Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  Afterword to “The Proving of Smollett Standforth”

  “The Proving of Smollett Standforth” started out as a more alt-history, regularly steampunkish story about an upper-middle-class boy and his sister. The story was told from her point of view, and the boy was brought near to death by the ghost’s visitations, but the sister was the one who vanquished the evil amber-necklace-bearing ghost-chambermaid in the end. That version had an extra romance, a seaside holiday, many tea palaces and decorative floral arrangements throughout, but it always felt to me as if I was playing around with these pretty things slightly to one side of the real story.

  Coming back to Smollett, I realized that the engine of the story was my own memories of lying in bed as a child imagining malign beings creeping towards me in the dark, while everyone else in the house slept. The terrible solitude of this haunting and the fact that Smollett can’t bring himself to confide in anyone are what works for me. So in the end I stripped away all the interesting interior decoration (and even the gaslight—the poor boy has to use a candle!) and the sympathetic sister and made Smollett the hero of his own story.

  —MARGO LANAGAN

  Sean Williams

  Number one New York Times–bestselling author Sean Williams has been called “the premier Australian speculative fiction writer of the age,” the “Emperor of Sci-Fi,” and the “King of Chameleons” for the diversity of his output, which spans fantasy, science fiction, horror, and even the odd poem. He has published thirty-five novels and seventy-five short stories. These include works for adults (Philip K. Dick Award–nominated Saturn Returns, Ditmar and Aurealis Award–winning The Crooked Letter), young adults (Locus-recommended The Storm Weaver & the Sand) and children (multiple award nominee The Changeling, and the Troubletwister series cowritten with Garth Nix). He lives with his wife and family in the dry, flat lands of South Australia.

  SEAN WILLIAMS

  The Jade Woman of the Luminous Star

  YOU MUST GET me out of here, Michaels. I have important work to do.”

  Those were the first words uttered by Hugh Gordon in my presence. I remember them clearly. On the one hand, I was relieved that he was willing to acknowledge me as a fellow professional, for a man of his standing, even in his dire circumstances, might have been tempted to dismiss me as a physician of no great renown, as in fact I am (and would very much like to return to being, Inspector Berkeley, once you have read this deposition). On the other hand, he seemed genuinely convinced that I could effect his release.

  When I declared that this was quite impossible, he became irritable and aggressive. He accused me of gloating, of malpractice, even of spying. The last is outlandish, of course, but might have seemed plausible before his arrest. You are no doubt aware of his reputation—as a scientist, I mean. His advances in aeronautical engineering have been considerable; many have even been adopted by the Ministry of Calculation for employment throughout the Empire. Now that his laboratory has been razed, is it too ghoulish to imagine that someone might want to pick his brains for knowledge the gallows might otherwise claim?

  Eventually, he took me at my word. He had no alternative, and I remember thinking that there was no predicament too alien for a keen intellect to confront. I admired the power of his mind, you see, even under such duress. I had not yet glimpsed the depths of his delusion—or of his cunning, depending on your interpretation of subsequent events.

  He warned me.

  “You will think me certifiable, Michaels, if I tell you the truth. I despaired too, at first, and with good reason: this vile place, with its loathsome inmates and equally loathsome porters, and all that preceded it . . . But then I wondered. Could it possibly be that she sent me here deliberately? You see, I felt something intangible when the door you just came through slammed shut behind me, something profound beyond words. Was this the ‘precipice of light’ Pattinattar wrote of nine hundred years ago? Had I chanced upon the secret of the ancients, which I must find anew or never see her again?”

  His eyes had taken on a remote and urgent look, staring beyond the walls of Exeter Vale Asylum toward vistas unknown. I endeavored to bring him back to more immediate mysteries.

  “Margaret, do you mean?”

  He sank back onto his cot and put his head in his hands. “No, not Margaret. And no, this was not the right place. I tried, but could not follow in the great poet’s footsteps. So here I am, Michaels, at your mercy.”

  I had been apprised of the statements he had made upon his arrest. I was aware that another woman might be implicated in the affair, although she had neither come forward nor been named. For your part, Inspector, you know that my purpose that day was to ascertain if this woman existed and, if so, whether she was complicit in the murder of Margaret Gordon. I resolved to be resolute in my pursuit of the truth, lest a great man of science be ruined over something of which he might be completely innocent.

  I thought, then, that he might be shielding a jealous mistress. I would come to wonder if injured pride and his fall from grace drove him to perpetrate violent acts on all the women around him.

  I do not know what I think now.

  “You must tell me what happened,” I said to him.

  “Yes, yes—and if I must tell someone, it might as well be a scholar like me.” He raised his head, regarding me with bloodshot but startlingly blue eyes. “I think it was Pattinattar, again, who said: ‘I do not mix with idle, useless men. I do not listen to their speech.’ ”

  He was trying to distract me with flattery.

  “Tell me who she is, Doctor Gordon. Where did you meet? Where was it she wanted you to go?”

  “Such difficult questions! You have no idea what you ask.”

  I said nothing.

  “Very well.” He shifted so his shoulders rested against the wall. “Her name is Abiha, and Margaret—poor Margaret—thought she was a ghost.”

