Ghosts by Gaslight Page 4

  Within one hour the process is complete, leaving him encapsulated, immobile, and half blind. A gurgling reaches his ears. The phantoms are draining the vat. A searing pain rips though his chest as a ghost yanks the respiration tube from his trachea. An instant later another specter seals the air-hole with an immortal bezalelite plug.

  Mummified by the exotic alloy, the prisoner is soon deprived of oxygen, and then of life itself. He is also deprived of death. Now and forever he will be the ghost of Jonathan Hobbwright—vibratologist extraordinaire become solitary golem—affixed to the cathode of Baron Nachtstein’s infernal machine. Someday, perhaps, when entropy has dismantled the universe, he will be a free man, but for now he must reconcile himself to the unendurable, the interminable, and the endlessly absurd.

  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. His imagination affords him only fleeting respite. Each time he dreams himself free of his bezalelite coffin—passing through the portals of the abyss, striking out for terra incognita—Satan’s angels give chase, and they inevitably track him down.

  Come back, Dr. Hobbwright. Return to perdition. Tell your story for the tenth time, the hundredth, the thousandth. The more frequently you give voice to the wretched chronicle of your life, death, and damnation, the more likely you are to stumble upon hope’s hidden wellspring.

  And until that improbable miracle occurs, you might take heart in recalling that the progenitor of your race is dead and gone. In the aeons to come, you will not be made to laud Gustav Nachtstein in song or build an altar to his glory. Cold comfort, to be sure, but in the bottomless pit one seizes upon whatever consolations lie to hand.

  AGAINST THE ODDS and in defiance of his circumstances, Jonathan Hobbwright’s most recent recitation yields the very fount of hope he seeks. According to the Baron’s confession, on certain rare occasions, despite the essential incompatibility between the human plane and the spectral, a disintegrating ghost will perform a philanthropic act. And so it happens that, when a fresh barrage of vibrations assaults Castle Kralkovnik—roaring through the Baron’s laboratory like a tornado, reducing the walls to rubble as it cracks the prisoner’s chrysalis—Jonathan is not entirely surprised.

  Sloughing off his husk, abandoning his corpse, the vibratologist floats free of the cathode, then fixes on Lotte’s crimson ghost. “How long was I entombed?” he asks.

  “Ten days,” she replies.

  “It felt like forever.”

  “Hell knows nothing of clocks.”

  “Where did you obtain the fork?” Jonathan asks.

  “From Alastair Wohlmeth,” Countess Nachtstein’s scarlet specter replies. “The task we set ourselves was grueling. In our given tenure Lotte and I had to reach Oxford, unseal the grave, open the coffin, steal the resonator, and return to the castle.”

  “I am deeply grateful.”

  “We have no need of your gratitude,” the Countess says. “Nor do you have need of ours.”

  “And now we must take eternal leave of you,” Lotte says as her misty form dissolves. “Oblivion beckons.”

  “Farewell, Dr. Hobbwright.” The Countess has become as transparent as the surrounding air. “Please know that it was never my intention to occasion your death.”

  It suddenly occurs to Jonathan that he desperately wants to enlighten humanity concerning the destiny of the dead. So tenuous is the spectral plane, so ultimately meaningless, he must share this knowledge with his former fleshly confederates. The Baron’s journal having been reduced to specks of carbon, Jonathan alone can tell the world about the appalling insipidity of ghosts.

  “I wish to perform a philanthropic act of my own,” he declares.

  “What do you have in mind?” the invisible Lotte asks.

  Even as the answer forms on Jonathan’s airy lips, he realizes that his aspiration is futile. There is no time to find a pen, an ink pot, a sheet of paper. Already he is less than ashes. Already he is a brother to dust.

  Wrenching sobs burst from the vibratologist’s ethereal throat. Briny droplets roll down his ephemeral cheeks. For an infinitesimal instant Jonathan Hobbwright is seized by an infinite remorse, but then his sorrow evaporates—like rain, like dew, like sweat, like the last and least of his tears.

