Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

The Comfort of the Seine

by Stephen Volk

My Dear Lestrade,

It is not a huge deductive leap to know you are at this moment wondering why, upon my recent death, this document is presented into your hands, and not those of my friend and chronicler Dr. Watson. The truth is, I cannot bear the thought that he might construe my privacy on these matters for so many years as something of a betrayal.

After you have read it, please place the enclosed securely in the files of the Black Museum at Scotland Yard. The reason for my not wanting this “adventure” to come to public attention in my lifetime will become clear in the reading of it.

But now, as the evening light is fading, I feel a heavy debt not to depart carrying an unwritten chapter of history to my grave, and if my arthritic hand will hold this pen long enough, I shall put the record to right.

Read on, detective. For what could be of more peculiar interest than the solution to a mystery where it seemed no mystery existed?

—Holmes

Youth is a country visited fleetingly, at the time with the only intention of reaching another destination, but in which we later wish we had lingered longer, whilst our energy was boundless and our eyesight good, and the colors of the world less grey and circumscribed. One ventures near cliff edges. One climbs branches, unable to conceive that they can snap. And one leaves one’s home country on a whim, feeling no more than a sleeve tugged urgently by an eager and fresh-faced friend. Thus, at the age of twenty, I found myself abandoning my studies in chemistry, zoology and botany at Sydney Sussex, Cambridge, to accompany the Scales brothers to Paris.

A fellow science student with whom I shared digs, Peter Scales, had coerced me to tag along with him and his sibling, Olaf, a young painter. They were twins, but beyond the superficial similarities — identicalities — the lads could not have been more dissimilar in terms of personality. Olaf wore an overcoat like a Prussian cavalry officer, tartan waistcoats and extravagant facial hair. Peter on the other hand was quite happy to be the wallpaper in a room. But it was fun to see the pranks they played, teasing the passengers on the cross-channel steamer, being seemingly in two places at once, doffing their hats first inside the cabin, then on deck, as if a single person had been transported by magic from the first location to the second. We laughed. Yes, I laughed not infrequently in those days.

Our journey had been prompted when Olaf heard that Renoir, Monet and Degas were exhibiting in the studio of the photographer Nadar. This was the very birth of the era of “Impressionism”, you understand — when the word was first used by the critic Louis Leroy to ridicule Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, thereby accidentally naming a movement. “Come on Yorkie!” cried Olaf (I still had quite a pronounced accent from the land of my forebears in those days). “It’ll be tremendous! The colors. You have no idea. These painters will be world-famous one day, mark my word. They’ll be hanging in museums!” I was by no means certain of that, and had little or no interest in art, but his enthusiasm was infectious. How could I refuse? England had become a bore. Disraeli was Prime Minister at the age of seventy. And we were young.

The other ulterior motive was, frankly: I spoke French. Not well, but enough. I’d learned it at my great-uncle’s knee, and though I had hardly any memory of him, the old je suis ran in my blood. Peter even quipped I had a nose like a Frenchman.

So, whilst the brothers sought out paintings that captured the fall of light, I was content to observe the fall of light itself on the architecture of the great city around me, and the atmosphere of boulevards once trodden by revolutionary feet, walls that still echoed with the Communards’ bullets and the cries of shop-keepers taken to arms, shockingly, within all-too recent memory. It was hard to believe: the streets I saw before me were regimented, grand, beautiful, populated by civilised and polite citizens of the modern day, yet behind that beauty lurked a spirit quick to anger and pitiless in its violence.

Having explored the Conciergerie, the grisly staging-post before the guillotine, I found myself walking along the Quai de la Corse with the intention of crossing the Pont Notre Dame to delve into Les Halles, the so-called “belly of Paris”, when I heard a female voice behind me:

“Monsieur!”

Instinctively I turned, and to my surprise the unmistakable scent of lilies hit my nostrils. Indeed, a lily itself was being thrust towards me. Equally instinctively, I pushed it aside, glimpsing the vagabond creature in rags and bonnet trying to force it upon me.

“Non! Monsieur. Monsieur…” she insisted, following me, in fact blocking my path as I turned away.

“Elle mourra,” she said.

I was taken aback. A strange phrase which I instantly translated:

It will die.

For some reason this gave me pause. She gave me pause. What would die? What was she telling me — or warning me of — and why? I felt a prickling sensation of unease across my shoulders, a vestigial memory awakened of the supernatural talents of gypsies….

The beggar girl thrust the flower at me again, her arm outstretched. “Elle mourra,” she repeated.

It will die.

What a fool! She meant that if she did not sell the flowers in her basket by the end of the day they would have to be thrown away and wasted. Laughing at my own stupidity, I took the lily and urgently dug into my pocket for change, but by the time I looked up from my palm she was disappearing into the Place Louis-Lépine. She glanced back from under the trees, the sunlight catching the corners of her eyes like the dabs of a paint brush. Then she was gone. Her act — the simple gift of a flower to a complete stranger — done.

That night the boys and I went to the Café Dauphine, not far from our lodgings in the Rue Quincampoix, and sank several “nightcaps”. They lost themselves happily in their cups, but, intoxicated in quite another way, I could not concentrate on a word they said.

