Ghosts by Gaslight Read online

  Ghosts by Gaslight

  Stories of Steampunk and

  Supernatural Suspense

  EDITED BY JACK DANN AND NICK GEVERS

  Dedication

  In memory of Kage Baker

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  James Morrow - The Iron Shroud

  Peter S. Beagle - Music, When Soft Voices Die

  Terry Dowling - The Shaddowwes Box

  Garth Nix - The Curious Case of the Moondawn Daffodils Murder

  Gene Wolfe - Why I Was Hanged

  Margo Lanagan - The Proving of Smollett Standforth

  Sean Williams - The Jade Woman of the Luminous Star

  Robert Silverberg - Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar

  John Langan - The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons

  John Harwood - Face to Face

  Richard Harland - Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism

  Marly Youmans - The Grave Reflection

  Theodora Goss - Christopher Raven

  Lucius Shepard - Rose Street Attractors

  Laird Barron - Blackwood’s Baby

  Paul Park - Mysteries of the Old Quarter

  Jeffrey Ford - The Summer Palace

  About the Editors

  Credits

  Copyright

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  GHOSTS BY GASLIGHT.

  Those three words neatly summarize a great paradox of the Victorian age.

  After all, the time of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) was by its own declaration an age of spreading enlightenment—the growth of literacy; the rapid introduction of mass-manufacturing technology; the propagation of humane values; the termination of the slave trade; legislation to curb cruelties inherent in industrial labor; and, on a literal level, the provision of ever more illumination to Britain’s (and America’s) cities, first by means of gas lighting, then with electricity. Let there be light! And yet even as the darkness of the streets and of some forms of economic deprivation was alleviated, the ghosts imagined by the population multiplied. Old fears, old phantoms and bogeys, old conceptions of bad luck and supernatural revenge combined with new wraiths and monsters born of the torments of social change and ideological awakening; and from the far corners of the British Empire returning soldiers, administrators, traders, travelers, and missionaries imported foreign narratives of yet more apprehension: accounts of Arabian Nights djinns, Transylvanian vampires, accursed rajahs, Chinese phantasms, West Indian duppies, and African totems. Real-life terrors like the depredations of Jack the Ripper mingled in the popular fancy with these improbable but direly potent materials; and in response, even as some Victorian fiction described hopeful or apocalyptic technological advance, many other tales brooded on the fantastic and the ominously irrational. The purposeful light of extrapolation competed with the looming darkness of the horrid.

  This anthology pays innovative tribute to both of those streams of Victorian storytelling: the scientific romance and the classic ghost story, as they matured through the Great White Mother’s reign and in that of her rotund and jocular son Edward VII, before the outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought shattering disillusionments. After all, a century later, speculative fiction continues to honor the two forms: steampunk novels and stories regularly recapture (and recomplicate) the gadget-encrusted early science fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, while leading horror and dark fantasy authors (many of them represented in this book) pay recurrent homage to the ghostly tale. So . . .

  Why not a feast of fine new stories, filled with the pleasurable disquiet of things that go bump in the night and, at times, the thrills of sinister, arcane machinery as well? Perhaps the paradox of Victorian superstition-amidst-enlightenment can be resolved by way of this mixture; and anyway, the results are bound to be extremely entertaining. Thus Ghosts by Gaslight, in which seventeen of the best contemporary writers of supernatural fiction revisit the world of fog and fear that our ancestors knew only too well, on both sides of the Atlantic.

