Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [16]
The rooming house was managed by a smiling, swarthy man named Emanetoglu, whose brother actually owned it, as well as two other buildings across the river. Mr. Emanetoglu manifested himself promptly at 8 a.m. on the fifteenth of every month, to collect the rent, and to drift into corners and corridors like smoke, commenting diffidently on the condition of paint, wallpaper, and bathroom floorboards. Impossible to dislike—except by Griffith, who referred to him as “Glue Pot,” when he was not calling him “The Wog”—he had, nevertheless, the rainy air of an apologetic ghost, as much trapped in the house by fate as they by finances. On the rare occasion that any roomer was briefly late with a rent payment, he was patient but oddly sorrowful, as though the lapse were somehow his own fault.
“You shouldn’t call him that, you know,” Scheuch chided Griffith once. “He’s a decent enough chap, Turk or no.”
“I hate seeing them strutting around so, that’s all.” Griffith bit down hard on the stem of the briar pipe he had lately taken to affecting. “Never used to see a one of them west of Greek Street. Now they’re all over London, got themselves the Ritz, got themselves Lord’s, got themselves Marks and Sparks, got themselves a bloody princess, they’ll shove a white man off the sidewalk if he don’t look slippy about it. You’d think they’d won the bloody war—and by God, I think that’s what they think. But they didn’t win the bloody war!”
Vordran spoke up then, in the way he had that always made him sound as though he were talking to himself. “Didn’t they, then? They fought us to a standstill. We bled ourselves dry, for no reason that I could ever see, and now they own half the Empire. We were fools.”
“Feel that way, you ought to go and enlist for a Turk,” Griffith mumbled as he stalked away.
It was during the late summer and early fall of 18__ that Angelos became obsessed with the study of what he called “etheric telegraphy.” His top-floor room—inconvenient to reach, but immensely practical for his pigeons—quickly became a hotbed of strange small sounds, and he began increasingly to ask Scheuch for assistance in dealing with certain mathematical issues. “There’s this chap named Faraday, and another one named Maxwell, and there’s a Yank dentist, if you’ll believe it, with some outlandish name like Mahlon Loomis, and all of them rattling on about electromagnetism, etheric force, amperes, communal fields . . . I don’t half know what three-quarters of that gibberish means, but I have to know. Can’t say why, I just do.” Scheuch, who was by nature an amiable, accommodating man, did his best to oblige.
Knowing Angelos better than either Griffith or Vordran ever bothered to know anyone, Scheuch expected this new passion to burn itself out by Boxing Day, at the very latest. But time passed, and snow fell; and, if anything, Angelos’s fervor grew only more intense. He spoke to Scheuch of partial differential equations, of spark-gap transmission and a thing called a coherer, apparently as indescribable as a state of grace. He returned late from work with packages from shops Scheuch had never heard of, crammed with wire coils, hand-cranks and strangely shaped glass bottles, along with magnets—endless magnets of every form and size. He went frequently without sleep; and Scheuch, who left for work at the same time as he, often saw him stumbling downstairs, his eyes plainly fogged and his step unsteady. He would not have been at all surprised to see Angelos brusquely dismissed from Christ’s for habitual drunkenness, but somehow he continued to be well regarded by his instructors, and to keep his marks at least at a respectable level. The tattered oilcloth leftovers from the last experimental balloon gathered dust in a far corner, in company with the banjo. The pigeons disappeared.
“I cannot even say what it is that he is aiming for,” Scheuch told Griffith on one of the days when the latter was in a mood to be comparatively genial with a non-public-school man. “He speaks constantly of ethereal waves of some sort—of induction, conduction