Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  Afterword to “Music, When Soft Voices Die”

  Not having seen him for more than fifty years, I don’t know where Ismail Turksen is today. But should he ever chance to read this story I hope he’ll understand my gratitude.

  We were both freshmen at the University of Pittsburgh in 1955, and my recollection is that, outside of my roommate, Ismail was the first friend I ever made there. He was also the first and only Turk I’ve ever known at all well, and certainly the first Muslim. I remember him as dark and slim and funny, with a great sudden laugh that contrasted intriguingly with his dry, deadpan sense of humor. Ismail found America a reliably constant source of amusement.

  What I know of Turkish history and folklore, I know almost entirely from Ismail. We’d sit in the Student Union cafeteria, or go for long walks along Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue on mild spring evenings, and he’d recount the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, and what Tsar Nicholas I meant by calling Turkey “the sick man of Europe.” I remember that we traded our grandmothers’ superstitions and household magics, and discussed the similarities and differences between Bronx rabbis and Istanbul hodjas. I could be wrong, but I think he knew at least as much about rabbinical scholarship as I did. Jews have been in Turkey for a very long time.

  When I finally sat down to write “Music, When Soft Voices Die,” after stalling as much as possible (I knew next to nothing of the steampunk genre and was truly terrified of attempting such a story), those old Pittsburgh chats with Ismail began to come back to me: first by slow degrees, and then with a growing rush. Desperation will do that. Mr. Emanetoglu isn’t anything like Ismail as I remember him, but I do hope that Ismail might have recognized him and perhaps approved.

  —PETER S. BEAGLE

  Terry Dowling

  Terry Dowling is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers of the fantastic. He has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine and “Australia’s premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows. His collection Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear won the 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection, earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and is regarded as “one of the best recent collections of contemporary horror” by the American Library Association. The acclaimed Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Terry in its twenty-one-year run than by any other writer.

  Dowling’s award-winning horror collections are An Intimate Knowledge of the Night and Blackwater Days, while his most recent titles are Rynemonn, Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder, and his debut novel, Clowns at Midnight, which London’s Guardian newspaper called “an exceptional work that bears comparison to John Fowles’s The Magus.” Major interviews with Terry conducted by Exotic Gothic editor Danel Olson can be found in The New York Review of Science Fiction and in Cemetery Dance Magazine. Terry’s home page can be found at www.terrydowling.com.

  TERRY DOWLING

  The Shaddowwes Box

  ON THE FOURTH night the dream remained the same: our train ran along the banks of the Nile, its locomotive fired by the mummies of cats and kings. There was Akhmet, yet again, insisting that it was true, leaning forward, bright-eyed, gesturing wildly in our hard-won compartment. A new tomb-pit, shallow but vast, had been unearthed in the sands south of Cairo, he was telling me as if he never had before, hundreds of mummified cats to one side, dozens of human pauper mummies to the other.

  “There had to be kings among them, Mr. Salteri,” Akhmet said, eyes flashing with the fine joke of it, exactly as they had on the momentous day itself six years earlier when I had made the fateful journey to the Wadi Hatas. “It’s what the reinterment commissions did back in the New Kingdom. They feared looters, professional tombaroli such as you, so they moved the royal mummies, hid them. This field had a small precinct to the west. Probably special mummies there, possibly nobles, queens, even kings! But so many mummies. Too many, you understand? What to do? Sell to the Americans? They pay well and take everything, but there is no time. The excavation supervisors search for amulets, jewelry, then dispose of the remains with the railway factors before the authorities arrive. Everything goes into the fireboxes. Whoosh! We ride on the burning dead.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said, those words again, then as now, largely because Akhmet wanted me to, and once again fancying our own late great Queen Victoria, or even the recently crowned King, giving their all like this, blazing away to help complete the run south from Saqqara.

  “Very common now, Mr. Salteri. The moumia burn like sticks. It’s the pitch.”

  “Akhmet, Mr. Minchin is aboard, you say?”

  “Of course, effendi. Even now he will be making his way here. The carriages are crowded. A few moments more.”

