Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  Coleman turned, sweeping his sword in a wide arc that caught Dunn’s stab and flung his blade to the side. The man recovered quickly, cutting an X in front of him. Rather than parry, Coleman retreated several paces. Dunn was considerably stronger than he and had selected a heavy cavalry saber for his weapon; Coleman did not rank his chances of defeating the man especially high. If he could distract him from Isabelle, who had assisted Cal up from the table and was supporting him as he limped toward the library door, then Coleman would consider his performance a success.

  Truth to tell, he was surprised by the fury with which Dunn now attacked him. Without a doubt, the balloons had cost him no small amount of time and effort. But Dunn’s face was scarlet, his large eyes protruding with fury. Coleman had little doubt that, were he to allow Dunn the opportunity, his host would put his saber to deadly use. The man’s moves were exaggerated, almost parodic, those of someone whose notions of handling a sword were drawn from the stage; should any of his swipes connect, however, its effects would be real enough.

  Dunn had backed him to the foot of the table. A pair of balloons floated to Coleman’s right, closer to the broad oak expanse (which, he had time to notice, was incised with row after row of the same figures written on the balloons’ paper surface). There was no need for him to slash the two of them, yet there was no denying the deep rush of pleasure that accompanied the act. At this latest insult to his inventions, Dunn roared and charged. Coleman ducked the swing at his head and jabbed Dunn’s right arm high, near the shoulder. Dunn yelped and retreated a step.

  The library door slammed shut behind Isabelle and Cal Earnshaw. Coleman doubted Cal would last out the next hour, let alone the remainder of the night, but at least he would do so in the company of his wife and not splayed on a table surrounded by a charlatan and his paper toys. Coleman lowered the tip of his sword. His breath coming fast, he said, “There. Mrs. Earnshaw’s wishes have been fulfilled. Now perhaps you and I can settle matters between us in a more civilized fashion. I apologize for the destruction of your creations. I would be willing to recompense you a fair amount—”

  “You fucking idiot,” Dunn said. He had pressed his left hand over the wound Coleman had given him; his fingers were scarlet. He had not dropped his saber, which he pointed at the first balloons Coleman had vandalized. “You think these are works of art? They’re cages.”

  “More metaphors?” Coleman looked to the other end of the room. The balloons he had stabbed were in a state of half collapse on the floor, surrounded by ever-widening pools of brackish ichor. Those he had sliced open were sagging downwards, raining their contents as they descended. Through the vents he had cut in them, he could distinguish something, a mottled surface his blade had torn and which was the source of the viscous liquid. That layer was pierced by additional holes, lozenge shaped and anywhere in size from that of a small coin to a handbreadth. Each of the holes was moving, opening and closing with a motion that was repellently familiar. Coleman stared at them blankly before understanding rushed in and he recognized the apertures as mouths. For a moment, he felt the room around him tilt crazily. He reached his left hand to his forehead. “My God . . .”

  With a sudden burst of speed, Dunn lunged forward and stabbed Coleman in the chest. The blade was a white shock. For a moment, Coleman was propelled out of his body to a lightless place. When he returned, he had fallen to his knees and Dunn was holding forth. “—true,” he said. “The veil between the worlds is thinner, here. With the proper preparations, the inhabitants of the other realm may be lured across, captured, and put to work. Their physical capabilities are limited, but what they offer in terms of knowledge . . . Their appetites, however, are considerable, and they require a rather specialized diet. Human sensation sustains them—the more intense, the better the meal. Pain they find particularly satisfying. The agonies of the dying will keep them happy and compliant for days.”

  “Your . . . services . . .” Coleman panted. With each breath, his chest filled with white fire.

  “No doubt some of my clients have taken comfort from their time with me,” Dunn said. “They’ve certainly been more use here than at any other time in their lives. It’s a pity,” he continued, “I had hoped that you—an artist—might understand the work in which I am engaged here. It was not my intention for your stay to end this way. But since it has, and since you have deprived my friends of their meal . . .” Dunn surveyed the balloons at the head of the table, the pair at its foot. The injuries of the nearer balloons did not appear as grave; indeed, while Dunn had been speaking, they had drifted closer to him. Through the rents in their paper cages, Coleman could see their excess of mouths gulping with a motion that reminded him of hungry fish at the surface of a pool. Dunn said, “Your attempt at gallantry has cost me more than you can conceive.”

