The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  The bells rang again; again, pale shapes shot through the near-dark, crossing the room in one direction and then the other. I whipped the blade from my cane and swiped at one of the filmy shapes; the two toughs must have seen the blade catch the lantern’s light, for they began to move toward me.

  I said, as loudly as I could, “This is a fraud, sir! A shameful sham! If she cannot even see the ghost that stands plainly before her, how can she raise any spirits?”

  The swells cheered; the toughs pushed through the crowd and took hold of my arms; there was a brief and undignified struggle as they wrestled me toward the door. For an instant, I managed to turn back and catch the gaze of the little ghost and give her the oblivion she so badly desired. One of the toughs tried to wrench my blade from my hand, but I would not let it go, and carried it high before me, with the captured scrap raised above my head like a battle flag. Behind me, the old man was thumping his stick on the floor and saying loudly that his daughter’s trance was broken and the session was ended. I shouted again that she was a fraud, that she could not even rid him of his infestation, and then I was borne out of the room.

  I suppose that the toughs would have found a quiet spot where they would have taught me a short, sharp lesson, but the young man followed on their heels, loudly protesting at my treatment, and got the attention of the two constables as we all tumbled out into the street. The blue-coats started toward us, and the two toughs, suddenly uncertain, loosened their grip. I shook myself free, and the young man took hold of my elbow and pulled me through the crowd of onlookers. A police whistle squealed hoarsely, people cheered, a flung bottle turned twice in the air and smashed against a wall, and we both ran.

  We did not stop until we had put two or three turns of the narrow lanes behind us, and leaned against a wall, out of breath and helpless with laughter.

  “I hope, sir,” the young man said, when he was able to speak, “that you have good evidence that those people are charlatans.”

  I showed him the scrap of muslin caught on the end of my blade. “Pulled through the air on wires,” I said. “Likewise, wires worked the bells concealed in the ceiling.”

  “And the stuff she choked up?”

  “Muslin also. Performers learn to swallow stuff and bring it back up again. The whole thing was no more than a theatrical trick, got up to gull the desperate and the unwary.”

  The young man studied me. He was a good foot shorter than me, and slightly built, but was possessed by a restless, barely contained energy. His eyes were very dark, almost black, and his gaze burned with purposeful intelligence. “If it is a charade, then what of you, sir? Are you a journalist from one of the newspapers, sent out to expose it? And if so, are you truly in mourning, or is that armband as much a sham as the show that you so effectively wrecked?”

  “I know something of these matters, that’s all. And I can assure you that I am genuinely in mourning: for my parents.”

  My anger had quite gone, although a few imps clung to me still. I brushed my hand through my hair, dismissing them, and felt foolish and ashamed. One of the most important disciplines in the matter of the dead is to learn to control the baser emotions, and in my disappointment and frustration I had let them master me.

  “I am sorry to hear of your loss,” the young man said, “but I think that you did not come here to contact your mother and father, for you did not step forward and pay the half-guinea.”

  “Neither did you, sir.”

  “I was cursing myself for a fool as soon as I entered that room. I imagine that anyone who can truly speak with the dead, if there is such a person, needs no theatricality.”

  “That’s very true.”

  “You mentioned a ghost.”

  “The couple who stood next to us had lost their first child. I should not have spoken of it. I really should not have spoken at all. Most of the people there were so undone by the loss of a loved one that they were willing to believe in anything, as long as it gave them a little comfort. I took away even that.”

  The young man studied me for a moment more, and then, as if coming to a decision, suddenly thrust out his hand. “My name is Brunel, sir. Isambard Kingdom Brunel.” He paused, head cocked, as if expecting me to recognize the name, then said, “I suppose that I came here because I too am desperate.”

  I took his hand and told him my name, and thanked him again for his help. “You risked your life in saving mine,” I said, “and I will be more than happy to give you any help I can. But I must say that you do not appear to be haunted, or troubled in any way that I can detect.”

