Chapter 10 fourth quarter

Director Kurtz and Deputy Director Savage arrived in a carriage. Professor Heywood and his student assistants escorted a stretcher covered with a white cloth and hurried into the dissecting room. Holmes found it amused to see that Chief Kurtz had sent two state troopers to guard the door of the autopsy room.What time is it, who wants to go to medical school?Kurtz rolled up the white cloth, exposing the body below the knees.Terrible.The dead man's feet were bare, and Holmes turned his head away at a glance. If he looked any further, he was about to choke: Are those still human feet? Both feet, just the feet, were doused with a large amount of something that smelled like kerosene, and then set on fire.Both feet were burnt loose and brittle, and two remaining bones protruded awkwardly from the ankles, dislocated from the ankle joints.The skin, hardly recognizable as skin, was swollen and cracked by the fire.The pink musculature is exposed.

Holmes felt dizzy and his chest tightened, as if the air in the dissecting room had suddenly become thinner, and what little air remained was surrounded by ether and chloroform.Heywood lifted the white cloth covering the rest of the body, revealing the dead man's bright red face distorted by pain, and he reached out to wipe the dirt off the dead man's eyes and cheeks.Suppressing his physical discomfort, Holmes surveyed the naked body from head to toe. Heywood leaned over to observe the corpse, and Chief Kurtz kept asking him questions, but Holmes thought the face looked familiar, but couldn't remember who it was.He blinked convulsively, wondering whether he should hold his breath so the oxygen he sucked into his lungs would stay there, or exhale it quickly so he could take another breath of air and store it before they took the little oxygen absorb light.The faces of the others were normal, and they obviously didn't care whether the air was stale. Holmes was sure that they would faint on the ground one by one at any moment.

One of those present asked Dr. Holmes if he was unwell.The man's soft, striking face, with its piercing eyes, gave him the appearance of a mulatto.The tone of his voice sounded familiar, and Holmes vaguely remembered that this was the police officer who had gone to Lowell during a meeting at the Dante Club. "Professor Holmes? Do you agree with Professor Heywood?" Director Kurtz asked afterward.The chief asked this question just out of politeness, not wanting to snub Holmes, not really asking for his opinion, because Holmes was far away from the corpse and couldn't see it clearly.Holmes tried to recall if he had overheard Heywood's conversation with Commissioner Kurtz, and vaguely recalled that Heywood seemed to have said that the dead were alive when their feet were on fire, but he must have been involuntary at the time. However, there is no way to extinguish the fire on the feet, and judging from the facial expression of the deceased and the absence of other wounds on the body, it is not impossible to die of cardiac shock.

"Well, of course," said Holmes. "Yes, of course, officer." Holmes turned toward the door, as if avoiding some fatal danger. "Gentlemen, please continue, I will take my leave for the time being, okay?" Director Kurtz turned his head and continued to ask Professor Heywood. Holmes walked to the door, walked through the hall, and walked to the yard, breathing in fresh air impatiently. It was getting late, and Dr. Holmes was wandering among the carts.The news of Talbot's murder weighed on him like a heavy weight, but out of embarrassment, he had not told anyone so far, nor had he gone to Fields or Lowell to confide the sensational story to them. news.

Walking up to an Irish woman's stall, the doctor realizes that his medical school scare was much worse than he first thought.Not so much because he loathed the transfigured corpse and the silent horror it endured, nor because Talbot, a clergyman as common in Cambridge as Washington Elms, Means killed.None of this was fundamental. What really horrified Holmes was that there was something familiar about the murder, very familiar. Holmes bought a loaf of warm brown bread and walked home.He wondered if he might have dreamed of Talbot's death, in an inexplicable skirmish.He must have read descriptions of such horrific acts, and the details had come to his mind involuntarily when he saw Talbot's body.So what book would describe such a horrible thing?Holmes stopped in the middle of the street, as if he saw the priest's flaming feet kicking in the air, and the flames were spreading rapidly...

From heel to toe—corrupt missionaries, clergymen, burned forever in the steep trenches, it is this part that burns.His heart sank. "The Divine Comedy! It's the Divine Comedy!" Longfellow studies the note left by Sergeant Ray.He mulled over the jumbled letters, copied them several times on another sheet of paper, and kept putting them back together like a game of Scrabble, forming new combinations, looking for evidence from past thoughts. For the scribbled things, he imagined many possibilities and compared them in many languages, but he still couldn't figure it out, so he had to put the hieroglyphs in a drawer.He took out the proofs of the sixteenth and seventeenth songs of "Inferno", and neatly annotated them according to the opinions of the last Dante Club meeting.It has been a long time since his poems have been on his desk.

He put down the manuscript in his hand, looked up at the attractive scenery outside the window through the window in front of the writing desk.The poet often expects that, with the arrival of autumn, his creativity will follow.There was no fire in the fireplace, but the fallen autumn leaves were piled up in the shape of flames. After dinner, he dismissed the servants, determined to make up for the newspapers that he usually had no time to read.After lighting up the lamp in the study, he only briefly read the newspaper for a few minutes.In the latest "Boston Evening News", he read a shocking reward: Edna Healy disclosed the details of the murder of her husband Artemis Healy, and specifically pointed out that the widow of Healy " At the advice of the chief of police and several other police officers," he has not been disclosed to the outside world until now.Longfellow could not bear to read any more, but in the next few hours he would realize that these details were seared into his mind.Longfellow couldn't bear to read, not because of the tragic death of the justice, but because of the widow Healy's widow's pain at this time evoked his sad memories of the past.