Most residents who remained fell into one of
three categories of exile: new couples setting
up housekeeping on a shoestring budget; the
elderly crowded out of the more expensive
districts; and young gentlemen of dubious
character. So it little surprised Lieutenant
Nicholas Rey to discover that the latest
address sources had found for the safecracker
Langdon W. Peaslee was in a Columbia Square
rooming house, bordered on one side by a
railroad track and on the other by a house of
ill-repute.
After Mr. Lowell's insistence that Peaslee
had been the stranger who had attacked him on
the mountain in Pittsfield, Rey and the Dante
Club had deduced that Peaslee was at the time
gathering the insects needed to frame Willard
Burndy when Lowell appeared on his own insect
expedition. Detective Rantoul, they concluded,
must have ordered Peaslee to do away with
Marcus Arnold, whose identity Rantoul had
discovered from the Soldiers' Aid Home.
In the weeks following the murders, Rey
pushed the weather-beaten Chief Savage to put
the heat on Peaslee. The Evening Telegraph's
Blake Spurn, suspicious of the case since his
meeting with Burndy, stayed on top of the
facts. The thief, meanwhile, disappeared from
Boston altogether. Rey guessed that Rantoul
had ordered his slippery cohort to skip town
until a conviction was returned in the Burndy
trial so they could collect their full reward.
During the sensation of Burndy's trial,
Burndy was even accused of supporting by some
the plot to assassinate Lincoln; by the
morning of the hanging, the unlucky
safecracker must have almost believed the
widely held insinuation that he was the
incarnation of all the nation's evils. After
Burndy was hung and the reward paid in full,
Rey's instinct told him that Peaslee was too
proud to stay away from Boston for long.
Especially with the field of safecracking left
wide open by Burndy's demise. A few weeks into
March, the Telegraph reported a sighting of
the glib safecracker around his favorite
watering hold, the Stackpole Tavern. A few
days later, Rey had traced Peaslee's
whereabouts to the South End.
"If he doesn't talk here," Rey briefed Sgt.
Stoneweather, "arrest him so we can bring him
in." Stoneweather nodded.
"Rantoul won't find out about this, will he,
Rey?" Stoneweather asked.
Rey put a finger to his lips. He passed
through the rooming house's heavy walnut door,
which boasted the fine woodwork of the South
End's faded glory, and up the stairs to the
room Peaslee had hired a week earlier from the
two widows who owned the establishment.
"Peaslee," Rey called out from the hall.
After several unanswered knocks, Rey
discovered the door to be unlocked and waved
Stoneweather in behind him. They found the
parlor and the bedroom empty, with minimal
signs of life. As they prepared to check the
wash room, Rey caught sight of a quick,
fleeting motion out of the corner of his eye.
He pulled his revolver.
He gestured to Stoneweather to be still, then
pointed.
An ashen gray reptile, covered in brown
hexagons, at least seven feet long, slithered
out suspiciously from the wash room for a
moment, then whipped around and returned
inside. The slithering, sliding sounds, that
only a moment earlier might have been mistaken
for silence, seemed all at once to fill the
apartment.
Rey led Stoneweather to the arched doorway of
the wash room.
There, in the bathtub, a man's sinewy, naked
body lay outstretched, arms hanging limply
over the sides. Rey counted seven,
Stoneweather ten, diamond-branded serpents
swarming over the body, shaking their black
and white ringed tails in a sign of conquest
and warning. Two snakes circled the arms of
the body as if to bind them. Two others of the
throng sank their fangs into both hollow
cheeks, while another wrapped its astounding
length around the inner thighs and loins. One
of the serpents, the largest of the group
(Stoneweather guessed it was eleven feet),
turned and displayed to the visitors its two
hollow fangs at the front of its mouth,
enclosed by two poisonous sacks of venom.
Stoneweather's hands began shaking violently
and he drew his weapon, firing aimlessly at
the bathtub.
"Stop! Stop!" Rey yelled. "He's dead already.
Let them be."
Stoneweather lowered his firearm, having only
shattered a few tiles in the wall. The snakes
paid little attention to the clamor, as if to
turn their noses up at such petty savagery.
The graceful creatures were so wholly entwined
around the limbs of the body as to make the
slender and punctured form of Langdon Peaslee
appear to be simply another serpent,
undulating with the rhythmic movements of his
fellow creatures.
Nicholas Rey could not bring himself to move
away from the scene, mesmerized by the
gliding, soothing motion of the vipers.
Rey thought of the lines from Mr.
Longfellow's translation, a presentation copy
of which had been sent to him with best wishes
from the poet. Rey remembered the punishment
of the thieves in the Eighth Circle of Hell;
there they were consumed by monstrous snakes,
then transformed into serpent forms
themselves. A line of Mr. Longfellow's - of
Dante's - reverberated through Rey's mind:
"Oh Justice of God! O how severe it is, that
poureth down such blows for vengeance!
