Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  “It’s me, Luke Honey.”

  “What’s your business here?”

  “I came to help you find the boy.” He dared not speak of what he’d so recently discovered, an abomination that once revealed was certain to drive the huntsman into raving madness. At this range Scobie’s ancient single-shot rifle would cut Luke Honey in twain.

  “Arlen’s gone. He’s gone.” Scobie lowered the weapon, his arm quivering in exhaustion.

  “You don’t believe that,” Luke Honey said with a steadiness born of staring down savage predators, of waiting to pull the trigger that would drop them at his feet, of facing certain death with a coldness of mind inherent to the borderline mad. The terror remained, ready to sweep him away.

  “I’m worn to the bone. There’s nothing left in me.” Scobie seemed to wither, to shrink into himself in despair.

  “The stag is wounded,” Luke Honey said. “I think you hit it again, judging from the racket.”

  “It don’t matter. You can’t kill a thing like that.” Scobie’s eyes glittered with tears. “This is the devil’s preserve, Mr. Honey. Every acre. You should’ve gone with the masters, got yourself away. We stayed too long and we’re done for. He only pretends to run. He’ll end the game and come for us soon.”

  “I had a bad feeling about Landscomb and Welloc.”

  “Forget those idiots. They’re as much at the mercy of hell as anyone else in Ransom Hollow.”

  “Got anything to drink?” Luke Honey said.

  Scobie hung the lantern from a branch and handed Luke Honey a canteen made of cured animal skin. The canteen was full of sweet, bitter whiskey. The men took a couple of swigs and rested there by the flickering illumination of the sooty old lamp. Luke Honey built a fire. They ate jerky and warmed themselves as the dank night closed in ever more tightly.

  Much later, Scobie said, “It used to be worse. My grandsire claimed some of the more devout folk would drag girls from their homes and cut out their innards on them stone tablets you’ll find under a tree here or there.” His wizened face crinkled into a horridly mournful smile. “An’ my mother, she whispered that when she was a babe, Black Bill was known to creep through the yards of honest folk while they slept. She heard his nails tap-tapping on their cottage door one night.”

  Luke Honey closed his eyes. He thought again of Arlen’s pitiful, small hands severed at the wrists and discarded in the brush, a pair of soft, dripping flowers. He heard his companion rise stealthily and creep away from camp. He slept and awakened to the old man kneeling at his side. Scobie’s face was hidden in shadow. Luke Honey smelled the oily steel of a knife near his own neck. The man reeked of murderous intent. He wondered where Scobie had been, what he had done.

  Scobie spoke softly, “I don’t know what to do. I’m a man of God.”

  “Yet here we are. Look who you serve.”

  “No, Mr. Honey. The hunt goes on an’ I don’t matter none. Your presence ain’t my doing. You bought your ticket. I come because somebody’s got to stand up. Somebody’s got to put a bullet in the demon.”

  “The price you’ve paid seems steep as hell, codger.”

  Scobie nodded. He remained quiet for a while. At last he said, “Come, boy. You must come with me now. He’s waiting for us. He whispered to me from the dark, made a pact with me he’d take one of us in return for Arlen. I promised you to him, God help me. It’s a vile oath and I’m ashamed.”

  “Oh, Scobie.” Luke Honey’s belly twisted and churned. “You know how these things turn out. You poor, damned fool.”

  “Please. Don’t make me beg you, Mr. Honey. Don’t make me. Do what’s right for that innocent boy. I know the Lord’s in your heart.”

  Luke Honey reached for Scobie’s arm and patted it. “You’re right about one thing. God help you.”

  They went. There was a clearing, its bed layered with muck and spoiled leaves. Unholy symbols were gouged into the trees, brands so old they’d fossilized. It was a killing ground of antiquity, and Scobie had prepared it well. He’d improvised several torches to light the shallow basin with a ghastly, reddish glare.

  Scobie took several steps and uttered an inarticulate cry, a glottal exclamation held over from his ancestors. He half turned to beckon, and his face was transformed by shock when Luke Honey smashed the butt of his rifle into his hip and sent him stumbling into the middle of the clearing.

  Luke Honey’s eyes blurred with grief, and Michael’s shade materialized there, his trusting smile disintegrating into bewilderment, then inertness. The cruelness of the memory drained Luke Honey of his fear. He said with dispassion, “My hell is to testify. Don’t you understand? He doesn’t want me. He took me years ago.”

  Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers, its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man’s upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart.

  Luke Honey slumped against the bole of an oak, the rifle a dead, useless weight across his knees, and watched.

  Afterword to “Blackwood’s Baby”

  Raised in a wilderness setting, I have an affinity for the natural horrors of Algernon Blackwood and Cormac McCarthy, both of whom were direct influences upon “Blackwood’s Baby.” Bram Stoker’s seminal Dracula, especially its adventure and gothic horror elements, served as further inspiration in addition to my enduring fascination with all things occult. “Blackwood’s Baby” is loosely related to “Catch Hell,” published in Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound, which also features the Black Ram Lodge and environs. Further stories and a novel will be set in Ransom Hollow.

