Ghosts by Gaslight (63 page)

I must confess to a certain tightness in the trousers after hearing Ludiya’s tale; an exquisite confusion stirred my thoughts.

“Physiognomist Cley, you and Physiognomist Chibbins must drink the Beauty and do battle with the phantom in a more substantial form. I know you can defeat her and save us,” said Miss Barlow. She reached across the table and laid her hand on mine.

My trepidation toward drinking Rothac’s sweet swill evaporated with Ludiya’s touch. I looked momentarily at the young woman’s mother, and that wrinkled visage was staring at our nearly clasped hands, smiling and nodding. I quickly drew my hand back.

“We’ll see,” I said.

Chibbins threw his spoon into the empty oatmeal bowl in front of him. “I summon the spirit,” he announced and belched loudly.

Mrs. Barlow winced. “The Ministry of Physiognomy is turning out some real chaff these days,” she said.

“My apologies for my partner,” I said, “but as you can see, I had a
word
with him about it last night.”

“I was referring to you, Cley,” she said.

“What’s that?” asked Ludiya, pointing to the center of the table.

I looked to see the green mist rising from the dried gourd centerpiece. In a flash, it coalesced into the rippling winding sheet form I’d witnessed on the path the previous night. Chibbins applauded, but I was not so happy to see the thing again. Ludiya screamed. Mrs. Barlow stood and shook her fist at the apparition. “Be gone,” she shouted in a cracking voice.

When I heard the popping noise, I dove to the floor. Somebody gave a sudden gasp of pain. When I finally lifted my head above the tabletop, I noticed the Sanctity of Grace had, of an instant, disappeared, and I remembered Rothac saying, “She hears everything, sees everything, is everywhere.” The next thing I knew, Ludiya was crying hysterically. I turned my attention to her mother, now pinned to the back of her throne with a thick icicle through the mouth. Blood and shattered teeth were everywhere. Her death stare was pointed in my direction.

“If we’re to be saved, you must take the Beauty, Cley,” said Ludiya amid her blubbering. Chibbins was busy placing coffee cups and saucers beneath the spots where the frozen shaft leaked onto the tablecloth. He lifted his empty oatmeal bowl, turned it upside down, and put it on Mrs. Barlow’s head, covering her eyes.

T
HAT AFTERNOON, CHIBBINS
and I made our way out to Rothac’s place and retrieved the cauldron of Beauty that still sat on the fireplace hearth. Of course, by then the fire was out and the stuff was cold, but Ludiya had told us it could be reheated. Chibbins carried the pot by its handle, twitching as he walked and sloshing the violet liquid so that some drops fell out. Wherever it fell, the snow turned not violet but black.

Once we returned to the Palace, I ordered Chibbins to drag Mrs. Barlow’s and Rothac’s remains to the carriage house where the cold would keep them somewhat fresher in death than life. When he returned from that task, I sent him out again, this time to count the willow trees. In the meantime, I found Ludiya and proffered my condolences. We sat on the divan in one of the hundred rooms, my arm tightly around her shoulders, like I was a favorite uncle. Her bosom pressed against me, and I lightly kissed her ear as she sobbed and said, “Poor Mother.”
Poor Mother
was not the appellation I’d have used for the old hag, although
Poor
might have been part of it.

After dinner, we retired to the plush thrones of the piano room, and Ludiya served us each a piping hot mug of the Beauty. The bubbling violet gave off a paradisiacal scent, and I found myself unable to resist it. So sweet, like a sweetness from the center of the earth or wrung out of the blue sky like rain wrung from the blouse of a field worker caught in a storm. I tasted it, and for a moment, my mind went blank. I saw pure white as if the powerful taste were instead a bright light. Once I began drinking, feeling the warmth of the brew as it traveled through me, I didn’t stop until the mug was empty. I took mine away from my lips as Ludiya did the same with hers. Chibbins had beat us both to the finish.

“Now,” said Ludiya, “give it a minute and you’ll begin to see what I was talking about.”

“How long do the effects of the drug last?” asked Chibbins.

I did a double take, unable to believe that my partner was capable of asking an intelligent question. In fact it was the question I was about to ask.

“Three or four hours,” she said.

“Must I stay in my chair?” asked Chibbins.

“No,” she said. “You will feel the need to rise and move around.”

