by Jack Dann
“That’s the ticket,” said Chibbins.
I puckered my lips to kiss the hand again, but in the moment I’d looked away it had become a bird talon. Ludiya had somehow become her mother, but her mother covered in feathers and sporting a sharp beak. I dropped the talon and reared back in my seat. I blinked and the avian Mrs. Barlow was gone. Ludiya stood in the middle of the room, pointing up at the mirror over the fireplace. Not merely reflected in it, but within the world of the mirror the green mist rose. This time it cohered into more than a mere floating cloud. It became a woman with short dark hair and spectacles, wearing a plain grey dress, like a servant’s uniform. She bobbed behind the glass and glanced from one to the other of us.
“Grab your scalpel,” I called to Chibbins, but there was no reply. I looked over to see him kissing Ludiya. He had her dipped back in his arms; her mouth was open, and so was his. I shuddered. “No,” I said.
“Yes,” said the Sanctity of Grace, and then the floorboards slid away, and I fell into the dark, like the builders of the Summer Palace, falling into their graves.
WHEN I WOKE, I was sitting upright, strapped to a chair so that my arms could not move. The Sanctity of Grace was before me, lightly tapping my cheek.
“Wake up, Cley,” she said. I opened my eyes and looked around. We were in a kind of study, rows of books lining the walls and gas lamps at the four corners. There was a door off to my right, and the Sanctity had taken her seat behind a desk, facing me.
“My office, Cley. Do you like it?”
“No doubt one of the Master’s secret chambers you died to keep secret,” I said. “Release me or you’ll come to feel the full weight of the Well-Built City’s security force upon you.”
“And what will they do? Kill me?”
“You must have been one bitter ghost to have generated the supernatural energy to perform your deeds,” I said.
“Bitter,” she said, “is too weak a word. For every ounce of saintliness I possessed in life, I now have a thousand volts of hatred in death. You see, I was with child. If it was only me, I’d have gone to my rest.”
“With child?” I said. “Not completely saintly, I see.”
“Only the ruling classes see sex as immoral,” she said. “And then, only for the lower class.”
“I’m to be a sacrifice to your unborn child?” I asked. “Perhaps I can barter Chibbins’s life for mine?”
“No,” she said, “you’re not to die, yet. You’re a tool in my plot.” She then picked up a pen and busied herself with some paperwork, reading documents and making minor corrections.
“There’s paperwork in death?” I asked.
“You don’t know the half of it,” she said.
She was the plainest-looking woman I’d ever seen. Of course, I’d already eyed her physiognomical features, but I’d yet to garner a reading. She was very nearly an exact medium in intelligence and yet, the indicators that divulged her moral worth, chin to hairline, left eye to right earlobe, rendered readings off the top end of the scale. I was baffled as to how the two measurements could coincide on the same face without grotesquely twisting her appearance. It was, literally, supernatural.
“And how long must I sit here?” I asked.
She didn’t look up but said, “Your partner will be along shortly to rescue you, and then we’ll be finished here.”
More time passed, and I wondered if perhaps all I was witnessing was a result of the Sheer Beauty. I watched closely for her image to ripple, for the walls of books to subtly waver insubstantially. And then the door burst in, wood chips flying. It was Chibbins, and he’d expertly kicked it in. I looked back to the Sanctity of Grace, who was rising from her chair. She walked around the desk and stood there.
“Physiognomist Chibbins, I believe you’ve got something for me,” she said, clasping her hands behind her back, like a schoolmarm awaiting an answer.
“Yes, madam ghoul, I’ve got the best thing for you,” he said and leaped forward into a somersault. While his body rolled, his left arm, hand holding a scalpel, was drawing back, so that when he sprang up onto one knee, he was ready to throw. The blade turned as it sailed slowly through the air. We all watched in anticipation, not the least the Sanctity of Grace, whom I was surprised took no effort to duck. With the sound of an eggshell cracking, the thing punctured her skull and dug into her ghostly brain. Her eyes glazed, she coughed up some dirt and then went over like a sack of laundry. A moment later, she turned to a green mist that quickly began to dissipate.
Chibbins was immediately at my chair, making easy work of the knots and straps that bound me. “Come quickly,” he said. “It took me forever to find you in the maze of secret passageways.” The catacombs beneath the house were impossibly complex, but Chibbins led the way with confidence and eventually brought us up, through a hidden stairway, back into the piano room. I will admit here, for no one else to see, that I’d still be there, beneath the Summer Palace, if it weren’t for my partner. We found Ludiya, on the couch, sleeping.
“Did you have your way with her?” I asked Chibbins.
“Heavens no,” he said, “to have done so would have been monstrous. I was administering artificial resuscitation. She passed out and I caught her.” He gave a smile, and I wasn’t sure if Chibbins was actually trafficking in irony or genuinely pleased with the aid he’d given. As it was, it didn’t matter. By morning, once the Beauty had worn off, blithering and buffooning without mercy or mustache, he was as inane as he’d been before its odd sea change.
