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Paris! In Paris it was, in the autumn of 1840. There I lived with my friend, that strange and interesting young fellow, August Dupin. We passed our days in reading and quiet thought, and our nights in long walks through the city. I have written before of his peculiar power of reasoning, a power which seemed to see the thoughts in a man’s soul as clearly as words upon a page.
One evening we were sitting in our library, the windows dark with a cold rain, when we received a visitor. He was introduced as Monsieur Ledoux, a country magistrate from a place called Les Marécages — the Marshes. His face was pale, and his hands would not be still.
“Monsieur Dupin,” he said, “a gentleman of my district has disappeared. His name is Valancourt. He has vanished from his house, which stands alone near the marshlands. We have searched for three days. The mud has swallowed every sign. His nephew, the only other person in the house, is sick with worry. But the local police — they are baffled. They find nothing. I have heard of your talents. I beg you to come and look with your own eyes.”
Dupin, who took a dark pleasure in problems which baffled others, agreed at once.
The house of Valancourt was a grey, wet place, surrounded by land that seemed more water than earth. The air smelled of rot. The nephew, a young man named Claude, met us with a face full of a careful, quiet sorrow. He told his story simply: his uncle had gone out walking in the evening and never returned.
The search had been thorough. Men had probed the black bogs with long poles. They had looked in every shed and thicket. Dupin walked the grounds slowly, his eyes missing nothing. He looked at the mud, at the walls of the house, at the old garden. He asked no unusual questions.
That night in our room, Dupin sat by the fire, his mind far away. Then he turned to me.
“Our young friend Claude,” he said, “is a man who watches us too closely. He does not fear the search. He fears only one specific discovery. He does not glance toward the marshes; he glances toward the house, toward the old kitchen garden. His anxiety has a fixed address.”
“What do you propose?” I asked.
“That the mind of a guilty man,” said Dupin, “is a locked room. We must make him believe we have already entered it, and that his secret is known. We shall stage a revelation.”
What followed was a thing of dark theatre. With only the magistrate in his confidence, Dupin made arrangements. The next morning, he declared the search hopeless.
“The earth has taken him,” Dupin said to Claude and the others gathered in the yard. “We must accept it. There is nothing more to be done here.”
He saw the subtle release in Claude’s posture, the quiet victory in his eyes.
“However,” Dupin continued, “before I leave, there is a point of cellar construction I wish to examine. It relates to the case of a missing man I read of once. Magistrate, Monsieur Claude, will you humor me?”
Puzzled but unsuspecting, they followed him into the cold, stone cellar. There, on a low table used for salting meat, lay a long shape covered by a heavy cloth.
“In that old case,” Dupin said, his voice calm, “the body was found somewhere no one had thought to look. A place declared useless.”
As he finished speaking, he stepped on a hidden cord.
There was a sharp snap.
The cloth flew back as the shape beneath it jerked upright, revealing the pale, dead face of Valancourt, seeming to stare with empty eyes at his nephew.
Claude did not scream. He made a gasping, choking sound, as if the breath had been stolen from his body. He stumbled backward, his face a mask of pure, unthinking terror.
“NO! IT IS A TRICK! HE IS IN THE WELL NO ONE COULD KNOW!”
He stopped himself, but it was too late. The truth poured out of him then — the argument, the accident, the desperate hiding of the body. The police seized him as he raved.
When it was over, Dupin lifted the cloth to show the simple mechanism of a strong spring and a lever.
“You see,” he said to the astonished magistrate, “the guilty mind knows its own secret. I merely built a key to fit the lock of his fear. When his own victim seemed to rise in accusation, his reason could not bear it.”
He placed the little device on the table.
“The body, of course, has since been recovered from its hiding place. It was exactly where his broken confession stated. But a body is silent. A man’s own terror, however, speaks volumes.”