Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  “I’ve long had an interest in the writings of Mr. Dunn and his set,” Cal said. “Mr. Davis, the Fox sisters . . . the picture of the next life they have advanced seems so much more reasonable than that of the traditional faiths. Upon our return to Brooklyn, I threw myself into a study of their work. I read their books; I sat in on their séances; I heard their lectures. Had my health been firmer, I would have attended one of their conventions, although there was no real need of that. What I had learned was enough to justify my previous interest.”

  Isabelle said, “During one of Mr. Dunn’s lectures, he mentioned that, upon occasion, he had aided those approaching this life’s end in readying themselves for the next. Afterwards, Cal and I succeeded in speaking to the man, and once he knew our story, he volunteered his services upon the spot.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes.” Cal nodded. “Not only did Mr. Dunn refuse what little payment we could offer, he provided for our travel from our home to his.”

  “How very generous of him.”

  “It was—it is,” Isabelle said.

  “Perhaps you had rather I defer my visit to Summerland,” Coleman said. “Compared to yours, my reasons for this trip are trivial. I would not wish to interfere with Mr. Dunn’s plans for you.”

  “Nonsense,” Cal said. “You won’t be interfering a bit.”

  “According to Mr. Dunn’s letter to us,” Isabelle said, “he will require some time alone with my husband. Although he assures us his house’s library is thoroughly stocked, I should be grateful for a companion to help me pass the hours.”

  “You may consider me at your disposal,” Coleman said.

  III

  Summerland, Poughkeepsie

  June 16, 1888

  Strange to meet Parrish Dunn today. I wouldn’t say I’ve been brooding on the man, but he has engaged my thoughts for much of the last several months. The successful arms merchant who washes his hands of the blood in which he’s steeped them for nigh on twenty years to devote himself to the promulgation of his new Spiritualist beliefs—not to mention, to fashioning his elaborate balloons—how could such a figure not be of interest? I’ve spent enough time—enough pages in this notebook—supplementing the scant description of him in Mrs. Barchester’s North Along the Hudson that to meet the original to whom my speculations owe their existence gave me a jolt.

  He looks like an arms merchant—strike that, he looks like an arms maker, one of those powers charged by the other gods with forging their spears and shields deep in the bowels of a smoking volcano. Until this point in my life, I have considered my five foot ten inches a more than adequate height, but Dunn must stand somewhere in the vicinity of six foot seven, six foot eight. He rises up to that measurement like a mountain; I’ve never done well at estimating anyone’s weight, so it may be more useful to write that he appears almost as wide as he is tall. Every item he was wearing—black suit, white shirt, black shoes—must have been specially made for him.

  Because of his size, Dunn’s face, which would otherwise fall somewhere in the broad middle of the human spectrum, has something of the grotesque to it. He is bald, and the expanse of his great skull somehow contributes to this impression. His heavy lips frame a mouth whose thick teeth seem formed for tearing the meat from a leg of venison. His nose is flat, wide, crossed by a white scar that continues across the right cheek. His eyes protrude from their sockets, so that he appears to watch you intensely.

  His appearance aside, Dunn has been the model host. His carriage was waiting for us at the train station, and he was waiting for us at the front gate to Summerland. (Note: Must check details of house. I’m fairly sure it’s the style known as Second Empire—tall and narrow, like a collection of rectangles stood on their short ends. Roof—Mansard roof?—like a cap. White with black trim, freshly painted, so the white blinding in the afternoon, the black shining. Extensive gardens in the English fashion. Situated on a hilltop overlooking the Hudson and the step hills on the other shore.) The room in which I have been housed is easily four times as large as the cabin in which I crossed the Atlantic, and extravagantly furnished.

