Edgar A. Poe: Five droll stories

William Carlos Williams, another "pure product of America," wrote a scintillating chapter on Poe in his book In the American Grain (1925).

To understand what Poe is driving at in his tales, one should read first NOT the popular, perfect— Gold Bug, Murders in the Rue Morgue , etc., which by their brilliancy detract from the observation of his deeper intent, but the less striking tales—in fact all, but especially those where his humor is less certain, his mood lighter, less tightly bound by the incident, where numerous illuminating faults are allowed to become expressive, The Business Man, The Man That Was Used Up, Loss of Breath, BonBon, Diddling, The Angel of the Odd— and others of his lesser Tales.

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The Man That Was Used Up (1839)

"The Man That Was Used Up" is a clever story -- though not as droll as Poe clearly hopes -- in which our narrator interviews various acquaintances about the career of living legend and fine figure of a man, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith "in the late tremendous swamp-fight away down South, with the Bugaboo and Kickapoo Indians."

The narrator interviews Miss Tabitha T. We at the Church of the Reverend Doctor Drummummupp, the Misses Arabella and Miranda Cognoscenti as they attend the Rantipole theatre to take in a performance by that fine tragedian Climax as Iago, the social butterfly  and lovely widow Mrs. Kathleen O'Trump, the graceful Mrs. Pirouette, and finally Mr. Theodore Sinivate.

Ultimately the narrator goes in search of the general himself:

....It was early when I called, and the General was dressing, but I pleaded urgent business, and was shown at once into his bedroom by an old negro valet, who remained in attendance during my visit. As I entered the chamber, I looked about, of course, for the occupant, but did not immediately perceive him. There was a large and exceedingly odd looking bundle of something which lay close by my feet on the floor, and, as I was not in the best humor in the world, I gave it a kick out of the way.

"Hem! ahem! rather civil that, I should say!" said the bundle, in one of the smallest, and altogether the funniest little voices, between a squeak and a whistle, that I ever heard in all the days of my existence.

"Ahem! rather civil that I should observe."

I fairly shouted with terror, and made off, at a tangent, into the farthest extremity of the room.

"God bless me, my dear fellow!" here again whistled the bundle, "what—what—what—why, what is the matter? I really believe you don't know me at all."

What could I say to all this—what could I? I staggered into an armchair, and, with staring eyes and open mouth, awaited the solution of the wonder.

"Strange you shouldn't know me though, isn't it?" presently resqueaked the nondescript, which I now perceived was performing upon the floor some inexplicable evolution, very analogous to the drawing on of a stocking. There was only a single leg, however, apparent.

"Strange you shouldn't know me though, isn't it? Pompey, bring me that leg!" Here Pompey handed the bundle a very capital cork leg, already dressed, which it screwed on in a trice; and then it stood upright before my eyes.

"And a bloody action it was," continued the thing, as if in a soliloquy; "but then one mustn't fight with the Bugaboos and Kickapoos, and think of coming off with a mere scratch. Pompey, I'll thank you now for that arm. Thomas" [turning to me] "is decidedly the best hand at a cork leg; but if you should ever want an arm, my dear fellow, you must really let me recommend you to Bishop." Here Pompey screwed on an arm.

"We had rather hot work of it, that you may say. Now, you dog, slip on my shoulders and bosom. Pettit makes the best shoulders, but for a bosom you will have to go to Ducrow."

"Bosom!" said I.

"Pompey, will you never be ready with that wig? Scalping is a rough process, after all; but then you can procure such a capital scratch at De L'Orme's."

"Scratch!"

"Now, you nigger, my teeth! For a good set of these you had better go to Parmly's at once; high prices, but excellent work. I swallowed some very capital articles, though, when the big Bugaboo rammed me down with the butt end of his rifle."

"Butt end! ram down!! my eye!!"

"O yes, by the way, my eye—here, Pompey, you scamp, screw it in! Those Kickapoos are not so very slow at a gouge; but he's a belied man, that Dr. Williams, after all; you can't imagine how well I see with the eyes of his make."

I now began very clearly to perceive that the object before me was nothing more nor less than my new acquaintance, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith. The manipulations of Pompey had made, I must confess, a very striking difference in the appearance of the personal man. The voice, however, still puzzled me no little; but even this apparent mystery was speedily cleared up.

"Pompey, you black rascal," squeaked the General, "I really do believe you would let me go out without my palate."

