Ghosts by Gaslight (19 page)

“I will ask Mr. Beecham this morning,” said Pinkney, “but I dare say he will be entirely happy with the idea.”

I
T WAS NEAR
a fortnight before Dravitt was to come. Smoll proceeded towards the day mazed with terror. Dravitt must not see the dream-lady, he knew that much. He
certainly
must not be forced to take her beads. But even if Smoll took them himself, as usual, how could he save Drav from being terrified by the whole transaction, by the mere sight of the woman, by her voice—now foggy, now sharp and clear—by her urgent attentions?

In a bid to be moved from the attic room he revealed his wounds one morning to Cook. “Gracious!” she cried. “How long have you gone about like this? Look at the boy, Pinkney! What are these? Have you seen anything like them?” And they turned Smoll about and exclaimed some more, the pair of them.

But all they did was smother the lesions with a strong-smelling grease that Cook mixed up, that everyone remarked on and made faces at when Smoll was near—everyone but the dream-lady, who only went at him with her customary combination of impatience and flattery.
It suits you,
she said just the same, as the beads burned on Smoll’s slippery chest, and the attic room might have been suspended from a hot air balloon miles above the Beecham house, or might be a wind-whipped hut out on the Arctic ice, for all the help he could expect from beyond its walls.

The night before Dravitt was due, Cook made Smoll bathe, his own small personal bath so that he would not infect anyone with his disease, if infectious he was. He sank back disconsolate in the stinging, soothing water, behind the screen in the kitchen.
Don’t rub at them; just soak,
Cook had said, and so he soaked, staring up at the ceiling and listening to Cook come and go, and others who must be explained to, about Smoll and his condition, and his coming brother.
We will bandage you up, the night he’s here,
Cook had said,
and put clean sheets on your bed, so’s he doesn’t catch it. We don’t want to send him down Caunterbury covered in bibulous plague, do we? Won’t impress his new master.

Soggy warm from bathing and freshly anointed with the foul salve, Smoll tottered upward through the cold house, carrying his candle and the wrapped hot-brick for his bed. He would meet Dravitt at the coach tomorrow afternoon; Drav would be looking out for him, excited, perhaps a little frightened that Smoll would not be there; when he saw Smoll he would beam, all relief and pleasure at having a companion in his adventure. He would be looking to Smoll for advice, for explanation. He knew nothing of the world, Dravitt, and he was very small (though he would have grown some since Smoll last saw him in the summer); he was easily cowed.

Smoll stood on the steep wooden steps, halfway through the floor into his room, clutching his brick and candle there on the threshold of his exile. The very air felt different here; the top half of him was tainted with its solitude and horror, while his legs stood in a freer, kindlier atmosphere below. He summoned his energies and stepped up wholly into the attic and went to the bed and put down the candle and tucked the hot-brick under the blankets. Then he came back and closed the door in the floor, shutting himself in, untethering himself from the safety of Beecham’s household. He climbed into bed, the bed that Dravitt would be sharing tomorrow. He blew out the candle with a frosty breath and hugged the hot-brick to his stomach, and he wept a little for Dravitt, for Dravitt’s innocence (which once he himself had shared), and for the distance he was from home and Biss and Ma, and for his own want of courage.

He was dozing when the attic announced the dream-lady’s imminence, its cold air curdling, hostile, its space become a little theatre where only unpleasant things might play out. Then she rustled at him out of the darkness, the hourglass waist of her, the cocked featureless head. She thrust at him her handfuls of gleam:
Take it.
Smoll flattened to the wall as always, without deciding to; the fear never lessened, however well he knew her, however often she uttered the same words. There was something distressing, indeed, in their repetition, in the mechanical nature of her performance, the fact that she could be neither paused nor halted.

The necklace shone in the darkness.
What would I do with it, for heaven’s sake?
hissed the rustling lady, and Smoll’s flesh crept from her touch, and his salved wounds winced and pained. His hands unstuck themselves from the wall as they always did, because he was obedient, and because she would go away if he obeyed, and the most important thing in the world was that she go away.