The next morning, after dressing, I suggested we walk through the Marché aux Fleurs, the flower market on the Place Louis-Lépine. The twins humoured me, with no idea my stomach was churning at the prospect that I might not see the girl again. But there she was, standing at her stall, in sturdy workman’s boots, cardigan tied sloppily round her waist, woollen balaclava under her second-hand bonnet, ruddy cheeks and pink knuckles, full lips spare of the gaud of make-up, nattering in a Parisian dialect incomprehensible even to my ear, giving the uncouth males around her a run for their money.

“All right,” said Olaf. “Hi-ho. Go and speak to her, then.”

“I have no idea what the deuce you mean.”

“Do you not?” He laughed, sticking his hand in his waistcoat and making a mime of a beating heart. “I thought he was interested in the botany here,” he said, nudging his brother. “But obviously it’s the biology he’s got his eyes on.”

“Rot.”

“Own up, Yorkie, old boy. It’s not a crime, for Heaven’s sake…”

I turned on my heel, not wanting to show them my cheeks were flushed.

We spent the rest of the day touring the Louvre, but I was beginning to grow sick of their company. Nothing to account for this, other than the fact that their jocular presence prevented me openly seeking the flower seller for fear of incurring their puerile taunts. Yet it was a preoccupation that refused to leave my mind. I was simply unable to banish it.

“My gosh. He really is sickening for something, this lad,” said Olaf later, sipping strong black coffee of the kind only palatable in France. “I think Cupid’s arrow has really struck its target this time…”

I was tempted to punch him on the chin. As it was, I grabbed my coat and returned to the Marché aux Fleurs, buying her a silly gift along the way in reciprocation for the flower she had given me.

It was late afternoon by now and the working day almost at an end. She did not see me at first. I loitered like a felon, content to observe the way she folded the brown paper to make bouquets and made gay little ribbons of rope or twine. Her grace was an attribute that captivated me. She captivated me. The hand upon her hip, the sway of her shoulders, the toss of her head. The ragged edges of her skirts skimming the cobbles. The wisps of reddish hair curling from the soft cleft at the back of her neck. In the end I could not disguise that I was staring at her — and finally our eyes met. I thought suddenly she might find me foolish, but as soon as she laughed and made a little curtsey I felt at ease. I handed her my gift. She looked at it with astonishment bordering on awe, the expression on her face utterly delightful.

“Je m’appelle Sherlock,” I stammered, like a schoolboy.

“Sheeur-loque,” she attempted, waiting for me to continue the conversation, but I could not. My courage punctured by the stray guffaws of some hefty-looking laborers, I lowered my head with embarrassment. In defiance of their ridicule she kissed my cheek. I can remember the warmth of her lips even now, as if a Lucifer had been struck inside me. I felt all at once weak at the knees and as powerful as a steam train. And, even as I fled stupidly, thought: if my next breath were to be my last, I shouldn’t care.

Over breakfast Olaf said there was nothing like someone else’s tragedy to raise his spirits. Peter asked if love was a tragedy, then? His brother told him in a pitying tone that he’d led a sheltered life. Refusing to enter into their badinage, I combed my hair fastidiously in the mirror and sped to the flower market without a word, determined that this time my shyness would not get the better of me.

Now, those who have followed my exploits later in life will know I have been confronted on occasion by scenes of unutterable horror — at the risk of disappointing you, this was not one of them. In fact the sight of her stall bolted up when all the others were open gave me at first only a mild sense of disappointment. She was not there — today — perhaps for good reason. I had no cause, at first, to believe anything untoward had happened. No reason at all. And yet … my heart told me otherwise.

The longer I conversed with the stall-holders, showering them with inquiries, the more the grip of foreboding took hold. My only response was a series of immensely irritating Gallic shrugs. Nobody knew where she was. Nobody even knew her name. How on earth could that be?

The questions multiplied. By the time I returned to the apartment I was beside myself, fretting visibly, but received no real sympathy from the twins. Yes, Peter could see I was upset, but in his naivety wondered why. Olaf on the other hand could only belittle my concerns.

“Isn’t it obvious? She shut up shop to go off with a man. Brazen hussy.”

“She wouldn’t do that.”

“Why not? How do you know? How could you possibly know? You’ve only just met her.”

“She’s not a hussy, I know that much.”

“Rich men. Tourists. Poverty-stricken women on their own have to make a living in all sorts of ways.” He saw me glaring at him, and held up his hands. “I’m just telling you the possibilities.”

“I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t,” I said through tight lips.

The following day I returned to the market, hoping against hope that a different scene would greet me. It did not. The padlock on the sorry-looking flower-stall was firm. A fat knife-sharpener scraped at his stone. The laborers unloading carts joked and whispered, rolling up their sleeves to show off their biceps to giggling waifs. What were they concealing? What did they know? I was determined to return, and return until I saw her — or know the answer why.

Two more days passed before I sat the brothers down and told them my absolute fear that some terrible calamity had befallen her. And that, in order to prove or disprove my conviction, I had resolved to visit the Paris morgue.