Hereupon, the negro, grumbling out an apology, went up to his master, opened his mouth with the knowing air of a horse-jockey, and adjusted therein a somewhat singular-looking machine, in a very dexterous manner, that I could not altogether comprehend. The alteration, however, in the entire expression of the General's countenance was instantaneous and surprising. When he again spoke, his voice had resumed all that rich melody and strength which I had noticed upon our original introduction.

"D-n the vagabonds!" said he, in so clear a tone that I positively started at the change, "D-n the vagabonds! they not only knocked in the roof of my mouth, but took the trouble to cut off at least seven-eighths of my tongue. There isn't Bonfanti's equal, however, in America, for really good articles of this description. I can recommend you to him with confidence," [here the General bowed,] "and assure you that I have the greatest pleasure in so doing."

I acknowledged his kindness in my best manner, and took leave of him at once, with a perfect understanding of the true state of affairs- with a full comprehension of the mystery which had troubled me so long. It was evident. It was a clear case. Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith was the man—the man that was used up.

*     *     *

The Business Man (1840)

Narrator Peter Proffit recounts his successful careers in Tailor's Walking-Advertisement, Eye-Sore owner, Assault-and-Battery artist, Mud-Dabbler, Organ-Grinder (sans monkey), Sham-Postman, and finally:

....My eighth and last speculation has been in the Cat-Growing way. I have found that a most pleasant and lucrative business, and, really, no trouble at all. The country, it is well known, has become infested with cats—so much so of late, that a petition for relief, most numerously and respectably signed, was brought before the Legislature at its late memorable session. The Assembly, at this epoch, was unusually well-informed, and, having passed many other wise and wholesome enactments, it crowned all with the Cat-Act. In its original form, this law offered a premium for cat-heads (fourpence a-piece), but the Senate succeeded in amending the main clause, so as to substitute the word "tails" for "heads." This amendment was so obviously proper, that the House concurred in it nem. con.

As soon as the governor had signed the bill, I invested my whole estate in the purchase of Toms and Tabbies. At first I could only afford to feed them upon mice (which are cheap), but they fulfilled the scriptural injunction at so marvellous a rate, that I at length considered it my best policy to be liberal, and so indulged them in oysters and turtle. Their tails, at a legislative price, now bring me in a good income; for I have discovered a way, in which, by means of Macassar oil, I can force three crops in a year. It delights me to find, too, that the animals soon get accustomed to the thing, and would rather have the appendages cut off than otherwise. I consider myself, therefore, a made man, and am bargaining for a country seat on the Hudson.

*     *     *

Loss of Breath (1840)

Mr. Lackobreath, while trying to strangle his bride on the morning after their wedding, loses his breath.  "Loss of Breath" recounts, in whimsically grotesque picaresque form, his attempts to recapture it. On his search he is crushed in a carriage, hung for a thief, autopsied by a surgeon, and experimented on by an apothecary with a Galvanic battery, before being interred in the "public vault." There he meets his neighbor, Mr. Windenough, who inadvertently acquired his breath while passing the Lackobreath house that morning.

As with "The Man That Was Used Up" and "The Business Man," there is an almost mathematical arrangement to these stories. Iteration and reiteration pulse as the narrator begins and then pursues his quest via interactions with various characters (out of Daumier, or Goya's late sketches). Humor in each episode is negation of terror. Rigorous stylistic trigonometry of framework supports the drollery.

There is no earthly commiseration in this schema for victims of what Poe terms life's "quantum of absurdity."

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Bon-Bon (1840)

The devil, perennial devourer of and commenter upon philosophers, makes an evening visit to the brilliant Parisian chef/philosopher/wheeler-dealer Pierre Bon-Bon.

But in "Bon-Bon" Poe sets himself a few too many rhetorical hurdles in the chase after laughs, dulling the piece's overall conceit.  It is a minor but clever conceit, as Bon-Bon tries to maneuver the devil into negotiations for his own soul.

("Hic-cup!")

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Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences (1843)

"Diddling" is another acid anatomy of US business psychology.

....Your diddler is minute. His operations are upon a small scale. His business is retail, for cash, or approved paper at sight. Should he ever be tempted into magnificent speculation, he then, at once, loses his distinctive features, and becomes what we term "financier." This latter word conveys the diddling idea in every respect except that of magnitude. A diddler may thus be regarded as a banker in petto —a "financial operation," as a diddle at Brobdignag. The one is to the other, as Homer to "Flaccus"—as a mastodon to a mouse—as the tail of a comet to that of a pig.

