Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [212]
“This isn’t stew,” he said. “This is a recipe left for me by the Sanctity of Grace. She wrote it, over a series of nights, in the ash of the fireplace. I’d wake each morning with excitement and run to see what she’d written. I wrote it all down, and to entice her to return, I’d leave her sweetmeats. On the morning that she left the last of the recipe, she also left a dollop of vomit on the platter that had held her reward.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“What is it?” said Chibbins.
Rothac scratched his armpit. I took a step back. “It’s a drug,” he said. “It makes the imagination reel and real. Drink a mug of it and you’ll see. Ludiya calls it Sheer Beauty.”
“Ludiya?” I said. “She’s been to this pen?”
“No, Physiognomist Cley. Don’t get the wrong idea. I take it to the Palace sometimes when I’m invited for dinner, and we sip it afterward, lounging in the plush thrones. Mrs. Barlow is quite a devotee of the Beauty.”
“Something like this would be illegal in the city,” I said. “The Master wants no escape for his electorate.”
“Try it while you’re here,” said Rothac. “You’ll see.”
“I’d rather drink your bathwater,” I said. “I want this mess disposed of by tomorrow. If the Master were present, you’d already have been immolated.”
The diminutive creature bowed.
AT DINNER WITH Mrs. Barlow and her daughter, Chibbins seemed hypnotized by the food. He was blessedly quiet but for the sounds of his chewing as he dispatched each dish with a methodical rapacity. The main course was stuffed meat hole and peppered thistle roots. It wasn’t for me. A charred tube of pig meat as big as a log stuffed with cremat—shit in a pit is what it should have been called—and a peppered pile of the gardener’s rakings. No thank you.
“Rothac told me about Sheer Beauty,” I said to the ladies.
Ludiya glanced nervously at her mother. Mrs. Barlow, who had a dribble of cremat on her chin, said, “And what of it?”
“It’s illegal,” I said.
“Cley,” she said, “you don’t understand. Every summer, all summer long, I am in contact with the Master. He treats me like I’m his mother. We sit out in the statue garden, surrounded by rosebushes, beneath an umbrella, and he tells me everything. So you’ll do nothing about the Beauty. You’ll say nothing about it. Or this summer I will be a mosquito in the Master’s ear, suggesting you be sent to Doralice.” She smiled and wiped her chin.
The old witch had me. I calmly turned to Ludiya and said, “What is it like to take the Sheer Beauty?”
She was sopping up a puddle of cremat with a slice of bread. The sight of her bringing the brown stained mess to her lips initiated a wave of erotic nausea that swept through me. “Strange things happen,” she said. “Odd things that leave you unsure if they are real or unreal. The more you believe them unreal, the realer they prove themselves to be; but then put faith in them, and their illusory nature begins to reveal itself again.”
“Can you give me an example?” I said, smiling, even though her explanation was something Chibbins might have come out with.
“You can speak directly to the Sanctity of Grace if you drink it. Without the Sheer Beauty, a living person can only feel the force of her power, hear her wailing, but with the drug, she appears clearly before you, as the woman she was, and not merely a green glowing mist floating through the night. She says that she went to her grave a saint, but her decades in the dirt have made her bitter. She’s returned for revenge against Master Below. ‘I’ve etched his headstone,’ she told me one night in the gazebo. ‘And yours,’ she added. Then the sky lit up pink with fireworks and a buck came out of the willows and entered the gazebo. He sang ‘Last Carriage to the Moon’ accompanied by music that seeped out of the shadows. When the sky had again gone black and the beast had finished his song, the Sanctity mounted him, grabbing his antlers with both hands, and they loped away amid the trees toward the old cemetery.”
IN A NIGHTMARISH