  “I have lost no relation, Mr Carlyle,” Brunel said. “What I have lost is my reputation, such as it is. I came here because of a murder. I hoped—”

  A police whistle shrilled, far off; another answered, much closer.

  Brunel took my arm. “We’ll get out of this,” he said. “I will tell you why I came here, and then we’ll see if you can’t be of some help to at least one poor foolish supplicant.”

  He hailed a cab under the flaring gas lamps at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, and after a brief argument with the driver, who swore that he could not travel south of the river because he would find no fare to get him back again, we climbed aboard and rattled away toward Waterloo Bridge.

  My new friend was not only an engineer; he was also the son of an engineer. His father, Marc Brunel, had devised an apparatus for tunnelling through soft ground or beneath water, and had won authorization from Parliament and backing from a group of wealthy subscribers to drive a tunnel beneath the Thames from Rotherhithe to Wapping.

  “It was an engineering wonder that excited the imagination of Europe,” Brunel said, “but it has been blocked up for three years now, owing to the pusillanimity of the damned directors, who took fright after it flooded and let all offers of help slip by them.”

  The project had got into difficulty from the beginning. Instead of the continuous stratum of strong blue clay promised by the geologists, the Brunels had encountered fissures and fractures where only gravel separated them from the bed of the river. In addition to the fetid conditions, and the consequent toll of “tunnel sickness” amongst the workers, the excavation suffered from two major inundations. After the first, it had taken six months to seal the cavity in the river bed with thousands of bags of clay, pump the water out of the shaft and twin bores of the tunnel, and remove the vast mound of silt that had been washed into the tunnel when it had been breached. Three months later, the river broke through again, and nearly claimed the younger Brunel’s life. He grew very animated as he told me every detail of this disaster. He had been working at the face of the tunnel, and was quickly up to his waist in water. A shifting baulk of timber trapped his leg, and by the time he had freed himself and reached the stair at the end of the east arch, his way was blocked by men fleeing from the flood. He was trying to reach the visitors’ stair in the west arch when a great wave broke upon him and, amazingly, bore him up to safety.

  The rush of the water was, he said, a very grand effect; he would have paid fifty pounds toward the expenses of such a spectacle, and instead had got it gratis. He was laid up for several months after his adventure, and by the time he had recovered his health, work on the tunnel had stalled for lack of funds.

  By now we had crossed the river and were rattling through narrow streets lined with grim, shuttered warehouses, and my companion broke off from his story and leaned at the open window, shouting up instructions to the cab driver. We had been travelling for almost an hour – such was the amazing size of the city – and I was beginning to wonder how I would ever find my way back to my lodging house when the cab drew up by a gate in a tall fence of tarred planks. Brunel paid the driver (who twitched the reins of his horse and clattered off in his boneshaker without a backward glance) and hammered on the gate until he woke the watchman.

  The gate opened onto a wide square waste, where heaps of bricks and sand and gravel and timbers lay in a great confusion of shadow
s and moonlight. There was a long low shed beside a rutted road, a tall narrow building of yellow brick with an even taller chimney at one end, and a timber-framed office beside a kind of open-sided byre one might expect to find in some remote Highland field; this rude construction sheltered the opening of the shaft that led down to the tunnel. Brunel unlocked the office and brought out and lit a lantern, sharpening the focus of its lens so that its beam shone inside the rim of the shaft. One half was boarded over; in the other, a cast-iron stair screwed down into darkness.

  I said, “You would like me to examine the tunnel now?”

  “It’s all the same down there, day or night,” Brunel said, and treated me again to his sharp gaze, and smiled. “I must seem an impatient man, Mr Carlyle, but once I’ve set my mind to a plan, I like to strike fast and sure.”

  “And I am not a man to go back on my word. I said that I would help you, and so I will.”