Now it comes…. Dear Lord, how I have postponed many times describing this, the most painful part of my narrative. Not that the details are vague — far from it. The images in my mind are pin-sharp and all too hideously indelible. I venture, should all my memories slip away tumbling like rubble down a slope as my life grows interminably longer and more brittle, this scene alone will remain. I even pull my dressing gown around my shoulders now, as I feel the icy chill of those walls upon my body…

Imagine a gentleman’s convenience with the dimensions of a palace. The same white tiles on every surface. The same overwhelming sibilance. The same residual smell of toxic substances masked by acrid disinfectant. We passed under pebbled-glass gratings through which could be seen the feet of Parisians going about their daily work, oblivious to the macabre and poignant scenes below.

Mentally, I urged the line to move faster. A woman up ahead was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, her backdrop a haze created by several hoses dousing the bodies. The cadaver of a large, hairy man with half his head missing silenced some dandies come for whatever perverse thrill they sought from the experience. If I was not sickened by that, I was sickened by what I saw next. For, amongst the dead, arranged with uniform indignity upon marble slabs, lay the flower girl’s corpse.

It knocked the air out of me and Peter caught my elbow. What was most shocking was the exhibition of every inch of her pale, untarnished skin. Skin I had never touched, yet presented here for the entire public to see. Had she been touched? Had they touched her? Rage clouded my vision. But when the callous spout passed over her, spraying water and giving the illusion of movement across her flesh, I could bear it no longer. I dashed forward, plucking the strand of hair thrown into disarray over her face by the hose.

“For pity’s sake, Sherlock…”

I shook my head vigorously. Lifted her ice-cold hand to my lips.

A moronic attendant shoved me back towards the line, barking that it was forbidden to touch the corpse. “Ne touchez pas le cadavre! Écartez-vous du cadavre!”

I felt another harsh prod against my chest and launched at him and would have killed him, had not Olaf’s tall frame stood separating us. The man backed away from my fiercely blazing eyes and spat in a drain.

“It’s time to go,” said Peter softly. “You need to sleep and you need to get out of this damned awful place.”

My eyes were red raw and I had no idea how much time — minutes or hours — had passed and what had occupied them but my devastation. I was sitting on the floor near the foot of the slab with the rain from the hoses dripping down the walls.

“My dear fellow,” I heard his brother’s voice. “Peter’s right. There’s nothing you can do.”

“Go. Go, if you want. Both of you. I’m going to stay.”

The next full hour I spent alone with my — how can I use the word? But I shall — beloved.

Presently the gas dipped lower and I heard footsteps and the rattle of keys. It became apparent I was the last visitor in the place, and was compelled to tear myself in agony from her side. I walked, leaden, to the stairs, but once there the terrible urge for one final glance overcame me.

There was no doubt — but at first there had been only doubt, so unerringly, absolutely strange was the picture before me. A man — was it a man? —stood over the bier: an elderly man with snow-white hair covering his ears, a pair of tinted pince-nez perched on the bridge of his nose, a black cape covering his entire frame, bent over the corpse, owlish head hovering but inches above her, as if smelling the bouquet of a fine wine. Toad-like, barrel-chested and with spindly legs, he made no sound — there was no sound but from the water of the hoses. His hands moved in alacritous gestures, almost those of a mesmerist. As I watched, dumbstruck, he went about his odious theatrics as if I were invisible. Was I invisible, and this a vile construction of my harried mind? If so — what did it mean? Why had I not seen him before, or heard his footfall?

Immediately I hurried to the nearest morgue attendant — the one who had manhandled me. But no sooner had I caught his arm and turned to look back than I saw, open-mouthed, that the apparition was gone.

“Excusez-moi. L’homme aux cheveux blonds,” I gabbled. “L’homme qui etait là-bas, habillé en noir. Cest qui?”

The morgue attendant looked entirely baffled. “L’homme, monsieur?”

“Oui. L’homme. Le vieux avec les lunettes.”

The attendant looked over a second time then shook his head, opening the iron gate for us both to exit. “Je n’ai vu personne,” he said.

I have seen nobody.

The twins tried to placate my anxiety with stiff alcohol and poor explanations, suggesting it was a visiting doctor or anatomist, but nothing they came up with accounted for the manner of the figure’s intense interest, or the diligence being applied to the macabre task. I could see now from their faces their answer was that I had seen something whilst the balance of my mind was unhinged. I laughed bitterly. Olaf said that I must know as a biologist that, when a person suffers a shock, their powers of observation become temporarily unreliable.

“Not mine,” I said. “I assure you. Not mine.”

Come the morning, Peter reminded me our tickets on the ferry were for noon. He said he and his brother fully intended to return to England at the prescribed time. I said very well, but I was afraid I could not join them. My studies were of scant importance to me now, and my trickle of inheritance would be enough to sustain me. In any case, I wasn’t worried if it didn’t. The point was, I could not live with the mystery. The mystery of the girl about whom no-one cared or grieved but me. The mystery of the girl over whose corpse a vile old man bent in sensual enquiry. The mystery of the girl who, out of nowhere, said to me:

Elle mourra.

It will die. The flower will die…. But also — my God, why had I not thought it before? My stomach knotted as I watched the ferry depart—

She will die.

I returned to the morgue, where the flower girl’s corpse still lay naked, nameless and unclaimed, convinced more than ever that this flesh-and-blood ghoul was somehow implicated in her death.

