Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  Cal pushed himself slightly higher in his Adirondack chair. “You may imagine,” he said, panting from the effort, “a man in my position finds a great deal he wishes he could do or undo. Some of it is fairly obvious: Isabelle and I will never have a family. Some of it is more idiosyncratic: I will not see the pyramids, which has been an ambition of mine since I read about them as a boy. I’ve tried to reconcile myself to these facts, for really, what else can I do? Yet I am so far unable to rise above my frustration—my anger, if I am to speak candidly—at everything I am to lose. I keep hoping that the peace which is supposed to descend on those nearing death’s precincts will find me, but it has not.

  “All of which,” he continued, “is preamble to my asking what regrets a man like you might harbor. You have lived longer than have I; you have traveled far, resided in places that are only names on a map to me. You have authored several novels, many more stories; you have written extensively for an assortment of periodicals. In short, you have had a life whose fullness, if not its exact details, I should have liked for mine. I know that you must have had your disappointments, but weighed against that fullness, I find it difficult to believe that any mistake or missed opportunity could matter that much.”

  Coleman set his book on the arm of his chair. A quartet of balloons hovered in the near distance; he fought the urge to depart the porch with all due speed. He had promised Isabelle that he would sit with her husband while he recovered from his morning session with Dunn (which appeared to be hastening the end they were supposed to be preparing him for: in the last five days, Cal had gone from gaunt to skeletal, his skin stretched taut over his bones—his skin had become gray and papery, and a sour odor clung to him). Doing his best not to listen to the balloons’ soft, incessant rustling, Coleman let his gaze drift to the Hudson, full of craft large and small this sunny day. “When I was a young man,” he began, “not very much older than you . . .” His voice trailed off.

  After a moment, Cal said, “Mr. Coleman?”

  With a shake of his head, Coleman said, “Forgive me, Mr. Earnshaw. In many ways, you’re right: my life has been much as I wished it to be. What part of it I could control, at least. And what has lain outside my control, I have tried to cultivate a philosophical attitude towards. Often, I’ve been able to console myself with the thought that whatever reversal of fortune I was experiencing would serve as the germ of a future story. In fact, what I’m about to tell you made it to a rather lengthy opening.

  “That scene was from the point of view of a young Venetian gondolier. I can’t remember the name I gave him. What was important was that he was a poet whose verses had not found success—thus his employment in the gondola—and his youth. This was contrasted with that of his passenger, whose middle age seemed to the gondolier just this side of the grave.” Coleman caught himself. “I apologize—”

  Cal waved his words away. “Go on. Please.”

  “Very well. The young man stares at his passenger openly, but the older man is too preoccupied either to notice or to mind. He is dressed for mourning, which may explain his distraction. Heaped on the passenger’s lap are a dozen dresses—well made, as far as the gondolier can tell, though a bit threadbare.

  “It is early morning. The sky is light, but the sun has yet to rise into it. In his heavily accented Italian, the passenger has requested that he be rowed out of the city and into the lagoon that borders it. The deepest point in the lagoon, he has said—he has insisted. The gondolier is not certain where the water is deepest. He waits until they are a suitable distance from the city, slows the gondola, and announces to the man that they have reached their destination.

  “The passenger does not question him. Instead, he shifts to his right, raises the dress on top of the pile, and places it into the dark water. He does the same with the next dress, and the dress below that, laying each in the water with remarkable tenderness, so that the gondolier is reminded of a groom bringing his new bride to the wedding bed.

  “However, when the man has only a handful of dresses in his lap, something happens that causes him to start back from the water. The dresses he has submerged have returned, buoyed to the surface by the air trapped in their folds. On his knees, the passenger rushes to the side of the gondola with such violence that the gondolier has to shift his stance to keep the craft from tilting into the lagoon. Without removing his jacket, the passenger thrusts his arms into the water up to the elbow, pushing down on the risen dresses. It does no good. Pressing one part of the dress causes the rest of it to rise even higher. The man shoves the dresses down frantically, as if he’s trying to drown them. He’s soaked, but he doesn’t care. The gondolier thinks that he should speak to his passenger, but he cannot decide what to say.

