Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [152]
“What in the world was the Duke of Buckingham doing in Saint Nichol?”
“Inspecting his property. He must own half the houses on Boundary Road. Him and Sir Charles Mellor and some other toffs was strolling about, looking at this house and that house.”
Charles Mellor was a charter member of the Inventors’ Club—I asked Dorothea if she was certain it had been him.
“Oh, it was Charlie, all right. We’d see him down here right frequent. There must have been half a hundred children swarming around with their hands out, begging for pennies. So I sneaked in amongst them and nicked the duke’s watch. Didn’t get nothing for it, though. My mother took it to a pawnshop and got swindled proper.”
“Where is your mother now?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She began sweeping in earnest, as if suddenly called to the task.
I left Dorothea to her chores and made my way to the sixth floor and pulled up a chair in front of the glass-walled chamber. Christine was nowhere in evidence, but from time to time a revenant would manifest in the chamber. In the main they were relics of the lower classes, those whose living cousins could be seen in the streets of Saint Nichol, a few dressed in the garments of another era; but there were also richly dressed men and well-appointed ladies. Many were in sharp focus, visible for a span ranging from scant seconds to a minute or two, and others were frayed and tattered like rotten lace, all but worn away—these last brought to mind the phantasmagorias I had delighted in as a boy, yet they exhibited a lifelike quality, a dimensionality, that those illusions had not. They neither spoke nor acknowledged my presence, though they came close enough to touch had there been no glass. Once something dark and whirling, a dervish shadow twice the mass of man that looked to be acquiring human form, materialized in the chamber and I heard above the noise of the machines a faint roaring, as from a distant crowd. This so alarmed me that I scrambled back from the glass, knocking over my chair. The figure was headless and armless, or else its head was tucked close in against its chest, giving the impression that it was surmounted by a massive torso and set of shoulders. It looked rather like a living pencil sketch, a black core encaged within a complexity of slightly less black lines that whirled rapidly about the central darkness, making it appear that the whole of the thing was in motion. Soon this apparition lapsed and I reclaimed my seat.
What most astonished me about the things I saw that day (and other days as well) was my reaction to them . . . or rather the lack thereof. I would not have believed that I could easily adapt to such a drastic shift in the way I perceived the world; yet there I sat, scribbling down observations concerning a subject whose existence I would have decried the day before, and doing so with a reasonable amount of aplomb. I mentioned this to Dorothea once and she replied that human beings were more resilient than most gave them credit for, putting this sentiment in the vernacular. “When a bloke tries to jam tackle the size of a cricket bat up your lolly, you’re afraid it’s never going to fit,” she said. “But once it’s in, it’s surprising how quickly you adjust to the situation.” She went on to say that ghosts no longer troubled her, even when they manifested outside of the chamber, in other portions of the house. I inquired of her about these manifestations and she told me that before Richmond had come to dwell in the house, she and others had encountered presences on the upper floors, notably an elderly woman who dragged her left leg as she walked; but Dorothea had not seen the old woman since Christine had died—it was as though she been evicted and Christine had taken her place.
At quarter past four that first afternoon, Christine appeared