Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  “For what purpose?” I asked.

  He drew himself up to his full height, presenting a stern pose. “I will not answer to you in my own house.”

  I blocked his way to the trapdoor. “In this instance, one in which our safety is at issue, I’m afraid you must.”

  “Are you threatening me, sir?”

  “I am attempting to ensure that you are not going to place us in greater danger than you already have.”

  “I need to inspect the machine,” said Richmond. “Something may be wrong.”

  “It seems to be running smoothly.”

  “Idiot! You can’t tell by listening to it! I have . . .”

  “Yet you were listening to it earlier, were you not?”

  Richmond hissed in frustration. “One cannot make such a judgment merely by listening. I have to see the instruments.”

  Jane closed her book. “We should allow him to do what he needs.”

  “I don’t trust him on his own,” I said. “And I will not leave you alone down here.”

  Richmond tried to force his way past me, and I shoved him back.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Jane. “It may well be that something has gone wrong. We’d be foolish not to let him attend to it.”

  I argued that venturing up onto the roof would be incautious, but with Richmond attacking me verbally and Jane supporting his basic argument, I relented. I insisted, however, on taking the lead. Nothing out of the ordinary met my eye when I cracked the trapdoor, yet when I threw it open I saw that something had gone very wrong, indeed.

  Streamers of fog trailed across the rooftop at eye level, but above the house a bank of thicker fog lowered, though actual fog was not its sole constituent. Its uppermost reaches stretched across half the sky and, depending from its bottom, a funnel had developed, extending downward toward the tip of the new attractor, itself visible above the roof peak, its silver rings glowing with a bilious, yellow-green radiance. At first glance the bank was like a great cloud whose bottom was cobbled with faces, but I saw on its underside a myriad images of not only disembodied faces, but torsos and limbs as well—they roiled up for an instant and were subsumed into the fog, replaced by the other revenants. Rags of filmy, opaque material were disgorged from the mouth of the funnel and these battened onto the attractor, fitted themselves to one or another of the rings, and slid down out of view. Whenever this occurred, and it occurred with increasing frequency, a silent discharge of yellowish-green energy shot upward from the attractor, spreading through the bank like heat lightning, permitting me to see shapes deeper within the fog. I thought that some of the shapes so illuminated were inhuman, yet they passed from sight so quickly that I could not swear to it.

  Urged on by Richmond, I clambered up onto the roof, still partly in shock, dismasted by the sight and by the silence as well. Oh, there was the omnipresent humming, loud and variable, but this apocalyptic scene, that of the ghosts of Saint Nichol, the relics of the damaged and the poor lured by the attractor, perhaps to their doom, for God only knew what Richmond’s improvements had wrought . . . it should have been accompanied by an explosive music, the final pyrotechnic symphony of a mad Russian who had devoted his life to its creation and then, having awakened to the worthlessness of his work, of all creative labor, had chosen self-slaughter over the ignominy of existence. Jane came up beside me and Richmond scrambled to the roof peak and stood, one hand on the chimney for balance, his hair feathering, superimposed against that insane sky. He let out an agonized shout and pointed—filmy bits were being torn away from the fog, spinning down away from the attractor.

  I climbed toward the roof peak, Jane at my heels, and reached it just as Richmond disappeared into the hole into which the new attractor had been set. At the edge of the roof stood the demon, the shadowy, headless thing—I could make out no more of its features or form than I had previously, yet I noticed that its dark substance whirled more slowly, perhaps because it was feeding, absorbing the opaque scraps that were ripped from the underbelly of the bank. That was my interpretation of its actions, that it must also be an attractor, albeit of a vastly different and less potent variety, a living version of Richmond’s machine. Some credence was given this viewpoint by Christine, who stood on the slant of the roof fifteen or twenty feet distant, her figure elongating, bending sideways at the waist and seeming to flow partway toward the shadow before snapping back to true, as though she were made of an elastic material and barely able to resist its pull.