The same odious morgue attendant recognized me from the night before, and seemed keen to avoid me. Minutes later I saw a few coins placed into his hand by one of the bereaved and he tugged his cap, which told me this rogue’s silence could be bought cheaply — and had. I gravitated to the other, slightly more savory employee at the wooden booth next to the stairs and described the man in pince-nez, whilst pointedly pressing coins into his palm. After which he whispered, yes, he had seen him, too. Several times.

“Comment s’appelle-t-il?” I asked.

The man’s eyes darted shiftily right and left. He coughed into his hand, turned the register towards me and ran a grime-encrusted finger down the line of signatures forming a column on the left.

“Dupin,” I read aloud.

It meant nothing to me. The only “Dupin” I knew was a mere fictional character, the brilliant detective in Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a supremely far-fetched fantasy in which a devotee of the so-called science of “ratiocination” works out that the culprit in the gruesome murder of a mother and her daughter (whose throats were cut and bodies mutilated) is in fact, amazingly, the pet Orangutan of a sailor, trained to shave its owner with a straight-razor. I recalled the tale only vaguely and dismissed the connection as quickly as it occurred to me.

“Do you know anything about him?” I asked in French. “His profession?”

“Détective,” came the terse reply.

I smiled and gave him a few more centimes for his trouble. The old man of the morgue was disguising himself, clearly. Or he was a detective named Dupin, the factual basis of Poe’s story; or, again, a detective who took the name from Poe. All were possibilities, and all unedifying. The words came back to me:

Elle mourra.

In what dreadful capacity could the girl have known that she would die? And if it was her expectation, how could it feasibly be any kind of accident? Did the white-haired man know? Indeed, did he execute the deed? Was this man the murderer? What was his connection to her if not? And why did he visit this place of the dead with such incessant regularity … for now I saw Dupin in the ledger on page after page, back, long before she met her death, long before I even met her…

I was only aware of the footsteps on the stairs when they abruptly stopped. I spun round and saw a shadow cast by gaslight upon the stone wall, hesitating, frozen before descending. I recognized the fall of the cape, the cut of its upturned collar, the spill of the cravat. The very frame was unmistakable, albeit faceless. It ran.

I was up, after it in an instant, but the bats’-wings of the cape flew upwards to the light with supernatural speed for a man of his advanced years. By the time I emerged into the street, breathless and blinking into the sun, I saw only the door of a carriage slamming after him. I hailed another, almost getting myself trampled by hooves as the reins were pulled taut. We gave pursuit, my head in a whirl, my heart pounding as I urged my driver at all costs not to lose our quarry.

After ten or fifteen minutes, to my relief I pinpointed the distinctive St-Médard church on my right and that gave me my bearings. Leaving behind the medieval-looking streets of Mouffetard, we eventually turned from the rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire into the rue Cuvier, which I knew to border the famous Jardin des Plantes. My transportation pulled to a halt and I climbed out, paying swiftly in order not to lose sight of the man I pursued.

To my astonishment, at a leisurely pace he entered the Ménagerie, France’s largest and oldest public zoo, created during the Revolution for the unhappy survivors of the one at Versailles — those not devoured by the hungry mob — and a new population of animals rounded up by the armies of the Republic from far-flung lands abroad. He walked on an unerring path, seemingly impervious to the hooting calls of jungle birds and the pacing of lions. I followed until he came to a halt, his back to me, looking through the bars of a cage.

I approached him from behind, careful not to surprise him unduly until I was directly upon him, then yanked him round to face me.

The countenance of a negro grinned at me, his smile radiant in a sea of ebony. His curly hair had been covered by the hat and scarf, his age — which explained his athleticism — not much more than my own.

“My name is Adolphe Le Bon,” he said in immaculate English, with a pitch as basso profundo as I have heard in my life. “At your service, monsieur.” He touched the brim of his top hat. “A gentleman said to give you this.” He handed me an envelope from his inside pocket. “Bonjour. Or should I say; Au ‘voir?”

Whereupon he strolled away, in no particular hurry, and I found myself considering the contents of the letter unwrapped in my fingers — a jumble of proof-readers’ symbols and numbers amounting to nonsense — whilst gazing through the bars at the rubbery, wizened visage of an aged and enfeebled Orangutan.

What game was this? A game I was compelled to play, obviously. Downing coffee at a street café, I stared at the hieroglyphs on the sheet of paper, cursing that if only I had Dupin’s deductive power to decipher them — or those of his creator. Then I remembered — of course! —in another of Poe’s tales, The Gold Bug, a code showing the whereabouts of buried treasure is broken by elucidating which character predominates, and relating it to the order of frequency of letters generally in the English language. Even so, how did I know this was in English? I was in Paris. What was the order of frequency of letters of the alphabet in French? Then the notion came to me that this was not a code similar to that in The Gold Bug: it was the exact same code as in The Gold Bug.

I sped to an English book shop I knew in Saint-Germain, purchased their only copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination and secluded myself in a corner. “As our predominant character is 8, we will commence by assuming it as the e of the natural alphabet…” Within minutes I had translated the cryptograph. What I held now in my hands was an address. But that was not all I had discovered.

