Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  Cracking the spine of the Baron’s journal, Jonathan retrieves an envelope containing the promised bank notes and train tickets. “I must confess, Countess, I’m perplexed by your presumption.” He glances toward the grave, noting that the crater is now sealed. The mourners linger beside the mound, each locked in contemplations doubtless ranging from cherished memories of Dr. Wohlmeth to wonderment over who among them will next feel the Reaper’s scythe to curiosity concerning the location of the nearest public house. “Does it not occur to you that I may have better things to do with my time than extirpating your son’s transgressions?”

  By way of reply, the Countess produces from her sack a tinted daguerreotype of a young woman. “I am not the only one to experience remorse over Gustav’s imprudence. My granddaughter Lotte is also in pain, tormented by her failure to warn her father away from his project. Having recently extricated herself from an ill-advised engagement, she is presently in residence at the castle. The thought of meeting the renowned Dr. Hobbwright has fired her with an anticipation bordering on exhilaration.”

  JONATHAN SPENDS THE remainder of the afternoon in the Queen’s Lane Coffee-House, perusing the Baron’s confession. Shortly after four o’clock, he finishes reading the last entry, then slams the volume closed. If this fantastic chronicle can be believed, then the evil that Gustav Nachtstein perpetrated was of so plenary an intensity as to demand his immediate intervention.

  He will go to the Black Forest, bearing a tuning fork and collateral voltaic piles. He will redeem the damned souls of Castle Kralkovnik. But even if their plight had not stirred Jonathan, the case would still entail two puissant facts: £1,000 is the precise sum by which a competent vibratologist might continue Dr. Wohlmeth’s work on a scale befitting its worth, and never in his life has Jonathan beheld a creature so lovely as Fräulein Lotte Nachtstein.

  15 March 1868

  After many arduous years of research into the dubious science of spiritualism, I have reached six conclusions concerning so-called ghosts.

  1. There is no great beyond—no stable realm where carefree phantoms gambol while awaiting communiqués from turban-topped clairvoyants sitting in candlelit parlors surrounded by the dearly departed’s loved ones. Show me a medium, and I’ll show you a mountebank. Give me a filament of ectoplasm, and I’ll return a strand of taffy.

  2. There is life after death.

  3. Once a specter has elected to vacate its fleshly premises, no ordinary barrier of stone or metal will impede its journey. A willful phantom can easily escape a Pharaoh’s tomb, a potentate’s mausoleum, or a lead casket buried six feet underground.

  4. With each passing instant, yet another quantum of a specter’s incorporeal substance scatters in all directions. Once dissipated, a ghost can never reassemble itself. The post-mortem condition is evanescent in the extreme, not to be envied by anyone possessing an ounce of joie de vivre.

  5. Despite the radical discontinuity between the two planes, a specter may, under certain rare circumstances, access the material world prior to total dissolution—hence the occasional credible account of a ghost performing a boon for the living. A deceased child places her favorite doll on her mother’s dresser. A departed suitor posts a letter declaring eternal devotion to his beloved. A phantom dog barks one last time, warning his master away from a bridge on the point of collapse.

  6. In theory a competent scientist should be able at the moment of death to encapsulate a person’s spectral shade in some spiritually impermeable substance, thus canceling the dissipation process and creating a kind of immortal soul. The question I intend to explore may be framed as follows. Do the laws of nature permit the synthesis of an alloy so dense as to trap an emergent ghost, yet sufficiently pliant that the creature will be free to move about?

  17 May 1868

  For the past two months I have not left my laboratory. I am surrounded by the music of science: burbling flasks, bubbling retorts, moaning generators, humming rectifiers. Von Helmholtz, Mendeleyev, and the rest—my alleged peers—will doubtless aver that my quest partakes more of a discredited alchemy than a tenable chemistry. When I go to publish my results, they’ll insist with a sneer, I would do better submitting the paper to the Proceedings of the Paracelsus Society than to the Cambridge Journal of Molecularism. Let the intellectual midgets have their fun with me. Let the ignoramuses scoff. Where angels fear to tread, Baron Nachtstein rushes in—and one day the dead will extol him for it.

