The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (12 page)

Horrid Affair.--A cow and a sheep belonging to Mr. Elias Humphreys, of Haverstraw, were discovered Friday in a terrible condition. The animals had been dispatched by means of a slash across the throat. Mr. Humphreys also reports that the animals had been most cruelly carved open, and from each, the heart removed. No trace of those organs remained. The villain responsible for these assaults cannot be identified. Word has reached this journal of similar reports pertaining to a cow in the possession of Mr. Joseph L. Roy, a neighbor of Mr. Humphreys. These reports could not be corroborated.

Canal Tolls.--The tolls collected on the state canals up to the 1st of September amount to $514,000; being about $100,000 more than were collected...

Narrative of Gus Landor

9

October 31st

"Cattle and sheep!" cried Captain Hitchcock, brandishing the newspaper like a cutlass. "Livestock are now being sacrificed. Can we consider any of God's creatures immune from this madman?"

"Well," I said. "Better cows than cadets."

I could see his nostrils flaring like a bull's--I knew again what it was to be a cadet.

"I beg you, Captain, please don't get yourself in a stew. We don't yet know this is the same man."

"It would be an extraordinary coincidence if it were not."

"Well, then," I said, "we can at least take comfort knowing he's moved his attentions away from the Point."

Frowning, Hitchcock ran his finger along the quill of his dress sword. "Haverstraw is not so very far from here," he said. "A cadet might reach it in upwards of an hour--a good deal less, if he managed to wangle a horse."

"You're right," I said. "A cadet could certainly cover the distance." And maybe I really did mean to provoke this good soldier and fine American, for why else would I have thought to add, "Or an officer?"

All I got for my pains was a steely look and a shake of the head. Followed by a brisk interrogation. Had I inspected the icehouse? Yes, I had. What had I found there? A great deal of ice. What else? No heart, no clues of any sort.

Very well, then, had I spoken with the Academy instructors? Yes, I had. What had they told me? They'd apprised me of Leroy Fry's grades in mineralogy and mensuration, and they had wished me to know he was fond of hickory chips. And they could have filled caverns with all their theories. Lieutenant Kinsley had advised me to look into the position of the stars. Professor Church had wondered if I'd heard about some of the extreme Druidical practices. Captain Aeneas MacKay, the quartermaster, had assured me that heart stealing was a comingof-age ritual in certain Seminole tribes (such as still existed).

Hitchcock drew it all in through his hard-pursed lips, then blew it out in a slow hiss.

"I don't mind telling you, Mr. Landor, I am more uneasy than ever before. A young man, and a pair of dumb beasts. There must be a connection between them, and yet I can find none. I can't, for the life of me, see what one man could want with all these--"

"All these hearts," I said. "You're right, it's a curious thing. Now, my friend Poe there, he thinks it's the work of a poet."

"Then perhaps," said Hitchcock, giving his coat sleeves a hard brush, "we should heed the counsel of Plato and banish all poets from our society. Starting with your Mr. Poe."

That particular Sunday was cool and boundless. I remember I was sitting alone in my hotel room; the sash was up, and if I tipped my head, I could see all the way up to Newburgh and, farther still, the Shawangunk Mountains. The clouds were frayed like collars, and the sun had laid down an aisle of glitter along the Hudson, and flaws of wind shuddered down from the gullies, stamping pinwheels on the water's belly.

And there! Right on time: the North River steamer, the Palisado, four hours out of New York City and just drawing in to the West Point landing. Round every deck the passengers crowded, more intimate than lovers, leaning over balustrades and crouching under awnings. Pink hats and robin's-egg-blue parasols and ostrich feathers of the deepest purple--God himself couldn't have matched it for color.

A whistle sounded, and the steam blew up in a shroud as the roustabouts took their places along the gangplanks, and I could see, fluttering like an aspen leaf, a tiny skiff--weighed down by bodies and luggage--being lowered to the water. More tourists bent on swarming into Sylvanus Thayer's kingdom. I leaned toward them, trying to fix them in my sights...

Only to find them peering back at me.

Their faces were tilted upward, yes, their opera glasses and binoculars were trained on my window. I rose from my chair and stepped back... back... until they had nearly dropped from view, and still I could feel them chasing me into the room, and I was all set to slam down the sash and close the shutters after it when I caught sight of a hand--a single human hand-- clawing its way onto the lintel.

I didn't cry out. It's doubtful I even budged. The only feeling I recall is a bare curiosity, of the sort I suppose an infantryman must feel as he contemplates the cannonball that is about to meet his head. I stood there in the center of the room and watched as another hand--the twin of the first--seized the lintel. I heard a small deep molish grunt, and I waited, scarcely breathing, as an upside-down leather pot, slightly askew, pushed its way into the window frame. Followed by a damp fringe of black hair and two large gray eyes, staring and straining, and two nostrils dilated with effort. And oh, yes, two lovely rows of teeth, gritting hard.