  —LAIRD BARRON

  Paul Park

  Paul Park has written ten novels and numerous short stories in a variety of genres. His most recent major work is the Roumania Quartet, made up of A Princess of Roumania, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, and The Hidden World; upcoming is a revised book version of his novella Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, with additional sections by John Crowley and Elizabeth Hand. Park lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

  PAUL PARK

  Mysteries of the Old Quarter

  (Newly excerpted and translated from the journals and correspondence of Dr. Philippe Delorme, among other sources)

  1. “THE RAIN AGAINST THE CASEMENT . . .”

  . . . I write this from my hotel room, which constitutes the majority of what I have seen so far, here in what was once the greatest city of New France. Outside, the narrow road is full of water, fog, and sodden filth. I have heard rumors of another, more modern metropolis on the other side of Canal Street, broad boulevards and large houses that contain actual Americans in their natural surroundings, as well as poorer but more vibrant neighborhoods of Germans and Italians. Though I could walk to that metropolis in half an hour, I gather that would be to break some sort of secret code. The indigenous culture of the city has curled in upon itself because it knows it is dying, even though it is in itself quite new, by European standards. But these sequences run quicker here, partly because of a mania for destroying and rebuilding, and partly because the land itself, a bend of miasmic and mephitic swamp between the river and the lake, appears to me a sink of dissolution, which has accelerated all natural processes of corruption and decay.

  So far I have kept this opinion to myself. At least I am attempting to do so. But perhaps some of my prejudices have already leaked out. This evening, for example, I addressed a local scientific society on the subject of an experiment into the nature of electricity, and in particular the electrical impulses in the brains of rats and monkeys. Afterwards I answered questions from the audience. It is an infuriating and pervasive characteristic of this tour that
these questions by no means have confined themselves to the subject of my demonstrations. A few days ago, a gentleman in Chicago asked me my opinion of the weather in the coming week—I might have predicted it would rain forever! And tonight I answered several questions about the theories of Mr. Charles Darwin.

  The religiousness of these people does not cease to astound. After my second attempt at reconciling what cannot, after all, be reconciled, I allowed myself a joke, although I did not smile. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “it was our simian ancestors that inhabited the Garden of Eden, as none of the activities described as taking place there would have required a brain much larger than an ordinary potato. It was in the land of Canaan, surely, that we began our inexorable descent, guided by the process of natural selection.” The most foolish beasts, I meant to imply, have the wit to copulate, and our development as a species, and as individual moral beings, could commence only at the moment we had turned our back on God.

  I was speaking in response to an enquiry about “reverse evolution,” an absurd and backward theory that has nevertheless found nourishment here in the superstitions of the inhabitants. During the ensuing silence I was tempted to mention your own observation that since God is reputed to have created man in his own image, then perhaps the early migration of Africans to Europe is evidence of man’s fall. Contrasting your and my complexions, you once observed how Lucifer’s supposed “brightness” might be more properly translated to emphasize the pallor of his skin, at least in comparison with God himself. But that would be a joke too painful to express in this crude nation. As you know, I am sometimes irritated by how the Continental newspapers can scarcely mention my work without including a line or phrase that concerns my “Moorish grandmother,” a lady whom I never had the privilege to meet. In Paris, a small amount of African or even Hebrew blood is considered a mark of distinction, perhaps of genius, at least in intellectual or artistic circles. That is not so here. If my history were well-known, my lectures would attract a different audience entirely, such as might buy tickets to observe a chimpanzee solve quadratic equations in the zoo.

  Ah, my love, the hour is late. The rain against the casement rattles like escaping steam. Soon I will close the humid curtains, climb onto the lumpy bed. If you were here in my exile, I would embrace you, and you would no longer complain that I was diffident or shy. I would run my fingers down the buttons of your back, and lower still. Doubtless we would converse, if at all, in the language of the angels in paradise, at least if our current scientific thinking is correct . . .

  (Addressed to Mme. Solange Baziat, May 23, 1888—unsent)

  2. LATER THAT NIGHT: “I DO NOT DWELL UPON MY FAILURES . . .”

  . . . Why do I persist in seeking some relief in these attempts at correspondence? Why do I expect to find comfort in the act of sharing my thoughts and actions with my friends, with you, for instance? No, it is more pertinent to ask why I am so often disappointed, why at these moments of attempted intimacy my loneliness attacks me with renewed ferociousness. I know already the attempt at connection will be in vain. And yet it is natural to try again and again. Surely this is the foundation of the sexual urge. And surely this is part of the religious urge as well, the faith that at one time we understood each other, and the hope that after death we will again, once we have lost the illusion of our separateness.

  My friend, I have already abandoned my first letter of the evening. It was to a woman of our mutual acquaintance. Always with her I am obliged to hide something of myself, in order to preserve her good opinion. In this case there was a name I must not mention for the sake of her jealousy—I understand that. But even so the details and events that I described—some trivial, some essential—had split so sharply from reality by the end of the first page, that I threw down my pen. And then no sooner did I lie down in darkness than I found myself fumbling for the lamp, gasping for breath, with an elevated heart rate. There is no sleep for me tonight.

