Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural

by Marvin Kaye (ed. )

  Berkeley came to play, of course. Arrogant, idle, and rich, he has for a year and more indulged himself with the generosity of a ruling class that bequeaths moral restraint to their commons without tax by the peerage. Paris did not corrupt him; its laissez-faire only obviated that discretion demanded at home.

  For myself, my name is Ethan Flagg. A modest patrimony has allowed me to study literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne, a living I augment in a clerical post at the American Embassy.

  Berkeley and I are of an age, three and twenty, but only he is young. I am aged with a sickness of the mind. Or let me pray that I am. At worst, to die at his hand will put a period to those nightmare visions which have tortured me since I was twelve years of age, visions that do not change but evolve, becoming clearer and more detailed until they sear now into my waking as well as sleeping hours with a sharpness of resolution consistent as it is hellish. Denise knows something of these dreams. Though I never speak of them, I sometimes wake her at night crying out in their incomprehensible patois. They are not to understand. They are horrors.

  Denise—Mlle. Denise Laurenne—is the cause of my quarrel with Berkeley. As an American without class or fortune, I was devastated with happiness when she lavishly returned the attentions I commenced after seeing her perform in l’Opera Comique. We are well matched, content together from the first. If she is a few years older and more experienced, if Berkeley’s insolent face leers from her recent past, I care not. Most of this infected life I could discard with ease, saving those hours which she inhabits. For her sake I am committed and likely doomed.

  Berkeley doesn’t care a rap for Denise now. She is déclassée, yesterday’s diversion, her name to be bandied freely about the Anglo Club to a ripple of cognizant laughter. What I could privately ignore was intolerable when he fronted me with it in the club billiard room. He chose his time carefully for the largest audience.

  “But surely la Laurenne has mentioned me to you?”

  I looked about at the ring of his faintly sneering companions who had left off their billiards to enjoy my humiliation, though I still attempted to keep my voice lowered.

  “This is not a subject for discussion in a gentlemen’s club.”

  Berkeley took snuff with an air of studied boredom. “Demme, sirrah, are you a gentleman? It seems the definition has broadened.”

  “Berkeley, as you were once her friend, I urge kindness—”

  “Toward whom, sir? Herself—or you?”

  “For her sake, if your breeding will not suffice.”

  He did not expect such a ready riposte. He laughed negligently—or with the appearance of negligence—careful that his friends missed none of our exchange. “Oh come, my dear . . . Flagg, is it? We are men speaking among men. I found her quite amusing.”

  My retort was the more scathing for its truth. As Denise put it, the well-worn shoe is a good judge of feet. She had mentioned Berkeley, and she is nothing if not candid. “That was her word, my lord: amusant. She catalogued you in humorous detail as a clumsy simpleton at amour. Clumsy or tedious, I do forget.”

  Berkeley’s smirk faltered. His friends edged closer like a circle of hounds around two of their breed embattled. “You are a demmed liar, Master Flagg.”

  “Am I so?” With icy precision, then, I proceeded to a probing corroboration of this or that particular, even to the private details of his person, which left no doubt as to the veracity of my account or Berkeley’s lamentable lack of finesse with women. Poor man; as I advanced from proof to proof the flush of vicious triumph that colored his inbred features darkened to murderous anger. That he had enjoyed Denise before me was to have been his coarse joke on a common clerk. That she found him hopelessly inept was my distilled revenge. The laughter of his friends was of a different timbre now.

  Berkeley was in deadly earnest now, perhaps even in pain. “Master Flagg, you will retract every word of this.”

  “But why?” I sank the dagger to its hilt. “Are we not men speaking among men? It is to laugh, my lord. As she did.”

  In the moment before he struck me I imagined I perceived something quite alien that peered from behind Berkeley’s mask of malicious ennui; as if he were an actor aware of a role, laughing not at me but at us together on a foolish stage. But it was merely my distorted judgment; he has no such sensitivity. His open hand whipped across my cheek.

  “You—shop boy!”

