Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  He did not offer details, but merely said that after some weeks he felt that it was incumbent upon them to return to Calcutta and make their report, and, when Smithers insisted on remaining to conduct further studies, of the type that so many venturesome men of our nation have carried out in Africa and Asia and the Americas, Brewster, finding it impossible to shake his resolve, at last reluctantly resolved to leave without him. The valley people seemed distressed at the thought of his departure, and indeed made it so difficult for him to locate the camels that he thought they might intend to restrain him from going; but eventually he found them, and—this part was very difficult too—went back out of the canyon, blundering around in one direction and another in that thick band of vapor before finding the one and only exit into the desert. Getting back to Bikaner from there was another great challenge, and only by some lucky guesswork was he able to retrace his earlier path. And after a lengthy and evidently toilsome journey back across the subcontinent, a journey that he did not choose to describe, but which I thought must have been so exhausting that it had put that strange appearance of premature age upon him, here he was among us once more in Yule’s office.

  Yule said, when he was done, “And would you be able to find that place again, if you had to? If I were to ask you to go back there now to get Smithers?”

  Brewster seemed stunned by the request.

  He winced and blinked, like one stepping out of a dark room into Calcutta sunlight. I could see signs of a struggle going on within him. Yule’s question had caught him completely by surprise; and plainly he was searching for the strength to refuse any repetition of the ordeal he had just been through. But the indomitable Yule was waiting grimly for a reply, and finally, in a barely audible voice, Brewster said, “Yes, I think that I could. I think so, sir. But is it necessary that I do?”

  “It is,” said Yule. “We can hardly do without him. It was wrong of you to come away with him still there. You must go back and fetch him.”

  Brewster considered that. He bowed his head. I think I may have heard a sob. He looked ragged and pale and tired. He was silent a great while, and it seemed to me that he was thinking about something that he did not care to discuss with us.

  Yule, waiting once again for a reply, appeared terribly tired himself, as though he wanted nothing more than a year’s rest in some gentler clime. But the great strength of the man was still evident, bearing down on poor Brewster with full force.

  After a long, an interminable silence, whatever resistance Brewster had managed to muster seemed to snap. I saw him quiver as it happened. He said quietly, huskily, “Yes, I suppose I must.” And planning for the return trip began forthwith.

  I was with Brewster the next day when Helena came to inquire about her errant fiancé. Brewster told her that Smithers was making great discoveries, that his discovery of this lost land would assure him eternal fame in the annals of exploration. He has remained behind for a while to complete his notes and sketches, Brewster said. I noticed that he did not meet the Adjutant’s daughter’s eager gaze as he spoke; in truth, he looked past her shoulder as though she were a creature too bright to behold.

  THIS TIME THERE was no grand farewell party. Brewster simply slipped away alone to the Grand Trunk Road. He had insisted that no one should accompany him, and he did so with such un-Brewsterlike firmness that even Yule was taken aback, and yielded, though to me it seemed like madness to let the man make that trip by himself.

  And so Brewster departed once more for that valley in the Thar. Soon Yule left us again also—he had another breakdown of his health, and went on recreational leave to Java—and, since we were now in the full throes of planning the Indian railway system and our staff was already undermanned, my own responsibilities multiplied manifold. In 1857 we had had only two hundred miles of track in operation in all of India. Our task was to increase that a hundredfold, not only for greater ease in our own military operations, but also to provide India with a modern system of mass transportation that would further the economic development of that huge and still largely primitive land. As the months went along and my work engulfed me, I confess that I forgot all about Brewster and Smithers.

  Yule returned from Java, looking much older. Before long he would resign from the Service to return to England, and then, as his wife’s health weakened also, on to the more benevolent clime of Italy, where he would complete and publish his famous translations of Marco Polo and other medieval travelers in Asia. In his remaining time in Calcutta he said nothing about Brewster and Smithers either; I think they had fallen completely out of his mind, which had no room for the irresponsible Smitherses and feckless Brewsters of the world.

  One day in 1861 or early 1862 I was hard at work, preparing a report for the Governor-General on the progress of the Bombay-Calcutta line, when an old man in faded robes was shown into my office. He was thin and very tall, with rounded shoulders and a bent, bowed posture, and his long, narrow face was deeply lined, so that his eyes looked out at me from a bewildering webwork of crevices. He was trembling as though palsied, though more likely it was just the tremor of age. Under his arm he carried a rectangular box of some considerable size, fastened with an ornate clasp of native design. Because his skin was so dark and he was wearing those loose robes I mistook him for a native himself at first, but then I began to think he might be a deeply tanned Englishman, and when he spoke his accent left no doubt of that.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he asked.

  I stared. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I do.” I was annoyed by the interruption. “Are you sure that the business you have is with the Public Works Department?”

  “I am, in fact, an employee of the Public Works Department. Or was, at least.”

  His face was still unrecognizable to me. But the voice—

  “Brewster?”

  “Brewster, yes. Back at last.”

  “But this is impossible! You’re—what, thirty-five years old? You look to be—”

  “Sixty? Seventy?”

  “I would have to say so, yes.”

