Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

Norris avoided a direct answer. “The metal bends and rivets come poppin’ out. I’ve nae seen the like. Good strong rivets, without cause or reason. Last night, boiler number two popped a score of rivets on the main pipe. If we hadna found and fixed it . . .”

  “Old machinery. It wears out.”

  “Aye, because ye keep it workin’ day and night. Ye must shut it down and rebuild it.”

  “I will not shut it down.”

  “Damp down the boilers, turn off the generators . . .”

  “No, I’m telling you. I cannot shut it down.”

  “Dr. Kessel, I’ve worked wi’ machines since I was a wee bairn. Ye think I’m only an engineer, but—”

  “That’s right, only an engineer. Not a scientist. You do not understand the importance of this work. This is the science of the brain, and we advance the science by a hundred years. It will be a great service to humanity when my mechanism is perfected.”

  Norris thrust out his jaw. “I canna tell about the science of the brain, but I know when there’s summat amiss wi’ a machine. Ye keep fixin’ and fiddlin’, but ye willna fix what was wrong from the start. The design was never thought out right.”

  “The design, is it?” Dr. Kessel sneered. “Or is it ghosts? Or perhaps some of your wee Scottish pixies?”

  Norris held his ground. “Mebbe,” he said.

  Dr. Kessel stopped his pacing. “I shall increase the wages.”

  “ ’Tis nae about the money.” Norris chewed at his lower lip. “How much more?”

  “One shilling a week.” Dr. Kessel studied the other man. “Two shillings.” Still no response from Norris. Dr. Kessel flung out his arms. “Four shillings more.”

  “Aye, ye can find the money when ye need it.”

  Norris had changed his tone. Seemingly, it was about the money after all. Dr. Kessel’s relief was obvious.

  I had been aware of a few light taps on my shoulders, and a swishing, swooshing sound in the trees. I realised then that it had started to rain—and the drops were rapidly turning into a deluge. My relatively sheltered spot between building and trees was no protection.

  I left the window and hastened back to my room in the guest wing.

  I WAS PERPLEXED and fearful. The suggestion that the physical components of the mechanism might be unsafe disturbed me; even more so, the talk of ghosts and haunting. Exactly what I had to fear I did not know, but the impressions of my midnight adventure came back to me in a hundred shifting associations. I could hold no one thought still and steady in my mind. I write it out calmly now—you see how measured are my sentences—but all that night a whirlwind blew through my brain.

  By morning, I was in an abnormal state even by my own standards. It was as though countless wheels spun at great speed inside me—yet ineffectually, disengaged. I couldn’t decide what to do for the best; indeed, I had lost all power of decision. I felt that a current was sweeping me along to some inevitable fate. I even felt I had a particular role to play, like an actor following a script.

  Last night’s storm had passed, and the new day had a stark, scoured look. The grass and paths were still wet, and a detritus of leaves and twigs littered the lawns. Four attendants came to collect us, including Mr. Hungerford with the American accent. I think Mr. Hungerford explained that I should avoid food before my treatment, so Mother and Father also went without breakfast.

  The next clear scene in my memory was when we trooped again into Dr. Kessel’s study. The room was as it had been on our previous visit and as I had seen it through the window—with a single significant addition. Against one wall—the wall not lined with bookshelves—there now stood a curious box, large and shallow and mounted on wheels. It was open at the top, low to the ground, and upholstered with plush white interior padding. I can’t say why, but as soon as I saw that box, I knew I was going to have to lie down in it.

  Dr. Kessel was brisk and business-like this morning. He told Father that my treatment might require up to five sessions with the mechanism, but a single donation to the institute would cover all costs. The attendants brought in the contract for Father to sign, and his eyebrows shot up when he saw the size of the expected donation. Banker that he was, he read through all the details of the contract before signing.

  Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to wander across to the box. A pair of leather straps lay loose across the padding, and, although I couldn’t tell their precise purpose, the sight of them made my heart beat faster. I saw also that the wheels of the box ran on two steel rails embedded in the carpet, as if half-buried in green grass. The rails continued as far as the wall behind, then appeared to vanish underneath it. In fact, this was the same wooden wall I had observed last night from the other side—and not truly a wall but a partition.