  And as if the words were indeed a cue, the door opened and Charles Minchin eased into the compartment, short and florid, grandly moustachioed, looking impossibly crisp in his suntans and solar topee.

  In the dream I stood, now as then, allowing that any archaeologist this well turned out might be a stickler for the niceties. “Mr. Minchin, it’s a pleasure.” We shook hands.

  “Lucas Salteri, the pleasure is mine. I’ve long admired your work.”

  I had to control my smile. To what did he refer? My most recent work had been looting Etruscan tombs outside Veii and Norschia in western Italy. Before that ten years as a West End stage magician, and eight as an engineer before that. My career echoed the great Giovanni Belzoni’s in so many ways. “Our arrangement stands?”

  “Of course. We have camels waiting. We will be at the site by early afternoon.”

  “But between stations—?”

  He consulted his timepiece. “The train will stop in a few minutes. It has been arranged.”

  And indeed the train did begin slowing.

  Ten minutes later we stood by the Nile amidst a cluster of date palms, watching swifts and martins darting over the fields of maize and sorghum as the train disappeared into the south. Ten more and we were mounted, and Minchin’s three fellahin assistants—accomplices they would soon prove to be, Akhmet, Moussa, and Sayeed, nondescript then but made vivid by subsequent events and the dream’s repetition—had finished loading the pack camels and we were heading off into the western desert.

  And that was where the dream ended, always ended, even in the earliest hours of this new momentous day, not at the tomb itself, not when Minchin played his hand, not at the betrayal.

  HERBERT KRAY ARRIVED almost precisely at three o’clock. The bells of St. Paul’s across the Thames had just finished sounding when he knocked at the door, and I heard Mrs. Danvers, my only human servant, hurrying to answer.

  I sat waiting in the large, elegant drawing room, secretly pleased that the day had turned chill and overcast again beyond the heavy drapes, and watched Ramose. There were fourteen things that he could do really well and tending the fire was one of them. He propped and stilted in his best penny-dreadful/Boys’ Own Paper mummy fashion over to the grate, poked it several times, then set down the poker and moved to the side, waiting for his next task.

  Mrs. Danvers ushered in my guest and left us without saying a word, just as I had instructed. Dr. Kray was very well presented, a tall handsome man in his early to middle forties, with a neatly trimmed beard and wearing a suit of the finest tweed. The golden watch-chain in his waistcoat pocket had a fob in the shape of a Horus falcon, proclaiming something of his trade in antiquities. I had no doubt that the Horus was genuine.

  I stood, crossed to him, and shook his hand. But before we could exchange more than a few of the usual pleasantries, I had the distinct if modest pleasure (modest given what was to follow) of seeing his eyes go large at the sight of my favorite manikin.

  “Good Lord, Trenton!” Kray said. “Bendeck mentioned that he’d heard one or two odd stories about you, but I would never have thought this! Tell me that you haven’t revived one of them!”

  “Hardly, Dr. Kray. It’s a construct, nothing more, made to resemble one of the part
ly unwrapped mummies from Maspero’s 1881 DB320 cache from Deir el-Bahri.”

  “It certainly looks authentic to me!”

  “You’re kind to say so. But listen and you will hear the clockwork. It’s all Bryson gears and a rotating oriete of my own design. A fairground diversion, nothing more. Still, if I time it right, you will think it is responding to my commands. But please do be seated.”

  There were three armchairs arranged before the fire, two in a semicircle facing the cheerful blaze, my own somewhat to the right so I could survey the whole room: the single door, the heavily fastened drapes that deadened most of the street noise, the darkly shrouded shape over by the southern wall.

  Even as Kray took the armchair nearest my own, I called, “Ramose, the port, if you please,” and the mummiform stirred, moved forward once more, propping and stilting, half toppling along, very much like one of those clever manikins you sometimes saw in the better klatsches and salons mécaniques off Fleet Street.

  The port had been poured out earlier by Mrs. Danvers, of course, three sets of glasses on three separate trays, all placed carefully out of sight of where Kray now sat. (Ramose was far from having the dexterity to actually pour drinks from a decanter.) This way the bandaged form need only lean forward and bring up the first tray, then do a slow turn, which put it close by Kray’s elbow.

