My Clockwork Muse Read online

  Summary

  New York City, 1847: A madman is on the loose. Someone is committing murders in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe's tales of terror. The police are stymied. When a corpse is found interred in a masonry wall in a subterranean chamber, they call on Poe himself to help solve the crime.

  Edgar Allan Poe's fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, has made the author famous as the master of deductive reasoning. But when "the father of the detective story" applies his powers of discovery to the "Poe Murders", he finds that the clues lead in only one direction: to Poe himself.

  Poe soon becomes the prime suspect, and he begins to doubt his own sanity as the evidence piles up against him. What of his somnambulistic trances that often find him at the graveside of his late wife, Virginia? Or the bizarre raven that visits him in his Fordham cottage? The strange mark on his neck? The odd behavior of his one-eyed cat, Pluto? And what of his doctor, Coppelius he of the bulging pale blue eye and his beautiful, other-worldly daughter, Olimpia? Nothing is as it seems.

  As the police tighten their noose around Poe's neck, he races against time to solve the crimes and clear his name. But he soon finds himself confronting horrors that not even his macabre fiction could have envisioned and a conspiracy that threatens the very fabric of reality itself.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  in

  My Clockwork Muse

  A Poe Files Mystery

  Edgar Allan Poe

  in

  MY CLOCKWORK MUSE

  A Poe Files Mystery

  by D. R. Erickson

  Copyright © 2011 by D. R. Erickson

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from D. R. Erickson.

  Cover design by Glendon Haddix of Streetlight Graphics.com

  Published by

  Rockford Road Publishing

  "Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled."

  Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  New York City, 1847

  I had just awakened from a dream of Allan when two men began pounding on the door of my shuttered room. I knew they were two by the manner of their knocking. The first rapped with his knuckles, a civilized man; the other slapped the wood with an open hand, causing the door to rattle and shake on its hinges.

  I gave a start, for the sound had melded with the termination of my dream. But when a commanding voice identified my visitors as Gessler's men, I knew it was no dream, however much I might wish it to be so.

  I threw my legs over the side of the couch, sat up and rubbed my eyes. My catnap had availed me little. My temples throbbed and, by God, I would sooner be back with the contemptible Allan than have Gessler's men outside abusing my door.

  "Open up!" the voice, a thick Irish brogue, bellowed at me amid the ear-splitting ruckus.

  "Please, sir!" a gentler voice pleaded. "We have come to fetch you by order of Inspector Gessler. It is a matter of the utmost urgency!"

  "Yes ... Yes ... One moment..." My shuttered windows admitted no light from outside, so I groped around in the dark for my coat. Briggs had no doubt told them where I was, the fool.

  I had no sooner found my coat and slipped my arms into the sleeves than my door burst open, filling my room with light. Two great amorphous shadows filled the frame of the open door. Before I knew what was happening, the men had grasped my shoulders and propelled me through the office—past the dumbfounded Briggs and the girls at their desks who gasped at my rough treatment—and out into the teeming streets of New York.

  "Ruffians!" I cried. "Unhand me!" I jerked my shoulders but the policemen's fingers were like iron. I felt they would leave permanent impressions in my flesh. The toes of my shoes scarcely brushed the pavement as the officers rushed me towards God knew what destination.

  "Inspector Gessler gives the orders, sir," said one of the men, a great strapping Irishman.

  In recent months, my eyes had become acutely sensitive to light and the street was as bright and devoid of color as the clattering of its masses was of poetry and it put me in an irritable mood.

  "You have no right," I began to complain. But seeing that the men were indeed little more than the inspector's automatons, I quickly added, "Gessler has no right. It is not fitting that he should burst into a man's private chamber—"

  "It is a fiendish business we're about, Mr. Poe," the Irishman said. "There is no time for courtesies."

  As if any of them had ever had time for courtesies. Certainly not in my experience with them.

  I was able to blink my eyes open a couple of city blocks later—imes New Roman" s 12just in time to be whisked inside again. My head began to throb anew and flashes of light and dark obscured my vision. The cops led me past a staircase and down a dark corridor. When we came to a door, we entered and started down a set of creaking steps that led into a basement. For all my eyes could tell, it might have been the blackest of caverns.

  As we tramped down the steps, I began to hear muted voices, Gessler's among them. The air smelled of a mildewy dampness overlaid with a sheen of corruption. I knew then that no good was going to come of this project and my spirits sagged. The light of a lantern flickered faintly on the brick wall at the base of the stairs and when we turned the corner I saw Gessler himself with half-a-dozen uniformed policemen examining the far wall of the chamber.

  He had pulled a scarf up over his nose and mouth and his men all bore looks of harried annoyance and revulsion. One of them had removed his coat and stood in his shirt sleeves with a sledgehammer resting head-down at his side. His chest was heaving and trapped in the hairs of his sweaty, beefy forearms were fine grains of mortar dust. In the light of a lantern set upon a nearby table, the dust glistened like flecks of gold. The object of his efforts was a gaping black hole in the wall, around the edges of which battered bricks clung like bad teeth.