  IT STARTED ON the twenty-fifth (he began, speaking with the clipped precision of one used to addressing the Royal Institution), and I say this, Michaels, with certainty, because it was the night of the lunar eclipse and I had been studying craters by telescope. My thoughts were as full as the face of that distant world. I imagined myself standing upon those jagged, airless mountains, staring up at the darkened globe of the earth. For all the advances we have made in recent decades, our trains, steamers, and airships are no closer to taking us there. We need infinitely more powerful forms of transportation to make these dreams reality, and I, unlike most dreamers, have the means to do just that. I had been working on them that very evening.

  It was well past midnight when Margaret came down for me, complaining about the noise. “What noise?” I asked. The household was asleep and the laboratory closed. All of Exeter was hushed. The eclipse had put the town in a somber, premonitory mood.

  “Someone has been knocking,” she said. “If not you, then who?”

  I could tell that she would not be pacified until the matter had received the attention she believed it deserved. Abandoning the telescope, I went inside to prove to her that there had been no knocking, by me or anyone else. With no one to upbraid, I hoped she would let the matter go, return to her bedroom, and leave me to conclude my observations in peace.

  We found no one in the house, no windows open, and no note at the front door. The house was empty and silent.

  Yet, as I was leading Margaret back to her rest, there came a sound from below—hard and sharp, a sudden clap as of a book falling face-first onto the floor.

  Margaret jumped, and I confess I started too. Barely had the echoes faded than I was on my way back down the stairs, convinced that the sound had originated in the laboratory.

  Have you seen my laboratory, Michaels? No? Well, it is as big as a barn, and needs to be, for I have tested engines in there and reconstructed whole sections of airship frames at one-to-one scales. These days, it is full of glass bells much larger than a man, dozens of them, connected by copper wires and containing delicate Faraday cages of my own design
. If someone were in there, they would find little they understood, but much that they could damage. It is—

  Ah, yes, I forget myself. It’s all gone—and why not? My research will benefit no one now.

  Poor Margaret. The irony that she was the one to draw this phenomenon to my attention is not lost on me.

  She waited in the doorway as I searched the vast space, leaving no cupboard or nook untouched. I found nothing, and the sound was not repeated. Yet I had heard it: the evidence of my senses was not to be denied.

  All I found was a slight crack in my newest bell, a crack that I was certain had not been there before. The bell was spoiled, but I dismissed it as a simple case of thermal compression in the cooling house, coupled with stored stress in the curved glass, suddenly releasing itself. I ascended with Margaret in tow, confident that I had found enough evidence to put her mind at rest. If it occurred to her to ask how a single crack could have made all the other noises she reported, she said nothing.

  I slept soundly. I may have dreamed, but I do not recall. I do have a sense of being plagued by my nightmare all that month, and I suppose this will interest you, Michaels: it is what drives me, day and night, in my quest for the perfect transportation device. It is a dream that has haunted me since childhood, a dream of a world poisoned by the fumes of its industry, where inefficient coal boilers spew smoke and char, interminable lines of vehicles choke the streets, and overloaded airships rain ash upon the sickened races below. For all my successes, all my novel advances, my greatest fear is that I have not done enough to prevent this calamity from coming to pass. I am far less afraid of being forgotten than of leaving no one behind to remember my efforts.

  (He chuckled at that, without humor, and I reminded him to adhere to the subject.)

  Margaret was the first to talk of haunting. I, of course, wouldn’t credit the idea, but it was indisputable that in subsequent days noises were heard in the house that could not be explained away as the servants at work or the walls settling. Strange thumps, scrapes, and sighs came at random intervals, utterly without warning, sometimes seeming near, other times as far away as Selene herself. I told Margaret she was imagining things, but I knew she was not. I could not explain it and would not accept her explanation, and so the phenomenon had to be ignored.

  I am embarrassed to admit to the willful disregard of data—data that might have led me much sooner to the understanding I now possess, and might even have prevented the calamity that befell dear Margaret—but there you have it. My mind was fixed on other matters. One week after that first night I was expected to address my peers at the Institution on my latest experiments, and my speech was not yet prepared. Instead of pursuing the matter of our spectral interloper, I worked long hours distilling my thoughts and combing the library for references I might have overlooked. There was no time for Margaret’s uneasy superstitions.

  On the day of my departure, I descended early to the laboratory, intending to add the final touches to my speech before anyone else awoke—only to find that my notes had been rifled through and scattered across the desk. Several pages had fallen to the floor, there to be trodden on like so much refuse. You can imagine my alarm. I woke the house with Herculean wrath and demanded that every maidservant be questioned. They swore that no one had entered the laboratory during the night. It had in fact been securely locked, by me, before retiring, and the lock had not been tampered with. I had the only key, but I did not believe them. Someone must have entered the laboratory and examined my work. Someone!

  My interrogation of the staff might have continued all day had not the urgent need to prepare for my departure intervened. I gathered up the notes in a fury, secured my valise, and rushed out to where my carriage was waiting to whip me to the station. Margaret farewelled me at the steps, in something of a state herself. Unnatural noises in conjunction with physical disturbance added up to a poltergeist in her mind, and she was reluctant to remain in the house without me to protect her.