  The single most interesting feature of my room, though, is the balloon floating in the center of it, at the foot of the bed. I’ve read Mrs. Barchester’s description of Dunn’s balloons over and over again; it’s one of the few passages in her book in which my fascination with the subject matter blinds me to the dreadfulness of her prose. Not surprisingly, she has not done the things justice. The size, for example: no doubt she’s measured the diameter correctly as three feet, but she has failed utterly in conveying a sense of the balloon’s volume, of the manner in which it fills the space in which it hangs like a globe set loose from its moorings. The things are apparently composed of brown paper, which appears heavy, coarse grained, and which still bears the folds and creases necessary to achieve the balloon’s shape. Its seams are dark with whatever Dunn used to seal them. Perhaps the most serious defect in Mrs. Barchester’s account of the balloons, however, lies in her remarks upon the designs that cover their surfaces. She writes of the “quaint, Oriental patterns with which Mr. Dunn has decorated his inventions.” Yet the arrangement of the figures in latitudinal lines, their irregular repetition, give more the impression of communication than ornamentation. The script is none I can read or even recognize: its characters appear drawn from the loops and twists woven into the room’s Turkey carpet; nor am I certain of the medium in which Dunn has applied them, which shines as if fresh, and in whose depths I catch traces of crimson, viridian, and purple.

  And there is more to note. A distinct odor clouds the air around the balloon. It mixes the wood-pulp smell of the paper with another, faintly medicinal scent, possibly that of ether. (Is this due to the manner in which Dunn suspends his creations?) Underneath the combined smells, I perceive a third—damp, earthy. The balloon’s surface produces a low and constant crackling as it shifts in the currents of air wafting into the room through its windows. I went to touch the thing, to add its texture to my catalogue of impressions, only to hesitate with the tips of my fingers a hairsbreadth from its paper. I was seized by the most overpowering repugnance, such that the hairs from the back of my hand right up my forearm stood rigid. I swear, my flesh actually shrank from the thing. For the briefest of instants, I wanted nothing more than to see the balloon destroyed—torn apart, set alight. It was the kind and intensity of response I would have expected at confronting an especially loathsome insect, not an eccentric’s amusement. I dropped my hand and decided my investigations had proceeded far enough for the moment.

  Such a curious reaction—a consequence of the day’s travel?

  IV

  Given his response to the balloon in his chamber, Coleman did not expect that he would be able to sleep in its presence, and he intended to ask Dunn to have it removed after dinner. At the conclusion of the meal, however, Dunn retreated to the library with Cal, whose preparations for their imminent work together the man declared must be seen to, posthaste. Not to mention, removed from close quarters with the thing, Coleman’s initial antipathy towards it seemed vague, ridiculous. He could wait, he decided, for morning.

  Once he was outside the door to his room, though, the self-assurance of minutes before felt cavalier, reckless. So he was relieved when he found the balloon had drifted to the window, where its presence was, if not pleasant, not as repellent.

  V

  “Do you believe Mr. Dunn?” Isabelle asked.

  “Heavens, no.” Coleman laughed. “A meeting with old Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew himself, on the eve of the battle at Gettysburg? Tutelage in the secret arts of Simon Magus? A saving intercession in his later life by the spirits of his mother, Paracelsus, and Swedenborg? It’s like a distillation of every melodrama produced these last fifty years. No, I suspect Mr. Dunn’s narrative is no more than a way for him to align his past acts with his present practices.”

  Isabelle frowned, but did not reply. She inclined towards a bush whose name Cole
man didn’t know but on whose branches a large orange-and-black butterfly moved its wings.

  “I am much more interested,” Coleman said, “in our host’s reluctance to describe the means by which he fashions his balloons.”

  VI

  “You are preoccupied today,” Isabelle said.

  “Am I?” Coleman turned his gaze from the blue sheet of the Hudson.

  She nodded. “Since Mr. Dunn’s recitation of his years as an arms merchant last night, your thoughts have been elsewhere, I believe.”

  Coleman smiled. “I fear I am not as cryptic as I would like.”

  “Or I am becoming more adept at deciphering you.”

