Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [119]
The partition was solid, heavy wood, two inches thick. No one stood close, but no one ran out of the study either. We listened to the appalling cacophony building up on the other side. Shrieks and screeches—it might have been the sufferings of the damned, but it was the metal itself. We didn’t need to see it to know that in every room the machinery was slowly, inexorably tearing apart.
Then Mr. Jamieson prodded me in the back.
“What did you say just now?” he demanded.
“It’s your bad thoughts that got inside the metal,” I told him.
“My bad thoughts?”
“And all the other patients.”
“Our bad thoughts?” Mr. Jamieson looked incredulous.
“Oh, I feared this,” said another voice. It was Dr. Kessel, wide-eyed and teetering on the edge of hysteria. “Bad thoughts infected my mechanism.”
“So ye knew all along,” Norris chimed in. “Ye knew it was haunted.”
“Suspected. Only suspected.”
“I told ye the design was wrong.”
“No.” Dr. Kessel had never been an impressive figure, but now he seemed pathetically cowed and shrunken. “There was no other way to build it. As long as the electricity was running . . . I was saving people.”
“You never saved anyone,” Mr. Hungerford bluntly. “It did.”
He nodded towards the machinery on the other side of the partition. The cacophony had now reached a crescendo. I don’t think any of us will ever forget those unbearable, piercing sounds of tortured metal.
“It’s hurting!” cried Dr. Kessel suddenly. “I have to help . . .”
He ran for the partition and reached for the bolts to unlock it. Norris and Mr. Hungerford were on top of him in an instant. Mr. Hungerford dragged his arms away and pinned them behind his back.
“No one can help anything now,” the American said.
When Dr. Kessel tried to struggle, Norris simply cuffed him over the head and knocked him to the ground. Then the two of them hauled him over the floor away from the partition.
He lay there blubbering and snivelling for a while. Then he turned his attention on me. “It is the boy’s fault. He caused it to happen.”
“Let him be.” Mr. Hungerford spoke up on my behalf. “It was bound to happen in the end.”
The sounds on the other side of the partition continued unabated for ten minutes, then began to die down. It was another half hour before they ceased altogether.
MY ACCOUNT IS almost finished. Only one last thing remains to tell—and now I know I can tell it calmly. I have maintained my equilibrium, have I not? All these dark experiences suppressed for years in my mind—I could not risk reliving them. No one ever had to struggle so hard for their sanity. But finally I have written it out: the nightmares, the box, the crown of wires, the hidden voices, the agony of the metal, and my own guilt.
Oh yes, I accept the guilt. Even if the electricity must have failed eventually, yet I was the one who made it fail then. Dr. Kessel and I were both responsible in our different ways. My role was to be the immediate agent and cause. Now that I write it out, the sequence of events seems strangely inevitable—including the one last twist in the story. Make of it what you will.
We waited a long while after the sounds had ceased. Outside, the sun had risen above the buildings of the institute, and Dr. Kessel’s study grew bright with morning light. Then Mr. Hungerford and Mr. Jamieson took the lead in unfastening the bolts. They peeped through the partition and opened the wings a little wider. All was silent. I can’t explain the impression, but it was a good silence.
We trooped through in single file and stared at the wreckage in awe and amazement. It was like some twisted, tangled forest. Fragments of glass littered the floor, and wires hung down from the ceiling. The metal frames were still generally upright, but distorted into the most fantastical shapes . . . shapes of pain, it