  Coleman’s shirt and trousers were warm, sticky, heavy with the blood emptying him. The library paled almost to blank, then returned. “As,” he said to Dunn, “as . . . a gentle-gentleman . . . I wonder if . . . if you . . .”

  “You must be joking,” Dunn said; nonetheless, his bulk inclined towards Coleman.

  Gripping its hilt as tightly as he could, Coleman slashed the rapier across Dunn’s face. As he did, something broke loose inside him and a tide of blood poured from the wound in his chest. He let go of the sword and fell beside it.

  A thin, high-pitched scream rose from Dunn’s throat. Coleman’s sword had raked his eyes, and his cheeks were wet with blood and fluid. He had dropped the saber and held his hands up on either side of him, as if imploring some supernatural agency to his aid. Still screaming, Dunn crashed into the table with such force it jolted across the floor. He staggered back from the collision, lost his footing, and tumbled down.

  The balloons were waiting for him. Their prisons ruptured, the creatures they had contained surged out of them and over Dunn. His vision was failing, but Coleman had the impression of something more liquid than solid, enough like a jellyfish to warrant the comparison. Dunn’s voice climbed higher, then failed. He clawed at the things on his chest, but that only allowed them to attach to his hands. With what must have been Herculean effort, Dunn sat up. His lips were forming words Coleman could not hear. Before he had uttered more than a few of them, one of the creatures spread itself over his face. His body shook as if with a seizure, then sagged backwards. In the quiet that followed, Coleman heard the noises of eating. Apparently, the balloons’ prisoners were capable of taking their nourishment more directly.

  The library faded a second time. When it returned, it was less distinct. Coleman guessed more of his blood was outside his body than remained in it. How odd to die so quickly. How odd to die in a library. In some ways, it was as appropriate a location as any. He hoped that Isabelle had managed to get Cal out of the house. He had waited too long to take her concerns seriously and try to aid her; he hoped it wouldn’t be held against him. He wasn’t much of a believer in an afterlife, hadn’t been for decades. He supposed he’d been mistaken. He wondered what he should expect. Whatever it was, he hoped it wouldn’t be hungry.

  XIV

  From Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (third edition):

  Coleman, Mark Stephen (1842–1888). American novelist and short story writer. Born in Kingston, New York, Coleman left for study at Cambridge at the age of eighteen and spent almost the entire rest of his life abroad, living successively in London, Paris, Venice, and then London again before returning to the Hudson Valley in his final months. Like Henry James, with whom he is often compared, Coleman took as his subject the experiences of Americans in Europe; however, Coleman’s Americans are plagued by remorse of past sins personal and familial, a preoccupation that links his work to that of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His most famous novel is Belgrave’s Garden (1879), an account of a wealthy American’s attempt to cultivate the land on which his ancestor ordered a brutal massacre during the second Jacobite rebellion in 1745. Coleman’s death was notorious: he died as a result of an apparent duel with the
spiritualist Parrish Dunn, who also was slain.

  For Fiona

  Afterword to “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons”

  Almost from the moment I received Nick’s invitation to submit to the anthology, I knew that the story would focus on these mysterious, faintly sinister balloons, of whose origins I’m honestly unsure (except that, due to the threat of their flying away should you relax your grip on them, balloons have been a locus of anxiety for me since I was a small child and one escaped up into the sky at the amusement park my parents had taken me to). I could see them clearly in my mind’s eye, these large, papery spheres, the creases in whose coverings were clearly visible. The temporal setting of the story suggested a Henry-Jamesian writer as the protagonist, as well as the story’s use of spiritualism (it is true that New York’s Hudson Valley was a center of spiritualist activity during the 1850s). I originally had it in mind to write a more conventionally structured story, but I stalled on that version not too far into it, and the story remained in a state of partial completion until it occurred to me that I might approach its material in a less conventional way, after which, the story spilled out of me in a couple of weeks. A couple of last-minute edits, and the story was done.

