Ghosts by Gaslight (21 page)

When dawn arrived, the carafe was empty and I was utterly exhausted. The maidservant found me asleep at my drafting table with my head on my arms when she knocked gently at the locked door to see if I required breakfast.

I roused myself and told her that, yes, I would require something even heartier than normal to get the day properly under way. I did not reveal to her that my quest had come to nothing. I was, if anything, more mystified than ever. After a nearly sleepless night, I now faced a long day of research, and questions from Margaret that I was no nearer to answering.

When I returned to the desk, what I saw sent all thoughts of food to the four winds.

Daubed in thick ink across my careful notes was a symbol I had seen before, but which I had not drawn. It was a sign used by alchemists of the fourteenth century to capture the union of the sexes.

Don’t scowl at me, Michaels. I’m not being unnecessarily prurient. One must describe what one sees: that is the most important rule of science, particularly if one has broken it already that week!

This crude drawing, this arcane symbol, was the first confirmed, physical manifestation of the creature that was to change my life forever.

You must imagine my wary excitement upon this discovery. I was not frightened by the phenomenon itself, but I very much feared being taken for a fool, and so I conducted a thorough search of the desk and its surroundings, the door and its lock, even the windows, tightly sealed against the night’s chill, lest someone had waited until I slept to deliver this cryptic sigil. I found nothing to suggest that it was anything other than an anomaly; and, perhaps, a message from beyond.

Breakfast arrived, with Margaret hard on its heels. I hid the defaced sheet under the rest of my notes and told no one about it. Why? Well, instinct played a part. Margaret was unsettled enough; I didn’t want her crying the house down, demanding exorcisms or séances or whatever is the latest fad in London these days. And we had lost enough staff already. Better, I told myself, to keep this development to myself for the time being, until I was absolutely certain of its import.

I know what you must be thinking: I was tired and had been reading alchemical texts all night. The sherry, too, might have played a part. It is only natural for you to assume that I had doodled the symbol myself in some deep hypnagogic state and woken unaware that I was its author. That is in fact the complete reverse of the reality. The symbol appeared
because
I was reading the texts. The hand that so crudely crafted it was drawn to me for this very reason.

Margaret was not persuaded by my assurances that nothing untoward had occurred that night, but the events of the day went some way toward reinforcing the white lie. As though the production of the drawing had calmed our so-called haunting, all further incidents were greatly reduced in magnitude. Nothing happened that could not be attributed to natural causes, and I was careful to ensure that calm prevailed.

That night, to be certain I was not interrupted, I slipped a dose of chloral into Margaret’s evening cocoa. When at last she was breathing peacefully, I returned to the laboratory, intending to open communication with our provocative ghost.

You see, several things had occurred to me. The ghost knew I was there: why else would it have placed that symbol directly in front of me, where I was certain to see it? That it had waited until I was asleep suggested that it had divined my purpose. Furthermore, it understood what I was reading, or at least recognized like symbols on the pages before me. All this spoke strongly of intelligence, so making contact with it was not only possible but desirable. If replicable, the exchange might dwarf all my other achievements to date.

I had acquired numerous blank sheets of paper, upon which I reproduced other alchemical symbols and wrote messages in several different languages, including Archaic Chinese. I placed them all about the laboratory, and waited. For several hours, nothing happened. I reread
The Writings of the Hidden Chamber
recovered from the tomb of Tuthmosis III in Luxor, which talks of the gates and ways of the gods, and I revisited the teachings of the Indian saint Bogar, who boasted that he could travel freely throughout the three worlds by means of astral projection. I began to grow sleepy, but drank cup after cup of coffee to ensure I did not succumb. If my alchemically inclined phantasm was to put in an appearance, I would be awake to welcome it.

At shortly after four in the morning, I heard footsteps approaching me across the floor of the laboratory. I sat up, but saw no one. My skin tingled. The hair on the back of my hands and neck stood to attention. I smelt something—the faintest hint of another person near me—and felt a puff of air against my cheek

“You are close,” whispered a voice into my ear, “so very close.”

