Ghosts by Gaslight (10 page)

Scheuch looked away from both Angelos and the
hodjas,
wrapping his arms around his own shoulders. Griffith started to speak and then stopped. Mr. Emanetoglu could not take his eyes from Angelos. To his own considerable surprise, his heart hurt for the Englishman in that moment, as it would have hurt for Ekrem.
Hodja
Cenghiz continued, “But
that
voice—the voice of the Sorrowheart—that voice your friend will never stop hearing. It is not just, for he surely meant no harm. But Allah’s justice is not ours.”
Hodja
Cenghiz cleared his throat. “For what it is worth, which is nothing, I am sad for you, Mr. Angelos.”

Griffith was already dozing off again, and Vordran’s eyes had turned as unfocused as when he first listened to Angelos’s stethoscope. Scheuch seemed to be the only person reacting to the reality of what Angelos had just been told. He said loudly, “I say, you can’t do that! Set that voice trailing him everywhere—haunting him forever! Who do you chaps think you are, anyway?”

Neither
Hodja
Abbas nor
Hodja
Cenghiz even bothered to look at him, so Mr. Emanetoglu plucked up his courage and intervened, saying sternly and earnestly, “Mr. Scheuch, these gentlemen are scholars, healers—even what you would call magistrates, when necessary. Surely you must be at peace with their judgment.”

“No, I mustn’t be at bloody peace with a damned thing,” Scheuch mocked him. “And you’re a bloody hypocrite for saying so, Emanetoggle.” He had never gotten closer than that to the proper pronunciation. “You heard him say it—it’s not
right,
and you all buggering know it! Like Job in the bloody Bible, and I never understood that story either, if you want to know. How you can stand there and say
be at peace
. . .”

He was very tired, and he ran out of words and rage at more or less the same time. Mr. Emanetoglu, looking on heartsick, saw Vordran puzzled and irritated, and Griffith not entirely among those present. Angelos, of them all, remained as strangely calm as though he were opening a letter that promised to be interesting. He said, “Well. Don’t exactly see myself staying on in Geraldine Row, I suppose.”

Hodja
Cenghiz coughed and cleared his throat. “Mr. Angelos, I am afraid that you cannot really stay anywhere, not for long. The Sorrowheart, the deepest pain of the world, has chosen to speak to you, and wherever you go it will follow—wherever you rest, those near you will hear its voice and feel its grief. It will spread like a marsh under a poorly drained road, growing steadily deeper and wider, and sucking everything—everything—down into it on every side.” His own voice was very nearly imploring. “Do you understand, Mr. Angelos? Please, do you understand me now?”

“I understand you.” Angelos rocked on his heels and ran a hand through his hair.
Such ordinary gestures,
Mr. Emanetoglu marveled dazedly,
for someone who has just had his life shattered, undeservedly. Could I behave so? I wonder.
Angelos said, “Well, if you will excuse me, I’ll need, as the phrase has it, to get my affairs in order. I can be gone by tomorrow night.” Mr. Emanetoglu saw nothing but affable flatness in his expression.

The
hodjas
consulted, the elder stooping like a hawk to mutter in the younger man’s ear.
Hodja
Cenghiz said, “
Hodja
Abbas will speak to the other voices in the house and tell them to be silent. It will take some little while.”

“By all means. Fumigate the baseboards to your hearts’ content.” Angelos bowed formally to the two old men. “I will be at Christ’s, seeing whether I can possibly pry some of my fees out of their grasp, since I will clearly not be attending classes this term.” He turned to Mr. Emanetoglu, holding out an envelope. “My usual payment.”

Mr. Emanetoglu accepted it, shaking his head miserably. “It will be too much by half. You will not have been here the whole month.” Their eyes met, and Mr. Emanetoglu whispered, “I am sorry—I am so sorry. I should never have brought them here.”