  AS YOU’LL SEE reflected in many of the stories in the present volume, the Victorian/Edwardian period’s fiction of the fantastic and the ominously irrational sometimes went far beyond instilling simple fright and awe. During the heyday of the classic ghost story in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were plenty of sensationalistic (and ephemeral) writers whose contributions to the many fiction magazines were all about cheap, garish effects; but their efforts were counterweighed by more profound, psychologically penetrating tales from such major literary names as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter de la Mare, Mrs. Oliphant, and Ambrose Bierce—and many writing in languages other than English. These authors were not slumming in a superficial popular genre; they had quite serious intent. And they were joined in this by inspired specialists in the supernatural, some of whom remain well known today for their spooky brilliance: J. Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Vernon Lee, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson. Henry and M. R. James (no relations), in their very different efforts like “The Turn of the Screw” and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” employed ghosts and other phantoms of the nocturnal hours to cast light on the interior of the human psyche; this was the collective goal. In the hands of all these practitioners, ghosts signified aspects of the mentalities of those still living: a man visiting a haunted house was in a real sense haunting it himself, witnessing apparitions that echoed the proceedings of his own subconscious. Just as the emerging discipline of psychiatry was beginning to probe the subtle, contradictory workings of the human brain, the Victorian and Edwardian canons of the ghostly were projecting upon the printed page flickering specters of our repressed desires and our most terrible impulses. The ghost, in the final analysis, is very often Us. And likewise the vampire, the werewolf, and the many further doppelgängers embodied in literary nightmares.

  This approach continues in Ghosts by Gaslight, with many a fresh twist. Ghost stories are gothic fictions, in that their objective landscapes—old manor houses, creepy backwoods, art galleries where the portraits stare out more purposefully than usual—are also intensely subjective. When Laird Barron’s hunters range the monstrous Washington wilderness in homage to Algernon Blackwood’s menacing panoramas of haunted Nature, and when John Langan’s Henry-Jamesian protagonist ventures into far more settled but still eerie precincts back east, they are going home to themselves, to self-knowledge. Such knowledge can be utterly horrifying, merely disturbing, subtly discombobulating, quietly domestic, or even somewhat antic. But of whatever color, it is revealing of what we have not been able, or willing, to realize about ourselves. So the part of Ghosts by Gaslight that is ghostly is about its afflicted characters staring into the mirror, at their grave reflections, amidst cries of terror and looming shades of night.

  But what of the gaslight, which can help to dispel the darkness? The “scientific romances” of Wells, Verne, and others anticipated future times—often very near futures—in which expanding frontiers of knowledge would deliver to humankind, or privileged sections of humankind, enormously increased power over Nature. These were Promethean fictions that expected the prodigious leaps of innovation already being experienced (from horse-drawn carts and carriages to widespread railways in just a generation! from cities of dangerous shadow to modern metropolises with brightly lit streets in just a few years! from crude telegraphy to radio in almost no time!) to continue, to the point where submarines would patrol effortlessly the greatest depths of the sea, airships would wander
the skies with serene impunity, and the first spacecraft, propelled by giant cannon or miraculous Cavorite, would allow swift visits to the moon. Human beings would at last ascend beyond their cruel enslavement to the earth’s surface, the cycle of the seasons, and the harsh laws of economics. Society would alter radically: utopias were glimpsed in many stories of this kind, whether socialist, anarchist, arcadian, or aristocratic. Grand visions indeed, promising so much . . . And yet Prometheus suffered dreadfully for bestowing the gift of fire upon mankind; and the scientific romancers were only too conscious of the perilous downside of technology run amok. For every victorious adventure there was a waiting catastrophe: the world devastated by novel weapons, political tyranny augmented with new instruments of oppression, aliens invading, Homo sapiens speciating into warring tribes of hominids. Early science fiction indeed illuminated the future, but black clouds of war and chaos cast warning shadows across the prospect. Current steampunk writing reflects this balance faithfully: in the stories that follow are to be found such things as death in well-built cities, gear-shifting mummies, ghosts in Faraday cages, the dark matter of balloons, and, of course, machines . . . machines that trap nightmares, machines that trap ghosts, machines that trap and enslave souls.

