Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (11 page)

The woman screamed again, this time the sound being much fainter, suggestive of increased distance, rather than her becoming weaker, or overcome in some way. Dupin and I hurried through dense bushes that lined the track. Within moments, we found ourselves in a broad meadow that possessed a smooth covering of snow. Our lanterns shone across that pristine shroud of white. Nothing had disturbed the snow—neither birds, animals, nor people. We scrunched onwards, searching for the distressed female. From the dark sky above, a lazy snowflake or two descended. We heard no sound. The woman had fallen silent.

“Perhaps there was no woman?” I suggested as the search revealed nothing but a winter’s meadow. “Might the cry have been made by a fox?”

“That was no fox, monsieur. You know as well as I.” Dupin raised the lamp higher, endeavoring to push back the darkness. “That was a lady in distress. Ha!” He pointed. “Now do you see what caused said distress?”

The light revealed a figure lying face down in the midst of the snowy landscape. I immediately began to hurry closer. However, Dupin stopped me by gripping my arm. “No, do not move. Not a single step. Something is wrong here... profoundly wrong.”

“Of course there is—a man lies dead. I can see his corpse with my own eyes.”

“Yes, you see the body... What is it that you
don’t
see?”

“He’s not wearing a coat or hat. See, he’s dressed in a cotton shirt and breeches.”

“What else don’t you see?” demanded Dupin. His manner wasn’t terse or annoyed; on the contrary, his eyes glittered with excitement. My friend detested the mundane routines of everyday life—this was anything but mundane.

I attempted to put myself inside Dupin’s remarkable mind, and apply his unique talent for observation, which he’d used to explain so many mysterious crimes. “Fifty paces from us, there is the body of a young man, wearing indoor garments,” I said, “but we must be four hundred meters from the nearest farmhouse. It’s a bitterly cold night, so he wouldn’t have been out walking when he was attacked.”

“Yes.”

“He must have been killed elsewhere and carried or dragged here.”

“No.”

“Then, Monsieur Dupin, what is it that I am
not
seeing?”

“Imagine the marks in the snow are our beloved hieroglyphics —decipher them, interpret them, extract information from every dot, swirl, and line.”

Not for the first time did I wonder if madness had taken root in my companion’s brain. “There are no marks in the snow,” I pointed out.

“Exactly.” Dupin extended his free hand to indicate the unblemished whiteness. “The body lies face down, his arms outstretched like a fallen bird. There are no marks in the snow. Not one within forty paces. He has only been here a short while, because he lies
on top
of freshly fallen snow, there is none on the cadaver. There are no footprints near the body to suggest that attackers approached him and struck him down there on that spot.”

I stared in astonishment. “What is even more inexplicable is how the man arrived in this meadow. He hasn’t left any footprints.”

“Carried by angels?” Dupin’s eyes gleamed with impish delight—a veritable witch-fire blazed there. The mystery enthralled him. “Or was the gentleman thrust from beneath the ground by the Devil? So, monsieur. From above? From below? What is it to be?”

I stood there in the forbidding snowfield that might have been conjured here from some Arctic wasteland. The cold air put its icy claws on my throat. The darkness grew even thicker... denser... the darkness of a tomb that imprisoned children’s ghosts.
Listen to them cry,
I thought,
listen to their sorrow.
The despairing sobs of tiny children, who had been cast lifeless and forgotten into the grave-pit, came a-creeping through my flesh to chill my blood, until shiver upon shiver poured through me, and I longed to run from that evil place that no longer seemed part of the natural world.

Dupin spoke in a low, hollow voice, as if his words, too, came ghosting from some melancholy realm of the dead: “To your right. Forty paces from us. See those indentations in the snow?”

He moved in the direction of which he spoke. Presently, I saw footprints, which I counted quickly. There were twelve of them; however, they were scuffed and elongated, suggesting that the person had moved with strange haste. The footsteps had simply appeared in the midst of that whiteness then stopped again. Yet where the footsteps ended there were a series of broken lines in the snowfall that created a series of dashes like so: - - - - - - These ran for perhaps fifty paces in all before they, too, simply vanished.

