Ghosts by Gaslight (51 page)

I lowered Jane into the hole and jumped down after her. Communicating with shouts and gestures, Richmond demonstrated that the switches no longer functioned—we would have to break the rings in order to stop the machine. There proved to be insufficient room in the hole to swing the long-handled hammers with which he equipped us, and we were forced to climb back onto the roof, leaving Jane to do whatever she could with a smaller hammer.

We stood side by side, Richmond and I, and each blow we delivered against the rings of the attractor sent a huge bloom of radiance into the fog bank. The humming rose in pitch and melded with the roaring of the shadowy creature to create a singing rush. Our blows scarcely dented the metal, however, and so we concentrated our efforts on a single ring. I lost track of Christine, unable to spare her a glance, and swung the hammer until my shoulders and arms ached with strain. I had given up hope that our assault would produce a result, when without warning the attractor crumpled all along its length, as if squeezed by an enormous fist. I cried out in exultation—I had the urge to embrace Richmond and turned to him, but was enveloped in a burst of light and lifted up . . . lifted, I say, and not flung.

If this was an explosion, it was a most peculiar one. There was no concussion, no heat, no sound, and I felt buoyed up in that flickering, yellow-green space. On every side were the fragmentary beings I had formerly seen from beneath. Ghastly, semitranslucent faces bobbled and drifted away from me, some with ragged, immaterial bodies in tow, and it seemed I was passing among them, pushing upward through their closely massed numbers. They did not appear to register my intrusion. A profound calm blanketed my fear and I thought that I had become a ghost and that this calmness must be a natural protection that attended my sudden transition into the afterlife, a kind of emotional shield. Believing that I shared their fate, I studied the spirits nearest me, searching for signs of agony or distress. They were haggard and bore signs of ill-usage and disease, yet their expressions were uniformly neutral, conveying the idea that they had come to terms with death, something that fresher ghosts like Christine had not. I derived little comfort from this, speculating that I might spend decades in a desolate condition before achieving even a negligible measure of peace, and I clutched at the hope that I might still be alive and that my deathly surround was an illusion, a dream I was having as I lay unconscious atop the roof; but all that served was to rouse my discontent, causing me to struggle, to jostle the spirits around me, creating gaps amongst them. Through one such gap I spotted a dark shape that swiftly grew in size and definition—the shadowy creature, heading straight toward me. My capacity for fright had been suppressed and I did not panic, but I did renew my struggles and discovered the yellow-green radiance to have a viscous consistency that hampered movement. Yet the shadow moved through it easily, as if born to that medium . . . though its movement may not have been so facile. I saw that it was spinning ass over teakettle—slowly, mind you, with an ease and grace that caused me to think it had done this many times before. I estimated, judging by its path, that it might miss me, but it did not. As the thing tumbled by, a portion of it grazed my hip, or better said, passed through my hip. It failed to disrupt my course in the least—there was no painful collision—but I felt numbness spread from my hip down my left leg to the knee, and I had an overwhelming sense of joy that may have been the residue of that brief contact. Not a meat joy, not an emotion bred by pleasure or by appetites fulfilled, but a blissful feeling, an ecstasy I would associate with purity, the sort of thing saints claim to experience when communing with God. The joy soon dissipated, however, and with it went my calm. Terrified, I thrashed about, attempting to break free from whatever held me fast. I continued to struggle until the light abruptly dimmed to the ordinary darkness of a London rooftop and I fell.

When I regained consciousness, the fog had thinned to a mist through which I could see a salting of dim stars. Jane kneeled beside me, her face smeared with coal dust, streaked with tears. She could not tell me what had happened, having been down in the hole the entire time, but according to her, everything I had experienced had taken place in a matter of seconds. At length she helped me to stand. My leg was still numb, and I had aches and pain resulting from the fall, though I could not have fallen far, because nothing was broken. All of the attractors were twisted and crumpled, like shriveled silver weeds—since most of them had been shut down, I guessed that a wash of energy from the one we destroyed had resonated with some core element in the machinery of the other three. Richmond lay facedown in the dust a dozen feet away. I hobbled over to him, dropped to my hands and knees, and asked if he was all right. He stirred and made a feeble sound.

