The Accursed (44 page)

Embarrassed, Pearce insisted that he had not been ill.

“Your skin tone is rather sallow. Have you traveled to a tropical or sub-tropical place, within the past year?”

“No . . .”

“You haven’t had any sort of fever? Chills? Your eyes are just slightly jaundiced, I think.”

“My eyes . . . ?”

“Of course, I am not a doctor; I am not an M.D. I should not be ‘diagnosing’ in this way.”

Pearce coughed again, not entirely able to clear his throat.

“You have the sort of cough Welsh miners have, after years of working underground. I mean—the sound of your cough resembles theirs. Have you been in any place where ‘particles’ might be in the air—an asbestos or a fertilizer factory, for instance?”

“No. I have not.”

“Have you
breathed in
anything of unusual pungency? A very strong marsh gas, for instance?”

“N-No . . .”

Seeing that his host was being made uncomfortable by this line of interrogation, the Englishman relented, though reluctantly. Thwarted in this impromptu investigation he poured another brandy for himself, and drank it down; seemed to sink into a kind of torpor, staring into the smoldering fire; and allowed his pipe to go out. Hesitantly, Pearce ventured the opinion that, as Arthur Conan Doyle had presented his “essence” in the stories, perhaps that was all that mattered. Sherlock Holmes was known by the world for his genius, not for his trifling eccentricities. “It isn’t an exaggeration to say, sir, that ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is rapidly becoming one of the heroic figures of the day.”

“Really! How bizarre.”

The Englishman spoke in so languid a drawl it was impossible to judge whether he meant mockery or sincerity. Again he took up the fire tongs to light his pipe, laughing quietly to himself. “What vexes me in this matter, Professor van Dyck, is my own ambivalence. For while it seems self-evident to me that the art of criminal detection is, or should be, an exact science, freed from human emotion, at the same time I am frankly drawn to the ‘romance’ of Doyle’s portraiture. Watson, for instance, does not exist except as Conan Doyle himself, tagging after me as he’d done in school—a relief, as I could not endure him for an hour.”

No Watson! Pearce thought this quite a disappointment.

The Englishman sucked at his pipe, emitting clouds of malodorous smoke. In a whimsical voice he speculated that, were he not a detective-pathologist, he should have liked to be, like his friend Doyle, a literary man; though of a gravity surpassing Doyle. “To invent outlandish fables, precise as clockwork, yet, it’s hoped, not predictable; to disguise an old-fashioned Englishman’s sentiment in such prose, and a ‘case for morals’; to temper elaborate work as if it were but child’s play—this would seem to me a challenging adventure. For, I think, the writer of fiction is the
supreme detective,
delving not only into intricacies of fact but into those of motive as well, like a psychologist; exploring the individual, and illuminating the species. In any case, Professor van Dyck, I have no right to object to Doyle’s undertaking, and must learn to accept my fate as a ‘character’ in another’s imagination. Which brings us, Professor, to
your
problem.”

Eagerly, Pearce showed his visitor the several charts comprising the Scheme of Clues, now so covered in tiny, spidery handwriting, and confused with a multitude of tacks, pins, beads, and the like, even the Englishman’s sharp eye faltered. Pearce attempted to explain the Curse, its history and (possible) origin; he attempted to explain the impasse at which he found himself. But he spoke in so excited a fashion, the Englishman asked him please to stop, and begin at the beginning. “There is nothing like chronology, my American friend, to put a brake on the soul’s impulse for headlong speed.”

So, while the Englishman lounged on the settee with heavy-lidded eyes, quietly puffing at his pipe, Pearce spent an hour attempting to recount the several manifestations of the Curse, so far as he knew of them. He spoke of the “visitation” of ex-President Cleveland’s deceased daughter, and of the near-simultaneous appearance of the demon Axson Mayte, and the seeming “entrancement” of Annabel Slade at her own wedding . . . He spoke of Annabel’s disappearance for several months, and of her reappearance, and subsequent death-in-childbirth; he spoke of the “fantastical, but not discountable” rumors of her having given birth to a hideous black snake, that subsequently vanished. And there were other crimes—murders . . .

At the mention of the black snake, the Englishman stirred, and opened his eyes as if rousing himself.