  GASLIGHT AND ITS successor, electrical lighting, lit up immense panoramas for the Victorians and Edwardians, in real life, in reason, and in the imagination. Indeed, the ghost story, as a form of psychological fiction, was a part of the general enlightenment, inasmuch as it shone a torch on the nature of the psyche, permitting expanded understanding of how we ourselves work. Equally, the vast threats unveiled by the scientific romance were necessary, instructive premonitions of the imminent upheavals of world war, revolution, and economic depression. We need light to see our ghosts by, even if it is merely some sort of ectoplasmic refulgence. Ghosts of the past and ghosts from the future unite in the chilling glow of this anthology, extending wisdom as well as fright, fateful comprehension as well as blind terror; and all in highly entertaining form, in some cases as pure fuliginous horror, in others as awestruck observation, or as yearning towards otherworldly radiance, or as cunning satirical fun.

  So let there be light . . . and ghosts yet to be revealed.

  —JACK DANN AND NICK GEVERS

  James Morrow

  Shortly after his seventh birthday, James Morrow dictated a loopy fantasy called “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. Upon reaching adulthood, the author again endeavored to write fiction, eventually winning two Nebula Awards, two World Fantasy Awards, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. Recent projects include a postmodern historical epic, The Last Witchfinder, praised by the New York Times for fusing “storytelling, showmanship and provocative book-club bait,” and a phantasmagoric tragicomedy, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, which NPR called “an ingenious riff on Frankenstein.” Jim’s most recent book is a stand-alone novella, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, set in 1945 and dramatizing the US Navy’s attempts to leverage a Japanese surrender via a biological weapon that strangely anticipates Godzilla.

  JAMES MORROW

  The Iron Shroud

  JONATHAN HOBBWRIGHT CANNOT discourse upon the formic thoughts that flicker through the minds of ants, and he is similarly ignorant concerning the psyches of locusts, toads, moles, apes, and bishops, but he can tell you what it’s like to be in hell. The abyss has become his fixed abode. Perdition is now his permanent address.

  Although Jonathan’s eyes deliver only muddy and monochromatic images, his ears have acquired an uncommon acuity. Encapsulated head to toe in damnation’s carapace, he can hear the throbbing heart of a nearby rat, the caw of a proximate raven, the hiss of an immediate snake.

  Not only is the abyss acoustically opulent, it is temporally egalitarian. Here every second is commensurate with a minute, every minute with an hour, every hour with an aeon. Has he been immured for a week? A month? A year? Is he reciting to himself the tenth successive account of his incarceration? The hundredth? The thousandth?

  Listen carefully, Jonathan Hobbwright. Attend to every word emerging from the gossamer gates of your phantom mouth. Perhaps on this retelling you will discover some reason not to abandon hope. Even in hell stranger things have happened.

  IT IS AT the funeral of his mentor and friend, the illustrious Alastair Wohlmeth, that Jonathan meets the woman whose impeccable intentions are to become the paving-stones on his road to perdition. By the terms of Dr. Wohlmeth’s last will and testament, the service is churchless and austere: a graveside gathering in Saint Sepulchre’s Cemetery, Oxford, not so very far from Wadham College, where Wohlmeth wrought most of his scientific breakthroughs. Per the dead man’s prescription, the party is limited to his one true protégé—Jonathan—plus his valet, his beloved but dull-witted sister, his three most promising apprentices, and the Right Reverend Mr. Torrance.

  As the vicar mutters the incantation by which an Englishman once again becomes synonymous with ashes and dust, the mourners contemplate the corpse. Dr. Wohlmeth’s earthly remains lie within an open coffin suspended above the grave, its oblong form casting a jagged shadow across the cavity like the gnomon on an immense sundial. The inscription on the stone is singularly spare: A. F. Wohlmeth, 1803–1881.