“Are you able to stand?” I asked.

He turned his head so that I could see his face—his eyes were closed, blood trickled from his nostrils, but his color was good, his pulse strong. I encouraged him, telling him that we had succeeded, but received no reply.

“Tell me what to do,” I said. “Should I fetch Bladge to help me carry you?”

He yielded a throaty squeak and opened his eyes. They were Christine’s eyes, hazel irises alive with agitated motion, twitching to the left, then to the right, like the dial of a combination lock that had jammed. All the muscles of his face were taut with strain, the tendons of his neck cabled. He sought to speak once again, making a horrid, guttering noise.

I recoiled, as did Jane, who had been peering over my shoulder. Richmond stared, though not at me—he was looking to my left at something that no longer existed in this world.

“Help him!” Jane reached out a hand to him, but withheld her touch. “Can you not help him as you helped me?”

I was loath to shake him, afraid that whatever injuries he had suffered might be affected; but I felt I had to try, although I knew to my soul that Christine had finally recognized her brother, and now that they were reunited, for better or worse, they would never be parted again.

A
WEEK AFTER
the events I have related, the body of Sir Charles Mellor was discovered on a mud flat alongside the Thames. The corpse was badly decomposed, and this made it impossible to determine the date of death; but it was obvious that he had been dead for quite some time, and there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the cause: seventeen stab wounds to his neck and torso. His murderer has never been brought to the bar, but I am persuaded to believe that Richmond, half mad and desperate to avenge Christine, acted upon the information I provided, woefully insufficient though it was. I imagine anyone of Mellor’s class and character would have suited his purpose and assuaged his guilt.

Shortly before I abandoned the house on Rose Street and returned to Wales, I visited Richmond in Broadmoor, where he was being held preparatory to his transfer to a private facility—the costs of this transfer and all subsequent costs to be assumed by Jane and Dorothea, the chief beneficiaries of his will. An orderly led him into the office where I waited, one belonging to a Dr. Theodore McGuigan, a harried, portly man with a Glaswegian accent, wearing a white smock and braces. When the door opened to admit Richmond, I heard demented laugher and shouts and a scream from off along the corridor. He stood blinking and disheveled, unmindful of my presence . . . of any presence, it appeared. His condition, as far as I could tell, was unchanged, except that his beard was untrimmed and food stains decorated his shirtfront. I asked McGuigan if I might have a moment alone with Richmond, and once the door closed behind him, I perched on the edge of his desk. Richmond stood downcast at the center of the room, his eyes hooded, one hand plucking fitfully at his trouser leg.

“I’ve had a while to think about things,” I said. “Had I been less self-involved, I might have understood what happened long before now. But I believe I’ve finally pieced it together.”

Richmond’s mouth worked, making a glutinous noise.

“That first night when you said that you wanted to learn who funded Christine . . . that was all you wanted to know, wasn’t it? You knew who had murdered her. You were simply looking for a way to shift the blame for her death onto the shoulders of another guilty soul.”

He rubbed the knuckle of his forefinger against his hip.

“You were the masked client. That’s why Christine responded to him as she did to no other man. She may have had some instinctual knowledge that you were the client. And then one night the mask slipped, or else you revealed yourself. What happened next? Did she reject you? Did she threaten you? You’ve told me she was the aggressor, but you’ve lied about so much, I wonder if that was just another lie.”

He shifted his weight from one leg to the other.

“Everything you did, all your attempts to bring her back . . . they were by way of expiation. She did something to infuriate you and you killed her.”

He remained unresponsive.

“Isn’t that right, Christine?”

With a laborious movement, he lifted his head and stared at me with those strangely animated eyes, eyes alive with dartings and glints of light—it was like looking through a crystal into the depths of an inferno, and I tried to imagine what he felt trapped in that terrible place. I had thought I would have no pity for him, but I was wrong. His facial muscles strained, his lips trembled, and a feeble fluting of indrawn breath issued from his throat. Then his head drooped, and once again he appeared oblivious to his surround.