Growing more excited by degrees, Pearce spread out the Scheme of Clues for the Englishman to see, as he delivered an impromptu lecture on its contents; he spoke of the “snake frenzy,” and of the “baffling” behavior of a young woman of good family who seemed to have been involved with a married man, the van Dycks’ very neighbor Horace Burr who, just recently, had murdered his invalid wife in her bed . . .

By this time the Englishman had unwrapped his long lean frame and took up in his indelibly stained fingers the Scheme of Clues to examine it closely. Pearce felt a thrill of pride seeing the world’s most honored consulting detective considering his amateur findings, his high, fine brow now creased and his eyes, of the hue of washed glass, emitting a chill glow. How many minutes the Englishman spent in this posture, frowning and grimacing, and muttering to himself, Pearce could not judge; but one can estimate from the events that followed, it might have been as long as a half hour. All this while Pearce stood at the Englishman’s elbow, staring and blinking, mute with apprehension and hope.

At last, when the suspense had grown near-intolerable, the Englishman took up one of Pearce’s fountain pens from his desk to make several broad slashes on the chart connecting singular points with other points, and turned to his stricken host with a playful smile.

“It’s elementary, my dear friend—do you see?”

But Pearce, though he tried, did not see. And badly wounded he was, by the peremptory way in which the English detective had slashed his elaborate graph and overwritten his intricate notes. Seeing the expression in the professor’s sallow face, and the strain in that face, the Englishman laid a hand on his shoulder to console him.

“Your deductive powers, Professor, while impressive in an amateur, were not going to bring you to the answer, since you’d failed to make crucial connections between events. It was a brilliant discovery of yours to realize that ‘Axson Mayte’ is a demon; yet, for reasons I can’t grasp, having perhaps to do with American idolatry of European pretensions, you failed to make an identical discovery in the matter of ‘Count English von Gneist.’ In fact, following the logic of Occam’s razor, it is my theory that
the two men are but one
. Why do you look surprised? The Count has, it seems, passed undetected in your midst; all the ladies have taken him up, and some of the gentlemen, too. And your infant son, whom you have designated here as ‘it,’ is, I’m sorry to say, not your son at all but the spawn of a demon—as, I think, you have halfway realized?”

Pearce stared at his visitor in stunned silence. He did not seem to have heard the Englishman’s final words.

Matter-of-factly, as if he had not pierced a man’s heart, the cavalier Englishman took up the charts with some exuberance, deftly indicating with the bowl of his pipe the “diabolical intricacies” of the many relationships, and how a single bold line might be drawn between A and E, removing in an instant all need for intervening points; in this way erasing weeks of Pearce’s ratiocinative labor. Likewise, stickpins at 4 June 1905, 24 December 1905, and 24 February 1906 logically connected, to demonstrate an (unacknowledged) triangulated relationship: for “Axson”—“Annabel”—“Adelaide”—“Amanda”—clearly matched; and “J”—“JS” (Johanna Strachan) with “JS” (Josiah Slade). And Count English Rudolf Heinrich Gottsreich-Mueller von Gneist could be connected, by a transposition of certain letters and figures, to several individuals on the chart including “WW” (Woodrow Wilson) and, unfortunately in this context, “JS” (Mrs. van Dyck).

And so on, and so forth, as the Englishman proceeded to “solve” the puzzle, as one might show another, slower-witted person how to “solve” a crossword puzzle, by making more lines, scrawling
X
’s over portions of the Scheme, ripping off a corner altogether and tossing it negligently into the fireplace. His curiosity was pricked, the Englishman said, by the absence of the demon’s sister Camille, on this chart; one of Pearce’s oversights, and a severe one at that, for Camille was one of “the most rapacious” of demons, in its female form. To the awestricken Pearce van Dyck the Englishman said, “You see, my friend, I know these hellish creatures of old, having dealt with them on the Continent in ’89, and then again in Mous’hole, Surrey, in ’93. The first case was given the title ‘The Adventure of the Poisoned Nursery’ by my old classmate Doyle; the second, “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane.” I remember the Count with much clarity, as he and I were apt to play billiards together, when not in ‘combat’; often, we dined together, at the expense of our benefactors—the individuals who’d retained me, and the individuals, invariably the owners of large ‘Gilded Age’ houses, who made the demons their houseguests, and invited them to their dinners. Let me now consult my little encyclopedia of genealogies to make certain . . .” The Englishman withdrew from his coat pocket a crimson-covered little volume, quite worn, through which he rapidly paged, until he came to what he was looking for; then read off, in a low, dramatic voice, such a barrage of names, the distraught philosopher could scarcely follow, like an aged and badly winded dog trotting after a sleek younger dog in the open air.