  If all goes well, by this time tomorrow I shall be holding in my hand a lump of the vital material. I intend to call it bezalelite, in honor of Judah Löew ben Bezalel, the medieval rabbi from Prague who fashioned a man of clay, giving the creature life by incising on its brow the Hebrew word Emeth—that is, truth.

  Although Judah Löew’s golem was a faithful servant and protector of the ghetto, the rabbi was naturally obliged to prevent it from working on the Sabbath, a simple matter of effacing the first letter of Emeth, the Aleph, leaving Mem and Taw, characters that spell Meth—death. But one fateful Friday evening Löew forgot to disable his brainchild. In consequence of this inadvertent sacrilege, the golem ran amok all day Saturday, and so, come Sunday, the heartsick rabbi dutifully ground the thing to dust.

  I shall not lose control of my golems. From the moment they come into the world, they will know who is the puppet and who the puppeteer, who the beast and who the keeper, who the slave and who the master.

  9 July 1868

  At long last, following a deliriously eventful June, I have found time to again take pen in hand. Not only did I fashion the essential alloy, not only did I learn how to produce it in quantities commensurate with my ambitions, but I have managed to coat living tissue with thin and malleable layers of the stuff. Naturally I first tested the adhesion process on animals. After many false starts and innumerable failures, I managed to electroplate a wasp, a moth, a dragonfly, a frog, a serpent, a tortoise, and a cat, successfully trapping their spirits as the concomitant suffocation deprived them of their lives.

  In every case, the challenge was to find an optimum rate at which to replenish the bezalelite anode with fresh quantities of the alloy. If I introduced too many positively charged atoms into the bath, then the cathode—that is, the experimental vertebrate or invertebrate—invariably suffered paralysis. Too few such ions, and the chrysalis became so porous as to allow the soul’s egress.

  I was pleased and surprised by how quickly a plated specter learns to move. Within hours of its emergence from the electrolyte solution, each subject variously flew, hopped, slithered, crawled, or ran as adeptly as when alive. To the best of my knowledge, a ghost’s condition entails only one deficit. Because the olfactory sense is actually heightened by the procedure, the creature will undergo a highly unpleasant interval as its former corporeal host decays within the chrysalis. Once decomposition is complete, however, the encapsulated phantom is free to revel in its immortality.

  Finding an experimental subject of the species Homo sapiens posed no difficulties. Three months ago my manservant Wolfgang was diagnosed with a cancer of the stomach. His anguish soon proved as unimaginable as the physicians’ palliatives proved useless. The instant I proposed to sever his tormented soul from his ravaged flesh, he surrendered himself to my science.

  I shall not soon forget the sight of Wolfgang’s glazed body rising from the wooden vat—eyeless, noseless, mouthless, hairless: the solution had plated all his features, much as an enormous candle burning atop a bust will, drip by drip, sheath the face in wax. In a single deft gesture I removed the breathing pipe and, taking up a permanent bezalelite plug, stoppered the ventilation hole, so that death by asphyxiation occurred in a matter of minutes. Even as the waters of Wolfgang’s rebirth sluiced along his arms and cascaded down his chest, he began teaching his phantom limbs to animate the chrysalis, his phantom eyes to pierce the translucent husk, and so he climbed free of the tar-lined tub without misadventure. The gaslight caught the hardened elixir, causing cold sparks to flash among the bu
lges and pits. A naïve witness happening upon my golem would have taken him for a knight clad in armor fashioned from phosphorescent brass and polished amber.

  “The pain is gone,” the ghost reported.

  “Naturally,” I replied. “I have disembodied you. Henceforth your name is Nonentity 101.”

  “I can barely see,” he moaned.

  “A necessary and—as you will soon realize—trivial side effect.”

  “I feel buried alive. Set me free, Herr Doktor Nachtstein.”

  “Take heart, Nonentity 101. You are the harbinger of a new and golden race. Welcome to Eden. Before long hundreds of your kind will inhabit this same garden, arrayed in immortal metal, sneering at oblivion.”

  “Let me out.”

  “Do not despair. In the present Paradise, the lethal Tree of Knowledge is nowhere to be found. This time around, my dear Adam, you will eat only of the Tree of Life.”

