Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [204]
(Posted in the Rue Royale, earlier that week)
6. POST-SCRIPT
. . . And one more thing, my God. An hour’s sleep without rest, buffeted by dreams. You stand before me in your same black beaded dress, bloodless and pale. When you touch me, I can measure in your body’s temperature the effect of the conium, which you discovered in my laboratory. And when you kneel down to unbutton me, where I once might have joyfully supposed you had been taught by nature alone, now I can perceive the course of your instruction in a brothel of dead souls, and a malign efficiency which gives me no pleasure or relaxation, but rather the reverse. I left France to avoid these dreams, but they have followed me. Where can I go to find relief?
(From the private diary of Philippe Delorme, May 24th, 8 o’clock)
7. OF POSSIBLE SIGNIFICANCE: AN INTERVIEW WITH MARIE LOUISE GLASPION, IN THE INFIRMARY OF THE URSULINE CONVENT, CHARTERS STREET, AUGUST 10, 1936
. . . I understand why you have come. You want to ask me about Madame Semiramis, how I left her house. Isn’t that right?
Even last year I would have told you nothing. But now you see me lying here too weak to raise my head, connected by this tube to this machine.
For some weeks now I have understood that I am dying. I have treated many others through this same infection of the lung, especially this summer, because of my work here with the sisters. But that is not the only reason.
Many years I have denied this, though by now I am too tired to continue: I still have the gift, which I inherited from my mother and have tried to turn to God’s purposes. When it refers to that night, my gift is where it starts, because of those two men that I saw arguing in the Rue Dauphine, when I was late returning to my mother’s house. The older one, he stood at the abyss. The snake was out upon his temple, as we used to say, and of course in the next days his name was in the papers, because he had been shot by some American.
Always one pauses, wondering to intervene, but how could I? What intervention could be made? I was only a girl, not yet fifteen years old. Besides, it was the younger man who stared at me with such hostility, because he thought I was a prostitute selling my body in an alleyway. In those days I was full of pride, not like now.
That was the night of a big storm. In the morning the streets were flooded in the Third District, not yet where I was, but toward the Rue Claibourne. So long ago! But I was soaked when I got home, and my mother scolded me. She was with some customers around the fire, although it was almost midnight. The rain fell through the roof into some pots. She had killed the cock.
What came to disgust me finally were the images of saints around the altar, Saint Roch and Saint John especially, together with the devil’s images from Saint Domingue. But in those days I saw this as normal. Maman told me to dry myself beside the fire, and I hated that also, because of the eyes of the customers, even though I knew full well that this was part of why they came, part of the devil’s net, part of that nonsense with Damboolah and Bamboolah and these things, my mother knew it too. It was she who stripped the wet scarf from my throat.
Will you give me some water, please? Thank you. You see I am too weak to pour a glass. Oh, you must not spill water on your microphone. Bring it close. I will speak to it as if it were a priest—I was astonished to see that same man the next morning, the one who had watched me in the Rue Dauphine, a gentleman of color, but light-skinned. Grey eyes. The rain had stopped for a moment. A humid wind chased the clouds over the rooftops, away toward the river. He came in drunk out of the street, stinking of tafia. I was sweeping with the wet broom, my sleeves rolled