Angelos patted his arm. “You did the best thing for everyone, sir. Even, it may well be, for me. After all, I was never much of a medical student, and I have always wanted to travel. And there will certainly always be company”—he chuckled suddenly—“and voices may be answered, spoken to as well as heard. Imagine . . .
imagine,
if I should actually strike up a conversation with the sorrowing heart of the world.” He touched Mr. Emanetoglu’s arm a second time. “Perhaps that is what I’m supposed to do, old man. Who knows?”

Behind them,
Hodja
Abbas paced back and forth in what had been Angelos’s rooms, talking to himself—as it seemed—in ponderous, rolling Turkish.
Hodja
Cenghiz followed him, step by step, writing down the words he recited on the strips of gilded paper they had brought with them from Haringey. Folding the strips according to a precise pattern, he then inserted them into various cracks in the floor and in the molding. Mr. Emanetoglu, watching, thought,
Nothing exists for us Turks unless it is written down. Even our magic has to be in writing.
He turned to say this over his shoulder, but Angelos had already left.

The night was cold and still when Angelos finally came back, well after the
hodjas
and Mr. Emanetoglu were gone, and Scheuch, Vordran and Griffith long abed. The only voice he heard was the one he knew, the one that continued and continued: wordlessly, incomprehensibly, pounding itself through his skull like a blazing nail. He stood and listened for a long while, before he finally said aloud, “We will be friends, you and I. There’s plenty of time for us to understand one another.” He went to bed then, and slept, if not well and deeply, at least without dreams.

Oddly, it was Griffith who was the most help in packing his belongings the next day. Scheuch, being as burly as a navvy, carried most of his bags and boxes to the hired wagon waiting in the street; but Griffith actually quarreled with him for the privilege. He appeared on the edge of telling Angelos the full story behind his failure to return to Oxford after the war, but they were interrupted by Vordran’s farewell, which was awkwardly emotional and vaguely accusatory at the same time. Angelos never did learn the truth of Griffith’s Balliol days, but he rather suspected that there had been a monkey involved.

Scheuch never said goodbye. He simply shook hands with Angelos, handed him the original envelope Angelos had given Mr. Emanetoglu the day before—it contained the same cheque, as well, and a short message from the Turk—growled, “I believe you know where I live,” and walked away. Angelos got up beside the driver, said to someone the driver could not see, “If you don’t care for the new digs, we won’t be there long,” and the cart rumbled away out of Russell Square.

None of his former housemates ever saw Angelos again. Mr. Emanetoglu’s brother Ismail quickly found a tenant to replace him, and he jogged along as well with the others as Angelos ever had. Scheuch eventually married and went to work in a Bristol branch of his London bank, while Vordran was eventually and unwillingly pensioned off from the Bishopsgate law firm where he was never a clerk. Griffith moved back to Oxford, went mad so genteelly that no one recognized it for quite some while, and ended his days in Bensham, as Angelos had feared for himself. Russell Square no longer played host to constant shadowy voices seeping down Geraldine Row—most especially not that
one
which had set children and their cowering parents running futilely indoors with their hands over their ears. There were, over time, legends of similar occurrences in Bayswater, Clerkenwell and Holborn; but each of those faded with the passing months and years of the new century, as happened even with that awful business up in Durham, so there you are.

Afterword to
“Music, When Soft Voices Die”

Not having seen him for more than fifty years, I don’t know where Ismail Turksen is today. But should he ever chance to read this story I hope he’ll understand my gratitude.

We were both freshmen at the University of Pittsburgh in 1955, and my recollection is that, outside of my roommate, Ismail was the first friend I ever made there. He was also the first and only Turk I’ve ever known at all well, and certainly the first Muslim. I remember him as dark and slim and funny, with a great sudden laugh that contrasted intriguingly with his dry, deadpan sense of humor. Ismail found America a reliably constant source of amusement.

What I know of Turkish history and folklore, I know almost entirely from Ismail. We’d sit in the Student Union cafeteria, or go for long walks along Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue on mild spring evenings, and he’d recount the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, and what Tsar Nicholas I meant by calling Turkey “the sick man of Europe.” I remember that we traded our grandmothers’ superstitions and household magics, and discussed the similarities and differences between Bronx rabbis and Istanbul hodjas. I could be wrong, but I think he knew at least as much about rabbinical scholarship as I did. Jews have been in Turkey for a very long time.