I leapt to my feet, filled with excitement and atavistic dread. I was alone in the laboratory, yet someone was speaking to me. An invisible being, a spirit—a ghost, why not? We don’t have words for such an experience. It is something that calculating machines could not calculate, that analytical engines could not analyze—yet I was experiencing it. I alone!

I flailed about, vainly seeking substance in the empty air. The ghost laughed, as though at the clumsy efforts of a child. One of my hasty pictograms fluttered into the air, and I caught it, crushing it in my fist. I felt taunted, belittled. Angrily, I demanded that the ghost reveal itself to me at once.

“I cannot,” said that faint whisper in my ear. “You must wait, Doctor Gordon.”

“How long?”

“One more night, and then the congress of our worlds will be complete. Will you be here to greet me?”

“Yes,” I said, without hesitation. Who would not? “I will be here.”

“Bring no one else,” the teasing spirit said, and fell silent. She said nothing more that night, and I felt no further sign of her presence.

Yes, I said “she.” The creature haunting my laboratory was plainly a woman, a woman of some intelligence and spirit by the sound of her, although her accent was unfamiliar. There was none of the breathless, echoing death rattles the writers of popular fiction would have us imagine. She clearly was not that kind of ghost.

Naturally, after the encounter, I could not sleep, and I spent the rest of that night and the following day in a fever of anticipation. Margaret was worried. She could sense that something had inflamed my intellectual passion, yet she saw my regular work go ignored. I paced about the laboratory, unwilling to leave, responding only vaguely to her entreaties, barely eating or drinking. I must have seemed like a man possessed; it is a wonder she didn’t accuse me of this very thing. A more credulous mind might have wondered if I had somehow fallen under the ghost’s spell. Not Margaret. She understood my moods as well as I understood hers. She knew when I had been seized by the power of an idea.

But what, really, did I have? Little that would have impressed the overly critical gentlemen of the Royal Institution, those who had jeered and catcalled at my latest presentation. I needed far more if I was to declare a breakthrough of such magnitude—a breaking through, indeed, between different planes of existence. I didn’t for a moment contemplate secreting an observer to witness what might follow that night. If nothing occurred, I would be an instant laughingstock. I needed more evidence before even considering public engagement.

I suppose I am a laughingstock now, Michaels. I expect people whisper terrible things about me and my behavior—that my mind gave way before the derision of my peers and I killed my wife in a moment of mania. If I had braved the possibility of further humiliation, this story might have had a very different conclusion, though I suspect that my visitor would easily have detected an observer and disappeared for good. The truth would have been denied me, and I would forever have wondered what I might have lost.

Again, I dosed poor Margaret so she would not be disturbed. Again, I sealed myself into the laboratory, armed with nothing but my books and my wits. Again, I endured hours of uncertainty before the stillness of the night was broken. Again, I started, but this time not at any mere wisp of air or whispering voice.

I jumped because right in front of me, from absolutely nowhere, appeared the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Not as a ghost or phantasm. There was nothing ectoplasmic about this visitation. She was as real as you or me.

Describe her? I cannot do her justice. She was Oriental, I thought at first, with full lips and dark eyes, and hair so brown it was almost black. The cut of her tresses was short but finely styled, not like a man’s, and her ears were pierced with gold. She was dressed in a way you would find most immodest, I am sure, in some kind of silken uniform, with trousers instead of a dress, a high collar, and gloves; all deep purples and greens, very harsh to my eye. Her smell was rich and tropical, like Amazonian flowers. She looked curiously about her, nodding as though finding her surroundings familiar, before she turned to me.

When she spoke, I knew that she was the being who had visited the night before. I will hear that voice the rest of my days.

“Hello, Doctor Gordon,” she said. “My name is Abiha, and I have been looking for you.”

A
T THIS POINT
in his tale, Doctor Gordon became too distraught to speak. He begged my indulgence, and I allowed him a moment or two to gather himself. When it became clear that his distress was mounting, not receding, I offered him a calmative draft, which he accepted.