  One of Dunn’s balloons had drifted near. Coleman raised his hand to push it away, only to find himself once more hesitating before his fingers touched its papery surface, his skin literally crawling at the thing’s proximity. Instead, he stood from the bench upon which he and Mrs. Earnshaw had admired the view from Dunn’s garden and set off at a slow pace along its paths. Isabelle hurried after him. He preempted her question about his response to the balloon by saying, “You are correct. I have been distracted, and our host’s words were the cause of it—specifically, his account of the bargain he struck for the rifles taken from the so-called Paris Commune. I was in Paris during the Commune. I’d come in with the second or third shipment of food Great Britain sent after the Prussians lifted their siege of the city. I’d thought I might write a series of articles about the state of the capital, which during the siege had become a focus of international attention and sympathy. It was a project for which I was well suited. Not only was I fluent in the language, but I had visited Paris several times during my youth, and I had maintained my correspondence with several of the friends I had made during those trips. One of these friends helped me secure lodgings in the Vaugirard district, and I settled down to work.

  “I was staying at the edge of the city, so each morning, I set out to walk into it. While I was cautious at first, I soon became more confident and was ranging far and wide. Some parts of the city seemed hardly to have been affected at all, others—I can recall my shock at seeing the Ministry of Finances, which had been pounded almost entirely into rubble by the Prussian guns, so that what remained resembled an antique ruin. Towards the end of the day, I would return home and record my experiences. Once a week, I would write a short essay detailing my impressions, which I sent off to Rupert Cook at Howell’s. He liked the pieces well enough, although he paid the bare minimum for them. To be frank, I did not expect Cook would continue to purchase my essays for very long, once their novelty wore off. For the moment, however, I was in Paris, gathering details for my next novel, which (I hoped) would meet with more success than either of my previous attempts had. If I harbored my resources, I judged I might be able to extend my stay by as much as another year.

  “In the wake of the French defeat, the city—the country—was in tumult. Indeed, the new government chose to convene in Versailles, for fear of the Parisian crowds. One of President Thiers’s first moves was to pass the Law of Maturities, whose ostensible purpose was to refill the coffers depleted by the war, but whose not-so-secret intent was to bring Paris, which was to provide an undue share of the revenue, to heel. The Commune arose as an attempt by the residents of the city to administer their own affairs more justly. For the two months of the Commune’s rule, Paris was—it was no less turbulent, but the daily chaos was shot through with optimism, with excitement. There was a significant population of foreigners living in the city, exiles, many of them, from more repressive states—and perhaps because of this, what was taking place felt as if its implications went far beyond the city’s borders. I filled all of one notebook and most of a second.

  “There had been some skirmishes between the forces defending Paris and those loyal to the national government, but nothing of consequence, or so I judged. How naïve do I sound if I say that I did not believe the dispute between the city and the country would be settled through force of arms? Yet the morning of May twenty-first, I awakened to the sound of the first of the national government’s forces marching through the streets. I had not appreciated the unhappiness the residents of the city’s western districts felt towards the Commune. This included one of my oldest correspondents, a former professor of the classics who I later learned had been passing information along to the president’s agents. In fact, he was among those to suggest the route by which the French army might gain access to the city, and to offer reassurance that the soldiers would receive a warm welcome when they arrived.

  “Which they did: the avenue outside my window was lined with men, women, children, there to greet the troops as liberators. I stared down at the ranks of men in their blue jackets and red trousers, their kepi caps perched on their heads, their rifles shouldered, and it was as if I were witnessing a performance, some new variety of theater performed in the open air. I could not accept its reality. I kept thinking, Surely not, surely not.

