Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [205]
She saw from his fine clothes that he had money. “I am Semiramis, Queen of Babylon,” she said, which was her usual nonsense in those days. I was breathless in a corner, and Monsieur was in tears. Maman could see immediately that he was ill, because she began to assemble from her shelf of jars one of her nostrums. I see now, after years of training in this infirmary, how harmful this was. I believe now that she might have poisoned many customers over the years, but in those days I thought it only foolishness, as I saw her prepare a sachet of goufre dust and pepper, because of the man’s fever. His eyes shone. My mother lit the altar candles, and then closed the shutters and the door into the yard.
“Monsieur,” she said, “someone is haunting you.”
“Yes.”
“And this person is a woman.”
“Yes.”
“And she disturbs your rest.”
“Yes.”
She said this to every man, and it was always so. She had placed him in an armchair and put a stool under his boots. Then she sat down beside him to take his pulse and put a damp cloth over his brow. Nor did he pull away from her, because he was desperate to be comforted, and in spite of my past fear I looked at him, a gentleman not yet thirty-five, with good teeth and hair.
“Shall we ask her what she wants? But, Monsieur, please tell me. Must we search for her among the living or the dead?”
His expression was desolate. Maman gave a signal, and I went to the altar to light a pyramid of incense and then wash my hands.
Will you hand me my rosary, there from the table? Thank you. It is not a serpent! It won’t bite you! I can see you are a skeptical person, as I was in my naiveté. But this Voodoo conjuring was not a matter of an error or harmless tricks, or the waste that comes from believing something that is not so. It is an opposing force. Not to believe, it is a kind of innocence. Now I think my faith commenced that day, the faith that brings me to this white bed. Before I was unable to distinguish, because I loved my mother, who jumbled them together, good and bad, sin and love. But this is our work on earth, to separate these things.
Now it began raining again, first gently, and then making spots on the dirt floor. I heard the thunder in the direction of Saint Roch. Superstitious, I touched the crucifix around my neck while my mother began to croon her language, most of it entirely invented out of nonsense words. Though I had heard these things before, and though they could not fail to embarrass me, still I was impressed to see her in her blue, flowered robe tied with a crimson sash, her thick hair knotted up. She was a tall woman, taller than I. She stood with her hand on Monsieur’s forehead, while he stared up at her. An educated man, doubtless he was not convinced by her mumbo-jumbo, and at the same time he might have realized he was in a dangerous position, closed up in a poor woman’s cottage. I saw him glance toward the door. At the same time I was fumbling through my mother’s wooden chest, and laying out on the altar her scientific implements, as she called them, her beakers and alembics for distilling her love potions, her hypodermic syringes, her fortune cards and tablets for automatic writing. If these things reassured Monsieur, he gave no sign. “She is very near,” my mother said. “I feel her wanting to come in,” words I had heard before.
Often on these occasions she would contort her face, and the voice of the spirit would slip between her clenched lips in a whisper, easy to misunderstand. That morning I was surprised all this had progressed so quickly. Usually my mother would sit to ask some questions, gaining confidences that she then would give back, though