  “At last the man slumps against the side of the gondola, exhausted, drenched, his face a mask of sorrow. That was where the scene ended, with him contracted in grief, the gondola surrounded by floating dresses, each moving slightly in the green water, the gondolier watching everything and contemplating a new poem he might write.”

  “The man,” Cal said, “the passenger—”

  “Yes,” Coleman said.

  “But the dresses—”

  “Belonged to a woman named Philippa Irving Ventner. She was a writer, an American—in fact, she was born in Phoenicia, up in the Catskills. I met her in Geneva. She was touring the continent along with her younger sister, Grace. She was supposed to be educating Grace in the finer points of European civilization, but her knowledge of the subject was less than complete. Not that this stopped her: if there was one thing she had perfected, it was in moving ahead, regardless of the circumstances. To be fair, it had led to her producing a novel, The Naturalist’s Lament, which had done extremely well. If I’m to be completely frank with you, none of my books has sold anywhere close to what hers did. The profits had funded her trip with Grace, which in turn led to another novel, Joanna’s Secret, which allowed her to remain abroad after she had returned her sister home.

  “No picture does her justice. There are many of them. She was happy to sit for any artist who cared to paint her, and she loved to be photographed. Look at the better portraits in either medium, and you will see her high cheekbones, her pointed nose, her brown hair. You will not see the watchfulness, the attentiveness that was her habitual expression. You will not see the wit that animated her eyes, her lips—the tilt of her head ever so slightly forward—when she was engaged in conversation. She had a keen sense of humor, though her response to most humorous stories and remarks was to hide her laughter behind her hands.”

  “You were—were you—”

  “I met her several times over the next half a dozen years,” Coleman said, “most often in Venice after I had settled there. She tried life in London, then Berlin, then Vienna, before finally taking up my suggestion that Venice might prove more agreeable to her. For a time, it was. We saw a great deal of each other, and the circles we frequented soon grew used to the pair of us attending their functions together. We had our routines, our rituals, our walks to St. Mark’s, our meals at Caffè Florian, our trips to the opera. She was the most agreeable person I have ever known; in her company, time ran more quickly, so that our excursions were over much too soon.

  “When she approached me about renting rooms in a palace together, the idea struck me as inspired.” At the expression of shock on Cal’s face, Coleman hurried on: “The palace was the property of Constance Aspern, a very old woman who in her youth was supposed to have been one of Lord Byron’s lovers. The fortune that had sustained her decades in Venice was drying up, the consequence of a series of bad investments, and she thought that by taking in lodgers, she might at least slow its loss. She offered a suite of rooms on the top floor, and another on the ground floor, but really, whichever floor you chose, you had the run of it, since Miss Aspern did not stray often or far from her rooms on the middle floor. The entire palace had seen better days, but there was a kind of shabby glory to it—not to mention, the rent was ridiculo
usly low. I took the top floor, Philippa the ground floor, and we settled into what seemed a particularly fortuitous arrangement.

  “For one winter and part of the following spring, it was. Philippa and I passed our mornings working, then joined Miss Aspern for lunch, then ventured out into Venice. So might we have continued to this very day, I daresay.”

  “What happened?” Cal asked.

  “Our friendship changed,” Coleman said after a moment. “It . . . deepened. I was—Philippa was a good ten years my junior. Children were . . . I . . . a long time ago, I had decided that, in order for me to achieve the art it was my ambition to produce, I would have to lead a certain kind of life. Until this point, I had remained true to my original plan. I suppose my resolve had borne fruit, albeit in books that were more praised than read. At private moments over the years, I had wondered whether the course I’d chosen was the best one, but I’d never had so clear an alternative presented to me. For a week in early, spring, I—we. . .

