Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [198]
“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.”
He would not look me in the eye. But as he spoke I could perceive, as if vaguely through the fog, the lineaments of his insanity. For six weeks he had packed the girl in ice, which he had transported in boxcars to a city where every courtyard and alleyway is lined with banana trees and bottlebrush palms.
“Monsieur, I’m begging you,” he said. “And you must forgive me for not telling you what I intended. But I guessed that if I asked you in a letter, you would have refused.”
In addition, he had bought or reconstructed what he imagined were the instruments from my laboratory, as he had seen them represented or described, powered by a coal-fired dynamo of his own invention. “I also am a man of science,” he protested. “Nor am I ignorant of medicine. Before the war