Ghosts by Gaslight (8 page)

Angelos, fishing hastily in his purse for the monthly payment, reassured him that all could not be better, calling him “old man” in the process, not once but twice. Mr. Emanetoglu pondered this development as he pattered down the stair.
Old man . . .
there was an expression that meant something to the English: an admission to a certain closeness, if any dark-skinned foreigner could ever be said to be close to an Englishman. Mr. Emanetoglu knew himself to be a naïve soul, quite often feeling out of place in this bewildering country, but he was not a fool.

“I know how many of them see every Turk as that dog Griffith does,” he said that night at dinner in Haringey, where he lived with his elder brother Ismail, his sister-in-law Ceylan, and their three young sons. “I hear them on the street when they think I do not understand—I know very well what they say, how bitter and spiteful they still are about the war, how many of them would wish us all drowned in the Strait of Marmora, if they did not more and more need our money. But there are some, like Mr. Angelos . . .” He sighed, his smile more than half mocking his own words. “I don’t know—what should I say?
Old man . . .
I am sure that is more significant than being invited to tea.”

“I am ready to believe anything of the English,” Ismail said flatly. “They are a mad people, and completely untrustworthy. If they were otherwise, there would not have been a war. It may be
old man
to your face, but it will be
nigger
behind your back. I would put no stock in their words, not ever.”

“Perhaps not.” Mr. Emanetoglu sighed again. “Perhaps.”

But he said nothing of what he had almost felt, almost sensed, in Angelos’s rooms, partly because he could find no words in Turkish or English to describe his impression; partly because he knew that his brother regarded him—quite kindly—as a well-intentioned blunderer at the best of times. All the same, hurrying to one or another of Ismail’s properties, he often found himself going out of his way to pass the tall old house in Russell Square, often lingering in the street for no purpose that he could have explained either to Ismail or to Angelos—or, for that matter, to the helmeted policemen who came along more than once to stare and sniff and harry him elsewhere.

He did talk about it, a little, to his youngest nephew, Ekrem, who was five years old, because he talked to Ekrem a good deal, as he had done almost since the boy’s birth. Being a practical child for his age, Ekrem asked him, “Why don’t you ask the
hodja
?,” meaning the venerable healer who lived two streets over from the Emanetoglus’ home. The
hodja
always kept sweets for children in the pouches at his waist, and Ekrem had great faith in him.

“What could I ask him?” Mr. Emanetoglu demanded. “What could I tell him? That I think something is wrong in that house, when I don’t even know whether that really is what I think? The
hodja
would laugh at me, as he should.”

“Well, he would give you candy, anyway,” Ekrem insisted stubbornly. “The
hodja
is nice.”

Angelos was becoming increasingly withdrawn, seeing less and less of his housemates, who, by and large, appeared plainly relieved to have a polite excuse to avoid him. Griffith, of all people, occasionally came seeking him at Christ’s, stepping as haughtily as a cat between hurrying lecturers, prankish students, and charity patients moaning in their own filth, waiting to be seen. Inconvenienced and irritated, Angelos would nevertheless give him a brief account of his latest experiments, and Griffith would stalk away again, apparently unwilling to be seen by social equals asking for information. Griffith was a notably catlike person in a number of ways.

Dispensing early with the stethoscope, Angelos had managed to set granules of common charcoal between two metal plates to create what he called “a carbon button,” serving as an improvised amplifier when connected to his hand-cranked generator. The fragmented whispers, mumbles and cries came crowding in, the vast majority of them in languages that Angelos could barely distinguish from each other, let alone translate or even guess at. The rare English voices were hardly any easier to understand: very few came in university accents, but rather from all points and ancestors of the empire. On the occasions when he actually sought Angelos out in his rooms, Griffith himself sometimes became as intrigued by a recognizable Lancashire or Cornish inflection as though he were coming home at last to Balliol. To Angelos he commented, “D’you know, even the wog—old Glue Pot—even he’s starting to sound human after a bit of this gabble. Remarkable, rather.”

