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

“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?”

“Of course. What is there in life, my dear Holmes, if not to be amused?”

“Damn you!” I pushed him away from the coffin.

“You see? Emotion rules you completely. It surges when you should keep it at bay. To what end? If you wish to discover why she died… If you want to know the truth of what happened to her, there is only one course open to you: the cold and relentless application of rationality.”

“I loved her!” I roared, turning away.

After a few seconds he whispered behind me: “I also loved one who died.” His voice was disembodied, sepulchral and totally, alarmingly devoid of self-pity. I felt guilty at my outburst and listened in earnest to the terrible words he uttered: “Her gradual decline… From imp to skeletal invalid. Not the loss of love over days, over a glimpse, an idea, but over years. From childhood to womanhood, in a laugh. Over the lengthening of her bones and the plumping of her hips, then to watch it snuffed out by the red death running in her blood. Listening to time, whose hands creep towards midnight. Thinking, what right did I have to sob, to weep, to wish for it to happen, yes — to will the chimes and choking to come, when all suffering will cease for all but the living?”

I turned back to him, wiping away tears with the heel of my hand.

He had none.

He said: “I can think of no higher endeavour than to banish hurt and pain from people’s lives by the application of logic. I understand your grief, sir. God knows, no man stands my equal in that subject. But one must look upon death and see only that — Death . One must stop being victim to the petty frailties of our own conjecture. Instinct. Guessing. Terror. Love. Such fripperies are the sludge which gums up our nerves and dampens our intellect. And self-perpetuates, like a virulent disease. The very king of pests. Like alcohol, emotional supposition is toxic to our system, but our system rebels against being deprived of it. It must be abandoned, and dependence on it shed, lest it rule our lives completely.”

Seeing the torture of unanswered questions in my eyes, Poe picked up the candelabrum and circled the coffin, looking down at what lay inside, the tiny, jewel-image of her face glimmering on his black irises.

“I shall proceed as I always do, with general observations, moving on to the nature of the crime. Your friend was raised by devout Catholics, in the city of Nîmes, from which she absconded and became a scullery maid…”

I was choked with disbelief. “You can’t possibly…”