Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology: Further Tales of Edgar Allan Poe's 1st Detective

AFTER THE END A NEW STORY ABOUT C. AUGUSTE DUPIN (with apologies to E.A. Poe) By LISA TUTTLE

I have written before about my quondam friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, with whom I long ago resided in an ancient house in a retired and desolate street in Paris, yet never have I described the details of his final case. That it would be of great interest to a very wide readership I was never in doubt, for it involved a series of horrific murders that terrified the public and baffled the police, and without the intervention of Dupin and his superior powers of analytical thought, the killer would never have been found and brought to justice.

The victims were all young women, but there was no discernible connection between them; one was married, one affianced; one a grisette, and another the daughter of a lawyer. They were of different classes and lived in different quarters of the city. At first, therefore, the police quite naturally assumed each had been murdered by a different man. There were no suspects, and no one came forward to inform or confess, but when another woman died, the public became convinced one single, bloodthirsty monster was responsible.

Dupin had already recognized the evidence, what he called the killer’s signature, even while the police resisted the idea.

The problem was how to find the murderer? No matter how he searched for a connection between these disparate women (or their families), Dupin could find nothing. They had lived and died in different arrondissements, did not attend the same church or buy their bread from the same baker. The only thing they had in common was their sex and relative youth (the eldest was twenty-four; the youngest, seventeen), and perhaps most importantly, the fact that they did not know their killer. Dupin concluded that the man the popular press had dubbed “The Beast of Paris” was deliberately choosing his victims from a large pool of total strangers, women previously unknown to him, with whom he had no traceable connection.

But who sets out to kill strangers, outside of wartime, for no reason or benefit?

Only a madman. Indeed, the senseless cruelty of the crimes could be the very definition of insanity. Yet, apart from that, the killer did not act like one in the grip of madness. He was cool and calculating. He planned his murders in advance, and possessed sufficient self-control to resist drawing attention to himself. If he was mad, it was only now and then, at times of his own choosing — which surely is not madness at all, but an expression of pure evil. A better name for this monster than “beast” would be “devil,” I thought.

By now, some of my readers will have guessed the identity of this devil, and recall the scandal that erupted when the police, acting on the results of Monsieur Dupin’s investigations, arrested one Paul Gabriel Reclus. Monsieur Reclus was known as a respectable, wealthy, unmarried gentleman of Paris. Not himself a member of either the government or the press, he had influential friends in both, and as a result, the police found themselves obliged to release him almost immediately, with groveling apologies, for they had no evidence against him. Although convinced by Dupin’s argument, constructed from his subtle observations, it amounted to nothing more than a delicate chain of logic. There were no witnesses to any of the murders, and nothing, not a single, solid object or piece of blood-stained clothing, in the possession of Monsieur Reclus to tie him to any one of the crimes. As he showed no signs of guilt or any inclination to confess, the police had nothing with which to convict him, not even an obvious reason for arresting him.

Naturally, they blamed Dupin for leading them astray. The results were quite disastrous for my friend. He did not mind the mockery in the press (although some of the cartoons were particularly savage) and simply ignored those military friends of Reclus who challenged him to a duel (after all, dueling was illegal, however common it might have been among bantam cocks obsessed with their notion of honor), but the charges of slander and libel brought against him in court cost him most of his patrimony to defend. However, there was something far worse than all of that: the secret, subterranean vengeance enacted by Reclus against Dupin, about which my friend dared say nothing. For Monsieur Reclus continued to kill innocent young women. He must have believed himself invincible, untouchable. But now, for his victims, he chose girls who possessed some connection to the one man who had revealed he knew his secret. Because Dupin led a retired and celibate existence, the connections were necessarily remote, of a sort only he would be sure to recognize. The first victim worked in the shop where my friend customarily bought his daily bread. The next was the wife of his butcher. Then a bookseller’s daughter met her mysterious, violent end.

Dupin realized that unless he could deliver the killer to the police with irrefutable evidence of his crimes — or killed the clever madman himself — more women would die. In addition, he knew that he had little time to act, as he anticipated the killer’s scheme was to implicate him in his crimes, planting clews that must eventually lead to the inevitable (although false) conclusion that Dupin was the murderer.

The Chevalier’s analytical skills were not limited to unraveling mysteries of the past, but extended to predicting what, following a certain course of action, an individual would do next. This, he insisted, was not a matter of intuition, but of observation; it was a purely scientific exercise, and would always be successful so long as the initial observations were sufficient and correct. To me, this seemed to contradict the notion of free will, suggesting human beings were little more than mechanical objects, forced to move in a particular way once their springs had been wound, but his results were such that I could never argue. When he declared that he had worked out precisely when, where, and who the killer would next attack, I knew he must be right. The only problem was how to ensure that the police arrived on the scene before the girl was killed, but when Reclus’ murderous intentions were still clear enough that his arrest and subsequent conviction would prove inevitable.