Cadet Fourth Classman Poe, at my service.

Without a word, he hauled his torso through the open window... paused there a bit to catch his breath... and then dragged his legs after him, crawling forward on his arms until he landed in a heap on the floor. At once, he sprang to his feet, lifted his hat to give his hair a swipe, and once again proffered me that European bow.

"My apologies for being late," he said, panting. "I hope I haven't kept you too long."

I stared at him.

"Our meeting," he said. "Directly after chapel, as you suggested."

I went to the window and looked down. It was a three-story drop-- followed by a hundredfoot incline--ending in rocks and river.

"You fool," I said. "You damned fool."

"It was you who insisted I come in daylight hours, Mr. Landor. How else was I to escape notice?"

"Escape notice?" I slammed the sash down. "You don't think every last soul on that steamer noticed you? Crawling up a hotel? I wouldn't be surprised if an Army guard's already been dispatched."

I strode to the door and actually waited there, as though at any second the bombardiers must come storming through. And when they didn't, I could feel (with some disappointment) my anger falling away in tatters. The best I could do was mutter:

"You might have been killed."

"Oh, the drop's not so bad as all that," he said, all business now. "And at the risk of exalting myself, Mr. Landor, I must tell you that I'm an excellent swimmer. When I was fifteen, I swam seven miles and a half in the James River, under a hot June sun and against a tide of three miles per hour. Next to that, Byron's little paddle across the Hellespont was child's play."

Wiping his brow, he sank into the spindle-backed rocking chair by the window and sat there yanking on his fingers, one by one, until the knuckles cracked--not unlike the sound Leroy Fry's digits made when I broke them.

"Please tell me," I said, lowering myself onto the end of the bed. "How did you know which room was mine?"

"I saw you from below. Needless to say, I tried to catch your eye, but you were too engrossed. At any rate, I am pleased to report that I have successfully decoded your message."

Reaching inside his coat, he drew out the scrap of paper, still stiff from its alcohol bath. Carefully unfolding it, he spread it across the bed and, kneeling on his haunches, ran his index finger along the rows of letters.

NG

HEIR A

T BE L

ME S

"Shall I begin by limning the stages of my deductive labors for you, Mr. Landor?" He didn't wait for a yes. "We begin with the note itself. What may we say of it? Being handwritten, it is patently of a personal nature. Leroy Fry had it with him at the time of his death; from that we may presume this note was sufficient to draw him from his barracks on the night in question. Given that the rest of the message was torn from his hand, we may presume that the note in some way identified its sender. The use of rather primitive block capitals would also indicate that the sender wished to disguise his identity. What are we to infer from these points? Might this note have been an invitation of sorts? Or might we more accurately call it a trap?"

He paused just a bit before that last word. Enough to make it obvious how much he was enjoying this.

"With that in mind," he continued, "we concentrate our labors on the third line of our mysterious fragment. We are rewarded here with the one word that we know, for a fact, is complete: be. The English lexicography harbors few simpler or more declarative words, Mr. Landor. Be. This immediately places us, I conceive, in the terrain of imperatives. The sender would bid Leroy Fry be something. "Be' what? Something that begins with an l. "Little?" "Lucky?" "Lascivious?" None of these gibes with the nature of an invitation. "Be lost?" Too ungainly a construction. Surely one gets lost, one loses one's way. No, if in fact Leroy Fry's attendance was desired at a particular time and place, there is but one word that can suffice: late."

He held out his hand, as though the letters were resting in his palm.

"Two words, then, Mr. Landor: be late. A bizarre request to affix to any invitation. Late was the last thing our sender should have wished Leroy Fry to be. Ergo, as we scan this third line, we can only conclude that we are in the midst of a negative construction. And with that, the identity of that first word becomes almost insultingly simple to deduce: don't. Don't be late."

He stood now and began pacing round the bed.

"Time, in short, is of the essence. And what better way to make that clear than with the fourth and, as far as we know, final line? A reinforcement of that earlier message. Begin with this enigmatic me. Is it a word unto itself, in the manner of the aforementioned be? Or is it, as I believe its position indicates, the latter portion of a larger word? Assuming the second case, we need not journey far to find a suitable candidate. Leroy Fry might be going to this predetermined location, but to the sender, Fry was--do you anticipate me, Mr. Landor?--he was coming." He extended his hand in a beckoning motion. "Come, Mr. Fry. With that in place, it is the height of simplicity to deduce the next word. Can it be any other than soon? We insert the word, et voila! Our little message reveals itself at last: Don't be late, come soon. Or even, depending on the degree of urgency, come soonest." He clapped his hands together and bowed his head. "And there you have it, Mr. Landor. The solution to our petit enigme. Respectfully submitted."

