Chapter 33 Section VI

Holmes, by the light of a candle, looking at a slide of insects with a microscope. He bent down and stared at a large fly through the lens, constantly adjusting the object of observation.The fly jumped and squirmed, seeming annoyed at him as the observer. no.It's not a fly jumping. The microscope slide also trembled.Suddenly there was a violent sound of horseshoes outside, and then suddenly stopped.Holmes rushed to the window and drew the curtains aside.A burly policeman in dark blue was leaning back, pulling the reins as hard as he could, to bring the spitfire mare to a halt. "Is that Dr. Holmes?" he called from the driver's seat. "You must come with me at once."

Amelia stepped forward and asked, "Wendell, what's going on?" Holmes did not answer her question, but said breathlessly: "Millie, send a letter to the Craigie's, tell them something has happened, and ask them to come round the corner to me in an hour. " The sky was gloomy, with a chilly wind blowing, as if it was going to rain.A carriage had just left, and another galloped up and stopped in the newly vacated place.Fields' carriage arrived.Lowell slammed open the carriage door and called Mrs. Holmes like a cannonball, asking her to bring Dr. Holmes back. "I don't know where he's gone, really, Mr. Lowell. But he was taken by the police. He told me to send you a note from Craigie's to meet you at the corner."

Lowell looked around the carriage, at a loss.On the corner of Charles Street, two boys were handing out flyers, shouting, "Flyers! Flyers! Get a flyer, please. Ladies and gentlemen." Lowell thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and a nameless terror gripped him, leaving his mouth dry.He pulled his hand from his pocket, holding a flyer that he had been given to him in the mall in Cambridge after seeing an unidentified man with Sheldon, and he took it. Stuff it in your pocket.He smoothed the flyer on his sleeve. "My God!" Lowell's lips trembled. The carriage stopped suddenly at the port.A small police boat took Holmes to a sleepy harbor island where an abandoned castle stood on solid granite rocks, empty and without windows.After entering the labyrinth of the fortress, the doctor followed the sergeant past a line of pale policemen, passed through several chaotic rooms, entered a cold and dark stone tunnel, and finally entered a dug-out room. Empty storage room.

The little doctor stumbled and almost fell.In the middle of the storeroom, on a hook that would have been used to hang a bag of salt or some other sack of storage, hung a man with his face turned towards him.More precisely, it had been a face.The nose was neatly cut in two, from the bridge of the nose to the bearded upper lip, and the skin on both sides overlapped.One ear hung on the side of the face as if it was about to fall off, and the hanging position was quite low, or rather, it was about to brush the rigid arched shoulder.His jaw drooped, his mouth could no longer be closed, and he seemed ready to speak at all times; however, black blood flowed from his mouth, and it was impossible to speak.A trail of blood ran straight from the severely drooping jaw to the man's genitals--the organ, the only thing left by which the monstrosity's sex could be determined, itself had been horribly cut in half, so accurately that even The doctors couldn't believe it.Muscles, nerves, and blood vessels were cut in half one by one, and the knife technique always maintained anatomical coordination, without the slightest frustrating disorder.Both hands hang limply by the sides of the body, covered with blood-soaked tourniquets, bloody and black.Hands are no longer hands.

A moment later Holmes realized that he had seen this badly disfigured face before, and a moment later he recognized the mutilated victim by the conspicuous dimple still stubbornly remaining on the chin.God!Suddenly, Holmes felt that he had died physically and mentally, that he had died once. Holmes stepped back, stepping into a cloud of vomit left behind by a homeless man who had come looking for shelter and was the first to see the scene.Holmes struggled to a nearby chair and sat down, as though he wanted to see all this clearly.He gasped involuntarily, and he didn't notice that there was a piece of underwear next to his feet that was so gorgeous that it would make people upset to look at it. It was neatly folded and placed on the trousers, and a few pieces of paper were scattered on the ground.

