Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  Jane is the single truth in my life, its sole constant. I have no reason to mistrust her affections, yet I often construct scenarios that paint our marriage as the endgame of an elaborate hoax. When I tell her about them (I tell her everything), she is amused and chides me for being so dismal. For instance, the other day, a sunny day with a salt breeze, as we walked in the green hills above the beach at Pwll Du, she responded to my latest fabrication by saying, “I had to labor at it, else you might have escaped my clutches.” She glanced at me with mischief in her eyes and said, “Seducing you was no easy task.”

  “As I remember, it was I who seduced you.”

  “Oh, please!” She gave me a pitying look. “After you rejected me that first night, we stayed up all hours, Dorothea and I, plotting your downfall.”

  “You consulted with Dorothea?”

  “It was her idea that I dress as I did on the following night. She thought if I wore matronly bedclothes it might put you at ease. And she lent me her robe. You may recall that it fit me rather snugly.”

  “The crinoline bonnet,” I said. “That almost put me off.”

  “Yes, I suppose that was a bit much. We debated whether or not to employ it.”

  “Why did you . . . ?” I left the question unstated, but she finished it for me.

  “Why did I seduce you?”

  I nodded.

  “Because you were beautiful,” she said. “Because you were sweet . . . and kind.”

  “Beautiful, perhaps,” I said, and smiled. “But these days I don’t feel especially kind or sweet.”

  “You’re still the man I fell in love with.”

  “Not so naïve as that man, perhaps.”

  She blocked my path, preventing me from walking onward. “You’re getting better, Samuel. You may not recognize it, but . . .”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “I wish I’d undergone what you did on the rooftop that night. If I could understand what you went through, I might be able to help you more efficiently.”

  “I can’t understand it myself. It didn’t seem like much of anything . . . at least in retrospect. A few seconds of fear, a few seconds when I was unafraid. But it’s been six years and everywhere I put my eyes, I see disease, poverty, corruption, things I once wanted to remedy, but now I no longer can . . . I don’t know.”

  “The world is not a happy place. That won’t change. But you can. You have! You are getting better.”

  We started walking again.

  “You’re more vigorous, you’re working longer hours.” She worried her lower lip. “I think you should give Jeffrey’s notebooks to someone. It can’t be beneficial to pore over them night after night.”

  “If I could decipher them and remove the material relating to the attraction of ghosts, I would. That information would surely be exploited.”

  “Burn them, then. Or give them to me. I’ll put them somewhere safe. You need to divest yourself of the past . . . that portion of it, anyway.”

  We had reached a spot overlooking a strip of white beach guarded at both ends by enormous boulders. The blue sea stretched tranquil and vast to the horizon, and the cloudless sky, a lighter blue, empty of birds, echoed that tranquility. Nothing seemed to move, yet I felt a vibration in the earth and air that signaled the movement of all things, the flux of atoms and the drift of unknown spheres. An emotion swelled in my breast, nourished by that fundamental vista, and I felt, as I had not in years, capable of belief, of hope, of seeing beyond myself. Jane linked her arm through mine and rested her head against my shoulder and whispered something that the wind bore away. And for that moment, for those minutes atop the hill, we were as happy as the unhappiness of the world permits.

  Afterword to “Rose Street Attractors”

  “Rose Street Attractors” springs from the idea of ghosts as emotionally charged fragments that are left behind at death, and the corresponding thought that these fragments might be somehow isolated or captured and then studied. It also has its roots in my lifelong fascination with the nature of obsession.

  —LUCIUS SHEPARD

  Laird Barron

  Laird Barron is the author of The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for best collection, and a second book of stories, Occultation. His work has appeared in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Clockwork Phoenix, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple honors, including the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, and Crawford Awards. Barron resides in Washington State.

