Ghosts by Gaslight (30 page)

Would that I could climb into bed and sink into slumber—but the combination of the memories the last few days have stirred and the balloon that floats near my window keeps me awake.

XII

“I intend to take my husband and depart this house immediately,” Isabelle said. “Will you help me?”

“Yes,” Coleman said.

XIII

There was a moment’s resistance, then the tip of the rapier broke the balloon’s skin. Coleman couldn’t say what he had expected—for the paper sphere to burst, or deflate, or shoot across the library on its suddenly released contents—but assuredly, it was not the gout of thick black fluid over the blade of the sword, across the floor. He drove the rapier in to the hilt, through the balloon’s other side, and withdrew it as his tutor had instructed him, ready for a second thrust.

He need not have bothered. Listing to the right, the balloon was sinking, dark liquid dripping from the cuts Coleman had made to it. The stuff was thick as treacle and struck the marble tiles with a wet splat. With a strangled cry, Dunn ran for the sword rack. Coleman stabbed the next balloon, stepped forward, and slashed the balloon after that. By the time he heard Dunn’s shoes slapping the floor behind him, Coleman had opened a vent in the fourth of the man’s inventions. His sword was coated in whatever filled the balloons, which oozed across the floor in growing puddles that stank of rot. It seemed impossible that such a substance could cause the balloons to rise, and yet—

Coleman turned, sweeping his sword in a wide arc that caught Dunn’s stab and flung his blade to the side. The man recovered quickly, cutting an X in front of him. Rather than parry, Coleman retreated several paces. Dunn was considerably stronger than he and had selected a heavy cavalry saber for his weapon; Coleman did not rank his chances of defeating the man especially high. If he could distract him from Isabelle, who had assisted Cal up from the table and was supporting him as he limped toward the library door, then Coleman would consider his performance a success.

Truth to tell, he was surprised by the fury with which Dunn now attacked him. Without a doubt, the balloons had cost him no small amount of time and effort. But Dunn’s face was scarlet, his large eyes protruding with fury. Coleman had little doubt that, were he to allow Dunn the opportunity, his host would put his saber to deadly use. The man’s moves were exaggerated, almost parodic, those of someone whose notions of handling a sword were drawn from the stage; should any of his swipes connect, however, its effects would be real enough.

Dunn had backed him to the foot of the table. A pair of balloons floated to Coleman’s right, closer to the broad oak expanse (which, he had time to notice, was incised with row after row of the same figures written on the balloons’ paper surface). There was no need for him to slash the two of them, yet there was no denying the deep rush of pleasure that accompanied the act. At this latest insult to his inventions, Dunn roared and charged. Coleman ducked the swing at his head and jabbed Dunn’s right arm high, near the shoulder. Dunn yelped and retreated a step.

The library door slammed shut behind Isabelle and Cal Earnshaw. Coleman doubted Cal would last out the next hour, let alone the remainder of the night, but at least he would do so in the company of his wife and not splayed on a table surrounded by a charlatan and his paper toys. Coleman lowered the tip of his sword. His breath coming fast, he said, “There. Mrs. Earnshaw’s wishes have been fulfilled. Now perhaps you and I can settle matters between us in a more civilized fashion. I apologize for the destruction of your creations. I would be willing to recompense you a fair amount—”

“You fucking idiot,” Dunn said. He had pressed his left hand over the wound Coleman had given him; his fingers were scarlet. He had not dropped his saber, which he pointed at the first balloons Coleman had vandalized. “You think these are works of
art
? They’re cages.”

“More metaphors?” Coleman looked to the other end of the room. The balloons he had stabbed were in a state of half collapse on the floor, surrounded by ever-widening pools of brackish ichor. Those he had sliced open were sagging downwards, raining their contents as they descended. Through the vents he had cut in them, he could distinguish something, a mottled surface his blade had torn and which was the source of the viscous liquid. That layer was pierced by additional holes, lozenge shaped and anywhere in size from that of a small coin to a handbreadth. Each of the holes was moving, opening and closing with a motion that was repellently familiar. Coleman stared at them blankly before understanding rushed in and he recognized the apertures as mouths. For a moment, he felt the room around him tilt crazily. He reached his left hand to his forehead. “My God . . .”

