¿Qué Sucedió En La Calle Morgue? (en Inglés)

What happened at the Rue Morgue?

By María Paula Guevara Rodríguez

One day, at about three o’clock, a number of terrible screams awoke the people of the Quartier St. Roch. The screams were coming from the fourth floor of a house in the Rue Morgue. Only two people lived there: Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye. After several attempts, the neighbors were finally able to enter the house together with two policemen. By this time, there were no more screams. But as they were running up the stairs, they heard two more angry voices coming from the upper part of the house. However, when they got to the fourth floor there was again silence. They divided into small groups to search the whole house. When they arrived at a back room, nothing could have prepared them for what they were going to see. The scene they discovered was almost too horrible to be described.

The apartment was disorganized. The furniture had been broken and the bed was lying in the middle of the floor. On chair was a razor covered in blood. Bloody lengths of human hair laid in the fire place. On the floor there were three large silver spoons, an earring and two bags that contained four thousand francs in gold. The drawers of a desk, which stood in one corner, had been opened and papers were scattered about.

Madame L’Espanaye was nowhere to be seen. Somebody noticed an extraordinary amount of soot in the fireplace and there they found the dead body of the daughter. The body was warm and was badly bruised and cut. The throat was also bruised and finger marks, which suggested that she had been strangulated.

They searched the rest of the house but found nothing. Finally, they went into the small garden at the back of the house. There they found the body of the old lady. Her throat had been completely cut. Two men had been trying to raise her but none of them could have imagined that the head would fall off. The body itself had been completely mutilated.

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