The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (59 page)

“I recall the exact words of Mlle. de Noailles,” I said, as coldly as I could. (But inside I was burning, you must imagine.) “I’m afraid I cannot repeat them in a public place. If her sister’s children could find reconciliation in anything that occurred that day, they are more imaginative than I, who witnessed the entire event. As for the will, I believe it is in litigation. Now, if you please . . . ”

But he would not be silenced! “Perhaps at that moment she was speaking to other emanations in the room,” he said. “Perhaps in the hours since her death, these souls were as real to her as you are to me. Perhaps at that moment, you yourself were insubstantial as a ghost.”

These words, indeed, reminded me of long-dismissed hypotheses. But I felt I could not display any uncertainty, perhaps out of a sense of foreboding. “If she were speaking to these other emanations, it is clear she was not pleased with them,” I concluded in a tone that ended the debate. And in fact the meeting broke up shortly afterwards. Imagine my displeasure, subsequently, walking home with my host and even sharing his umbrella, when I heard him explain how the entire reason for my presence in this city, the entire reason he had found the money to invite me to address his miserable society—all that was a blind, a trick. He had no interest in my recent work, but had fixed instead on the death of Sophie de Noailles, which in my own terrible grief I had allowed myself to desecrate with criminal absurdities and humiliations. In other words, he begged me to revisit the worst moments of my life, because he also (as I might have guessed!) had lost someone who was dear to him. His only daughter, a young lady not yet twenty years old, was recently deceased under painful and mysterious circumstances.

“If I could speak to her once more,” said Monsieur Maubusson. “Only to ask her what occurred. If I could hear from her lips who was responsible, no matter how veiled and shrouded her speech—you see it is a matter of justice! And I think it was not true what you said in the hotel, even according to your own description. That woman you mentioned, was it possible she spoke in code? You imply the words themselves were meaningless. But I think it likely that these spirits would employ a code.”

I considered this. But Maubusson was wrong to say there was no meaning in the words that Sophie de Noailles spoke on her deathbed. It is that the words themselves were barnyard epithets I could not believe she knew.

Could one imagine a code made up of three or four of the most obscene vulgarities, repeated over and over? The street was very dark, very wet. The water swirled around my boots. We were passing a line of wooden cottages with wide porches and long shuttered windows. Light gleamed between the slats.

I stopped, and made him return with his umbrella. For several moments I had known what he was asking. “No,” I said. “I cannot do this. I refuse.”

His face was close to mine. But he would not look me in the eyes. “Please,” he said. “If I could just . . . ”

But at that moment something new occurred to me. It had been more than a month since I’d received his invitation. “When did your daughter die?”

“Six weeks ago.” When he saw my look of horror, he put up his hand. “You needn’t worry. I have taken all precautions.”

He would not look me in the eye. But as he spoke I could perceive, as if vaguely through the fog, the lineaments of his insanity. For six weeks he had packed the girl in ice, which he had transported in box-cars to a city where every courtyard and alleyway is lined with banana trees and bottlebrush palms.

“Monsieur, I’m begging you,” he said. “And you must forgive me for not telling you what I intended. But I guessed that if I asked you in a letter, you would have refused.”

In addition, he had bought or reconstructed what he imagined were the instruments from my laboratory, as he had seen them represented or described, powered by a coal-fired dynamo of his own invention. “I also am a man of science,” he protested. “Nor am I ignorant of medicine. Before the war my father would attend to all our laborers, as was the custom at that time.”

I shuddered, and looked away from him. A negress floundered toward us down the middle of the street, carrying a lantern. Her old-fashioned dress and her wide hat were drenched. She stood behind my host, so that he couldn’t see her—I had heard this district of the city, or nearby, was notorious for prostitution, either in large palaces or else small, individual residences. She was a pretty girl, of a type that I admire, and I studied the silent movement of her lips. “
Vous cherchez quelque chose?
”

“Sir,” I said, “you must abandon this.”

