Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [125]
When Theron Saxton lapsed into silence, I laid a hand upon his shoulder, shuddering inwardly as I peered into the glass.
“Finally,” he said, reaching up to clasp my hand, “I bethought myself of our long friendship that no mystery could cloud and nothing break. And so I wrote in haste, and here you are.”
“Here I am, and here I shall stay until we penetrate this mystery and banish the ghost of glass.” Although I achieved the tone of heartiness for which I strove, my voice wavered.
He blotted his eyes again. “And now I know that others can discern the thing I fear, that I shall be forced to keep myself monastic in dread that others will glimpse this—this grotesquerie that haunts reflection. It harms my brother’s memory that elsewise would shine and be a comfort. But more, it means that I cannot be free until they shut my eyes and nail the coffin lid upon my face.”
“Come, Saxton,” I said gently, seating myself on the footstool by his chair; “you take the thing in true romantic style, desperate, lorn, and without hope. Surely we are beyond such raw panics in these modern days. The world grows quite rational. There may be a path out of this labyrinth.” My words were reasonable, but I trembled inwardly, feeling an awe that overmastered confidence.
“This tomb,” he murmured, “where lives no love, no bride, no child, nothing. Where I hide from pools and salvers, the least scrap of looking glass, the trough below the pump: I am buried alive, a condemned man!”
“No, you are no longer cut off from sympathy but have confessed your trouble. You have a very constant ghost, and yet not quite a ghost such as is told in tales,” I said, “not the sort of creature one can imagine subject to exorcism, or threatened by bell, book, and candle.” I bent toward the fire, ignoring the image in the looking glass but feeling the pressure of its face and the eyes under waxen eyelids.
Saxton slumped, head in hands.
“Yet there must be a solution,” I said, half to reassure myself.
When he made no reply, I got up and climbed onto the chair, cauling the mirror once more in black cloth.
Rather than sending me to slumber, Mrs. Molebury’s hot toddy seemed to have slapped awake my faculties, and I was eager to consider how I might be of assistance. I could not help but be compelled by the image in the mirror as I coaxed the fabric over the eagle’s wings. When I allowed my glance to drift to the half-shadowed head, I felt a jolt of raw fright that I credited to the horror of things in the wrong place, the simple source of so much terror.
“Let us survey the books recovered from your great-grandfather’s time and investigate. You cannot be singled out for persecution from all of humanity and history, I feel certain.”
“Surely you are too far gone for anything but sleep,” Saxton protested.
“I embarked on this journey at twilight and spent most of the evening and half the night snoring heartily under buffalo furs, so I am quite able to do a little archaeological digging.”
As the twins had taken no small degree of pride in Flavel Saxton’s collection of books and added to it considerably, augmenting their forebear’s work with volumes written over the past century, I had hope of finding a means of aid. Too, old Flavel Saxton had been alive during the Salem witch trials, when one of my own ancestors played a deadly part in judgment, and so he might have had some passing fascination with things preternatural or in the fate of those poor unfortunates who had