“Baudelaire’s French versions of my tales appeared in Le Pays, and Adventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym in Moniteur universel. I helped him out with some details about compass bearings and such, and acted as his lexicon of the Southern states. But his abominable life style took its toll. As a former imbiber of substances — I had not touched a drop since my resurrection — I saw all the signs of a hopeless addict. He collapsed with a cerebral disorder on the flagstones of l’Église Saint-Loup in Namur, upset by a poem he’d read about happiness.” Poe attempted to smile. “They sent a confessor in his last hours, but by then all he was saying was Bonjour, like a child.”
“I’m sorry.”
He waved the sentiment away.
“No more… Nevermore….” He gazed into his glass of water. “Every day is an act of will. Which is something. To have a toe at the very edge of doom and resist the urge to plummet.”
I found myself saying out loud: “I too have dark valleys.”
He sipped and placed the glass on the table beside his chair. “Then you and I have similarities too.”
“But why use the name ‘Dupin’ if you didn’t want to be found?”
“Who said I didn’t want to be found?” He rose, wrapping a woollen shawl round his shoulders. “Perhaps I was waiting for the right person to find me.” He walked to the macaw and stroked the back of its neck with a curled forefinger.
“Whilst he was alive Baudelaire kept me reasonably secluded, but to keep me from going mad with inactivity of the mind he would bring me puzzles in the form of stories in the newspapers. Robberies. Murders. Abnormal events. Inexplicable mysteries. I would study them and, if I could, write to the newspapers with solutions. As I had done with Marie Rogêt. Always under the inevitable nom-de-plume — ‘Dupin’. From the moment I set foot on French soil, with that poor sot in my coffin, I found I had no more stomach for writing fiction. Death, madness, my trademark — I’d had enough of that. The raven had croaked itself hoarse. It is one thing to write a detective story. You know the solution and simply confound the reader. But to deduce by the powers of logic in real life…? That is true art. And I felt it stimulating to accumulate skills to that end. Pretty soon the police got to know the name and would come to me for help. It was no more than a game at first. But a game that kept me alive.”
“As the re-naming of your servants is also a game,” I interjected. “Le Bon, Madame L’Espanaye … in the manner of a charade. Surrounding yourself with characters of your own creation to keep the real world at bay. To feel safe.”
“But I am safe. Immensely safe, now.” As he walked to the mantel shelf his eyes gleamed in the sallow light of the candles. “For I am no longer, you see, under the glamour of my pernicious gift: my imagination. Anyone who has ever studied my stories properly knows they are all about one thing: the awful toll of madness, the horror of lost reason…. Rue Morgue says it all, for anyone with eyes to see. That even the absurdest, most abominable crime can be solved by rationalism. Well, rationalism was my driftwood in the storm. It was my salvation, Mr. Holmes — as it can be yours.”
I was startled. “Mine?”
He stared at me, dark eyes unblinking with intensity. “We human beings can be the ape — the basest instinct, dumb force of nature — or we can excel, we can elevate ourselves.” He tapped his expanse of forehead. “By civilization. By enlightenment. By perception. By the tireless efforts of eye and brain….”
He spoke with the utter conviction of a zealot, or lunatic. A chill prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. I asked myself if the “awful toll of madness” had indeed been left behind him, or was I in the presence of a maniac who had committed one crime by his own admission and could easily commit another to cover his tracks?
I rose to my feet, frightened now.
“Why am I here? Why did you bring me?”
By way of reply there resounded four brisk knocks at the double-doors to an adjoining chamber — so sudden that it made my heart gallop. Poe had turned away and was adjusting his string tie in the mirror, as if he hadn’t even heard my voice, or simply chose to ignore it.
“Entrez.” He moved only to deposit the stub of his cigar into the flames.
The double doors yawned open and in silence four men emerged from the dark as if from another realm. They marched in slow formation with their backs erect, the reason for which became hideously clear — they carried a coffin on their shoulders. My chest tightened. I found I could not move, powerless but to watch as they laid it down in the firelight in the centre of the room, resting on two straight-backed chairs arranged by Madame L’Espanaye.
The pallbearers straightened. One I recognized as the morgue attendant who had lied to me, now shuffling back into the shadows whence he came. Another, the elegant Le Bon in his spotless shirt, had procured a screwdriver from somewhere and was proceeding to unscrew the lid of the casket as a continuation of the same odd, balletic ritual.
I looked at Poe. He was idly, at arm’s-length, leafing through the pages of the Life of Poe I had placed on the side-table, then shut it disinterestedly and tugged at his cuffs. It made my blood run cold to realize that, far from being alarmed by this extraordinary intrusion, he had designed it.
Each screw emerged, conveyed by Le Bon, like a bullet in the palm of his kid-gloved hand to a kidney-shaped dish. As he circled the coffin to the next, and then extracted it with the lazy precision of a priest performing Eucharist, I was filled with a growing presentiment of what I was about to behold: what I had to behold, to make sense of this, if it made any sense at all. After the lid was prised off the loyal negro blended into the darkness of the adjacent chamber, closing the doors as he did so.
I stifled a sob at the inevitable sight of the flower girl’s body inside, the bluish-purple shades of livor mortis bringing a cruel blush to her ears and nose.
“Dear God. This is obscene…”
“No,” said Poe. “Death is obscene. But death, when all else is removed, is no more than a mystery to be solved.”
“Sir—” I could hardly spit out the words, so full was I of repulsion. “You have — abandoned all that is human, and decent and … and good with your delusion…”
He remained unutterably calm as he gazed into the casket. “If you truly believed that — sir — you would have walked away long ago.”
“What makes you think I cannot walk away this second?”
“Because, sir, you cannot walk away from the mystery. That is your curse.”
“You are mad.”
Poe smiled and quoted from a familiar source: “True, nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I have been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” Then his eyes hardened. “You know I am not.”
He fetched a candlestick and set it down closer to the corpse, the better to illuminate the indecent marbling of her once flawless skin.
“Though your powers of deduction are elementary, by now you will have realized the purpose of my clandestine visits to the morgue. The meticulous observation. I was of course undertaking exercises in ratiocination. The building offers me subjects in the purest possible sense. On every slab, every day, a code, a cipher to be unlocked. The application of logic telling the very tale the dead themselves cannot. What better place to perfect my craft?” He chuckled softly.
“This hobby amuses you?”