Ghosts by Gaslight (22 page)

“No, do not speak. Listen first. You have evidently mastered the art to some degree, or I would never have found you, congress or no congress, and I see by the books you have assembled that you are treading in the footsteps of great men—and great women, too. Sex is no impediment to inspiration, as your research will have revealed to you, I hope.

“Soon our worlds will diverge once more, and I have therefore only a brief opportunity to examine your progress. I desire to know how far along the path you have come. Will you tell me? Will you hold nothing back? Knowledge shared is knowledge doubled, as we say on my world. Together we will travel much farther than apart.”

Thus she set me off into the very same presentation I gave to the Royal Institution, three days earlier. I prefaced it by describing my nightmare of a polluted world and my dream of the perfect means of transportation, at which she nodded most vigorously, her eyes alight with interest. I thought I had found the perfect audience—from whom I expected to learn much more in turn—and I roamed about the laboratory, gesticulating, and demonstrating each piece of equipment as I came to it. She followed me closely and did not interrupt, not even to ask questions about the more esoteric details of my theory.

I mistook her attention for understanding, even approval.

I did not notice her furrowed brow until my demonstration of the prototype flux duplicator, the core component of my dream transport system, concluded.

“What is it?” I asked her. “Where have I erred? The theory is new, I know—I am, perhaps, the only person in this world who could understand it—but I am sure it is as familiar to you as a child’s multiplication tables.”

“Familiar?” she said. “Hardly, Doctor Gordon. Machines mean nothing to me. I came here to see you, to hear about your work, not theirs. What set you off along this path? What strange occurrence? There must have been some kind of spatial bilocation to prove to you the possibility of this method.”

“Bilocation?” I echoed her in turn, and it felt suddenly as though we were speaking different languages.

“Yes, a transference from locus to locus, possibly achieved by accident rather than design. You clearly know nothing of the Helioverse, but that doesn’t rule out travel in this world alone. What is your significant location?”

“I don’t understand,” I said, with utter frankness.

“You don’t? So what made you think you could ever enslave this talent to a mere device? Where is the practical principle that guided your research?”

“In all honesty,” I said, reminded of my ordeal at the Institute, “I possess nothing other than thought experiments, but I am close to demonstrating a functional circuit—”

“A working execution-machine, you mean. It is guaranteed not to work.”

“But my theories—”

“Your eddies in a river are marvellously metaphoric, Doctor Gordon, but you have failed to pursue them to their logical conclusion. What would happen if you froze an eddy long enough to re-create it? On being released from the icebox the eddy would dissolve into ordinary water, and you would be left with nothing. Put yourself through this contraption of yours, and you too would dissolve. Die, if you prefer. Better that these devices remain harmless trinkets, as I originally thought them to be, or you dismantle them and direct your efforts to more accomplishable aims.” Abiha flicked the edge of one of my precious glass bells, making it chime a resonant, deep G. “I’m sorry, Doctor Gordon, but I beg you not to eradicate yourself in pursuit of a fundamentally flawed notion.”

I stared at her in shock and dawning horror. Could what she said really be true?

“How do you travel, then,” I asked her, “if not by machine?”

“By will,” she said, “and by art. That is all you need to swim the river of life.”

“Will you teach me?”

She didn’t answer immediately. On my desk lay a rare edition of the
Picatrix,
and she flicked through it as though seeking guidance. I sensed disappointment in her, along with disapproval, and waited anxiously for her response. I am a proud man, but I am not afraid to admit when I am wrong. A rigid mind is not a scientific mind. I would abandon all my research if it meant attaining the reality she had demonstrated to me that evening.

My mind flew with the possibilities. World upon world upon world, all full of human life! She must not be the only traveller of her kind. How many times had voyagers made the crossing during our planets’ intimate conjunctions? Magical texts are full of magical visitors who instructed the alchemists of old: you might already know about the giants of Genesis, but what about the companions of Horus who founded the original Egyptian dynasties, or the Fankuang Tzu of the Taoists, the Sons of Reflected Light who came from far across the sea, bringing wisdom and insight with them? Could Abiha’s people and these beneficent visitors be one and the same?