“Don’t knock me out, though, will you?” he asked me. “I must finish what I have begun.”

I left the cell and returned some minutes later with a sedative of my own concoction. He drained the vial readily enough. Before long, he grew calm again and his limbs lost some of the restless energy that had made listening to him an exhausting experience. I felt that he was nearing the crisis at the heart of his story, and that he knew, at some level of his being, that to continue would be to confront the true depths of his illness.

I was not disappointed.

“Abiha stayed for one hour,” Gordon told me. “She assured me that she was not a spirit from beyond the grave, and that she was no more or less human than I. She said that she had journeyed to our world from another, one called Surobia, although that was not the place of her birth. That was yet another world, Arora, which she had left more than a year ago—to explore, she said, like some female Livingstone. These other worlds she spoke of are not transcendental dimensions or Heaven’s empty halls, apparently. They orbit the sun as the earth does, home to animals and plants and civilizations like ours. Sometimes they approach one another, and for periods lasting around a fortnight, which Abiha described as ‘congress,’ those few individuals who have the trick of it can make the crossing.

“Yes, Michaels, raise your eyebrows. I won’t deny I did the same at first. Where are these worlds, exactly? If they were as real as she claimed, would we not see them through our telescopes and feel their effects in our world’s stately progression about the sun? But as she talked, I remembered the alchemists of old and their insistence that this world was not the only one of human experience. I thought of the ice ages and the various other cataclysms that have befallen our changeable Earth. What if there truly are such worlds in a reality alongside ours, orbiting a sun that exists in all realities? What if the ancients were right and we moderns so very, very wrong?

“Take Philolaus. He imagined a Central Fire that bright Sol orbited, and about which another Earth, the Antichthon, also circled, forever hidden from us. Then there are the levels and spheres of Cabalism, all reaching out from a central, fiery point. What about the Heart of the Sun in Uthman ibn Suwaid’s
Turba Philosophorum
? Or Hermes Trismegistus’s Utmost Body, that alchemists could fly to with the Philosopher’s Stone?”

I cut across his lecture—almost a sermon, such was the intensity with which he spoke—to convey my surprise that a man of science could place any faith at all in the ravings of lunatics and mystics. Hadn’t their theories been proven wrong centuries ago, or exposed as the carefully encoded ceremonies of a depraved cult of sensualists?

“Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist,” Gordon responded. “Did you know that? The man who gave us calculus and the laws of gravitation, perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived—he would scoff at your skepticism, sir, and with good reason, I think.

“And as for the allegation of copulation, well—all the alchemists I’ve spoken of believed in the union of the sexes and the power it unleashes, so perhaps there is something to that too. Take
Asclepius,
or
Kulacudamani Tantra
and the Realized Ones of the tantric arts, or
The Yellow Emperor’s Canon of the Nine-Vessel Spiritual Elixir
—look them up yourself if you don’t believe me!”

Needless to say, Inspector Berkeley, I have not done so. I am no prude, but I have no use for the ravings of charlatans. I was, however, keenly aware of the word
congress
in the context of Doctor Gordon’s narration, and the close relation between its appearance and that of the mysterious other woman. His description of her spoke volumes, as did his confusion of intellect with passion, and his willingness to drug his wife in order to conduct an illicit nocturnal rendezvous in his laboratory. It seemed clear to me, then, what dark truth his own mind could not yet bear to look at directly.

I gave him a moment to compose himself, then asked that he tell me all that had transpired between him and the nocturnal, exotic Abiha.

AS BEST
I can remember (he said) this is it.

“We all of us, Doctor Gordon, have places of significance,” she said. “Mine are the workshops of men like you, great thinkers who propel our species out of the darkness of ignorance and into the light of the intellect. I am drawn to such places and to the work performed there. That is why I have come to you. I felt the power of your experiments rippling out across the Helioverse, calling me to you.