The tale is a catalogue of some of the "modern instances"' of diddling.

....A neat diddle is this. A friend holds one of the diddler's promises to pay, filled up and signed in due form, upon the ordinary blanks printed in red ink. The diddler purchases one or two dozen of these blanks, and every day dips one of them in his soup, makes his dog jump for it, and finally gives it to him as a bonne bouche . The note arriving at maturity, the diddler, with the diddler's dog, calls upon the friend, and the promise to pay is made the topic of discussion. The friend produces it from his escritoire , and is in the act of reaching it to the diddler, when up jumps the diddler's dog and devours it forthwith. The diddler is not only surprised but vexed and incensed at the absurd behavior of his dog, and expresses his entire readiness to cancel the obligation at any moment when the evidence of the obligation shall be forthcoming.

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The Angel of the Odd — An Extravaganza (1844)

Our drunken narrator has a hallucinatory nighttime encounter with the Angel: "....he said that he was the genius who presided over the contretemps of mankind, and whose business it was to bring about the odd accidents which are continually astonishing the skeptic."

The next day the narrator gets a special helping of such contretemps:

His departure afforded me relief. The very few glasses of Lafitte that I had sipped had the effect of rendering me drowsy, and I felt inclined to take a nap of some fifteen or twenty minutes, as is my custom after dinner. At six I had an appointment of consequence, which it was quite indispensable that I should keep. The policy of insurance for my dwelling house had expired the day before; and, some dispute having arisen, it was agreed that, at six, I should meet the board of directors of the company and settle the terms of a renewal. Glancing upward at the clock on the mantel-piece (for I felt too drowsy to take out my watch), I had the pleasure to find that I had still twenty-five minutes to spare. It was half past five; I could easily walk to the insurance office in five minutes; and my usual post prandian siestas had never been known to exceed five and twenty. I felt sufficiently safe, therefore, and composed myself to my slumbers forthwith.

Having completed them to my satisfaction, I again looked toward the time-piece, and was half inclined to believe in the possibility of odd accidents when I found that, instead of my ordinary fifteen or twenty minutes, I had been dozing only three; for it still wanted seven and twenty of the appointed hour. I betook myself again to my nap, and at length a second time awoke, when, to my utter amazement, it still wanted twenty-seven minutes of six. I jumped up to examine the clock, and found that it had ceased running. My watch informed me that it was half past seven; and, of course, having slept two hours, I was too late for my appointment "It will make no difference," I said; "I can call at the office in the morning and apologize; in the meantime what can be the matter with the clock?" Upon examining it I discovered that one of the raisin-stems which I had been flipping about the room during the discourse of the Angel of the Odd had flown through the fractured crystal, and lodging, singularly enough, in the key-hole, with an end projecting outward, had thus arrested the revolution of the minute-hand.

"Ah!" said I; "I see how it is. This thing speaks for itself. A natural accident, such as will happen now and then!"

I gave the matter no further consideration, and at my usual hour retired to bed. Here, having placed a candle upon a reading-stand at the bed-head, and having made an attempt to peruse some pages of the "Omnipresence of the Deity," I unfortunately fell asleep in less than twenty seconds, leaving the light burning as it was.

My dreams were terrifically disturbed by visions of the Angel of the Odd. Methought he stood at the foot of the couch, drew aside the curtains, and, in the hollow, detestable tones of a rum-puncheon, menaced me with the bitterest vengeance for the contempt with which I had treated him. He concluded a long harrangue by taking off his funnelcap, inserting the tube into my gullet, and thus deluging me with an ocean of Kirschenwasser, which he poured, in a continuous flood, from one of the long-necked bottles that stood him instead of an arm. My agony was at length insufferable, and I awoke just in time to perceive that a rat had ran off with the lighted candle from the stand, but not in season to prevent his making his escape with it through the hole. Very soon, a strong suffocating odor assailed my nostrils; the house, I clearly perceived, was on fire. In a few minutes the blaze broke forth with violence, and in an incredibly brief period the entire building was wrapped in flames. All egress from my chamber, except through a window, was cut off. The crowd, however, quickly procured and raised a long ladder. By means of this I was descending rapidly, and in apparent safety, when a huge hog, about whose rotund stomach, and indeed about whose whole air and physiognomy, there was something which reminded me of the Angel of the Odd,—when this hog, I say, which hitherto had been quietly slumbering in the mud, took it suddenly into his head that his left shoulder needed scratching, and could find no more convenient rubbing post than that afforded by the foot of the ladder. In an instant I was precipitated, and had the misfortune to fracture my arm....

