Ghosts by Gaslight (5 page)

“The specters are hatching!” Lotte shouts.

“It’s not safe here!” Jonathan screams, urging the women toward the stairwell. “Run!”

Despite her advanced age, the Countess manages to negotiate the steps two at a time, as do Jonathan and Lotte, so that everyone reaches the ground floor within three minutes. No sooner does Jonathan start charging down the corridor than the ceiling disintegrates, squalls of plaster cascading into his path. Frantically he sidles and weaves amidst the plummeting timbers and errant chunks of masonry, but his athleticism proves useless before the force he has unleashed. As he reaches the door to the conservatory, a wayward chandelier, luminous with gas, lands squarely atop his skull. The bright bludgeon plunges him into darkness, but not before he notices that the hall now swarms with a thousand phantoms, each a disquieting shade of red and all wearing strangely despondent expressions, utterly unbefitting of persons recently released from the bottomless pit.

A
T FIRST
J
ONATHAN
assumes that he has fallen prey to a nightmare. How else might he explain the scene now stretching before him? Heaped with kindling, two wooden obelisks rise from the central courtyard, each holding a Nachtstein woman—bound, gagged, and blindfolded. The plaque above Lotte’s head reads
Singularist
. Countess Nachtstein’s stake is labeled
Quadripartist
.

The phantoms have immobilized Jonathan as well, cuffing his wrists with manacles, hobbling his feet with fetters, and they have additionally stripped away his clothing. The vibratologist shivers in the Schwarzwald wind, goose bumps erupting on his bare skin like rivets, even as his cranium aches with the aftermath of his encounter with the chandelier. Vapor-faced phantoms throng across the plaza, their visages twisted by an inscrutable sadness. As if ignorant of the laws of actuality, the former golems attempt to prolong their purchase on the world. They flex their nonmuscles, tense their nonligaments, curl their nonfingers.

“Surely you don’t mean to burn these women,” Jonathan says. “They rescued you. You owe them everything.”

“We mean to burn them—as surely as we mean to electroplate you,” says a crimson specter in a fluttering voice.

“That makes no sense.”

“True,” says a scarlet specter. “We understand your frustration. You want your ghosts to be outré but not perverse, weird but not recondite, occasionally sublime though never ridiculous. So sorry, Herr Doktor. We are avatars of the abyss. Coherence is not our business.”

Jonathan watches helplessly as a vermilion ghost applies a firebrand to the fagots encircling the Countess’s stake. As the flames climb the fleshly ladder of the victim’s form, a carmine specter flourishes a Wohlmeth Resonator—the very fork, Jonathan realizes, that gave the golems their freedom—and hurls it into the burgeoning conflagration.

“The dead don’t lack for foresight,” a maroon ghost avers. “In a matter of minutes the fork will become a charred ruin, thus canceling any hopes you might entertain of liberation by a passing Samaritan.”

Now a ruby specter sets Lotte’s pyre aflame, but not before jamming the Baron’s journal into the fagots.

“Set her free!” Jonathan screams.

A
BAND OF
phantoms drags the vibratologist out of the plaza and down a maze of stairways to the Baron’s subterranean laboratory, a cavernous space dominated by the electrolyte vat. Although they’ve never done this before, his captors act with great efficiency, ramming a respiration tube down his throat, dumping him into the solution, chaining his naked body to the cathode column.

Ignoring his pleas for mercy, a magenta specter connects the rectifier to the anode, agleam with the Baron’s alloy. Countless positively charged bezalelite atoms drift through the bath and accumulate on Jonathan’s flesh. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, the metal embraces the helpless vibratologist, each instance of adherence like the sting of a microscopic hornet.

Within one hour the process is complete, leaving him encapsulated, immobile, and half blind. A gurgling reaches his ears. The phantoms are draining the vat. A searing pain rips though his chest as a ghost yanks the respiration tube from his trachea. An instant later another specter seals the air-hole with an immortal bezalelite plug.

