Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

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 Nimes, 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 Nimes. 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.