Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [172]
I blocked his way to the trapdoor. “In this instance, one in which our safety is at issue, I’m afraid you must.”
“Are you threatening me, sir?”
“I am attempting to ensure that you are not going to place us in greater danger than you already have.”
“I need to inspect the machine,” said Richmond. “Something may be wrong.”
“It seems to be running smoothly.”
“Idiot! You can’t tell by listening to it! I have . . .”
“Yet you were listening to it earlier, were you not?”
Richmond hissed in frustration. “One cannot make such a judgment merely by listening. I have to see the instruments.”
Jane closed her book. “We should allow him to do what he needs.”
“I don’t trust him on his own,” I said. “And I will not leave you alone down here.”
Richmond tried to force his way past me, and I shoved him back.
“I’ll go with you,” said Jane. “It may well be that something has gone wrong. We’d be foolish not to let him attend to it.”
I argued that venturing up onto the roof would be incautious, but with Richmond attacking me verbally and Jane supporting his basic argument, I relented. I insisted, however, on taking the lead. Nothing out of the ordinary met my eye when I cracked the trapdoor, yet when I threw it open I saw that something had gone very wrong, indeed.
Streamers of fog trailed across the rooftop at eye level, but above the house a bank of thicker fog lowered, though actual fog was not its sole constituent. Its uppermost reaches stretched across half the sky and, depending from its bottom, a funnel had developed, extending downward toward the tip of the new attractor, itself visible above the roof peak, its silver rings glowing with a bilious, yellow-green radiance. At first glance the bank was like a great cloud whose bottom was cobbled with faces, but I saw on its underside a myriad images of not only disembodied faces, but torsos and limbs as well—they roiled up for an instant and were subsumed into the fog, replaced by the other revenants. Rags of filmy, opaque material were disgorged from the mouth of the funnel and these battened onto the attractor, fitted themselves to one or another of the rings, and slid down out of view. Whenever this occurred, and it occurred with increasing frequency, a silent discharge of yellowish-green energy shot upward from the attractor, spreading through the bank like heat lightning, permitting me to see shapes deeper within the fog. I thought that some of the shapes so illuminated were inhuman, yet they passed from sight so quickly that I could not swear to it.
Urged on by Richmond, I clambered up onto the roof, still partly in shock, dismasted by the sight and by the silence as well. Oh, there was the omnipresent humming, loud and variable, but this apocalyptic scene, that of the ghosts of Saint Nichol, the relics of the damaged and the poor lured by the attractor, perhaps to their doom, for God only knew what Richmond’s improvements had wrought . . . it should have been accompanied by an explosive music, the final pyrotechnic symphony of a mad Russian who had devoted his life to its creation and then, having awakened to the worthlessness of his work, of all creative labor, had chosen self-slaughter over the ignominy of existence. Jane came up beside me and Richmond scrambled to the roof peak and stood, one hand on the chimney for balance, his hair feathering, superimposed against that insane sky. He let out an agonized shout and pointed—filmy bits were being torn away from the fog, spinning down away from the attractor.
I climbed toward the roof peak, Jane at my heels, and reached it just as Richmond disappeared into the hole into which the new attractor had been set. At the edge of the roof stood the demon, the shadowy, headless thing—I could make out no more of its features or form than I had previously, yet I noticed that its dark substance whirled more slowly, perhaps because it was feeding, absorbing the opaque scraps that were ripped from the underbelly of the bank. That