To the public, Dupin’s skills could seem magical, yet he always insisted they were purely rational. And, in the past, in my previous stories about Monsieur Dupin, I have delighted in explaining the chain of reasoning that led him to feats of understanding which seemed like clairvoyance, mind-reading, or some other of those super-human skills sometimes displayed by people who have been mesmerized.

But I have never written about the case I might once have called “The Devil of Paris,” never given all the details of what was to be C. Auguste Dupin’s last case. Yes, he solved it, but at a great cost.

Of course, it was not his fault the police arrived too late to save the life of Dupin’s own cousin. At least they were in time to catch Reclus red-handed, and none of his influential friends were able to save him from the guillotine. In vain did I argue with my old friend that he had performed the great public service of protecting any number of young women from the ravages of “the beast”; sadly he could never allay the guilt he felt about focussing the attention of the murderer on his cousin and the other three blameless young women whose misfortune it was to be connected to men with whom Dupin had commercial dealings. In vain did I argue he could not possibly be held to blame for the actions of that evil creature. His reply was that he should have known how Reclus would take his revenge, that he should not have given the police the killer’s name without the evidence they needed to arrest him.

His partial failure weighed upon his conscience, and turned him away from the police. They had let him down as much as he had let down the last four victims of Reclus, and henceforth he would take no interest in contemporary crime or current affairs, but would instead dedicate all his mental capacities to questions of historic and philosophical matters. He instructed me never to write about his final case, and although I no longer feel bound by that injunction, neither do I wish to revisit those old days and write of his solving of the case of the beast — or devil — of Paris in the sort of detail I devoted to his earlier exploits. I merely raise the subject as a reminder to my readers, for its bearing on what would transpire later, the subject of this story.

Had I remained in Paris, I sometimes think things might have turned out differently for Dupin — but it was not to be. Even as my old friend was becoming more determinedly entrenched in his studies, retreating from the present day, I received a letter from my father, summoning me home with some urgency to help with the family business. With a feeling of profound melancholy, I bid farewell to the Chevalier, begging him not to forget me, and to write often.

I had, I think, half a dozen letters from him after my return to Baltimore, each one a superb, if not entirely comprehensible, essay on a subject of deepest obscurity, such as the origins of the Kartvelian languages; the meaning of the gigantic stone heads of Easter Island; the manner in which eels reproduce; and a new interpretation of the Mayan calendar. Apart from mentioning certain rare volumes he had been fortunate enough to acquire for his library, he made little reference to the details of his quotidian life, although from the regular changes of address I understood his fortunes were continuing to decline, as he moved to ever-poorer quarters.

That is, until the last letter, in which he mentioned, in a post-script, that he was about to be married and would shortly be departing Paris for his wife’s country estate. He mentioned no word of love, nor did he describe the beauty or charm of his intended, although he did inform me that the future Madame Dupin came from a family equal in age and nobility to his own, but far superior in wealth. She had also inherited a library of impressive size. I perceived at once that this was no love match, but a practical arrangement by which Monsieur Dupin might subsidize his bibliophilia.

Unfortunately, he neglected to include his new address, or even his fiancée’s name or the location of her library. Surely he intended to inform me once he was settled into his new home, but within days of receiving that last letter, I found myself in a tricky financial situation, and was forced to depart the city abruptly without leaving a forwarding address. Alas, this set an unhappy pattern for the next two years, and as I lived a vagabond existence and moved from Brooklyn to Boston, then from Philadelphia to Poughkeepsie, I could only scour the newspapers for news from France, and quiz any recent visitors for word of him, but to no avail.

Until, at last, one day, in the pages of the New York Herald, I glimpsed the name of C. Auguste Dupin almost buried in a dense column of black type devoted to a series of shocking deaths — that series of hideous, inhuman killings dubbed by our press “the French Wolf-Man Murders.” Although he had no connection with the police or this case (as I discovered after reading the entire article), Dupin’s name was invoked by the journalist who fancied he saw some similarities to the murders in the Rue Morgue, and thought the genius who had solved that strange mystery would also be able to explain this one.

