Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [120]
I strained my ears as we moved cautiously forward. Faint creaks accompanied the disturbance of our footsteps, but the whispering and muttering voices had gone.
Mr. Jamieson turned to me. “Is it over?” he asked.
I nodded.
I can’t describe the sense of peace, the deep solemnity. I saw tears on Mr. Jamieson’s face and realised that I was crying too. Tears of relief or tears of sadness—I don’t know which. Daylight entering from the high-set windows filtered through the gaunt, racked metal; motes of dust, the residue of so much violence, drifted in the sunbeams.
“Look!” cried Mother, and flung out an arm.
At first I couldn’t see what she was pointing at—though I recognised the spot, where the steel rails terminated. The padded box was there, almost buried under a pile of fallen apparatus.
“Yes!” cried Mr. Jamieson, pointing too.
Then I saw: it was the metal frame behind the box. It had lost most of its struts so that only two remained, warped out of their proper positions in such a way as to form a perfect vertical and a perfect horizontal. In effect, the shape of a cross.
Mr. Jamieson dropped to his knees and put his hands together. He began gabbling a prayer that I’m sure never featured in any prayer book. Norris also knelt and bowed his head; then Mother; then everyone except Father. Mr. Hungerford pushed Dr. Kessel forcibly to his knees.
“Suffered for us,” Mr. Jamieson gabbled on. “Pure and innocent . . . bore our sins . . . defiled by human thoughts.”
Of course, Mr. Jamieson was an ex-seminarian, so you can understand where his thinking came from. Father remained sceptical and repeated that it was “only a machine” many times on our journey back to London. As for me . . . well, I had panicked before the mechanism ever had the chance to draw off my bad thoughts. Yet, from that time on, my nightmares disappeared as if they had never existed. So what does that show? I wonder.
Afterword to “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism”
I know some people have memories that go back to babyhood, but not me. The first memory that I’m sure is my own real memory—and not re-created from what adults told me—comes from a holiday in the seaside town of Fleetwood, in Lancashire, England. I must have been about four or five, and what I remember is Fleetwood pier, which had been recently destroyed by fire. It stuck far out into the sea, a wreckage of tangled, twisted girders, and not just tangled, not just twisted, but racked and contorted like an expression of agony, a frozen shriek of pain. There you have the whole germ and genesis of “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism.”
I’d now count “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism” as a “steampunk” story. Ten years ago, I’d hardly heard of “steampunk”—I mean, I’d heard of the word, but I’d never thought it had anything to do with me. But I was wrong—I’d been blindly blundering my way towards steampunk from a long time before then. The fascination with nineteenth-century culture and Dickensian atmospheres was already there in The Black Crusade and The Vicar of Morbing Vyle (the latter my first novel, published in 1993). And the fascination with old-fashioned steam-age machinery was there in the industrial scenery of the Humen Camp in the three Ferren books and in the fabulous contraptions of (again) The Black Crusade. When I completed Worldshaker and it was instantly categorized as “steampunk,” I realised I’d discovered my own true home. Or as the poet said, it was like coming home and knowing the place for the first time.
“Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism” was an amazingly difficult story to write, because I couldn’t get the voice I needed. I started to write in first person, rewrote in third person, tried again with a different-sounding first person, another go at third person, and finally—phew! gasp!—hit upon a first-person voice that sounded just right. I guess the problem was the contradiction between using formal vocabulary and long sentences, as necessary for a nineteenth-century feel, but also conveying intense emotion and