  Brunel led the way down the long spiral staircase, and held up his lantern as we came out on a platform of pine planking. The tunnel was much grander than I had expected: a brick floor sloping away into darkness, brick walls leaning back and meeting more than twenty feet overhead in a grand arch, with buttresses at regular intervals, and side arches through to the parallel bore. We scrambled down a ladder and walked along the gentle slope, our footsteps echoing dully on wet, slimy bricks, to the edge of a great wedge of black water that stretched away to a blank brick wall.

  Brunel explained that the tunnelling shield his father had invented was bricked up behind the wall, to prevent further inundations. It was, he said, a set of massive cast-iron frames, six frames to each arch of the tunnel, each frame divided into three storeys to form thirty-six working cells. Experienced miners had worked in each of the cells, taking away one of the wooden boards that formed the working face, excavating a hand’s-width of soil, replacing the board flush against the new face, and moving on to the next. When all the boards of a cell had been extended, the cell was jacked forward; when all the cells had been extended, the shield itself was moved forward. Thus the excavation had proceeded a few inches at a time, with bricklayers extending the arches behind so that only the very edge of the excavation was unsupported.

  “It was the narrowest of gaps,” Brunel said, “but it was still hazardous, and it was made worse because the directors, damn them, grew impatient and ordered that it should be doubled, to speed up the work. My father and I knew that the ground was treacherous, but the directors insisted on it, and insisted on admitting sightseers too, despite the risk. It was only by great good fortune that the waters broke through when the arch was not full of visitors.”

  Brunel had been watching me narrowly as he talked. Now he broke off from his discourse and asked if I was feeling quite well.

  “There are no ghosts here, sir, if that’s why you ask.”

  “Yet men have died here. Poor Richardson, and Ball and Collins, and the others . . .”

  “The matter of death is not as simple as the penny dreadfuls would have it, Mr Brunel. You mentioned a murder. Who was it that was killed here?”

  “He was not murdered here at all, although I thought . . . Are you all right, Mr Carlyle?”

  “A curious singing in my ears, and a sense of oppression.”

  Brunel looked disappointed. “I feel it myself. I have calculated that when the Thames is in full flood, the tunnelling shield had to support upwards of six hundred tons.”

  A strange compulsion made me walk forward. My boots splashed into shallow water and I was suddenly as thirsty as a Bedouin, and knelt and scooped up a palmful of water and sucked it down. I felt it writhe like a worm in my throat and tasted thick warm blood; at the same moment, the arch of brick above groaned, and I felt, distinctly, that I was in two places at once. I was kneeling in the black water, and I was pressed flat by a great suffocating weight, as in one of those nightmares in which we cannot flee the frightful horror advancing upon us.

  Then Brunel was hauling me up by the armpits, and the spell was broken. My right hand hurt like the devil, the taste of blood was thick and foul in my mouth, and the little lake was as choppy as a storm-tossed sea. The arch of the bore groaned again, and Brunel said, “Sometimes the ground above shifts with the tide.”

  “Something is lost,” I said, although I did not know why.

  Brunel held up the lantern by his face and studied me and said, “If there are no ghosts, you would make a passable substitute for one, Mr Carlyle. Let’s get above ground, and find something to warm our blood.”

  Inside the long shed, he poked around in the drawers of a huge desk, pulled out a bottle of brandy, poured generous libations into two tin mugs, fastened my fingers around one, and settled a blanket around my shoulders. The brandy burned through the thick foul taste that coated my mouth and tongue, but my hand still ached – it was as if someone had wrapped a hot wire around the base of the forefinger. Brunel sat in a chair opposite, his hands on his knees and his elbows square, and sipped his brandy and watched me take in my surroundings. The space where we sat had been made over into an office, with the desk at one end of a big, square carpet, and a table and chests with ladders of narrow drawers below racks of pigeon-holes at the other. Beyond was a gloomy workshop, with work benches, a lathe and a drill press and other machinery, glass and glazed ceramic carboys in wicker baskets, racks of copper piping and sheet metal, and half-finished or half-dismantled machinery.

