Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [13]
The phantoms have immobilized Jonathan as well, cuffing his wrists with manacles, hobbling his feet with fetters, and they have additionally stripped away his clothing. The vibratologist shivers in the Schwarzwald wind, goose bumps erupting on his bare skin like rivets, even as his cranium aches with the aftermath of his encounter with the chandelier. Vapor-faced phantoms throng across the plaza, their visages twisted by an inscrutable sadness. As if ignorant of the laws of actuality, the former golems attempt to prolong their purchase on the world. They flex their nonmuscles, tense their nonligaments, curl their nonfingers.
“Surely you don’t mean to burn these women,” Jonathan says. “They rescued you. You owe them everything.”
“We mean to burn them—as surely as we mean to electroplate you,” says a crimson specter in a fluttering voice.
“That makes no sense.”
“True,” says a scarlet specter. “We understand your frustration. You want your ghosts to be outré but not perverse, weird but not recondite, occasionally sublime though never ridiculous. So sorry, Herr Doktor. We are avatars of the abyss. Coherence is not our business.”
Jonathan watches helplessly as a vermilion ghost applies a firebrand to the fagots encircling the Countess’s stake. As the flames climb the fleshly ladder of the victim’s form, a carmine specter flourishes a Wohlmeth Resonator—the very fork, Jonathan realizes, that gave the golems their freedom—and hurls it into the burgeoning conflagration.
“The dead don’t lack for foresight,” a maroon ghost avers. “In a matter of minutes the fork will become a charred ruin, thus canceling any hopes you might entertain of liberation by a passing Samaritan.”
Now a ruby specter sets Lotte’s pyre aflame, but not before jamming the Baron’s journal into the fagots.
“Set her free!” Jonathan screams.
A BAND OF phantoms drags the vibratologist out of the plaza and down a maze of stairways to the Baron’s subterranean laboratory, a cavernous space dominated by the electrolyte vat. Although they’ve never done this before, his captors act with great efficiency, ramming a respiration tube down his throat, dumping him into the solution, chaining his naked body to the cathode column.
Ignoring his pleas for mercy, a magenta specter connects the rectifier to the anode, agleam with the Baron’s alloy. Countless positively charged bezalelite atoms drift through the bath and accumulate on Jonathan’s flesh. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, the metal embraces the helpless vibratologist, each instance of adherence like the sting of a microscopic hornet.
Within one hour the process is complete, leaving him encapsulated, immobile, and half blind. A gurgling reaches his ears. The phantoms are draining the vat. A searing pain rips though his chest as a ghost yanks the respiration tube from his trachea. An instant later another specter seals the air-hole with an immortal bezalelite plug.
Mummified by the exotic alloy, the prisoner is soon deprived of oxygen, and then of life itself. He is also deprived of death. Now and forever he will be the ghost of Jonathan Hobbwright—vibratologist extraordinaire become solitary golem—affixed to the cathode of Baron Nachtstein’s infernal machine. Someday, perhaps, when entropy has dismantled the universe, he will be a free man, but for now he must reconcile himself to the unendurable, the interminable, and the endlessly absurd.
JONATHAN HOBBWRIGHT CANNOT discourse upon the formic thoughts that flicker through the minds of ants, and he is similarly ignorant concerning the psyches of locusts, toads, moles, apes, and bishops, but he can tell you what it’s like to be in hell. His imagination affords him only fleeting respite. Each time he dreams himself free of his bezalelite coffin—passing through the portals of the abyss, striking out for terra incognita—Satan’s angels give chase, and they inevitably track him down.
Come back, Dr. Hobbwright. Return to perdition. Tell your story for the tenth time, the hundredth, the thousandth. The more frequently you give voice to