Marquis de Sade's "The Ghost"

Note: The following is a retelling of "Le Revenant" ("The Ghost") by the Marquis de Sade, from the small book Short Histories, Stories, and Fables, which he wrote in La Pelagie prison between 1794-1795. It is uncharacteristically a tame, even bourgeois tale. We have remained faithful to the original in that regard. C'est la vie.

She approached the lacquered box on the catafalque uneasily, tiptoeing in the hush. Before her, stretched out in eternal repose like a waxen effigy, lay the man she had once loved—or thought she had. His hands were folded crosswise upon his chest. The look on his face was not serene; it was aggrieved. His final image of the world seemed to confirm his soul’s despair.

The lights were dim, the mourners gone, the chamber fallen to silence. She could hear the ticking of the clock like bones against the stones of time. Somewhere, a lonely bird cawed at the evening sun. She tore herself away from the image of him and moved into the adjoining room.

Before her, the bedchamber sprawled—disused, but not dishevelled. It would remain cold and inert, devoid of love and passion’s embrace, forever. The headboard was an ornate, heavily lacquered thing, done over in intricate carvings and gilt scrollwork—the sort of vulgar opulence that pretends to virtue by its expense. Once, she had traced those patterns idly with her finger, half-bored, half-tempted; now they seemed hieroglyphs of some exhausted faith. The sheets were folded with military precision. A faint trace of his scent—tobacco, sweat, the animal sweetness of age—lingered in the fabric.

She stood at the foot of the bed, not daring to sit, and for the first time felt the absurdity of mourning a man who had rarely been kind, never faithful, yet always hers in that ruthless, practical way men give themselves: body first, conscience later.

The air hung thick, perfumed with lilies and dust. Death had made even fine furniture vulgar. Then she saw it—the corner of the tapestry lifting, as if stirred by an unseen breath, revealing the dull gleam of iron beneath. Her pulse kept time with the clock. She approached and drew the tapestry aside. Worked into the paneling like a secret confession was the shape of a skull, its jaw parted, as though whispering an invitation. In its mouth, the faint impression of a keyhole gleamed like a pupil.

She hesitated only a moment before drawing the small iron key from her bodice. The metal was cold as conscience. When she pressed it into the skull’s mouth, her mind flashed back to the Death card she had drawn that morning—the crowned skeleton, the rising sun, the figure kneeling in acceptance. She had smiled at the omen then, smug in her disbelief. Now the same image flared behind her eyes as the lock turned with a soft, deliberate click.

A hollow breath seemed to pass through the room. She reached into the darkness beyond, her fingers brushing something both smooth and wrong—not quite wood, not quite flesh. She pulled, her palms quivering, as if stung by the bolt of some galvanic battery. Yesterday she had been laying out cards—The Lovers, The Hanged Man, and that mirthless figure of Death, helmeted and grim, like a Black Knight from a ghostly tale. Outside, the wind picked up. The walls howled. The candles guttered on the mantle. Her eyes dimmed over.

Before her, a hole seemed to open in the wall. Inside, she thought she could see strange, swirling forms—as if a face, twisted in agony, tried to shape itself from the void, wailing in pain before dissolving again. It was a moment before He stepped through from the interminable veil.pause

It was the very image of him—yet as if seen through a glass darkly. The skin of her bones prickled into electrical cold. Her eyes bulged, her chest heaved, and she could only sit inert. “I have come,” he said slowly, “to settle accounts. I have toiled a night in the confines of this dark space—the flickering of an eye, a moment—but an eternity here is the work of a moment. I have failed in my duties to you. I have forgotten you in my will.”

He held aloft one marble-white hand. She strained to see what the bejeweled fingers held. It was a key. “Here,” he intoned, in a hollow voice that edged ever so slightly with the clotted dirt of a newly turned grave, “this key will unlock the secret compartment behind the headboard of my bed. You will know where to place it. Remove the box, and inside—a treasure beyond your present reckoning, my little gypsy—will be yours for the taking.” He turned, bitterly, and she realized he was dragging a heavy chain with iron boxes in his wake. They scraped across the floor like coffins being moved. Then he was gone—the candlelight steady again, the air still and unbreathing.

By morning’s light, she roused herself and went with a friend to his house. The door stood open, and the scent of mourning crept out to meet them. Within, they found him as custom demanded—laid out in his coffin, pale and still. No one stopped them. They climbed the stairs to his rooms, to the bed she knew too well. She touched the headboard, found the hidden aperture, and turned the key. The small iron door swung open. Inside, behind the panel, lay a box of beaten silver, heavy with coin and paper notes, untouched and unrecorded.

She took it, said nothing, and left.

That was the end of it. They say the story was told in every quarter of Paris for a season—that she never again spoke his name, nor was ever seen to smile. The philosophers may argue the rest. The dead, for their part, slumber on.

My book: Theater of the Worm : Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread

My book: Silent Scream: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels.

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