Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  AT FIRST HE felt only faint pains, here and there about his neck, a slight heat in the skin of his chest where the locket lay. Sometimes these were itches and no more, and if he lifted the neck of his shirt to search for signs of them, he saw no mark—the first few times, the pains themselves eased utterly, he was so reassured by the sight of his clear skin.

  Then a redness began to grow and to glow in the flesh there, visible in the light of a bright day outdoors but not by candlelight or lamp. The reddened skin was sensitive to the touch of a finger or the rubbing of shirt cloth; if he scratched it absentmindedly it would sting and burn, and the pain of that would linger.

  There rose blisters, then, pepperings of them where each bead had lain in the night, and a flowering on his breast from the locket’s weight. They burst and itched and wept, and the skin stayed raw; sometimes by nightfall it had healed dry, but the dream-lady’s visit would inflame it again, when she forced the unnatural burden of the ghost beads on him.

  The wounds never quite bled; at worst they leaked a watery fluid that stained Smoll’s shirt and nightshirt yellow. “What have you spilt on yourself?” Cook might scold him, but it was less a question than a lament at the general carelessness of boys, and she did not pursue him for an explanation.

  THE DREAM-LADY WOULD thrust the beads one last nervous time at Smoll, her shining, rattling handfuls of them. His own hands would turn palm up to take them. He was an obedient boy, and before he had left to live here his mother had kissed him and instructed him to do exactly as he was told by all at Mr. Beecham’s house. Also, he was afraid that the beads, if he did not catch them, would slither and crash to the floor. The noise they would make terrified him enough; the consequences of such a concussion, he could not begin to imagine.

  And once she had poured the beads into his hands, their weight and coldness compelled him; he understood himself to have made some kind of pledge in accepting them. There was no handing the necklace back, however much it pained him to hold it, the weight like a load of polished river stones. They chilled his hands, and the dragging of the overspilt ones made his whole arms shake. She had pushed them out of her time into his, and by taking them he had taken them on, somehow; he had become responsible for them. That’s right—you have it! she now exulted, and she had an eye again, a jagged gleam on the darkness as she nodded. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

  He might say Yes. He might creak out the truth: It is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. He might gather the spills of beads or leave them depending from the fat gold locket for which the whole embarrassment of ivory, amber, and jet had been assembled. No matter what he chose to do—if choice, indeed, played any part in it—she would nod and gleam in the same way; the same impression of her tight smile would hang there in the night before him. Put it on, she now said; they were only partway through whatever bewitchment she was working. Her voice issued not from her tensed lips but from the fearful air all around; it rose at Smoll from inside him, from the marrow of his own small bones.

  Always he put the necklace on, although it was cold, and painfully heavy. The sooner he put it on, the sooner this trial would end.

  You see? The woman melted into relief. Her head tilted more. Her smile flickered, then became more distinct; for an appalling moment it was too large for her face, the next instant it shrank too small, then the mouth was extinguished altogether. It suits you, she said unctuously, mouthlessly. Then she leaned forward and hissed, Hide it under your clothes, before Mistress comes and sees.

  He did as she bid him, covering the noose of beads and locket with his nightshirt. Each time they made him gasp, the cold striking through his breastbone, the sudden weight straining at his neck.

  Yes, that’s right, the lady would say—she was not a lady, of course; she was a servant like himself. She leaned at him; she had eyes and teeth. Her words caught up with her mouth, and some nights he would feel not only the ice-burden of the beads but also feathers of her historical breath against his face and front. By now he was fixed and imprisoned, by the beads and by his fear, by her face tilted forward, her forehead white and broad, the eyes wide and drinking up the sight of the hidden necklace.

  Then she would be gone. But the necklace would stay, coldly burning. And the horror of her presence stayed too, the boxed-in attic air crawling with it as a street-dog’s coat crawls with vermin. All Smoll’s skin crawled too, and his ears still heard her hisses, and his spine still jolted with the ghost noises behind her, the ghost steps climbing the nonexistent stairs.

