Ghosts by Gaslight (36 page)

“Yes!” cried Mr. Jamieson, pointing too.

Then I saw: it was the metal frame behind the box. It had lost most of its struts so that only two remained, warped out of their proper positions in such a way as to form a perfect vertical and a perfect horizontal. In effect, the shape of a cross.

Mr. Jamieson dropped to his knees and put his hands together. He began gabbling a prayer that I’m sure never featured in any prayer book. Norris also knelt and bowed his head; then Mother; then everyone except Father. Mr. Hungerford pushed Dr. Kessel forcibly to his knees.

“Suffered for us,” Mr. Jamieson gabbled on. “Pure and innocent . . . bore our sins . . . defiled by human thoughts.”

Of course, Mr. Jamieson was an ex-seminarian, so you can understand where his thinking came from. Father remained sceptical and repeated that it was “only a machine” many times on our journey back to London. As for me . . . well, I had panicked before the mechanism ever had the chance to draw off
my
bad thoughts. Yet, from that time on, my nightmares disappeared as if they had never existed. So what does
that
show? I wonder.

Afterword to
“Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism”

I know some people have memories that go back to babyhood, but not me. The first memory that I’m sure is my own real memory—and not re-created from what adults told me—comes from a holiday in the seaside town of Fleetwood, in Lancashire, England. I must have been about four or five, and what I remember is Fleetwood pier, which had been recently destroyed by fire. It stuck far out into the sea, a wreckage of tangled, twisted girders, and not just tangled, not just twisted, but racked and contorted like an expression of agony, a frozen shriek of pain. There you have the whole germ and genesis of “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism.”

I’d now count “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism” as a “steampunk” story. Ten years ago, I’d hardly heard of “steampunk”—I mean, I’d heard of the word, but I’d never thought it had anything to do with me. But I was wrong—I’d been blindly blundering my way towards steampunk from a long time before then. The fascination with nineteenth-century culture and Dickensian atmospheres was already there in
The Black Crusade
and
The Vicar of Morbing Vyle
(the latter my first novel, published in 1993). And the fascination with old-fashioned steam-age machinery was there in the industrial scenery of the Humen Camp in the three
Ferren
books and in the fabulous contraptions of (again)
The Black Crusade
. When I completed
Worldshaker
and it was instantly categorized as “steampunk,” I realised I’d discovered my own true home. Or as the poet said, it was like coming home and knowing the place for the first time.

“Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism” was an amazingly difficult story to write, because I couldn’t get the voice I needed. I started to write in first person, rewrote in third person, tried again with a different-sounding first person, another go at third person, and finally—phew! gasp!—hit upon a first-person voice that sounded just right. I guess the problem was the contradiction between using formal vocabulary and long sentences, as necessary for a nineteenth-century feel, but also conveying intense emotion and an underlying thrill of horror. My lifeline was Edgar Allan Poe—I confess, I actually read a Poe short story every morning before starting work on “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism.” I’ve never put myself under an influence in that way before! Yet that too was like coming home, because Poe was the first great love of my adult reading life, which began when a German teacher at school decided to forget about teaching German and instead spent a whole period reading us “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But that’s another story . . .

—R
ICHARD
H
ARLAND

Marly Youmans

Marly Youmans is the author of seven books that include novels, a volume of poetry, and two young adult fantasies. Her novel
The Wolf Pit
was short-listed for the Southern Book Award of the Southern Book Critics Circle and won the Michael Shaara Award. Forthcoming are two collections of poetry,
The Throne of Psyche
(Mercer University Press) and
The Foliate Head
(Stanza Press); and three novels,
Glimmerglass
(PS Publishing),
Maze of Blood
(PS Publishing), and
A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage
(winner of the Ferrol Sams Award, Mercer University Press).

