My Clockwork Muse
Authors: D.R. Erickson
Tags: #steampunk, #poe, #historical mystery, #clockwork, #edgar allan poe, #the raven, #steampunk crime mystery, #steampunk horror
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
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
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 cried. "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.