place, successfully reaching halfway to heaven, using an envelope of silk containing hydrogen or coal gas. Men fly, monsieur. The ground cannot hold them.”

  “The woman who screamed, where is she?”

  He beckoned me to the footprints. “Female feet made these. They move fast, then the feet are dragged. I believe she climbed from a grapple hook that had descended from the basket of the balloon, made those messy, hither-thither prints before climbing onto the grapple hook once more. The iron hook made those dash marks in the snow as the balloon rose and fell while it moved southwards. The marks end because the craft gained altitude. See the yellow particles on the snow? The captain of the flying ship discharged a ballast of sand in order to rise into the sky.”