He heard someone calling him.It turned out that Officer Lei was standing by.The air in the room seemed to be shaking, and things in the house seemed to be tipping over.Holmes struggled to his feet, shaking his head dizzily at Ray. The doctor had an asthma attack, and the sound was sickening, but it made him inadvertently stand closer to the twisted corpse.He was just about to leave when he felt something wet lightly touch his arm.It felt like a hand, but in fact, it was a bloody leg wrapped in a tourniquet.Holmes didn't move—he was sure he did.He was too shocked to move his feet.He prayed that he was in a nightmare, and there was nothing else he could do.

"My God, it's alive!" screamed the detective, running away, his screams cut off as if severed as he squeezed his mouth shut, suppressing the churning of his stomach. And the things on it, don't let it spit out.Chief Kurtz also yelled and ran away. Holmes came back to his senses, looked directly at Jannison's blank, bulging eyes on his mutilated naked body, and carefully observed the horrific limbs swaying and twitching in the air.For a split second, actually just one-tenth of a hundredth of a second, the body came to a standstill, gradually froze, and would never twitch again, but Holmes had no doubts in the slightest about the reality of what he had just witnessed. .The doctor stood there dumbly like a zombie, his small mouth was dry and twitching uncontrollably, he blinked his eyes, uncontrollably welling up nasty tears, his fingers were writhing violently.Dr. Holmes knew that the twitching of Janison's body was not the voluntary movement of a living creature, much less the intentional movement of a sentient being.They are involuntary twitches delayed by unspeakable death.But even knowing that doesn't help.

Holmes was so cold from such a sudden touch that he hardly knew how he got back to the port and how he got back to the medical school in a police carriage named Black Maria.On one side of the carriage lay Jannison's body.Once in medical school, Haywood students volunteered to assist Dr. Holmes in dissecting cadavers.Upstairs in the medical school, in a dark room, he could barely feel how his hand was cutting the scalpel into the unbelievably chopped corpse. "The law of retribution is fulfilled in me." Holmes looked up sharply, as if hearing a child calling for help.The student turned his head and looked back, Ray, Kurtz and the other two police officers who had already entered also turned to look.Holmes stared at Janison again, his mouth grinning from the slit jaw.

"Dr. Holmes?" asked the student. "Are you all right?" He suddenly fell into hallucinations, and the voices, whispers, and commanding voices he had heard before echoed in his ears again.Holmes' hands were shaking so badly that he couldn't even cut a turkey, so he asked permission to leave early, and Heywood's assistants did the rest of the autopsy.Holmes left Grove Street in a trance, turned into an alley, and slowly let his shortness of breath ease.He heard someone coming towards him.Lei followed the doctor into the alley. "I'm sorry, I can't speak at the moment," Holmes said, looking down at the ground.

"Who killed Janison?" "How do I know!" Holmes roared.Distraught, he was numb with the mutilated body in his mind. "Translate this for me, Dr. Holmes." Ray broke Holmes' hand and slipped him a piece of letterhead. "I'm sorry, Officer Ray. We've already..." Holmes fumbled for the letter, his hands shaking violently. "'Because I parted so close,'" Ray recited what he had overheard last night, "'Alas! I now carry my head, separated from its roots in this body. Thus, The law of retribution is upon me.' That's what we just witnessed, isn't it? What does the law of retribution mean, Dr. Holmes? The law of retribution?"

"There is no definite... how do you know..." Holmes undid his silk tie, trying to catch his breath, "I don't know anything." Ray continued: "You read about this murder in a poem. You saw it before it happened, and you did nothing to stop it." "No! We did our best. We tried. Sorry, Officer Ray, I can't…" "Do you know this man?" Ray took out a newspaper with Griffon Lonza's portrait from his pocket and handed it to the doctor. "He jumped off the building at the police station." "Please!" Holmes gasped. "That's enough! Go away!" Holmes picked up the newspaper, held up the page with the portrait, and revealed, "It's Griffon Lonza." Ray's eyes lit up, which showed that he was moved and comforted. "Translate this record for me now, Dr. Holmes, will you? It's a record of what Lonza said before he died. Tell me what kind of language it is." "Italian. Tuscan dialect. Before me there was nothing created, only eternal; and I am eternal. You who walk in here, throw away all hope." "Give up all hope. He's warning me," Ray said. "No... I don't think so. From what we know of his state of mind, he probably thought he was reciting these words at the gates of hell." "You should have told the police a long time ago." Ray said loudly. "It's going to get worse if we do that!" Holmes said loudly. "You don't understand—you can't understand, Officer. Only we have the chance of finding him! We think we have found him." —we thought he had escaped. All the police had was cinders! Without us, it wouldn't stop at all!" The heavy paneled door of the author's anteroom was pushed open a crack, and the three occupants jumped out of their chairs.A black boot tentatively moved in slowly.After entering the room and closing the door, Holmes felt so safe that he no longer thought of anything that might endanger him.Haggard and pale, he sat on the same sofa with Longfellow, across from Lowell and Fields, and he wished a nod would be enough to return greetings from each of them. They waited for Holmes to start.Lowell handed him a crumpled leaflet, which stated that Janison was missing, and those who knew and provided clues would be rewarded with thousands of dollars. "So you already know," said Holmes, "Jenison is dead." He began, in a erratic, intermittent tone, with the sudden arrival of a police carriage at 21 Charles Street. Lowell drank his third glass of Bordeaux red wine and said, "Fort Warren." "Brilliant choice for our Satan," said Longfellow, "I'm afraid we don't remember this one more clearly than the one we wrote about the Divisor. We just translated it yesterday, which is kind of weird. 'Evil Bag' is A stone field - and Dante described it as a fortress." Lowell said: "Once again we see that we are dealing with a scholar of unrivaled intelligence, who is clearly capable of expressing the essence of the artistic details described in the "Divine Comedy". The details of Dante's poetry are deeply understood." Fields didn't want to listen to the literary debate at the moment. "Wendell, you said that after the murder, the police were deployed throughout the city? Why didn't Satan be found?" "To touch or see him, you need the help of the hundred-handed giant Briareus and the hundred-eyed giant Argos." Longfellow said calmly. Holmes went on, "Jennison was found by a drunkard who had been going to sleep there from time to time since the castle was disused. The drunkard was still there on Monday and everything was normal. He was back at the castle on Wednesday and saw That horrific scene. He was terrified and didn't call the police until the next day -- today. Janison was also seen on Tuesday afternoon, but he didn't go home to sleep that night. The police investigated what they could find Everyone. A prostitute in the port said she saw someone coming out of the fog in the port area on Tuesday night. She tried to follow him (I think this is her professional habit) but disappeared in front of a church trace of the man." "Jenison was killed on Tuesday night, then. But the police didn't find the body until Thursday," Fields said. "But, Holmes, you said that Janison was still... probably at that time... " "You mean... he... was killed on Tuesday, but he was still alive when I arrived at the scene this morning? I saw the corpse convulsing with my own eyes. Even if I drank the water of the river of forgetfulness, I would never Will forget!" said Holmes, with a look of disappointment on his face. "Poor Jenison was so badly mutilated that he couldn't survive--it must be--but the cutting and bandaging were done just enough to slow the flow of blood so that he wouldn't die. It was a lot like watching the tail end of a fireworks display on the Fifth of July, except I found he didn't have a single lethal organ pierced through his body. Such a brutal carnage involved a very delicate technique, must have been a man who was extremely proficient in internal trauma A man, perhaps a doctor," he said in a muffled voice, "with a sharp machete. In Janison our Satan, through pain, his most masterly law of retribution, was perfectly fulfilled. The twitches I witnessed were lifeless, Fields dear, nerves dying in final convulsions. The moment was as grotesque as any Dante could have conceived. Death has long been a boon." "But surviving two days after being attacked," Fields insisted, "what I'm trying to say is...medically speaking...survival, that's impossible!" "'Survive' here means not completely dead, not that there is still a part of life-stuck between life and death. Even if I have a thousand mouths, I don't bother to describe the process of dying from the beginning!" "Why should Phoenix be punished as a solicitor?" Lowell asked as impartially and precisely as possible. "With all our efforts we have not been able to resolve the doubts about Elisha Talbot, my dear Lowell," said Longfellow. What? Two laws of retribution, two invisible evils." "Don't you know Janison very well?" Fields asked Lovell, "Don't you really have any ideas?" "He's a friend; I'm not going to investigate his crimes!" Lowell hung his head. Holmes sighed, "Officer Ray is as sharp as a knife blade. Maybe he has always been skeptical of our knowledge. He eavesdropped on the meeting of our Dante Club and recognized the way of Janison's death from it. The law of retribution Logic, discordant, he put Janison in touch, and, with a little explanation from me, he immediately understood that the deaths of Judge Healy and Reverend Talbot also had The Divine Comedy tinge to them." “Just like Griffon Lonza did when he committed suicide at the police station,” Lovell said, “the poor guy saw Dante in everything.” "What will Officer Ray do with us now that he knows we're involved?" Longfellow asked. Holmes shrugged. "We know and don't report. We've impeded investigations into two of the most horrific murders Boston has ever seen, and now three!" Ray is most likely, as we speak, Denounce us and Dante! Will he have any loyalty to a poem? How much loyalty should we have?" Holmes got up and tightened the waist of his baggy breeches, and paced nervously.Fields rested his chin on his hands as he watched Holmes pick up his hat and coat. "I just wanted to tell him what I knew," Holmes whispered numbly. "I couldn't go on." "You need to take a break now," Fields said first. Holmes shook his head. "No, Fields dear, not just tonight." "What?" Lowell exclaimed. "Holmes," said Longfellow, "I understand that this may seem unanswerable, but it is necessary to our fight." "You can't just walk away!" Lowell said loudly.His voice echoed in the room, and he felt full of strength again. "We've gone too far, Holmes!" "We have gone too far from the beginning, far from where we belong." Holmes said calmly, "I don't know what decision Officer Ray will make, but I will cooperate without reservation, and I hope you Same thing. I just hope we don't get arrested for obstruction - or worse - complicity. Isn't that what we already did? Murder after murder, we're all to blame. " "Then you shouldn't have betrayed us to Ray!" Lowell jumped up. "What would you have done, Professor?" Holmes asked. "Going away isn't the way to go, Wendell! It's messed up. For God's sake, right here at the Longfellows' house, like all of us, you swore an oath to protect The Divine Comedy!" But Holmes was unmoved. Moving, he put on his hat and buttoned his coat. "You don't understand!" Holmes burst out all the suppressed emotions in his heart, and he began to attack Lowell, "Why did I see two horrific chopped up corpses instead of you brave men? Scholar?! I was the one who descended to Talbot's burial with a nose full of corpses! I was the one who went through the whole process from beginning to end, while you sat comfortably by the fire, sifting and analyzing the words!" "Comfortable? Don't forget, I was almost killed by a man-eating bug!" Lowell yelled. Holmes sneered, "I'd rather be bitten by ten thousand flies than see what I've seen!" "Holmes," implored Longfellow, "remember: Virgil told the pilgrim that fear was the chief obstacle to his journey." "That sentence is worth nothing to me! Say no more, Longfellow! I withdraw! We were not the first to try to release Dante's poetry, and perhaps we all failed without exception! Dante Just a lunatic, and his work is a monster. He was kicked out of Florence, so he got revenge by writing a blatant literature that pretends to be God. Now we put it in the city we thought we loved Release it, and we will pay the price of our lives for it!" "Enough, Wendell! Enough!" Lowell yelled, standing in front of Longfellow, as if defending him from the blows. "Dante's own son thought he was hallucinating that he had actually gone to hell, and spent his life trying to deny what his