Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [14]
And until that improbable miracle occurs, you might take heart in recalling that the progenitor of your race is dead and gone. In the aeons to come, you will not be made to laud Gustav Nachtstein in song or build an altar to his glory. Cold comfort, to be sure, but in the bottomless pit one seizes upon whatever consolations lie to hand.
AGAINST THE ODDS and in defiance of his circumstances, Jonathan Hobbwright’s most recent recitation yields the very fount of hope he seeks. According to the Baron’s confession, on certain rare occasions, despite the essential incompatibility between the human plane and the spectral, a disintegrating ghost will perform a philanthropic act. And so it happens that, when a fresh barrage of vibrations assaults Castle Kralkovnik—roaring through the Baron’s laboratory like a tornado, reducing the walls to rubble as it cracks the prisoner’s chrysalis—Jonathan is not entirely surprised.
Sloughing off his husk, abandoning his corpse, the vibratologist floats free of the cathode, then fixes on Lotte’s crimson ghost. “How long was I entombed?” he asks.
“Ten days,” she replies.
“It felt like forever.”
“Hell knows nothing of clocks.”
“Where did you obtain the fork?” Jonathan asks.
“From Alastair Wohlmeth,” Countess Nachtstein’s scarlet specter replies. “The task we set ourselves was grueling. In our given tenure Lotte and I had to reach Oxford, unseal the grave, open the coffin, steal the resonator, and return to the castle.”
“I am deeply grateful.”
“We have no need of your gratitude,” the Countess says. “Nor do you have need of ours.”
“And now we must take eternal leave of you,” Lotte says as her misty form dissolves. “Oblivion beckons.”
“Farewell, Dr. Hobbwright.” The Countess has become as transparent as the surrounding air. “Please know that it was never my intention to occasion your death.”
It suddenly occurs to Jonathan that he desperately wants to enlighten humanity concerning the destiny of the dead. So tenuous is the spectral plane, so ultimately meaningless, he must share this knowledge with his former fleshly confederates. The Baron’s journal having been reduced to specks of carbon, Jonathan alone can tell the world about the appalling insipidity of ghosts.
“I wish to perform a philanthropic act of my own,” he declares.
“What do you have in mind?” the invisible Lotte asks.
Even as the answer forms on Jonathan’s airy lips, he realizes that his aspiration is futile. There is no time to find a pen, an ink pot, a sheet of paper. Already he is less than ashes. Already he is a brother to dust.
Wrenching sobs burst from the vibratologist’s ethereal throat. Briny droplets roll down his ephemeral cheeks. For an infinitesimal instant Jonathan Hobbwright is seized by an infinite remorse, but then his sorrow evaporates—like rain, like dew, like sweat, like the last and least of his tears.
Afterword to “The Iron Shroud”
Equipped with uni-ball pens and legal pads, I composed “The Iron Shroud” in longhand during a protracted trip to Eastern Europe. I’d been invited to give a talk at the 2010 International Tolstoy Conference at Yasnaya Polyana, and my wife and I decided to return home in slow motion, stopping off in Poland and the Czech Republic. If the reader detects a whiff of Kafka about my tale, this may be because much of it was written in cafés not far from the mesmerizing Franz Kafka Museum in Prague. And, of course, the story features considerably more than a soupçon of that city’s legendary Golem.
—JAMES MORROW
Peter S. Beagle
Peter S. Beagle is one of America’s leading fantasists. His books include the novels A Fine and Private Place, The Last Unicorn (which has sold more than six million copies worldwide and was made into a popular animated film), The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin; the short story collections Giant Bones, The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche, The Line Between, We Never Talk About My Brother, Mirror Kingdoms, and