  We climbed down the slope of the roof toward the hole so as to learn what could be done to help Richmond. I saw him below, his hands busy with the switches on a brass box situated between two of the rings. He shouted and beckoned for me to join him. Whatever hesitancy I felt was erased by the garishly lit fog bank, lowered to within a few feet of the attractor, spewing forth its ghostly issue—the moil of limbs and faces over our heads was supremely grotesque, Dantean in scope, yet the multiplicity of forms also put me in mind of the rococo ornamentation I had seen on the walls of a temple in Udaipur, only in this instance the ornaments were animated by some occult principle. Bursts of yellow-green light now flickered across the breadth of the sky.

  I lowered Jane into the hole and jumped down after her. Communicating with shouts and gestures, Richmond demonstrated that the switches no longer functioned—we would have to break the rings in order to stop the machine. There proved to be insufficient room in the hole to swing the long-handled hammers with which he equipped us, and we were forced to climb back onto the roof, leaving Jane to do whatever she could with a smaller hammer.

  We stood side by side, Richmond and I, and each blow we delivered against the rings of the attractor sent a huge bloom of radiance into the fog bank. The humming rose in pitch and melded with the roaring of the shadowy creature to create a singing rush. Our blows scarcely dented the metal, however, and so we concentrated our efforts on a single ring. I lost track of Christine, unable to spare her a glance, and swung the hammer until my shoulders and arms ached with strain. I had given up hope that our assault would produce a result, when without warning the attractor crumpled all along its length, as if squeezed by an enormous fist. I cried out in exultation—I had the urge to embrace Richmond and turned to him, but was enveloped in a burst of light and lifted up . . . lifted, I say, and not flung.

  If this was an explosion, it was a most peculiar one. There was no concussion, no heat, no sound, and I felt buoyed up in that flickering, yellow-green space. On every side were the fragmentary beings I had formerly seen from beneath. Ghastly, semitranslucent faces bobbled and drifted away from me, some with ragged, immaterial bodies in tow, and it seemed I was passing among them, pushing upward through their closely massed numbers. They did not appear to register my intrusion. A profound calm blanketed my fear and I thought that I had become a ghost and that this calmness must be a natural protection that attended my sudden transition into the afterlife, a kind of emotional shield. Believing that I shared their fate, I studied the spirits nearest me, searching for signs of agony or distress. They were haggard and bore signs of ill-usage and disease, yet their expressions were uniformly neutral, conveying the idea that they had come to terms with death, something that fresher ghosts like Christine had not. I derived little comfort from this, speculating that I might spend decades in a desolate condition before achieving even a negligible measure of peace, and I clutched at the hope that I might still be alive and that my deathly surround was an illusion, a dream I was having as I lay unconscious atop the roof; but all that served was to rouse my discontent, causing me to struggle, to jostle the spirits around me, creating gaps amongst them. Through one such gap I spotted a dark shape that swiftly grew in size and definition—the shadowy creature, heading straight toward me. My capacity for fright had been suppressed and I did not panic, but I did renew my struggles and discovered the yellow-green radiance to have a viscous consistency that hampered movement. Yet the shadow moved through it easily, as if born to that medium . . . though its
movement may not have been so facile. I saw that it was spinning ass over teakettle—slowly, mind you, with an ease and grace that caused me to think it had done this many times before. I estimated, judging by its path, that it might miss me, but it did not. As the thing tumbled by, a portion of it grazed my hip, or better said, passed through my hip. It failed to disrupt my course in the least—there was no painful collision—but I felt numbness spread from my hip down my left leg to the knee, and I had an overwhelming sense of joy that may have been the residue of that brief contact. Not a meat joy, not an emotion bred by pleasure or by appetites fulfilled, but a blissful feeling, an ecstasy I would associate with purity, the sort of thing saints claim to experience when communing with God. The joy soon dissipated, however, and with it went my calm. Terrified, I thrashed about, attempting to break free from whatever held me fast. I continued to struggle until the light abruptly dimmed to the ordinary darkness of a London rooftop and I fell.

