That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns.
Soon, in the midst of walk-on actors, the usurper reacted with a bewildered terror at the sight of the specter of his victim, which he alone could distinguish:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm’d rhinoceros, or th’Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble. Or be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword;
If trembling I inhabit then, protest me
The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow!
Unreal mockery, hence!
A cold sweat stung Lucian’s neck. Alone in his loge, hands trembling on the guardrail, he had the impression that all the faces below, haloed in a vermillion light, were turning ostensibly toward him. Sponging his temples dry, he had to admit he was still feeling the effects of his time at the Golden Dream that afternoon, magnified tenfold by the playwright’s thunderous parables. Sometimes it happens that a mild discomfort takes on such an intensity that one would willingly leap into a pyre to escape from it. The nearest real person at this moment, the only one who would be able to help him, was separated farther from him than the ghost of the King of Scotland! For almost another hour, Charlene belonged only to the stage, as did for that matter the audience transfixed by her performance.
But the hellish couple “still young in action” was going to retire in order to quench themselves in the soothing waters of sleep. Haunting the illusory moors, the three witches, made up to perfection like transvestites for All Hallows’ Eve, came to the front of the stage to consult Hecate, mistress of evil spirits, under the faraway rumbling of a storm.
Lucian didn’t let himself watch the interlude, so much did he fear a new setback of a completely falsified reality. The play continued on with these supporting roles. By concentrating on the exterior details as if immersed in the dark gold of opium, he perceived, like a little isolated flame, the face of Kate Fox among the many masks, and was irrationally frightened of some kind of singular collusion between her and Lady Macbeth, who came back on stage in the fifth act in a trance, without even having to mimic the act of sleepwalking.
Out, damn spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,
then, ‘tis time to do’t. Hell is murky! Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power
to account?—Yet who would have thought the old
man to have had so much blood in him?
A murmur crossed the auditorium when, after some hypnotic confessions, Lady Macbeth cried out as expected: “To bed, to bed! there’s knocking at the gate,” for it became clear that the actress had found herself alone under a magnetic influence. Her role finished, she stood crazed in front of the side curtains backstage, while her partners went on with the scene. Clad in the same combination of colors as the decor, a stagehand came to lead her offstage. Charlene appeared to fall down flat, stage left.
In the hands of the makeup artist removing her greasepaint, little by little she regained consciousness in front of a mirror just after the curtain had gone down. The reflection of Lucian Nephtali appeared, smiling tensely.
“What happened?” she asked in a faint voice.
“It’s best to spare you,” he said only.
“I don’t remember being applauded . . .”
“The applause happened without you, but it was for you that the public cheered.”
“Are we going to Buffalo Street?”
“The car is waiting for me and Kate is already on board. But you, to bed, to bed, to bed! Go home to sleep. Your nerves are on edge.”
“Not at all! Come, come, come, give me your hand . . .”
The next day, Lucian woke badly with the certitude of having killed his friend Nat Astor. His foggy reasoning led him to believe that this murder was not such a big thing, considering the immortality of souls. Was it really so terrible to push a mortal into eternity? Kate and Charlene had reached no conclusions in front of his friend’s grave: some dematerialized intruder wanted too much to intervene; not counting the destitutes of long ago and the fugitive slaves from the common grave. One legend claims that every cemetery has as its guardian the phantom of the first person buried there. That night, during the ceremony, a Negro dressed in charcoal sacks suddenly appeared a few steps away from Nat Astor’s gravestone. His face lit by oil lamps, he alleged that he was the caretaker of the place, which made the gravedigger paid to guide them laugh maliciously.
“That would surprise me greatly,” he shot back. “Negroes have their own section!” But the shadow returned with a laugh of his own.
“Long ago,” he declared, “in the time of the British Empire, the throat of a Redskin or a baptized slave was slit in secret to ward off evil spirits on the eve of the inauguration of a new white cemetery. This is how I came to be the first person buried here.”