Now that we had eradicated the threat to the Summer Palace by killing the ghost of the Sanctity of Grace, Ludiya pretended to want nothing to do with me. I tried to comfort her some more in the fashion I had the previous day, and she shrugged off my grasp and told me I’d outstayed my welcome. A woman of such a tender age, she did not have the vocabulary to express her affection for me, and so her words became twisted, expressing the opposite of her desires. I could tell. I pressed my lips against hers and forced my tongue into her mouth. She bit it. True love is a sharp pain, I tell you.
WITH THE TASTE of blood still on my lips, Chibbins and I rode back in our carriage to the Well-Built City. We had brought with us Rothac’s notes, and the cauldron of the remaining Sheer Beauty sat on the seat next to my partner. Every now and then, he’d stick his pinky into the cold mixture and bring it to his mouth, and for a few seconds he’d go from gibbering fool to sophisticated conversationalist, calling me, “Cley, old boy.” All together, this amazingly erratic performance irritated me more than usual. Amid the kaleidoscope of Chibbinses, I wondered what our time in the Willow Forest added up to. It didn’t seem to make any sense at all.
Physiognomist Scheffler had me report to the Master himself about the case. I was sent to his tower office at the center of the city. I’d met Drachton Below before. One night he’d mysteriously come to my rooms when I was a student in the Ministry and took me to see a young woman he’d transformed into an automaton. I’d not yet had to face him in a professional setting and was worried that he’d have little patience with the story I had to tell about his summer retreat.
His office was circular, with windows all around, a 360-degree view. I entered a room below its floor and then climbed a stair that left me in the middle of its circle. Below stood at the window, looking down.
“Physiognomist Cley reporting, Master.”
He turned, cocked his head back and raised one eyebrow. “Cley, you’ve been to the Summer Palace?”
“Physiognomist Chibbins and I.”
“Yes, well, the Chibbins boy is a subtraction of zero from itself,” he said. “I’m sure it was a pleasure working with him.”
“A delight,” I said.
“His father will be pleased to hear it. Now sit down and tell me of this ghost Scheffler said you’d encountered.”
I launched into my absurd story, mentioning Ludiya, Mrs. Barlow, Rothac, and the Sanctity of Grace. When I got to the part where the old woman’s head was pierced by an icic
le, he said, “Thank goodness for small favors.” He referred to Rothac as “a curious and dirty little satyr,” and at the mention of Ludiya, he smiled sardonically. He only really became interested when I began to describe the Sheer Beauty and its effects. The rest of the story disappeared for him, and he wanted to know every little detail of the violet brew. When I told him I’d brought Rothac’s notes back with me and a cauldron of the stuff, he came around the desk and patted my shoulder.
“Excellent work,” he said. Soon after, he dismissed me, and I went back to the Ministry.
In the days that followed, I developed the most overwhelming urge to again sample the Sheer Beauty. I could easily say my wretched bodily and emotional state was akin to withdrawal from addiction. Profuse sweating, itching of the scalp, and the darkest dreams, things far worse than death scuttling in the shadows of sleep. At times, when I passed the bakery on my way to the Ministry, I mistook the smell of their crumb cake for that of the drug. I was in a bad way and growing weaker, more confused as the days wore on.
One night, after working late, completing a desk so full of paperwork the Sanctity of Grace might have pitied me, I went home and climbed into bed. I was shivering convulsively and the sweat poured down my face. The Beauty had a grip on me and was squeezing me like a sponge. Through my delirium, I heard a knock at the door to my apartment.
“Yes?” I called weakly.
“I’ve come to fetch you at the request of the Master, Drachton Below,” said the voice.
I groaned. “Coming,” I said. I rolled out of the bed and eventually managed to get off my knees. Buttoning my shirt and trousers was a chore, what with shaking hands. Out in the carriage, I met, of all people, Chibbins, and the moment I saw him, I feared this meeting with the Master must have something to do with our investigation of the Summer Palace. It soon became clear to me that Chibbins was suffering withdrawal from the Beauty as well. His hands trembled as did mine, and he belched and farted at a furious clip. “Chibbins is ill,” he said.
The Master sat before us in his office at the top of the city. I’d truly thought we were to be done away with, but Below was ecstatic. We greeted each other, with me showing the appropriate deference to our leader and Chibbins mumbling that Chibbins was going to vomit.
“This purple mess you’ve brought back from the Summer Palace, my dear physiognomists, this Sheer Beauty, is a revelation,” said the Master. “I’ve had my scientists ferret out its constituent ingredients, and quite the pharmacopeia it is too—shrubs and buds, bulbs and petals and roots from the wilderness we call the Beyond. How this woman’s ghost devised this elixir is a mystery, but the results of imbibing it are exquisite.”
“It’s addictive,” I said to him. “Since taking it I crave it more every moment.”
“No longer a problem, Cley,” said Below. “I’ve decided to make it liberally available to everyone in the physiognomical and security services.” Here, he opened a drawer in his desk and took out a hypodermic needle, the phial of which was filled with a violet liquid. “That mixture in the pot you brought back was mild slop compared to what my people have done with it. They’ve boiled it down to its active essentials, synthesized them, and suggested a method of delivery a hundred times more potent than sipping from a mug.”