father said!" Holmes gushed, "Why should we To rescue him at the cost of his life? The Divine Comedy is not a literary work of love. Neither Piedrich nor Florence, Dante cares! He is venting his anger at being exiled, Imagine his enemies struggling and begging for help! Have you ever heard him mention his wife, even once? In spite of all the things that have disappointed him, he feels great satisfaction and that's why! I just hope Protect us from losing everything we have! I've hoped for that since the beginning!" "You don't want to find out who's guilty," Lowell said, "just as you never thought Bucky was guilty, just as you assumed Professor Webster was innocent when he was hanging from a rope. When dangling around!" "Not like that!" cried Holmes. "Oh, that's a good thing you're doing for us now, Holmes. A good thing!" shrieked Lowell. "You're as steady as your wildest lyrics! "He was about to continue, but Longfellow's soft palm covered his mouth tightly, and he couldn't break it off, like an unbreakable iron gauntlet. "We would not have made such great progress without you, my good friend. You do need to take a good rest. Please pay our respects to Mrs. Holmes." Longfellow said softly. Holmes left the author's reception room.Longfellow lowered his hand, and Lowell followed the doctor to the door.Holmes hurried into the hall, looking back over his shoulder as his friend followed him, staring icily.Turning the corner, Holmes was hit hard by a wheelbarrow full of papers, being pushed by Teal, the night shifter in Fields' office with a mouth that was always grinding his teeth or Chewing action dude.Holmes was knocked over, the trolley overturned, and papers were strewn all over the hall and on the doctor.Teal kicked the paper off Holmes and tried sympathetically to help him to his feet.Lovell also charged at Holmes, but stopped again, again irritated, ashamed of his soft-heartedness. "Well, you're happy now, Holmes. Longfellow needs us! You betrayed him at last! You betrayed the Dante Club!" Listening to Lowell's repeated accusations, Till's eyes widened in horror, and he helped Holmes up. "I'm very sorry," he whispered in Holmes' ear.Even though it was entirely the doctor's fault, he could barely utter a word of apology. Lowell rushed into the author's reception room and slammed the door behind him. "Well," Lovell was pleading, "tell me how Holmes did this to us, Longfellow. Why would Holmes do this at this hour?" Fields shook his head. "Lowell, Longfellow thinks he's realized something," he said, studying the look on the poet's face. "Do you remember how we dealt with the Divisor piece last night?" "I remember. So what?" Lovell asked. Longfellow had already begun to pick up his coat, and he looked out the window, "Fields, is Mr. Holden still at the Riverside Press at this time?" "Horton's always there, at least when he's not in church. Can he do us any favors, Longfellow?" "We must get there at once," said Longfellow. "Have you realized something to help us, my dear Longfellow?" Lowell asked hopefully. He felt that Longfellow was thinking about it, but the poet made no reply as he rode across the river to Cambridge. Arriving at the Riverside Printing Office, housed in a tall brick building, Longfellow asked Holden for a complete printing record of the translation of the "Inferno" translation of the "Divine Comedy". Fields showed him the schedule. "Longfellow handed in the proof the week after we had the translation meeting. So, no matter what day Horton wrote on the receipt when he received the proof, we met at the Dante Club before that, the week before. Wednesday." The translation of the third song, about the Fencer, was delivered on the third or fourth day after Judge Healy was killed.Three days before the Wednesday devoted to the translation of songs Nos. 17, 18, and 19, which contained punishment for clergymen, the Reverend Talbot was murdered. "But we found something about the murder!" Lowell said. "That's right, and at the end of the day I moved our schedule up to the Ulysses piece so we could get back on our feet, and I did the middle pieces myself. Now, Janison's been murdered, by all accounts , happened on this Tuesday. It was triggered by the article we translated yesterday, and it happened the day before we finished the article.” Lowell's face instantly turned pale, and then flushed again. "I see, Longfellow!" Fields exclaimed. “Every murder — every crime — happened the day before we at the Dante Club translated the poem that justified the murder,” Longfellow said. "Why didn't we see that before?" Fields exclaimed. "Someone is teasing us!" Lowell's voice was low and echoing.Immediately afterwards, he quickly lowered his voice and whispered: "Someone has been watching us from the beginning to the end, Longfellow! This must be someone who understands our Dante Club! Someone