For my part, I was staring at Chibbins. Something had happened. A great change had come over him. Not only had the Beauty conferred upon him a sort of relaxed, confident persona, leaning back in his chair with one leg suavely over the left arm, but he now had, without my witnessing it having grown, a thin dark mustache. He looked over at me and said, “Cley, old boy, do we have a plan?”

“Chibbins, what’s happened to you?” I asked.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “I propose we charge the Sanctity of Grace simultaneously, scalpels carving the air. We’ll slice her stem from stern and leave what’s left for the peacocks.”

“Calm down,” I said. “We’ll wait to see what the meeting brings.”

“There are birds in the fireplace,” said Ludiya, and I noticed piano music, although no one sat at the bench.

“It’s starting,” I said.

“Cley, you have a halo,” said Chibbins.

“Where did you get the cigarette?” I asked.

“I’ve no idea,” he said and took a drag. “Right now, there are green jewels crawling across the ceiling.” His head was back and he was laughing.

Ludiya stood and approached me. I reached out and took her hand. Bringing it to my lips, I kissed the back of it.

“That’s the ticket,” said Chibbins.

I puckered my lips to kiss the hand again, but in the moment I’d looked away it had become a bird talon. Ludiya had somehow become her mother, but her mother covered in feathers and sporting a sharp beak. I dropped the talon and reared back in my seat. I blinked and the avian Mrs. Barlow was gone. Ludiya stood in the middle of the room, pointing up at the mirror over the fireplace. Not merely reflected in it, but within the world of the mirror the green mist rose. This time it cohered into more than a mere floating cloud. It became a woman with short dark hair and spectacles, wearing a plain grey dress, like a servant’s uniform. She bobbed behind the glass and glanced from one to the other of us.

“Grab your scalpel,” I called to Chibbins, but there was no reply. I looked over to see him kissing Ludiya. He had her dipped back in his arms; her mouth was open, and so was his. I shuddered. “No,” I said.

“Yes,” said the Sanctity of Grace, and then the floorboards slid away, and I fell into the dark, like the builders of the Summer Palace, falling into their graves.

W
HEN I WOKE,
I was sitting upright, strapped to a chair so that my arms could not move. The Sanctity of Grace was before me, lightly tapping my cheek.

“Wake up, Cley,” she said. I opened my eyes and looked around. We were in a kind of study, rows of books lining the walls and gas lamps at the four corners. There was a door off to my right, and the Sanctity had taken her seat behind a desk, facing me.

“My office, Cley. Do you like it?”

“No doubt one of the Master’s secret chambers you died to keep secret,” I said. “Release me or you’ll come to feel the full weight of the Well-Built City’s security force upon you.”

“And what will they do? Kill me?”

“You must have been one bitter ghost to have generated the supernatural energy to perform your deeds,” I said.

“Bitter,” she said, “is too weak a word. For every ounce of saintliness I possessed in life, I now have a thousand volts of hatred in death. You see, I was with child. If it was only me, I’d have gone to my rest.”

“With child?” I said. “Not completely saintly, I see.”

“Only the ruling classes see sex as immoral,” she said. “And then, only for the lower class.”

“I’m to be a sacrifice to your unborn child?” I asked. “Perhaps I can barter Chibbins’s life for mine?”

“No,” she said, “you’re not to die, yet. You’re a tool in my plot.” She then picked up a pen and busied herself with some paperwork, reading documents and making minor corrections.

“There’s paperwork in death?” I asked.

“You don’t know the half of it,” she said.

She was the plainest-looking woman I’d ever seen. Of course, I’d already eyed her physiognomical features, but I’d yet to garner a reading. She was very nearly an exact medium in intelligence and yet, the indicators that divulged her moral worth, chin to hairline, left eye to right earlobe, rendered readings off the top end of the scale. I was baffled as to how the two measurements could coincide on the same face without grotesquely twisting her appearance. It was, literally, supernatural.

“And how long must I sit here?” I asked.

She didn’t look up but said, “Your partner will be along shortly to rescue you, and then we’ll be finished here.”

More time passed, and I wondered if perhaps all I was witnessing was a result of the Sheer Beauty. I watched closely for her image to ripple, for the walls of books to subtly waver insubstantially. And then the door burst in, wood chips flying. It was Chibbins, and he’d expertly kicked it in. I looked back to the Sanctity of Grace, who was rising from her chair. She walked around the desk and stood there.

