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Who would swallow deadly poison, unless she wanted to destroy herself? And these mice and these kittens—at fourteen, I could not bear to think about them. I’d had enough. I stepped toward him, and Monsieur followed me with his eyes. I don’t know what I was going to do. But I was finished with something. My mother turned toward me also, and I could see it mixed together in her face, something that knew that I was going to challenge her, and reject her, and run away from her, not only that morning, but forever in the years to come. Her face twisted with rage. She had her fingers locked in Monsieur’s hair, and she forced his head back and forth, and turned his neck one way and another. When I came toward her, she turned his head so that he watched me, twisting his neck with her right hand. She was a strong woman, but what she used was not her strength. It was the strength of the devil that was inside of her, a devil in league with many others, and many other names. But always it requires a human agency. Another drink of water, please. You see I offer a confession at long last, but not just for myself . . .

(Recorded and transcribed as part of the research into a book, Mysteries of the Old Quarter, by Ernest Butler Smith [Grossett & Dunlap, 1938], an interview never quoted or otherwise mentioned in the published text)

8. THREE YEARS PREVIOUS: “ . . . THE MORNING HAS COME AFTER THE STORM”

September 10, 1885

My dear Monsieur,

I thank you for the flowers you have sent. I will be so happy to see you when I have returned from the sanatorium, which Papa tells me we have you to thank for the arrangements, due to your friendship with the director, a kind gentleman, even though he is a Swiss with a long beard. It is hard to remember how I must have behaved to be so desperate in that place. But now the morning has come after the storm, because of your generosity. Oh, I am so ashamed. But now Papa tells me there is no reason to concern myself, that these attacks of nerves are quite common and can be easily forgotten. To be a woman is to have these moods. Oh, I am happy to think so! I am quite sure you will be proud of me, and of the progress I have made. I wish it were tomorrow. But what will come, will come quickly, after all.

Fondly,

S. N.

(From a letter discovered in the inside waistcoat pocket of a corpse, otherwise unidentified, found in a coal sack in a flooded alley off the Rue Dumaine, May 26, 1888)

Afterword to “Mysteries of the Old Quarter”

For a while I lived in New Orleans, where this story takes place. Like many stories set there, it is haunted by the ghost of the 2005 hurricane.

—PAUL PARK

Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the stand-alone novels The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year, as well as the Well-Built City Trilogy, consisting of The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond. His short stories have been collected into three books—The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. Along with his wife and two sons, he lives in South Jersey and teaches writing and literature at Brookdale Community College.

JEFFREY FORD

The Summer Palace

FOR GENERATIONS, THE ruins of the Well-Built City lay like some fallen monster we were unsure had really expired and thought might only be playing dead, all the while scheming. Decades passed and then slowly, cautiously, a few brave souls invaded its crumbled opulence, bringing back reports of wonders as if they’d travelled far away to some exotic other continent. In fact, the ruins were a few mere miles from our village of Wenau, which, as history has it, was spawned by those fleeing the city’s destruction.

Once the intrepid few began to bring back both strange and useful artifacts from the ruins, the citizenry of our village took notice. On the day that one of those explorers bought everyone at the inn a round of Rose Ear Sweet and paid for it with a gold coin he