I must be strong and record my impressions before they fade.
Yet... no wonder my penmanship resembles the thin, palsied scrawl of a very old lady, though I am not yet twenty-five. My hand shakes despite myself, as my body shivers despite the snapping flames I sit so near.
I had hoped that my unconventional life thus far had prepared me to face disagreeable things, things that those who lead more circumscribed lives might call distasteful, even bizarre. Brutal. Shocking.
But this... where to begin?
With the beginning, I tell myself now. I take pride in not being the green girl I am taken for by the blind old eyes all around me. Buck up, my dear childish self! You are a mistress of deceit, and besides, the world will need to know the truth. Someday.
How odd it is that when one is assaulted by the unendurable that the mind fastens on the irrelevant.
So I stood alone and undiscovered on that horrible threshold and elected to notice that the center of the chamber was occupied by the most bizarre piece of furniture I had ever seen. A sort of barber's chair by way of Versailles.
Barber's chair. The phrase puts me in mind of Sweeney Todd, the murderous "demon" barber of Fleet Street in London, the city which I last visited before this one.
And, of course, thoughts of the barbarous Sweeney Todd made the rivulets of drying blood encrusting the chair's brocade into something more than... distant and gruesome embroidery.
Having forced my mind to admit what my eyes had already seen and repudiated by looking elsewhere, I forced my gaze to the figures that occupied the bloody appliance.
My first thoughts are unforgettable, and so unlike me, who has seen much unpleasantness from an early age:
I will not swoon.
I will not vomit.
I will not go mad.
I WILL NOT!
Copyright © 2001 by Carole Nelson Douglas
)
When several young women are discovered brutally slaughtered in the
lavishly appointed room of a Parisian brothel, the police bring in Irene
Adler. To find the truth? Or is her presence part of a complicated plot
to conceal the murderer's identity? These murders bear an uncanny
resemblance to murders that took place in London a short time earlier.
