I have scarcely anything to add. The Ourang-Outang must have escaped from the chamber, by the rod, just before the break of the door. It must have closed the window as it passed through it. It was subsequently caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plantes. Le Bon was instantly released, upon our narration of the circumstances (with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the Prefect of Police. This functionary, however well disposed to my friend, could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two, about the propriety of every person minding his own business.
“Let him talk,” said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply. “Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience. I am satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle. Nevertheless, that he failed in the solution of this mystery, is by no means that matter for wonder which he supposes it; for, in truth, our friend the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna- or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has ‘ de nier ce quiest, et d’expliquer ce quin’est pas.’ ”
The Quick and the Undead BY NELSON DEMILLE
So much commentary has been written about Edgar Allan Poe over the last century and a half that it seems unnecessary to add more. Unless, of course, one has something new to say, which is unlikely, though that’s never stopped academic writers.
This is my way of saying that I’m not going to try to outshine the Poe scholars who delve deep into the mind and writings of Edgar Allan Poe and who allude to Jung, Freud, and the collective unconsciousness. Not to mention mythopoeic inevitability. Instead, I’m going to fall back on the safety of a personal narrative, which recounts my introduction to Edgar Allan Poe.
This story begins in 1954 when I was eleven years old, so if the details seem fuzzy, you’ll understand.
Three-D movies were big in the mid-1950s, and I made it a point not to miss any of them, no matter how badly they’d been reviewed by my peers who’d scraped up the twenty-five cents before I did. In 1954 the hot 3-D movie that everyone was raving about was Phantom of the Rue Morgue. I didn’t know what a rue morgue was, but I did know that The Phantom was a good comic strip. I’d also never heard of Edgar Allan Poe, and I didn’t know that Poe’s short story, upon which the movie was loosely based, had been titled “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” That was irrelevant to me, and apparently, also to Hollywood. In any case, my classmates who’d seen the movie set me straight on the meaning of the title (a rue is like a street) and gave the movie a solid rating of “piss your pants.”
I grew up in Elmont, a small community on Long Island, New York, which consisted mostly of postwar housing tracts. Within this community was a new movie theater within walking distance of my house, which in those days meant two miles. Lying between the theater and my house was-spooky music, please-a cemetery. But this was not the kind of horror-flick churchyard cemetery that I associated with ghosts, ghouls, zombies, werewolves, vampires, or any other species of the living dead; this was a nice Jewish cemetery, and who ever heard of a Jewish vampire? The cemetery, Beth David by name, actually bordered the backyard of my house, and lying as it did in the center of the town, it was a good shortcut to and from a lot of places, including the movie theater.
I had lived peacefully with this cemetery since we’d moved into the house, about six or seven years before, and from my second-floor bedroom window I could see the neat green acres of Beth David and rows and rows of polished granite tombstones. During the day the cemetery was filled with funeral processions, workers, and visitors, and my only fear in crossing this burial ground was the possibility of getting chased by the cemetery guards who patrolled in marked cars. I never got caught, and years later I became the star sprinter (one-hundred-yard dash in ten flat) of the Elmont Memorial High School track team.
My only experience with the cemetery at night was to stare at it now and then from my bedroom window. In five or six years of looking, I never once saw anything come out of a grave, or move that shouldn’t move; the trees moved in the wind, the headlights of patrol cars moved on the roads. That was about it. So my proximity to, and trespassing in, the cemetery in my backyard made it a familiar place that held no terrors for me and caused no childhood mental trauma that needed to be addressed, then or now.
Except for that one time when I took the shortcut through the cemetery following a late-Saturday-afternoon showing of Phantom of the Rue Morgue in 3-D color.
The movie, by today’s standards, would barely raise a hair on the back of anyone’s neck. But in 1954, when you’re eleven, weird makeup, creepy music, and blood-splatter patterns can easily send you sprinting up the aisle to the popcorn stand.
A quick Internet search of Edgar Allan Poe filmography informs me that Karl Malden, before he learned how to act, played the part of the Rue Morgue mad scientist, Dr. Marais. Logging in a better performance was a trained gorilla, whose name is lost to cinema history, and also Merv Griffin, of all people, who played a French medical student. I remember the mad scientist and the gorilla, but not Merv. The plot, such as it is, is simple: Dr. Marais uses the gorilla to exact revenge on various beautiful women who have spurned him. Each of these ladies has been given a jingling bracelet that attracts the killer gorilla. I know you want more of this plot, but I don’t want to spoil your next Netflix selection. Suffice it to say, whenever these young ladies walk along a street, alone, at night, the tinkling bracelet is heard by the sharp-eared, preprogrammed gorilla. Why no one notices this gorilla is not something to be examined too closely; I never gave it much thought myself, and neither did the adults who made the movie. We’re talking here of a major suspension of disbelief, and kids are good at that. Kids are also good at Pavlovian response and getting themselves scared out of their susceptible little minds, so when those pretty ladies jangled their bracelets, the movie theater let out a collective gasp and a few involuntary squeals. The future do-gooders among the mostly preadolescent crowd yelled out warnings to the strutting tarts.
The really scary parts of the movie, however, were the 3-D shock effects. You just never knew when something was going to hurtle at you from the screen, and if you can remember this, you’ll verify that literally the entire audience in a 3-D shocker screamed and ducked. I mean, popcorn flying, Cokes splashing, and 3-D glasses being ripped from faces by the G-forces created by rapidly moving heads, arms, and bodies.
Bottom line on Phantom of the Rue Morgue is, it sucked. But it was scary.
It was fall or maybe winter, and by the time I and a few friends left the theater about 5:00 P.M., it was getting dark. The rule was, “Get home as soon as the streetlights come on.” They’d come on, and I was late. My cell phone hadn’t been invented yet, and the pay phone on the corner cost a nickel, or maybe a dime, and no one wanted to splurge on that just to say we were alive and running late. We mostly walked or biked wherever we went, and the concept of a parent coming to pick us up was not part of the zeitgeist of that simpler, safer, and unpampered age. Our parents had taught us welclass="underline" however you got there, get back the same way.
Well, I’d walked to the movie theater, and now I had to walk home.
From the corner of Elmont Road and Hempstead Turnpike, where the theater was, it was about two miles, if I took the circuitous street route. However, if I took the direct route through the cemetery…