  “Anthony!”

  Mother called me back. The contract had been signed, and, as one of the attendants bore it away, another stepped forward with a beaker of cloudy, milky liquid.

  “Dr. Kessel wants you to drink this,” she said.

  I shook my head. My reluctance was growing stronger by the minute.

  Mother’s mouth tightened. To my thirteen-year-old eyes, my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world; even now, when I consider her photographs, I can say without a doubt that she was unusually attractive. But her large grey eyes could flash with a steely determination, and I admit I was sometimes a little afraid of her.

  “It is only a sleeping draught,” said Dr. Kessel, more to my parents than me. “He will sleep and dream, until the bad thoughts come to the surface. Then my mechanism draws them off.”

  “Only a sleeping draught,” Mother repeated. “You want to be cured, don’t you, Anthony?”

  I stared at the liquid. “I don’t like it,” I said—meaning the liquid, the box, the straps, everything.

  “Do you want to have nightmares for the rest of your life?”

  Still I wouldn’t take the beaker.

  “Let me talk to him,” said Mr. Hungerford.

  He put an arm over my shoulder and led me aside. One of the other attendants came too. I expected Father or Mother to object—was this the role of a servant? But Mr. Hungerford didn’t dress like a servant or behave like a servant, and I soon learned the reason why. Besides, he had such an open, friendly manner, it would have been difficult to take offence. Even his Yankee twang was somehow agreeable.

  “You’re a lucky fellow,” he began. “This is a great opportunity for you.”

  I remained silent.

  “I’ve been in your position, you know,” he went on, unperturbed. “Me and Mr. Jamieson here. We both had doubts about the mechanism. Right, Mr. Jamieson?”

  Mr. Jamieson was the other attendant, a tall, thin man with a gingery beard. “That’s true indeed,” he said.

  I began to have an inkling of their real circumstances. “You had the treatment here? I thought you were just . . . I mean, I thought you were . . .”

  “Servants?” Mr. Hungerford laughed. “Half right, half right. We serve Dr. Kessel, but only because we choose to. You could call us gentlemen of independent means. Dr. Kessel helped us, so now we help him.”

  “More than helped us,” Mr. Jamieson put in.

  “Yes.” Mr. Hungerford accepted the correction. “He saved us. And he can do the same for you. What he does here is the closest you’ll ever come to a miracle in this world.”

  “Are all the attendants ex-patients?” I asked.

  “Sure they are. Though only a few ex-patients become attendants. Most folks go back to their jobs and families. But they’ve all found peace for themselves, same as us.”

  “Did you have nightmares too?”

  “Not nightmares, no. Mine were waking hallucinations. Terrible bad pictures in my head. I used to see blood running down walls, blood on faces, blood on cups and plates, everywhere. I reckon I’d have gone mad, except I came here for the treatment.”

  He followed the line of my gaze as I looked towards Mr. Jamieson.

  “Ah, Mr. Jamieson,�
� he went on. “Don’t ask him about his bad thoughts. He was in a seminary training to become a priest, but something went wrong and switched the other way. He used to hear a voice in his head telling him to do ugly, cruel, brutal things. There was a mighty weight of evil on his soul when his family brought him here. Two years ago he had the treatment, and he’s been a new man ever since.”

  Mr. Jamieson merely smiled and nodded, letting the American tell the story on his behalf.

  “What do you see when you look at us?” Mr. Hungerford asked suddenly. “How do we seem to you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer such a personal question. “You seem . . . er, fine.”

  “We feel fine.” Mr. Hungerford grinned broadly. “You should have seen us before the treatment. Now we’re happy as a couple of kings.”

  He did seem happy. There was a twinkle in his eye and the hint of laughter hovering always round his mouth. I envied him.

  “Think of it like having a tooth pulled,” said Mr. Jamieson. “Have you ever had a tooth pulled?”

  “Yes.”

  “Unpleasant experience?”

  I pulled a face.

  “But now? Are you glad you had it done?”

