Ghosts by Gaslight Page 3

  6 August 1870

  I must confess, though with a certain understandable reluctance, that I have found in the Franco-Prussian War a catastrophe of enormous convenience. Approach a man who has just been blown apart by an artillery shell, his viscera spilling forth like turnips from a torn sack, and propose to translate him into a domain where his agony will vanish and his soul endure forever, and he will invariably assent. If you kneel beside a soldier recently trampled during a cavalry charge and offer to sign him up for an eternity of painless existence, he will forthwith beg for a contract and a pen.

  This afternoon my creatures and I landed in the Alsatian town of Fröschwiller, where earlier in the day Marshal Patrice de Mac-Mahon’s French brigades had clashed with a combined force of Prussians, Bavarians, Badeners, Württembergens, and Saxons. Perhaps historians will ultimately frame the Battle of Fröschwiller as the cradle of a unified German state, but what I beheld on that ghastly field was not so much a cradle as a mass grave. Each side, I would estimate, lost at least 10,000 men to instant death or irremediable wounds.

  Crossing the bloody terrain with a large convoy of tumbrels, the golems collected over five hundred candidates for bezalelite immortality. Thanks to humankind’s affection for mayhem, I shall soon have an army of my own.

  3 October 1870

  Immediately after the necessary plans and diagrams arrived from Prague, along with a team of master builders, I embarked on a colossal endeavor. Here in the heart of the Schwarzwald we have razed my ancestral manor and begun to assemble in its stead a structure of stupefying splendor. My new abode will replicate the Bohemian castle of Kralkovnik wall for wall, gate for gate, lane for lane, arch for arch, and vault for vault.

  Among their many virtues, my golems are extraordinarily diligent laborers. Already the first, second, and third courtyards have been paved. Tomorrow a crew of three hundred and fifty will start erecting Poelsig Tower, even as the remaining seven hundred and twenty-five lay the foundations of the principal château.

  A man’s home, it has been remarked, is his castle. By analogy, a man’s castle is his kingdom and his kingdom his empire. I intend to administer my dominion in a manner befitting the first scientist to weld the carnal plane to its spectral counterpart—that is, with a firm but enlightened hand. As Lotte told me this morning, “When the golems undertake to compose their epics, they will sing their creator’s praises in rapturous words, borne by the most sublime music ever heard in heaven or on earth.”

  AT FIRST LIGHT Jonathan Hobbwright rises from his canopied bed and, venturing beyond the castle walls, begins his quest for a suitable site on which to stage the golems’ salvation. From seven o’clock until noon he roams the fields and woods, eventually happening upon a clearing so wide it could accommodate a circus act featuring a troupe of elephants. The vibratologist returns to the castle, seeks out Nonentity 157, and enlists its aid in transporting the apparatus to the place where, God willing, he will redeem the Baron’s creatures.

  After Nonentity 157 departs, Jonathan bears the Wohlmeth Resonator to the center of the circle. Coils of fog sinuate across the ground like phantom serpents. Meticulously he deploys the tuning fork, prongs pointed upwards in a configuration evoking the Devil’s own trident bursting through the crust of the earth. Next he places the voltaic piles a full hundred yards from the resonator, fearing that without this margin the vibrations will shatter not only the bezalelite husks but the battery array itself, thus terminating the golems’ deliverance in medias res.

  At this juncture Countess Nachtstein’s icily beautiful granddaughter appears, dressed in a bright scarlet cloak, so that her emergence from the fog suggests the Red Death exiting a white tent. In the moist but congenial glow of morning, Lotte seems a rather different person from the high-minded moralist who dominated the previous night’s dinner conversation, and she addresses Jonathan in tones that betray genuine contrition.

  “Please accept this lunch along with my apology for scolding you last night,” she says, handing over a sack containing, Jonathan is gratified to see, cold meat, warm bread, two apples, and a flask of burgundy. “My father did monstrous things. I would deny that fact only at my peril.”

  “In most contexts, honoring one’s parents is a laudable endeavor. I cannot blame you for defending Baron Nachtstein, injudicious as his project might have been.”