  He studied me implacably. “I am Brewster,” he said. “I will be thirty-seven come January.”

  “This is impossible,” I said, though aware of the foolishness of my words as soon as I spoke them. “For a man to have aged so quickly—”

  “Impossible, yes, that’s the word. But I am Brewster.”

  He set that box down on my desk, heedless of the clutter of blueprints and maps on which he was placing it. And he said, “You may recall that Lieutenant-Colonel Yule ordered me to return to a certain valley in the Thar and bring Major Smithers out of it. I have done so. It was not an easy journey, but I have accomplished it, and I have returned. And I have brought Smithers with me.”

  I peered expectantly at him, thinking that he would wave his age-withered arm and Smithers would come striding in from the hall. But no: instead he worked at the clasp of that big wooden box with those trembling fingers of his for what seemed like half an hour, and opened it at last, and lifted the lid and gestured to me to peer in.

  Inside lay a bleached skull, sitting atop a jumble of other bones, looking like relics exhumed from some tumulus of antiquity. They were resting on a bed of sand.

  “This is Smithers,” he said.

  For a moment I could find nothing whatever to say. Then I blurted, “How did he die?”

  “He died of extreme age,” Brewster said.

  And he told me how, after expending many weeks and months crossing India and bashing around in the Thar, he had finally heard the ghostly singers and the distant drums and gongs again, and they had led him to the hidden valley. There he found Smithers, fluent now in the local lingo and busy with all manner of public-works projects in a full-scale attempt to bring the inhabitants of the valley into the nineteenth century overnight.

  He was married, Brewster said, to that lovely long-legged native princess who had been teaching him the language.

  “Married?” I repeated foolishly,
thinking of mournful Helena, the Adjutant’s beautiful daughter, faithful to him yet, still waiting hopefully for his return.

  “I suppose it was a marriage,” said Brewster. “They were man and wife, at any rate, whatever words had been said over them. And seemed very happy together. I spoke to him about returning to his assignment here. As you might suspect, he wasn’t eager to do so. I spoke more firmly to him about it.” I tried to imagine the diffident Brewster speaking firmly to his strong-willed friend about anything. I couldn’t. “I appealed to his sense of duty. I appealed to him as an Englishman. I spoke of the Queen.”

  “And did he yield?”

  “After a while, yes,” Brewster said, in a strange tone of voice that made me wonder whether Brewster might have made him yield at gunpoint. I could not bring myself to ask. “But he insisted that we bring his—wife—out of the valley with us. And so we did. And here they are.”

  He indicated the box, the skull, the bones beneath, the bed of sand.

  “Hardly had we passed through the barrier but they began to shrivel and age,” he said. “The woman died first. She became a hideous crone in a matter of hours. Then Smithers went.”

  “But how—how?”

  Brewster shrugged. “Time moves at a different rate within the valley. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it. The people in there may be living six or eight hundred years ago, or even more. Time is suspended. But when one emerges—well, do you see me? How I look? The suspended years descend on one like an avalanche, once one leaves. I spent a few weeks in that village the first time. I came back here looking ten or twenty years older. This time I was there for some months. Look at me. Smithers had been under the valley’s spell for, what, two or three years?”

  “And the woman for her entire life.”

  “Yes. When they came out, he must have been a hundred years old, by the way we reckon time. And she, perhaps a thousand.”

  How could I believe him? I am an engineer, a builder of railroads and bridges. I give no credence to tales of ghosts and ghouls and invisible specters whose voices are heard on the desert air, nor do I believe that time runs at different rates in different parts of our world. And yet—yet—the skull, the bones, the withered, trembling old man of not quite thirty-seven who stood before me speaking with Brewster’s voice—

  I understood now that Brewster had been aware of what going back into that terrible valley to fetch Smithers would do to him. It would rob him of most or all of the remaining years of his life. He had known, but Yule had ordered him to go, and yes he had gone. The poor man. The poor doomed man.

  To cover my confusion I reached into the box. “And what is this?” I asked, picking up a pinch of something fine and white that I took for desert sand, lying beneath the little heap of bones like a cushion. “A souvenir of the Thar?”

  “In a manner of speaking. That’s all that remains of her. She crumbled to dust right in front of me. Shriveled and died and went absolutely to dust, all in a moment.”

  Shuddering, I brushed it free of my fingers, back into the box.

  I was silent for a while.

  The room was spinning about me. I had spent all my days in a world in which three and three make six, six and six make twelve, but I was not sure that I lived in such a world any longer.

  Then I said, “Take what’s left of Smithers to the chaplain, and see what he wants to do about a burial.”

  He nodded, the good obedient Brewster of old. “And what shall I do with this?” he asked, pointing to the sandy deposit in the box.

  “Scatter it in the road,” I said. “Or spill it into the river, whatever you wish. She was Smithers’s undoing. We owe her no courtesies.”

  And then I thought of Helena, sweet, patient Helena. She had never understood the first thing about him, had she? And yet she had loved him. Poor, sweet Helena.