He had thought he had no room, when the woman was there, for considering or scheming, for outwitting her. She took him over, he had thought, and his whole being underwent her visitation, was ground through it like meat through Cook’s great dark mincing machine down in the kitchen.

But tonight he found that he did have an extra thought spare, a small pocket in his mind where ruled, unafraid because unaware, his younger brother—not Dravitt as he would be now, skinny and bright faced and ready to start his new life apprenticing, but Dravitt when he was small and round and red curled, a plaything for Smollett and his sisters; the sleep-sodden Dravitt whom Smollett had carried home after the midsummer bonfire; the Dravitt who had run stout and screaming with laughter, Biss and Clara pursuing him, towards Smollett, whose one hand was tip-fingered on the oak that was Home for this game, whose other reached out to Drav, so that he might reach safety sooner.

The beads began to rattle, from the lady’s hands to Smoll’s, and to weigh on his palms, fall over his fingers. In the cold light of the winter moon pouring through the attic window each bead was vaguely its own color, the ghostly ivory, the implacable jet, the flecked transparent warmth-that-was-not-warm of the amber. They piled and slid on Smoll’s palms; the woman’s white hands were emptying; her breath from the other time blew warm, sour and intent on his forehead. He had only these few moments while she poured, while she reached through from her time to his; once the last bead left her grasp, he would be helpless against her returning tomorrow and including his brother in her terrors.

“No.” Smoll’s voice was small, ineffectual. No matter. The voice it was uttered in did not matter.

He grasped a bead and sprang with it up from his bed. He pushed his arms through from his time into hers, forced his head into the cold syrup of the past. “No,” he said to the woman’s clear, bright-eyed face, to her alarm, to the smell of the past, to the smell that filled the past house of an old, gone meal, part of it burnt. Against the force of her will and her magic, with all his small strength he pushed the loop of beads back through the thick air and over her head.

He forced it down around her neck. Her face, aghast, almost touched his. “Mistress!” cried Smoll into the syrup, dropping to the bed again, dragging on the necklace, all but swinging from it. “Come quickly! She has your necklace, your lock—”

Her hand stopped his cry. It was not a soft lady’s hand; it was worked to leather, cold and strong and real, and smelled of laundry soap. She took him by the mouth and by his nightshirted ribs, and hissing she began to push him out of her time, her eyes wild, her eyes
afraid
as he had never seen them. He saw the enormity of what he was doing, the disgrace and punishment it would entail for her, not a ghost-woman or a dream-woman at all but an ordinary servant like himself, whose good name in her household was the only wealth that she had in the world. Still he fought to stay, to make his voice heard in the house of her time, to make as much noise there as he could, whether words or no. He yammered behind her hand; he threw himself about to loosen her grip on his mouth, and let out more noise.

Slowly her strength succeeded against his—but he had not meant to conquer, only to delay her, only to keep her fighting and in possession of the necklace until the other person, the maker of the dream-footfalls, reached the top of the stairs and entered. He listened for the mistress through the strain and pain and noise of the struggle. His ears were right at the border between the two times now, and all sounds were warped there, the dream-lady’s grunts compressed into quacks, her panting concertina’d to weirdly musical whistles. The knocking on the attic door he heard as thunder; the mistress’s voice was a god’s calling across a breadth of sky.

And then as the doorknob rumbled in its turning, the servant-woman pushed Smoll wholly through the divide, the magicked aperture between the times, back into his rightful night. As she and her era fell away, as she shrank, she tore the necklace off and flung it after him. Soundlessly it splashed against the intervening time as against a window between herself and Smoll. She watched in dismay as it fell, and the door opened behind her no bigger than a playing card now, and the dark opening swallowed up woman and beads and attic and all.