With a sudden burst of speed, Dunn lunged forward and stabbed Coleman in the chest. The blade was a white shock. For a moment, Coleman was propelled out of his body to a lightless place. When he returned, he had fallen to his knees and Dunn was holding forth. “—true,” he said. “The veil between the worlds is thinner, here. With the proper preparations, the inhabitants of the other realm may be lured across, captured, and put to work. Their physical capabilities are limited, but what they offer in terms of knowledge . . . Their appetites, however, are considerable, and they require a rather specialized diet. Human sensation sustains them—the more intense, the better the meal. Pain they find particularly satisfying. The agonies of the dying will keep them happy and compliant for days.”

“Your . . . services . . .” Coleman panted. With each breath, his chest filled with white fire.

“No doubt some of my clients have taken comfort from their time with me,” Dunn said. “They’ve certainly been more use here than at any other time in their lives. It’s a pity,” he continued, “I had hoped that you—an artist—might understand the work in which I am engaged here. It was not my intention for your stay to end this way. But since it has, and since you have deprived my friends of their meal . . .” Dunn surveyed the balloons at the head of the table, the pair at its foot. The injuries of the nearer balloons did not appear as grave; indeed, while Dunn had been speaking, they had drifted closer to him. Through the rents in their paper cages, Coleman could see their excess of mouths gulping with a motion that reminded him of hungry fish at the surface of a pool. Dunn said, “Your attempt at gallantry has cost me more than you can conceive.”

Coleman’s shirt and trousers were warm, sticky, heavy with the blood emptying him. The library paled almost to blank, then returned. “As,” he said to Dunn, “as . . . a gentle-gentleman . . . I wonder if . . . if you . . .”

“You must be joking,” Dunn said; nonetheless, his bulk inclined towards Coleman.

Gripping its hilt as tightly as he could, Coleman slashed the rapier across Dunn’s face. As he did, something broke loose inside him and a tide of blood poured from the wound in his chest. He let go of the sword and fell beside it.

A thin, high-pitched scream rose from Dunn’s throat. Coleman’s sword had raked his eyes, and his cheeks were wet with blood and fluid. He had dropped the saber and held his hands up on either side of him, as if imploring some supernatural agency to his aid. Still screaming, Dunn crashed into the table with such force it jolted across the floor. He staggered back from the collision, lost his footing, and tumbled down.

The balloons were waiting for him. Their prisons ruptured, the creatures they had contained surged out of them and over Dunn. His vision was failing, but Coleman had the impression of something more liquid than solid, enough like a jellyfish to warrant the comparison. Dunn’s voice climbed higher, then failed. He clawed at the things on his chest, but that only allowed them to attach to his hands. With what must have been Herculean effort, Dunn sat up. His lips were forming words Coleman could not hear. Before he had uttered more than a few of them, one of the creatures spread itself over his face. His body shook as if with a seizure, then sagged backwards. In the quiet that followed, Coleman heard the noises of eating. Apparently, the balloons’ prisoners were capable of taking their nourishment more directly.

The library faded a second time. When it returned, it was less distinct. Coleman guessed more of his blood was outside his body than remained in it. How odd to die so quickly. How odd to die in a library. In some ways, it was as appropriate a location as any. He hoped that Isabelle had managed to get Cal out of the house. He had waited too long to take her concerns seriously and try to aid her; he hoped it wouldn’t be held against him. He wasn’t much of a believer in an afterlife, hadn’t been for decades. He supposed he’d been mistaken. He wondered what he should expect. Whatever it was, he hoped it wouldn’t be hungry.