pinpointed our translation progress and committed murder!" "Wait a minute. It might just be a horrible coincidence." Fields stared at the paper again. "Look here. We've translated nearly twenty-four articles, and only three murders." "Three terrible coincidences," said Longfellow. "It's no coincidence," Lowell said firmly, "our Satan is racing us to see what comes first—either to translate the Divine Comedy into words, or into blood! We lost that game!" Fields objected, "But who is likely to know our progress in advance? Doesn't such an elaborate crime need to have enough time? We don't write down the timetable in detail, and occasionally there will be a week apart, sometimes Longfellow would skip one or two articles he didn’t think we were fully prepared to translate, and throw them out of sequence.” "Even I don't know which ones we've translated, let alone who would know," Lowell admits. "Who is likely to have the details, Longfellow?" asked Fields. "If all this is true," Lowell said, "it means that we are somehow implicated in a murder that has already begun!" All three fell silent.Fields looked at Longfellow with concern. "Nonsense!" he said. "Lowell's talking nonsense!" was the only retort he could think of. "I don't claim to understand this strange pattern," said Longfellow, rising from Holden's desk, "but we can't miss what it suggests. Whatever actions Officer Wray takes, we will It can no longer be thought that our participation is solely our prerogative. It must be translated now, or perhaps more people will be slaughtered." After Fields returned to Boston in a carriage, Lowell and Longfellow walked home through the falling snow.Longfellow stopped for a while a block from Craigie's. "Are we responsible for this?" His voice sounded frightening, so faint that only he could hear it. "Don't let that maggot get in your head. I said those words inadvertently. Longfellow." "You've got to be honest with me, Lowell. Do you think—" Longfellow hadn't finished speaking when a little girl's scream came from the sky, and the ground on Bretto Avenue seemed to be shaking. Longfellow followed the sound intently to find out where it came from, and when it came to his own home, his legs gave way.He knew he would have to rush frantically down Bretto Avenue towards the house under the first snow that covered the ground.But for a brief moment, his thoughts held him in place, and he trembled at the thought of what might happen, like a man waking from a terrible nightmare with wide-eyed eyes in a quiet room. Search for signs of bloody mishaps as well.Memories rush forward like water breaking a bank.Why can't I save you, my love? "Go get my rifle?" Lowell cried frantically. The two rushed to the first steps of Craigie's house at almost the same moment, and they rushed into the vestibule side by side.In the drawing room, they found Charlie Longfellow on his knees trying to calm excited little Anne Allegra, who was yelling and squealing with joy as she watched the presents her brother brought them.Trapp was barking with delight, wagging his fat tail in circles, and baring his teeth like a man laughing. "Oh, Daddy," she cried, "Charlie's coming home for Thanksgiving! He's brought us French jackets, the red and black striped ones!" Alice gave them to Longfellow and Lowe. Er strikes a pose. "Heroic!" Charlie clapped his hands in praise.He hugs Dad. "Hey, Dad, you're so pale, aren't you? Are you sick? I just wanted to give you a little surprise! You look much older," he said, laughing. Longfellow's white skin returned to color, and he pulled Lovell aside. "My Charlie is coming home," he whispered, as if Lowell didn't see it. Late at night, when the children had gone upstairs to bed and Lowell was gone, Longfellow was at peace. A tiny scraping sound, like fingers running across a blackboard, caught Trapp's attention, and his ears pricked up alertly, even though he had been trampled by Longfellow while playing.The sound sounded like the screech of ice scraping against a window in the wind. The hour hand pointed to two o'clock in the morning, and Longfellow was still writing.The fire burned so hot that the mercury column on the thermometer rose to the sixth mark, but no matter how much he added wood to the fire, it would not rise a little bit.While closing the shutters, he noticed an unusual mark on one of the windows.He opened the shutter again.The scraping of ice turned into another sound: someone cutting glass with a knife.He is just a stone's throw away from them.At first glance, the inscriptions carved into the window panes are somewhat indecipherable.But Longfellow read it almost as soon as he saw it, but he put on his hat, scarf, and coat and went out the window, and he ran his fingers at the sharp edges of the words, so that this threatening letter could be read. Read it clearly. "My translation".