Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [121]
—RICHARD HARLAND
Marly Youmans
Marly Youmans is the author of seven books that include novels, a volume of poetry, and two young adult fantasies. Her novel The Wolf Pit was short-listed for the Southern Book Award of the Southern Book Critics Circle and won the Michael Shaara Award. Forthcoming are two collections of poetry, The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press) and The Foliate Head (Stanza Press); and three novels, Glimmerglass (PS Publishing), Maze of Blood (PS Publishing), and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (winner of the Ferrol Sams Award, Mercer University Press).
MARLY YOUMANS
The Grave Reflection
Some years after my father’s decease, I discovered an envelope labeled “Saxton” in his handwriting, tucked inside a chest of papers left in my possession. On reading the first line on the enclosed sheets, I guessed what the anecdote enclosed would contain, for its queer, secret events were long a matter of private wonder and curiosity to our family. I believe that my father would have liked to publish the account had it not been for his affection for the “younger Mr. Saxton,” who remained a fast friend and steady correspondent until my father passed to the next world, wherein all such mysteries as these will surely be revealed.
This account, released for public inspection now that the principal parties involved in its uncanny transactions have flown, will, I trust, be of some interest to my father’s many admirers among a new generation of readers.
—R.H.L., 1890
ALTHOUGH I AM by nature a homebody who prefers to immure himself in the nest of family, rejoicing in the little circle of lives that Divine Intelligence has seen fit to bestow upon me, I could not ignore the message that came to me from a village in a remote corner of our district, home to my boyhood friend Theron Saxton. He had been a spirited fellow with always a prank and a jest to enliven the table or hearth, so much so that he earned the enmity of many sagacious, dour souls who could not bear that the often heavy dough of life should be leavened by the yeast and spice of his merriment. The message handed to me at the door was urgent:
If you love me, come to me at once, my dear Hawthorne, for I am plagued as no man has ever been, and I feel my mind like a mere chip of a boat whirling in a gale, close to capsizing from the storm within and without me.
I knew very well what sort of sorrows had recently accompanied my friend, enveloping him in a sable blackness. Not six months before, a beloved brother, Mr. Edward Saxton, his elder by some twenty minutes and twin to himself in every minute particular, had succumbed to the ravages of consumption. The unfortunate man had borne up under the weight of disease for many months, an example of patience and manly fortitude, before taking to his bed and declining and dying in the space of a fortnight. My wife and I arrived too late for anything but the burial and stood among the other mourners, our cloaks whipping in the autumn gusts. I had not seen my friend since and now regretted my lack of spirit and ambition in correspondence, which might have comforted him and kept me snug at home on a brisk winter’s night.
Having tenderly parted from my wife and children, I hurried to town and set out by a clattering mail coach at twilight. The bitterness of the evening seeped into my bones, and I was glad to share some moth-eaten buffalo robes with a stranger. I dozed off and was dreaming an absurd but uneasy dream—struggling with a gigantic warrior in rattling and clanking