In thumbing through the pages, I had naturally alighted upon The Murders in the Rue Morgue. And by chance my eyes had fallen upon a certain name: that of “Alphonse Le Bon”, who was arrested for the extraordinary crime— “a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity” —before the real culprit was incarcerated: a large, tawny Orangutan of the Burmese species.

By fading light I walked to the Pont Neuf, crossing the river to the Île de la Cité, where I sensed the man in the rue de la Femme-sans-Tête confidently awaited me.

I struck a flint to read the name-plates of the apartments. All were blank. I saw a handle which I pulled, presuming that it sounded a bell somewhere within the belly of the old building, though I heard nothing. Laughter came from a lighted window opposite and I wondered if this was a district of ill-repute. It was the kind of shriek which could be interpreted either as extreme pain or extreme pleasure and I preferred to think the latter.

“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.”

Who is it? squawked the parrot.

“And the mystery of the missing moustache is self-evident,” I said. “For one can dress a double to look like one’s self, but one cannot force him to grow facial hair he does not have. And so you shaved off your own.”

“Bravo!” Dupin laughed and clapped his hands. We had been conversing in French but he spoke English now for the first time, with the musical lilt of a Southern gentleman. “Many have tried but none has got so far! Le Bon, the cognac! This is a cause for celebration! Chevalier Auguste Dupin has met his match!” The dapper negro emerged from the gloom and poured me an ample glassful. “I do not partake myself.”

“The stuff can be the death of you.”

“I fear water will be the death of me now.” Poe grinned, holding up a glass into which he had poured clear liquid from a jug. “A ‘way to watery death’ is not quite the poetic thing, is it? I quite resist banality, in death as in life.”

“And the death of the flower girl?” I made it quite clear in my tone that I had not forgotten the purpose of my visit. “What is the poetry in that, sir?”

He avoided my question.

“Let me first tell you of the last weeks on this earth of Edgar Allan Poe.” Whilst he spoke the manservant Le Bon circled the room lighting candles. “It had been a year of wild dullness…. I was drumming up support for a five-dollar magazine and trying to convert my Philistine countrymen to literature — an impossible task. I came to the conclusion I could only raise money by lecturing again: with tickets at 50¢ I could clear $100 — if sober. So, with the ferocious spirit of the true dipsomaniac I took the oath of abstinence, prostrated myself at the Sons of Temperance: a solid challenge to my cravings — but, alas, unattainable…. The word ‘teetotal’ had hardly wettened my tongue before — I fell, spectacularly…. My lecture was stolen. I descended further into debt: but these are excuses. The true drinker repels the very idea of his own happiness. We deem the prospect of solace intolerable.

“I had to leave Richmond on business, but the real reason was a desperation to escape. Escape my own shabby dreams, and, ringing like a foul tintinnabulation, the doctor’s warning after Philadelphia that one more drop of the hard stuff would see me to the bone yard. Truth was, my life had become all pose and no prose. Fancy-mongering was wearisome now. I was a performing dog wandering the miasmic stars of Eureka. So I propped up the steamer’s bar, wishing most the while a maelstrom would suck it down, and me with it.

“As you said, the streets of Baltimore were en fête with election fever. I went unnoticed in streets teeming with drunks filthier drunk than me. I was on a spree. Maybe my last. I was determined to put and end to this life, little knowing I would start a new one.

“Outside a tavern a man pestered me for a game of cards. He wanted to win back money he had lost, because he was sailing for Europe the next day and didn’t want to arrive penniless. The man was drunk, drunker than me — so drunk he was not even aware that, a little thinner in the girth and thicker in the cheeks, he was my double. I did not even remark upon it and I drank with him until he passed out in an alley. I thought he was dead. I felt his pulse.

“Then, with a thundering heart, I saw an extraordinary opportunity to reinvent my life, if I had the audacity to carry it through. He, being dead, had nothing to lose, and I everything — everything to gain. I took a ticket from his inside pocket, made out in the name of ‘Reynolds’: his passage across the Atlantic. I changed clothes, taking all his identifying belongings and giving him mine, finally leaning the Malacca cane I had borrowed from Dr. Carter against his knee: the final piece of evidence that this dishevelled inebriate was Poe.

“I took the ocean crossing, shaving off my moustache and cutting my hair lest someone identify me. No-one did. On arrival I read of my own demise, of poor Reynolds calling out his name again and again: my doppelganger, my William Wilson calling for his own identity to be restored, in life, in death — but, alas, it never was.

“He was interred at the Presbyterian cemetery on Lafayette and Green Street. My premature burial. I read the despicable death notices penned by Griswold, twisting the facts, emphasizing my bad points and down-playing my good, but I could hardly react to any attack on my former identity without exposing my new one. As it was, I feared someone might uncover my ploy, the police or the Reynolds family, and come looking for me, so I changed my name again on arrival.”

“To Dupin?” I said. “Your most famous character?”

Poe shook his head. “Not at first. To begin with I stayed with my friend Charles Baudelaire, the poet. He had read many of my works before I died. For that reason, and my innate Francophilia, I gravitated to Paris. He’d translated my piece on Mesmeric Revelation in La Liberté de Penser. He saw me as a mystic and visionary and the inventor of skillfully engineered tales, and had written to tell me as much, so it was fitting I turned to him in my hour of need. He kept me under lock and key in rooms at the Hôtel Pimodon, always in penury over the years, partly because he kept me afloat too.