At that point, there had been two deaths, within weeks of each other, in the same region of France. One young woman had been bloodily slaughtered in a lonely forest, and the other died in her own bed. Both had had their throats ripped out, apparently by some fierce beast. The girl in the forest had been presumed to have fallen prey to a wolf (very rare in that part of the country, yet presumably not quite extinct) until the second killing, which apart from the setting, seemed almost identical to the first. But how had a wolf come to enter and leave a young lady’s bedroom without attracting attention? Sensationalist newspapers and superstitious public alike spoke of that creature which is a man in daylight and a wolf by night: the were-wolf, or loup garou.

A week later, the newspaper carried more reports from France. The police were convinced the two deaths were completely unrelated, nor were they murders, despite misleading reports. One woman had been attacked by a wolf, which had been spotted several times in the district. The other had been killed by her own dog, turned unexpectedly savage. Although it had run away, it had been caught and destroyed.

Yet even as this story appeared in our American papers, another woman had died in a quiet country lane in a French village, her throat torn out, and in every other particular her death resembled that of the other two women. Soon enough, that story reached us across the ocean, accompanied by some of the hysteria gripping that region of France, and full of speculation as to the true reason for these deaths.

A surgeon who had examined all three bodies announced his conviction that the culprit was a human being. Not an animal, and certainly not a supernatural shape-shifting creature, but an exceptionally cunning and ruthless man who was driven to kill by some inexplicable compulsion (here he reminded questioners of the Reclus case in Paris a few years earlier) — mad in that way, but utterly rational in his ability to disguise his crimes.

It would have been better for Dr. De La Roche if he had never spoken out, for his announcement did not affect the rising hysteria about the loup garou, and three days later, both he and his wife were found dead in their home, their throats savaged in the same manner as seen on the other victims. When I heard that, it occurred to me that even if the police asked for his help, Dupin — now with the safety of his own wife to think about — would surely refuse. Would he be right to do so? Could anyone else solve this fearful mystery?

My mind therefore was certainly fixed on Dupin, as well as the recent terrible crimes in France, on the evening I attended a session promising “mesmeric revelations” in the home of Mr. D— W— of Elmira, New York.

Displays of mesmerism have been so popular and widespread in recent years that I think I need hardly explain the theory. The gathering at the W— home in Elmira was small and informal, for the parlor could comfortably accommodate no more than a dozen guests. The designated somnambule was the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house, and we had been told in advance that her particular talent, when under the influence of the magnetic passes made by her father, was to become a channel, or medium, through which we might receive the voices of the dead. Particularly likely to speak were those troubled spirits who had recently passed out of the realm of the physical, their deaths so sudden that they had not yet come to terms with their new state.

Even under the rapt gaze of an audience, Miss W— succumbed to the expected strange, sleep-like state quite rapidly. Almost at once she gasped, and exclaimed in French, then, in that same language, began to teasingly scold some gentleman who had, it seemed, taken her by surprise. The one-sided conversation that followed, at first flirtatious, became increasingly bold and salacious as the speaker began to bargain with the male stranger, offering the pleasures of her body in return for payment. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, but noticing none of my fellow guests responding, realized I must be the only person there who understood the language.

The somnambule — or, I should say, whoever spoke through her — now changed her tone. She seemed nervous, even frightened of the man she had been so intent upon wooing, and there could be no mistaking her terror when she screamed.

At that bloodcurdling sound there was a shocked flurry throughout the stuffy parlor — one lady fainted dead away — and Mr. W— seemed about to try and wake his daughter when I stopped him. Recognizing that we’d heard evidence of a crime, I begged him to question his daughter as to the identity of the spirit.

But Miss W— was only a conduit, and knew nothing of what transpired while she was in this state. Fortunately, the spirit was still nearby. As the only French-speaker, it fell to me to question her, and firstly I inquired her name.

“I am Marie Callot.”

That was the name of the third victim of the murderous “wolf-man” of France. I felt a chill, and heard gasps and murmurs from others who also recognized her name from the papers.

How I longed for the aid of Auguste Dupin as I quizzed the victim about her attacker! Perhaps he would have made more of her slender evidence than I could. The girl had not known the man, and had scarcely seen his face in the dark lane where he encountered her. She could only say that she did not think he was a local; he had a Paris accent, and from the fine cloth and fashionable cut of his clothes, she knew he was “quality.” No, he did not bite her throat, nor did he metamorphose into a hairy animal. She did not see what sort of knife he held, only felt its rough bite as he slashed her throat and took her life with it.

After I had translated her words for the others, Marie was allowed to depart. I asked Mr. W— if we could summon other victims of this killer so I could question them.

He agreed to try, saying that it was best to summon the recently departed by name — and thus we called up Dr. De La Roche. I thought a man of science might have the most helpful observations to offer.

When Miss W— began to speak, her tone had dropped by nearly an octave: “Where am I?” growled an unfamiliar voice in French. “Is this Heaven or Hell?”