  When I regained consciousness, the fog had thinned to a mist through which I could see a salting of dim stars. Jane kneeled beside me, her face smeared with coal dust, streaked with tears. She could not tell me what had happened, having been down in the hole the entire time, but according to her, everything I had experienced had taken place in a matter of seconds. At length she helped me to stand. My leg was still numb, and I had aches and pain resulting from the fall, though I could not have fallen far, because nothing was broken. All of the attractors were twisted and crumpled, like shriveled silver weeds—since most of them had been shut down, I guessed that a wash of energy from the one we destroyed had resonated with some core element in the machinery of the other three. Richmond lay facedown in the dust a dozen feet away. I hobbled over to him, dropped to my hands and knees, and asked if he was all right. He stirred and made a feeble sound.

  “Are you able to stand?” I asked.

  He turned his head so that I could see his face—his eyes were closed, blood trickled from his nostrils, but his color was good, his pulse strong. I encouraged him, telling him that we had succeeded, but received no reply.

  “Tell me what to do,” I said. “Should I fetch Bladge to help me carry you?”

  He yielded a throaty squeak and opened his eyes. They were Christine’s eyes, hazel irises alive with agitated motion, twitching to the left, then to the right, like the dial of a combination lock that had jammed. All the muscles of his face were taut with strain, the tendons of his neck cabled. He sought to speak once again, making a horrid, guttering noise.

  I recoiled, as did Jane, who had been peering over my shoulder. Richmond stared, though not at me—he was looking to my left at something that no longer existed in this world.

  “Help him!” Jane reached out a hand to him, but withheld her touch. “Can you not help him as you helped me?”

  I was loath to shake him, afraid that whatever injuries he had suffered might be affected; but I felt I had to try, although I knew to my soul that Christine had finally recognized her brother, and now that they were reunited, for better or worse, they would never be parted again.

  A WEEK AFTER the events I have related, the body of Sir Charles Mellor was discovered on a mud flat alongside the Thames. The corpse was badly decomposed, and this made it impossible to determine the date of death; but it was obvious that he had been dead for quite some time, and there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the cause: seventeen stab wounds to his neck and torso. His murderer has never been brought to the bar, but I am persuaded to believe that Richmond, half mad and desperate to avenge Christine, acted upon the information I provided, woefully insufficient though it was. I imagine anyone of Mellor’s class and character would have suited his purpose and assuaged his guilt.

  Shortly before I abandoned the house on Rose Street and returned to Wales, I visited Richmond in Broadmoor, where he was being held preparatory to his transfer to a private facility—the costs of this transfer and all subsequent costs to be assumed by Jane and Dorothea, the chief beneficiaries of his will. An orderly led him into the office where I waited, one belonging to a Dr. Theodore McGuigan, a harried, portly man with a Glaswegian accent, wearing a white smock and braces. When the door opened to admit Richmond, I heard demented laugher and shouts and a scream from off along the corridor. He stood blinking and disheveled, unmindful of my presence . . . of any presence, it appeared. His condition, as far as I could tell, was unchanged, except that his beard was untrimmed and food stains decorated his shirtfront. I asked McGuigan if I might have a moment alone with Richmond, and once the door closed behind him, I perched on the edge of his desk. Richmond stood downcast at the center of the room, his eyes hooded, one hand plucking fitfully at his trouser leg.

  “I’ve had a while to think about things,” I said. “Had I been less self-involved, I might have understood what happened long before now. But I believe I’ve finally pieced it together.”

  Richmond’s mouth worked, making a glutinous noise.

  “That first night when you said that you wanted to learn who funded Christine . . . that was all you wanted to know, wasn’t it? You knew who had murdered her. You were simply looking for a way to shift the blame for her death onto the shoulders of another guilty soul.”

  He rubbed the knuckle of his forefinger against his hip.

