Free Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology by Paul Kane

foreman didn’t seem to know what to make of this strange little guy in the fancy clothes. But on the principle that most people he met were going to turn out to be more important than he was, he coughed it up. “We got twenty men dead. The whole night shift. I went away to sign in the morning crew, and when I got back they was all...” He faltered into silence and pointed down into the caisson, as if the period of his sentence might be found down there.
    “Twenty men?” Dupin echoed, and O’Reilly nodded. “Twenty men is a full complement, then? A full workforce?”
    “It depends what’s going on,” O’Reilly said. “There’s less men on at night, on account of we just light the lanterns up in one half of the caisson. There’s a fire hazard, see?”
    “No,” Dupin said forcefully.
    “What?”
    “No, I do not see. Show me.”
    “Listen here, I got to...”
    “Show me.”
    If the situation hadn’t been so tragic, I might have laughed at the spectacle of this queer little foreigner taking charge so decisively. Dupin followed the foreman and I followed Dupin, my materials case clutched in my hand like a doctor’s Gladstone bag—only there wasn’t going to be any good I could do down there, I thought, as we skirted round the wheezing steam pump. Not unless you count bearing witness.
    The caisson was eighty feet long, sixty wide and forty deep. The last ten feet or so were under the bedrock of the East River, so the air had a hellish dampness to it. We went down through several successive chambers, each sealed off by greased tarpaulins laid out in overlapping sheets. You had to lift a corner of the tarpaulin each time, like turning the page of a massive book, to expose the trapdoor and carry on down to the next level. Below us, candle flames flickered fitfully like someone was keeping vigil down there. The bellows of the steam pump kept up a consumptive breathing from up over our heads, and from below us that sound was compounded by the muttered conversations you mostly get around the bedsides of dying men.
    The floor of the caisson was one half packed earth and one half new-laid stone. There weren’t any dying men there, only hale ones and dead ones. The dead ones were laid out in rows, like men sleeping in a dormitory. The living ones stood over them, candles in their hands, looking impotent and terrified as behooves men who are in the presence of such a disaster.
    The shift manager—a clerkish-looking man of middle age, named Sittingbourne—introduced himself to us, and we returned the favor. I was vague about exactly who Dupin was, but emphasized our association with the Harper’s Weekly. That put a woeful look on Sittingbourne’s face, as well it might. This was the sort of thing he would probably have wanted to keep out of the papers until he’d talked to his bosses about what shape his future might likely take.
    “See here,” he said, “don’t you go talking to none of my people without me being in on the conversation. Is that understood?”
    “You got any people left for me to talk to?” I countered— and he deflated like a punctured soufflé.
    “It was an accident,” he said. “A terrible accident. I don’t see how anyone could have foreseen this, or done anything to guard against it.”
    “Perhaps not,” Dupin said acerbically. “But perhaps—yes. That is what we must ascertain. I wish to see the bodies.”
    This came as a surprise to all of us, but principally to Mr. Sittingbourne, who thought he was dealing with newspapermen and now wondered if he was maybe dealing with something even scarier than that. A state commissioner, maybe.
    “The... the bodies?” he temporized.
    Dupin brushed past him, taking his candle out of the man’s hand in an en passant move that made me wonder if he’d ever done any fencing. He squatted down beside the nearest body and brought the candle up close to its face.
    I winced, but I didn’t look away. I’m a sketch artist, and looking away