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!