He rose, walked over to Chibbins, who upon the Master’s approach put his two fingers on Below’s stomach and walked them up toward his chin.
The Master laughed and looked over at me, “If it was anyone else, I’d kill them right now,” he said, nodding to Chibbins. “Instead, in return for his asininity, I give him Beauty.” He lifted the hypodermic needle and plunged the tip into Chibbins’s neck, emptying a third of the phial. Before he removed it, the dim physiognomist had gone quiet. Below then walked toward me. Sharing a needle, I knew, was not healthy, and taking that needle in the neck was not a welcome thought, but I willingly bared my neck in order to feel the exquisite madness flowing through me again.
Chibbins, now mustached and elegant in his way and wit, the Master, and I stood at the window, staring down on the lights of the city. Oh, the things I saw, real and unreal, transpire before my eyes. Chibbins was ingenious in his use of metaphor when confabulating, off the cuff, a prose poem about the physiognomical deficiencies of the populace. The light snow that fell across town appeared golden confetti. In the distance there was piano music like in the parlor back at the Summer Palace. Everything was both profound and hilarious.
“You’ve inspired me, Chibbins, my good man,” said the Master. He went to his desk and leaned over a funnel next to it attached to a tube, through which he spoke commands to his people on the lower floors. “Send out the security forces with flamethrowers. Order them to incinerate anyone they see on the street.”
We watched from our great height as some minutes later small fires could be seen erupting in the streets beneath us. The Master clapped and howled with each one. Chibbins put his arm around our leader’s shoulders and laughed uproariously. I was dazed with the visions and the glow of the drug and wore a fixed smile. Somewhere amidst the merriment, the high spirits, and hallucinations, it struck me, like an icicle to the heart, that the Sheer Beauty itself was the agent of revenge that would eventually topple the city. Having envisioned the destruction it would bring, I embraced it like a favorite uncle, and ever since have lived for the sharp pain of the needle.
Afterword to “The Summer Palace”
It’s been ten years since last I wrote about Physiognomist Cley, the protagonist of the Well-Built City trilogy—The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond. I’m not sure what caused him to rear his bleak, thoroughly opinionated head again. It wasn’t like I had to conjure him. His carriage rolled up, and he just strode into this ghost story like he owned it. And, when all was said and done, he did. Perhaps he is a voice fit for our current time, perhaps he just grew weary of being relegated to the shadowy edges of my imagination. In any event, he’s returned. This tale deals with his investigations before achieving the exalted rank of Physiognomist, First Class, the time period described in the novels. It seems a great trove of Cley’s personal papers, records of early cases of his in the physiognomical service, has been uncovered by a conscientious citizen of Wenau, digging around in the ruins of the Well-Built City. He’s informed me that he may stay around a while now and that I should consider surgery for my face, as it’s a mockery of nature.
—JEFFREY FORD
About the Editors
JACK DANN has written or edited over seventy-five books and is the editor (with Janeen Webb) of the groundbreaking anthology of Australian stories, Dreaming Down-Under, which won the World Fantasy Award in 1999. The sequel, Dreaming Again, was published to rave reviews. The influential Australian Bookseller + Publisher wrote, “If you read short fiction you’ll want this collection. If you don’t, this is a reason to start.” The anthology Gathering the Bones, of which Dann was a coeditor, was short-listed for the International Horror Guild Award and included in Library Journal’s “Best Genre Fiction of 2003.” His anthology Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy (coedited with Gardner Dozois) was short-listed for the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. He is also a recipient of the Nebula Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (four times), the Peter McNamara Achievement Award, and the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for Excellence. He has been honored by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight). His own fiction has been compared to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Carlos Castaneda, J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Mark Twain. His website is jackdann.com.
NICK GEVERS is senior editor at the major UK independent press PS Publishing (www.pspublishing.co.uk), under the banner of which he coedits, with Peter Crowther, the twice-yearly Postscripts genre fiction anthology, the latest volumes of which are Edison’s Frankenstein, The Company He Keeps, The New and Perfect Man, and Unfit for Eden. His other SF and fantasy anthologies include Infinity Plus (with Keith Brooke
), Other Earths (with Jay Lake), Extraordinary Engines, The Book of Dreams, and Is Anybody Out There? (with Marty Halpern). A past book reviewer and author interviewer for such publications as Locus, Locus Online, SF Weekly, Interzone, Foundation, SF Site, Infinity Plus, Nova Express, and The Washington Post Book World, Nick lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
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Credits
Cover design by James Iacobelli
Cover photograph collage © by Alamy
Copyright
A continuation of this copyright page appears in the Copyright Acknowledgments.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
GHOSTS BY GASLIGHT. Collection copyright © 2011 by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-199971-0
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062100702
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Copyright Acknowledgments
Anthology copyright © 2011 by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers.