Yesterday Never Dies. Brian Stableford
in spite of the fact that it was not really solid, that it was the mere appearance of a person. I was not in doubt about that, and not merely because I had not heard anyone come into the box. There was something about the presence that was unmistakably spectral, although I could not pin down exactly what it was. It was not transparent any more than it was phosphorescent, but it was not truly present either; it had no mass; it did not belong.
There was, however, something odd even about the quality of its unbelonging. It did not seem out of place. It seemed, in fact, to be exactly where it ought to be, in the empty seat next to mine...but if it was not out of place, it was definitely out of time. It belonged to the past—perhaps not to a very distant past, but one that was definitely dead.
It was wearing spectral clothes, in a style that might still have passed muster even today, and there was nothing unusual about the cut of its black hair and beard, but there was something in its attitude and its gaze that spoke of displacement. Even before it turned to look directly at me, I could measure a peculiar puzzlement and disorientation in its perception, as if it could not quite understand why everything around it was different. When it did turn its head, the movement was slightly awkward—and it was then that I noticed that its hands, positioned on the handle of a wooden walking-stick wedged vertically between its knees, were gnarled by arthritis—an arthritis that probably affected its neck too.
Ghosts, I presumed, did not usually suffer from arthritis, so I deduced that this one must be more like some kind of strange echo of an arthritic person who really had sat in an equivalent chair in an equivalent box, perhaps in 1834. If the image really had been displaced in time, I thought, then of course everything looked different. This was still the Salle Favart, but it had been completely rebuilt after the fire of 1838. And Robert le Diable was still Robert le Diable, but this was not the same version of the opera that had been played here in 1834, if what Saint-Germain had said could be trusted. Not only were the dancers different, but so was the dance, and the music accompanying it.
The ghost was that of a man of about sixty, probably a little older than Meyerbeer and Scribe, but when he turned to look at me and I stared into his dark, ungleaming eyes, I had an impression of much greater antiquity than that. His overall appearance, I felt sure, dated from 1834—I was even convinced that I could guess the name of the man at whom I was looking—but there was something within and beyond that appearance that was much older, and much less human.
The Devil himself?
I thought not; the gaze did not seem particularly friendly, but it did not seem to be malevolent either—mischievous, perhaps, or at worst slyly malicious. Even so, I told myself, it might conceivably have been one of the many pale simulacra of the Christian Devil that haunted the interstices between our material world and what some people called the dream dimensions. There are, as Hamlet remarked, more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.
I almost contrived to unfreeze my throat in time to speak, although I have no idea what I would have said. Instead, the ghost spoke, perhaps thus proving that it had some small measure of material presence.
“Yesterday never dies,” it said, “but such is the rhythm of time that one has to grasp its echoes on the wing.”
There was a measure of melancholy in the words—as, I suppose, befitted their content—but there was also an odd note of satisfaction, of intellectual triumph. The latter was a note that I had heard before, in Auguste Dupin’s voice, when he had solved a puzzle of some sort.
“Can you see me?” I enquired, interestedly.
I could not see any sign in the phantom’s expression that it had heard what I said, but it did give the impression that it could see someone sitting where I was sitting...or had been sitting in a chair alongside his own, in 1834 or some other time: Auguste Dupin, I guessed, if this really was an echo of 1834 caught on the wing...with how many other undying yesterdays caught in its uncanny net?
Seized by a sudden intuition, I looked across the auditorium, wondering whether Chapelain, the mystery woman, and Jana Valdemar could also see the phantom. Chapelain was staring at the stage, his profile reflecting the distant limelight—but both masked women were ignoring the final steps of the ballet and looking across the auditorium. The combination of the masks and the angle of the feeble lighting made it impossible to judge their expressions, or to see where their gazes were focused, but I was immediately convinced that they could see that I was not alone, even if they did not know that my companion was not human.
I immediately looked back at the ghost again, in order to estimate how much they might be able to see of it by the light reflected from the phantom visage—at least, I tried to. As unobtrusively as it had appeared, the specter had vanished again.
Perhaps they didn’t see it, I thought. Perhaps they were merely looking at me. I did not believe it.
Strangely enough, even though I had not felt frightened—and ironically, in view of the observations I had earlier made of Lucien Groix—I found that my hand was convulsively closed on the pommel of my own walking-stick, although I had no memory of even having picked it up. Even though I had not yet shown any sign of arthritis in my knuckles, the grip was so tight and painful that I had difficulty relaxing the fingers in order to lie the cane down again—but I had no sensation of wielding it, even symbolically, as a weapon of defense; it was more a matter of clutching an amulet or a talisman: an echo of a time even more remote, I supposed, than the heroic age of swords and chivalry.
If the rest of the opera would have been an anticlimax after the dance of the nuns in any case, it was doubly or triply so after the manifestation of the ghost: the ghost, I presumed, of the mysterious and long-dead Professor Thibodeaux. I suppose it ought still have been possible for me to obtain a thrill of sorts from Bertram’s summons to Hell, if not from Robert’s marriage to Isabelle, all the more so having been given the glimpse of something even more enigmatic than the problematic overlap of 1834 and 1847 in the spectral eyes, but it was not.
I was by now, it seemed, too experienced a ghost-seer to be thrown off my stride by such a subtle hint of diabolism, and too seasoned a dealer with entities mistaken for and conflated with the imaginary devils of Christendom to find their occasional intrusion into our world anything more that a fact of life. I had been beyond the limits of the world, and had been possessed in my own flesh by an entity that most people would have identified as a demon. I was not a novice in such matters.
Indeed, I had sufficient second-hand expertise, by virtue of many long conversations with Dupin, to know that my sighting of the ghost was highly atypical in several respects. Most ghost-seers, according to Dupin, only see ghosts that they are half-expecting to see: ghosts of people that they knew in life, or ghosts of their ancestors, or anecdotal ghosts with whose stories they are familiar—because, of course, the experience of seeing a ghost is mostly, and often entirely, subjective. It was obvious to me now that the reason that Dupin had not breathed a word about what he half-expected to see tonight was his curiosity to know whether I would be able to see anything at all, given that I had never met Thibodeaux and had only heard his name in passing. He would doubtless be very interested to know that I had.
But where was Dupin? If he had half-expected to see a ghost tonight, that made it more than doubly surprising that he had missed the opportunity. Any number of things might have kept him away from a mere opera—especially one that he considered second-rate—but to keep him away from a manifestation that anyone but him would have considered supernatural...that was a different matter.
I could not help wondering whether his absence might have anything to do with the “slight indisposition” of the person originally intended to occupy the third seat in Chapelain’s box, although she had managed to arrive at the interval, even if he had not; but I knew that I had to be cautious about placing too much credence in any “deduction” in that regard. I had to remember that I was only a pupil, not a master, in Dupin’s arcane arts.
On the other hand....
Pierre Chapelain was a magnetizer: a physician who employed treatments based in the science of suggestion. He used magnetism—or hypnotism, as it was increasingly being called nowadays—as both an aid to diagnosis and an aid to make his