“Physiognomist Chibbins, I believe you’ve got something for me,” she said, clasping her hands behind her back, like a schoolmarm awaiting an answer.

“Yes, madam ghoul, I’ve got the best thing for you,” he said and leaped forward into a somersault. While his body rolled, his left arm, hand holding a scalpel, was drawing back, so that when he sprang up onto one knee, he was ready to throw. The blade turned as it sailed slowly through the air. We all watched in anticipation, not the least the Sanctity of Grace, whom I was surprised took no effort to duck. With the sound of an eggshell cracking, the thing punctured her skull and dug into her ghostly brain. Her eyes glazed, she coughed up some dirt and then went over like a sack of laundry. A moment later, she turned to a green mist that quickly began to dissipate.

Chibbins was immediately at my chair, making easy work of the knots and straps that bound me. “Come quickly,” he said. “It took me forever to find you in the maze of secret passageways.” The catacombs beneath the house were impossibly complex, but Chibbins led the way with confidence and eventually brought us up, through a hidden stairway, back into the piano room. I will admit here, for no one else to see, that I’d still be there, beneath the Summer Palace, if it weren’t for my partner. We found Ludiya, on the couch, sleeping.

“Did you have your way with her?” I asked Chibbins.

“Heavens no,” he said, “to have done so would have been monstrous. I was administering artificial resuscitation. She passed out and I caught her.” He gave a smile, and I wasn’t sure if Chibbins was actually trafficking in irony or genuinely pleased with the aid he’d given. As it was, it didn’t matter. By morning, once the Beauty had worn off, blithering and buffooning without mercy or mustache, he was as inane as he’d been before its odd sea change.

Now that we had eradicated the threat to the Summer Palace by killing the ghost of the Sanctity of Grace, Ludiya pretended to want nothing to do with me. I tried to comfort her some more in the fashion I had the previous day, and she shrugged off my grasp and told me I’d outstayed my welcome. A woman of such a tender age, she did not have the vocabulary to express her affection for me, and so her words became twisted, expressing the opposite of her desires. I could tell. I pressed my lips against hers and forced my tongue into her mouth. She bit it. True love is a sharp pain, I tell you.

W
ITH THE TASTE
of blood still on my lips, Chibbins and I rode back in our carriage to the Well-Built City. We had brought with us Rothac’s notes, and the cauldron of the remaining Sheer Beauty sat on the seat next to my partner. Every now and then, he’d stick his pinky into the cold mixture and bring it to his mouth, and for a few seconds he’d go from gibbering fool to sophisticated conversationalist, calling me, “Cley, old boy.” All together, this amazingly erratic performance irritated me more than usual. Amid the kaleidoscope of Chibbinses, I wondered what our time in the Willow Forest added up to. It didn’t seem to make any sense at all.

Physiognomist Scheffler had me report to the Master himself about the case. I was sent to his tower office at the center of the city. I’d met Drachton Below before. One night he’d mysteriously come to my rooms when I was a student in the Ministry and took me to see a young woman he’d transformed into an automaton. I’d not yet had to face him in a professional setting and was worried that he’d have little patience with the story I had to tell about his summer retreat.

His office was circular, with windows all around, a 360-degree view. I entered a room below its floor and then climbed a stair that left me in the middle of its circle. Below stood at the window, looking down.

“Physiognomist Cley reporting, Master.”

He turned, cocked his head back and raised one eyebrow. “Cley, you’ve been to the Summer Palace?”

“Physiognomist Chibbins and I.”

“Yes, well, the Chibbins boy is a subtraction of zero from itself,” he said. “I’m sure it was a pleasure working with him.”

“A delight,” I said.

“His father will be pleased to hear it. Now sit down and tell me of this ghost Scheffler said you’d encountered.”

I launched into my absurd story, mentioning Ludiya, Mrs. Barlow, Rothac, and the Sanctity of Grace. When I got to the part where the old woman’s head was pierced by an icicle, he said, “Thank goodness for small favors.” He referred to Rothac as “a curious and dirty little satyr,” and at the mention of Ludiya, he smiled sardonically. He only really became interested when I began to describe the Sheer Beauty and its effects. The rest of the story disappeared for him, and he wanted to know every little detail of the violet brew. When I told him I’d brought Rothac’s notes back with me and a cauldron of the stuff, he came around the desk and patted my shoulder.