“Neither,” said I, “but a parlor in New York State. We speak to you by means of a medium created through mesmerism.”

“Mesmerism! Do you mean that absurd charade still keeps idiots occupied? How long have I been dead?”

“Scarcely more than a week.”

“Ah, so I am still in Limbo. And what of Dupin?”

I was quite startled to hear this name issue from the lips of the young medium. “You refer to the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin?”

“Certainly. When he came to my door—”

Excited, I burst out: “When?”

“Why, on the last morning of my life! I was surprised, yet pleased, thinking that if he had taken an interest, the murders must be solved. And I should hear it first! I invited him inside, to take a bowl of coffee. It was still early, and my wife and I had not yet broken our fast.

“Once we were seated in the morning room, he congratulated me on having solved the mystery. I assured him that I was still very much in the dark.

“‘But you know,’ said he, ‘you perceived that the three young women were murdered, killed by a man, not attacked by wolves, dogs, or the frightful loup garou.’”

“‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but not the identity of their slayer; that, like his motives, remains mysterious.’

“He denied there was any mystery, and when I asked if he meant that he could identify the killer, he said, very calmly, that he could name the man, and explain every detail of the three killings.

“Astonished, I asked why he had not told the police. Was it not true they had asked for his help, and he had declined to become involved?

“Yes, he said, that was true. He had decided never to work with the police again after his last experience with them had left him agitated and disturbed. Although he had identified the killer to the police and the man had subsequently been executed for his crimes, Dupin considered he had failed to solve the case.

“I begged him to explain, and he replied that although he had discovered who had committed the murders, there remained unanswered the more troubling query: why.

“Most crimes can be explained, he told me. A man becomes a killer in a fit of passion — he goes for his knife in a jealous rage, or beats or strangles a woman who repulsed his amorous attentions, or when driven past endurance by a nagging wife. Other killers are more calculating; they kill for revenge, or to remove an obstacle in their path. What reason could there be for a rational man to deliberately choose to murder strangers almost at random?

“I replied that some killers were insane, and it was fruitless to attempt to apply reason to the actions of a madman.

“Dupin replied that it made no sense to describe this killer as mad. The man was both clever and rational. He knew that what he did was wrong, but he killed for a purpose, although he understood that his purpose would be considered repulsive by most civilized beings, and if he was caught, he would pay for his crimes with his life. He was quite sane. He made a decision. He had no wish to die, but his desire to kill was so powerful, the reward so great, that he judged the risk of being caught was worth it.

“I stared at the great detective in astonishment, thinking he was joking, but he looked utterly serious. ‘Reward?’ I repeated. ‘Explain to me, sir, what possible reward could there be in killing a stranger?’

“Dupin gave me a cold, distant look as he replied: ‘Pleasure.’

“‘You expect me to believe Reclus killed purely for the pleasure — the, I should say, imaginary pleasure of it — and yet you say he was not mad?’ I said.

“‘He was not mad,’ argued Dupin. ‘He was a man of superior intellect, and quite peculiarly refined sensibilities, able to feel sensations that would be lost on most. He told me that the pleasure of taking a life was the greatest pleasure he had ever known — it was particularly keen when the victim was a young and beautiful woman, but any death was to be savored.’”

A faint sigh — a melancholy, expiring sigh — issued from the lips of the fair young medium and she wavered a little in her seat.

“I think it is time, we must not overtax her system,” said Mr. W—, moving toward his daughter and raising his arms as if anxious to perform the passes that would bring her out of her mesmerized state, but I blocked him.

“Not yet,” I said urgently. “Please — just give me a little longer!”

I looked around the stuffy room, hoping one of the other guests would support me, and realized that there would be no help forthcoming from them. The audience had grown bored with our incomprehensible conversation.

“Just a few more questions,” I said quickly. “Then I will translate — you see, he is about to reveal the identity of the French were-wolf!”

This caused a satisfactory stir of interest, so I put the question to Dr. De La Roche at once: “But what about the more recent murders? Did you ask Dupin to identify the killer?”

“Of course. He advised patience — all in good time, I think he said — and asked how I could be so certain the killer was a man and not an animal. Was it not true that, as he had read, each of the women’s throats revealed the unmistakable tooth-marks?”

“Indeed they did, and I may have chuckled a little as I explained that my closer examination, under a microscope, had convinced me that although the marks had been made by animal teeth, the wounds were not bites. There is a distinction, you see. After examining the pattern of the marks, I felt certain that the wounds had been inflicted by some implement, either artificially made, or the jawbone of some large, carnivorous animal, a wolf or a tiger, wielded by a human hand in such a way as to mimic the bite of an animal as it cut the throat.

