A Mysterious Murder

In the heart of modern Paris, beneath the flickering gaslight of Rue Saint-Cyprien, there stands a building that refuses to die.

Old stones breathe faintly there—exhaling dust and memory. Number 14 had once been a boarding house, then a sanatorium, then abandoned for years. Now, it was a quaint but eerie apartment building, the kind gentrifiers eyed and exorcists avoided. And on the top floor, under a rotting wooden attic, was the scene of the most bizarre murder Paris had seen in over a century.

The survivors would speak of strange lights that flared without bulbs, of voices rising in languages no one knew. There were claw marks on plaster walls—six feet above the floor. Mirrors refused to reflect what they should. Candles bent sideways as though in the presence of an unseen breath.

No one in the building knew how long the tenant had been dead before the stench crawled under doors and down stairwells.

But all of them would come to remember the name: C. Auguste Dupin.