  Thus the sad comedy begins. These affairs are straitly codified in Paris. Cards of address were exchanged, the Viscount Hampton volunteered as Berkeley’s second while I was advised to engage one of my own. If we could not compose our differences, the meeting would take place no later than two mornings hence when a doctor and a suitable place had been found. Someone mentioned the convenient privacy of the St. Germain district . . .

  Denise considers the duel sheer folly and urges me to ‘apologize to Berkeley, as if it were not her honor he derided. “My honor, Ethan? La!”

  How desirable and dear she is, her face framed in dark curls kepi Very short for the wigs her roles demand. She has seen most of what the world offers women and can no longer be disillusioned by any of it. Those tight gamine curls framing the sad warmth of her eyes is a delightful contradiction for me.

  “Mais, bien merci, I have not such an honor. What I have is a good life with you. That is more important. For Berkeley”—her shoulders lift and fall in a gesture only the French can render eloquent—“he is a sad fool, sadder than you guess. Let it go.”

  “I cannot.”

  “But why? I do not feel dishonored. C’est comique.”

  May you never know just how comic, Denise. “But the comedy is not ended.”

  “Ah, zut!” She throws up exasperated hands. “You men. It is not my honor but your own pride.”

  “He insulted you.”

  Denise smiles. “France herself has been used to insult since Julius Caesar. Everyone who fancied conquest has found his shortest route through Paris. She has learned to relax in the supine position, as have women. Men take what they want, women what God sends them. So we survive; it is the world.”

  “And am I just one more conqueror?”

  “Non, mon cher.” Denise holds out the arms I can never deny. “When God sent you, he was feeling generous. Come: do not talk, but love me.”

  In her all-cleansing embrace I enjoy the only sure sanity I have ever known. Later, as Denise slumbers beside me, I stare wakefully at the moon sinking beyond our window and ponder the shape of time. There are heady new forces abroad in the world. France ha, built in blood what Jefferson and Paine conceived in noble experiment. The old order, Berkeley’s order, is dying, but what will grow in its place? Rousseau eulogizes the perfectible human spirit with no title but Mankind, Beethoven’s new symphonies are hammer strokes at the chains of tradition, but what Prometheus do we free?

  And so the sickness comes over me as it spreads insensibly over the face of time. I begin to perspire profusely. Thank God Denise is asleep; perhaps this time she can sleep through it. The blood pounds in my ears; I grind my face into the pillow. The sensation of nausea engulfs me. I resist, pray with my whole being. God help me, I am here now in Paris. It is May 15, 1806. May 15. It is—

  July 3, 1863. The sun’s baked Gettysburg bone-dry for three days. Lieutenant Cushing’s tunic is open and the front of his red underwear sticks to his chest. I’m stripped down to drawers with a bandanna around my head and tight over my ears. The sky is made of loud iron, the whistle and scream and boom of shells. Yesterday Lee had eighty guns bearing on this hill; today there’s more than a hundred and twenty. He’s tried our flanks for two days, and we threw him back. Old Robert E’s got to fish or cut bait today. First he’s got to knock out Cushing’s guns.

  They’re trying. The Southern batteries have shelled us for two straight hours. Not the whole line, just us. We’re down to three guns. The rest are junk along with their crews, and every God-damned cannon in the Army of Northern Virginia is pointed across the
valley right at me.

  Cushing chews a dead see-gar, staring at the trees on the opposite slope. “Why’d Lee wait? He coulda took us yesterday before we dug in.”

  “Down!” We flatten out as the shell screams over and explodes somewhere near number four gun. Sure enough, someone pipes up: “Number four gun. Short in the crew.”

  Cush leans his head against the wall, eyes shut, tuckered out. “Flagg, get that gun firing.”

  I round up three ammunition carriers to fill out the powder-grimy crew. It’s just quarter of three. We’re loading number four when it happens.

  “Here they come.”

  Across the valley the blue Virginia flag bobs out of the covering trees, flanked by gray ranks, wave after wave of them, moving down the slope like a slow tide.

  “That’s Pickett.”

  “Prime . . . ready.”

