Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (22 page)

The woman looked younger than she was, though queenly. At first sight you might have taken her for a tall slim schoolgirl, no older than the Carlotta of Belgium who would marry the ill-starred Maximilian of Austria, lose her Mexican empire and husband and sanity all at once and live on for 60 more years. But then you would have noticed the woman's slender maturity. She was dressed in gleaming black rep from neck to wrists and toes, yet she showed a gray silk ankle as she walked. She wore gloves of black lace. Her face was very pale, but gay, yet her large dark eyes had a strange dispassionate distance in them. Her glistening black hair was centrally parted in the style of the times, but flared out into the suggestion of a raven's wings.

The man looked older than he was, at least as years are reckoned by an insurance agent. He too was pale and darkly clad, wearing a black alpaca coat. His sunken eyes looked permanently but rather beautifully blacked by the invisible punches of life. Yet there was a jauntiness to him, a power of romance, however desperate. He wore a white shirt and black string tie, and across his upper lip a modest straight mustache.

As they hastened along, not with but near each other, the man sighed very softly yet shudderingly and gently grasped the woman's elbow and said, "Mademoiselle, may I have the honor of buying you a drink?"

She jerked, but chiefly with her chin as she turned her face toward him. With a marked French accent she said, "Sir! You startled me! I did not hear your footsteps."

"Nor I yours. At first I thought you were a spirit."

"And you dared accost me! But see, sir, it is only that I wear caoutchouc over-slippers, as I now perceive you do yourself."

"Mademoiselle has answered one question brilliantly. Now the other. My invitation."

"Sir! You are very forward."

He stared at her with a gloomy smile, not quite apologetic, and answered, "I don't believe I've ever been forward in my life, not even with my late wife. You remind me of her – Virginia was very young – and also the heroine of my story 'Ligeia,' where a beloved wife returns from the dead."

Her nostrils flared, but her expression was still merry. "You Americans are all very forward. And you cry your own wares."

"I'm a mere hack, a pen-pusher," he replied with a slight shrug. "A scribbler of stories which my critics tell me are too strained and trifling, too fantastical, to bear rereading or warrant imitation. But it's true we Americans are supposed to be forward -great hustlers and good at diddling."

"What is that, pray?"

"The art of out-sharping the other man when money is at stake. I once wrote an article on the topic."

"Then I suppose you are very expert at the practice yourself."

He shook his head, the barest swing of his gaunt cheeks. "My parents were actors and so presumably fakers and good diddlers. Yet I don't recall that I ever did a successful diddle myself in my whole life. I work for such pittances as magazines and lecture-goers disburse."

Hard French practicality showed for a moment in the woman's gaze. She said, "As for making money, I see no harm in that, but merit."

The other smiled, showing dark teeth a little, and lifted a sardonic left eyebrow. "Ah, but suppose a whole nation were bitten by a gold bug. There might be danger then, a sort of fever, a dancing madness."

"You are referring, sir, to the recent gold discoveries in California?"

"No, mademoiselle, only to another story I wrote."

"Pen-pusher! Scribbler!"

"As you say, and as I said before you. But I perceive across the street the lamps of the family entrance of what is a reputable tavern. Not Sadler's, but sufficient."

As they crossed, there came ponderously dashing around the corner ahead, through the gas-fumey murk, a great dray drawn by two huge black horses. Its wheels creaked thunderously on the cobbles, the heavy empty barrels added their gloomy note, while from the whip of the dark, big-shouldered drayman there came a series of loud cracks.

The last crack came quite close to them as they gained the opposite curb, and the woman lifted a hand protectively, though since she did not flinch, the gesture had the appearance of a command.

She said, as soon as the great noise had passed, "What is it, sir? You are shaking, you have grown pale as death. Yet the dray missed us by several yards. Did it perhaps remind you of some dreadful experience in battle? The sounds were indeed somewhat like distant cannonading and nearby musketry."