  Afterword to “The Iron Shroud”

  Equipped with uni-ball pens and legal pads, I composed “The Iron Shroud” in longhand during a protracted trip to Eastern Europe. I’d been invited to give a talk at the 2010 International Tolstoy Conference at Yasnaya Polyana, and my wife and I decided to return home in slow motion, stopping off in Poland and the Czech Republic. If the reader detects a whiff of Kafka about my tale, this may be because much of it was written in cafés not far from the mesmerizing Franz Kafka Museum in Prague. And, of course, the story features considerably more than a soupçon of that city’s legendary Golem.

  —JAMES MORROW

  Peter S. Beagle

  Peter S. Beagle is one of America’s leading fantasists. His books include the novels A Fine and Private Place, The Last Unicorn (which has sold more than six million copies worldwide and was made into a popular animated film), The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin; the short story collections Giant Bones, The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche, The Line Between, We Never Talk About My Brother, Mirror Kingdoms, and Sleight of Hand; and the nonfiction books The California Feeling, The Lady and Her Tiger, In the Presence of Elephants, and The Garden of Earthly Delights. After a career pause, in 2002 he came roaring back on the scene with an extraordinary run of short fiction—over sixty stories, novelettes, and novellas—including a sequel to The Last Unicorn called “Two Hearts,” which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

  Now seventy-two, Peter continues to write steadily and has more than a dozen books in the publishing pipeline, including new novels (Summerlong and I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons); new collections (The First Last Unicorn & Other Beginnings, Green-Eyed Boy, 6 Unicorns, and Four Years, Five Seasons); revised and updated editions of older works (The Innkeeper’s Song, The Magician of Karakosk, Avicenna); new nonfiction books (Sméagol, Déagol, and Beagle: Essays from the Headwaters of My Voice and Me Is Us); and his first two children’s books. Since late 2001 he has made his home in Oakland, California. For more information on Peter Beagle and his works, go to www.conlanpress.com.

  PETER S. BEAGLE

  Music, When Soft Voices Die

  THERE WERE FOUR of them living in the gabled rooming house with two chimneys on Geraldine Row, on the east side of Russell Square. This would have been perhaps six years after the Ottoman War, and quite shortly following the wedding of Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Maude Charlotte Mary, to Prince Selim Ali, who eventually became Sultan Selim IV. The marriage was not a happy one.

  The four men’s names were Vordran, Scheuch, Griffith, and Angelos. They were not friends.

  Scheuch and Vordran might have been thought to have something in common, since Scheuch was a bank clerk, while Vordran, eldest of the four, worked in a Bishopsgate law firm. But Vordran was not a clerk, nor ever would be, no more than he would ever be a barrister or a solicitor. He was merely a copyist and, since he took shorthand, an occasional secretary. Once, when jolly young Scheuch had the bad form to invite him to join him for tea, Vordran ticked him off sharply before the other two, saying coldly, in his slight, unplaceable accent, “I am a jumped-up office boy, and I will be treated so or left in peace. Do not ever dare to condescend to me again.” Scheuch kept his distance from then on.

  Angelos was a second-year medical student at Christ’s Hospital, himself quite sensible of the fact that names such as his—further, his mother was Jewish—were rarely admitted to study at the ancient institution. Even younger than Scheuch, he appeared a much more serious soul, but on further acquaintance one discovered that his interests and fanc
ies ranged from pigeon-racing to hot-air ballooning (very much in vogue since the Turkish bombing of London) to the newly recognized science of galvanic phrenology, by means of which one could unfailingly identify a future Mozart or a mass murderer-to-be through analyzing the electrical resistance in different portions of the skull, neck bones, and clavicles. He played the banjo, but never past eight o’clock, or before ten.

  Griffith had been at Balliol. That was very nearly all one was allowed to know about Griffith, besides the fact that he was a waiter at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. His term at university had apparently been interrupted by his enlistment in the war, of which he was justifiably very proud; but why he never returned to Oxford after the Pact of Trieste remained a mystery. What was not mysterious about him was the fact that, where Vordran was undeniably brittle and prickly, Griffith was, quite simply, arrogant to the point of being unbearable. Everything in his life—and, consequently, every person as well—was viewed through the prism of his lost world, and found wanting. He seemed less a proper snob than a kind of wretched exile, but this understanding made him no more likable, or even tolerable; the others came to speak to him as little as they could, except when encountered entering or leaving the house, or meeting on the stair. Griffith appeared more than satisfied with this arrangement.