He was expecting something--applause, maybe. A gratuity? a blast of cannon? All I did was pick up the scrap of paper and smile.

"Oh, this is first-rate work, Mr. Poe. Absolutely first-rate. I do thank you."

"And I thank you," he said, "for offering me such a pleasing diversion." Easing himself back into the rocker, he planted one of his boots on the windowsill. "However short-lived," he added.

"No, it was my pleasure. Truly, it was my... oh, there's just one thing, Mr. Poe."

"Yes?"

"Did you have any luck with the first two lines?"

He gave me a wave of his hand. "No getting anywhere with those," he said. "The first line contains but two letters. As for the second, the only possible choice is their. A word begging for an antecedent, which sadly is lost to us. I was forced to declare the first two lines a loss, Mr. Landor."

"Hmm." I went to the bedside table and pulled out a stack of cream-colored paper and a pen. "I wonder, Mr. Poe, are you a good speller?"

He raised himself up a little. "I was judged a flawless speller by no less an authority than the Reverend John Bransby of Stoke Newington."

You see? No simple yeses or nos with him. Everything had to be freighted down with allusions, appeals to authority... and what authority was this? John Bransby? Stoke Newington?

"So I take it you've never done what so many of us do," I said.

"And that is... ?" "Confuse the spelling of similar-sounding words. By which I mean, for example, their," I said, writing out the word so he could see it. "And they're ... oh, and there."

He bent his face over the paper, then shrugged.

"An abysmally common solecism, Mr. Landor. My roommate commits it ten times a day--or would if he wrote his own letters."

"Well, then, what if our note-writer were, say, more like your roommate and less like you? What might we have then?" I crossed out their and circled there. "An invitation indeed, eh, Mr. Poe? Meet me there. Oh, but we run up against another word, don't we? Beginning with an a."

Squinting down again, he ran the letter along his lips. A few more seconds before he said, in a tone of wonder:

"At."

"At, of course! Why, I wouldn't be surprised if there had been a time following hard on: Meet me there at eleven P.M., something of that sort, That would be direct enough, wouldn't it? But, now if our sender did set a specific time, I'm not sure he'd be asking Fry in that fourth line to come soon. Bit of a contradiction, isn't it? Maybe Come see me would be closer to the mark."

Poe gazed dully at the paper. Quiet he was.

"There's only one problem," I said. " We still don't know where they were to meet, do we? And all we have to go on is those two letters, n and g. Now the curious thing about that letter combination--as I'm sure you've noticed, Mr. Poe--is that it turns up quite often at the ends of words. I wonder, can you think of any place on the Academy grounds that might have an ng trailing behind?"

He looked out the window, as though the answer might be framed there--and found that it was.

"The landing," he answered.

"The landing! Now that, Mr. Poe, is an excellent choice. I'll meet you at the landing. Oh, but there are two landings, aren't there? Both guarded by the Second Artillery, as I understand it. Not much in the way of privacy, eh?"

He gave that some thought. Looked at me once or twice before venturing to speak again.

"There's a cove," he said at last. "Not too far from the North Landing. It's where Mr. Havens brings his wares."

"Where--where Patsy brings them, you mean. Ah, then it must be a rather secluded sort of place. Would it be known to your fellow cadets?"

He shrugged. "Anyone who's ever smuggled in beer or whiskey knows about it." "Well, then, we have--for now--a solution to our little puzzle. I'll be at the cove by the landing. Meet me there at eleven P.M. Don't be late. Come see me. Yes, that'll do quite nicely for the time being. Leroy Fry receives this invitation. He finds himself obliged to accept. And if we're to believe Mr. Stoddard's testimony, he accepts it with a light heart. We might even believe he was glad to accept this invitation. "Necessary business," he says, winking in the dark. Does that suggest anything to you, Mr. Poe?"

Something curved around his lips; one of his eyebrows went up like a kite.

"To me," he said, "it suggests a woman."

"Ah. A woman, yes. That's an awfully interesting theory. And of course, with the letter being written as it was--in block capitals, as you say-- there'd be no good way of knowing the sender's sex, would there? So Leroy Fry may well have set off that evening believing that a woman was awaiting him at the cove by the landing. And for all we know, a woman was waiting." Lowering myself onto the bed, I propped a pillow behind me and leaned back against the headboard. I stared at my scuffed boots. "Well," I said, "that's a problem for another day. In the meantime, Mr. Poe, I can't... I mean to say, I'm so grateful for your assistance."

If I was expecting him to accept my thanks and quietly leave... well, I don't think I ever expected that.