  “The end of that time found me on a train to Paris. I was not—I had been contacted by an editor about the possibility of writing a piece for his magazine about the French capital ten years after its emergence from martial law. I decided that the ten days such a trip would require would allow me to evaluate the path onto which my life had swerved. I feared—I knew how my departure would appear to Philippa, and I did my best to reassure her that I was not fleeing her. She wasn’t pleased, but neither was she overwrought. I would be back soon, and we would talk when I was.

  “That was the last I saw of her. The night I left, the railing on which she was leaning as she stood at the window gave way, plummeting her to the courtyard thirty feet below. She was not killed instantly; she survived another three days in the hospital. No one knew how to reach me. Philippa departed this life without regaining consciousness, with only Miss Aspern for company. By the time I returned, a day later than I’d planned, she had been buried for several days.”

  “You had decided . . .”

  “Does it matter?” Coleman said.

  Cal did not answer.

  “I left Venice not long after,” Coleman said. “Miss Aspern had no objection to my maintaining my rooms; I believe she had some notion of congruence between us. I had neither the inclination nor the desire to figure in her tableau. I did see Grace—Philippa’s younger sister, now married with four children. I met her at her sister’s grave. I hadn’t remembered Grace as especially remarkable, and in the years since I had seen her last, she had grown into one of those Americans who make you embarrassed for the country: vain, provincial, willfully ignorant. I had expected, had steeled myself for, an outpouring of sorrow at the sudden extinguishing of so bright a light. Instead, I was subject to a torrent of scorn for such an ‘odd duck.’ I did my best to defend Philippa, but I was so astonished, I fumbled the effort. I grew angry, furious, so much so that I had no choice but to leave the cemetery immediately or risk doing violence to the woman.”

  Coleman slumped back in his chair. The quartet of balloons had settled into close orbit around him and Cal. He picked up his book and said, “In no way do I wish to minimize what you face losing. But there are times I have thought that, the longer I’ve lived, the more elaborate have grown the disasters in which I have enmeshed myself.”

  IX

  “And how is your work proceeding, Mr. Coleman?” Dunn asked. Isabelle and Cal had retired to their room for an hour before a late dinner. Coleman was seated in the lounge, his notebook open in his lap, when Dunn walked into the room. Closing the notebook, Coleman said, “My latest is still in the early stages.”

  “Would I be presumptuous,” Dunn said, seating himself on the chair next to Coleman’s, “if I asked its plot?”

  “I don’t suppose so,” Coleman said, “although I should warn you that most of the interest in my fiction arises from its execution, rather than its conception.”

  “You do yourself a disservice. You must forgive me—I have a terrible memory for the titles of these sorts of things—but your story about the man who is haunted by the ghosts of the family he did not have struck me as very original.”

  “ ‘The Undiscovered Country,’ ” Coleman said, “and thank you. The piece I am working on now is in a similar vein. It concerns a man who, as a result of an injury received in battle, has lost the ability to feel. He is a scientist, and he devotes his efforts to understanding the nature or source of human feeling. This leads to his performing a series of ghastly experiments upon a pair of innocents who seek his aid.”

  “Fascinating,” Dunn said. “You intend the scientist as a villain.”

  “Not a villain so much as a . . . monomaniac, I would say. Of course, his inability to feel complicates the matter. Can he be held responsible for his actions if he is deficient in so fundamental a way?”

  “Yes,” Dunn said. “I thought you were going to say that it is the knowledge he pursues that muddies the waters.”

  “Oh?”

  “Surely a great deal may be forgiven if the objective is the advancement of human understanding.”

  “I’m not sure,” Coleman said. “It seems to me more the case that a great number of sins have sought to hide themselves under the fig leaf of knowledge.”

  “Sin? I am surprised to hear you employ such a useless word. What the world calls sin, Mr. Coleman, is little more than the courage of the uncowed intellect to follow its inclinations.”

  “A sentiment worthy of Goethe’s Faust.”

  “A character, I remind you, who is rewarded for his ceaseless striving.”

  “What a consolation to poor Gretchen,” Coleman said.

  Dunn laughed. “You have an answer to everything, sir.”

  “So my brothers always complained.”