M
ARLY
Y
OUMANS
The Grave Reflection

Some years after my father’s decease, I discovered an envelope labeled “Saxton” in his handwriting, tucked inside a chest of papers left in my possession. On reading the first line on the enclosed sheets, I guessed what the anecdote enclosed would contain, for its queer, secret events were long a matter of private wonder and curiosity to our family. I believe that my father would have liked to publish the account had it not been for his affection for the “younger Mr. Saxton,” who remained a fast friend and steady correspondent until my father passed to the next world, wherein all such mysteries as these will surely be revealed.

This account, released for public inspection now that the principal parties involved in its uncanny transactions have flown, will, I trust, be of some interest to my father’s many admirers among a new generation of readers.

—R.H.L., 1890

A
LTHOUGH
I
AM
by nature a homebody who prefers to immure himself in the nest of family, rejoicing in the little circle of lives that Divine Intelligence has seen fit to bestow upon me, I could not ignore the message that came to me from a village in a remote corner of our district, home to my boyhood friend Theron Saxton. He had been a spirited fellow with always a prank and a jest to enliven the table or hearth, so much so that he earned the enmity of many sagacious, dour souls who could not bear that the often heavy dough of life should be leavened by the yeast and spice of his merriment. The message handed to me at the door was urgent
:

If you love me, come to me at once, my dear Hawthorne, for I am plagued as no man has ever been, and I feel my mind like a mere chip of a boat whirling in a gale, close to capsizing from the storm within and without me.

I knew very well what sort of sorrows had recently accompanied my friend, enveloping him in a sable blackness. Not six months before, a beloved brother, Mr. Edward Saxton, his elder by some twenty minutes and twin to himself in every minute particular, had succumbed to the ravages of consumption. The unfortunate man had borne up under the weight of disease for many months, an example of patience and manly fortitude, before taking to his bed and declining and dying in the space of a fortnight. My wife and I arrived too late for anything but the burial and stood among the other mourners, our cloaks whipping in the autumn gusts. I had not seen my friend since and now regretted my lack of spirit and ambition in correspondence, which might have comforted him and kept me snug at home on a brisk winter’s night.

Having tenderly parted from my wife and children, I hurried to town and set out by a clattering mail coach at twilight. The bitterness of the evening seeped into my bones, and I was glad to share some moth-eaten buffalo robes with a stranger. I dozed off and was dreaming an absurd but uneasy dream—struggling with a gigantic warrior in rattling and clanking armor and, as if that were not enough to occupy and challenge my dream self, battling with my Goliath-sized knight in the midst of an earthquake—when I was awakened by a prodigious thumping on the side of the coach. The driver wrenched open the door and informed me that we had gained the foot of the lane leading to Saxton’s Folly, as my friend’s ancestral house was known to citizens of the nearby town. Although no doubt longing to finish his run, the fellow was good enough to proffer a pull of spirits from his pocket flask and to warn me against the thick pack of ice on the roadway, furnishing me with a sturdy metal-tipped staff that I promised to guard and remit to his care on my homeward journey.

To a man shocked suddenly awake, the gloom and cold of the lane was unwelcome. But the clouds that had recently brought a few pristine feet of snow were scattering from the moon, and patches of mingled moonshine and starlight shone here and there on the uneven surface of ice. The hooves of the horses and the iron-clad wheels of the coach made a racket as the coach proceeded apace without me, and I was left alone with the glitter of the stars.

Wrapping my cloak closely about me, I stepped into the fir-lined lane. Soon I was longing for a wandering 2:00 a.m. dram seller with Jamaica, cognac, strong beer, or a cup of mulled wine. I would have paid a good deal better than the going rate for another small drop of flame to warm my insides. But there was no help for it, so I scudded along with a will in the deep groove of wagon tracks, gazing around me at the black silhouette trees and the dazzle of stars and the faint twisting lights of the aurora borealis, barely visible so far from their native home. Although the shadows of the firs oppressed me with a sense of density—as if they might detach themselves from the ice-fringed trees and pour after me, plucking my sleeve and peering into my face with faces cut from crisp sheets of blackest night—I had a heartening fancy that the bright constellations had shed the snow that crested the tops of my boots and spilled inside, so that the world was knee-deep in tumbled stars.