  LAIRD BARRON

  Blackwood’s Baby

  LATE AFTERNOON SUN baked the clay and plaster buildings of the town. Its dirt streets lay empty, packed as hard as iron. The boardinghouse sweltered. Luke Honey sat in a chair in the shadows across from the window. Nothing stirred except flies buzzing on the window ledge. The window was a gap bracketed by warped shutters, and it opened into a portal view of the blazing white stone wall of the cantina across the alley. Since the fistfight he wasn’t welcome in the cantina, although he’d seen the other three men he’d fought there each afternoon, drunk and laughing. The scabs on his knuckles were nearly healed. Every two days, one of the stock boys brought him a bottle.

  Today, Luke Honey was drinking good strong Irish whiskey. His hands were clammy and his shirt stuck to his back and armpits. A cockroach scuttled into the long shadow of the bottle and waited. An overhead fan hung motionless. Clerk Galtero leaned on the counter and read a newspaper gone brittle as ancient papyrus, its fiber sucked dry by the heat; a glass of cloudy water pinned the corner. Clerk Galtero’s bald skull shone in the gloom, and his mustache drooped, sweat dripping from the tips and onto the paper. The clerk was from Barcelona, and Luke Honey heard the fellow had served in the French Foreign Legion on the Macedonian Front during the Great War, and that he’d been clipped in the arm and that was why it curled tight and useless against his ribs.

  A boy entered the house. He was black and covered with the yellow dust that settled upon everything in this place. He wore a uniform of some kind, and a cap with a narrow brim, and no shoes. Luke Honey guessed his age at eleven or twelve, although his face was worn, the flesh creased around his mouth, and his eyes suggested sullen apathy born of wisdom. Here, on the edge of a wasteland, even the children appeared weathered and aged. Perhaps that was how he himself appeared now that he’d lived on the plains and in the jungles for seven years. Perhaps the land had chiseled and filed him down too. He didn’t know because he seldom glanced at the mirror anymore. On the other hand, there were some, such as a Boer and another renowned hunter from Canada Luke Honey had accompanied on many safaris, who seemed stronger, more vibrant with each passing season, as if the dust and the heat, the cloying jungle rot and the blood they spilled fed them, bred into them a savage vitality.

  The boy handed him a telegram in a stiff white envelope with fingerprints all over it. Luke Honey gave him a fifty-cent piece and the boy left. Luke Honey tossed the envelope on the table. He struck a match with his thumbnail and lighted a cigarette. The light coming through the window began to thicken. Orange shadows tinged black slid across the wall of the cantina. He poured a glass of whiskey and drank it in a gulp. He poured another and set it aside. The cockroach fled under the edge of the table.

  Two women descended the stairs. White women, perhaps English, certainly foreign travelers. They wore heavy Victorian dresses, equally staid bonnets, and sheer veils. The younger of the pair inclined her head toward Luke Honey as she passed. Her lips were thinned in disapproval. She and her companion opened the door and walked though its rectangle of shimmering brilliance into the furnace. The door swung shut.

  Clerk Galtero folded the newspaper and placed it under the counter. He tipped his glass toward Luke Honey in a sardonic toast. “The ladies complained about you. You make nois
e in your room at night, the younger one says. You cry out, like a man in delirium. The walls are thin and she cannot sleep, so she complains to me.”

  “Oh. Is the other one deaf, then?” Luke Honey smoked his cigarette with the corner of his mouth. He sliced open the envelope with a pocketknife and unfolded the telegram and read its contents. The letter was an invitation from one Mr. Liam Welloc Esquire to take part in an annual private hunt in Washington State. The hunt occurred on remote ancestral property, its guests designated by some arcane combination of pedigree and long-standing associations with the host, or by virtue of notoriety in hunting circles. The telegram chilled the sweat trickling down his face. Luke Honey was not a particularly superstitious man; nonetheless, this missive called with an eerie intimacy and struck a chord deep within him, awakened an instinctive dread that fate beckoned across the years, the bloody plains and darkened seas, to claim him.