“We had certain similarities. His stepfather General Aupick he despised, as I despised mine. He endured a life of money troubles, as had I. He was afflicted by bouts of pessimism, as was I. Arrogant, as was I…. But his vie libre was also a vie libertine, centred on the taverns of the Latin Quarter. He hated solitude. I welcomed it. To begin with I ventured outside rarely, if at all. I helped him with his satirical contributions to the Corsaire-Satan, and later with Les Fleurs du Mal. He in turn brought me the world, by way of the Café Tabourey or the Théâtre de l’Odéon.

“After a while he introduced me to his Bohemian cronies as ‘Dupin’ — his little joke. The name wasn’t known in France because in the first translation of Rue Morgue the detective was re-named ‘Bernier’ for some reason unknown to either of us. And ‘duping’, you see — the pun was deliciously appealing.

“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?”

“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…”

“I assure you, everything I say is arrived at by the painstaking application of my methods. At the morgue I procured her clothing, which had not yet been incinerated, and her petticoats were imprinted with a faded workhouse stamp of Ste-Ursule of Nîmes. The flesh on her back, sad to say, betrayed healed scars which indicated the application of a scourge used specifically by Catholic nuns. And the condition of her hands, ingrained with blacking invisible to the naked eye, presented ample proof of her time in service. But what concerns us here primarily is the manner of her death…”

He bent over the corpse, finger tips on the rim of the coffin, exactly as he had done in the morgue, and sniffed, taking the air into his dilating nostrils in short gasps, eyes closed as if savoring its bouquet like a connoisseur of fine wine.

“The scent of putrefaction is repulsive to most individuals, quite naturally: as human beings we have bred ourselves over millennia to abhor decay. Which is a great shame, because its study I’ve found to be invaluable. Just as a tea-taster can discern subtleties in a blend that the uneducated could not possibly discern, I have trained myself over the years to be able to assess the olfactory distinctions between stages of decay. This, when combined with other observations — visual, tactile — enables me, most often, I would say invariably, to be able to pinpoint to the day, sometimes to the hour, the time of death. These are not extraordinary talents, my dear Holmes, but ones that most people could apply, given the inclination and training. Foremost, I noticed immediately the corpse had not decomposed as swiftly as it might — always a good indication of immersion in the intense cold of water. This was confirmed by finding none of the customary bruising caused by the effect of gravity on an inert mass on land — ergo, she either drowned or was committed to the Seine very soon after dying. Since there were no pre-mortem signs of violence on the epidermis, my conclusion was therefore the former.

“The wind that night was unseasonably harsh,” he continued. “Coming as it did from a south by southwest direction. The covers of the stalls were flapping and she was the last of the stall holders to leave. She was in high spirits. Perhaps she even contemplated that she might have been in love.”

“Do not tease me,” I snapped.

“On the contrary. I am delivering the facts, however shocking or unpalatable they may be. Now, do you wish me to carry on?”

I had no alternative but to nod.

“Alone now, she feels a few dots of rain in the air and opens her parasol. A new parasol from her young admirer. In a flash it is caught by a sudden gust of wind, plucked from her hands. She grasps after it, but in vain.” This he acted out in spasmodic motions. “She chases it, but it bounces away across the Quai de la Corse, taking flight, this way, that, cart-wheeling down the boatman’s steps and landing in the mud ten, fifteen yards beyond.

“And so she ventures out — but the mud is not as firm as it looks. It acts like glue. It is up to her ankles before she knows it. Frightened, she tries to extract herself, but only sinks deeper. Almost certainly she cries out for help, but nobody hears. The river level rises. Water fills her mouth, her lungs. Soon she is submerged completely.”

“This is outrageous…” I breathed.

He ignored me. “In time, buoyancy lifts her and carries her away in the predetermined arc of the current to the jetty near the Pont Ste-Beuve. The activity of the morning boats dislodges the submerged corpse once again and it travels, aided by the wash of tourist vessels and commercial traffic, lodging temporarily against the supports of the Pont Cavaignac on her way to her final port of call, the Pont Olivier Knost, where the body is spotted by passers-by and conveyed by the authorities — requiescat in pace — to its resting place, the City Morgue.”

I shook my head, struggling hard to assimilate all he had told me. Struggling to believe that such deductions were possible. Wanting to reject them as fabulous, as fictional — as another of his fanciful tales…

My doubt all too visible in my features, he explained: “Upon minute examination, I found slivers of timber in the knots in her hair. Under the microscope these fragments showed algae matching those upon the vertical struts of the jetty near Pont Ste-Beuve. I also found fragments of paint and rusted metal in a post-mortem gash on her skull, the shade of blue matching that of the Pont Cavaignac.

“After my first examination of the body in the morgue, I sent Le Bon out on a mission with three questions. One, what was the prevailing wind that night? Two, what was the color of the paint used on the Pont Cavaignac? And three: is there a factory near the Pont Notre Dame, working through the night, producing sufficient noise to cover a drowning girl’s cries for help? There was. A printer’s shop, hard at work producing the next day’s news. Upon whose pages, alas, come the morrow, the mystery of a missing flower girl did not merit so much as a single line.”