"The Angel of the Odd" clearly looks forward to Poe's sublime 1845 story-essay "The Imp of the Perverse."

*     *     *

Poe's droll stories should be taken in small doses. Too much of his prehensile humor can set the reader's teeth on edge. Still, the material is rewarding. Poe clearly foresaw the all-against-all nature of post-Civil War capitalist exploitation, the way it permeated all social interaction, dissolved class solidarity, and bred perverse and contrary destructive and self-destructive behavior. The acid of Twain and Bierce is also germinated in these tales.

William Carlos Williams, not Eliot (or Harold Bloom) is the most sympathetic critic of Poe that I have read. As he closes his chapter on the writer in In the American Grain, he notes:

....Of this method in the Tales, the significance and the secret is: authentic particles, a thousand of which spring to the mind for quotation, taken apart and reknit with a view to emphasize, enforce and make evident, the method. Their quality of skill in observation, their heat, local verity, being overshadowed only by the detached, the abstract, the cold philosophy of their joining together; a method springing so freshly from the local conditions which determine it, by their emphasis of firm crudity and lack of coordinated structure, as to be worthy of most painstaking study—The whole period, America 1840, could be rebuilt, psychologically (phrenologically) from Poe's "method."

Jay

21 April 2021

Harmonies de l’Enfer: The Legacy of Erich Zann by Brian M. Stableford (2010)

The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by Brian M. Stableford (2010)

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Stableford's synthesis of Poe and Lovecraft in "The Legacy of Erich Zann" is one of the most sophisticated and successful I have read. In it, the narrator follows Auguste Dupin on an investigation into the murder of a concert violinist with possible infernal connections. This leads to connections with the earlier mysterious disappearance of Erich Zann.

(The only comparison to Stableford's work here is Reggie Oliver's novella "The Green Hour," which also follows Dupin).

Here Stableford's Dupin begins to put things together:

     .... “The author of the Harmonies de l’Enfer signed himself Apollonius in honor of Apollonius of Tyana, although he added the title of Abbé as a primitive shield against accusations of heresy. Unfortunately, almost everything the modern world knows about Apollonius of Tyana is derived from a fictitious biography written by Philostratus, who tried to promote a cult by advertising the sage as a miracle-worker, in frank imitation of the manner in which early Christians represented Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, the original Apollonius was a neo-Pythagorean philosopher, who attempted to elaborate Pythagoras’ notion that a proper understanding of the nature of the universe required to be sought in terms of the hidden virtues of numbers and musical harmonies, and the parallels between them.

     “In recent times, of course, the uses of mathematics in producing representations of the universe, in matters of precise measurement and the formulation of scientific laws, have proved spectacularly successful, but such endeavor has been severed from its once-intimate connection with the concept of harmony. Although musicians like Johann Sebastian Bach have continued to find mathematics useful in the understanding and composition of music, the contribution of music to the understanding of reality has been minimized, and some of the key properties of music—in particular, the ability of music to represent and communicate emotional states, appealing to aspects of mind more fundamental than consciousness itself—have long been abandoned by the majority of philosophers as unfathomable mysteries, unamenable to rational analysis.

     “The Medieval Apollonius and Erich Zann were, however, among the rare exceptions to this generalization. The former took his initial inspiration from his namesake, while the latter took his from his former mentor, Giuseppe Tartini, but both men set out in search of ecstasy: a musical and spiritual path to a paradisal state of mind. Both, alas, found their initial quests betrayed and subverted as soon as they achieved their initial successes.”

     “Subverted by what?” I put in. I was struggling to cope with Dupin’s discourse, as usual, but I knew from experience that inserting prompts and questions sometimes helped me to cling on to the thread of his arguments.

     “Something that has been given many names by those who have sensed its presence,” Dupin said. “The Sumerians called it Tiamat, the Persians Ahriman. Christians, inevitably, have subsumed it within the concept of the Devil, but the Christian tendency to personalize the Devil, as a caricature of Pan or, more recently, as an urbane Mephistopheles, is a distraction. Of all the various conceptualizations, the one perhaps best-suited to the description of the phenomenon as it is humanly experienced is Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.”

     “I don’t know that name,” I admitted.

