Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [89]
“In a manner of speaking. That’s all that remains of her. She crumbled to dust right in front of me. Shriveled and died and went absolutely to dust, all in a moment.”
Shuddering, I brushed it free of my fingers, back into the box.
I was silent for a while.
The room was spinning about me. I had spent all my days in a world in which three and three make six, six and six make twelve, but I was not sure that I lived in such a world any longer.
Then I said, “Take what’s left of Smithers to the chaplain, and see what he wants to do about a burial.”
He nodded, the good obedient Brewster of old. “And what shall I do with this?” he asked, pointing to the sandy deposit in the box.
“Scatter it in the road,” I said. “Or spill it into the river, whatever you wish. She was Smithers’s undoing. We owe her no courtesies.”
And then I thought of Helena, sweet, patient Helena. She had never understood the first thing about him, had she? And yet she had loved him. Poor, sweet Helena.
She must be protected now, I thought. The world is very strange, and sometimes too harsh, and we must protect women like Helena from its mysteries. At least, from such mysteries as this one—not the mystery of that hidden valley, I mean, though that is mysterious enough, but the mysteries of the heart.
I drew a deep breath. “And—with regard to the Adjutant’s daughter, Brewster—”
“Yes?
“She will want to know how he died, I suppose. Tell her he died bravely, while in the midst of his greatest adventure in Her Majesty’s Service. But you ought not, I think, to tell her very much more than that. Do you understand me? He died bravely. That should suffice, Brewster. That should suffice.”
Afterword to “Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar”
I’ve long been an admirer of the classic Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories—by M. R. James, Oliver Onions, J. S. Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and so on—and had been reading another old favorite, Rudyard Kipling, when news of this new anthology arrived. It seemed a logical thing to write a ghost story in the mode of Kipling for it.
—ROBERT SILVERBERG
John Langan
John Langan is the author of a novel, House of Windows, and a collection of stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cthulhu’s Reign, By Blood We Live, Poe, and The Living Dead. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. He teaches classes in creative writing and gothic fiction and film at SUNY New Paltz and lives nearby with his wife, son, two cats, and a changing menagerie of insects, amphibians, and reptiles.
JOHN LANGAN
The Unbearable Proximity of
Mr. Dunn’s Balloons
I
“Come, now,” Dunn said. His voice sounded as reasonable as it had at any point these last seven days. “Surely, you must have expected something like this.”
On reflection, Coleman supposed the man had a point. That did not stop him from thrusting his rapier into the nearest of the balloons.
II
“I’m sorry?” Coleman said, turning from the train’s window. Under the pretense of watching the Hudson slide past, he had been studying his reflection, renewing his debate with himself over shaving the beard he had worn since his midtwenties, the white hairs which he feared added a full decade to his appearance, advancing (distinguished) middle age to premature old age.
“I asked if you are planning to interview Mr. Dunn,” the young man seated across the compartment said. “You had said you write, so it occurred to me that you might be at work on an article about him.”
“I am not,” Coleman said. “I no longer write as much for the magazines as I used to. Of late, I’ve been concentrating my efforts on my fiction.”
“Oh,” said the young man, who had introduced himself at Grand Central as Cal Earnshaw. While the suit in which he traveled appeared of reasonable quality, there was a leanness to Cal’s face that suggested those of beggars Coleman had passed along the Venetian canals. The even younger woman seated beside