  The rooming house was managed by a smiling, swarthy man named Emanetoglu, whose brother actually owned it, as well as two other buildings across the river. Mr. Emanetoglu manifested himself promptly at 8 a.m. on the fifteenth of every month, to collect the rent, and to drift into corners and corridors like smoke, commenting diffidently on the condition of paint, wallpaper, and bathroom floorboards. Impossible to dislike—except by Griffith, who referred to him as “Glue Pot,” when he was not calling him “The Wog”—he had, nevertheless, the rainy air of an apologetic ghost, as much trapped in the house by fate as they by finances. On the rare occasion that any roomer was briefly late with a rent payment, he was patient but oddly sorrowful, as though the lapse were somehow his own fault.

  “You shouldn’t call him that, you know,” Scheuch chided Griffith once. “He’s a decent enough chap, Turk or no.”

  “I hate seeing them strutting around so, that’s all.” Griffith bit down hard on the stem of the briar pipe he had lately taken to affecting. “Never used to see a one of them west of Greek Street. Now they’re all over London, got themselves the Ritz, got themselves Lord’s, got themselves Marks and Sparks, got themselves a bloody princess, they’ll shove a white man off the sidewalk if he don’t look slippy about it. You’d think they’d won the bloody war—and by God, I think that’s what they think. But they didn’t win the bloody war!”

  Vordran spoke up then, in the way he had that always made him sound as though he were talking to himself. “Didn’t they, then? They fought us to a standstill. We bled ourselves dry, for no reason that I could ever see, and now they own half the Empire. We were fools.”

  “Feel that way, you ought to go and enlist for a Turk,” Griffith mumbled as he stalked away.

  It was during the late summer and early fall of 18__ that Angelos became obsessed with the study of what he called “etheric telegraphy.” His top-floor room—inconvenient to reach, but immensely practical for his pigeons—quickly became a hotbed of strange small sounds, and he began increasingly to ask Scheuch for assistance in dealing with certain mathematical issues. “There’s this chap named Faraday, and another one named Maxwell, and there’s a Yank dentist, if you’ll believe it, with some outlandish name like Mahlon Loomis, and all of them rattling on about electromagnetism, etheric force, amperes, communal fields . . . I don’t half know what three-quarters of that gibberish means, but I have to know. Can’t say why, I just do.” Scheuch, who was by nature an amiable, accommodating man, did his best to oblige.

  Knowing Angelos better than either Griffith or Vordran ever bothered to know anyone, Scheuch expected this new passion to burn itself out by Boxing Day, at the very latest. But time passed, and snow fell; and, if anything, Angelos’s fervor grew only more intense. He spoke to Scheuch of partial differential equations, of spark-gap transmission and a thing called a coherer, apparently as indescribable as a state of grace. He returned late from work with packages from shops Scheuch had never heard of, crammed with wire coils, hand-cranks and strangely shaped glass bottles, along with magnets—endless magnets of every form and size. He went frequently without sleep; and Scheuch, who left for work at the same time as he, often saw him stumbling downstairs, his eyes plainly fogged and his step unsteady. He would not have been at all surprised to see Angelos brusquely dismissed from Christ’s for habitual drunkenness, but somehow he continued to be well regarded by his instructors, and to keep his marks at least at a respectable level. The tattered oilcloth leftovers from the last experimental balloon gathered dust in a far corner, in company with the banjo. The pigeons disappeared.

  “I cannot even say what it is that he is aiming for,” Scheuch told Griffith on one of the days when the latter was in a mood to be comparatively genial with a non-public-school man. “He speaks constantly of ethereal waves of some sort—of induction, conduction . . . even of being able to affect physical objects in another room, another country. I’d set him down as a pure crackpot, except that he’s such a plausible chap, if you know what I mean. One could almost believe . . .” He shrugged helplessly and raised his eyebrows.

  “We had a fellow like that up at Balliol,” Griffith reflected. “Rum cove from the first. Other chaps kept bullpups, ratters—he kept a monkey, called it his associate. Never could find a roommate because of that beast. Always experimenting, night and day—chemistry, I suppose, from the smell, or maybe that was the monkey. Killed in the war, poor chap. Him, not the monkey. Can’t say what became of the monkey.”