     “It is to be found in the Harmonies de l’Enfer and various other texts that are sometimes called forbidden, in a stronger sense than merely being placed on the Roman Church’s Index. Nyarlathotep is one of the Old Ones—a company of entities that are something other than gods or demons, although they have powers and inclinations that are somewhat similar. They reside, though not completely, in the dream-dimensions: spaces that surround and are connected to the three dimensions of space experienced by humans but lie beyond the scope of the human sensorium’s mundane sustenance of consciousness. Nyarlathotep’s seat is sometimes called Kadath: a region of the dream-dimensions that is exceedingly difficult to reach, even by the utmost exertions of the unentranced human mind.

     “In our scientific era, we tend to think of consciousness in terms of observation and recording, as if it were merely a device for collecting and collating data, organizing them into a coherent and meaningful image of the world—albeit a device whose efficient operation is troubled by the anarchic workings of emotion and appetite, and the sometimes-nightmarish absurdity of dreams. Ever since Plato, philosophers have routinely conceived of human being as something fundamentally divided, in which noble and orderly rationality is engaged in a constant struggle with baser animal urges and the hectic distractions of dreams—but humans are still capable of feeling whole and undivided on occasion, especially when immersed in works of art, and most especially of all when immersed in music.

     “It is possible, however, to conceive of consciousness in a different way, not as a collector but as a composer, not as a dealer in atomized data building rational edifices threatened, troubled and undermined by the seismic shocks of emotion and dream, but as a seeker and synthesizer of harmonies, forever attempting to bind all experience into a whole whose nature is essentially ecstatic, or sublime, in the technical sense of either term.

     “The creative process of consciousness, seen in this light, is a fundamentally hopeful one, in that it works on the assumption that ecstasy and sublimity, once fully achieved, will be blissful and paradisal: the mental and moral optimum of which the human mind is capable. Insofar as we have been able to determine the truth, however, the reality is that the final fulfillment of consciousness is not blissful or paradisal in any simple or straightforward sense, but has an emotional texture that is far more frightful and horrific.

     “Within this version of spiritualist philosophy, Heaven and Hell cannot be opposites or alternatives, in such a way that one might arrive at one or the other, dependent upon the moral health of one’s soul. In the holistic way of thinking, Heaven and Hell can only be co-existent, intricately inter-twined, not merely bound together but somehow in harmony. In this way of thinking, therefore, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, is not some external threat menacing the human mind with dissolution into madness, although it can easily take on that semblance in the rational imagination; it is something inherent within the human mind and essential to it—just as fundamental, in its own way, as the order inherent in methodical logic and mathematics.

     “However we may choose to conceive of consciousness in the broadest sense, however, one truth that remains is this: in our waking lives, we are fugitives, taking refuge in a deliberately limited consciousness that strives to master and control emotion and to deny the capriciousness of dreams. When we sleep, our defenses are eroded, but we have countered that erosion by the strategic forgetfulness that dispels our dreams. There are, however, states intermediate between waking and sleep, in which that physiological strategy is far less effective. We enter one such state when we listen to, and respond to, music; we enter another when we submit to the magnetic effects that induce a somnambulistic or somniloquistic trance. We become particularly vulnerable when the two effects operate in combination: when we surrender, as players or as listeners to somnimusicality. We are uniquely well-equipped, then, to storm the heights of ecstasy and sublimity, paradise and bliss—and, by the same token, we are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of the Crawling Chaos. As the wisest of modern aesthetic philosophers, Edmund Burke, has pointed out, the sublime always contains an element of horror, and that element of horror is its truest essence, its most fundamental note.”

     It was high time for another interruption. “And is that what Erich Zann achieved, by means of his spoiled Stradivarius?” I said. “He attempted to storm the heights of ecstasy and sublimity, but failed, and only opened his soul to horror: to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.”

     “Sometimes, my friend,” Dupin said, despairingly, “I think that you are ever-intent on misunderstanding me, by oversimplifying everything I say. The whole point of what I have been saying is that Zann’s Stradivarius—Palaiseau’s Stradivarius—is not spoiled at all...."

The end is suitably operatic in its apocalyptic energy. The reincarnated Zann, an angel-voiced twelve year old boy, forces the narrator to return to Zann's old room. Dupin follows, to the rescue.

…the voice and the accompanying notes of the retuned violin began to crawl into my heart and soul, filling them with ecstasy—not the false ecstasy of human hopes and loving desires, which attempted to abandon fear and pain and sorrow and horror in search of some idyllic purification, but the true ecstasy that embraced and embodied fear and pain and sorrow and horror, and restored the wholeness of experience and perfection, mundanity and vision, reality and dream, life and death.