  With an admiring chuckle at the cleverness of the whole thing, the antiques dealer took a glass, crying, “Bravo! Truly marvelous!”

  Ramose straightened, moved behind the semicircle of chairs, and brought the tray and the other glass to me.

  Herbert Kray sipped his port, then set his glass on the small occasional table before the chairs. “Dashed clever. I’d love to know the trick of it. But to business, Mr. Trenton. Your message said that you might have a prime antiquity to sell.”

  I too set aside my glass. “Let us let Ramose do his other party trick first.” I made sure Kray saw me take out my timepiece, seem to be consulting and calculating an exact timing. “Ramose, please show our guest the WH38.”

  Again, as if responding to the spoken command, the mummiform jerked into life. With a whirring of gears and the distinctive click-shift-lock of the Bryson armatures, he stiff-legged to the shrouded shape looming behind the curve of the armchairs. Kray craned about to follow the whole thing, showing the same wide-eyed delight as before, watching as the mummy stopped, raised one bandaged, hook-clawed hand and seized the black velvet dust-cloth covering the tall shape beneath. The claw-hand closed, clenched, pulled. Ramose took one, two steps back, tottering slightly as the shroud came fully away.

  In my mind I applauded silently. Exactly as rehearsed.

  “Ah my!” Kray said, and yet again stared in wonder. Before him—behind him more correctly, though by now he was out of his chair and standing once more—was an unadorned wooden Egyptian burial casket propped upright, held at a gentle eight degrees in a gleaming brass frame consisting of rods, brackets, intricate clamps and gears, all fitted close, keeping it secure.

  “Wonderful!” Kray said. “But that frame. I see clockwork. What on earth—?”

  “Just some new conservation techniques I’m trying, Dr. Kray. Precautions against the local humidity, vibrations caused by traffic, doors closing, that sort of thing. I keep my guest in the drawing room here to offset the effects of damp. Hence the heavy drapes I’ve had installed. The subdued lighting.”

  “Of course. Of course. Has it been opened?”

  “It never has. Please feel free to examine the seals, if you wish. They are Twentieth Dynasty.”

  Kray did so, moving in close. His zeal was impossible to hide. He was seeing a lost king, a queen, another of the marvelous reinterred royal mummies of the kind officially discovered by Maspero in 1881, or those from the Loret cache seven years later. “You are prepared to sell this?”

  “Dr. Bendeck and yourself are reputable experts in this business. I thought I should come to you first.”

  “Yes, yes. Capital! But contents unseen? Hm.” Kray made as if to be deep in thought, frowning slightly, stroking his neatly bearded chin with one hand.

  “Just as I found it, Dr. Kray,” I said.

  “Which was where, Mr. Trenton, if I may ask?”

  “You will understand that this must remain undisclosed for the present.”

  “Of course. Of course.” Kray was examining the casket again, carefully, so carefully, spending long minutes studying the wood, the mixture of pitch and resins keeping it still airtight after so many centuries. He was no doubt imagining a new royal cache, one not yet made known to the Arab Bureau, the Antiquities Service, or the British High Commission, or possibly even more: the barely imaginable wonder of a new sealed tomb, possibly that of Herihor or Tutankhamun, for heaven’s sake, a continuing stream of artefacts finding their way into the special holds of ships using the Suez Canal or reaching England by way of the old contraband routes out of Morocco and Spain. “I’m sure we can reach an agreement, Mr. Trenton. But please. Why have you invited me here ahead of Dr. Bendeck? We are business associates. He said he was asked to call on you at four o’clock, yet your invitation to me specified three and asked for strictest discretion. Surely we might have called on you together. Unless . . . May I assume . . . ?” Kray hesitated a final time, daring not say it.

  I spread my hands. You understand how it is. Make an offer if you wish. “I know you are a man of discrimination, Dr. Kray. A man of letters. A scholar as well as a collector and a dealer. I merely wanted to give you time to examine this piece in your own time, make an unhurried appraisal, form your own conclusions.”