  “Stand by to fire.”

  Pickett’s Virginians are part of Dutch Longstreet’s command. Old Dutch is a cautious man, but he’s held off too long this time. There’s all of Hancock’s corps behind this wall. We’ve faced Pickett before: we know his brigadiers.

  “There’s Kemper.”

  “And Garnett.”

  “And that old dandy, Armistead.”

  My men stop talking. They know what’s going to happen. Pickett’s men must move across the valley bottom with no cover at all, every inch of it boxed and known to our guns. Nobody talks about that anymore. My mouth is full of cotton, watching them come on so slow in such straight marching order. They’re leaving wounded like a leaky bucket; you can follow their path by the gray drops.

  They halt once to give us a rifle burst. Off to my left, someone screams with a high, gurgly sound like a butchered hog.

  “It’s the lieutenant. They got Cushing.”

  Cush is shot through the mouth and crotch, the worst kind of wound. He won’t last till night, but I can’t think of that now. There’s fifteen thousand Johnnys crossing the valley, more people than I ever saw at one time, and Armistead’s brigade is running now, straight at me. I pick up Cush’s sword—waving a sword in my dirty underwear, that’s what I’ll remember about Gettysburg—and run hunched over back to number four, while a fat mother-hen staff officer reins up his horse and sits there like someone was going to take one of those glass-plate pictures of him.

  “You there! Who’s on Mr. Cushing’s guns? Who’s in command?”

  I jam the sword upright in the ground. “Me, Flagg. Stand by, one, two, and four.”

  “Prime . . . ready.”

  “Fire!”

  Another shell comes in way too close. “They got Schulz’s whole crew. Number one’s out.”

  “Fire!”

  My throat is raw with smoke and screaming. We swab, load, prime, and fire. The world is all black and red and that one roar tearing out of my lungs. Fire . . . fire . . . There’s another roar, dull and far on our left, that I realize is our other batteries as they tear into the remains of Pickett’s lost division. The gray ranks are ragged and thin now, no longer anything like lines but still coming. The smoke blossoms out and blows away to show bigger and bigger holes where men ain’t anymore, like a boy scooping up lead soldiers from the floor with both hands. But Armistead staggers on toward me with the pitiful remains of his brigade.

  “They’re too close, Flagg. We’re shooting over.”

  “Battle range! Battle range! Run ’em down!”

  The gun is flattened out to point-blank range. We work like maniacs over it, seeing nothing, know nothing except the gun.

  “Fire!”

  “Fire!”

  “Fire!”

  “Number two out.”

  “Fire!”

  Armistead reaches the wall in front of us. He’s wounded, but he jumps the top and gets as far as the muzzle of number four, waving his damned fool hat on his sword, yelling for his men to follow. He sees me too late as I swing Cush’s sword two-handed. Die, you son of a—

  He could’ve got me, but he was slow. And so, for me, the war goes on.

  “They’re goin’ back. They’re beat.”

  “Don’t let ’em. Fire!”

  We go on tearing up Pickett like old newspaper as he limps home over seven thousand bodies. I want to yell at George Pickett, touch him, make it personal, somehow, because it’s getting damned hard to be a person anymore.

  “Pickett, you—”

  You what? You were a person once, too. They tell me you were one of those damned Daguerreo-type-posing fools who loved war. You could still live like that in ’61, but there’s no way now. Seven thousand bodies in the valley down there, divided between a few cannon. How many are mine? Three, four hundred? I never broke a law in my life and I’ve killed more men than the busiest murderer in history. I thought about that at Bull Run the first time my gun tore up a line of Johnnys. I can’t think of it now, it costs too much. You used to dream of swords and honor, Pickett. I wonder what you’ll dream tonight.

  We swab the gun and let it cool. The war goes on.

  Denise makes our morning chocolate and discreetly absents herself on the arrival of Berkeley’s second, Viscount Hampton. Son of the Earl of Albemarle, young Hampton is cap-à-pied the high-blooded dandy in fitted doeskin breeches and Gieves-tailored coat. He stands with the distance of my worn carpet between us, as if to tread on it would soil the soles of his mirror-polished boots.