Mummified by the exotic alloy, the prisoner is soon deprived of oxygen, and then of life itself. He is also deprived of death. Now and forever he will be the ghost of Jonathan Hobbwright—vibratologist extraordinaire become solitary golem—affixed to the cathode of Baron Nachtstein’s infernal machine. Someday, perhaps, when entropy has dismantled the universe, he will be a free man, but for now he must reconcile himself to the unendurable, the interminable, and the endlessly absurd.

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. His imagination affords him only fleeting respite. Each time he dreams himself free of his bezalelite coffin—passing through the portals of the abyss, striking out for terra incognita
—
Satan’s angels give chase, and they inevitably track him down.

Come back, Dr. Hobbwright. Return to perdition. Tell your story for the tenth time, the hundredth, the thousandth. The more frequently you give voice to the wretched chronicle of your life, death, and damnation, the more likely you are to stumble upon hope’s hidden wellspring.

And until that improbable miracle occurs, you might take heart in recalling that the progenitor of your race is dead and gone. In the aeons to come, you will not be made to laud Gustav Nachtstein in song or build an altar to his glory. Cold comfort, to be sure, but in the bottomless pit one seizes upon whatever consolations lie to hand.

A
GAINST THE ODDS
and in defiance of his circumstances, Jonathan Hobbwright’s most recent recitation yields the very fount of hope he seeks. According to the Baron’s confession, on certain rare occasions, despite the essential incompatibility between the human plane and the spectral, a disintegrating ghost will perform a philanthropic act. And so it happens that, when a fresh barrage of vibrations assaults Castle Kralkovnik—roaring through the Baron’s laboratory like a tornado, reducing the walls to rubble as it cracks the prisoner’s chrysalis—Jonathan is not entirely surprised.

Sloughing off his husk, abandoning his corpse, the vibratologist floats free of the cathode, then fixes on Lotte’s crimson ghost. “How long was I entombed?” he asks.

“Ten days,” she replies.

“It felt like forever.”

“Hell knows nothing of clocks.”

“Where did you obtain the fork?” Jonathan asks.

“From Alastair Wohlmeth,” Countess Nachtstein’s scarlet specter replies. “The task we set ourselves was grueling. In our given tenure Lotte and I had to reach Oxford, unseal the grave, open the coffin, steal the resonator, and return to the castle.”

“I am deeply grateful.”

“We have no need of your gratitude,” the Countess says. “Nor do you have need of ours.”

“And now we must take eternal leave of you,” Lotte says as her misty form dissolves. “Oblivion beckons.”

“Farewell, Dr. Hobbwright.” The Countess has become as transparent as the surrounding air. “Please know that it was never my intention to occasion your death.”

It suddenly occurs to Jonathan that he desperately wants to enlighten humanity concerning the destiny of the dead. So tenuous is the spectral plane, so ultimately meaningless, he must share this knowledge with his former fleshly confederates. The Baron’s journal having been reduced to specks of carbon, Jonathan alone can tell the world about the appalling insipidity of ghosts.

“I wish to perform a philanthropic act of my own,” he declares.

“What do you have in mind?” the invisible Lotte asks.

Even as the answer forms on Jonathan’s airy lips, he realizes that his aspiration is futile. There is no time to find a pen, an ink pot, a sheet of paper. Already he is less than ashes. Already he is a brother to dust.

Wrenching sobs burst from the vibratologist’s ethereal throat. Briny droplets roll down his ephemeral cheeks. For an infinitesimal instant Jonathan Hobbwright is seized by an infinite remorse, but then his sorrow evaporates—like rain, like dew, like sweat, like the last and least of his tears.

Afterword to
“The Iron Shroud”

Equipped with uni-ball pens and legal pads, I composed “The Iron Shroud” in longhand during a protracted trip to Eastern Europe. I’d been invited to give a talk at the 2010 International Tolstoy Conference at Yasnaya Polyana, and my wife and I decided to return home in slow motion, stopping off in Poland and the Czech Republic. If the reader detects a whiff of Kafka about my tale, this may be because much of it was written in cafés not far from the mesmerizing Franz Kafka Museum in Prague. And, of course, the story features considerably more than a soupçon of that city’s legendary Golem.