“D’Adalbert—D’Apthorp—Castle Szekeley—Grand Duke of Bystel-Kohler—Baron Eger Frankstone—Castle Gottsreich-Mueller—House of the von Gneists of Szurdokpuspoki, Wallachia.
Arms:
argent, on a cross flory azure, between four Old World choughs, a serpent passant quadrant.
Crest:
demi-serpent rampant per pale or and azure, collared per pale counterchanged, armed
. So you see, Professor van Dyck, it’s as I suspected,” the Englishman said languidly, turning his pale penetrant eyes on the dazed American. “A disagreeable business indeed but not, thank God, irremediable. The thing in the crib upstairs must be disposed of—at once. If your wife cannot part with it, if she ‘resists’—you must take measures against her, as well. But why do you look at me in such a way, Professor? Is this all so very surprising to you? I can’t think it is,” he said, sucking on his pipe, with a maddening sort of complacency, “since your ingenious ‘Scheme of Clues’ contained the answer all along, though you failed to see it.”

The Englishman then turned to the stone hearth and took up the poker, and held it for some minutes in the fire, that was now modestly blazing, while he continued to speak in a kindlier voice. “From time to time it is not only permissible, Professor van Dyck, but quite necessary, as your beloved Kant would agree, to ‘transcend’ the merely local law. (As I believe Doyle reports my having done upon several notable occasions, that a greater evil might be prevented.) For ‘evil’ is after all a relative term: there being a minor and pragmatical sort, to be disposed of as one swats a fly, and a vast, all-encompassing, one might say universal sort, that must be halted by any means at hand. None of this, I know, can be foreign to you as a moral philosopher of international reputation; yet it seems you have been dilatory in attending to the situation beneath your own roof. For it somehow slipped past your scrutiny that your wife, whom you wished to believe is ‘faithful’ to you, was nonetheless seduced sometime in the late spring of last year, by an agent of the Fiend; and that an irrefutable syllogism presents itself here within the walls of your ancestral home. Which is to say: evil must be overcome; evil dwells here, in its crib in the nursery; therefore no other remedy is possible except your proceeding, with as much dispatch as possible, in
eradicating it
.”

With dilated and slow-blinking eyes Pearce van Dyck regarded the tall, lean-bodied Englishman and for some seconds stood immobile as stone. Then, in a halting motion, he removed his glasses, that he might polish their dampened lenses. Once or twice he seemed about to speak, for his blanched lips quivered; but no word escaped him. It was a respectful gesture on the part of “Sherlock Holmes” to allow the stricken man to ruminate in silence.

All this while, the poker was being heated, changing by degrees from black to red-hot to
white-hot,
and giving off an unnatural light.

When at last it was prepared the Englishman grasped it in a hearty grip, and passed it to Pearce van Dyck, who staggered just perceptibly, as the weight of the iron poker was greater than he seemed to have expected. The Englishman then walked him to the foot of the stairs, in a genial and brotherly way you would not think characteristic of the more aloof fictional Holmes. “I’m sure you are recalling at this moment, Professor,” the Englishman murmured, “how in one of the final books of
The Republic
the ‘tyrannical ruler’ is reasoned to be three times three squared, and then cubed,
more unhappy
than Plato’s Philosopher King: which is to say, seven hundred twenty-nine times. Only think! Plato was the most brilliant of philosophers, unless he was frankly mad, like so many of his successors. Yet, the courageous action you are about to take against the thing beneath your own roof, the thing that nurses at your wife’s breast, the thing that dares to identify itself as
Pearce van Dyck, Jr.,
will, at a future time, reward you with three times three squared, and then cubed, more
joy,
than you would have felt otherwise—as the quasi-father of a Horror, let us say. And so, now—upstairs!—to the nursery, and to the marital bed.”

So, with incandescent poker brandished aloft like a king’s scepter Pearce van Dyck ascended the dimly lighted staircase, to what awaited him on the second floor.

3.

It does not hurt greatly. The pain can be borne. Summon forth your courage, Johanna! And do not resist for that will only make him angrier.