Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

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 fete 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 Liberte 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 Hotel 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 Cafe Tabourey or the Theatre de l’Odeon.

“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’Eglise 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 Roget. 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