past his shoulder by leaning slightly to the right, and I did so, reflexively.
“No, she’s not,” I said, taking that inference from the fact that her eyes were open—although I realized my mistake almost instantly.
Her eyes were open, but she was not awake, Indeed, it seemed to me that there might even have been a sense in which they were not her eyes, for the moment. Whoever or whatever appeared to using them was staring directly to me, and I had a strangely sickening sensation that it was not for the first time.
My own words echoed sardonically in the breached haven of my consciousness: Once touched by the Crawling Chaos, it seems—even as a mere innocent bystander—one is tainted forever.
When Thibodeaux’s ghost had met my gaze, there had been something else therein. Now it seemed to be in Amélie Lacuzon’s eyes: the eyes of the “old witch,” who was, I suspected, a magnetizer as powerful as Chapelain or Saint-Germain, or perhaps a medium as powerful as Jana Valdemar.
Dupin had turned in response to my remark, and I assumed that he could see the open eyes as clearly as I could, but they still seemed to be staring at me. Automatically, he moved within the frame of the inner door so as to block my view—or perhaps to intercept the stare.
“Don’t worry,” he said, after a few seconds. “It’s not uncommon for habitual somnambulists to open their eyes while they’re asleep. I don’t think she’s actually going to try to move.”
“I thought you preferred the term somniloquist,” I said, feigning laconism.
“I prefer both terms to be used accurately,” he said. “‘Somnambulist’ when someone moves in her sleep, ‘somniloquist’ when someone talks.”
I didn’t want to get into a pedantic discussion, although I could have argued that the concierge had not really moved, but only stared—ominously, it seemed to me.
By the time that Dupin had moved himself, however, sufficiently for me to obtain another glance at Madame Lacuzon’s face, her eyes were closed again. She was, as Dupin had claimed, still asleep.
“It really would be best if you went home now, my friend,” Dupin continued, “not just because of the threat of infection, assuming that whatever Amélie has is infectious, but because I’m very tired, although I mustn’t go to sleep.”
“But I’ve told you everything, and you haven’t told me anything!” I protested. “Who is this Professor Thibodeaux? Why did you expect to see his ghost tonight? Why, come to that, did you go to the theater with him in 1834—and to see one of the ‘devil operas’ of which you’re so scornful?”
Dupin was having none of it, though.
“I promise that I’ll come to see you tomorrow, my friend,” he assured me, “as soon as I’m sure that it’s safe for me to leave Amélie alone—but probably not before noon. If anyone comes looking for me in the meantime, having failed to get any answer here, please make my apologies. When I see you, I’ll gladly tell you everything—everything I know myself, that is—about Blaise Thibodeaux, the resonance of time, and why he once told me that he would do his very best to appear at the Opéra-Comique tonight, dead or alive.”
I saw no point in raising further objections, in the circumstances, and gave in gracefully. “I’ll tell Madame Bihan that her cousin is ill,” I said. “I’m sure that she’ll lend you all the assistance she can.” Madame Bihan was my housekeeper, supplied on her cousin’s recommendation.
“Thank you,” Dupin said. “And I’m sorry, once again, for disappointing you this evening.” I had never before heard him apologize three times in such a short span of time—and, even more remarkably, that was the second time that I actually believed his assertion.
I walked home without encountering any footpads, deep in thought—even though I had little real substance to fuel my ruminations.
I gave Madame Bihan the information about her cousin’s illness, including Dupin’s assertion that she seemed to be over the worst, and went to bed, hoping—in vain, as it turned out—that I would be able to sleep peacefully now that I had unburdened myself to Dupin.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE UNMASKED WOMAN
Perhaps I did sleep a little, but only fitfully, if so, and only between the hours of three and four o’clock, when my tiredness reached its inevitable extreme—a trough rather than a peak. By five, long before dawn, I was wide awake again, tossing and turning blearily. By the time I actually got out of bed at six-thirty, Madame Bihan had already set off to help Dupin care for her cousin, so it was her husband who made my breakfast.
That seemed an imposition and annoyance, so fractious was my mood, although I had insisted for some years after first renting the house that I did not need and would rather not have any servants, and would be perfectly capable of fending for myself, as a good American should.
The problem with servants, I thought, with Dupin’s mysterious relationship with Madame Lacuzon in mind as well as my own trivial plight, is that one falls into the habit of relying on them, and soon convinces oneself that one cannot possibly do without them.
When I had restored my spirits with second-rate pain-au-chocolat and coffee, I went into the library—which always seemed more like a library than a smoking-room in the morning, when the air was still relatively fresh, at least until the first blasts of the winter wind forbade the opening of the windows. I did not intend to stay there—Bihan had lit the fire in the reception-room—but I wanted to search the books that Dupin stored there, his own meager quarters in the Rue Dunot no longer being able to accommodate his collection. I had a vague memory that I might have seen the name Thibodeaux there.
I had. Indeed, such was the reliability of my half-memory that I laid my hands on it almost immediately.
La Résonance du temps by Blaise Thibodeaux had been published by a perfectly respectable Parisian press; it was evidently not one of Dupin’s fabulously rare “forbidden books.” The copy was slightly battered, although it was only dated 1833, but that was because it had evidently been bought second-hand from one of the bouquinistes along the Seine. Thibodeaux had obviously not been such a close friend of Dupin’s as to give him a complimentary copy—or perhaps he had been the kind of author who expects his friends to purchase brand new copies out of loyalty to his purse...a futile expectation in Dupin’s case.
I carried the thick volume into the reception-room and sat down in my customary armchair on the side of the hearth next to the bay window, which was letting in a gray but nevertheless abundant light. The page count—well in excess of four hundred—and the small size of the typeface were hardly incentives to leisurely reading, but I assumed that the previous night’s mystery would provide me with sufficient motive to keep turning the pages. Had the publisher been enthusiastic to offer the book to the public, I presumed, he would have set the text in two volumes, so the fact that it was uncomfortable crammed into one suggested that Thibodeaux had probably paid for it to be printed, and had been anxious to keep the cost down.
I had hardly opened the book when the doorbell rang. I closed it again and waited. Bihan, as usual, seemed to take so long to answer it that I began to wish that I had answered it myself.
Finally, the old man appeared on the threshold of the reception-room.
“There’s a lady at the door, Monsieur, wearing a domino. She would not give me a card, but said that you would be willing to