A bitter sadness rose in my throat. I was numb with astonishment, dazzled, uncomprehending, light-headed, on the brink of alarm. The feeling was not unlike love: I wanted to be seduced, I wanted to believe, to succumb — yet everything told me to protect myself from harm, to dismiss that which drew me so compulsively to it.

Poe placed a hand on my shoulder.

“There was no murder, no murderer, no rhyme nor reason, no conspiracy, no plan, no suicide…” he said. “Just the wind, the water, the mud, the current…. Sometimes Nature itself is the most devious criminal of all.”

I turned away from him and looked into the crumbling coals of the fire. The heat from it dried and prickled my eyes but I continued to stare without blinking. A coke had fallen out below me and he lifted it back into place with long-handled tongs. He was silent for a while and I was grateful for that. I heard him refill my glass of cognac and place it on the table beside my chair. The other chair opposite creaked as Poe once again occupied it and crossed his spidery legs. I had a sense of a snowy halo in my peripheral vision. The black loops of a string tie. A weak mouth. A massive brow shadowing the eyes of a nocturnal Caesar.

“Your logic is faultless except for one thing,” I said, controlling the quaver in my voice. “The parasol. It strikes me as something of a conjecture.”

“Not at all. I might conjecture that what took her out onto the mud must have been something of meaning to her, something of sentimental value, which is why she felt compelled to retrieve it. I might conjecture that, given there has been a parasol seller on the corner of the rue de Lutece for twenty years, that is what I would have given her as a gift, had I been in love. But my business is not conjecture.” He picked a small red parrot feather from his sleeve and examined it between his fingers. “I know she was the last to leave the market simply because, upon enquiry, nobody remembered seeing her leave. I spoke to the knife sharpener and he told me the only unusual thing that day was she had a parasol — one he had never seen before — and an object altogether too bourgeois for someone of her status in society. It stuck in his mind, he said, because she walked up and down like a queen, her smile radiant. He said, in fact, he’d never seen her so happy.”

Happy. The last word had a devastating effect on me. It immediately drained me of everything but remorse. The feelings I had patently kept submerged for days welled up and overwhelmed me. I could do nothing to stop them. They broke the banks and I wept like a child.

“Now. Look at her.”

Poe took my hand and wrapped my fingers round a candlestick. It lit my way to the coffin, where the prone, lifeless husk that had once been so vibrant shimmered in its amber glow.

“Géricault, when he was painting his Raft of the Medusa, locked himself away with no company but dead bodies and even shaved his hair off to eliminate completely his need for contact with the outside world. All so that he could concentrate completely on the work at hand.”

I wondered why he was unrolling a cloth bag of surgical equipment — scalpel, forceps, scissors — but my query was soon answered.

“We are going to stay here, like Géricault, for however many hours it takes until your tears run dry. Then we will be done.” He lifted the cloth cover from a microscope on a desk. “You shall grow to know her as only God knows her. And then your wisdom will have outgrown your pain, and you will be free.” He walked over to me and placed an object in my hand.

It was a magnifying glass.

Dawn light began to outline the shutters as the screws were secured once more round the rim of the coffin lid. Poe rolled down his sleeves, buttoned his cuffs, and sent Le Bon with a message for the unscrupulous attendants from the morgue to come and remove the body.

“We shall say no prayers for her,” he said. “She goes to the ground and becomes dirt, as we all shall.”

He opened the windows.

The air became fresh and clean. Slowly the noises of ordinary life and work permeated from the cobbled bustle of the street. A gentle bathing of the everyday was welcome after a long and suffocating night of cigar fog and candle wax. By sunlight, the apartment in the rue de la Femme-sans-Tete was no longer a prison, no more a threat, a labyrinth with some Minotaur, part god, part monster, at its centre.

“I am not, nor have I ever been, healthy.” He pinched my nostrils and drew the razor carefully down the cleft between my nose and mouth. A gobbet of soap hit the water in the bowl. “For my sins, a sedentary existence and the habitual use of alcohol and opiates is now written upon every organ in my body. At sixty-five I am heavy and weary, rheumatic and vulnerable to colds. My stomach is a harsh critic. I take quinine, digitalis and belladonna: one loses track of what produces the symptoms and what treats them. Truth is, I cannot know how many summers I shall endure…” He did not look into my eyes, focusing only on brushing more soap into my bristles. “Having no biological offspring, I have long harboured the desire to pass on what I have learnt of the science of ratiocination to someone else in this world before I take to dust. I have sought a pupil. A young adept of sorts. Foolish perhaps. Vanity, certainly…”

“That was the purpose of your test.”

“You found me, Holmes, and in so doing, I found you. Even though the clues were abundant, you were the first to show the propensity to solve such puzzles. Perhaps it is arrogance — that has always been my fatal flaw — but I do believe there may be some merit in my methods. I know the young despise the old, quite rightly and vive la revolution! — but…”

I was stricken with incredulity as I gathered the nature of his proposition.

“You would teach me?”