  —JOHN LANGAN

  John Harwood

  John Harwood was born in Hobart, Tasmania, where he grew up in a house full of books, including numerous collections of ghost stories, an interest that would resurface many years later in his first novel, The Ghost Writer. He was educated at the Friends’ School and the University of Tasmania, where he read English and philosophy, before going on to Cambridge as a graduate student.

  The Ghost Writer (first published by Jonathan Cape in 2004) won the International Horror Guild’s First Novel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Horror and Dark Fantasy, and the “Children of the Night” Award for Best Gothic Novel of 2004, from the Dracula Society of Great Britain. The Séance, a dark mystery set in late Victorian England, was published in 2008; it won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel of 2008. Both novels are published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  JOHN HARWOOD

  Face to Face

  IT WAS, I think, the last Christmas of the old century; at any rate it was certainly at Reginald Carstairs’ great barracks of a place down in Surrey that my friend Maurice Trevelyan and I were sitting up late; so late that, excepting the bishop, we had the drawing room fire entirely to ourselves. And since the bishop was, as usual, sound asleep, he made an ideal chaperone. Nobody seemed to know what he was, or had been, bishop of; I very much doubt whether he knew himself, for he was so old and venerable that he woke only long enough to dine, imbibe a glass or two of port, and settle himself back into his favourite armchair. He was invariably asleep in it when the last guest went upstairs, no matter how late; but someone must have put him to bed, for his chair was always empty in the mornings.

  Not that we required a chaperone: I was, as everybody knew, simply a married woman whose husband never went out, and Maurice was equally well established in the character of a forty-five-year-old bachelor of quiet habits and modest means. He had remained unmarried, it was rumoured, because of a youthful attachment, prematurely ended by the death of the woman to whose memory he remained devoted. It was not a subject I had ever raised with him, for Maurice hated to be quizzed over his personal life. I had divined this early on, in fact on the very day we were introduced in the office of the review he was then editing. Some acquaintance was chaffing him about a supposed indiscretion; I saw Maurice recoil; he saw my discomfort on his behalf, and a current of sympathy was set flowing between us. The review, to which I contributed a tale or two, lasted less than a year before its patron abandoned it, but our friendship was by then a settled thing.

  Some may wonder, if personal matters were excluded, what on earth we had to talk about, to which the answer is: everything under the sun, but more particularly anything and everything that either of us had ever read or written or, in his case, dreamed of writing, for I doubt there was ever a poet with a deeper sense of his vocation than Maurice Trevelyan. Yet he was at the same time so self-effacing as to be almost impossible to describe. Put a pen or a manuscript in his hand, and you could not doubt his force of character: about a passage of writing he could not prevent himself from telling the exact truth, however discomforting to the writer; but on any other subject he would happily yield the floor to men twenty years his junior. Even his physical appearance was not easy to capture; he was unremarkably slender, moderately tall, with dark hair receding at the temples, and fine but regular features, save only that the left side of his face looked strangely seared: I do not mean withered or scarred, but rather marked by a fixed pallor, as though he had come too close to a fire whose flames burned cold instead of hot. At any rate I can put it no better than that, and on the evening in question, as we sat gazing into the flames, our occasional silences filled by the creak and crackle of burning coals and the faint snores of the bishop dreaming peacefully on the far side of the hearth, it remained among the topics that had never been raised between us.

  Instead we spoke—or rather Maurice spoke, as he would do only when we were alone—of the unwritten poem that, in various guises, had haunted him all his life. Everything good that he had ever done—and he was the most exacting, indeed ruthless critic of his own writing—seemed to him, at certain moments, only the shadow of this other work whose outlines he constantly glimpsed, but whose substance he could never capture. He believed in the community of all true poets through the ages, and sometimes spoke as if all true poems were but fragments of some great ur-poem, or Platonic quintessence of the art; at other times as if our language, in all its richness and beauty, existed in a fallen state, like some great ruin of antiquity, mere broken remnants of a celestial tongue we had once known, and lost; to this end he was fond of quoting Shelley’s remark about the fading coal, or the close of “Kubla Khan”: he had an especial sympathy for poets who had left behind great but unfinished works. He agreed, up to a point, with Pater, that all art aspires to the condition of music, but believed that there was a poem, destined for him and him alone to write, that would be the fulfilment of his life and the perfection of his art, and yet be expressible in ordinary English words, however extraordinary the effect of the whole might be. There were moments, he said, in which he could hear the rhythm of its lines falling as clearly as footsteps passing along a hall, and feel certain that if his inner ear were only a little more acute, he could catch the words before their echoes faded.

