Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [117]
Only when Dr. Kessel stepped a pace forward did the thing become clear to me. It was like a crown—a crown of wires—and also like a bird’s nest. Strands of copper were woven one over another to an incredible degree of complexity.
And there was another voice inside the strands!
It was a low, sinister whisper that erected the hairs on the back of my neck. Faint and distinct, like the muttering but not the same. I traced its movement as it circled round and round in the woven wires. I could distinguish no individual words, but the tone was insidious, sly and horrible.
An association came instantly to my mind: the voice that Mr. Jamieson had heard in his head, telling him to do things. Ugly, cruel, brutal things!
Was it an arbitrary association? No doubt. But the idea was right.
I tried to call out to the adults towering above. “Listen, listen to them!”
The voice in the crown of wires changed to a revolting laugh, a wet and breathy chuckle.
“What does he mean?” asked Mother.
“Something’s going wrong, isn’t it?” said Father.
“Not at all.” Dr. Kessel sounded snappish. “We shall put this over his head and wait for him to fall asleep.”
He meant the crown of wires. But when I saw it coming towards me, I panicked completely. I wrenched my arms free from the blocks, found the buckle, and undid the leather straps. I sat up in the box and gaped at the room around me.
The apparatus was as I had seen last night: tubes, domes, and spirals of glass, contained in rows of frames and cabinets. There was wiring too, more wiring than I had realised. A veritable spider’s web connected every item of apparatus to every other item. But that wasn’t what I gaped at.
Inside the wiring, inside the frames, inside the metal parts were voices—hundreds and hundreds of them. They scurried this way and that, constantly in motion, whispering, murmuring, gabbling, giggling. I even heard shrill squeals, distant yet close, that came from the silvery coils in a particular set of glass domes.
“Anthony! What are you doing?”
“Lie back down.”
“Is he hallucinating?”
Why couldn’t they hear what I heard? “Open your ears!” I cried.
Dr. Kessel put a hand on my shoulder. Before he could force me to lie back down, I knocked his hand away, kicked my legs free from the blocks, and jumped right out of the box.
Mother tried to catch hold of me, but I eluded her.
Her eyes flared. “Stay where you are! This is your last chance, Anthony! Don’t waste it!”
I continued to back away.
“No!” Dr. Kessel shouted loudest of all. “Keep him away from there!”
Attendants lunged forward—too late. I blundered into the very cabinet that had provoked Dr. Kessel’s cry of warning. Even worse, my foot caught in some wiring, and I tumbled over backwards.
There was a tremendous crash, and a sensation like a hammer blow through my bones. I had never experienced an electrical shock before, but I experienced one then.
The cabinet toppled under my weight and I collapsed on top of it. I rolled off sideways, crushing more glass and snapping more wires in the process.
The attendants cried out in dismay. “The control unit!”
“It’s wrecked!”
“What’ll happen now?”
“Will the whole mechanism stop?”
I looked back and saw a cascade of sparks flying out from the cabinet. There were spitting, explosive sounds and a smell of burning.
I crawled further away, like some criminal from the scene of the crime. The light in the room grew dim as the shimmering glows inside the glass apparatus flickered and died. The mechanism was coming to a stop.
Dr. Kessel’s reaction went beyond anger or despair. The look on his face conveyed outright terror.
I crawled further and further away. Ahead of me was a brick wall pierced by a jagged archway. No one was watching as I stumbled to my feet and passed through. I found myself in the middle room of massive humped machines—the generators, as I now supposed.
Here too the mechanism was failing. The generators no longer gave off their deep hum, and the silence was eerie, the echoes cavernous. From the next room along I could hear