“I do not understand,” I confessed. “A corpse lies in a field. There is an impossibility about the manner of its arriving. No footprints led to the corpse, none led away. Then there is a smattering of footprints—impossible footprints!—as they suddenly appear from nowhere in the middle of a meadow before vanishing again... In addition, there is a line of marks in the snow that abruptly end. This is the mystery of all mysteries, Dupin. A mystery that must surely contain the supernatural at the center of its dark heart. There is no other explanation that I can see, other than witchcraft.”

“The mystery
does not
embody magic in any form whatsoever. This enigma can be traced back to the French name of Montgolfier.” He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “I would prefer to savor the mystery. To peel back its exquisite layers one by one, and reveal its solution to you in a languid manner over many glasses of amontillado. But there is no time, my friend. Lives are at stake.” With a sudden impetuousness he rushed toward the corpse. “The snow is fifteen centimeters deep. This young gentleman has been thrust down through it with great force. His bones are broken. Death arrived in a single second. He had no time to writhe or struggle.” He swung the lantern round, casting its glow over the winter shroud. “No footprints, so he did not walk here to the place of his death, nor was he carried.”

“You spoke the name Montgolfier. Are you suggesting this individual fell from a balloon?”

“Fell, pushed, cast out, jettisoned!”

“But who would ascend in a balloon in this dreadful weather?”

The excited man spoke faster—ever faster. “Since Montgolfier rose over French soil
—this
French soil—undertaking the first manned balloon flight over half a century ago, there have been hundreds of astonishing ventures into the sky. In 1841, Charles Green ascended to a height of eight kilometers above the Earth. The temperature on that summer’s day dropped to twenty-seven degrees below freezing. Ice formed on the balloon’s rigging, and the sky turned from blue to black. Soon, another English gentleman by the name of Monck Mason intends to travel through the atmosphere all the way to America. It is recorded historical fact that many extraordinary voyages have taken place, successfully reaching halfway to heaven, using an envelope of silk containing hydrogen or coal gas. Men fly, monsieur. The ground cannot hold them.”

“The woman who screamed, where is she?”

He beckoned me to the footprints. “Female feet made these. They move fast, then the feet are dragged. I believe she climbed from a grapple hook that had descended from the basket of the balloon, made those messy, hither-thither prints before climbing onto the grapple hook once more. The iron hook made those dash marks in the snow as the balloon rose and fell while it moved southwards. The marks end because the craft gained altitude. See the yellow particles on the snow? The captain of the flying ship discharged a ballast of sand in order to rise into the sky.”

“I thought I was beset by witchcraft,” I said in a breathless daze. “For a moment I believed I heard the ghosts of weeping children.”

“You heard children weeping, indeed.” Dupin looked upward. “But the children you heard crying in sorrow are very much alive and are high above our heads.”

“By the saints! Who would subject infants to such an horrific ordeal?”

The man gravely studied the dark, cloud-burdened skies before all of a sudden shouting a warning. “Look out!”

He pushed me aside. At that moment, I heard a thin, whistling note, which rapidly swelled into an alarming rush of noise. A black object sped from the sky to strike the ground where I’d been standing before Dupin pushed me away. There, embedded in the field, was a black pole that was as long as my arm and tipped with a sharp, iron point.

“That is most definitely not Cupid’s arrow of love.” Dupin began to run. “We are under attack, monsieur. Hurry!”

“Shouldn’t we run for the road, if we are to escape?”

“We’re not escaping. We will do our utmost to capture the balloon and bring a murderer to justice.”

We ran, carrying our lanterns. Barely had we covered forty meters when I beheld a remarkable vision. A lady clad in pure white stood on a branch, high in a tree. She shouted some words I could not identify. Yet without a shadow of doubt I realized that this was the same woman who had made the dreadful scream that had sent us running into the field in the first place.

“Behold!” Dupin sang out. “The female aeronaut!”

“Mademoiselle,” I shouted, fearing that she would fall, “hold tight to the branch. We will rescue you.”

The young woman called down in a language I didn’t understand. Then she asked a question in passable French: “Is this Belgium, monsieur?”

“This is France, mademoiselle,” Dupin replied. “You have alighted near Paris.”

