No sooner had I absorbed the nightmare image than her hands tore the front of the bodice asunder, popping the buttons and ripping away the collar.
Pulling my cuffs over one hand, I reached out to help — but the swing of her arm knocked mine away.
The features were falling asunder. Nose. Chin. One eye, a hollow, slid… Then to my amazement Marie-Claire’s gloved hands — no, gauntleted hands — tore off her face and flung it aside.
Fizzing, it broke apart against the wall and fell to the floor. A plaster of Paris mask made by any of a dozen workshops along the Seine. The wig of sausage curls came off next, hurled after it, sizzling on the floorboards like a cut of beef on a griddle.
The figure hastily disrobed a leather balaclava to reveal a thin mop of snowy white hair. Even the leather, extending as it did over the shoulders, was blackened and burning in patches where the acid had eaten through the clothing, and Poe wasted no time in divesting himself of it, and the thick brown gloves with it. Last to be thrown aside in a heap were the goggles as he stepped out of the hoops of the crinoline cage.
He ran to a bowl of water and up-ended it over his head, shook the water out of his hair and flattened it back with his hands.
“Did you see it? What did you see?”
“Nothing!”
We were in the corridor. I still brandished my pistol. Christophe the doorman looked like a startled sheep.
“Tell Monsieur Bermutier, the policeman, that the Phantom is in the building,” said Poe. “Tell him Monsieur Dupin says the devil has been foiled, but he has escaped underground. It is imperative he send all his men in that direction. All his men. You understand?” The man nodded. “Tell him they must descend to the lake. Immediately! Or he will get away. Go. Go!”
The man shot off. I started to follow him, but Poe caught my arm.
“No. We go this way.”
He swept out of the Stage Door entrance into the dark, not pausing to answer any of the questions rushing through my mind. Not least: if the prima donna was not in the dressing room, where was she? In the hands of a terrible abductor? And if the monster was secreted, as he had just said, in the Opéra, or under it, why on earth were we running away from the place as if our lives depended on it?
As we took to the street I kept up with the detective, an incongruous if not ludicrous sight in his flapping skirts and petticoats. Even with trousers and boots underneath, his long white hair and jagged elbows gave him the appearance of a spirited old maid.
Poe dropped to one knee, and I almost fell over him.
He picked up an object from the ground. A theatrical mask with green feather-like marks, eye holes and a large hooked beak.
“Papa guinea! Onward!” Poe cried, inexplicably. “Keep up with the pig!”
At first I thought that this was some strange colloquial expression in the French vernacular to which I had not previously been exposed, but no. What we had to keep up with was indeed just that — a pig. A very fat, very pink pig, whose curl of a tail and rear end I now could make out wobbling in and out of the shadows cast by the street lamps ahead.
I was convinced I was going mad. No, that I had gone mad. The process was complete and unequivocal. But it was there, in front of me. A pig on a leash, no less, with a man in a peaked cap in tow, keeping up a brisk walking pace with the animal, its ears flapping and its snout rubbing along the pavement like a bloodhound. Poe following — in the billowing dress of a courtesan. And I following him.
On the boulevards people were laughing and drinking in the harsh, false glare of the cafés as if the garish reds and golds of the theater were bleeding out after us. The signs were phosphorescent — names like La Barbarie, Sans Soleil, or La Bataille — the eerie glow of absinthe and folly, of love affairs not yet begun and long ended. And not a single soul batted an eyelid at three men hastening past, one at least half dressed in ladies garments, with a pig at the end of a rope.
Then I glimpsed him.
The dwarf!
Far ahead, almost out of sight. Scurrying along low to the ground, head down, swathed in a scarlet hood and cape. And soon just that, a swirl of red, lost into the crepuscular haze as the Boulevard des Italiens became the Rue St. Marc.
Soon we had left the bright lights of the cafés behind, and lost sight of the hooded bloodstain to whom we were giving chase. Solitary women now lingered in the shadows, hands extending for money, but we hurried past them, interested only in where this path, and this misshapen gnome, clothed in his Red Death cowl, was taking us, and if, in some nether-region of Poe’s “ratiocination,” this insanity — this unparalleled absurdity— made sense.
Whatever trail the beast was following, and clearly the scent was still in its nostrils, took us to the grim environs of the Rue St. Denis of notorious repute, den of vice since medieval times, and the expectation of such did not fall short. Almost every doorway was adorned with a streetwalker showing a leg or sometimes a bare, grubby breast to advertise her wares, with the shamelessness of the desperate and misbegotten. I shuddered at the rough brush-strokes of rouge that were intended to rouse passion, but instead only invoked, to this young observer at least, an overwhelming disgust, tinged with pity. But these specimens — variously termed comediennes, lorettes, grisettes, les codettes, or (most dismissively of all) les horizontals—did not crave my pity and likely would have bitten my fingers off if I had offered a helping hand.
Our four-legged companion, moving at great speed, spurred only by the occasional “Allez!” or “Vite!” from its master, led us via a murky alleyway to the Rue Blondel.
Its snout dragged us to a doorway with red faience tiles on its façade. Snorting, it tugged the man in the peaked cap through into an ill-lit stairwell, where he was unceremoniously grabbed by a bald, nattering Chinaman with rolled up sleeves and the girth of a pannier horse. Poe thrust his arm against the ogre’s chest, but one might as well have tried to keep a mastiff at bay with a pipe cleaner. The thug pawed it away effortlessly, and was about to punch him in the nose and quite possibly take the head from his shoulders in the process when, registering that his assailant wore a flouncy pastel-colored dress, he simply burst into laughter. The hearty guffaw was cut short when the barrel of my pistol made a cold circle against his temple.
A wrought-iron staircase led upward.
The pig was first up it. The man second. Poe third. “Don’t touch it!” And I came close after, backward, making sure I did not step on the empty bottle of sulfuric acid lying there, still hissing. I kept the oriental giant in my sights the whole way. Even with his animal intellect he knew better than to follow, and I fear I would have put a bullet in him with not a vast amount of provocation.
I pulled aside a red curtain sticky with grime and heard screams ahead. Shrill, girlish screams, and those of men — and of a dwarf, for all I knew.