  To some, this fascination with the unattainable might have become a torment, but Maurice seemed content with his lot. I had often wondered what he would make of the remainder of his life if that one perfect poem were ever to swoop down from the heavens and alight upon his outstretched wrist, but I never quite liked to ask, for it seemed an intrusion upon that privacy which, it sometimes struck me, we shared so intimately without ever mentioning.

  We sat, then, watching the coals brighten and fade, which put me in mind, as often, of Shelley; almost simultaneously, Maurice began softly to speak the lines from “Adonais”:

  The One remains, the many change and pass;

  Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

  Stains the white radiance of Eternity . . .

  where he ceased, for which I was grateful, for the trampling of the dome always seems to me wanton and wrong. It may be pagan to think so, but to me the beauty is in the whole: the One and the Many, the pure sunlight streaming through stained glass; heaven’s light would be poorer without earth’s shadows. Though perhaps heaven’s light may be as far beyond mere sunlight as the many-coloured dome surpasses a shop window. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”

  I did not realise I had spoken the last words aloud until I became aware of a stillness on my right. I looked up from the coals to find Maurice staring at me as if I had become a g
host.

  “Laura”—he spoke my name as if suddenly uncertain of its meaning—“how did you know my thought?”

  “I did not,” I said, “or not knowingly.”

  As best I could, I retraced my steps for him, but he continued to stare at me with that stricken intensity until I trailed off, at a loss to understand how such a familiar verse could trouble him so profoundly. Gradually he recovered himself and began to look at me in his accustomed way; and then he took my hand, something he did not commonly do except at meeting and parting. His hand was very cold, despite the heat of the fire, and instinctively I sought to cover it with both of mine. But still the prohibition that had nurtured our friendship kept me from speaking.

  “Those lines of Shelley’s,” he resumed, after a long pause, “how often have I read them over or heard them spoken, and yet never until tonight . . . I saw”—pointing with his other hand into the heart of the fire—“the dome shatter and re-form into—a thing of darkness. And then you spoke, of all verses, that one. ‘Face to Face’ is the title of a manuscript I once read—in part. A tale, I must call it, though it was not like any tale I have ever read; indeed it was not like anything I have ever read. It was, in its effect upon the reader, the exact reverse, the most sinister inversion”—he shivered slightly, and I noticed that the seared place below his cheekbone looked paler than usual—“of that perfect poem we were discussing just now. And it was written by the woman I once dreamed of marrying.”

  I had not meant to release his hand, but found that I had done so. In the shadows opposite, the bishop slept on.

  “You must first understand,” said Maurice, as if answering some objection on my part, “in what extremity she was driven to—manifest it. Her mother and mine were close friends; in a manner of speaking we grew up together. Her letters were extraordinarily vivid. She was nineteen, and I twenty-one, when they came to live in London, and from then on I saw her frequently, until all was changed by the sudden death of her father, whose passing left them in a precarious position. My own father did what he could, but his means were very limited. I felt I could not . . . at any rate I did not . . . suffice to say,” he continued somewhat hurriedly, “that my friend came to the notice of Sir Lewis Wainwright, a wealthy man some thirty years older than herself. He had, I think, had some business dealing with her late father; it was certainly within his power to secure not only her future but that of her mother and her two younger sisters. I did not—perhaps could not—believe that she ever loved him. From the first he struck me as cold, indeed evil in the very emanations of his being; I felt in him that capacity to wither and shrivel with a glance, to inspire the shrinking that flesh instinctively feels from sharpened steel, or serpents. To the casual eye, no doubt, he was simply a tall, distinguished gentleman still in the prime of life, immaculately and fastidiously dressed, perfectly courteous in manner; yet how she could have been so deceived . . . it was like watching a sleepwalker moving slowly towards the brink of a precipice and finding oneself unable to move or cry out. My consciousness of my own position kept me silent, and even made me doubt what in my heart of hearts I could not doubt; and besides, what could I have said? A poor student who could barely meet the cost of his own subsistence? Yet I should have spoken—”