Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [200]
Now convinced I’d been asleep, I tried immediately to remember. But as so often happens, my dream faded, and the woman in it also faded from my mind. As she did so, her complexion changed and lost its color, so that I was no longer sure I was remembering the negress of the Rue Dauphine. In fact I was convinced it was not she. And yet the doctors say it is impossible to invent a new face in a dream, the face of someone we have never met.
Then the generator stopped, and the silence in the house was enormous, baffling. Over the course of the night I’d become accustomed to the sound, until I felt rather than heard it. I stood over the basin washing my face, and now I raised my head to look into the dark mirror. In the sudden quiet, I thought I heard the sound of my host’s surrender, of his submission to his grief, at the moment (I thought—irrationally) of his success. How else could I explain the experience I’d just had? Subsequently I discovered several ways, but at that moment I was convinced. At the same time I imagined a new sympathy with my host, because in my own thoughts I had merged my unhappiness with his. And though the emotions of a father might seem different from those of a lover (if I could aspire to calling myself that—I speak only of my feelings, not of her response), still I could understand his grief in the death of a beautiful woman in her prime.
I wiped my face, threw on my clothes. I needed to confirm that the person from my dream, the small, delicate, cat-like woman who had bit me on the lip, was indeed Mlle. Maubusson. In my febrile state, it was imperative for me to verify this fact, and at the same time I felt some vestige of my excitement when I first attacked the problem of re-animation in the year prior to Mlle. de Noailles’s death, little knowing that before long I would have such a personal interest in my success.
I opened the door of my bedroom and followed the new silence down the stairs. As I descended step by step, my candle in my hand, I reconsidered momentarily the contempt with which I had rejected my host’s theory of ghosts, or spirits, or “emanations,” in the light of my own recent experience. Was it possible that we are haunted in dreams by our beloved dead, not just in metaphor but in actual fact? If so, was it impossible to imagine a plane or space where they might commune, or even share each other’s bodies, as I had conceived in that transitional moment between sleep and wakefulness?
The wallpaper was heavily patterned, pink and cream. Yet there was a dirty stripe opposite the banister, where many hands had slid. It was not hard for me to find, on the second storey, the room I sought. I heard low voices beyond the door.
I knocked, then entered. How can I describe the scene? I stood in a lady’s bedroom, furnished with the dark, mahogany, over-embellished chests and cabinets that are habitual in rich Creole households. There was a four-poster bed—unoccupied. The wallpaper was pink and green, hand-painted with scenes along the river. The gas was lit, and by its spectral flame I saw my host, dressed in shirt-sleeves, the electrodes still in his hand. The dynamo was in the courtyard outside, and the wires snaked in the open window, together with a number of black rubber tubes, which led to a zinc bathtub in the middle of the room.
There was another man also, a young, curly-headed fellow, and when he spoke, I could tell by his accent that French was not his native language: “Who the devil are you?”
I scarcely heard him. In the bathtub, packed in ice, was the woman from my dream.
She was dressed in a pink night-gown, and her rich black hair was loose around her shoulders. She had high cheekbones, a small, sharp nose, and a soft line of hair along her upper lip. Her skin was pale, but whether because of the constant refrigeration or else from the effect of the electrical stimulation, it still retained a rosy glow. Astonished by this, immediately I perceived that one of the tubes that ran to her must have maintained the circulation of her blood, while another, perhaps, pumped