XIV

From
Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia
(third edition):

Coleman, Mark Stephen (1842–1888). American novelist and short story writer. Born in Kingston, New York, Coleman left for study at Cambridge at the age of eighteen and spent almost the entire rest of his life abroad, living successively in London, Paris, Venice, and then London again before returning to the Hudson Valley in his final months. Like Henry James, with whom he is often compared, Coleman took as his subject the experiences of Americans in Europe; however, Coleman’s Americans are plagued by remorse of past sins personal and familial, a preoccupation that links his work to that of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His most famous novel is
Belgrave’s Garden
(1879), an account of a wealthy American’s attempt to cultivate the land on which his ancestor ordered a brutal massacre during the second Jacobite rebellion in 1745. Coleman’s death was notorious: he died as a result of an apparent duel with the spiritualist Parrish Dunn, who also was slain.

For Fiona

Afterword to
“The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons”

Almost from the moment I received Nick’s invitation to submit to the anthology, I knew that the story would focus on these mysterious, faintly sinister balloons, of whose origins I’m honestly unsure (except that, due to the threat of their flying away should you relax your grip on them, balloons have been a locus of anxiety for me since I was a small child and one escaped up into the sky at the amusement park my parents had taken me to). I could see them clearly in my mind’s eye, these large, papery spheres, the creases in whose coverings were clearly visible. The temporal setting of the story suggested a Henry-Jamesian writer as the protagonist, as well as the story’s use of spiritualism (it is true that New York’s Hudson Valley was a center of spiritualist activity during the 1850s). I originally had it in mind to write a more conventionally structured story, but I stalled on that version not too far into it, and the story remained in a state of partial completion until it occurred to me that I might approach its material in a less conventional way, after which, the story spilled out of me in a couple of weeks. A couple of last-minute edits, and the story was done.

—J
OHN
L
ANGAN

John Harwood

John Harwood was born in Hobart, Tasmania, where he grew up in a house full of books, including numerous collections of ghost stories, an interest that would resurface many years later in his first novel,
The Ghost Writer
. He was educated at the Friends’ School and the University of Tasmania, where he read English and philosophy, before going on to Cambridge as a graduate student.

The Ghost Writer
(first published by Jonathan Cape in 2004) won the International Horror Guild’s First Novel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Horror and Dark Fantasy, and the “Children of the Night” Award for Best Gothic Novel of 2004, from the Dracula Society of Great Britain.
The Séance,
a dark mystery set in late Victorian England, was published in 2008; it won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel of 2008. Both novels are published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

J
OHN
H
ARWOOD
Face to Face

I
T WAS, I
think, the last Christmas of the old century; at any rate it was certainly at Reginald Carstairs’ great barracks of a place down in Surrey that my friend Maurice Trevelyan and I were sitting up late; so late that, excepting the bishop, we had the drawing room fire entirely to ourselves. And since the bishop was, as usual, sound asleep, he made an ideal chaperone. Nobody seemed to know what he was, or had been, bishop of; I very much doubt whether he knew himself, for he was so old and venerable that he woke only long enough to dine, imbibe a glass or two of port, and settle himself back into his favourite armchair. He was invariably asleep in it when the last guest went upstairs, no matter how late; but someone must have put him to bed, for his chair was always empty in the mornings.

Not that we required a chaperone: I was, as everybody knew, simply a married woman whose husband never went out, and Maurice was equally well established in the character of a forty-five-year-old bachelor of quiet habits and modest means. He had remained unmarried, it was rumoured, because of a youthful attachment, prematurely ended by the death of the woman to whose memory he remained devoted. It was not a subject I had ever raised with him, for Maurice hated to be quizzed over his personal life. I had divined this early on, in fact on the very day we were introduced in the office of the review he was then editing. Some acquaintance was chaffing him about a supposed indiscretion; I saw Maurice recoil; he saw my discomfort on his behalf, and a current of sympathy was set flowing between us. The review, to which I contributed a tale or two, lasted less than a year before its patron abandoned it, but our friendship was by then a settled thing.