J. Campbell - Gaslight Arcanum - Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

“He expected you an hour ago.” The door had been opened by Alphonse Le Bon, now wearing a tail coat and bow tie.

I stepped inside. A matronly woman in a cloth cap stood half-way up the stairs.

“Madame L’Espanaye will show you up.”

Madame L’Espanaye? Then I remembered…

“EXTRAORDINARY MURDERS. —This morning, about three o’clock, the inhabitants of the Quartier Saint-Roch were aroused from sleep by a succession of terrific shrieks issuing, apparently, from the fourth storey of a house in the rue Morgue, known to be in the sole occupancy of one Madame L’Espanaye…”

Another character stepped from the pages of fiction… Or fact?

I followed her, trailing my hand through the thick dust on the banister rail, dreading with every step that I was entering some kind of house of insanity, a realm where the imagined and the real were interchangeable. Where the fabrications of grotesquerie took the place of the norm. Where actors — if they were actors — took the place of the killers and the killed. I looked over the parapet of the mezzanine to see Le Bon far below, staring up at me.

Madame L’Espanaye curtseyed and drifted backwards into ash-colored shadows. I was left alone in front of a door.

I pushed it open to find myself in a Louis XIV room so packed with all manner of artefacts (once my eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom) it had all the semblance of a fusty and abandoned museum. A museum of clocks was my first impression: pendulums from the Black Forest; cuckoo clocks from Switzerland; automated clocks from America, all blending into a whispering, clacking, clicking chorus of ticks and tocks. But there were other denizens in the shadows. Vast collections of pinned butterflies hung like oils. Not one human skeleton, but several. Stuffed birds of extravagant plumage. I reached out to touch a macaw — quickly to realize as its beak nipped my finger it was not stuffed at all. To my greater astonishment, it spoke.

Who is it?

“Mr. Holmes,” I replied, announcing myself to my unseen host.

Who is it?

“Sherlock.”

Who is it?

I hesitated, fumbling for words. “An Englishman. A student…”

A laugh came from the darkness as a man poked a fire in the small grate. “There lies the way to madness, monsieur. Or enlightenment.” In spite of the glow of revivified coals, I could not yet discern his features.

“I disturbed it,” I said. “I didn’t know it was real.”

“Quite possibly the feeling was mutual.”

As he held a candle to the flames and set it in a brass holder beside his high-backed leather chair, I saw illuminated the old man who had been arched over the flower girl’s corpse. Now, by contrast, settling back, crossing his thin legs, he looked professorial, almost statesmanlike, and I found it hard to envisage him as the insane criminal I had imagined, with his high forehead and weak mouth. But common sense also told me the most devious and successful criminals were those who passed for ordinary men and women. And intellect did not preclude a person from committing abominable acts; merely added strength to the possibility of them evading capture.

“You laid a trail for me to follow. Why?”

Dupin shrugged. “I do so admire — detection.”

“You may not like what I have detected.”

He took his time to light a cigar, puffed on it and used it to indicate an empty armchair facing him. I sat down and found his open case of Hoyo de Monterreys offered to me, then shortly afterwards a tray of various cut-glass decanters. I abstained. There were secrets to unveil and I would unveil them.

“I know who you are,” I said. “But not why you are here.”

“If you applied the science of ratiocination, Mr. Holmes, you would.”

“The brain is a curious organ and often it needs relaxation but sometimes it needs to be spurred by fear or anxiety for the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place.”

Dupin hazarded a thin smile. “Illuminate me.”

“Pieces, shall we say, such as the bust of Pallas semi-hidden in the darkness over in that corner. Such as the talking bird I encountered upon entering. Such as the cipher I was given. Such as the appropriation of certain names from certain tales. The ape…”

“Circumstantial.”

“Perhaps. As is no doubt the way you wrote the date in the register at the morgue, which I thought barely notable at the time. The French, like we English write it for brevity, day, month, year. Alongside the name Dupin however, the date reads month, day, year, in that order — much in the manner of an American.”

Dupin sat in silence and allowed me to continue.

“You see, monsieur , it was not until I left the bookshop with this volume under my arm that the very obvious conclusion occurred to me.” I produced Tales of Mystery and Imagination . “For, as in The Purloined Letter, it had been in plain sight all along. Yet it was not until I thought of my good friends — the two brothers who so uncannily resemble each other that, to a stranger, they cannot be told apart — that the picture was complete.”

“Indeed?”

“Indeed, monsieur. ”

“And will you share with me that — conclusion?”

I took another, smaller volume from my pocket.

“The prefatory items in the Tales were instructive but inadequate. I returned to the bookshop and luckily found upon the shelves a copy of Thomas Holley Chivers’ Life of Poe , published by Dutton in 1852.” I looked into Dupin’s eyes but they held no expression — not even, particularly, of interest. “Edgar Poe died on the 7th October 1849, the theory being that he had been the victim of a so-called cooping gang. The congressional elections were in full swing in Baltimore and, because there was no register of voters, bully boys were being employed by candidates to round up derelicts and get them drunk enough to register false votes a number of times in succession.” I referred to my notes and underlinings in the Chivers.

“He was found by Joseph Walker, a compositor at the Baltimore Sun, lying in the street outside Cooth and Sergeant’s Tavern on East Lombard Street, which served as a polling station.

“Dr. Snodgrass received a letter from Walker about a gentleman rather the worse for wear at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, and found the writer without his customary moustache; haggard, bloated and unkempt. His clothing, I quote: ‘a sack-coat of thin and sleazy black alpaca, ripped at intervals, faded and soiled, pants of steel-mixed pattern of cassinett, badly-fitting, if they could be said to fit at all…”

I put particular emphasis on this last phrase, but it had no effect on the listener.

“Poe was taken to Washington hospital,” I continued, “where he experienced exceeding tremors of the limbs, and active delirium. When questioned in reference to his family, his answers were incoherent. When asked where he lived, he could not say. Towards the end, in his stupor and torment, he called out for ‘Reynolds! Reynolds!’ — which onlookers took to refer to the navigator of the South Seas, an inspiration for The Narrative for Gordon Pym — until his poor soul was finally at rest.” I looked up. “But he is not at rest, monsieur — is he?”

Dupin had sunk back in his seat, the wings of which served to conceal his face in shadow. He placed his fingertips together in a steeple.

“Yes, a man was found drunk in a gutter,” I said. “But he called out ‘Reynolds’ in his delirium because that was his own name. And nobody would listen. He was identified by the Malacca cane borrowed by Poe from Dr. John Carter simply because the object had been placed in his hands by another. On the evidence of witnesses themselves this substitute was more ‘haggard’ yet more ‘bloated’ than Poe (perhaps the word ‘fatter’ would be more accurate) except Dr. Snodgrass recognized his friend’s clothes, albeit that they hardly fitted the occupant. Of course they didn’t. Because the man was not Poe. Poe was alive. Is alive.”