At the top of the hill I stopped, panting from exertion in the icy air, and looked up at Saxton’s Folly. Old Flavel Saxton had spent his fortune on the house, a massive colonial edifice with additions and porches and outbuildings that included a mighty barn for carriages and horses. He died penniless and house proud. The Saxton twins, his great-great-grandsons, had managed to buy the home place back from the descendants of their ancestor’s creditors and to restore it to the antique glory of a century before. Further efforts had resulted in the gathering together of much family furniture and some four thousand books belonging to the original Saxton library, an enormous collection in Flavel Saxton’s unsettled times. Seen by moonlight, the manse resembled a natural cliff, altogether lifeless, shrouded in snow, and for a moment I lingered, half inclined to turn tail and fly down the lane rather than be taken into such frozen rockiness.

But soon I chided myself for a wayward fancy, long my undoing, and waded forward to cross the lawn. With a deal of care I scaled the treacherous, deep-draped steps to the door and clanged the knocker against its iron plate, sending snowflakes and tiny icicles flying. As if spirited to my summons, someone answered almost immediately, and I glimpsed a candle’s flame fluttering within a cupped hand.

“What’s this fuss and ruction—”

Blinking, a pink-nosed lady in an old-fashioned mobcap held up the candle to peer at me with cataract-clouded eyes but was soon thrust aside by Saxton, his face flashing with glad humor.

“No problem, Mrs. Molebury, none—it’s my boyhood friend, Mr. Hawthorne, who has been good enough to come swiftly when I called—fetch him a hot toddy, will you? He must be as cold as a churchyard stone.”

Saxton pulled me inside and ushered me to a bench beside a dying bed of coals. In a trice he had poked the half-extinguished embers into a semblance of life, added kindling and logs, and then helped me to remove my boots.

“It is good of you, Hawthorne, so very agreeable of you to come at such a summons and leave the children and your dear wife. I shall not forget it in a hurry.”

When he looked up at me from the ground where he was kneeling, one of my dripping boots still in his hands, I saw that Saxton appeared pallid, as if he had been sitting up many nights—as he had done before Edward Saxton’s death. At that instant, nothing of his usual gaiety of manner remained to him. I wondered about his sorrow for his brother: surely grief for a twin was less consolable than most, the two siblings being joined, as it were, metaphysically, one being the enfleshed reflection of the other.

“Indeed, I shall not forget,” he said softly. He gave a small shiver, but in another instant he smiled again, and the old joking Theron Saxton I knew peeped out of his face.

“What’s the matter, my friend?” I gripped his arm, leaning forward.

“Let’s have your cloak,” he said; “you must be soaked, scaling that infernal hill in the dark. You’re encrusted in snow! You’ll be lucky not to take sick, traveling so late.”

“It was a fine night for a tramp—the stars out, and wisps of the northern lights.” I studied his face as he lifted my ice-sequined cloak and draped it over the back of a Windsor chair that, drawn near the fire, did service as a drying rack.

He turned toward the flames, adjusting a rickety eight-legged fire screen that might have been steady on its wrought-iron lion’s feet in the days of Flavel Saxton.

“What is it?” My voice came in a whisper; I felt the quickening pulse of an unreasoning alarm.

“There’s time enough to explain in the morning,” he said, his eyes going to the grandfather clock. “Surely you are exhausted from travel. Mail coach, was it?”

I nodded, watching him, my sense of something amiss only increasing. Well, I was certainly weary, but I hadn’t rushed from home and launched my one-man boat into the teeth of a gale only to take harbor between clean sheets.

“Here’s Mrs. Molebury, best of housekeepers,” he cried as the old lady appeared in the doorway, balancing candle and toddy on a pewter tray that must have been as old as the fire screen, so crude and massy did it appear. “Doubtless with her famous buttered brandy and cider toddy, doctored with the brown spices and a twist of dried peel, and magically thrown together in a trice.”