  X

  “It will not be long, now, will it?” Isabelle said.

  Coleman opened his mouth to offer a comforting platitude, but none would come. The sour smell that emanated from Cal had spread throughout the house. He said, “Your husband is in a great deal of pain.”

  “He is,” Isabelle said. “I cannot understand how he bears it. But I might wish he were bearing it with me, rather than Mr. Dunn. I will lose my husband soon enough, Mr. Coleman; I would like to spend what time I have left with him in his company.”

  “Didn’t Dunn inform you—”

  “That he would be taking my husband from me for sessions morning, afternoon, and evening? That those sessions would continue for a week, with no end in sight save Cal’s? No, Mr. Coleman, he did not. I assumed our stay would last a few days, no more. And I assumed that Mr. Dunn would require a few hours at most to prepare my husband for what is to come. I had read about Mr. Dunn’s house—the beauty of its location, its garden—and I fancied that coming here with Cal would be a kind of farewell occasion for us. Instead, it has been a rehearsal for the solitude I am too soon to know.”

  “Has your husband told you what the sessions consist of?”

  “He has. Apparently, Mr. Dunn has him lie on the table in the library. Then he positions several of his balloons around the room.”

  “The balloons?”

  “They are supposed to aid Cal in the process.”

  “Which consists in what?” Coleman said. “Does Dunn fill his head with pictures of the life to come?”

  “No,” Isabelle said, “just the opposite. He tells Cal to allow his mind to fill with the agony that afflicts him.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Mr. Dunn says that since Cal’s pain is the route that will lead him out of this world and into the next, it is necessary for him to immerse himself in it, in order for his transition to be a smooth one.”

  Coleman frowned. “Does your husband at least feel that Dunn’s ministrations are helping him?”

  “He insists they are when I ask him, but if you could see the look in his eyes . . . I think he cannot stand for his sessions with Mr. Dunn to be anything other than helpful.”

  XI

  Summerland, Poughkeep
sie

  June 22, 1888

  According to Dunn, not just the Hudson but the stretch of the river next to Poughkeepsie is the site of a doorway from this world to the next. Of course it would be, wouldn’t it? But (supposedly) all manner of phenomena visible on the surface of the water during the late 1850s, reported in local papers. Must research.

  Strange how tired I am—not from any exertion, obviously, but from the stress of Cal Earnshaw’s rapidly worsening condition, and its effect on his wife. Tonight, she made her most direct plea yet for Dunn to allow her to take Cal and depart for home. Dunn would have none of it, insisting that he and Cal still have a great deal of preparation to do. He tried to draw me in on his side, but I refused. Perhaps I should have spoken more forcefully, insisted that Dunn send the Earnshaws on their way.

  Would that I could climb into bed and sink into slumber—but the combination of the memories the last few days have stirred and the balloon that floats near my window keeps me awake.

  XII

  “I intend to take my husband and depart this house immediately,” Isabelle said. “Will you help me?”

  “Yes,” Coleman said.

  XIII

  There was a moment’s resistance, then the tip of the rapier broke the balloon’s skin. Coleman couldn’t say what he had expected—for the paper sphere to burst, or deflate, or shoot across the library on its suddenly released contents—but assuredly, it was not the gout of thick black fluid over the blade of the sword, across the floor. He drove the rapier in to the hilt, through the balloon’s other side, and withdrew it as his tutor had instructed him, ready for a second thrust.

  He need not have bothered. Listing to the right, the balloon was sinking, dark liquid dripping from the cuts Coleman had made to it. The stuff was thick as treacle and struck the marble tiles with a wet splat. With a strangled cry, Dunn ran for the sword rack. Coleman stabbed the next balloon, stepped forward, and slashed the balloon after that. By the time he heard Dunn’s shoes slapping the floor behind him, Coleman had opened a vent in the fourth of the man’s inventions. His sword was coated in whatever filled the balloons, which oozed across the floor in growing puddles that stank of rot. It seemed impossible that such a substance could cause the balloons to rise, and yet—