Camera Obscura Read Free Page B

more. In the back of the wardrobe she found a box and inside the box a bottle of Scotch whisky, Old Bushmills, expensive and, if she recalled correctly, a lizardine favourite. It was three-quarters empty. Beside it was a roll of bank notes. They looked new. She ran her thumb through them, then put them in her pocket. Curiouser and curiouser.
      There was a dresser with a vanity mirror and plenty of rouge and white paint, and she could almost picture the senior L'Espanaye in her mind. She went through the drawers and found a small-calibre gun at the bottom-most one on the left, and it was loaded. The bed was large and unmade, the sheets rumpled. In the small adjacent washroom she found several bottles of pills and grimy walls, and when she ran the tap the water was brackish.
      She scanned the bedroom again but found nothing else of interest and moved on to Mademoiselle L'Espanaye's room. The daughter's was almost bare, the bed dominating the room, a single chair by the window, candles, many no more than stubs, standing like fat monks around the room, their wicks dead. She tossed the room and found nothing: it was as if no one had lived there and if they had, they'd left nothing behind them.
      Conjecture: the two women shared the master bedroom, and the dead man had been using the daughter's room.
      Grimm whistled from the other room, and so she walked over and stared down at the man's corpse, which looked even worse now than it did before, thanks to Grimm. "Traces of what?" she said.
      The automaton spoke in Silbo Gomero, a technical compromise on communication that was also an assurance of confidentiality, since there were not many speakers of the whistling language, in Paris or elsewhere. The language had come from the Canary Islands, adopted by the Spanish who settled there and finally modified by Grimm's makers using a simplified French vocabulary. Grimm whistled again, and the lady said, "That doesn't make any sense."
      Grimm whistled, more insistent now, and she said, "What do you mean, watch?"
      Instead of an answer the mechanical insect crept closer to the corpse and extended a pincer toward it, gently touching the man's flesh. The lady watched. A small blue spark of electricity passed between Grimm and the dead man.
      The corpse twitched.
      The woman watched, her hand going to the butt of her gun without her being consciously aware of doing so. Grimm retreated from the body but it continued to twitch – and now its one remaining eye shot open.
      The woman took a step back and her gun was in her hand and pointing at the corpse – she watched a dead foot kick, and the finger that had been pointing at nothing was rising now, impossibly, and the dead man was pointing directly at her , his face twisted in a mask of grotesque agony, accusing her…
      The bullet took out the remaining eye and bits of brain exploded over Grimm and the print of the lizard queen. The pointing hand fell down, lifeless again. The body shuddered, once, twice, and finally subsided. The woman reholstered her gun and said, "Get rid of it."
      Grimm began to whistle then, apparently, changed its mind. It approached the corpse again, pincers extended like surgical saws. Together, woman and automaton worked to erase the crime that had taken place there, tonight, and as they worked, dismantling the lifeless body into its separate components, she wondered why it was left the way it had been – were they interrupted, or was the dead man himself a message scribbled into the stones of the Rue Morgue for her to find?
     
 

FOUR
    Outside Rue Morgue
     
 
    When the work was done she left Grimm to dispose of the body parts – the giant insect secreting quicklime, squatting over the man's dismembered corpse digesting one piece at a time. She looked through the apartment again – there had been no sign of a struggle, and she thought it was a reasonable enough proposition that the two women who resided here had merely been