     For a second, or perhaps two—though they seemed to stretch far beyond the confines of Earthly time—I believed that I understood the effect that the music of Erich Zann had been reaching for, of its own accord, and in defiance, in the first climax of Zann’s life, of its own composer and player. I understood how very unfortunate, and how perversely fortunate, Zann had been in having been deprived of a voice in his previous incarnation.

     He was not deprived of a voice now; his music had moved beyond the confines of the Stradivarius violin, and the unfettered human imagination.

     Then the monsters came in earnest, threatening to invade the human world through the window of that absurdly-perched garret, in fulfillment of the pact that Erich Zann had made. They came to bring a flood of horror into the world, with all the corollary delight implied by the fullness of the term. No human could imagine why they had to do it, but I understood that they were acting under compulsion.

     At that point in a similar séance, fifteen years before, Erich Zann’s flesh had rebelled against the enormity of his own daring, and he had tried to play the violin that had been playing him. He had entered into a contest that had killed him, but he had kept the monsters at bay. He had lost the fight, and won it. The violin had continued to play him even after he was dead, but the music had been futile, unaccompanied.

     This time, Zann reborn had no intention of doing any such thing, and no capacity even to attempt it. This time however, Auguste Dupin was plying the bow and pressing the strings of the Stradivarius. This time, he was the one who rebelled, and set out, heroically, to seize control of the educated, bewitched, accursed, ensouled Stradivarius.

     Whether he knew it or not—and I firmly believe that he had always known it, if only on some occult but not-entirely-subconscious level—the Chevalier had been preparing for this moment for fifteen years. He had been very scrupulous in letting musical instruments alone, and extremely scrupulous in retuning his own self. The running scordatura that he attempted now was quite unprecedented, but it was utterly logical, rational and analytical, and in that sense, he had practiced it a million times before.

     Apollonius of Tyana, the self-styled Abbé Apollonius and Erich Zann might have insisted that human beings were fundamentally undivided, and that the unending battle fought between reason and emotion, will and appetite, demonstrated by its very inconclusiveness that no such division could ever truly be effected, but Auguste Dupin did not admit that and would not admit it now. His somnimusicality was not ecstatic at all, but purely physiological, and he brought all of his mental and moral resources to bear on the contest in which he engaged against his would-be possessor.

     Dupin launched an attack, with all his inner might, against the Stradivarius. Refusing any longer to be played, he insisted on becoming the player—the determinant not only of the notes the instrument was playing, but of the uncanny song that the reincarnate, fully articulate Erich Zann was singing.

     He had no music of his own to play, but he did not need any; the point was not to play a melody but to interrupt and shatter one.

     Auguste Dupin was, not merely by training but by nature, a disentangler, a man possessed of acumen. He attacked the play of the violin not as an item of music, a question of aesthetics, but as a conundrum, a puzzle to be solved. He set out to fulfill the true mission of the human mind, which was not to seek the horrific fulfillment of bliss but to analyze and separate, not by way of cultivating unwholesomeness, after the fashion of the Crawling Chaos, but to contrive a neat and orderly division. He set out, in his attack, to undo the knot that had been contrived in the weft of fate by Erich Zann’s music and Erich Zann’s reincarnation: to smooth out the boundary between the real world and the unruly dimensions of dream.

     For a moment, everything hung in the balance. The snowflakes drifting outside the window seemed to stop in the course of their eldritch evolution: to stop falling; to stop shimmering; to stop sparkling.

     The cold was so deeply enmeshed in my soul and my bones that I was afraid that Dupin had left it too late, that he had not solved the puzzle in time. I was terrified that the monsters had got through. It was a truly beautiful fear, a truly sublime terror; I almost contrived to experience the combination as Erich Zann yearned to experience it.

     Then the boy’s divine and demonic soprano voice broke.

     On one level, that was all that happened; his voice broke, as the voices of adolescents routinely do. The incredible note that he was sounding turned into an all-too-credible croak, and Erich Zann’s magical cantata abruptly turned into a farce.

     The window, of its own accord, slammed shut.

     The individual who no longer even seemed to be a child clutched his throat, and collapsed.

     Hood leapt to his feet, and screamed.

     Dupin stopped playing. He bent down, and set the violin down on the floor, as reverently as it deserved. It was, after all, a Stradivarius.

     Then he turned to me, and simply said, without any preamble or particular emphasis: “Run for your life….”

❖

Jay

11 June 2020