Ghosts by Gaslight (60 page)

She saw from his fine clothes that he had money. “I am Semiramis, Queen of Babylon,” she said, which was her usual nonsense in those days. I was breathless in a corner, and Monsieur was in tears. Maman could see immediately that he was ill, because she began to assemble from her shelf of jars one of her nostrums. I see now, after years of training in this infirmary, how harmful this was. I believe now that she might have poisoned many customers over the years, but in those days I thought it only foolishness, as I saw her prepare a sachet of goufre dust and pepper, because of the man’s fever. His eyes shone. My mother lit the altar candles, and then closed the shutters and the door into the yard.

“Monsieur,” she said, “someone is haunting you.”

“Yes.”

“And this person is a woman.”

“Yes.”

“And she disturbs your rest.”

“Yes.”

She said this to every man, and it was always so. She had placed him in an armchair and put a stool under his boots. Then she sat down beside him to take his pulse and put a damp cloth over his brow. Nor did he pull away from her, because he was desperate to be comforted, and in spite of my past fear I looked at him, a gentleman not yet thirty-five, with good teeth and hair.

“Shall we ask her what she wants? But, Monsieur, please tell me. Must we search for her among the living or the dead?”

His expression was desolate. Maman gave a signal, and I went to the altar to light a pyramid of incense and then wash my hands.

Will you hand me my rosary, there from the table? Thank you. It is not a serpent! It won’t bite you! I can see you are a skeptical person, as I was in my naiveté. But this Voodoo conjuring was not a matter of an error or harmless tricks, or the waste that comes from believing something that is not so. It is an opposing force. Not to believe, it is a kind of innocence. Now I think my faith commenced that day, the faith that brings me to this white bed. Before I was unable to distinguish, because I loved my mother, who jumbled them together, good and bad, sin and love. But this is our work on earth, to separate these things.

Now it began raining again, first gently, and then making spots on the dirt floor. I heard the thunder in the direction of Saint Roch. Superstitious, I touched the crucifix around my neck while my mother began to croon her language, most of it entirely invented out of nonsense words. Though I had heard these things before, and though they could not fail to embarrass me, still I was impressed to see her in her blue, flowered robe tied with a crimson sash, her thick hair knotted up. She was a tall woman, taller than I. She stood with her hand on Monsieur’s forehead, while he stared up at her. An educated man, doubtless he was not convinced by her mumbo-jumbo, and at the same time he might have realized he was in a dangerous position, closed up in a poor woman’s cottage. I saw him glance toward the door. At the same time I was fumbling through my mother’s wooden chest, and laying out on the altar her scientific implements, as she called them, her beakers and alembics for distilling her love potions, her hypodermic syringes, her fortune cards and tablets for automatic writing. If these things reassured Monsieur, he gave no sign. “She is very near,” my mother said. “I feel her wanting to come in,” words I had heard before.

Often on these occasions she would contort her face, and the voice of the spirit would slip between her clenched lips in a whisper, easy to misunderstand. That morning I was surprised all this had progressed so quickly. Usually my mother would sit to ask some questions, gaining confidences that she then would give back, though nothing that might shock someone, for her purpose was always to console or reassure. These phrases that she used were very bland. But now Monsieur had not yet been a quarter of an hour in the house. And it really was as if something was desperate to get in. I could hear the shutters rattle in the wind. My mother’s transformation was so violent and abrupt I was astonished. I dropped the vial in my hand and watched it shatter on the hearth, between the enormous bags of charcoal that my father sometimes brought. She did not stop to scold me. Her eyes were turned back in her head. When she spoke, it was in a type of language different from the patois I had always heard from her, a woman who could not write her name. In a moment she had the accent of the Creoles sent to Paris for their education. “Oh, Monsieur, I felt I could say anything, show you my secret self. Perhaps it even gave me pleasure to think of you as a more natural man, less civilized than others I had met, because of your heritage. But civilization has its uses, of which self-restraint is the most prominent—too late I see that now. When I stumbled back and collapsed on the settee, at that moment you mistook my hesitation for surrender! I can never forgive you for misjudging me. And even if it took me less than a minute to recover my strength, so that I was able to strike you in that area, the source of all your urges, still it was enough. A second would have been enough! It is in our impulses that we betray each other and ourselves. Our actions are pale shadows, chasing afterward. Besides, did you think it was impossible for me to have found out that you had come that evening from Mme. Baziat’s house? Did you think I would not smell her perfume on your breath, while you were kissing me?”

“I had had a . . . glass of wine,” faltered Monsieur. His cravat had come undone. My mother stood over him with her hand on his forehead, pushing him back into his chair.

Even when she beat me, I had never seen her in a rage like this, a mixture of ice and flame. “Do you think I am interested in your excuses? You betrayed me.”

“But I never—”

“Fool, do you think I am still speaking of that night? You were to visit me the next afternoon, at two o’clock. I specifically told you. Did you forget? One month before, when you gave my father and me a tour of your laboratory, you spoke of the death of Socrates, and the poison you were using for your experiments—I stole it. I wanted to provide my own experiment, perhaps with a kitten or a mouse. But then at one o’clock, because of my despair, I thought I’d use a larger animal. How would I know you would not come? Can you be so stupid as to think I wished to die? No, I wished to punish you as you deserved. I imagined you’d have all the time to make the antidote. I’d read the book. Socrates—the fellow talked for hours. But how could you think that I was serious when I said I never wished to see your face again?”