Seated on the couch where he must have ended up last night, Lucian took some time before getting his bearings. The bluish light announcing the sunrise bathed this interior in the unreality of dream. Mounted on the wall above a full-length mirror tilted toward the ceiling, a recent photograph of Charlene in a frightful rhinestone frame left him perplexed, until he recognized the pattern of the carpet, the ebony and mahogany furniture around him. Quietly he put on his shoes and went off to find a spirit or a body, once again surprised by the accumulation of mirrors and painted portraits, drawings or photographs, all of them endlessly reflecting from one wall or partition to another.
He found the actress in her bedroom, lying across the bed, a satin negligee bunched above her naked body. The emotion he felt had nothing to do with the sensual. Seated at the foot of the bed, he contemplated her beautiful breasts, spread apart, and the circumscribed forest of mystery between the groin and the border of her pubis. To him a woman’s sex looked like a cross of burning eyelids with a bloody heart. Could he put his lips there without fear, like on the mouth of a dying man? Gently, he pulled the fabric down over this perfect body and sat next to the sleeping woman. It’s the face that saves a body from monstrosity. Everything becomes spirit in its prism. There is no longer woman or man. A face is the imprint of an angel’s glance. With her eyes closed, this one resembles the one in his dream—a mask drowned in the ocean’s depths . . .
“Is that you, Lucian?” murmured those lips between two worlds.
“You were sleeping half-naked.”
“You should have taken me as dead. I love being made love to in my sleep . . .”
“I just woke from a dreadful nightmare. A gravedigger was leading you and me to Nat’s grave. Kate Fox was accompanying us. It was night. Under the gravedigger’s dull lamp, you couldn’t stop laughing, a mad if quiet laugh. Kate was in a state of extreme distress. She asked Nat’s spirit to manifest itself but a shadow stood up before us and claimed to be the guardian of souls . . .”
“Is that so terrible? It’s just grief. Nat’s spirit is still linked to yours.”
“I’m the one who killed him.”
Charlene sat up, letting her bare breasts oscillate in a beam of sunlight.
“I was with you on the terrace when he shot himself in the park.”
“I was also in the park.”
“Lucian, Lucian, we were coming home, all three of us intoxicated from the Golden Dream. I recall that Harry Maur was furious when he let us into his house. That bear hates honey. He made us drink some of his whiskey to remind us of ordinary drunkenness.”
“I remember all that too, Charlene. But in the state that you were in, that all of you were in, you could very well have imagined me at your side on the terrace while I was arguing with Nat in the park. In my nightmare, Kate exclaimed: ‘No, no! I cannot hear this,’ while staring at me with horrified eyes.”
“Calm
down, Lucian. If all our dreams described exact reality, what place would there remain for spirits? They are who come to visit us in sleep, they communicate with us through great symbols and small insinuations. Not all of them are benevolent. Human dream is the domain of spirits more or less stuck in their memory, and disembodied criminals prowl around there alongside God’s angels. Besides, you can’t have forgotten that we drove Kate back home last night?”
“That was our plan when leaving the theater.”
“In the car, she appeared to have been deeply affected by the spectacle of the witches, those three fatal sisters, and the carnage of Dunsinane. She said a strange thing that seemed to have permanently marked you: ‘All of those around us who die, die by our own fault.’ You threw a startled look at her as if she’d guessed your thought. This I saw quite well, thanks to the passing headlights of a sedan traveling at breakneck speed.”
Emerging from the shadows, a ginger-colored angora cat jumped onto the bed. Out of its slightly opened mouth came the droning of a hive. Intact, a large blowfly escaped from it, which the cat re-caught and bit, wounding it. The stunned insect circled loudly on the bed between Charlene’s legs.
“Rid me of this horror,” she said.
Not knowing if she was addressing him or her cat, Lucian picked the fly up between two fingers and without even thinking ate it.