The two times snapped apart to their proper distances; Smoll felt the event of that, in his ears and in the punching of air into his throat and lungs. Somewhere between sprawled and sitting, he stared from his rumpled bed, out into a darkness utterly free of reverberations. No dread sang there, and no historical glee resounded. No weight sat bead by bead around his neck or ached against his breastbone. There was only Smoll in his eyrie, the odor of Cook’s salve, warm from his exertions, clouding up from the neck of his nightshirt, the light of the moon pouring down on him from the window.

Afterword to
“The Proving of Smollett Standforth”

“The Proving of Smollett Standforth” started out as a more alt-history, regularly steampunkish story about an upper-middle-class boy and his sister. The story was told from her point of view, and the boy was brought near to death by the ghost’s visitations, but the sister was the one who vanquished the evil amber-necklace-bearing ghost-chambermaid in the end. That version had an extra romance, a seaside holiday, many tea palaces and decorative floral arrangements throughout, but it always felt to me as if I was playing around with these pretty things slightly to one side of the real story.

Coming back to Smollett, I realized that the engine of the story was my own memories of lying in bed as a child imagining malign beings creeping towards me in the dark, while everyone else in the house slept. The terrible solitude of this haunting and the fact that Smollett can’t bring himself to confide in anyone are what works for me. So in the end I stripped away all the interesting interior decoration (and even the gaslight—the poor boy has to use a candle!)
and
the sympathetic sister and made Smollett the hero of his own story.

—M
ARGO
L
ANAGAN

Sean Williams

Number one
New York Times–
bestselling author Sean Williams has been called “the premier Australian speculative fiction writer of the age,” the “Emperor of Sci-Fi,” and the “King of Chameleons” for the diversity of his output, which spans fantasy, science fiction, horror, and even the odd poem. He has published thirty-five novels and seventy-five short stories. These include works for adults (Philip K. Dick Award–nominated
Saturn Returns,
Ditmar and Aurealis Award–winning
The Crooked Letter),
young adults (Locus-recommended
The Storm Weaver & the Sand)
and children (multiple award nominee
The Changeling,
and the
Troubletwister
series cowritten with Garth Nix). He lives with his wife and family in the dry, flat lands of South Australia.

S
EAN
W
ILLIAMS
The Jade Woman of the Luminous Star

Y
OU MUST GET
me out of here, Michaels. I have important work to do.”

Those were the first words uttered by Hugh Gordon in my presence. I remember them clearly. On the one hand, I was relieved that he was willing to acknowledge me as a fellow professional, for a man of his standing, even in his dire circumstances, might have been tempted to dismiss me as a physician of no great renown, as in fact I am (and would very much like to return to being, Inspector Berkeley, once you have read this deposition). On the other hand, he seemed genuinely convinced that I could effect his release.

When I declared that this was quite impossible, he became irritable and aggressive. He accused me of gloating, of malpractice, even of spying. The last is outlandish, of course, but might have seemed plausible before his arrest. You are no doubt aware of his reputation—as a scientist, I mean. His advances in aeronautical engineering have been considerable; many have even been adopted by the Ministry of Calculation for employment throughout the Empire. Now that his laboratory has been razed, is it too ghoulish to imagine that someone might want to pick his brains for knowledge the gallows might otherwise claim?

Eventually, he took me at my word. He had no alternative, and I remember thinking that there was no predicament too alien for a keen intellect to confront. I admired the power of his mind, you see, even under such duress. I had not yet glimpsed the depths of his delusion—or of his cunning, depending on your interpretation of subsequent events.

He warned me.

“You will think me certifiable, Michaels, if I tell you the truth. I despaired too, at first, and with good reason: this vile place, with its loathsome inmates and equally loathsome porters, and all that preceded it . . . But then I wondered. Could it possibly be that she sent me here deliberately? You see, I felt something intangible when the door you just came through slammed shut behind me, something profound beyond words. Was this the ‘precipice of light’ Pattinattar wrote of nine hundred years ago? Had I chanced upon the secret of the ancients, which I must find anew or never see her again?”