  It would be easy to say that she had been reading too much fabulous fiction—but that would ignore a facet of her character that I had always admired, and which is essential for any wife of mine: an open mind. Some would say that I have said much stranger things, and indeed I proposed a few of them that very day.

  I said “peers” earlier, when I referred to my audience at the Royal Institution, but what I mean is my critics. You may not be familiar with my most recent theories—of life on this earth as a river, and an individual, such as you or me, as an eddy in that river, a self-sustaining whirlpool of vital dynamism that endures even though the particles of water comprising it constantly change. This philosophical principle has received a warm welcome in some quarters—but the same cannot be said of the theories of transportation that naturally arise from it. Doesn’t it strike you as odd, Michaels, that we lug this ponderous sack of tissues around with us every time we go hither and yon? Wouldn’t it be easier to abandon it and adopt an identical one when we arrive—to move the eddy alone and leave the river behind?

  Well, you are not alone, and some of my critics dislike my methodology as much as my philosophy. If I am so interested in transportation, they say, why base myself in Exeter, so far from the great steel machines of the north? There, I say, is the answer. Those machines are not in my vision. They crush the landscape and foul the sky. They are the nightmare, not the dream.

  Yes, yes, the ghost. I am getting there, have no fear, if by my own slow and tortuous path.

  It was well after nightfall by the time I returned home. I was exhausted. My ears rang with the bleating of pedants, and I was in no mood for what greeted me. Who would have been? The house was in an uproar, due to a rash of “manifestations,” as Margaret called them, from eerie whispers to strange explosions; even a minor earthquake, I was told, that had upset a row of plates in the kitchen, shattering every one. I was inclined to regard at least the last of these incidents as carelessness, perhaps even willful trickery, but in the face of Margaret’s distress I could not dismiss them all. Something was afoot. The question was, what?

  Two of the servants had resigned, citing good, Christian horror at such devilish pranks, though not above accepting generous severances if they kept silent in the parish. My presence reassured those who remained, and when they had gone home, leaving me and Margaret alone in the unsettled house, I was able to put my mind to the problem, for that was how I now regarded it—something to be solved and put behind me, rather than dangerously ignored.

  Already I knew that the phenomena came at all hours, not just during the night; and that apart from the dishes and the cracked glass bell—both of which might have been coincidence—they consisted solely of sensory impressions. Nothing concrete had been detected. What other data we had were as elusive as the atoms of my imaginary river.

  I told Margaret that I was going to make camp in the laboratory that night, in order to study the phenomenon more closely. She told me I was addled even to consider it, but I was adamant. The manifestations were confined to the ground floor, so it made sense to conduct the experiment in situ. I gathered a decanter of sherry and several books from the library to pass the time. Exhausted though I was, I planned to stay awake the entire night and record what I experienced.

  Ah, Michaels, if only my notes survived! One sheet would provide you with all the evidence you need, although perhaps you would interpret it as the product of a deranged psyche. You would see in those notes my keenest observations, with each incident dutifully timed and described, accompanied by speculations as to cause, where such was not immediately obvious.

  Of the sounds, many were mechanical, such as tiny clicks and whirrs that came at irregular intervals, as though a vast and invisible calculating machine surrounded me. Others were natural: once, for instance, I swear I heard a birdcall, and there were the faintest hints of voices, coming and going at the very fringe of perception.

  I monitored several thermometers and recorded numerous wide swings in temperature. Different parts of
the room often disagreed by several degrees, and I was forever loosening and tightening my cravat.

  At least twice, I swear, something poked me gently, once between the shoulder blades and once in my chest. Nothing at all was to be seen.

  I accumulated several pages of notes over the course of the night, but came to no conclusions. My attention wandered back to my work, and to the books I had brought with me for the long vigil. They were translations, mostly, of texts dismissed in these enlightened days, but in which I hoped to find a gleam of inspiration. For thousands of years, you see, alchemists have written of moving in ways that would seem magical to us. Lu Yen’s Chu T’ang Shu described traversing the tapestry of stars to the edge of day—that is in third-century China, when the most famous Chinese alchemist of all, Ko Hung, believed that he could fly to heaven by mounting the air and treading on light, echoing the Daoist Dance of Yu, where adepts physically trace out the constellations in order to travel to the stars. Such apparently preposterous claims are not confined to China, by any means. Egyptians believed that certain words provided people with the power to travel safely through different worlds after death, while The Coffin Texts claim that one can learn how to cross over the sky and explore the entire universe. Thoth boasted of descending to the earth with secrets belonging to the horizon, and that claim was later taken up by the Greeks: in Corpus Hermeticum, Hermes Trismegistus instructs students to fly into the heavens without wings. Scholars have often suspected that there was something these venerable philosophers understood that we have forgotten; my intention was not to recover that supposedly lost knowledge, but instead to make it a reality and put it to the salvation of our civilization. If people dreamed thus, once upon an age, then I could make them dream again.