  “The man who would expiate my father’s sins is not only a great scientist but a paragon of graciousness.”

  When Lotte squeezes Jonathan’s arm and suggests that she help him finish installing the resonator, he can discern no ulterior motive. During the subsequent hour they connect a long rubber-sheathed wire to the positive terminals of the voltaic piles, then attach a second such strand to the negative terminals, subsequently running the insulated copper filaments to the fork and wrapping them around the outer prongs. Returning to the piles, Jonathan fastens the wires to a pair of chronometers, the first enabling him to determine how many minutes will elapse before the blade of the concomitant knife-switch descends, the second allowing him to fix the interval between the initial vibrations and the termination of the circuit.

  “I see no reason not to move quickly,” Lotte says. Suddenly her imperious aspect is ascendant. It seems she has taken command of the experiment, a situation to which Jonathan is expected to acquiesce. “We shall switch on the resonator at three o’clock. Is that acceptable to you?”

  “What if it were unacceptable?”

  Lotte makes no reply but instead points to the rheostat. “I assume that, given bezalelite’s extreme density, we should run the apparatus for at least an hour—and at full power.”

  “I would advise against it. To drive a Wohlmeth Resonator beyond eight hundred amperes would be to create an acoustic cyclone. My preferred parameters would be four hundred amperes for twenty minutes.”

  “We shall compromise,” Lotte informs Jonathan. “Six hundred amperes for forty minutes. After setting the chronometers, we shall retreat to the safety of the castle. We needn’t worry about the golems’ welfare. After all, they’re already dead.”

  3 November 1877

  When I embarked on this project, I fully anticipated the delight I would derive from observing the golems prepare our meals, make our beds, brew our beer, plow our fields, and harvest our crops. But I had no inkling of the satisfactions to be had in commanding them to engage in meaningless tasks.

  Come to Castle Kralkovnik, ladies and gentlemen. Behold the living dead playing polo in the moonlight using pumpkins instead of balls. Watch the tethered spirits build a tower to heaven on an inviolable order from Yahweh, then tear it down in response to an equally sacrosanct command. Bear witness to my metal phantoms as they plan and rehearse nine separate productions of Macbeth, each to unfold five seconds out of phase with both its antecedent and its successor, then stage multiple command performances for their favorite baron.

  On the whole, it is wrong for a person to spawn a race of artificial beings and demand their unquestioning obedience. Godhead too easily goes to one’s head. From time to time, however, the world is blessed with an individual so wise that he may play the part of locally situated deity without any attendant corruption to his character.

  12 February 1878

  Last month I made a momentous discovery. No matter how much he may be adored, worshiped, and feared, a man in my position will not be satisfied until his progeny come to blows over how best to interpret their creator’s will. We demiurges cannot rest until a great quantity of violence has occurred on our behalf. If I am to enjoy genuine peace of mind, my adherents must go to war.

  In keeping with the scenario I wrote for them, the orthodox golems—the Singularists, led by Nonentity 741—believe in a unitary deity. The Quadripartists, under Nonentity 899, insist that I am of a piece with a pantheon that includes my mother, Helga, my daughter, Lotte, and my alter ego, Rabbi Judah Löew ben Bezalel. Both sides employ incineration as their principal method for punishing incorrect understandings of my u
nknowable essence. Once a heretic has been tried and convicted, he is chained to a stake, engulfed by mounds of kindling, and put to the torch. Of course, unlike most victims of religious persecution, Singularists and Quadripartists actually wish to be treated in this brutal fashion, for they imagine that the flames might prove hot enough to melt their shells: a physical impossibility, but desperate specters will not be reconciled to the laws of nature.

  This same expectation of deliverance undergirds the theological wars that periodically ravage the Schwarzwald. The sight of a thousand golems falling upon one another with claymores, cudgels, and battle-axes is as exhilarating a spectacle as a deity could ever hope to witness. Needless to say, the carapaces always remain intact. Like the golems themselves, my bezalelite is essentially a supernatural phenomenon, impervious to the ambitions of the quick and the desires of the dead.