Only Scheuch continued to spend any considerable time in Angelos’s rooms, frequently—as Angelos was forced to admit—to the project’s benefit. He proved to have the most discerning hearing of all four men, often catching phrases completely opaque to Angelos himself, and learning to react to tones rather than guessing at literal meaning. Crouching as close to the “carbon button” as he could, he would mutter,
“
Couldn’t make out a bloody word, but there’s a sweet voice she’s got . . .” and, later, “What’re
they
all on about, then? Sounds like my mum’s whole family on Christmas morning . . . That chap’s an idiot. You don’t have to understand an idiot to know he’s an idiot . . . Oh,
that
poor bugger’s in trouble—that one’s in awful trouble, poor soul—you can hear it. I wish . . .”

He always made his comments in the present tense, without exception. When Angelos pointed out to him that if his theory was correct, the chances were that almost every voice he was hearing—if not, indeed, every single one—was of someone long dead, Scheuch answered simply, “I know that, old fellow. But I
can’t
know that, if you follow me. Just can’t, that’s all.” Angelos never raised the matter again.

Vordran did come once, quite late at night, to ask directly when Angelos opened the door, “Do you ever hear the same voice twice? Do you ever recognize a voice you might have heard before?”

Angelos frowned. “What could the odds be? It would be like recognizing the same fish in a school that swam past you—lord, even an hour ago. Vordran, it’s as I told you, we could be sweeping up the remains of every word that’s ever been uttered—perhaps only in England, only in London, perhaps only within a few square miles of this house. And even so . . .”

“And even so . . .” Vordran nodded. “I understand. London is very old. I was only wondering.” He stood looking down at Angelos for a moment. “I am impressed, Angelos. You have taught yourself a great deal in a short time.” He paused, frowning. “Do you find the voices louder than they were?”

“Louder?” Angelos shook his head. “I don’t think so. A bit more intelligible, yes—that’s the carbon button—but louder? I only wish they were.”

“Perhaps you do not. Remember what I told you about eavesdroppers.” Vordran paused, seemingly waiting for an answer or a further question. He got neither and left.

Yet as spring aged into a patchy, dusty London summer, one at least, of all the numberless voices, was indeed growing clearer in Angelos’s rooms, and steadily more familiar as well, if no louder. It was a woman’s voice, though low enough in timbre that Angelos at first took it for the sobs of a man in soul-strangling anguish. He could never determine its language or nationality, no matter how carefully he listened, nor how piercingly pleading the voice became. Never swelling in volume, it did not pass on like the others, but only continued to wail in soft desperation: a cry like wind over stone at first, though later it took on the sound of a torture victim long beyond screaming for mercy, broken and barely whining with each turn of the rack. At other times, it—
she—
sounded as though she were making love with a demon, which terrified Angelos and made him squeeze his eyes shut until they hurt. There were words in it then, but none he knew.

No one heard it beyond his rooms, at first. There were times when he was certain that the little homemade amplifier could not possibly contain the terrible crying; that it existed only in his riven head. He shut down the generator altogether, sometimes for days, but the voice continued whimpering in the walls of his rooms when he tried forlornly to sleep, and followed him pitilessly when he dragged himself to lectures at Christ’s Hospital. It came to grieve, finally, through his entire life, and he wept nightly for the horror it witnessed at the same time that he cursed it and prayed for it to leave him alone. He grew to believe beyond question that he was going mad and had a lawyer draw up papers to make certain that he was to be delivered to Bensham Asylum, and not to Devon Pauper. He made copies for each of his housemates and slipped them under their doors.

When they in their turn at last began, one at a time, to hear the lone voice in its own context—whether or not Angelos had the generator running—each reacted as differently as might have been expected. Griffith denied fiercely that anything unusual was happening at all, while Vordran admitted to the voice, but blamed Angelos’s foolhardy experiments for waking some ghost or spirit long resident in the old rooming house. Only Scheuch considered the situation more or less as it was: the four of them bound, whether as victims, prey, or helpless bystanders, to the endless imploring sorrow of a single human being from another time and—in all likelihood—another country. No less frightened than the others, he determined consciously to drown himself in the voice, to listen to it to the point of numb boredom, inoculating himself against its eternal misery. The technique had proven remarkably effective against the mean arrogance of his bank’s manager; he saw no reason why it should not aid him in this situation. Scheuch was not a highly imaginative man, but he paid attention to what worked.

