Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [91]
“Nonsense,” Cal said. “You won’t be interfering a bit.”
“According to Mr. Dunn’s letter to us,” Isabelle said, “he will require some time alone with my husband. Although he assures us his house’s library is thoroughly stocked, I should be grateful for a companion to help me pass the hours.”
“You may consider me at your disposal,” Coleman said.
III
Summerland, Poughkeepsie
June 16, 1888
Strange to meet Parrish Dunn today. I wouldn’t say I’ve been brooding on the man, but he has engaged my thoughts for much of the last several months. The successful arms merchant who washes his hands of the blood in which he’s steeped them for nigh on twenty years to devote himself to the promulgation of his new Spiritualist beliefs—not to mention, to fashioning his elaborate balloons—how could such a figure not be of interest? I’ve spent enough time—enough pages in this notebook—supplementing the scant description of him in Mrs. Barchester’s North Along the Hudson that to meet the original to whom my speculations owe their existence gave me a jolt.
He looks like an arms merchant—strike that, he looks like an arms maker, one of those powers charged by the other gods with forging their spears and shields deep in the bowels of a smoking volcano. Until this point in my life, I have considered my five foot ten inches a more than adequate height, but Dunn must stand somewhere in the vicinity of six foot seven, six foot eight. He rises up to that measurement like a mountain; I’ve never done well at estimating anyone’s weight, so it may be more useful to write that he appears almost as wide as he is tall. Every item he was wearing—black suit, white shirt, black shoes—must have been specially made for him.
Because of his size, Dunn’s face, which would otherwise fall somewhere in the broad middle of the human spectrum, has something of the grotesque to it. He is bald, and the expanse of his great skull somehow contributes to this impression. His heavy lips frame a mouth whose thick teeth seem formed for tearing the meat from a leg of venison. His nose is flat, wide, crossed by a white scar that continues across the right cheek. His eyes protrude from their sockets, so that he appears to watch you intensely.
His appearance aside, Dunn has been the model host. His carriage was waiting for us at the train station, and he was waiting for us at the front gate to Summerland. (Note: Must check details of house. I’m fairly sure it’s the style known as Second Empire—tall and narrow, like a collection of rectangles stood on their short ends. Roof—Mansard roof?—like a cap. White with black trim, freshly painted, so the white blinding in the afternoon, the black shining. Extensive gardens in the English fashion. Situated on a hilltop overlooking the Hudson and the step hills on the other shore.) The room in which I have been housed is easily four times as large as the cabin in which I crossed the Atlantic, and extravagantly furnished.
The single most interesting feature of my room, though, is the balloon floating in the center of it, at the foot of the bed. I’ve read Mrs. Barchester’s description of Dunn’s balloons over and over again; it’s one of the few passages in her book in which my fascination with the subject matter blinds me to the dreadfulness of her prose. Not surprisingly, she has not done the things justice. The size, for example: no doubt she’s measured the diameter correctly as three feet, but she has failed utterly in conveying a sense of the balloon’s volume, of the manner in which it fills the space in which it hangs like a globe set loose from its moorings. The things are apparently composed of brown paper, which appears heavy, coarse grained, and which still bears the folds and creases necessary to achieve the balloon’s shape. Its seams are dark with whatever Dunn used to seal them. Perhaps the most serious defect in Mrs. Barchester’s account of the balloons, however, lies in her remarks upon the designs that cover