  He stuck the telegram into his shirt pocket, then drank his whiskey. He poured another shot and lighted another cigarette and stared at the window. The light darkened to purple and the wall faded, was almost invisible. “I have nightmares. Give the ladies my apologies.” He’d lived in the boardinghouse for three weeks, and this was the second time he and Clerk Galtero had exchanged more than a word in passing. Galtero’s brother Enrique managed the place in the evening. Luke Honey hadn’t spoken to him much either. After years in the wilderness, he usually talked to himself.

  Clerk Galtero spilled the dregs of water on the floor and walked over with his queer, hitching step and poured the glass full of Luke Honey’s whiskey. He sat in one of the rickety chairs. His good arm lay atop the table. His hand and arm were thickly muscled. The Legion tattoos had begun to elongate as his flesh loosened. “I know you,” he said. “I’ve heard talk. I’ve seen your guns. Most of the foreign hunters wear trophies. Your friends, the other Americans, wear teeth and claws from their kills.”

  “We aren’t friends.”

  “Your associates. I wonder, though, why you have come and why you stay.”

  “I’m done with the bush. That’s all.”

  “This place is not so good for a man such as yourself. There is only trouble for you here.”

  Luke Honey smiled wryly. “Oh, you think I’ve gone native.”

  “Not at all. I doubt you get along with anyone.”

  “I’ll be leaving soon.” Luke Honey touched the paper in his pocket. “For the States. I suppose your customers will finally have some peace.”

  They finished their drinks and sat in silence. When it became dark, Clerk Galtero rose and went about lighting the lamps. Luke Honey climbed the stairs to his stifling room. He lay sweating on the bed and dreamed of his brother Michael, as he had for six nights running. The next morning, he arranged for transportation to the coast. Three days later he was aboard a cargo plane bound for Morocco. Following Morocco there would be ships and trains until he eventually stood again on American soil after half a lifetime. Meanwhile, he looked out the tiny window. The plains slowly disappeared in the red haze of the rim of the earth.

  LUKE HONEY AND his party arrived at the lodge not long before dark. They’d come in two cars, and the staff earned its keep transferring the mountain of bags and steamer trunks indoors before the storm broadsided the valley. Lightning sizzled from the vast snout of fast-approaching purple-black clouds. Thunder growled. A rising breeze plucked leaves from the treetops. Luke Honey leaned against a marble colonnade and smoked a cigarette, personal luggage stacked neatly at his side. He disliked trusting his rifles and knives to bellhops and porters.

  The Black Ram Lodge towered above a lightly wooded hillside overlooking Olde Towne. The lodge and its town lay in the folds of Ransom Hollow, separated from the lights of Seattle by miles of dirt road and forested hills. “Backward country,” one of the men had called it during the long drive. Luke Honey rode with the Brits Bullard and Wesley. They’d shared a flask of brandy while the car left the lowlands and climbed toward the mountains, passing small, quaint townships and ramshackle farms tenanted by sober yeoman folk. Wesley and Bullard snickered like a pair of itinerant knights at the potato pickers in filthy motley, bowed to their labor in dark, muddy fields. Luke Honey didn’t share the mirth. He’d seen enough bloody peasant revolts to know better. He knew also that fine cars and carriages, horses and guns, the gloss of their own pale skin, cursed them with a false sense of well-being, of safety. He’d removed a bullet from his pocket. The bullet was made for a buffalo gun and it was large. He’d turned it over in his fingers and stared out the window without speaking again.

  After supper, Dr. Landscomb and Mr. Liam Welloc, coproprietors of the lodge, entertained the small group of far-flung travelers who’d come for the annual hunt. Servants lighted a fire in the hearth, and the eight gentlemen settled into grand oversized chairs. The parlor was a dramatic landscape of marble statuary and massive bookshelves, stuffed and mounted heads of ferocious exotic beasts, liquor cabinets, and a pair of billiard tables. Rain and wind hammered the windows. Lights flickered dangerously, promising a rustic evening of candlelight and kerosene lamps.

