Doctor Who_ Ghost Ship - Keith Topping [31]
'Are you quite finished, you very silly man?' I asked, irritated when he finally ran himself dry of rhetoric. It was as clear as crystal that Osbourne was completely insane. He had become, as many scientists are prone to, obsessed with his creation. And by his own insecure vanity. 'What you're doing is fantastically dangerous,' I told him. 'You're playing God and you aren't doing it very well, I have to tell you. They say that the line between outright genius and outright madness is a thin one,' I continued, sadly. 'And you seem to be living proof of that.'
Osbourne began to laugh at me. A callous lunatic chuckle that turned into a snigger and seemed to go on and on and on for hours, rattling in his throat. And, as he laughed, so he plucked the cork from the bell jar and the ghosts began to appear. All of them, surging out from their enclosed world and filling the room with the sounds of their despair.
'See what I've done, Doctor,' Osbourne shouted above the rising crescendo. 'See what I've been and gone and done!'
I looked around myself and I saw it.
A terrible thing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DISPOSSESSED
O soul, be changed into little water drops,
and fall into the ocean, ne'er be found.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, DOCTOR FAUSTUS
THE NOISE OF THE RELEASED GHOSTS REVERBERATED AROUND THE room. It was awe inspiring, like the release of a vast, ceaseless wind into a long valley. The shockwaves hit me at the same time as they hit everything else in the room, and every atom in my body was affected by it. The cabin porthole threatened to shatter and let loose the ghosts from their prison but, I suspected, even that eventuality would not see them leave.
They were trapped here, on this ship. Bound by circumstances and by bonds too tight ever to break. Here, terribly, they would remain for as long as the ship remained.
After a moment, the wailing, caterwauling sounds reduced to a more sedate and sane level, and I stole a glance across at Osbourne. He sat amid the swirling torrent of ill-defined shapes in a circle of ethereal light. He was still smirking with an undisguised glee at just how clever a little boy he was. It sickened me. There was something beyond amoral about this man. Beyond any concept of science as sanity. Desperate, tragic, overwhelmingly small evil.
But now, at last, I finally understood the nature of the manifestations that had been lingering around me, haunting me for the past days, and which filled the room around me even as I worked it all out. I could give their suffering a name, at least. 'You've been randomly trapping within this jar the essences of people who have been or are or will be on board the ship when some terrible tragedy has befallen them or when they have been feeling sad or lonely or depressed. Am I right?' I asked Osbourne, angrily.
If he was surprised that I had discovered the exact nature of his cruel experiments, he didn't show it. He maintained his bland mask of a casual lack of interest in everything going on around him. 'Ghosts of the past,' I continued when he refused to answer me, 'ghosts of the present and ghosts of the future. These essences, although only fragments or echoes of true reality, nevertheless do possess a measure of human consciousness. And an understanding of their plight. And the process only works on negative energy because it requires such huge levels of adrenaline and brain activity to give it a kick-start.'
It was something that I had dreaded ever since the first apparition had made itself known to me. Osbourne's machine wasn't just capturing people at the point of their death. After all, how many people had died, or would die, on board the Queen Mary? A couple of hundred at most, perhaps? But there were many tens of thousands of spirits in here. What Osbourne was trapping in his obscene experiment, like some grotesque butterfly collection, were snapshots