  "Ah, Mr. Poe!" Gessler exclaimed when he saw me enter. He pulled his scarf away from his mouth and stepped lightly over mislaid pieces of lumber and clumps of scattered coal that skittered away into the gloom as his feet struck them. He held out a hand and I took it, happy only to have the Irishman's fingers relinquish their iron grip on my shoulder. I winced, however, at the strength of Gessler's over-enthusiastic clasp. "So happy that you could come at such short notice."

  "What choice did I have?" I snapped crossly, pulling my hand out of his meaty paw. Gessler feigned sympathy, though he dismissed the men who dragged me here with a satisfied nod that did not admit to any degree of injustice at my handling.

  "You must forgive my men," he said. "But our need is urgent. When you see the ghastliness of the crime, you will understand their brusqueness."

  "Crime!" I c
ried. "Again you summon me to the scene of a crime. I must object, Inspector. Your men rouse me from my offices when I have business to attend to. My business, and not yours!"

  "Ah, but when you see—"

  "See? After the glare of the street, I can scarcely see a thing! My poor eyes are as likely to see one another across the bridge of my nose as any object you may want to put before them!"

  I rubbed my eyes to illustrate the depth of my discomfort. But it was, in fact, my dread of what I knew I would see that caused my anger to surface. Gessler was not an unkindly man and I knew he bore me genuine affection, though at times, my torment unaccountably seemed to please him.

  I had first met the man during the occasion of my lecture at the New York Society Library, after which he had expressed to me a contempt for Longfellow—which I realized afterward had only been meant to charm me. The real object of his interest was a character I had created for several of my stories and for which I had achieved some literary renown, the detective Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, a master of deductive reasoning. I remembered having some long, pleasant discussion of the topic with him at the conclusion of my remarks, but I feared later the enthusiastic Inspector Gessler of the New York City police was confusing the creation with the creator. My suspicions were confirmed some weeks later when he invited me to the scene of an appalling murder. Two bodies had been found, one stuffed up a chimney and the other flung from a window.

  "It is just as in 'The Rue Morgue'," he announced to me with some satisfaction as I was ushered into the victims' bed chamber.

  I remembered feeling the blood rush from my face at the sight of a real corpse stuffed up a real chimney. A ghastly business indeed. Then, as now, my anger had been quick to surface.

  "I can see no connection to me in this affair. I did not invent methods of disposing of corpses, Constable."

  "Ah, but you did, Mr. Poe," Gessler said. "You invented this method. And you invented the man who discovered the fiend who employed it."

  I could not believe my ears. "But it is a real murderer you seek, Inspector. Not a wild orangutan of some fantasist's imagination!"

  "It is nothing less than the fantasist's imagination that recommends you to me, Mr. Poe. Certainly, a man who can claim a creation of such deductive capacity as your Auguste Dupin does himself possess great powers of detection. I beg you, sir, to put these to the test against this most unsolvable of murders."

  That was how it had started with Gessler. I don't know if he ever solved that crime, but I feared this one might be even worse.

  "Take some time to collect yourself then," I heard Gessler saying now as I squeezed the bridge of my nose. When I opened my eyes, I saw him, an unnaturally large man, looking down at me with a sympathetic eye.

  To see him for the first time, you would give him little credit for the sensitive intelligence I knew he possessed. A Prussian cast in the mold of a von Stueben, he would look more at home drilling troops than solving obscure murders. When he spoke, his great drooping mustache fluttered in the gusts of his breath. The mustache was intended to hide a pronounced overbite, which produced a little too much spittle for his—and normally his listeners'—comfort, and his similarly constituted side whiskers his rather clownish ears.

  What he lacked in good looks, he made up for in wit. From experience, I knew he had a way of couching his probing questions in the course of everyday conversation. Intellectually, I strove to be on my guard. Emotionally, I felt I was not up to it. Not today. Not with my temples still throbbing and my increasingly nervous attention fixed upon the broken down wall.

  I steeled myself, resigned to my fate. "Well, let's have a look then, Inspector," I relented, straightening my jacket.

  The policemen moved aside as Gessler led me to the far end of the chamber. He replaced his scarf over his nose and as the stench of death grew stronger, I drew my unbuttoned jacket across my face. Eying me expectantly, Gessler grabbed a lamp and held it to the jagged edge of the breach, illuminating the interior of the narrow cavity. As I inclined my head toward the opening, I gasped at what I saw inside. I let my coat fall from my face in astonishment.

  "Good God!" I cried. "It is Fortunato!"

  Gessler cocked his head. "So you know the man?" he asked, but I scarcely heard his words. I could not tear my eyes from the face of the corpse. Its flesh had turned a dark shade of green. Its swollen tongue protruded from its mouth, held in the clench of teeth exposed by shrunken lips. But what filled me with terror was the manner of the thing's dress—a fool's motley and a conical hat, supporting a column of little bells.