That, I realized, was likely as close to an answer as I would receive and, seeing no point in prolonging this one-sided dialogue, I called in the orderly, who led him back to his cell, there to continue an internal dialogue with his sister.

As he escorted me to the entrance, a short walk attended by the cries and pleadings of the deranged, Dr. McGuigan said, “I’m told that Richmond was engaged in important work.”

“Indeed, he was. But I fear it may never be re-created,” I said. “His machines were destroyed and his notes have gone missing.”

“What a pity. He was a brilliant man.”

We went a few paces in silence and then McGuigan said, “You were there, weren’t you? On the night he was stricken. Can you enlighten me as to what happened?”

“I was in another portion of the house.”

We approached the door and McGuigan spoke again. “Tell me,” he said. “What do you think caused the abnormalities in his eyes?”

“I can be of no assistance to you there,” I said. “I know nothing about them.”

I
DID NOT
lie to Dr. McGuigan—I know nothing except that I know nothing. It may be that I am like all men in this, yet it seems they are unaware of their condition and thus act with an authority of which I am no longer capable. Everything in my story is subject to doubt, to words such as “perhaps” and “likely,” and since that story is central to my life, I have grown to doubt most of the certainties of my existence.

Jane and I were married in May of the year, and that same summer I opened a clinic in Swansea where I treat the disadvantaged; yet I do so absent the enthusiasm that once I had for the task. I doubt the worth of charity and justice, those values that underscore the work, and find it difficult to reconcile the conviction needed to perform my duties with my loss of faith in the good.

Over the ensuing six years I have taken to writing fiction. Using details gathered during my months on Rose Street, I have gained a wide readership for my ghost stories, which are written with an excess of detachment yet are often praised for their passionate expression. However, the true function of these fictions is self-examination, the same as when I peer into mirrors, looking for shadows in my eyes, afraid that my encounter with that darkness in the cloud of ghosts has infected me and is—despite its apparent state of bliss—responsible for my despairing outlook. Sometimes I remove Richmond’s notebooks from the hidden drawer in my desk and go through page after page of equations and technical gibberish, as indecipherable as hieroglyphs, hoping they will magically spark some insight into the essence of that darkness. The feeling of joy it transmitted when I brushed against it, so at odds with its terrible aspect . . . Was joy its natural state? Was that emotion a tool of the divine? Did it signal the opening of a portal into heaven or was it the lure of a devil? Did it offer a sweet oblivion to the revenants of Saint Nichol, a state counterfeited by Richmond’s attractors, which instead acted to destroy them? That might explain why they flocked to the rooftop, and it might explain as well why Christine did not hide from it—I may have misinterpreted her presence on the roof. I suspect if I could fathom that mystery, I would understand everything. Perhaps we are all of us either attractors searching for ghosts upon which to feed or ghosts seeking oblivion. And perhaps the salient difference between the spirit world and this one is that here we can be both.

Jane is the single truth in my life, its sole constant. I have no reason to mistrust her affections, yet I often construct scenarios that paint our marriage as the endgame of an elaborate hoax. When I tell her about them (I tell her everything), she is amused and chides me for being so dismal. For instance, the other day, a sunny day with a salt breeze, as we walked in the green hills above the beach at Pwll Du, she responded to my latest fabrication by saying, “I had to labor at it, else you might have escaped my clutches.” She glanced at me with mischief in her eyes and said, “Seducing you was no easy task.”

“As I remember, it was I who seduced you.”

“Oh, please!” She gave me a pitying look. “After you rejected me that first night, we stayed up all hours, Dorothea and I, plotting your downfall.”

“You consulted with Dorothea?”

“It was her idea that I dress as I did on the following night. She thought if I wore matronly bedclothes it might put you at ease. And she lent me her robe. You may recall that it fit me rather snugly.”

“The crinoline bonnet,” I said. “That almost put me off.”

“Yes, I suppose that was a bit much. We debated whether or not to employ it.”