Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [173]
We climbed down the slope of the roof toward the hole so as to learn what could be done to help Richmond. I saw him below, his hands busy with the switches on a brass box situated between two of the rings. He shouted and beckoned for me to join him. Whatever hesitancy I felt was erased by the garishly lit fog bank, lowered to within a few feet of the attractor, spewing forth its ghostly issue—the moil of limbs and faces over our heads was supremely grotesque, Dantean in scope, yet the multiplicity of forms also put me in mind of the rococo ornamentation I had seen on the walls of a temple in Udaipur, only in this instance the ornaments were animated by some occult principle. Bursts of yellow-green light now flickered across the breadth of the sky.
I lowered Jane into the hole and jumped down after her. Communicating with shouts and gestures, Richmond demonstrated that the switches no longer functioned—we would have to break the rings in order to stop the machine. There proved to be insufficient room in the hole to swing the long-handled hammers with which he equipped us, and we were forced to climb back onto the roof, leaving Jane to do whatever she could with a smaller hammer.
We stood side by side, Richmond and I, and each blow we delivered against the rings of the attractor sent a huge bloom of radiance into the fog bank. The humming rose in pitch and melded with the roaring of the shadowy creature to create a singing rush. Our blows scarcely dented the metal, however, and so we concentrated our efforts on a single ring. I lost track of Christine, unable to spare her a glance, and swung the hammer until my shoulders and arms ached with strain. I had given up hope that our assault would produce a result, when without warning the attractor crumpled all along its length, as if squeezed by an enormous fist. I cried out in exultation—I had the urge to embrace Richmond and turned to him, but was enveloped in a burst of light and lifted up . . . lifted, I say, and not flung.
If this was an explosion, it was a most peculiar one. There was no concussion, no heat, no sound, and I felt buoyed up in that flickering, yellow-green space. On every side were the fragmentary beings I had formerly seen from beneath. Ghastly, semitranslucent faces bobbled and drifted away from me, some with ragged, immaterial bodies in tow, and it seemed I was passing among them, pushing upward through their closely massed numbers. They did not appear to register my intrusion. A profound calm blanketed my fear and I thought that I had become a ghost and that this calmness must be a natural protection that attended my sudden transition into the afterlife, a kind of emotional shield. Believing that I shared their fate, I studied the spirits nearest me, searching for signs of agony or distress. They were haggard and bore signs of ill-usage and disease, yet their expressions were uniformly neutral, conveying the idea that they had come to terms with death, something that fresher ghosts like Christine had not. I derived little comfort from this, speculating that I might spend decades in a desolate condition before achieving even a negligible measure of peace, and I clutched at the hope that I might still be alive and that my deathly surround was an illusion, a dream I was having as I lay unconscious atop the roof; but all that served was to rouse my discontent, causing me to struggle, to jostle the spirits around me, creating gaps amongst them. Through one such gap I spotted a dark shape that swiftly grew in size and definition—the shadowy creature, heading straight