  “Different sort, Angelos,” Scheuch replied. “Not defending him or anything, just saying he’s not exactly round the bend. Eccentric, absolutely, but not . . . I don’t know—not potty, not like that. Eccentric.”

  Griffith, his interest lost well before Scheuch had finished speaking, raised an eyebrow himself and said, “Jew.”

  That winter was a hard one, even for London. The Russell Square rooming house, like most such, lacked any form of central heating, and all four men suffered to one degree or another from colds and chilblains. The world-famous London fog, which was not a proper fog at all, settled over the city, leaving a coal-oil film over everything; the Thames froze over, and a few starving wolves invaded from the countryside, as none had been known to do since prewar days. The men trudged to their various occupations through the dirty snow, or—in Vordran’s case—waited with hats pulled tightly down for one of the new streetcars, which might, in postwar London, be steam- or battery-driven on one day, then pulled by teams of men or horses the next. Simpson’s suffered a notable falling-off in custom, enough that Griffith was on involuntary furlough an extra day out of the week; while the bank where Scheuch was employed frequently went whole days without a single client coming in from the street. The city closed down, as though under a filthy potlid; and—with the same legendary stoicism through which they had endured the Turkish siege—Londoners simply waited for the winter to end.

  But in Russell Square, Angelos remained the single cheerful soul. (“Well he might be,” Griffith sneered, “as many frozen paupers as he and his grisly crew must be slicing up these days.”) The young man still worked a full day at Christ’s Hospital, then made his way home to spend half the night making odd, frequently disquieting noises with his homebuilt machines for which Scheuch had no names. Most often he slouched into Scheuch’s rooms to slap down a scribbled-over clutch of foolscap, grumbling, “Bloody Faraday, bloody Hughes, bloody diamagnetism, makes no bloody sense!” and appealing for assistance with a new batch of equations. “If you could just cast an eye over these, I swear I’ll not trouble you again. Bloody Faraday!”

  Scheuch aided as best a country day school education and a certain natural bent for mathematics allowed him to do, th
us becoming the closest thing Angelos possessed to a colleague, without in the least comprehending exactly what the other could possibly be driving toward. As he commented warily to Vordran, “It’s a good bit like playing blindman’s buff, where your eyes are covered and you’re spun around until you can’t tell where you’re facing, or which way anything is. I don’t know what on earth the man has in mind.”

  Much to his surprise, the older man answered him slowly and thoughtfully, saying, “Well, many of the people he quotes to you share an interest in wireless communication. Who knows—he may yet have you talking to people in Africa or China, this time next year. If you know anyone there, that is to say,” and he made the little half-hiccough sound that qualified as a chuckle with Vordran.

  Scheuch gave a weary shrug, spreading his hands, as he found himself doing more and more when asked about Angelos’s behavior. “That could be what he’s after, for all of me—as much time as I’ve spent with the fellow, I confess I haven’t the least idea.” Turning away, he added, “I do sometimes fancy I hear voices in his rooms, you know. Through the door, when I’m passing.”

  “Voices?” Vordran had a longer attention span than Griffith. “What sort of voices?”

  “Pieces of voices,” Scheuch answered vaguely. “Snatches, phrases . . . probably not voices at all, just Angelos talking to himself, the way he does.” Vordran stood looking after him for some while, rubbing his chin.

  The winter passed. The snow melted, leaving the city gutters running with soiled water; hawthorn and horse chestnut trees began to bloom in Victoria Park, and bluebells cautiously replaced the snowdrops of Highgate. The women of London began to be seen in the filmy headscarves and baggy iridescent pantaloons that had become the highest style since Princess Maude had worn them to a state dinner in Prince Selim Ali’s honor. Griffith was fully employed at Simpson’s once more, while the Bishopsgate firm where Vordran would never be a clerk bustled with new clients suing their families. Scheuch spent most days at the bank on his feet, jovial and patient as ever as he handled other people’s money and tended the firm’s shining brass calculators. London—at least the London they three knew—was London again.