  To assert that Alastair Wohlmeth was a latter-day Prometheus would not, in Jonathan’s view, distort the truth. Just as the mythic Titan stole fire from the gods, so did Wohlmeth appropriate from nature some of her most obscure principles, transforming them into his own private science, the nascent sphere of knowledge he called vibratology. This new field was for its discoverer a fundamentally esoteric realm, to be explored in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Pythagoreans practicing their cultish geometry. Of course, when the outside world realized that Wohlmeth’s quest had yielded a practical invention—a tuning fork capable of cracking the thickest crystal and pulverizing the strongest metal—the British Society of Engineers urged him to patent the device and establish a corporation dedicated to its commercial exploitation. One particularly aggressive B.S.E. member, a demolitions expert named Cardigan, wanted to market the Wohlmeth Resonator as “an earthquake in a satchel-case,” a miraculous implement auguring a day when “the dredging of canals, the blasting of mines, the shattering of battlements, and the moving of mountains will be accomplished with the wave of a wand.” To Dr. Wohlmeth’s eternal credit, or so Jonathan constructed the matter, he resisted all such blandishments. Until the day he died, Wohlmeth forbade his disciples to discuss the resonator in any but the most opaque mathematical terms, confining the conversation to quarterlies concerned solely with theoretical harmonics. The technical periodicals, meanwhile, remained as bereft of articles about the tuning fork as they did of lyric poetry.

  Contrary to Wohlmeth’s wishes, a ninth mourner has appeared at the service, a parchment-skinned crone in a black-hooded mantle. Her features, Jonathan notes, partake as much of the geological as the anatomical. Her brow is a crag, her nose a promontory, her lower lip a protuberant shelf of rock. With impassive eyes she watches while the sexton, a nimble scarecrow named Foote, leans over the open coffin and, in accordance with the deceased genius’s desires, lays a resonator on the frozen bosom, wrapping the stiff fingers around the shank, so that in death Dr. Wohlmeth assumes the demeanor of a sacristan clutching a broom-sized crucifix. An instant later the sexton’s assistants—the blockish Garber and the scrawny Osmond—set the lid on the coffin and nail it in place. Foote works the windlass, lowering Wohlmeth to his final resting place. Taking up their spades, Garber and Osmond return the dirt whence it came, the clods striking the coffin lid with percussive thumps, even as the crone approaches Jonathan.

  “Dr. Hobbwright, I presume?” she says in a viscous German accent. “Vibratologist extraordinaire?”

  “Not nearly so extraordinaire as Alastair Wohlmeth.”

  Reaching into her canvas sack, the crone produces the January, April, and July issues
of Oscillation Dynamics for 1879. “But you published articles in all these, ja?”

  “It was a good year for me,” Jonathan replies, nodding. “No fewer than five of my projects came to fruition.”

  “But 1881 will be even better.” The crone’s voice suggests a corroded piccolo played by a consumptive. “Before the month is out, you will bring peace and freedom to a myriad unjustly imprisoned souls.” From her sack she withdraws a leather-bound volume inscribed with the words Journal of Baron Gustav Nachtstein. “I am Countess Helga Nachtstein. Thirty years ago I gave birth to the author of this confession, my beloved Gustav, destined for an untimely end—more untimely, even, than the fate of his father, killed in a duel when Gustav was only ten.”

  “My heart goes out to you,” Jonathan says.

  The Countess sighs extravagantly, doubling the furrows of her crenellated brow. “The sins of the sons are visited on the mothers. Please believe me when I say that Gustav Nachtstein was as brilliant a scientist as your Dr. Wohlmeth. Alas, his investigations took him to a dark place, and in consequence many innocent beings have spent the past eleven years locked in an earthly purgatory. Just when I’d begun to despair of their liberation, I happened upon my son’s collection of scientific periodicals. The fact that the inventor of the Wohlmeth Resonator is no longer among the living has not dampened my expectations, for I assume you can lay your hands on such a machine and bear it to the site of the tragedy.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “As consideration I can offer one thousand English pounds.” The Countess presses her son’s diary into Jonathan’s uncertain grasp. “Open his journal to the entry of August the sixth, 1870, and you will find an initial payment of two hundred pounds, plus the first-class railway tickets that will take you from London to Freiburg to the village of Tübinhausen—and from there to Castle Kralkovnik in the Schwarzwald. May I assume that a week will suffice for you to put your affairs in order?”