Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

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! Ecartez-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 la-bas, habille 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