“‘Yet it was not very well done if you were able to recognize its artificiality,’ said Monsieur Dupin, frowning.

“I assured him that it had fooled the police and would pass muster with most people, even other doctors, but that I had a great deal of experience with animal bites. Monsieur Dupin looked oddly reassured as he nodded his head. ‘You are particularly observant, and very thorough in your examinations,’ he said. ‘A paragon among men of medicine!’

“As I was modestly denying this, Monsieur Dupin reached inside his coat to reveal what he had hidden there. It was something like the curved blade of a sickle, but lined with rows of sharp teeth, some of them natural animal teeth, others manufactured from glass and steel. At first, I felt only wonder at the sight of it, for I had not yet comprehended why Monsieur Dupin had come to visit me at home, so early in the morning, and I did not realize that the emotion I should have felt was fear, until I saw my own blood spurting out over the white table cloth, and knew it was far too late.

“I tried to ask him why, but could barely manage to gurgle as the life seeped out of my body. Yet he understood me well enough, smiling that distant, cold, inhuman smile of his as he replied, ‘You may call it madness, but I do not. It is the greatest pleasure.’”

If it is true that the mesmerized can channel the voices of the dead, and if I truly spoke to the spirit of a murdered man, still I must ask: can the dead lie? Is his story true, or could it be some nightmare experienced by the soul in Limbo, no more to be believed than the mad visions that fill my own head every night?

There is no doubt in my mind that De La Roche met Dupin, for when I heard the altered voice of the medium describe his “distant, cold, inhuman smile,” I could see it myself, with my inward eye, recalling how Dupin, in the grip of his analytical passion, would become frigid and abstract, his expression vacantly staring, his voice rising to a higher tone as if (I sometimes fancied) he was possessed of a bi-part soul, his body inhabited in turn by one of two distinctly different personalities. But never did I for a moment imagine that one of those two selves might be evil incarnate; I always knew Dupin for a prodigy and a wonder, not a monster.

I broke my promise to the rest of the audience and did not satisfy their curiosity by translating the conversation I’d had with the dead French doctor. Instead, I pleaded an attack of the megrims, and staggered out of the house just as soon as young Miss W— was restored to her natural self. The fortunate girl retained no recollection whatsoever of anything that had transpired during her trance, and no one else could enlighten her on the subject of what the Frenchman had said.

I do not want to believe that my old friend has become a killer. But I sense no trickery, and can think of no reason why someone should wish to fool me, or to blacken the name of C. Auguste Dupin.

Perhaps the most terrible thing is that although I do not want to believe it, neither can I wholly disbelieve. Knowing him as I did, I can imagine how his own curiosity and reliance on rationality could have been his undoing. The lack of any reason for the series of murders in his last case always preyed upon his mind. However repugnant and absurd, the explanation given by Reclus for his own actions could not be dismissed. The idea of murder as a pleasure might have become a maggot in Dupin’s brain, eating away at him until he was finally driven to test the matter for himself.

Once having killed… But here my chain of reasoning breaks down, for I cannot believe that the man I knew, even at his most coldly analytical, could perform such a ghastly experiment. Surely he would not murder a helpless, harmless young woman simply to test a theory?

Even if he killed in self-defense, or to save someone else, killing someone who deserved to die… if, in so doing, he had tasted something of the intoxicating pleasure Reclus had promised, might he not have become addicted, driven to kill again?

But no, the idea is too repulsive. It is madness. Only a madman could conceive the notion of murder as “the greatest pleasure.” Reclus was mad.

And Dupin?

Dupin, if he has become a killer, must be mad, in the same, seemingly rational way as the man he sent to the guillotine, the man who infected him with his terrible, repulsive idea.

Already, in the day and night that have passed since the mesmeric séance of which I have written, fresh reports have reached New York of still more killings in France: two sisters, this time, their throats savagely chewed by an unknown creature.

Yet how can I tell the police what I know? More importantly, how can I convince them? A letter is easily dismissed, and if I made the effort of traveling to France to speak to the people in power there, I should probably find myself locked up. I can imagine how Dupin would respond, with a mocking, pitying smile: “A dead man told you I had killed him? And do you often converse with the dead? This is common in America? My dear friend, I fear you are suffering from a fever of the brain…”

Dupin has the ear of the French police, as I do not, but I have something else. I have the ear of the public, in this country and abroad. My readers will not like this story as much as they liked “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” I admit, I do not like it so much myself. Yet it must be told. I must beg my readers to supply the necessary ending.