Chapel Noir by Carole Nelson Douglas Read Free Book Online Page A

American fantasist Edgar Allan Poe, whose horrific stories I had read during my Shropshire days when ghost stories were my only entertainment, all combined to heighten my natural dread at facing death, and death in a particularly revolting form.
    Still. I was a country parson’s daughter, and had seen much in my tending of the ill young and old in the parish that would surprise a dweller in large cities, where much ugliness is swept away into institutions.
    On the first story we were led again to the wide passage. A rich flocked wallpaper of oriental design glinted gold back from the walls as our guiding lamp passed. Dragons writhed in the flickering twilight, and roofs like piled hats seem to shimmer with worms instead of tiles.
    By the time we came to the painted and gilded door where two gendarmes stood at attention, my hands were cold and clasped before me. Just like . . . Pink’s, I realized, and I had seen nothing yet.
    “The first to see has the least to fear,” Irene whispered in my ear.
    I noticed that her face was pale, her features drawn into the same falsely serene control I had seen on Pink’s young face.
    The man who had never identified himself nodded to the guards. One swept open a door with military precision, never glancing inside.
    The stench that rushed out to greet us was unfortunately familiar, though stronger than any I had encountered before. A charnel-house reek of unfettered blood and bowel.
    All six of us recoiled involuntarily from that awful odor.
    Grim-faced, Inspector le Villard held up the lamp. “It is not too late to retreat.”
    Irene’s answer was to take the heavy light from him and step inside the door.
    I followed, fumbling with both hands in my pocket for my silver talisman and one of the many objects that ornamented it.
    “We are on the banks of the river Seine again, Nell,” Irene muttered.
    I knew instantly what she meant, seeing again the sopping dead body of the sailor, reeking of death and damp. We were to breathe through our mouths.
    Yet the notion of taking that fetid overwhelming scent into our lungs . . . I thrust my find to Irene. A slender glass vial capped in silver on both ends.
    “Rub the perforated end on your nostrils.”
    She recoiled from the strong scent that assailed her. I answered her confused look.
    “Smelling salts. You should not be able to detect any other odor for some minutes.”
    By then she had inhaled as deeply as a Regency dandy ingesting snuff, and I did the same. I noticed the Frenchmen behind us exchanging rueful glances, and turned to offer them a medicinal whiff. But men are foolishly fearful of being thought womanly, and they refused my remedy with terse headshakes.
    The salts had not only driven all other odors from my nostrils, they had cleared my senses and stiffened my spine. I was now free to join Irene in gazing on the scene Pink had stumbled into.
    I remembered most clearly the strange barber’s chair she had mentioned. The lamp abetted us by picking out the swirls of gilt wood that defined its outré shape.
    Gold winked from elsewhere in the chamber. It was as richly overdecorated as the room upstairs.
    Irene had lowered her gaze to the floor and was studying the wood parquet visible between the Savonnerie carpets scattered before the furniture. An unusual black background to the florid French designs gave the chamber a properly sober note, and made a dramatic canvas for the even more elaborate furniture.
    And what strange furniture it was, even for Paris! A dressing table with a towering rococo mirror. A chaise longue. Some upholstered chairs and small tables. The room was accoutered like a bedchamber in every respect . . . except that there was no bed.
    I may not know much of worldly matters, being a spinster, yet even I knew that it was most unlikely that a brothel, however elevated its clients, was not likely to have a bedroom without a bed.
    “Have you taken photographs?” Irene asked the men lurking in the doorway still