“There is a price, of course.” He wiped the straight razor in a cloth, both sides. “The price is your heart. Your tell tale heart…. The tale it tells is always a lie, and always leads to pain.” His sad eyes turned to mine. “Is it a cost you are prepared to pay, Sherlock?”

I took the cloth from his hands and wiped the residue of soap off my face as he waited for my answer.

We played four hundred games of chess, and a thousand games of cards. He taught me every intricacy of luck and chance, and every statistic that disproves every superstition. He dissected every belief like a pinned-out frog, occasionally making it kick for demonstration purposes, then revealing how the effect was achieved. He knew the machineries of life and mind and held them in his head like railway timetables. He revealed to me the foolishness of crowds and the absurdities of love, the fallacies of poor thinking, and the whirring cogs of the criminal mind. My old education was over and my real education begun: my training to be the outsider, observing life but not being in its thrall.

We argued over Hegel’s Logik, observed by the beady eye of a parrot named Griswold. We pored over Giovanni Battista Morgagni, and Taylor’s seminal work on pathology and toxicology, the first in the English language.

We read by lamp light. We slept on the floor or in our chairs but more often talked through the night.

When we were busy, and the doors bolted so we would not be disturbed, food and drink was lowered on a rope through a trap door from upstairs by the loyal servant Le Bon.

I was made to memorize a hundred imprints of soles of shoes. And a hundred types of house brick. Coins. Coral. Types of dentition. Birds’ eggs. Navigational equipment. Moths.

Blindfolded, I learned how to identify cigarette brands by smell alone.

The nature of breeds of dog — not to mention their owners.

He would show me a hundred Daguerrotypes and direct me to deduce the maladies from the patients’ photographs alone. And more. More, more, he taunted me. What more do you see?

Hour after hour, day after day, the room became clearer, as if a veil were lifted. As if my eyes had been put through a pencil sharpener. As if the world, muddy and intangible, were slowly being made clean and whole.

Habitually we would visit the aforementioned Ménagerie, and always pay a special pilgrimage to the old Orangutan named — I remember it clearly — Bobo.

Sometimes, after supper, as we walked beside the Seine, Poe took my arm. He liked a stroll, but sometimes his vanity meant he left his walking cane at home. He would tell me not to nag him when I reminded him of the fact. Often we sat on a certain bench and gazed at the Moon reflected on the water.

Watson spoke in derogatory fashion of my lack of knowledge in the field of astronomy. The truth is, I know not too little, but too much.

Poe taught me to listen to the music of the spheres.

Giordano Bruno said there is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.

The observer. The detective.

I spent three years with Poe before he died and he taught me — not “all I know” (such a claim would be absurd) — but how to know. He was no less than a father to me, and the only thing he ever asked in return is that I keep his secret from the world.

We were sometimes seen around Paris: C. Auguste Dupin, with his white hair, black cape and yellow sunglasses, and his young English assistant.

Some mysteries were solved.

The affair of the so-called “phantom” of the Paris Opera. The case of the horla and its tragically afflicted seer. The “crying spider” of Odilon Redon.

We applied arithmetic to decadence and catacombs.

I never resumed my studies at Cambridge. My university was that of Poe: of detection, and of life.

As he became frail I cared for him in that and another apartment, smaller, but with a view of the Bois du Boulogne.

He observed life from the window. We tested each other in deducing the characteristics of walkers on a Sunday afternoon. He’d bemoan my pipe tobacco. I’d in return call him a pious ex-drunk.

When his eyesight went, I read to him aloud. I remember all too well his reaction to Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo. The tragic fate of Quasimodo made him grimace with emotion. I thought he had been moved by the fates of the hunchback and Esmeralda, but he quickly retorted it would have been better in verse … and shorter. Though he muttered that it was obviously influenced by his own Hop Frog — and most inferior to it.

He was cantankerous and conceited, vain as a poodle and unmelodious to the ear. But I have never known a more intelligent or electric individual, which almost always excused his inveterate rudeness and dire fluctuations of mood.

Most of all, I owe him my vocation. Sherlock Holmes — detective. What would I have become, else?

It will be a surprise to no one that my friend had a fear of being buried alive, and therefore stipulated in his will that the examining doctor open a vein in his neck to ensure no such ghastly mistake could be made. In the event the medic was all thumbs I had to perform his final wish myself.

Thinking of the grave in far-off Baltimore and its false incumbent, I watched the smoke rise from the Paris crematorium in a black plume.

The bird of death was silent at last, the black fading to white, the book of grotesquerie and wonder closed, the coffin breath exhaled, the great, unfathomable mind becalmed and untormented at last. He exists now only on every bookshelf in England, and in my final thoughts.

As I now lie close to death myself, I know more clearly than ever what my master — the master — knew: that Nature is chaos. Chaos is truth. Death is the final mystery. And our only defence is knowledge.

Infinite knowledge. Infinite, and futile, knowledge.

* * * * *

STEPHEN VOLK was recently nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Award for his novella Vardoger. His writing has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Best British Mysteries, Best New Horror and Gaslight Grotesque. Stephen is the creator/writer of the series Afterlife and Ghostwatch as well as many other film and television projects. The Society of Fantastic Films awarded him their International Award for contributions to the genre.