There was thunder over the river, and rain upon the roof of our little house. Monsieur was quiet. I think he must have guessed what was to happen. He had a fever, after all, and his skin was yellow, streaked with sweat. He could not look my mother in the face. Instead, he glanced at me. But in place of helping him, perhaps I gave him the last shock to his system, for at that moment I felt something beside my ear. When I looked up, I saw my mother’s serpent, which she used sometimes in her ceremonies. It lived in a wicker basket underneath the altar, but was forever getting out, a harmless creature from the swamp. So it was reaching toward me from one of the shelves, a long, green creature that was like this tube that runs to the cylinder of compressed oxygen, right by my nose, like this.

I brushed it away. Because I have the gift, I was afraid. But at the same time I was thinking how terrible this woman was, so cruel and such a liar. Innocent as I was, even I could see that if you reject this man one day, and kick him in the place she mentioned, perhaps you can’t expect for him to visit you the next day as if nothing had happened. Who would swallow deadly poison, unless she wanted to destroy herself? And these mice and these kittens—at fourteen, I could not bear to think about them. I’d had enough. I stepped toward him, and Monsieur followed me with his eyes. I don’t know what I was going to do. But I was finished with something. My mother turned toward me also, and I could see it mixed together in her face, something that knew that I was going to challenge her, and reject her, and run away from her, not only that morning, but forever in the years to come. Her face twisted with rage. She had her fingers locked in Monsieur’s hair, and she forced his head back and forth, and turned his neck one way and another. When I came toward her, she turned his head so that he watched me, twisting his neck with her right hand. She was a strong woman, but what she used was not her strength. It was the strength of the devil that was inside of her, a devil in league with many others, and many other names. But always it requires a human agency. Another drink of water, please. You see I offer a confession at long last, but not just for myself . . .

(Recorded and transcribed as part of the research into a book, Mysteries of the Old Quarter, by Ernest Butler Smith [Grossett & Dunlap, 1938], an interview never quoted or otherwise mentioned in the published text)

8
. T
HREE YEARS PREVIOUS: “ . . . THE MORNING HAS COME AFTER THE STORM”

September 10, 1885

My dear Monsieur,

I thank you for the flowers you have sent. I will be so happy to see you when I have returned from the sanatorium, which Papa tells me we have you to thank for the arrangements, due to your friendship with the director, a kind gentleman, even though he is a Swiss with a long beard. It is hard to remember how I must have behaved to be so desperate in that place. But now the morning has come after the storm, because of your generosity. Oh, I am so ashamed. But now Papa tells me there is no reason to concern myself, that these attacks of nerves are quite common and can be easily forgotten. To be a woman is to have these moods. Oh, I am happy to think so! I am quite sure you will be proud of me, and of the progress I have made. I wish it were tomorrow. But what will come, will come quickly, after all.

Fondly,
S. N.

(From a letter discovered in the inside waistcoat pocket of a corpse, otherwise unidentified, found in a coal sack in a flooded alley off the Rue Dumaine, May 26, 1888)

Afterword to
“Mysteries of the Old Quarter”

For a while I lived in New Orleans, where this story takes place. Like many stories set there, it is haunted by the ghost of the 2005 hurricane.

—P
AUL
P
ARK

Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the stand-alone novels
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque,
The Girl in the Glass,
and
The Shadow Year,
as well as the Well-Built City Trilogy, consisting of
The Physiognomy,
Memoranda,
and
The Beyond
. His short stories have been collected into three books—
The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant,
The Empire of Ice Cream,
and
The Drowned Life
. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. Along with his wife and two sons, he lives in South Jersey and teaches writing and literature at Brookdale Community College.

J
EFFREY
F
ORD
The Summer Palace

F
OR GENERATIONS, THE
ruins of the Well-Built City lay like some fallen monster we were unsure had really expired and thought might only be playing dead, all the while scheming. Decades passed and then slowly, cautiously, a few brave souls invaded its crumbled opulence, bringing back reports of wonders as if they’d travelled far away to some exotic other continent. In fact, the ruins were a few mere miles from our village of Wenau, which, as history has it, was spawned by those fleeing the city’s destruction.

Once the intrepid few began to bring back both strange and useful artifacts from the ruins, the citizenry of our village took notice. On the day that one of those explorers bought everyone at the inn a round of Rose Ear Sweet and paid for it with a gold coin he claimed to have discovered amidst the remarkable debris, the entire populace instantly became treasure hunters. We, who had once cowered at the thought of what savage phantoms trod its broken streets, now swarmed over the place like a community of rats picking clean a carcass. At first we wanted wealth, but then those of us whose curiosities exceeded the mundane became a kind of troop of archeologists. We dug for meaning, the ideas and philosophies, the history of the place, trying to piece together where and what we’d come from.

Everyone has their keepsakes from the Well-Built City, and to be sure, I have mine. I never discovered gold or one of the strange mechanical devices that are so highly prized. What I discovered, few of my neighbors would consider worth a feather. In one of the hundred caverns created by the destruction of what must have been a towering building (from a mosaic circle inlaid in the marble floor of the place’s entrance, I learned it had once been known as the Ministry of Physiognomy), I salvaged a box of old papers. Time had seared the pages brown, rain had played havoc with the ink, and the box itself was mildewed, smelling like an open grave. Still, I carried the sodden load back to my home in Wenau. There, I removed the hundreds of damp pages from the box and set them out, twenty-five at a time, in the summer sun.

Once they were dry, I began to study them. They were all written by the hand of the same individual, a man by the name of Cley. He was a physiognomist, a sort of investigator, who read, in the physical features of men and women, their guilt or innocence, their immorality and their grace. Bonikem, who is writing a history of the Well-Built City based on all that has been discovered, has told me that this fellow, Cley, rose to a high position in the government under the rule of Drachton Below, becoming Physiognomist, First Class. “I’ve not been able to find certain connections I need to corroborate it,” Bonikem told me, “but I’m sure Cley had a hand in the city’s demise.”