When I finally sat down to write “Music, When Soft Voices Die,” after stalling as much as possible (I knew next to nothing of the steampunk genre and was truly terrified of attempting such a story), those old Pittsburgh chats with Ismail began to come back to me: first by slow degrees, and then with a growing rush. Desperation will do that. Mr. Emanetoglu isn’t anything like Ismail as I remember him, but I do hope that Ismail might have recognized him and perhaps approved.

—P
ETER
S. B
EAGLE

Terry Dowling

Terry Dowling is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers of the fantastic. He has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by
Locus
magazine and “Australia’s premier writer of dark fantasy” by
All Hallows
. His collection
Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear
won the 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection, earned a starred review in
Publishers Weekly,
and is regarded as “one of the best recent collections of contemporary horror” by the American Library Association. The acclaimed
Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
series featured more horror stories by Terry in its twenty-one-year run than by any other writer.

Dowling’s award-winning horror collections are
An Intimate Knowledge of the Night
and
Blackwater Days,
while his most recent titles are
Rynemonn,
Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder,
and his debut novel,
Clowns at Midnight,
which London’s
Guardian
newspaper called “an exceptional work that bears comparison to John Fowles’s
The Magus
.” Major interviews with Terry conducted by
Exotic Gothic
editor Danel Olson can be found in
The New York Review of Science Fiction
and in
Cemetery Dance Magazine
. Terry’s home page can be found at
www.terrydowling.com.

T
ERRY
D
OWLING
The Shaddowwes Box

O
N THE FOURTH
night the dream remained the same: our train ran along the banks of the Nile, its locomotive fired by the mummies of cats and kings. There was Akhmet, yet again, insisting that it was true, leaning forward, bright-eyed, gesturing wildly in our hard-won compartment. A new tomb-pit, shallow but vast, had been unearthed in the sands south of Cairo, he was telling me as if he never had before, hundreds of mummified cats to one side, dozens of human pauper mummies to the other.

“There had to be kings among them, Mr. Salteri,” Akhmet said, eyes flashing with the fine joke of it, exactly as they had on the momentous day itself six years earlier when I had made the fateful journey to the Wadi Hatas. “It’s what the reinterment commissions did back in the New Kingdom. They feared looters, professional
tombaroli
such as you, so they moved the royal mummies, hid them. This field had a small precinct to the west. Probably special mummies there, possibly nobles, queens, even kings! But so many mummies. Too many, you understand? What to do? Sell to the Americans? They pay well and take everything, but there is no time. The excavation supervisors search for amulets, jewelry, then dispose of the remains with the railway factors before the authorities arrive. Everything goes into the fireboxes. Whoosh! We ride on the burning dead.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said, those words again, then as now, largely because Akhmet wanted me to, and once again fancying our own late great Queen Victoria, or even the recently crowned King, giving their all like this, blazing away to help complete the run south from Saqqara.

“Very common now, Mr. Salteri. The
moumia
burn like sticks. It’s the pitch.”

“Akhmet, Mr. Minchin is aboard, you say?”

“Of course, effendi. Even now he will be making his way here. The carriages are crowded. A few moments more.”

And as if the words were indeed a cue, the door opened and Charles Minchin eased into the compartment, short and florid, grandly moustachioed, looking impossibly crisp in his suntans and solar topee.

In the dream I stood, now as then, allowing that any archaeologist this well turned out might be a stickler for the niceties. “Mr. Minchin, it’s a pleasure.” We shook hands.

“Lucas Salteri, the pleasure is mine. I’ve long admired your work.”

I had to control my smile. To what did he refer? My most recent
work
had been looting Etruscan tombs outside Veii and Norschia in western Italy. Before that ten years as a West End stage magician, and eight as an engineer before that. My career echoed the great Giovanni Belzoni’s in so many ways. “Our arrangement stands?”