Without calling Le Bon, he fetched our coats from their pegs.
“Will he live with his shame?” I asked, inserting my arms in the one he held up for me.
“Of course he will,” said Poe, doing the same in reverse.
“I shall never be able to listen to opera again, after this vile business.”
“Crime is vile in all its manifestations. Mysteries abound. We are adrift in an ocean of unknowing. The only respite is to solve them. And until we conquer the great question of non-dimensional creation, the seeking of those solutions will be the essence and eternal vexation of Man. Come, let us go to the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, to the Restaurant Morot, and talk about the rigors of decapitation. There’s a murder in Le Figaro today and I’m convinced they have the wrong man. You remember? With its dark fittings and the hat racks above the tables it’s like dining in a railway carriage. Vidal will always find a table for me, and he serves the best pig’s ears in Paris. You can drink, and I shall watch.”
“Amontillado?”
“Please. That is beneath you.”
He took my arm. His own was thin. He was a skeleton in a suit by sunlight. It brings a tear to my eye now, but I hardly noticed then a frailty that was increasing with the passing years. Years all too few.
We were, of course, too late. Out of gossip and half-truths the myth was born. If accidents happened at the theater, the stage hands would still ascribe it to their Fantôme. He had escaped, but not into the non-existent lake — into stories. Descending with his disfigured face and mask to his watery home. And coming to haunt us from the pages of a book, and the flickering screen.
In the months that followed we had other cases, including that of an extraordinary patient of Dr. Charcot at Salpêtrière, the “Gates of Hell” affair, and the spirit photography of Monsieur Boguet, but none pierced my heart quite as much as the tale of Olivier Guédiguian, whose mask disguised a monster, and little Édith Dufranoux, the true Phantom of the Opéra de Paris.
NEW MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
By
CLIVE BARKER
Winter, Lewis decided, was no season for old men. The snow that lay five inches thick on the streets of Paris froze him to the marrow. What had been a joy to him as a child was now a curse. He hated it with all his heart; hated the snowballing children (squeals, howls, tears); hated, too, the young lovers, eager to be caught in a flurry together (squeals, kisses, tears). It was uncomfortable and tiresome, and he wished he was in Fort Lauderdale, where the sun would be shining.
But Catherine’s telegram, though not explicit, had been urgent, and the ties of friendship between them had been unbroken for the best part of fifty years. He was here for her, and for her brother Phillipe. However thin his blood felt in this ice land, it was foolish to complain. He’d come at a summons from the past, and he would have come as swiftly, and as willingly, if Paris had been burning.
Besides, it was his mother’s city. She’d been born on the Boulevard Diderot, back in a time when the city was untrammeled by free-thinking architects and social engineers. Now every time Lewis returned to Paris he steeled himself for another desecration. It was happening less of late, he’d noticed. The recession in Europe made governments less eager with their bulldozers. But still, year after year, more fine houses found themselves rubble. Whole streets sometimes, gone to ground.
Even the Rue Morgue.
There was, of course, some doubt as to whether that infamous street had ever existed in the first place, but as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction. That great divide was for young men, who still had to deal with life. For the old (Lewis was 73), the distinction was academic. What did it matter what was true and what was false, what real and what invented? In his head all of it, the half-lies and the truths, were one continuum of personal history.
Maybe the Rue Morgue had existed, as it had been described in Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal story; maybe it was pure invention. Whichever, the notorious street was no longer to be found on a map of Paris.
Perhaps Lewis was a little disappointed not to have found the Rue Morgue. After all, it was part of his heritage. If the stories he had been told as a young boy were correct, the events described in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” had been narrated to Poe by Lewis’ grandfather. It was his mother’s pride that her father had met Poe, while traveling in America. Apparently his grandfather had been a globe-trotter, unhappy unless he visited a new town every week. And in the winter of 1835 he had been in Richmond, Virginia. It was a bitter winter, perhaps not unlike the one Lewis was presently suffering, and one night the grandfather had taken refuge in a bar in Richmond. There, with a blizzard raging outside, he had met a small, dark, melancholy young man called Eddie. He was something of a local celebrity apparently, having written a tale that had won a competition in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. The tale was “MS. Found in a Bottle” and the haunted young man was Edgar Allan Poe.
The two had spent the evening together, drinking, and (this is how the story went, anyway) Poe had gently pumped Lewis’ grandfather for stories of the bizarre, of the occult and of the morbid. The worldly-wise traveler was glad to oblige, pouring out believe-it-or-not fragments that the writer later turned into “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In both those stories, peering out from between the atrocities, was the peculiar genius of C. Auguste Dupin.
C. Auguste Dupin. Poe’s vision of the perfect detective: calm, rational, and brilliantly perceptive. The narratives in which he appeared rapidly became well-known, and through them Dupin became a fictional celebrity, without anyone in America knowing that Dupin was a real person.
He was the brother of Lewis’ grandfather. Lewis’ great uncle was C. Auguste Dupin.
And his greatest case — the Murders in the Rue Morgue — they too were based on fact. The slaughters that occurred in the story had actually taken place. Two women had indeed been brutally killed in the Rue Morgue. They were, as Poe had written, Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye. Both women of good reputation, who lived quiet and unsensational lives. So much more horrible then to find those lives so brutally cut short. The daughter’s body had been thrust up the chimney; the body of the mother was discovered in the yard at the back of the house, her throat cut with such savagery that her head was all but sawn off. No apparent motive could be found for the murders, and the mystery further deepened when all the occupants of the house claimed to have heard the voice of the murderer speaking in a different language. The Frenchman was certain the voice had spoken Spanish, the Englishman had heard German, the Dutchman thought it was French. Dupin, in his investigations, noted that none of the witnesses actually spoke the language they claimed to have heard from the lips of the unseen murderer. He concluded that the language was no language at all, but the wordless voice of a wild beast.
An ape in fact, a monstrous orang-outang from the East Indian Islands. Its tawny hairs had been found in the grip of the slain Madame L’Espanaye. Only its strength and agility made the appalling fate of Mademoiselle L’Espanaye plausible. The beast had belonged to a Maltese sailor, had escaped, and run riot in the bloody apartment on the Rue Morgue.