  12 August 1879

  Today I endured one of the most distressing events of my life. Shortly after Nonentity 316 and Nonentity 214 appeared at the breakfast table, the former serving my morning eggs and sausage, the latter bringing me my newspaper, Nonentity 667 strode into the dining hall, looming over me while I attempted to read an article detailing how the spiritualism fad has come to Vienna.

  “You are blocking my light,” I told the golem.

  “Rather the way you have occluded our enlightenment,” Nonentity 667 replied. “We have read your journal, Herr Doktor Nachtstein. You have deceived us. The procedure cannot be undone.”

  “Nonsense. You have misinterpreted the entry in question. I now have in hand the knowledge by which you will transcend the alloy. Allow me two more experiments, three at the most, and I shall bless you all with oblivion.”

  “Perhaps we shall exact our retribution tomorrow, perhaps the next day, perhaps a year from now. But know that our vengeance is coming.”

  “You cannot frighten me,” I said, though in truth I was terrified. “For Singularists and Quadripartists alike, I am the only possible source of salvation.”

  “Fiat justitia, ruat caelum,” Nonentity 667 said. “Let justice be done though the heavens may fall.”

  HEAVY OF HEART, unquiet of mind, Jonathan paces Castle Kralkovnik’s highest point, the roof of Poelsig Tower. His path is an ellipse, its eastern focus marked by Countess Nachtstein, the western by Lotte, the center by a telescope pointing toward the clearing. He wishes he had not assented to Lotte’s insistence on running the resonator at six hundred amperes. Conceivably her directive sprang from some intuitive insight into her father’s intractable alloy, but more likely it bespoke only a mania to cleanse his legacy.

  Pausing before the telescope, Jonathan presses his right orb to the eyepiece. He adjusts the tubes, making the image crisp. The golems stand in three concentric circles around the tuning fork, a tableau suggesting a tossed pebble raising rings in a pond. A palpable serenity has descended upon the creatures. They are patience personified. Having waited so many years for their freedom, they can endure whatever interval remains before the chronometer blade drops.

  “One month after they stole my father’s journal and learned that the plating is seemingly permanent,” Lotte says, “a mob of golems, two dozen at least, appropriated every dagger, hatchet, and sword in the castle.”

  “With military precision—most of them were soldiers—they disassembled my son,” the Countess says. “Each bore away a different piece of him and buried it in the forest.”

  “It speaks well of your Christian generosity that you would seek to liberate the Baron’s murderers,” Jonathan says, stepping away from the telescope.

  “Our project has less to do with compassion than with self-preservation,” the Countess replies. “Upon consummating their plot against Gustav, the golems gave Lotte and myself to know that their next victims would be we ourselves. Only after it became clear that we were taking every conceivable step to free them, hiring one metallurgist, galvanicist, and molecularist after another, did they become as compliant as when my son first brought them into being.”

  A white-hot bead of anger burns through Jonathan’s breast. If the present experiment fails, he will surely become entangled in whatever lethal designs the golems draw against Lotte and the Countess. How dare these women presume to put him in such jeopardy? But before he can articulate his fury, he hears the sharp electric report of the chronometer blade snapping into place.

  Jonathan again avails himself of the telescope. Already the trident had become a humming, wailing, incandescent blur, each prong oscillating like the pendulum of some demonic inverted clock. At the edge of the circle, poplars and beeches shiver in the aural storm. The trunks fracture, and the trees crash to the forest floor, even as scores of owls, rooks, larks, foxes, hares, hedgehogs, and deer flee the cataclysm. On all sides of the resonator, jagged crevasses open in the earth.

  So great is the pain in Jonathan’s head that he abandons the telescope, shuts his eyes, and massages his throbbing temples. His tendons tremble like harp strings plucked by invisible hands. Were the tower nearer to the fork by as few as ten yards, he calculates, his eardrums would rip, his heart burst, and his skeleton turn to powder.