  When the steps ceased, and the fear loosened its hold on him sufficiently, he lay back down, crushed to his little bed by the beads and locket, collared and chained down. To breathe, to lift the locket weight on his chest and let in air underneath, he must summon some force and determination. He lay entirely imprisoned, hauling himself from breath to breath, and whether he failed in that effort for want of air, or the task of breathing exhausted him, eventually he would sleep.

  “WHY, LOOK HERE! A letter has come for a Master Smollett Standforth.”

  Smoll looked up from his porridge. Mr. Pinkney placed the note before him. “Posture, boy!” Smoll straightened, and the raw skin of the sores crinkled and burned beneath his shirt.

  “That’s a nice hand,” said Cook, passing behind him with her own bowl.

  “The priest will have written it,” he said, “for my ma.”

  Cook sat all bustle across the table corner from him. “Shall I read it to you?”

  “Please, if you would.” He pushed it towards her. He did not want it near. It promised nothing but complications, and he had not the energy to accommodate them.

  “I hope it is not bad news.” Cook gave him a kind and serious look through her porridge steam. She examined the glossy seal with approval before breaking it, then she labored through some of the writing within. “She hopes you are well,” she said, “and she sends you her love. They are all well there—no bad news, then.” Cook patted Smoll’s hand before toiling on. “Only Biss has been laid low with a fever. That has broken. All is well. She is coming good. Biss is your sister?”

  “She is my cousin. But she lives with us, as good as a sister.” And Smoll lost his good posture again, thinking of Biss waving him off in the carriage that day, a little weeping to lose him; of Biss laughing too much sometimes and having to be sat and calmed; of Biss ill and subdued, lying abed (unimaginable!), and how he had not been there to help Ma care for her or to share in the worrying.

  “Ah, here is the business. ‘Your brother Dravitt has come into the good fortune of being apprenticed to Nape’s uncle George Paste down at Caunterbury, and he will be coming through London on the twenty-ninth of January—’ ” Cook read on, frowning, crouched over the letter. If he had not known her, by her expression right now he would have thought her a most bad-tempered person.

  “Your porridge will get cold,” said Smoll. His own porridge was all spooned up and eaten, fast and nervously, he had been rendered so self-conscious by the letter, and by his home life being brought out around the breakfast table, here in his new life. It pained him, the thought of Ma relaying to the priest all she wanted Smoll to know, and the way the priest had corrected and embroidered her words with priest language, putting himself and his education between Smoll and his ma.

  “She hopes Mr. Beecham will permit young Dravitt to stay here a night on his journey, is the sense of it, boiled down.”

  They both looked to Mr. Pinkney, at the far end of the table with his tea and thin toast, his braces and his white, white shirtfront on which never a drop was spilt, never a crumb was deposited.

  Pinkney tipped his head, sipped his tea. “I am sure Mr. Beecham will have no objection. Dravitt, is it?, should be no trouble to us, sharing your little eyrie for a night.” He took another sip and glanced along the table, a glint in his eye. “Unless he is of a much different make from yourself, Smoll. Is he a wild boy, your brother?”

  “Oh no, sir. Drav would be timider than me, by far.”
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  “Oh, Smoll.” Cook laughed a little at Smoll’s earnestness and gave his hand a brisk rub where it lay there on the table.

  He barely noticed, he was so occupied with the warring emotions inside him. He felt a stab of missing Dravitt and all the littlies, and Biss and Ma, and the house, and all around it, the village he knew, so humdrum, every stone and weed of it, every codger and kid. This keen distress was cut through by the relief it would be to see Drav again and show his new life to him—yet it would be pain, too, for it would agitate Smoll’s homesickness, which until now had been thoroughly obscured by the novelty of his new duties and worries. And all these complexities were in turn flattened by the stark dread, the absolute impossibility of Drav’s visiting, the intractable necessity for Mr. Pinkney and Mr. Beecham to forbid it. Sharing your little eyrie for a night—that must not happen. Drav must never endure a night with Smoll in the attic room! Clearly Cook and Pinkney knew nothing of what happened up there, once the household slept. Smoll gathered up his posture again, lifted his chin, and the necklace of raw patches stretched and twinged.