  “Master Flagg: Lord Berkeley has instructed me to accept your public apology.”

  “C’est dommage. I had hoped you brought his.”

  “Then, as it is . . .”

  “As it is.”

  Excellent lines for comedy. One can see Kean in my role, though I hear he loves life.

  “The pistols will be Gastin Renettes loaded with the fullest allowable charge,” Hampton advises. “There will be heavy recoil and less accuracy. On the other hand, in the event of a hit . . .” He elides the thought, searching me for any sign of wavering, finds none and continues. “He leaves it to you to choose a single discharge at will or exchange of shots until one party is sufficiently wounded.”

  “One shot at will.”

  Our business is concluded, yet some atom of humanity stays Hampton. “Flagg, I cannot fault you alone in this affair, but Harry Berkeley has fought before. I urge you to apologize.”

  “No.”

  “You are a helpless clerk. He has wagered his life—even foolishly—more often than I can think of. Have you ever discharged a pistol?”

  “Even a cannon, my lord. Indeed, there have been days on end when I did little else.”

  I did not think Hampton a man for irony, but he surprises me. “You are very like him: a plain brick wall. That the two of you should duel—” Hampton shrugs. “Very well. Tomorrow morning at six. The small park beyond St. Germain.” His head chops up and down once, and he withdraws.

  Shortly afterward my own second arrives: Rijn van den Tronck, a friend from New York City and a fellow student at the Sorbonne. He has been to see Berkeley. Stocky, blond, and apple-cheeked, Rijn looks now like a schoolboy fresh from a stiff caning.

  “He laughed at me, Ethan. He will accept an apology only if it is public. He will make none himself.”

  “I expected no grace from Berkeley.” We sit down to the remaining chocolate and toast from breakfast. There is another important detail now, the letters I have written.

  “This to my father in Washington City. In the event . . .”

  “I understand.”

  “This to Denise.”

  Rijn shuffles the letters, searching for the right words. “What does she think of this?”

  “I would not dwell on that. This last to yourself. It authorizes you to draw on my bank for such arrangements as may be necessary. There is a bequest for your studies. The balance to Denise.”

  Rijn tucks the letters in a pocket of his waistcoat. “I want no profit from this.”

  “Have no fear. It is not enough to embarrass your scruples.”

  “How do you
feel, Ethan?”

  “Dear Rijn, privately I am terrified for my life—as a miser fears the loss of a false penny. But I am more afraid of my sickness than of dying.”

  “These dreams you will not speak of: would you confide them to a physician?”

  “I dare not. I should be barred up in Charenton for life.”

  “What are these dreams?”

  “Parts of hell.”

  “And you will not tell even me?”

  Tell Rijn? I peer into that stolid yonker face, its expression a testament to a sane universe and the ever-improving spirit of man.

  “How could I? The mercy and justice of God, the application of humanist philosophy, these are a fixed center to the wheel of your life.”

  “And yours, Ethan.”

  “Would it help you to know there is no more God?”

  “Don’t say that again, Ethan.”

  “That someday the bare truth of this will permeate the acts, if not the sentience, of the most brutish minds; that a few will accept it, even more flee from it as they have fled down the centuries from every truth worthy of the name—”

  “Stop!”

  “How stop? Of the most lucid philosophy, how much has the world ever used? The great majority, Rijn, unable to endure the reality of God or the reality of no God, of personal freedom and sole responsibility, will whirl in futile circles, tearing at each other for the sake of motion. Describe this in detail? For your sanity, no.”

  “And you will not seek any cure?”

  There is Berkeley and tomorrow.

  “I seek nothing else, Rijn.”

  He bends across the table to grip my arm. “You can only seek while you live. Berkeley means to kill you.”

  “Right on, man. That mother’s gonna blow me away.”

  The table blurs in front of me. My skin sheens with perspiration, my mind expands like a pustulant bubble. Rijn has never seen one of my attacks. He is stunned at the bastard English.