Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [199]
I shuddered and looked away from him. A negress floundered toward us down the middle of the street, carrying a lantern. Her old-fashioned dress and her wide hat were drenched. She stood behind my host so that he couldn’t see her—I had heard this district of the city, or nearby, was notorious for prostitution, either in large palaces or else small, individual residences. She was a pretty girl, of a type that I admire, and I studied the silent movement of her lips. “Vous cherchez quelque chose?”
“Sir,” I said, “you must abandon this.”
By the light of the lantern flame, I could see my host was weeping. “I cannot. Monsieur, you are my final hope. If you won’t help me . . .”
I made a signal with my hand. The woman turned away, and we came here. Perhaps now you can guess why I lie sleepless in my room. I am on the third floor, but elsewhere, somewhere, I can hear the steam-powered generator, throbbing faintly in the walls. Tomorrow I will ask for the first train to Jackson. In the meantime, the rain hisses like escaping steam . . .
(Addressed to M. Joachim Valdor, May 23rd—unsent)
3. EARLY MORNING: “. . . A GESTURE I RECOGNIZED . . .”
. . . I ask myself if I should finish or amend this second letter now, at a remove of many hours. But when I re-read it, I can see it is as misleading as the first, in mood, in fact, in everything. No doubt it is useful to descend through layers, saying adieu at every step, first to the man I ought or else imagine myself to be. Second, perhaps, I could take leave of all my thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Then finally I am reduced to describing what I have done, or I will do. I only hope I am bold enough to admit them to myself.
After midnight, then, I closed my letter to Joachim and lay down for the second time. I was mistaken to say I would not sleep, for how else to describe what happened? Perhaps I was experiencing the first effects of the fever that this morning has registered on my thermometer, and which is at the stage now that it sharpens my awareness, rather than diminishing it.
But I anticipate—I was asleep in bed. This is what I must conclude, even though according to my own perception I lay awake, braiding my heartbeat with the throbbing in the walls. There was some disturbance in the street, a man shouting. Someone spoke, a different kind of voice, well-remembered, close to my ear. I started up, and then I saw her in a corner of the wall beside the curtain, her hand on the tasseled cord. “Solange,” I said, because Solange Baziat was in my mind. Dressed in black, she turned toward me, smiled, and touched her hair in a gesture I recognized. “Mon Dieu,” I murmured, because my interest in Mme. Baziat has always been measured by how much, at any given moment, she resembles someone else, someone who now approached me dressed in the same black beaded dress that I remembered from the night I had attempted to take her in my arms, in her father’s apartment in the Place Vendôme. Then I had been cruelly, even violently rebuffed, but this time I expected something different, I don’t know why. “Sophie,” I cried, reaching out my hand to hide her face, and she moved under it and laid her cheek against my breast. Then I felt her fingers on my lips, while at the same time her other hand grasped me lower down, to such effect that I felt myself let go, as in a dream. I bent to kiss her, and she seized my lip between her teeth, and at that moment I knew I’d been mistaken, fooled by my regrets—Sophie was dead. This woman in my arms was someone else, younger and smaller, someone I didn’t know at all, an actual woman who had slipped into my room, perhaps the same one I had seen that evening in the street outside. “Vous cherchez quelque chose?”
No, it was impossible, absurd. How could she have gotten in? And by the time I was fully awake, she had disappeared, although the door remained closed. She left me to wipe myself with my nightshirt and attend to my bleeding lip. A smell lingered in the air, a mixture of perfume and