In some ancient Chinese traditions you will find reference to the Highest Clarity, a place beyond the sky, where live the Jade Women of the Luminous Star. Was I looking at such a woman right now, in my very own laboratory?

“I am sorry, Doctor Gordon,” she said again. “You are not ready.”

She closed the book and stepped back from the desk, and in her eyes I saw the certainty of her decision, the futility of all forms of protest I might offer, and a determination to leave.

That was when I made the greatest mistake of my life.

The prospect of losing her was intolerable. She possessed the secret I had pursued for so long; I would not let it slip through my grasp! I lunged for her and took her arm, but she had already begun the charm or spell she used to travel between worlds.

The moment my skin touched hers, I felt a foglike ether envelop me, and all the light and heat was sucked out of the world. She gasped and tried to pull away, but I resisted, gripping so tightly I fear I hurt her—but not out of anger, I swear, or fear of losing her. A terrible sense of emptiness in the ether, of
dissociation,
had me mortally afraid for my life. If I let her go, I thought, I would be lost between worlds and surely die.

We struggled back and forth, she beating at me with her fists, and me imploring her to return with me or take me with her. Whether she heard my cries or not, I do not know. The laboratory faded from sight, and the features of a new world appeared, one with metallic columns and bright lights. The air was dry and smelled of spark-gaps. Shapes rose up around us, and I felt their hands gripping me, pulling us apart. They snarled and spat at me in a foreign tongue. I strained to hang on to her, but could not resist them.

Finally, a stout blow to my forehead tore me loose. I was hurled back into the ether, where I tumbled for an instant, insensate, before landing with a bone-jarring impact on the floor of my laboratory.

I lay there for perhaps a minute, stunned. My skin was cold. I felt frost on my eyelashes. The chill seemed to penetrate right to my bones. But for the hammering of my heart, I might have been frozen solid.

Then the sound of smashing glass stirred me from my delirium.

I sat up, feeling her eyes upon me: Abiha’s dark eyes, devoid of pity, demonically invisible. I staggered to my feet and stared wildly about the laboratory.

One of my glass bells chose that moment to shatter. It exploded into a thousand crystalline pieces, struck powerfully by an invisible hand, and I gasped in alarm. What cruel sabotage was this? Denying me her secrets was punishment enough, surely. Why destroy my greatest work as well? If I died in error, wasn’t that my own business?

A third bell disintegrated. I picked up a spirit level and went on a rampage of my own, striking at the empty air in an attempt to catch one of my spectral tormentors off-guard—to no avail, of course, although I raged and swore. I begged. My cries went unheard beneath the shattering of the bells. The ground was soon covered in tiny shards, as though an artificial snow had fallen from the roof. My feet crunched at every step.

Soon just one glass bell remained, and I lunged for it, determined to save it at least from the slaughter. When I was barely a hand span away, it shattered in my face, and I thought I heard someone laughing.

I threw the spirit level at the empty air and roared my frustration. And still I could feel her, in the laboratory, all around me, mocking my impotence in silence.

A hand touched my shoulder.

I spun around with fists upraised, ready to do battle with the devil himself.

Margaret fell back, white-faced. “Darling! I heard the noise and came down to see. What in God’s name are you doing?”

I dropped my hands and fell back, imagining how this must look to her. To her senses, the laboratory was empty apart from me, and she must surely have witnessed me lunging at that last bell with spirit level in hand. She would of course imagine me the architect of this disaster. But what would she think had occurred in my mind to make such actions possible? What possession, what madness?

In that moment of self-realization, I understood everything.

“My darling,” I said to Margaret, striving my utmost to keep my tone level and my expression one of sincerest sanity, “do not be alarmed. I know how this must seem to you. Be assured that the reality is not as it seems. Our visitor—well, as you can see the haunting has got entirely out of hand, and we must leave immediately. It is not too late.”