  I nodded.

  Mr. Hungerford snapped his fingers. “All the badness pulled out of you. See, it’s exactly the same. Will you give it a try?”

  I nodded again.

  “You won’t regret it, I promise you.”

  They walked me back to the attendant with the sleeping draught. I suspect that the others had overheard every word; certainly they had begun no conversation among themselves in all the time we’d been talking.

  “He’ll give it a try,” Mr. Hungerford announced.

  Dr. Kessel merely nodded, as though he had never expected any other answer.

  I drank off the milky liquid, which proved to be quite tasteless. Then, as intuition had foretold, Dr. Kessel instructed me to lie down in the box.

  I climbed in and lay on my back, with my head pointing in the direction of the partition. The padding was as soft as eiderdown. The sweet-and-stale odour that pervaded the study at large seemed more concentrated here. Mr. Hungerford and Mr. Jamieson bent over and fastened the straps across my chest. However, the straps were too long and hung loose on me.

  “It is no problem,” said Dr. Kessel, and turned to signal the other two attendants.

  A moment later, they came forward bearing assorted blocks of wood. Triangular blocks of wood, rectangular blocks of wood, blocks in curved shapes and segments—they were like oversize pieces from a child’s play set. Under Dr. Kessel’s direction, the attendants fitted them around me in the bottom of the box. Two blocks went on either side of my head, two blocks under my armpits, two blocks against my waist, four blocks to keep my legs in place. I was immobilised in a ridiculous outstretched position, legs slightly apart, hands touching the sides of the box.

  By now the sleeping draught was beginning to take effect. Sounds and voices came to me loud or soft, sharp or muffled, as if passing in and out of successive tunnels. I heard the noise of the partition being slid back: a slow grinding and grating. Then came the sound of the mechanism itself: rhythmical, pounding, metallic. There was a change in the air as smells of fumes and oil drifted into the study.

  Mr. Hungerford and Mr. Jamieson reappeared a moment later, leaning over me, gripping the back of the box. Mr. Hungerford gave me an encouraging wink. They pushed, and the box rolled forward along the rails into the rooms beyond.

  Pinned in by the wooden blocks, travelling headfirst and upside-down, I could see only what was straight above me: the bare boards of a ceiling and a network of rubber-coated wires attached to the boards. When we turned gradually to the left, the tops of metal frames entered my field of vision—the same metal frames I had seen last night. Fizzing, crackling noises reminded me of the shimmering glows inside the glass apparatus.

  “Our own steam engines and generators supply electricity,” Dr. Kessel was saying. “The power supply must never fail . . .”

  I entered a muffled tunnel of drowsiness and ceased to pay attention. But inside that tunnel, I started to hear something else, a different kind of voice. How to explain it? While all other sounds were muted, this was very distinct, albeit faint. It was a mutter as of somebody talking to himself, preoccupied with his own business. The mutter seemed to move about from place to place, now ahead of the box and now behind it.

  I tried to follow the source, but the wooden blocks prevented me from turning my head.

  Then the muttering passed across directly above me. Could it be a voice on the other side of the ceiling? I was instantly and absolutely sure that it wasn’t. No, it was in one of the rubber-clad wires—actually inside the wire. I could even pinpoint the particular wire!

  I gasped—and drew Mr. Hungerford’s attention.

  “He seems agitated,” he said.

  Mother looked down. “How long does this sleeping draught take to work?” she asked Dr. Kessel.

  “It is very fast.” The doctor sounded puzzled. “He should be falling asleep by now.”

  “Just relax, kid,” Mr. Hungerford told me. “Don’t fight it.”

  All at once, I was very determined not to fall asleep.

  The box reached the end of the rails a moment later. There was a click as it came to a halt and locked into place.

  Mr. Hungerford and Mr. Jamieson straightened and stood upright. Seven adults loomed above me, tall as trees. Perspective distorted their features, so that their faces were all chin and no eyes. The yellowish light from the apparatus gave them a sallow look.

  They were talking among themselves, paying no heed to the strange voice muttering. I realised then that I alone—in my abnormal mental state, under the influence of the sleeping draught—I alone could hear it.