  “Yes, yes, I see. I thank you for that.”

  “And give us a chance to talk. Let me be frank. When Dr. Bendeck arrives, it will be different.”

  Kray returned to his armchair, seated himself again. He took another sip of port and gave me a shrewd look. “Very well,” he said finally, setting down his glass. “May I be equally frank? This is an unadorned casket. It possibly contains the mummy of a nonentity like those unidentified individuals Maspero discovered among the fifty kings of the DB320 cache. The controversial Unknown Man E, for instance, possibly a disgraced royal prince, possibly a murdered royal suitor for Tutankhamun’s widow, but, equally possible, nothing more than a favorite servant, even someone the overzealous reinterment officials accidentally included in their haste to stay ahead of the looters.” Kray leant forward, well-manicured hands on his knees. “If there were the occasional relic of—not to put too fine a point on it—actual intrinsic as well as archaeological value, say, of gold or silver, gemstones, of the finest craftsmanship, I would be happy to reach some mutual accommodation on a more—personal—basis.”

  I smiled and nodded to indicate that this was exactly what I had had in mind, as if, all going well, there would indeed be such intrinsically valuable pieces on offer.

  “Excellent,” I said, raising my glass. “This is precisely why I made so bold as to ask you here ahead of your, so I’ve been told, more officious colleague. As you can appreciate, I prefer not to deal with a consortium.”

  “Capital.” Kray emptied his glass and chuckled with pleasure again as Ramose repeated his earlier performance, stilting and propping across to the decanter, tilting forward to pick up the second tray of the three, and returning with it, setting it down on the occasional table between Kray and me. Fortunately, instinctively, my guest moved his empty glass clear and placed it on the tray when he took a filled one. Ramose could not have managed such a retrieval. The mummy then stiff-legged back to his place to the left of the fire and became still, though, as ever, seeming to be listening, following everything we said.

  While Kray’s attention was on the construct, I checked the time. A quarter of four. Kray’s examination of the WH38 casket had taken longer than expected. Bendeck would be here soon. It was time to give the good doctor his due. Minchin had been their agent in Cairo, the one who did the dirty work, Bendeck the main investor. But Herbert Kray, as several reliable source
s had it, had been the mastermind behind all that had happened in the tomb in the rocky defile at Wadi Hatas that day. Minchin and his fellahin may have done the actual deed, Bendeck may have sold the artefacts, but Kray had undoubtedly planned the whole affair. I had simply been an awkwardness, an additional complication to be dealt with, someone to be left behind when they had finished plundering the tomb and sealed it up again. They knew nothing of the two goatherds who had followed us, brothers to the one who had sold me the papyrus. Instead of robbing me themselves as they had originally intended, they had become my liberators.

  I pretended to sip my port, began directing the small talk that would crown the afternoon’s events. “Dr. Kray, do you know what a Shaddowwes Box is?”

  “No, Trenton. I can’t say that I do.”

  “The great Elizabethan alchemist John Dee was said to have had one. And Aleister Crowley, our Great Beast. It’s a sealed box containing nothing but darkness. A sort of memento mori, really. A reminder of what awaits us all unless we believe in a Creator. Even Shakespeare was said to own one. And it’s spelt ‘shaddowwe’ with the double d and w after one of the Bard’s favoured spellings for shadow.”

  “I see.” Kray didn’t see at all, and my rhapsodic tone clearly troubled him.

  I gestured at the coffin behind his chair. “I must say that having an unopened casket standing there for the past three weeks has given me a shudder or two. I mean, have you ever wondered about what truly happened to that Unknown Man E in the DB320 cache?”

  Kray had to come back from where his own thoughts had taken him. “The Unknown Man? I have to say I know very little about it. He’s the chap they found screaming, yes?”

  “Indeed. Wrapped in a sheepskin—something ritually unclean to the Ancient Egyptians—bound hand and foot, it seems. Some say it’s Pentewere, the conspirator son of Ramesses III who was captured when the Harem Conspiracy against his father failed. Some accounts say he was made to take poison, others that he was buried alive in an unmarked casket.”