  “You were the masked client. That’s why Christine responded to him as she did to no other man. She may have had some instinctual knowledge that you were the client. And then one night the mask slipped, or else you revealed yourself. What happened next? Did she reject you? Did she threaten you? You’ve told me she was the aggressor, but you’ve lied about so much, I wonder if that was just another lie.”

  He shifted his weight from one leg to the other.

  “Everything you did, all your attempts to bring her back . . . they were by way of expiation. She did something to infuriate you and you killed her.”

  He remained unresponsive.

  “Isn’t that right, Christine?”

  With a laborious movement, he lifted his head and stared at me with those strangely animated eyes, eyes alive with dartings and glints of light—it was like looking through a crystal into the depths of an inferno, and I tried to imagine what he felt trapped in that terrible place. I had thought I would have no pity for him, but I was wrong. His facial muscles strained, his lips trembled, and a feeble fluting of indrawn breath issued from his throat. Then his head drooped, and once again he appeared oblivious to his surround.

  That, I realized, was likely as close to an answer as I would receive and, seeing no point in prolonging this one-sided dialogue, I called in the orderly, who led him back to his cell, there to continue an internal dialogue with his sister.

  As he escorted me to the entrance, a short walk attended by the cries and pleadings of the deranged, Dr. McGuigan said, “I’m told that Richmond was engaged in important work.”

  “Indeed, he was. But I fear it may never be re-created,” I said. “His machines were destroyed and his notes have gone missing.”

  “What a pity. He was a brilliant man.”

  We went a few paces in silence and then McGuigan said, “You were there, weren’t you? On the night he was stricken. Can you enlighten me as to what happened?”

  “I was in another portion of the house.”

  We approached the door and McGuigan spoke again. “Tell me,” he said. “What do you think caused the abnormalities in his eyes?”

  “I can be of no assistance to you there,” I said. “I know nothing about them.”

  I DID NOT lie to Dr. McGuigan—I know nothing except that I know nothing. It may be that I am like all men in this, yet it seems they are unaware of their condition and thus act with an authority of which I am no longer capable. Everything in my story is subject to doubt, to words such as “perhaps” and “likely,” and since that story is central to my life, I have grown to doubt most of the certainties of my existence.

  Jane and I were married in May of the year, and that same summer I opened a clinic in Swan
sea where I treat the disadvantaged; yet I do so absent the enthusiasm that once I had for the task. I doubt the worth of charity and justice, those values that underscore the work, and find it difficult to reconcile the conviction needed to perform my duties with my loss of faith in the good.

  Over the ensuing six years I have taken to writing fiction. Using details gathered during my months on Rose Street, I have gained a wide readership for my ghost stories, which are written with an excess of detachment yet are often praised for their passionate expression. However, the true function of these fictions is self-examination, the same as when I peer into mirrors, looking for shadows in my eyes, afraid that my encounter with that darkness in the cloud of ghosts has infected me and is—despite its apparent state of bliss—responsible for my despairing outlook. Sometimes I remove Richmond’s notebooks from the hidden drawer in my desk and go through page after page of equations and technical gibberish, as indecipherable as hieroglyphs, hoping they will magically spark some insight into the essence of that darkness. The feeling of joy it transmitted when I brushed against it, so at odds with its terrible aspect . . . Was joy its natural state? Was that emotion a tool of the divine? Did it signal the opening of a portal into heaven or was it the lure of a devil? Did it offer a sweet oblivion to the revenants of Saint Nichol, a state counterfeited by Richmond’s attractors, which instead acted to destroy them? That might explain why they flocked to the rooftop, and it might explain as well why Christine did not hide from it—I may have misinterpreted her presence on the roof. I suspect if I could fathom that mystery, I would understand everything. Perhaps we are all of us either attractors searching for ghosts upon which to feed or ghosts seeking oblivion. And perhaps the salient difference between the spirit world and this one is that here we can be both.