—J
AMES
M
ORROW

Peter S. Beagle

Peter S. Beagle is one of America’s leading fantasists. His books include the novels
A Fine and Private Place,
The Last Unicorn
(which has sold more than six million copies worldwide and was made into a popular animated film),
The Folk of the Air,
The Innkeeper’s Song,
and
Tamsin;
the short story collections
Giant Bones,
The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche,
The Line Between,
We Never Talk About My Brother,
Mirror Kingdoms,
and
Sleight of Hand;
and the nonfiction books
The California Feeling,
The Lady and Her Tiger,
In the Presence of Elephants,
and
The Garden of Earthly Delights
. After a career pause, in 2002 he came roaring back on the scene with an extraordinary run of short fiction—over sixty stories, novelettes, and novellas—including a sequel to
The Last Unicorn
called “Two Hearts,” which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Now seventy-two, Peter continues to write steadily and has more than a dozen books in the publishing pipeline, including new novels (
Summerlong
and
I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons);
new collections (
The First Last Unicorn & Other Beginnings,
Green-Eyed Boy,
6 Unicorns,
and
Four Years,
Five Seasons);
revised and updated editions of older works (
The Innkeeper’s Song,
The Magician of Karakosk,
Avicenna);
new nonfiction books (
Sméagol, Déagol, and Beagle: Essays from the Headwaters of My Voice
and
Me Is Us);
and his first two children’s books. Since late 2001 he has made his home in Oakland, California. For more information on Peter Beagle and his works, go to
www.conlanpress.com.

P
ETER
S. B
EAGLE
Music, When Soft Voices Die

T
HERE WERE FOUR
of them living in the gabled rooming house with two chimneys on Geraldine Row, on the east side of Russell Square. This would have been perhaps six years after the Ottoman War, and quite shortly following the wedding of Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Maude Charlotte Mary, to Prince Selim Ali, who eventually became Sultan Selim IV. The marriage was not a happy one.

The four men’s names were Vordran, Scheuch, Griffith, and Angelos. They were not friends.

Scheuch and Vordran might have been thought to have something in common, since Scheuch was a bank clerk, while Vordran, eldest of the four, worked in a Bishopsgate law firm. But Vordran was not a clerk, nor ever would be, no more than he would ever be a barrister or a solicitor. He was merely a copyist and, since he took shorthand, an occasional secretary. Once, when jolly young Scheuch had the bad form to invite him to join him for tea, Vordran ticked him off sharply before the other two, saying coldly, in his slight, unplaceable accent, “I am a jumped-up office boy, and I will be treated so or left in peace. Do not ever dare to condescend to me again.” Scheuch kept his distance from then on.

Angelos was a second-year medical student at Christ’s Hospital, himself quite sensible of the fact that names such as his—further, his mother was Jewish—were rarely admitted to study at the ancient institution. Even younger than Scheuch, he appeared a much more serious soul, but on further acquaintance one discovered that his interests and fancies ranged from pigeon-racing to hot-air ballooning (very much in vogue since the Turkish bombing of London) to the newly recognized science of galvanic phrenology, by means of which one could unfailingly identify a future Mozart or a mass murderer-to-be through analyzing the electrical resistance in different portions of the skull, neck bones, and clavicles. He played the banjo, but never past eight o’clock, or before ten.

Griffith had been at Balliol. That was very nearly all one was allowed to know about Griffith, besides the fact that he was a waiter at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. His term at university had apparently been interrupted by his enlistment in the war, of which he was justifiably very proud; but why he never returned to Oxford after the Pact of Trieste remained a mystery. What was
not
mysterious about him was the fact that, where Vordran was undeniably brittle and prickly, Griffith was, quite simply, arrogant to the point of being unbearable. Everything in his life—and, consequently, every person as well—was viewed through the prism of his lost world, and found wanting. He seemed less a proper snob than a kind of wretched exile, but this understanding made him no more likable, or even tolerable; the others came to speak to him as little as they could, except when encountered entering or leaving the house, or meeting on the stair. Griffith appeared more than satisfied with this arrangement.