  “I will ask Mr. Beecham this morning,” said Pinkney, “but I dare say he will be entirely happy with the idea.”

  IT WAS NEAR a fortnight before Dravitt was to come. Smoll proceeded towards the day mazed with terror. Dravitt must not see the dream-lady, he knew that much. He certainly must not be forced to take her beads. But even if Smoll took them himself, as usual, how could he save Drav from being terrified by the whole transaction, by the mere sight of the woman, by her voice—now foggy, now sharp and clear—by her urgent attentions?

  In a bid to be moved from the attic room he revealed his wounds one morning to Cook. “Gracious!” she cried. “How long have you gone about like this? Look at the boy, Pinkney! What are these? Have you seen anything like them?” And they turned Smoll about and exclaimed some more, the pair of them.

  But all they did was smother the lesions with a strong-smelling grease that Cook mixed up, that everyone remarked on and made faces at when Smoll was near—everyone but the dream-lady, who only went at him with her customary combination of impatience and flattery. It suits you, she said just the same, as the beads burned on Smoll’s slippery chest, and the attic room might have been suspended from a hot air balloon miles above the Beecham house, or might be a wind-whipped hut out on the Arctic ice, for all the help he could expect from beyond its walls.

  The night before Dravitt was due, Cook made Smoll bathe, his own small personal bath so that he would not infect anyone with his disease, if infectious he was. He sank back disconsolate in the stinging, soothing water, behind the screen in the kitchen. Don’t rub at them; just soak, Cook had said, and so he soaked, staring up at the ceiling and listening to Cook come and go, and others who must be explained to, about Smoll and his condition, and his coming brother. We will bandage you up, the night he’s here, Cook had said, and put clean sheets on your bed, so’s he doesn’t catch it. We don’t want to send him down Caunterbury covered in bibulous plague, do we? Won’t impress his new master.

  Soggy warm from bathing and freshly anointed with the foul salve, Smoll tottered upward through the cold house, carrying his candle and the wrapped hot-brick for his bed. He would meet Dravitt at the coach tomorrow afternoon; Drav would be looking out for him, excited, perhaps a little frightened that Smoll would not be there; when he saw Smoll he would beam, all relief and pleasure at having a companion in his adventure. He would be looking to Smoll for advice, for explanation. He knew nothing of the world, Dravitt, and he was very small (though he would have grown some since Smoll last saw him in the summer); he was easily cowed.

  Smoll stood on the steep wooden steps, halfway through the floor into his room, clutching his brick and candle there on the threshold of his exile. The very air felt different here; the top half of him was tainted with its solitude and horror, while his legs stood in a freer, kindlier atmosphere below. He summoned his energies and stepped up wholly into the attic and went to the bed and put down the candle and tucked the hot-brick under the blankets. Then he came back and closed the door in the floor, shutting himself in, untethering himself from the safety of Beecham’s household. He climbed into bed, the bed that Dravitt would be sharing tomorrow. He blew out the candle with a frosty breath and hugged the hot-brick to his stomach, and he wept a little for Dravitt, for Dravitt’s innocence (which once he himself had shared), and for the distance he was from home and Biss and Ma, and for his own want of courage.

  He was dozing when the attic announced the dream-lady’s imminence, its cold air curdling, hostile, its space become a little theatre where only unpleasant things might play out. Then she rustled at him out of the darkness, the hourglass waist of her, the cocked featureless head. She thrust at him her handfuls of gleam: Take it. Smoll flattened to the wall as always, without deciding to; the fear never lessened, however well he knew her, however often she uttered the same words. There was something distressing, indeed, in their repetition, in the mechanical nature of her performance, the fact that she could be neither paused nor halted.

  The necklace shone in the darkness. What would I do with it, for heaven’s sake? hissed the rustling lady, and Smoll’s flesh crept from her touch, and his salved wounds winced and pained. His hands unstuck themselves from the wall as they always did, because he was obedient, and because she would go away if he obeyed, and the most important thing in the world was that she go away.

  He had thought he had no room, when the woman was there, for considering or scheming, for outwitting her. She took him over, he had thought, and his whole being underwent her visitation, was ground through it like meat through Cook’s great dark mincing machine down in the kitchen.