  The assembly was supremely merry when the tale-telling began.

  “We were in Mexico,” Lord Bullard said. Lord Bullard hailed from Essex; he was a decorated former officer in the Queen’s Royal Lancers who’d fought briefly in the Boer War, but had done most of his time pacifying the “wogs” in the Punjab. Apparently his family was enormously wealthy in lands and titles, and these days he traveled to the exclusion of all else. He puffed on his cigar while a servant held the flame of a long-handled match steady. “Summer of 1919. Some industrialist friends of mine were vacationing from Europe. Moaning and sulking about the shutdowns of their munitions factories and the like. Beastly boring.”

  “Quite, I’m sure,” Dr. Landscomb said. The doctor was tall and thin. He possessed the ascetic bearing of Eastern European royalty. He had earned his degree in medicine at Harvard and owned at least a quarter of everything there was to own within two counties.

  “Ah, the cessation of hostilities is ever a trying time for the makers of bombs and guns,” Mr. Liam Welloc said. He too was tall, but thick and broad with the neck and hands of the ancient Greek statues of Herakles. His hair and beard were bronze and lush for a man his age. His family owned half again what the Landscombs did and reportedly maintained ancestral estates in England and France. “One should think the opportunity to beat swords to plowshares would open whole new realms of entrepreneurial delights.”

  “Exactly. It’s a lack of imagination,” Mr. Williams said. A bluff, weather-beaten rancher baron attired in Stetson boots, corduroys and impressive buckle, a starched shirt with ivory buttons, and an immaculate Stetson hat. He drank Jack Daniel’s, kept the bottle on a dais at his side. He’d come from Texas with Mr. McEvoy and Mr. Briggs. McEvoy and Briggs were far more buttoned down in Brooks Brothers suits and bowlers; a banker and mine owner, respectively. Williams drained his whiskey and poured another, waving off the ever-hovering servant. “That’s what’s killing you boys. No diversity, no imagination. Trapped in the 1800s. Can’t run an empire without a little imagination.”

  “Germany is sharpening its knives,” Mr. Briggs said. “Your friends will be cranking up the assembly lines inside of five years. Trust me. They’ve the taste for blood, those Krauts. You can’t beat that outta them. My mistress is Bavarian, so I know.”

  Lord Bullard thumped his cigar in the elegant pot near his foot. He cleared his throat. “Harrumph. Mexico City, 1919. Bloody hot. Miasma, thick and gray from smokestacks and chimneys of all those hovels they heap like ruddy anthills.”

  “The smog reminded me of home,” Mr. Wesley said. Wesley was dressed in a heavy linen coat, and his boots were polished to a high gloss. His hair was slick and parted at the middle, and it shone in the firelight. When Luke Honey looked at him, he thought Mr. Weasel.

  “A Mexican prince invited us to a hunt on his estate. He was conducting business in the city, so we laid over
at his villa. Had a jolly time.”

  Mr. Wesley said, “Tubs of booze and a veritable harem of randy strumpets. What was not to like? I was sorry when we departed for the countryside.”

  “Who was it, Wes, you, me, and the chap from York . . . Cantwell? Cotter?”

  “Cantwell.”

  “Yes, right then. The three of us were exhausted and chafed beyond bearing from frantic revels at the good prince’s demesne, so we ventured into the streets to seek new pleasures.”

  “Which, ironically, constituted the pursuit of more liquor and fresh strumpets.”

  “On the way from one particularly unsavory cantina to another, we were accosted by a ragtag individual who leaped at us from some occulted nook in an alley. This person was of singularly dreadful countenance; wan and emaciated, afflicted by wasting disease and privation. He smelled like the innards of a rotting sheep carcass, and his appearance was most unwelcome. However, he wheedled and beseeched my attention, in passable English, I must add, and clung to my sleeve with such fervor it soon became apparent the only way to rid myself of his attention was to hear him out.”