XII.
The Life of Phantoms
The big house on Central Avenue had lost its copper plaque with the Fox & Fish Spiritualist Institute insignia as well as some of its furniture, which was distributed to relatives. The two younger Fox sisters were living there temporarily—though Margaret was currently on tour in Philadelphia along with Leah’s ex-manager. Kate sat grieving over this abrupt dislocation of the restless and complicit little family world she had known. Disciples and supporters had quietly returned to their churches, or had joined propaganda societies; some of them had set out on their own, increasing the army of mediums that crossed America and Europe by the hundreds to appear before crowds of converts, believers, and supporters who these days numbered in the millions. Now a pythoness adored in Washington, Wanda Jedna carried on her same divine plan in the battle for universal emancipation. For the living as well as spirits, there could be no segregation. Many of Leah’s companions had taken their leave, encouraged by recent theories positing that the gift of mediumship was available to every soul. If with a little study every Puritan could become minister of a cult or another sect of the reformed church, it was even easier to take part in the spiritualist doctrine since no certified congregation could limit the practice. And the spontaneous conversions were by now far too many to count. Spiritualist networks scattered throughout organized private séances, mediumistic seminars, and group camps—like Onset Bay Grove or Lake Pleasant in Massachusetts, the Wonewoc Spiritualist Camp in Wisconsin, and even Lily Dale not far from Rochester—where fervent crowds often coming from very far away congregated, in the manner of those great Puritan meetings that came out of the Revolutionary War.
There was hardly anyone left but the Catholics to ostracize the new faith. The archbishop of Quebec or Paris hurled anathemas at the necromancer wave that was fast outpacing the baptisteries. The Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition condemned for its part the use of magnetism and other methods of divination. Talking tables were commerce with the devil. It was the devil himself responding to their trances and invocations.
Kate doesn’t open the anonymous death threats addressed to the three sisters any more than the uncountable letters from learned societies, mystic factions, or of single individuals anxious to confess, a number of whom were melancholics, maniacs, or other fanatics stricken with insanity. From all over the world came these requests for long-distance divination with scraps of fabric, strands of hair, or photographs to help—and the hope of receiving news from their dear departed by return mail.
While waiting for a sign from her sisters, Kate sorted piles of paper and hovered half-asleep over her notebooks. She hardly received anyone anymore, except the occasional relative, leaving Maggie in charge of paying the bills and Janet in charge of housekeeping. Maggie seemed delighted about her stay in Philadelphia, according to the single letter that had reached her, after more than a month: her handwriting was beautiful, that of a passionate being, leaning into the wind of inspiration and oddly riddled with details about the public demonstrations, galas in progressivist circles, and other notable encounters, like the worried joy of a child surrounded by all the colored paper ripped from her presents. There was the question of two or three mentions of a certain Elisha Kane, a doctor by profession and explorer, with whom she’d had exchanges as fierce as they were friendly. Thus she declared: “Mr. Kane is an unbearable rationalist. He claims that there is nothing true in our practices.” And a few lines later, “This dear Mr. Kane showed himself to be a perfect gentlemen in ushering a clique of unbelieving Puritans away from me.”
This very night, Kate had reread several times the single letter from Maggie, a bitter smile at her lips, thinking of the shadows that were about to extend under the high ceilings and how she wouldn’t have the courage to confront the maid hiding in the kitchen by ordering her to light all the lamps. A weariness had taken hold of her like it had done in Hydesville. She wandered through the house for hours with an intense feeling of dispossession. Soon to turn eighteen, she felt old, completely forsaken from the inside. Between the death of her young brother and then of her mother, blocks of nothingness had crossed through her; now the dead pursued her mercilessly, little white souls, demons, octopi in tears over a repeated drama, detached hands grasping daggers sharp with grief. She didn’t want to hear the lamenting widows of the world confronting the grave anymore. In a matter of a few years, this naughty game of little girls had shaken the foundations of Puritan society; but was it her fault that most grown ups didn’t really exist, that they were puppets frightened by their own living image? How could a child more alive than fire and water be transformed one day into this scarecrow of God? Patchworks of cadaverous things, all adults had a little of bit of Frankenstein in them.