  I said, “I must apologize once more, it seems.”

  “You said that something was lost, Mr Carlyle. Can you tell me what it was?”

  “I don’t know why I said it. Perhaps you should tell me the rest of the story. Someone was murdered, I believe.”

  Brunel got up and walked about around the perimeter of the carpet for a few moments, fingering a silver circular slide rule that he had pulled from one of the pockets of his waistcoat. I was to learn that he was always too full of energy to sit still for long. He had to be up and doing things even while he thought.

  “We employed two sorts of labourers,” he said. “The men at the face of the tunnel, working on the frames, were skilled miners, my corps d’élite. I would trust them with my life. The rest were mostly Irish navigators, who worked the hand pumps and transported the soil from the excavation. They were good enough fellows, and worked hard and for the most part uncomplainingly, but they were men released from the useful influence of domestic ties, and as a consequence were easily led into temptation, particularly on pay day. They were much given to drinking their pay as quickly as they could, even though we provided beer at the end of every shift, to ease their suffering after working in such difficult conditions.”

  He was still walking to and fro, his hands shaping expressive gestures in the air.

  “On the whole, I found them very manageable, but there were one or two rogues, and one or two frank criminals to boot. One of these was a man by the name of Coffee Joe, so called not for his liking of the reviving bean but because he was so often in drink that he deserved the soubriquet less than anyone else. I’ve told you how close we dug to the river bed. Quite often, small objects dropped long ago into the river would be washed through by small runs of water. Leather shoes, the square nails used by shipwrights, buckles, glass bottles, even a coin or two. Any other man finding such an object would present it to one of the foremen, but Coffee Joe was known to keep his finds. I heard a rumour that he had sold an enamelled dagger handle to an antiquarian for ten shillings, but put it down to envy, and did not dismiss him. He was a hard worker, despite his liking of drink.”

  “But he found something else,” I said. Despite the warm fug of the brandy, the forefinger of my right hand still felt as if it was being slowly amputated.

  “That’s how the story went,” Brunel said, “although I heard about it only after the last, fatal flood. Some of the men cursed Coffee Joe, even though by then he had quit the site – he had, in fact, been arrested for his part in inciting a drunken riot in a tavern. The story was that
he had taken something which he blamed for a change in his luck. He claimed to be haunted by water. It would bubble up between the flags of the wretched cellar where he had a bed, the spray of public fountains would drench him, pumps would spit mud at him, and so on and so forth. And he had bad dreams, he said, of floods, not just of water—”

  “But blood,” I said, and for a moment the taste of that substance was so thick in my mouth that I thought I might choke on it.

  Brunel had stopped at the far end of the carpet, and was watching me closely. He said, “When you took that draught of water, and the flood pool grew so agitated, I knew that it was something of the same matter. Is it a ghost?”

  “If it is, it is the most potent and undetectable ghost I’ve ever known.”

  “And you have known some, in your time.”

  “I will admit to the acquaintance of a few, Mr Brunel. What happened to Coffee Joe after he was arrested?”

  “He was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania and three years’ hard labour, and at the end of it he found his way back to London.”

  “A navigator indeed.”

  Brunel agreed. “He was found dead just five days ago. One of his former fellows heard of it, and communicated it to me.”

  “He was, perhaps, drowned?”

  “He was found with his throat cut. I spoke to the Inspector who investigated the murder. He said that the cellar in which Coffee Joe’s body was found was drenched with blood, and the fatal wound had been so savagely inflicted that the head was almost completely severed.”

  “This was the same cellar in which Coffee Joe had nightmares of drowning, years ago.”

  Brunel looked at me, and raised one of his vigorous black eyebrows.

  “He travelled halfway around the world,” I said. “I must assume that it was because he wanted to find something he had left behind – and where else might a man like him leave it, except in the one place in the world where he could lay his head of a night? And he must have been desperate to find it, because it is against the law for a transportee to return to this country.”