  Fortunato.

  "From my story," I said, my voice barely rising above a whisper.

  I soon became aware of Gessler's voice behind me. I turned and gazed at him in bewilderment. It was then that I noticed he had been holding a rolled-up magazine in his fist. I saw that it was an issue of Godey's. He began reading, his eyes moving back and forth over the page.

  "... 'A moment more and I had fettered him' ... 'Throwing the links about his waist' ... 'I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar' ... Oh, yes, here it is. 'I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche.'" He lowered the magazine and gazed at me from under his heavy brow. "With the man inside, as you know, Mr. Poe ... With the man inside."

  I looked back to the corpse and saw that it was indeed secured to the wall with a length of chain.

  "Do you recognize the words?"

  "Why shouldn't I? They are mine."

  Gessler raised the magazine once again to the level of his eyes. He shook his head, chuckling thoughtfully. "'The Cask of Amontillado'," he read. "Masterful, Mr. Poe! Your best work, if I may say. Not to be read after dark, though." He wagged a finger humorously, as if to admonish me.

  I was about to chuckle in reply when from inside the niche there came a tinkling sound as that of jingling bells. I jerked around with a start. Could the dead thing have moved? My impulse was to run, but when I realized the sound was merely the result of some unseen effect of the body's decomposition and not its reanimation, I caught myself. The corpse had merely shifted slightly, nothing more. Gessler, enjoying my anxiety, laughed.

  But to me it was no laughing matter. It was the jingling bells that produced the story's most evocative effect. No sound from within the ever-shrinking aperture but the jingling of the bells. That was the image that propelled me through the writing of the story. Imagine it! Left to die alone in the dark, thirsty and frightened, to lose one's mind before losing one's life.

  Fortunato! By God, it was cruel. But what choice had Montresor? Injuries were one thing. But insults heaped upon insults—these could not be suffered!

  "What's this you say about insults?" Gessler inquired, spoiling my reverie.

  I composed myself quickly, though it bothered me that I had spoken aloud without meaning to. I feel my stories deeply, and to see one come alive, so to speak... Well, it's not something a man can prepare for. I said in a measured tone, "I am merely quoting from the story. '... injuries I had borne as best I could; but when he ... when he ...'"

  "'...ventured upon insult'," Gessler provided the words when he found me struggling.

  "'...ventured upon insult'," I resumed in a loud voice. "'I vowed revenge.' Yes, thank you, Inspector. A clue to a motive, perhaps."

  "Ah, very good, Mr. Poe." He turned to the Irishman. "Officer, are you recording this?"

  "Yes, sir, Inspector," the Irishman said and he began scribbling in a little notebook.

  Gessler turned back to me. "Tell me, Mr. Poe. I am no man of letters, nor a scholar, but a simple policeman. Could you translate this for me, please? 'Nemo me impune lacessit'," he read from the text of the Godey's story, pronouncing each word with difficulty.

  "It is Latin," I said.

  "Meaning...?"

  "'No one attacks me with impunity.' It is the motto of the Montresors."

  "Montresor...The architect of Fortunato's demise, you might say." Gessler paused to laugh at his little pun. "In y
our story, that is. The murderer. The man who walls Fortunato up alive and leaves him to die."

  "Yes, yes," I said. "It is a tale of the imagination, sir."

  "Of course. But I wonder. Would the writer of such a tale be likely to harbor fantasies of revenge in his own right?"

  The implication of his words stunned me. I had recovered from the shock of a man murdered after the method of my story. Perhaps I had not yet come to grips with the fact of two murders committed in such a fashion, for the former 'Rue Morgue' affair had momentarily slipped my mind. But I was not prepared for the shock of being accused of this heinous act.

  "It is literature, you oaf!" I cried with such force that the cops around me straightened for action. "The writer invents, dreams and imagines," I went on, "often out of whole cloth. What you have here is an imitator, an impressionable lunatic who has chosen to murder after the style of my story—a story, need I remind you, that is published and known to all." My fury slipped suddenly to mocking sarcasm. "Even so—Ha-Ha!—do you think I would commit a crime from my own story? I'm no fool, sir!"

  Now, it was Gessler's turn to be stunned. "Oh, my dear Mr. Poe!" he exclaimed when his shock had worn off. "Certainly you do not think..." He let his voice trail off as he gazed at me curiously. I stood with my fists clenched. "Oh, you do! My poor fellow." Then he started to laugh and I began to relax. "Oh, no, no! It is not my intention to accuse you, sir, but only to elicit your aid." He held the rolled-up Godey's under his eye and gave me a wink. "It is not Montresor I seek, but Dupin."

  "Dupin again!" I said with a mixture of relief and astonishment. I was beginning to think the inspector truly was an oaf. "A character in a story having no more connection to me than that poor fellow in this wall has to Fortunato." I thrust my head in the direction of the corpse.