Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [177]
“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