She looked at me without understanding, but with recognition. She knew me and trusted me. She would have left with me—I know it. She was my wife, and I had never before done anything to harm our happiness.

It was then, Michaels, that the most terrible thing of all occurred. Margaret made a soft cry, like a child, and staggered forward. I supported her before she could fall to the ground and cradled her in my arms. Her head lolled backwards, and I felt a vile rush of blood over my hands. Struck a fatal blow from behind, she was dead before I caught her.

Only when I smelled smoke did I begin to fear for my own life.

A
SECOND TIME,
Doctor Gordon broke down, but this time he forswore all forms of chemical relief. He declared that he would finish or be damned—for damned he already seemed to be. The demons from the other world, he said, had set about demolishing his reputation as well as his work, and in that he acknowledged they had totally succeeded.

The rest of the story differs little from eyewitness testimony. Firemen attending the scene found him lying in the lane at the back of his library, spared by mere inches from flaming debris. He was liberally splashed with blood and in a state of maniacal frenzy. Several witnesses heard him cry out, “Come back to me! Come back!” When asked if he was referring to his wife, he clearly declared that he was not. “The other woman,” he said. “And if she can’t have me, she means to destroy me!” Upon which, he collapsed unconscious and was borne away for treatment.

Only when investigators found Margaret’s charred skeleton in the remains of the house, the back of her head apparently staved in by a hammer, and he was formally accused of murder—only then did Doctor Gordon emerge from the catatonia that had gripped him since his discovery. But he remained stubbornly mute. Even when he was charged, he said nothing. He was transferred from the hospital to Exeter Vale and has remained here ever since, sleepless and to all appearances unrepentant, pending a proper psychological examination.

On the fourth day, he seemed at last ready to talk.

“And here we are,” he said when he had finished his sorry tale. “What do you think? Am I deluded? Depraved? Both?”

I refrained from commenting on his condition. It seemed clear to me that the man had suffered a major breakdown. Perhaps he truly believed that someone else had killed Margaret, but the facts of the case are plain. He was alone in the laboratory when Margaret entered. He admits that himself, invisible spirits notwithstanding. She came upon him unexpectedly while he was in the midst of demolishing his recent work. Who knows what he imagined, in the grip of such ungovernable emotions? She intruded; he was discovered. So Margaret Gordon died a violent death in the house she had shared with her husband for twenty years, and only her husband could have killed her.

I believe he understood my conclusions without requiring me to declare them. He was merely deluded, not deprived of his faculties. I knew that, Inspector Berkeley, but I nevertheless allowed him to get the upper hand.

“If you will not release me,” he said, “then I would like to see Margaret. Where she lies, anyway. She must have been buried by now. We have adjacent vaults reserved in the Catacombs of the Lower Cemetery, and I hope to lie next to her when this grisly business is over. Do you think that might be arranged? If so, I will go quietly—plead guilty and of sound mind, confess whatever you like. You have heard my story, and if I cannot convince you of the truth of it, then I have no wish to cause further inconvenience to you or anyone else.”

The request was not altogether surprising, nor the granting of it wholly unjustified. I will defend that conclusion to the grave. For a dangerous madman, there would have been no question of release. But he, who seemed sane enough, lacking only the honesty and good character to reveal the whole truth about what happened that ghastly night—him I could not deny. It seemed certain to me that, in a deranged state brought on by insomnia, and by romantic circumstances he was naturally wary of revealing, he had murdered the one person he had ever been a danger to, and that I or anyone else was therefore safe in his presence. Granting his request could ease the conclusion of his trial and leave the resources of both judiciary and asylum free for those in greater need.

“Tell me just one thing,” I said, before taking my leave to obtain permission from Superintendent Gilfoyle.

“Anything, Michaels.”

“You said you felt something when you came here—an intangibility, a profundity, or words to that effect. What do you think that might have been?”

He studied his hands as though looking for bloodstains.

“Perhaps no more than my imagination,” he said. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. You will think it the nearness of the Creator, perhaps, or fate’s cold hand upon me, some such nonsense.”