"No, mademoiselle," he began shudderingly, speaking on the indrawn breath. "True, I was once enrolled at the U.S. Military Academy, but expelled because I deliberately absented myself from call. But ever since, beginning faintly even at West Point," and here his white face took on an agonized look, "I have heard that sound of incessant cannonading. Now faint, now thundering close, I have heard it with the inner ear in Baltimore, Washington, Fredericksburg, New York, Providence, Philadelphia, this Richmond and once, very loudly in Gettysburg. I have seen faces red-lit and blood-stained by broad daylight on peaceful-seeming streets. I have seen them grinning with hate where others perceived only smiles. I have flinched from the imagined, dreadfully real flash of bayonets and rifle-fire. I have heard the screams of the wounded, the jeers of the conquerors, the snarls of the vanquished, the groaning of caissons, the roaring of fires consuming cities. And always, faint and far though near in nightmares by day and night, that endless cannonading."

Now sweat dripped down his face, his cheeks twitched, his eyes blinked incessantly, while the palsied trembling of his hands if anything increased, as if he were about to have an epileptic seizure. The woman moved to soothe and restrain him, but was held paralyzed by his hypnotic glare. Without pause he continued, "Oh and I have written stories about it, I have pushed my pen on many dreadful journeys. 'Metzengerstein,' the apotheosis of a great cavalry charge into a flaming hell. 'The Masque of the Red Death,' where a dire sickness of blood, of streaming wounds, stalks a nation and resistlessly enters the highest homes and stills the most riotous gaiety. 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' where the cannonading becomes the ticking of a tortured heart that will not die in the body of a floored-up murdered man. 'William Wilson,' in which brother pursues with relentless secret hate and stabs down one closer than brother. 'The Cask of Amontillado,' wherein a supposed friend walls up friend alive and the cannonading sinks to the soft thud of brick into mortar. 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' where an undiscoverable giant anthropoid wreaks horrid and senseless destruction on the innocent. And 'The Pit and the Pendulum,' all fiery iron and flashing, hissing inescapable steel."

His speech broke off into gasps which swiftly diminished in volume. His trembling gradually moderated, his cheeks and eyelids grew still, and his eyes lost most of their glare.

"Oh, alas, sir," the woman said with feeling, "you are cursed with a sensitivity like my poor brother's. Perhaps you have the dreadful gift of premonition. These horrible phantasms of war which haunt you may refer to an impending conflict. Is it possible that the Mexicans, though beaten last year, may attack your land and this time successfully?"

"No, something closer." He shivered slightly and blinked his eyes, now as one who returns somewhat wondering to reality. Then he frowned. "But I fear you are correct that it is premonition. There are preternatural sensitivities which we wish were madness, but are not."

"But what nation, if not Mexico?" the woman pressed. "Surely you do not suggest that the British would attempt to reconquer their great colony more than a quarter century since they burnt Washington?"

"Something closer," I said. The glare increased again in his eyes and he struck his stiffly white-fronted bosom. He whispered. "As close as my heart. Look deeply as I have into the gas-lit faces in the streets around us, in the streets of any American city, and you will see a carefully dissembled maniacal hatred, a hooded yet furnace-red glare–"

He broke off. As if in obedience to a mesmerist's command, the woman had begun to look with blank eyes into the various shadowed and high-lit faces of the throng eddying around the island-of-two which they constituted. This grotesque and theatrical action seemed to recall him fully to reality. The visionary glare ebbed entirely from his dark-circled eyes, a comic light momentarily flooded them, his gaunt features assumed a courtly and attentive demeanor, he pressed the woman's elbow, and said, "Your pardon. In pursuing my wild and witless fantasies, I churlishly allowed hospitality to be chased from my mind. It is time and more that we partook of the refreshment which I suggested." And he steered them toward the doubly lamp-lit white doorway decorated with faint arabesques of gilt.

"But sir, will your strength permit it?" the girl protested anxiously. "Your pallor. Your shivering. I had begun to fear you were suffering with some fever or other malady requiring the attention of a physician."

"No disease which a drink will not cure," he assured her with a quirking smile and ushered her through the doorway which had meanwhile been opened by a bobbing and upward-grinning Negro dressed in red jacket and dark trousers that came to mid-calf. "While life itself is a fever."

"My brother champions the same theory," she murmured somewhat puzzeledly as other drab faces preceded them with obsequious and fawning smiles to two chairs upholstered with red plush and facing each other across a small round table draped with snowy linen.