By the light of the lantern flame, I could see my host was weeping. “I cannot. Monsieur, you are my final hope. If you won’t help me . . . ”

I made a signal with my hand. The woman turned away, and we came here. Perhaps now you can guess why I lie sleepless in my room. I am on the third floor, but elsewhere, somewhere, I can hear the steam-powered generator, throbbing faintly in the walls. Tomorrow I will ask for the first train to Jackson. In the meantime, the rain hisses like escaping steam . . .

(Addressed to M. Joachim Valdor, May 23rd—unsent)

3. Early Morning: “ . . . a gesture I recognized . . . ”

. . . I ask myself if I should finish or amend this second letter now, at a remove of many hours. But when I re-read it I can see it is as misleading as the first, in mood, in fact, in everything. No doubt it is useful to descend through layers, saying adieu at every step, first to the man I ought or else imagine myself to be. Second, perhaps, I could take leave of all my thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Then finally I am reduced to describing what I have done, or I will do. I only hope I am bold enough to admit them to myself.

After midnight, then, I closed my letter to Joachim and lay down for the second time. I was mistaken to say I would not sleep, for how else to describe what happened? Perhaps I was experiencing the first effects of the fever that that this morning has registered on my thermometer, and which is at the stage now that it sharpens my awareness, rather than diminishing it.

But I anticipate—I was asleep in bed. This is what I must conclude, even though according to my own perception I lay awake, braiding my heartbeat with the throbbing in the walls. There was some disturbance in the street, a man shouting. Someone spoke, a different kind of voice, well-remembered, close to my ear. I started up, and then I saw her in a corner of the wall beside the curtain, her hand on the tasseled cord. “Solange,” I said, because Solange Baziat was in my mind. Dressed in black, she turned toward me, smiled and touched her hair in a gesture I recognized. “
Mon Dieu,
” I murmured, because my interest in Mme. Baziat has always been measured by how much, at any given moment, she resembles someone else, someone who now approached me dressed in the same black, beaded dress that I remembered from the night I had attempted to take her in my arms, in her father’s apartment in the Place Vendôme. Then I had been cruelly, even violently rebuffed, but this time I expected something different, I don’t know why. “Sophie,” I cried, reaching out my hand to hide her face, and she moved under it and laid her cheek against my breast. Then I felt her fingers on my lips, while at the same time her other hand grasped me lower down, to such effect that I felt myself let go, as in a dream. I bent to kiss her, and she seized my lip between her teeth, and at that moment I knew I’d been mistaken, fooled by my regrets—Sophie was dead. This woman in my arms was someone else, younger and smaller, someone I didn’t know at all, an actual woman who had slipped into my room, perhaps the same one I had seen that evening in the street outside. “
Vous cherchez quelque chose?
”

No, it was impossible, absurd. How could she have gotten in? And by the time I was fully awake, she had disappeared, although the door remained closed. She left me to wipe myself with my nightshirt, and attend to my bleeding lip. A smell lingered in the air, a mixture of perfume and decay.

Now convinced I’d been asleep, I tried immediately to remember. But as so often happens, my dream faded, and the woman in it also faded from my mind. As she did so, her complexion changed, and lost its color, so that I was no longer sure I was remembering the negress of the Rue Dauphine. In fact I was convinced it was not she. And yet the doctors say it is impossible to invent a new face in a dream, the face of someone we have never met.

Then the generator stopped, and the silence in the house was enormous, baffling. Over the course of the night I’d become accustomed to the sound, until I felt rather than heard it. I stood over the basin washing my face, and now I raised my head to look into the dark mirror. In the sudden quiet, I thought I heard the sound of my host’s surrender, of his submission to his grief, at the moment (I thought—irrationally) of his success. How else could I explain the experience I’d just had? Subsequently I discovered several ways, but at that moment I was convinced. At the same time I imagined a new sympathy with my host, because in my own thoughts I had merged my unhappiness with his. And though the emotions of a father might seem different from those of a lover (if I could aspire to calling myself that—I speak only of my feelings, not of her response), still I could understand his grief in the death of a beautiful woman in her prime.

I wiped my face, threw on my clothes. I needed to confirm that the person from my dream, the small, delicate, cat-like woman who had bit me on the lip, was indeed Mademoiselle Maubusson. In my febrile state, it was imperative for me to verify this fact, and at the same time I felt some vestige of my excitement when I first attacked the problem of re-animation in the year prior to Mlle. de Noailles’s death, little knowing that before long I would have such a personal interest in my success.