  “The seven days that followed have come to be known as La Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week. In short order, Thiers’s forces took the western districts; the east, however, was the seat of the Commune, and the fighting there was fierce. Travel through the streets was difficult, sometimes impossible, but it wasn’t necessary to go very far to know what was happening. All you had to do was walk to your window to hear the crack of the rifles, the boom of the cannons. The sharp smells of gunpowder and burning wood stained the air. Later, I read that, at the president’s request, the Prussians had expedited the release of thousands of the French soldiers they had captured, in order to swell the ranks of the national army. The Commune had no centralized plan for defense; rather, each district was charged with its own security. This allowed the army to divide and conquer the Commune. I, who had missed the civil war in the land of my birth, found myself at the heart of another.

  “Nor was the Bloody Week the worst of it. Following the army’s conquest of the city, the members of the Commune were subject to extended reprisals. Having been associated with the city’s government to the slightest degree might lead to trial and execution. The cemetery at Père Lachaise, the Luxembourg Gardens, were taken over by firing squads. I might have fallen under suspicion, myself, were it not for my old friend the professor of the classics, who testified to my character.

  “I could have stayed, I suppose, but the prospect of remaining in the ruin of the Commune was too bleak. Rupert Cook had lost interest in my reports, so I judged the time right to depart Paris. I stopped at Geneva for a few months, spent the winter in Florence, and settled in Venice. There I remained for the next fifteen years, for the first five of which Paris remained under martial law. Needless to say, the novel I had hoped would emerge from my time in the city remained unwritten. It has only been the past few years that I have been able to return to Paris. I had thought I might live there again, but it was impossible. The ghosts of seventeen years past would not allow it.

  “So to hear that Mr. Dunn had built his early fortune by trading in the Commune’s weapons was . . . unsettling. To say the least.” His smile was humorless.

  Another balloon had drawn close to them. “I believe your husband’s afternoon session should be drawing to a close,” Coleman said. He walked away from the balloon, towards the house.

  VII

  “Were you of age during the War Between the States?” Dunn asked.

  “I was,” Coleman said without turning his gaze from the swords racked between two of the library’s considerable bookcases. He touched the pommel of a rapier. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  The sword was heavier than Coleman anticipated. It took him a moment to find its balance, after which, he slashed right to left, left to right, theatrically.

  “You were an officer,” Dunn said.

  “I was not,” Coleman said, replacing the sword. “I suffered an . . . injury a few years before the outbreak of hostilities. I was visiting family friends, and there was a fire in their barn, which I j
oined the effort to extinguish. I was standing too close to one of the walls when it collapsed and showered me with debris. The quick response of my fellows saved me, but I was left unfit for service. Both my older brothers, Will and Bob, distinguished themselves in the war; in fact, Bob became one of Grant’s aides.” He spared a glance at Dunn, who was studying him intently. Coleman went on, “Since moving to London I’ve taken up fencing as a way to hold the effects of aging at bay.”

  “The effects of your injury have lessened with the years,” Dunn said.

  “They have not hindered my exercise, no.”

  “Perhaps they would have allowed you to join your brothers.”

  “Perhaps,” Coleman said. “I was in England when Sumter was shelled, and my father insisted I remain there.”

  “Due to your wound.”

  Coleman felt his face redden. “If there is an inference you would like to make clear—”

  “Nothing of the kind,” Dunn said, waving one of his massive hands. “You should be grateful—you should fall on your knees and give thanks to whatever God you venerate for that injury. Whatever discomfort, whatever pain it has brought to you has preserved you from an experience vastly more terrible, from wading knee-deep in a tide of blood and gore. It was something of a witticism among my fellow soldiers that should any of us fall in battle, he need have no fear of the Christian hell, because next to the sights we had witnessed, its famous torments would count as naught.” Dunn paused. “I beg your pardon: I don’t mean to bore you with an old soldier’s platitudes. Lunch should be ready on the patio.”

  Coleman followed Dunn out of the library with the enormous oak table at its center, the handful of balloons floating amidst its bookcases. He was thinking that Dunn had uttered his description of the war in a tone not of horror, but nostalgia.

  VIII

  “I wonder, sir, what you regret,” Cal Earnshaw said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Coleman looked up from his book.