  But tonight he found that he did have an extra thought spare, a small pocket in his mind where ruled, unafraid because unaware, his younger brother—not Dravitt as he would be now, skinny and bright faced and ready to start his new life apprenticing, but Dravitt when he was small and round and red curled, a plaything for Smollett and his sisters; the sleep-sodden Dravitt whom Smollett had carried home after the midsummer bonfire; the Dravitt who had run stout and screaming with laughter, Biss and Clara pursuing him, towards Smollett, whose one hand was tip-fingered on the oak that was Home for this game, whose other reached out to Drav, so that he might reach safety sooner.

  The beads began to rattle, from the lady’s hands to Smoll’s, and to weigh on his palms, fall over his fingers. In the cold light of the winter moon pouring through the attic window each bead was vaguely its own color, the ghostly ivory, the implacable jet, the flecked transparent warmth-that-was-not-warm of the amber. They piled and slid on Smoll’s palms; the woman’s white hands were emptying; her breath from the other time blew warm, sour and intent on his forehead. He had only these few moments while she poured, while she reached through from her time to his; once the last bead left her grasp, he would be helpless against her returning tomorrow and including his brother in her terrors.

  “No.” Smoll’s voice was small, ineffectual. No matter. The voice it was uttered in did not matter.

  He grasped a bead and sprang with it up from his bed. He pushed his arms through from his time into hers, forced his head into the cold syrup of the past. “No,” he said to the woman’s clear, bright-eyed face, to her alarm, to the smell of the past, to the smell that filled the past house of an old, gone meal, part of it burnt. Against the force of her will and her magic, with all his small strength he pushed the loop of beads back through the thick air and over her head.

  He forced it down around her neck. Her face, aghast, almost touched his. “Mistress!” cried Smoll into the syrup, dropping to the bed again, dragging on the necklace, all but swinging from it. “Come quickly! She has your necklace, your lock—”

  Her hand stopped his cry. It was not a soft lady’s hand; it was worked to leather, cold and strong and real, and smelled of laundry soap. She took him by the mouth and by his nightshirted ribs, and hissing she began to push him out of her
time, her eyes wild, her eyes afraid as he had never seen them. He saw the enormity of what he was doing, the disgrace and punishment it would entail for her, not a ghost-woman or a dream-woman at all but an ordinary servant like himself, whose good name in her household was the only wealth that she had in the world. Still he fought to stay, to make his voice heard in the house of her time, to make as much noise there as he could, whether words or no. He yammered behind her hand; he threw himself about to loosen her grip on his mouth, and let out more noise.

  Slowly her strength succeeded against his—but he had not meant to conquer, only to delay her, only to keep her fighting and in possession of the necklace until the other person, the maker of the dream-footfalls, reached the top of the stairs and entered. He listened for the mistress through the strain and pain and noise of the struggle. His ears were right at the border between the two times now, and all sounds were warped there, the dream-lady’s grunts compressed into quacks, her panting concertina’d to weirdly musical whistles. The knocking on the attic door he heard as thunder; the mistress’s voice was a god’s calling across a breadth of sky.

  And then as the doorknob rumbled in its turning, the servant-woman pushed Smoll wholly through the divide, the magicked aperture between the times, back into his rightful night. As she and her era fell away, as she shrank, she tore the necklace off and flung it after him. Soundlessly it splashed against the intervening time as against a window between herself and Smoll. She watched in dismay as it fell, and the door opened behind her no bigger than a playing card now, and the dark opening swallowed up woman and beads and attic and all.

  The two times snapped apart to their proper distances; Smoll felt the event of that, in his ears and in the punching of air into his throat and lungs. Somewhere between sprawled and sitting, he stared from his rumpled bed, out into a darkness utterly free of reverberations. No dread sang there, and no historical glee resounded. No weight sat bead by bead around his neck or ached against his breastbone. There was only Smoll in his eyrie, the odor of Cook’s salve, warm from his exertions, clouding up from the neck of his nightshirt, the light of the moon pouring down on him from the window.