Ghosts by Gaslight (2 page)

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

—J
ACK
D
ANN AND
N
ICK
G
EVERS

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.

J
AMES
M
ORROW
The Iron Shroud

J
ONATHAN
H
OBBWRIGHT
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.

I
T IS
A
T
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?”

Cracking the spine of the Baron’s journal, Jonathan retrieves an envelope containing the promised bank notes and train tickets. “I must confess, Countess, I’m perplexed by your presumption.” He glances toward the grave, noting that the crater is now sealed. The mourners linger beside the mound, each locked in contemplations doubtless ranging from cherished memories of Dr. Wohlmeth to wonderment over who among them will next feel the Reaper’s scythe to curiosity concerning the location of the nearest public house. “Does it not occur to you that I may have better things to do with my time than extirpating your son’s transgressions?”

By way of reply, the Countess produces from her sack a tinted daguerreotype of a young woman. “I am not the only one to experience remorse over Gustav’s imprudence. My granddaughter Lotte is also in pain, tormented by her failure to warn her father away from his project. Having recently extricated herself from an ill-advised engagement, she is presently in residence at the castle. The thought of meeting the renowned Dr. Hobbwright has fired her with an anticipation bordering on exhilaration.”

J
ONATHAN SPENDS THE
remainder of the afternoon in the Queen’s Lane Coffee-House, perusing the Baron’s confession. Shortly after four o’clock, he finishes reading the last entry, then slams the volume closed. If this fantastic chronicle can be believed, then the evil that Gustav Nachtstein perpetrated was of so plenary an intensity as to demand his immediate intervention.

He will go to the Black Forest, bearing a tuning fork and collateral voltaic piles. He will redeem the damned souls of Castle Kralkovnik. But even if their plight had not stirred Jonathan, the case would still entail two puissant facts: £1,000 is the precise sum by which a competent vibratologist might continue Dr. Wohlmeth’s work on a scale befitting its worth, and never in his life has Jonathan beheld a creature so lovely as Fräulein Lotte Nachtstein.

15 March 1868

After many arduous years of research into the dubious science of spiritualism, I have reached six conclusions concerning so-called ghosts.

1. There is no great beyond—no stable realm where carefree phantoms gambol while awaiting communiqués from turban-topped clairvoyants sitting in candlelit parlors surrounded by the dearly departed’s loved ones. Show me a medium, and I’ll show you a mountebank. Give me a filament of ectoplasm, and I’ll return a strand of taffy.

2. There is life after death.

3. Once a specter has elected to vacate its fleshly premises, no ordinary barrier of stone or metal will impede its journey. A willful phantom can easily escape a Pharaoh’s tomb, a potentate’s mausoleum, or a lead casket buried six feet underground.

4. With each passing instant, yet another quantum of a specter’s incorporeal substance scatters in all directions. Once dissipated, a ghost can never reassemble itself. The post-mortem condition is evanescent in the extreme, not to be envied by anyone possessing an ounce of joie de vivre.

5. Despite the radical discontinuity between the two planes, a specter may, under certain rare circumstances, access the material world prior to total dissolution—hence the occasional credible account of a ghost performing a boon for the living. A deceased child places her favorite doll on her mother’s dresser. A departed suitor posts a letter declaring eternal devotion to his beloved. A phantom dog barks one last time, warning his master away from a bridge on the point of collapse.

6. In theory a competent scientist should be able at the moment of death to encapsulate a person’s spectral shade in some spiritually impermeable substance, thus canceling the dissipation process and creating a kind of immortal soul. The question I intend to explore may be framed as follows. Do the laws of nature permit the synthesis of an alloy so dense as to trap an emergent ghost, yet sufficiently pliant that the creature will be free to move about?

17 May 1868

For the past two months I have not left my laboratory. I am surrounded by the music of science: burbling flasks, bubbling retorts, moaning generators, humming rectifiers. Von Helmholtz, Mendeleyev, and the rest—my alleged peers—will doubtless aver that my quest partakes more of a discredited alchemy than a tenable chemistry. When I go to publish my results, they’ll insist with a sneer, I would do better submitting the paper to the Proceedings of the Paracelsus Society than to the Cambridge Journal of Molecularism. Let the intellectual midgets have their fun with me. Let the ignoramuses scoff. Where angels fear to tread, Baron Nachtstein rushes in—and one day the dead will extol him for it.

If all goes well, by this time tomorrow I shall be holding in my hand a lump of the vital material. I intend to call it bezalelite, in honor of Judah Löew ben Bezalel, the medieval rabbi from Prague who fashioned a man of clay, giving the creature life by incising on its brow the Hebrew word Emeth—that is, truth.

Although Judah Löew’s golem was a faithful servant and protector of the ghetto, the rabbi was naturally obliged to prevent it from working on the Sabbath, a simple matter of effacing the first letter of Emeth, the Aleph, leaving Mem and Taw, characters that spell Meth—death. But one fateful Friday evening Löew forgot to disable his brainchild. In consequence of this inadvertent sacrilege, the golem ran amok all day Saturday, and so, come Sunday, the heartsick rabbi dutifully ground the thing to dust.