  THE SPARTAN TRAIN that brings Jonathan Hobbwright eastward from the tiny village of Tübinhausen to the outskirts of Castle Kralkovnik comprises a lone passenger carriage hauled by a decrepit switch engine. Shortly after six o’clock post meridiem, he arrives at a forlorn clapboard railway station, terminus of a spur line created solely to service the late Baron Nachtstein’s estate.

  As Jonathan wanders about the platform, a thunderstorm arises in the Schwarzwald, the harsh winds flogging his weary flesh. The station offers no refuge, being as tightly sealed as Dr. Wohlmeth’s grave, its door secured with a padlock as large as a teapot. For a half hour the vibratologist huddles beneath the drizzling eaves and leaky gutters, until at last a humanoid figure comes shambling through the tempest, gripping a kerosene lantern that imparts a coppery glow to its bezalelite skin.

  “Good evening, Dr. Hobbwright,” the golem says in the voice of a man shouting from within a furnace.

  “Actually, it’s a deplorable evening.”

  “I am called Nonentity 157. My race, you will hardly be surprised to learn, regards you as the new Moses, come to set us free.” The ghost heaves the vibratologist’s steamer trunk onto his massive shoulders. “Judging from its weight, I would surmise that herein lies the mechanism of our deliverance.”

  “A thousand-ampère Wohlmeth Resonator plus an array of voltaic piles.”

  Nonentity 157 leads Jonathan down the sodden platform and across the glistening tracks. Peering through the gale, the vibratologist discerns a stout and stationary coach, hitched to a pair of electroplated horses. Nonentity 157 lofts the steamer trunk atop the roof, securing it with ropes, then opens the door and guides Jonathan into the mercifully dry passenger compartment. Climbing into the driver’s box, the golem urges his team forward.

  By the time the conveyance reaches its destination, the storm has subsided, the curtains of rain parting to reveal a bright gibbous moon. The silver shafts strike Castle Kralkovnik, limning a complex that is less a fortress than a walled hamlet, the whole mass surmounting a hill so bald and craggy as to suggest a skull battered by a mace. The phantom horses trot through a portal flanked by stone gargoyles and began negotiating a labyrinth of cobblestoned streets.

  Golems are everywhere on view, skulking along the puddle-pocked alleys, clanking across the bridges, rumbling through the tunnels, huddling beneath the Gothic arches. In this city of the walking dead, every citizen seems to Jonathan a kind of renegade pawn, recently escaped from a tournament whose rules, while ostensibly those of chess, are in fact known only to Lucifer.

  The coach halts beside the veranda of the main château. As Jonathan alights, two golems appear, give their names, and set about simplifying his life. While Nonentity 201 takes charge of the steamer trunk, Nonentity 337 leads the vibratologist upward along the graceful curve of the grand staircase to a private bedchamber. A note rests on the pillow. Countess Nachtstein wants him to join her and Lotte for supper at eight o’clock. When the trunk appears, Jonathan changes into dry clothing: a wholly benevolent carapace, he decides, as opposed to the malign husks in which the Baron’s progeny are imprisoned.

  RETURNING TO THE first floor, Jonathan employs his olfactory sense—his nose is almost as keen as a golem’s—in finding the dining hall. The Countess and her granddaughter are seated at a ponderous banquet table, drinking Rhenish.

  “Welcome, Dr. Hobbwright,” the Countess says. “Do you prefer white wine or red?”

  “Red, please.”

  “Will burgundy suffice?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Owing to the tinted daguerreotype, Lotte Nachtstein seems to Jonathan a familiar presence. Like the reputation of a famous personage, her high cheekbones, supple mouth, and flashing green eyes have preceded her. Jonathan soon learns, however, that her nature is as harsh as her features are fair. While a cadre of golems serves the dinner—a veritable feast predicated on an entire roast boar—it becomes apparent that gentle words rarely fall from this fräulein’s generous lips.

  “Evidently I’ve become something of a legend among your father’s experimental subjects,” Jonathan says, savoring his wine. “They see me as the source of their salvation.”

  “My father never regarded the golems as mere experimental subjects,” Lotte says in an acerbic tone. “If you’d read his journal more carefully, you would have grasped that fact.”

  “Nevertheless, his project went beyond the pale.”