  Now I will try again. Perhaps what I am about to say, I can share with none but you.

  The purpose of my previous letter was to allow me to distract myself with nocturnal fantasies so that I might forget my anxiousness. Perhaps you will be relieved to hear I have given up hope of that. My current missive has a different cause, though I will begin with the same base of fact, the root of every possible narrative—it has not stopped raining since my arrival. I am staying at the house of a Creole gentleman, a narrow, three-storey mansion in the Rue Dauphine. He is the sponsor of my lectures, a tall, thin, dignified, and upright person who is also, as it happens, quite insane. His name is Maubusson, and he owns an indigo plantation outside of the city, an enterprise that he himself must know is doomed to fail, because of a recent artificial synthesis.

  Despite the weather, this evening I was well disposed. My host was generous enough to buy me supper at a restaurant that might not have offended even you. I observed during the meal that he seemed distracted and glum, but he showed no obvious lunacy—my dear, he was just lying in wait! After coffee we proceeded to the ballroom of a nearby hotel. Three-quarters of an hour afterwards, I had finished my lecture and then rapidly disposed of several infuriating and irrelevant questions about the origin of species. My friend, I thought I could perceive the finish line, when I espied his outstretched hand. “Sir,” he said, “I would like to ask you news of some earlier experiments, in which you corresponded with the spirits of the dead.”

  I grimaced, then cut him off. “I do not like to dwell upon my failures. You understand—”

  Alas, he understood nothing. He was not satisfied, and so obliged me to persist: “You speak of a line of inquiry that is several years old, during the course of which I must admit that I allowed my personal desires to dominate my scientific objectivity. It is true that through the use of electrical stimulation, I was able to prolong consciousness in a small number of recently expired subjects. But the accounts of these experiments were distorted by a sensationalist press, and I am now convinced that I was wrong in my conclusions. The boundary between living and dying is not as firm, perhaps, as we imagine, or at least as I imagined at that time.”

  While I was speaking, still he had not lowered his hand. His smile was skull-like, and exposed his yellow teeth. Because he was my host and benefactor, I was compelled to let him speak. “But I recall a description of a scene at the bedside of a Parisian lady—I forget her name—when she was reconciled to her niece and nephews, and was even able to explain to them the terms of her estate . . .”

  “I recall the exact words of Mlle. de Noailles,” I said, as coldly as I could. (But inside I was burning, you must imagine.) “I’m afraid I cannot repeat them in a public place. If her sister’s children could find reconciliation in anything that occurred that day, they are more imaginative than I, who witnessed the entire event. As for the will, I believe it is in litigation. Now, if you please . . .”

  But he would not be silenced! “Perhaps at that moment she was speaking to other emanations in the room,” he said. “Perhaps in the hours since her death, these souls were as real to her as you are to me. Perhaps at that moment, you yourself were insubstantial as a ghost.”

  These words, indeed, reminded me of long-dismissed hypotheses. But I felt I could not display any uncertainty, perhaps out of a sense of foreboding. “If she was speaking to these other emanations, it is clear she was not pleased with them,” I concluded in a tone that ended the debate. And in fact the meeting broke up shortly afterwards. Imagine my displeasure, subsequently, walking home with my host and even sharing his umbrella, when I heard him explain how the entire reason for my presence in this city, the entire reason he had found the money to invite me to address his miserable society—all that was a blind, a trick. He had no interest in my recent work, but had fixed instead on the death of Sophie de Noailles, which in my own terrible grief I had allowed myself to desecrate with criminal absurdities and humiliations. In other words, he begged me to revisit the worst moments of my life, because he also (as I might
have guessed!) had lost someone who was dear to him. His only daughter, a young lady not yet twenty years old, was recently deceased under painful and mysterious circumstances.

  “If I could speak to her once more,” said Monsieur Maubusson. “Only to ask her what occurred. If I could hear from her lips who was responsible, no matter how veiled and shrouded her speech—you see it is a matter of justice! And I think it was not true what you said in the hotel, even according to your own description. That woman you mentioned, was it possible she spoke in code? You imply the words themselves were meaningless. But I think it likely that these spirits would employ a code.”

  I considered this. But Maubusson was wrong to say there was no meaning in the words that Sophie de Noailles spoke on her deathbed. It is that the words themselves were barnyard epithets I could not believe she knew.

  Could one imagine a code made up of three or four of the most obscene vulgarities, repeated over and over? The street was very dark, very wet. The water swirled around my boots. We were passing a line of wooden cottages with wide porches and long shuttered windows. Light gleamed between the slats.

  I stopped, and made him return with his umbrella. For several moments I had known what he was asking. “No,” I said. “I cannot do this. I refuse.”

  His face was close to mine. But he would not look me in the eyes. “Please,” he said. “If I could just . . .”

  But at that moment something new occurred to me. It had been more than a month since I’d received his invitation. “When did your daughter die?”

  “Six weeks ago.” When he saw my look of horror, he put up his hand. “You needn’t worry. I have taken all precautions.”