The man looked around at walls papered in dark red, trimmed with gilt, topped with a red fringe, and mellowly candle-lit.

"No mirrors. Good," he said with a sharp nod, then explained, "I detest looking at my own face, especially when I have a companion with features as fair as yours to gaze upon." Then, as the woman bent her raven-tressed head and demurely lowered her long-lashed, faintly blue-veined eyelids, his voice became very businesslike. "And now may I suggest a sherry flip? I have discovered that an egg mixed with liquor or wine moderates its intoxicating fire while adding desirable nutriment."

"Yes, you may, sir," she said, looking up with a pleased smile. "Oh, you are most wise, sir. My poor brother, though no older than I has already a frightening affinity for one of the most maddening of liquors. You will yourself partake of a sherry flip?"

Changing neither expression nor tone of voice, he said, "No. Blackberry brandy," then added somewhat more loudly but without looking toward the departing waiter, "in a claret glass."

Then for a while he gazed quizzically, almost teasingly at her saddened features. He asked, "You find me something of a paradox? – a Sphinx, an Angel of the Odd, an Imp of the Perverse?"

"A little perhaps, sir," she confessed gravely. "But what are those last two?"

"Titles I have scribbled above stories," he replied, brushing his mustache with a thumbnail. "Last three."

She smiled as if against her will, shaking her head slightly and raising for a moment her hands clad in black lace, as if to say, "You are too much for me, sir." But then her features grew grave again. She leaned forward. Her eyes moved from his toward the doorway by which they had entered, then back again, and she said softly, "What you said about the people in the streets. To me they seemed sane, alert, amiable, even if – your pardon, sir – somewhat uncouth by Gallic standards."

He did not seem to hear her. He was frowning at the doorway by which the waiter had departed and now he drummed the table impatiently with his thin knuckles.

"Oh sir, do you even remember what you said?" she asked concernedly.

"Alert is the significant word," he pronounced. "Alert for any morbid sensation. Sniffing for accidents, altercations, murder, horror. Some of them, I assure you, do nothing else, night and day. Consult my 'The Man of the Crowd,' though that in part describes London."

"But what you said of brother battling brother and friend betraying friend. It is hard for me to believe that could ever happen here, where even bloody revolution took a more moderate, prudent course than in my fierce-minded motherland. During the three quarters of century of its existence, your new nation has increasingly demonstrated its solidarity, the indissoluble union of its states."

"There is another story I have written," he replied, his eyes still on the doorway, his knuckles still lightly drumming. 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' wherein a vast, seemingly eternal structure – a veritable stone nation – cracks asunder. Note that Usher begins with the letters U.S. and ends with the feminine pronoun accusative. Alas, mademoiselle, and all appearance to the contrary, this country is moribund, like the man kept alive after death by hypnotism and instantly collapsing into loathsome putrescence when wakened. My story 'Valdemar.' And none of us will escape the terror when it comes – no, not even if we could fly to the moon with my 'Hans Pfaall.' For the madmen run this particular lunatic asylum – my benign 'Doctor Tarr' and kindly 'Professor Fether.'"

"Oh sir, you have written a story for everything," she told him with laughing resignation lightly touched by mockery.

The waiter had meanwhile trotted prancingly in and placed their drinks before them. Once the man's fingertips grasped the stem of his darkly-filled wineglass, his impatience left him.

"Not a story for the secret of the universe," he said with a jocularly rueful smile. "Once, after inhaling ether, I thought I glimpsed even that. 'Eureka!' I cried out. 'I have found it!' And I did make a lecture of it," he admitted. "But now I doubt the vision. Oh, mademoiselle, I am bombarded or bewhirlwinded by scraps and rags and threads of visions, come from I know not where. I weave them into my flimsy word-tapestries. Rarely I know their meanings. Chiefly I conjecture. And I am certain they have millions of meanings I have never dreamt. That poppinjay of a darky who served us this refreshment, it occurs to me now I may have written about him and all his race."

"That Negro, sir?"

"Yes, that Negro. In another walled-up dead-and-alive story, 'The Black Cat.' And the cat has his ultimate revenge, though it may take a hundred years and more. But away with gloom!" He lifted his glass and said to her over it, gazing at her with admiring, inquiring eyes, "To–?"