“I see you are respectable gentlemen,” she shouted. “I wish you to guide me to a magistrate. I have to make a charge of murder.”

“Where is the balloon now?” asked Dupin.

“Do you not see it? There, above your heads, gentlemen. I have captured the balloon
and
the murderer.”

I gazed up into the dark sky. In the combined light of both our lamps, I made out a vast, rounded form. This was the envelope filled with gas that was so much lighter than air. Beneath the titanic balloon hung a basket, one of considerable dimensions that had been fashioned like the superstructure of a galleon, so it had a deck and what appeared to be an arrangement of cabins at either end. A rope of twenty meters descended to a grapple hook that had been jammed into the branches of the tree, no doubt by the woman in white.

“Did you throw the dart at us?” I asked.

“The lady did not,” Dupin answered on her behalf. “The hurler of the weapon will be that slayer of the unfortunate man lying in the field.”

“Where is the killer?” I asked.

This question required no verbal answer. A burly figure in black appeared on the deck of the craft above our heads, and a second dart whistled out of the gloom to embed itself in the frozen soil.

Dupin beckoned to the woman. “Hurry down. You’ll be slain, too, if you remain there.”

The lady moved as nimbly as a cat. White skirts fluttering, she rapidly descended. A third dart pierced the darkness, its point grazing the toe of my leather boot.

“His aim is improving,” I warned.

“Here I come!” With that the woman leapt from a branch.

Dupin managed to hand the lantern to me before catching her in his arms. Without setting her down, he ran with her. I followed as he led the way through a line of bushes to where I glimpsed a building not thirty paces from the tree and its captive balloon.

The building, it transpired, was a barn. Therein, were bales of straw arranged around a large plow sitting in the middle of the floor. Dupin put the woman down, and bade me to enter; he then closed the stout timber door before shooting home a pair of formidable bolts.

“Safe, I trust,” I pointed upward, “from that devil’s javelins.”

The woman appeared remarkably self-assured and free from hysteria, considering her ordeal.

“We cannot remain here,” she insisted. “We must report the murder—your soldiers must capture the balloon before the Pastor can free it.”

“What happened?” Dupin asked gently.

“Did you not hear? I must find a magistrate and demand that an arrest warrant be issued.”

“We cannot leave yet. We will be struck down by the darts before we have covered twenty paces.”

“But the man killed my fiancé. I will not rest until he faces the guillotine.”

“We are confined to this barn for a time, mademoiselle. Please tell us what befell you.”

The woman was pretty, with pale blue eyes, and blonde ringlets. Yet she was no swooning damsel. A storm of anger boiled behind that blue-eyed gaze. “I will kill him with my own hands, if need be.”

“Kill whom?”

“Pastor Larsson.” She took a deep breath as she realized she could put her trust in us. And there in the golden lamplight within the barn, she told her story. “My name is Annette Lamberg. My fiancé and I worshiped at the same chapel in Denmark. The pastor is a man of great oratory power and conviction. Pastor Larsson could, I’m sure, persuade birds to swim and fish to fly. He convinced his congregation that the Earth suffered from contagion. That a plague germ had infected the soil, and everyone who walked upon it would soon be struck down by a foul pestilence and die. Pastor Larsson told us that an angel had appeared and told him that the only way to escape the plague was to build an ‘Ark of the Air.’ The angel explained how to build an enormous balloon that would safely carry the God-fearing high above the ground until the plague had passed. Once it had, he and his congregation would inherit an Earth free from both sin and plague.” She looked upward as if she could see the balloon suspended there above the red tiles of the barn. “You see, winds blow from the north during the winter. The Pastor calculated that prevailing winds would carry us south over Europe and over the Mediterranean to Africa. Accordingly, thirty-six hours ago, we boarded the
Seraphiel
—that is the name of our craft—and ascended into the skies above Denmark. As the pastor had predicted, the breeze carried us south at great speed. On board the
Seraphiel,
there are thirty-five men, women, and children. We have provisions for a month, and a system for collecting rainwater to drink. Therefore, we have the means of sailing the skies above the African wilderness, far from tainted humanity, until the angel returned to Pastor Larsson and told him that he may land his craft.”