  She must be protected now, I thought. The world is very strange, and sometimes too harsh, and we must protect women like Helena from its mysteries. At least, from such mysteries as this one—not the mystery of that hidden valley, I mean, though that is mysterious enough, but the mysteries of the heart.

  I drew a deep breath. “And—with regard to the Adjutant’s daughter, Brewster—”

  “Yes?

  “She will want to know how he died, I suppose. Tell her he died bravely, while in the midst of his greatest adventure in Her Majesty’s Service. But you ought not, I think, to tell her very much more than that. Do you understand me? He died bravely. That should suffice, Brewster. That should suffice.”

  Afterword to “Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar”

  I’ve long been an admirer of the classic Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories—by M. R. James, Oliver Onions, J. S. Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and so on—and had been reading another old favorite, Rudyard Kipling, when news of this new anthology arrived. It seemed a logical thing to write a ghost story in the mode of Kipling for it.

  —ROBERT SILVERBERG

  John Langan

  John Langan is the author of a novel, House of Windows, and a collection of stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cthulhu’s Reign, By Blood We Live, Poe, and The Living Dead. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. He teaches classes in creative writing and gothic fiction and film at SUNY New Paltz and lives nearby with his wife, son, two cats, and a changing menagerie of insects, amphibians, and reptiles.

  JOHN LANGAN

  The Unbearable Proximity of

  Mr. Dunn’s Balloons

  I

  “Come, now,” Dunn said. His voice sounded as reasonable as it had at any point these last seven days. “Surely, you must have expected something like this.”

  On reflection, Coleman supposed the man had a point. That did not stop him from thrusting his rapier into the nearest of the balloons.

  II

  “I’m sorry?” Coleman said, turning from the train’s window. Under the pretense of watching the Hudson slide past, he had been studying his reflection, renewing his debate with himself over shaving the beard he had worn since his midtwenties, the white hairs which he feared added a full decade to his appearance, advancing (distinguished) middle age to premature old age.

  “I asked if you are planning to interview Mr. Dunn,” the young man seated across the compartment said. “You had said you write, so it occurred to me that you might be at work on an article about him.”

  “I am not,” Coleman said. “I no longer write as much for the magazines as I used to. Of late, I’ve been concentrating my efforts on my fiction.”

  “Oh,” said the young man, who had introduced himself at Grand Central as Cal Earnshaw. While the suit in which he traveled appeared of reasonable quality, there was a leanness to Cal’s face that suggested those of beggars Coleman had passed along the Venetian canals. The even younger woman seated beside Cal, his wife, Isabelle, said, “If I may be forward, Mr. Coleman, why are you on your way to Mr. Dunn’s? From what I’ve read of your novels, it doesn’t seem as though the . . . extravagances of Mr. Dunn and his followers would hold much of interest for you.”

  Despite himself, a little thrill raced up Coleman’s spine at Mrs. Earnshaw’s admission of familiarity with his work; a similar confession, he felt certain, would not trouble her husband’s lips. He said, “You underestimate me, Madame. My father was a Swedenborgian, albeit an idiosyncratic one.”

  “You don’t say,” Cal said.

  “I do.”

  “Do you imply that you have inherited your father’s beliefs?” Isabelle said.

  “I imply nothing of the kind,” Coleman said. “My father found Swedenborg sufficient to his needs; my interest, however, has tended towards the manner in which we make our way through this life, rather than any other.”

  “Yet surely,” Isabelle said, “the nature of our beliefs about the life to come may exert a profound influence upon our con
duct in the life that is.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Coleman said. “Although, from my observations, that influence is frequently more occult than direct.”

  “Then why have you joined us?” Cal said. “Not that we regret the company.”

  “I am on this train,” Coleman said, “in hopes of seeing Mr. Dunn’s balloons, about which so much has been written.”

  “You have read Mrs. Barchester’s report of them?” Isabelle said.

  “It was that which brought them to my attention,” Coleman said. “A friend passing through London made me a gift of her book. My thoughts of late have tended in the direction of the place of my birth. I would not call any point along the Hudson my home, but so much of my childhood was spent traveling up and down the shores of what we used to call the North River that something of the word’s glamour attaches to the region, as a whole. When my friend’s generosity presented me with Mrs. Barchester’s record of her tour up the Hudson, I took it as practically an omen that I should revisit the scenes of my boyhood. Her description of Mr. Dunn’s rather remarkable paper balloons iced the cake, so to speak. Even before I had turned the last page, I had booked my trip and written to another friend to ask if it were in his powers to arrange a visit to Summerland for me. It was, and”—Coleman spread his hands—“I have the pleasure of your company. I take it your motivations are of a more spiritual character.”

  “We are going to prepare for my crossing,” Cal said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My husband is ill, Mr. Coleman.” Isabelle laid a gloved hand on her husband’s. “We have exhausted all of his inheritance and most of mine in search of a cure. There is none. The last physician we consulted—Sir Luke Strett: perhaps you have heard of him? He is very well known on the Continent.”

  Coleman was unsure. “The name is familiar, yes.”

  “He advised us that Cal’s time is short, and that there are better ways to spend it than chasing false hope.”