  Fighting his way through the crashing waves of sound, Jonathan returns to the telescope. Everywhere he looks, fault lines zigzag across the golems’ metal flesh. Their faceless heads resemble ancient vases, cracked and battered by history’s vicissitudes. Like an ancient mosaic shedding its tiles, the creatures molt bit by bit. Bezalelite fragments drop from their phantom arms, legs, and torsos, revealing the moldering bones beneath. Momentarily mastering his fear and transcending his astonishment, Jonathan takes satisfaction in knowing that—given the intensity of the tremors—the fork is probably freeing not only the human golems but also the Baron’s experimental insects, reptiles, and mammals.

  “Mirabile dictu!” the Countess cries.

  “The specters are hatching!” Lotte shouts.

  “It’s not safe here!” Jonathan screams, urging the women toward the stairwell. “Run!”

  Despite her advanced age, the Countess manages to negotiate the steps two at a time, as do Jonathan and Lotte, so that everyone reaches the ground floor within three minutes. No sooner does Jonathan start charging down the corridor than the ceiling disintegrates, squalls of plaster cascading into his path. Frantically he sidles and weaves amidst the plummeting timbers and errant chunks of masonry, but his athleticism proves useless before the force he has unleashed. As he reaches the door to the conservatory, a wayward chandelier, luminous with gas, lands squarely atop his skull. The bright bludgeon plunges him into darkness, but not before he notices that the hall now swarms with a thousand phantoms, each a disquieting shade of red and all wearing strangely despondent expressions, utterly unbefitting of persons recently released from the bottomless pit.

  AT FIRST JONATHAN assumes that he has fallen prey to a nightmare. How else might he explain the scene now stretching before him? Heaped with kindling, two wooden obelisks rise from the central courtyard, each holding a Nachtstein woman—bound, gagged, and blindfolded. The plaque above Lotte’s head reads Singularist. Countess Nachtstein’s stake is labeled Quadripartist.

  The phantoms have immobilized Jonathan as well, cuffing his wrists with manacles, hobbling his feet with fetters, and they have additionally stripped away his clothing. The vibratologist shivers in the Schwarzwald wind, goose bumps erupting on his bare skin like rivets, even as his cranium aches with the aftermath of his encounter with the chandelier. Vapor-faced phantoms throng across the plaza, their visages twisted by an inscrutable sadness. As if ignorant of the laws of actuality, the former golems attempt to prolong their purchase on the world. They flex their nonmuscles, tense their nonligaments, curl their nonfingers.

  “Surely you don’t mean to burn these women,” Jonathan says. “They rescued you. You owe them everything.”

  “We mean to burn them—as surely as we mean to electroplate you,” says a crimson specter in a fluttering voice.

  “That makes no
sense.”

  “True,” says a scarlet specter. “We understand your frustration. You want your ghosts to be outré but not perverse, weird but not recondite, occasionally sublime though never ridiculous. So sorry, Herr Doktor. We are avatars of the abyss. Coherence is not our business.”

  Jonathan watches helplessly as a vermilion ghost applies a firebrand to the fagots encircling the Countess’s stake. As the flames climb the fleshly ladder of the victim’s form, a carmine specter flourishes a Wohlmeth Resonator—the very fork, Jonathan realizes, that gave the golems their freedom—and hurls it into the burgeoning conflagration.

  “The dead don’t lack for foresight,” a maroon ghost avers. “In a matter of minutes the fork will become a charred ruin, thus canceling any hopes you might entertain of liberation by a passing Samaritan.”

  Now a ruby specter sets Lotte’s pyre aflame, but not before jamming the Baron’s journal into the fagots.

  “Set her free!” Jonathan screams.

  A BAND OF phantoms drags the vibratologist out of the plaza and down a maze of stairways to the Baron’s subterranean laboratory, a cavernous space dominated by the electrolyte vat. Although they’ve never done this before, his captors act with great efficiency, ramming a respiration tube down his throat, dumping him into the solution, chaining his naked body to the cathode column.

  Ignoring his pleas for mercy, a magenta specter connects the rectifier to the anode, agleam with the Baron’s alloy. Countless positively charged bezalelite atoms drift through the bath and accumulate on Jonathan’s flesh. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, the metal embraces the helpless vibratologist, each instance of adherence like the sting of a microscopic hornet.