It was as though . . . how shall I put it? . . . as though Carina were in some way a “carrier” of what we had then not yet learned to call The Death Wish. Men who knew her too well hungered no longer for life.
The press began to concern itself, as best it might with due regard for the laws of libel, with this situation. Leading articles hinted at possible governmental intervention to preserve the flower of England from this insidious foreigner. Little else was discussed in Hyde Park save the elimination of Carina.
Even the memorable mass suicides at Oxford had provided no sensation comparable to this. Carina’s very existence seemed as much in danger as though Jack the Ripper had been found and turned over to the English people. We are firm believers in our English justice; but when that justice is powerless to act, the Englishman aroused is a phenomenon to fear.
If I may be pardoned a Hibernian lapse, the only thing that saved Carina’s life was . . . her death.
It was a natural death—perhaps the first natural action of her life. She collapsed on the stage of Covent Garden during a performance of Mozart’s Cost fan tutte, just after having delivered the greatest performance of that fantastic aria, Come scoglio, that a living ear has heard.
There were investigations of the death. Even my cousin, with an understandable personal interest, took a hand. (He was the only one of Carina’s close admirers to survive her infection; I have often wondered whether this fact resulted from an incredible strength or an equally incredible inadequacy within him.) But there was no possible doubt that the death was a natural one.
It was after the death that the Carina legend began to grow. It was then that young men about town who had seen the great Carina but once began to mention the unmentionable reasons which had caused them to refrain from seeing her again. It was then that her dresser, a crone whose rationality was as uncertain as her still persistent terror was unquestionable, began to speak of unspeakable practices, to hint at black magic as among milady’s avocations, to suggest that her utterance (which you have heard) of flights of notes, incredibly rapid yet distinct, owed its facility to her control and even suspension of the mortal limitations of time.
And then began . . . the horror. Perhaps you thought that by the horror I meant the sequence of Carina-carried suicides? No; even that lay still, if near the frontier, within the uttermost bounds of human comprehension.
The horror passed those bounds.
I need not ask you to envision it. You have beheld it. You have seen clothing sucked dry of its fleshy tenant, you have seen the haberdasher’s habitation sink flabbily in upon itself, no longer sustained by tissue of bone and blood and nerves.
All London saw it that year. And London could not believe.
First it was that eminent musicologist, Sir Frederick Paynter, FRCM. Then there were two young aristocrats, then, oddly, a poor Jewish peddler in the East End.
I shall spare you the full and terrible details, alluding only in passing to the Bishop of Cloisterham. I had read the press accounts. I had filed the cuttings for their very impossibility (for even then I had had adumbrations of the concept which you now know as The Anatomy of Nonscience).
But the horror did not impinge upon me closely until it struck one of my own patients, a retired naval officer by the name of Clutsam. His family had sent for me at once, at the same time that they had dispatched a messenger to fetch my cousin.
As you know, my cousin enjoyed a certain fame as a private detective. He had been consulted in more than one previous instance of the horror; but I had read little of him in the press save a reiteration of his hope that the solution lay in his familiar dictum: “Discard the impossible; and whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be true.”
I had already formulated my now celebrated counter-dictum: “Discard the impossible; then if nothing remains, some part of the ‘impossible’ must be possible.” It was thus that our dicta and ourselves faced each other across the worn and outdated naval uniform on the floor, complete from the gold braid on its shoulders to the wooden peg below the empty left trouser leg, cut off at the knee.
“I imagine, Horace,” my cousin remarked, puffing at his blackened clay, “that you conceive this to be your sort of affair.”
“It is obviously not yours,” I stated. “There is something in these vanishings beyond—”
“—beyond the humdrum imagination of a professional detective? Horace, you are a man of singular accomplishments.”
I smiled. My cousin, as my great-uncle Etienne used to remark of General Massena, was famous for the accuracy of his information.
“I will confess,” he added, “since my Boswell is not within earshot, that you have occasionally hit upon what satisfies you, at least, as the truth in some few cases in which I have failed. Do you see any element linking Captain Clutsam, Sir Frederick Paynter, Moishe Lipkowitz and the Bishop of Cloisterham?”
“I do not.” It was always discreet to give my cousin the answer which he expected.
“And I do! And yet I am no nearer a solution than . . .” His pipe clenched in his teeth, he flung himself about the room, as though pure physical action would somehow ameliorate the lamentable state of his nerves. Finally he paused before me, looked sharply into my eyes and said, “Very well.