With his keen hearing, he was the one who first noticed that the voice was beginning to be audible in Russell Square. He thought at first that he might be imagining it; but when Vordran commented on it, and Angelos’s increased pallor and sleeplessness gave silent assent, Scheuch conducted his own research, carefully pacing out the exact range of the voice—which increased, block by block, every week or thereabouts—and also making note of the local residents’ awareness of the sound, or lack of it. Some seemed as yet unaffected, but many were beginning to look as though, like himself, they had taken to spending their nights with their heads buried under several pillows. Scheuch found it cheaper than gin and laudanum, though no more effective.

It was at this point, on the fifteenth of August—a Saturday morning—that Mr. Emanetoglu came to collect the rent.

The small, dark man turned, as always, at the northeast corner of the square, passed the Cabmen’s Shelter, walked another block—and then abruptly froze where he stood, raising his head and cocking it sideways, like an attentive bird or a hound on point. After a moment he began to run, which was not something Mr. Emanetoglu did at all often, and children laughed at his clumsy gait as they scattered out of his way. Reaching the house on Geraldine Row, he first knocked, then rang, as was his invariable custom, no matter his current urgency. When no one responded he waited no longer, but let himself in, thrusting the door open so violently that it rebounded from the wall and banged shut behind him. He took the long stair two steps at a time, like a young man hastening to his beloved. He was talking loudly to himself in Turkish, and his normally serene brown eyes were wide and wild.

Griffith’s room being just off the first-floor landing, it was the one that Mr. Emanetoglu burst into without announcing himself, demanding as the door slammed open, “What have you done? What has
happened
here?”

Griffith was not asleep. Griffith did not appear to have ever been asleep. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, with his head in his hands, and he did not immediately look up at Mr. Emanetoglu’s furious question. He muttered at last, “Ah, hello there, old Glue Pot—pull up a chair.” He raised his head, blinking. “Is it that time already? Half a second, then—”

“Never mind the rental fee!” Mr. Emanetoglu shouted at him. “What have you
done,
you foolish man?” He actually took Griffith by both slumped shoulders, as though to shake him into sense, and then released him and stepped back, making every effort to calm himself.

“Who did this?” he asked. “If it was not you, who then? Answer me!” He realized that he was sweating through his good linen suit, which he always wore on rent-collecting day. “Who is this who is responsible? Which man?” He was vain of his proficiency in English, but knew that when he was hurried or upset, the impossible grammar tended to set gleeful traps for him. “Who? Which?”

Griffith shrugged. “Angelos . . . yes, why not Angelos? Bloody Jew, you know, Angelos . . .” His head lolled forward. Mr. Emanetoglu pushed him back on his bed and went up the stair at a run.

Angelos met him at the top, waiting with his arms folded resignedly across his chest. He looked very nearly skeletal and even nearer to complete collapse than Griffith, but he held himself with a stubborn, painful dignity. He said, “Mr. Emanetoglu, I’m going to have to ask you for one or two days’ grace on the rent. No more than two, I assure you.”

“Never mind the bloody rent!” Mr. Emanetoglu would go to his grave—he was certain of it—never truly comprehending the significance and usage of that single English word, but he employed it at every sensed opportunity, hoping that if it should fit into the conversation, so perhaps would he. “What has occurred here, Mr. Angelos? Tell me precisely what you and your friends”—for Scheuch and Vordran had come trudging up the stair behind him—“have done to my brother’s nice house?” He was outraged to realize that he was close to weeping.

Angelos’s voice was wearily conciliatory, without being at all defensive. “Mr. Emanetoglu, this is my fault entirely. I have been experimenting at random to learn whether it might be possible for people, say, in Turkey to speak directly to people here in England—and instead, I began to hear voices right in my rooms—”

“Voices of spirits who haunt my brother’s house?” Mr. Emanetoglu broke in furiously. “No, it is you four, you yourselves, who are haunted—whatever ghosts or demons may be in this house, you surely brought them with you! I could feel it, hear it,
smell
it on the street outside!” He checked himself, turning—as he never failed to do in such crises—to the calming words of his personal guru, the great Sufi Muhammad al-Ghazali, who never failed to comfort him by reminding him that it was wisdom always to consider and to doubt.
“Doubt is the
scholar’s dear friend, and self-doubt the dearest . . .”
Therefore, taking several deep breaths before he spoke again, he said quietly, “It is an old house, this, and I know from my own experience that some old houses can in some way retain the . . . the shadows of those who once lived there. Is that what happened, Mr. Angelos? Did you and your . . .
experiments
awaken Ismail’s house?”