I opened the door of my bedroom, and followed the new silence down the stairs. As I descended step by step, my candle in my hand, I reconsidered momentarily the contempt with which I had rejected my host’s theory of ghosts, or spirits, or “emanations,” in the light of my own recent experience. Was it possible that we are haunted in dreams by our beloved dead, not just in metaphor but in actual fact? If so, was it impossible to imagine a plane or space where they might commune, or even share each other’s bodies, as I had conceived in that transitional moment between sleep and wakefulness?

The wallpaper was heavily patterned, pink and cream. Yet there was a dirty stripe opposite the banister, where many hands had slid. It was not hard for me to find, on the second storey, the room I sought. I heard low voices beyond the door.

I knocked, then entered. How can I describe the scene? I stood in a lady’s bedroom, furnished with the dark, mahogany, over-embellished chests and cabinets that are habitual in rich Creole households. There was a four-poster bed—unoccupied. The wallpaper was pink and green, hand-painted with scenes along the river. The gas was lit, and by its spectral flame I saw my host, dressed in shirt-sleeves, the electrodes still in his hand. The dynamo was in the courtyard outside, and the wires snaked in the open window, together with a number of black rubber tubes, which led to a zinc bathtub in the middle of the room.

There was another man also, a young, curly-headed fellow, and when he spoke I could tell by his accent that French was not his native language: “Who the devil are you?”

I scarcely heard him. In the bathtub, packed in ice, was the woman from my dream.

She was dressed in a pink nightgown, and her rich black hair was loose around her shoulders. She had high cheekbones, a small, sharp nose, and a soft line of hair along her upper lip. Her skin was pale, but whether because of the constant refrigeration or else from the effect of the electrical stimulation, it still retained a rosy glow. Astonished by this, immediately I perceived that one of the tubes that ran to her must have maintained the circulation of her blood, while another, perhaps, pumped air into her lungs—I could see the harness and the plugs for her nostrils, which her father had just now cleared away.

“How have you fed her?” I enquired.

My host came toward me. “By means of a tube right through to her stomach. And a protein solution, which I saw described in—”

“Who the devil are you, sir?” repeated the curly-headed gentleman. But I was studying the electrodes in Maubusson’s hands, and didn’t answer. Besides, I thought, it was up to my host to explain my presence, which he did. “Henry, this is Professor Delorme, from Paris. I spoke to you—”

“Did you now? Well perhaps he would be good enough to wait outside, until we are finished here. Under the circumstances—”

I looked at him now, a young man with a mottled complexion and side-whiskers. “Monsieur,” said my host, “may I present my daughter’s fiancé, Mr. Henry Lockett?”

“
Enchanté,
” I said. “But am I right in thinking it was to the young lady’s temples that you attached the posts? I can see the marks—”

“It was unclear in your description,” confessed Monsieur Maubusson. Then he paused. “Professor, I can tell from your face that I have blundered—please, if you could help us now. It’s not been five minutes since—”

“No, it’s enough,” cried Mr. Lockett, in English. He moved to confront me, a menacing, muscular figure, though he was not my height. “It is finished. Make an end, sir. Make an end.”

He was talking to Maubusson, but he was staring at me. As for my host, he continued without stopping. “I had thought I could duplicate your results by following your descriptions. Forgive me. If that had been possible, I never would have thought to involve you . . . ”

I had turned away from Mr. Lockett, and was examining instead the face of Mlle. Maubusson in her zinc bathtub. I examined her long eyelashes and dark lips. Already, though, there was a yellowish pallor to her cheeks, which suggested we had not much time. “The electrodes must be divided, and fastened to several places on the cranium,” I said. “Other places also.”

I only said this because she resembled so completely the woman in my dream. Mr. Lockett threw up his hands. “By God, that’s enough,” he said. “Maubusson, I can’t tolerate this—I won’t have this fellow touch her with his black hands. I will not stay here. If you persist, I will inform the authorities the first thing in the morning—no, by God, sir, stand aside.“