  “This is what fits over his head,” Dr. Kessel was saying.

  “Like a crown,” Mother commented.

  “Yes, indeed. This is the most important part of the mechanism.”

  I rolled my eyes back in my head, trying to focus on what the doctor held in his hands. The thing was above and behind me, and I felt giddy, even nauseated, from the vain effort to bring it into view.

  “Be calm, Anthony,” said Mother.

  “He’ll be fine,” said Mr. Hungerford.

  Only when Dr. Kessel stepped a pace forward did the thing become clear to me. It was like a crown—a crown of wires—and also like a bird’s nest. Strands of copper were woven one over another to an incredible degree of complexity.

  And there was another voice inside the strands!

  It was a low, sinister whisper that erected the hairs on the back of my neck. Faint and distinct, like the muttering but not the same. I traced its movement as it circled round and round in the woven wires. I could distinguish no individual words, but the tone was insidious, sly and horrible.

  An association came instantly to my mind: the voice that Mr. Jamieson had heard in his head, telling him to do things. Ugly, cruel, brutal things!

  Was it an arbitrary association? No doubt. But the idea was right.

  I tried to call out to the adults towering above. “Listen, listen to them!”

  The voice in the crown of wires changed to a revolting laugh, a wet and breathy chuckle.

  “What does he mean?” asked Mother.

  “Something’s going wrong, isn’t it?” said Father.

  “Not at all.” Dr. Kessel sounded snappish. “We shall put this over his head and wait for him to fall asleep.”

  He meant the crown of wires. But when I saw it coming towards me, I panicked completely. I wrenched my arms free from the blocks, found the buckle, and undid the leather straps. I sat up in the box and gaped at the room around me.

  The apparatus was as I had seen last night: tubes, domes, and spirals of glass, contained in rows of frames and cabinets. There was wiring too, more wiring than I had realised. A veritable spider’s web connected every item of apparatus to every other item. But that was
n’t what I gaped at.

  Inside the wiring, inside the frames, inside the metal parts were voices—hundreds and hundreds of them. They scurried this way and that, constantly in motion, whispering, murmuring, gabbling, giggling. I even heard shrill squeals, distant yet close, that came from the silvery coils in a particular set of glass domes.

  “Anthony! What are you doing?”

  “Lie back down.”

  “Is he hallucinating?”

  Why couldn’t they hear what I heard? “Open your ears!” I cried.

  Dr. Kessel put a hand on my shoulder. Before he could force me to lie back down, I knocked his hand away, kicked my legs free from the blocks, and jumped right out of the box.

  Mother tried to catch hold of me, but I eluded her.

  Her eyes flared. “Stay where you are! This is your last chance, Anthony! Don’t waste it!”

  I continued to back away.

  “No!” Dr. Kessel shouted loudest of all. “Keep him away from there!”

  Attendants lunged forward—too late. I blundered into the very cabinet that had provoked Dr. Kessel’s cry of warning. Even worse, my foot caught in some wiring, and I tumbled over backwards.

  There was a tremendous crash, and a sensation like a hammer blow through my bones. I had never experienced an electrical shock before, but I experienced one then.

  The cabinet toppled under my weight and I collapsed on top of it. I rolled off sideways, crushing more glass and snapping more wires in the process.

  The attendants cried out in dismay. “The control unit!”

  “It’s wrecked!”

  “What’ll happen now?”

  “Will the whole mechanism stop?”

  I looked back and saw a cascade of sparks flying out from the cabinet. There were spitting, explosive sounds and a smell of burning.

  I crawled further away, like some criminal from the scene of the crime. The light in the room grew dim as the shimmering glows inside the glass apparatus flickered and died. The mechanism was coming to a stop.

  Dr. Kessel’s reaction went beyond anger or despair. The look on his face conveyed outright terror.

  I crawled further and further away. Ahead of me was a brick wall pierced by a jagged archway. No one was watching as I stumbled to my feet and passed through. I found myself in the middle room of massive humped machines—the generators, as I now supposed.