Kate was wearing her only fancy dress, brilliant with embroidered flowers. Barefoot, she went through each of the rooms with a slight shudder of terror. What she was feeling had no name in English, and she doubted it had a word even in Enochian, the supposed language of angels. A sort of rippling undulation was coming from objects and particular spaces: it seemed to her that the times lived by others here and there manifested themselves to her in a thousand mute innuendos. What advantage was there having this paroxysmal vulnerability? A kind of sponge more innervated than the cornea, ready to fill until soaked by the least impression, that’s how it felt to her in the worst moments. Quite despite herself, a dull pain at each moment, nothing escaped her senses, not the twitch of an eye, not the belated private sigh of an admission. From an out of place chair or a particular shift of dust motes in a luminous ray, she induced intentions or unsuspected events. Which didn’t prevent her from being dismayed at her own lack of culture and ignorance about the things of life, like love and sexuality. Seeing other people love and desire each other taught her nothing about herself. She stopped with curiosity in front of the big mirror in Leah’s otherwise empty bedroom. Was she pretty or seductive, would someone one day want to unbutton her dress and undergarments? She started to laugh, twirling, and ran to an adjoining door. Her brother David and her cousins had pillaged her mother’s bedroom after her funeral, but a negligible remainder was spread on the chimney mantel and in the corners, enough to ignite flares of emotion in the young girl’s face. These little items had belonged to the old woman as much as the spots on her hands and her wrinkles when she smiled. Knitting needles in a skein of wool, a pair of well-worn slippers, and a bandage for her varicose veins all brought the indivisible effect of her presence to Kate. She staggered while sobbing.
“Little Mother, where are you?” she implored in a tiny voice.
Something
trembled around her. Was it the Rochester night, with its red and black tentacles? Alert, she stood petrified, arms drawn up close to her chest, pupils dilated. The pair of slippers had moved, she saw it without seeing it, the right one moved in front of the other, taking turns very slowly with the left one and so on in a simple movement of walking. The long needles flew up with the yarn and started to stitch above the slippers like the mandibles of a beetle or crab. This lasted an indefinite time before the light of the full moon supplanted the night’s darkness. Then came the sonorous knocks, like a box being nailed shut. Suddenly dizzy, Kate could no longer feel her legs. In a cottony listlessness, she fell to her knees and patted the floor with both hands. Janet called to her from below in a shrill voice. Coming back to herself, the young woman fled the room and stumbled into the staircase at the end of the hallway.
As if collapsed upon herself, looking like a dropped puppet, she was stared at blankly by the maid. Finally Janet rushed to gently gather her up.
“A gentleman is here to see you, Miss!”
“At this hour?”
“He has come before, back in your mother’s day.”
Kate thanked the servant, intrigued by the sort of religious cornet that she had fastened to her head. In the entryway, Alexander Cruik made no excuse for his late intrusion.
“I dreamed about you,” he blurted out while removing his hat. “My dreams are thoughts that come to me from God. ‘Departing dream, and shadowy form of midnight vision,’ that’s from Thoreau. Do you have a few minutes you could grant me?”
Preceded by Janet who was holding a candlestick, Kate invited the preacher into the downstairs living room. She asked for a fire, some light, and drinks, troubled to see this austere figure emerging from out of the night. With his silver hair standing in a crown on the top of his head, his eagle’s profile, the blue edge of his otherwise colorless gaze and the lanky presence of a meadow runner, the missionary had a little bit of the presence of an Iroquois Indian ghost of the Great Lakes disguised in the strict suit of a Puritan. His voice, made hollow by preaching, had an unusual sweetness.
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