  “For a man of Gustav Nachtstein’s genius there are no pales,” Lotte says haughtily. “You are not the first prospective savior to visit us, Dr. Hobbwright. In recent months my grandmother and I have consulted with experts from all over England and the Continent. Every imaginable remedy has been tried and found wanting: acids, chisels, hacksaws, steam drills, welding torches, explosives.”

  “But Dr. Hobbwright is our first vibratologist,” the Countess reminds Lotte, then turns to Jonathan and says, “My granddaughter and I believe that the right sort of specialist has finally come to Castle Kralkovnik.”

  “Speak for yourself, Mother,” Lotte says. “You were convinced that Dr. Pollifax’s silver bullets would free the golems, likewise Dr. Edelman’s caustic butter, not to mention your misplaced faith in Dr. Callistratus, who wasted six days attempting to deplate the cat.”

  Jonathan helps himself to a second glass of burgundy. “Might I presume to ask how Baron Nachtstein met his end?”

  “Violently,” Lotte says.

  “His creatures assassinated him,” the Countess says with equal candor. “The details are unpleasant.”

  “My father died even more horribly than my mother, who suffered a fatal hemorrhage giving birth to me,” Lotte says. “Just as the Baroness Nachtstein’s fertility destroyed her, so did Baron Nachtstein’s brilliance occasion his downfall.”

  “Your father was extraordinarily gifted, but his journal also reveals a man obsessed,” Jonathan says.

  Lotte sips her rhenish and glowers at the vibratologist. “It’s the golems who are obsessed, incapable of seeing beyond their idée fixe about damnation. I ask you, Dr. Hobbwright, does not the fact that they declined to plate my father argue for the fundamental benevolence of the procedure? If their condition is as intolerable as they maintain, they would have logically inflicted it on their creator instead of simply murdering him.”

  “In that case, perhaps I should return to Oxford,” Jonathan says, sensing that in defending the Baron so vociferously, Lotte has overstepped the bounds of her actual beliefs. “Given that your father’s creatures are such incurable dissemblers, I see no point in helping them.”

  “No, please—you must stay,” Lotte insists. “Perhaps my father was mistaken. If the golems say their situation is unendurable, it behooves us to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

  13 January 1869

  Nonentity 157 and his bezalelite brethren are adamant on one point. They insist that a wandering soul’s burning need is to venture forth from its cadaverous habitat and dissipate, occasionally favoring its survivors with a benevolent gesture en passant. By tampering with this process,
I have plunged the golems into an irreparable despair. Indeed, I have dispatched them to hell.

  My instincts tell me to ignore these complaints. Creatures in such a metaphysically unprecedented state are wont to indulge in hyperbole. Like the vast majority of sentient beings, my golems are unreliable narrators of their own lives.

  As it happens, their illusion of damnation is useful to my purposes. By promising to return them to the electrolyte bath any day now, subsequently reversing the plating process and dissolving their husks, I retain a remarkable measure of control over their minds. I cannot speak for the whole of creation, but here in the Schwarzwald law and order enjoy a proper degree of hegemony over anarchy and chaos.

  Judging from my latest series of animal experiments, I would have to say that, alas, bezalelite plating can occur in one direction only. I would do well to sequester that unhappy fact in the pages of this journal. Were the golems to comprehend the immutability of their situation, they would suffer unnecessary distress.

  To date I have brought forth one hundred and thirteen electroplated souls, most of them terminal consumptives and cancer patients from Freiburg, Pforzheim, Reutlingen, and Stuttgart. With each such parturition I come closer to perfecting my methods. To help maintain a constant ion level, I have learned to add potassium cyanide to the bath, along with salts of the bezalelite itself. Conductivity can be further enhanced with carbonates and phosphates. As it happens, if the golem-maker first deposits a layer of pure silver on the subject’s epidermis, no more than one-tenth of a micrometer thick, total adhesion of the alloy to the protein substrate is virtually guaranteed. Finally, if the experimenter wishes to hasten the process by means of high current densities, he should employ pulse plating to prevent erratic deposition rates. In the case of human subjects, the ideal cycle is fifteen seconds on followed by three seconds off. To ensure a wholly homogeneous chrysalis, the golem-maker will want to vary the direction of the electricity flowing from the rectifier. In density the reverse should exceed the forward pulse by a factor of four, while the width of the forward pulse must be three times that of the reverse.