Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [29]
“I didn’t know you spoke English.” Scheuch was frantically going back over his behavior toward both old Turks. “I’m sure I would have—I don’t know—paid more attention, if I’d known.”
“Yes,” said Hodja Cenghiz. “I am sure you would have.”
The stairway funneled the monstrously suffering voice—as Scheuch had long since come to think of it—making it sound louder than he knew it was. He said as much to Hodja Cenghiz, who responded simply, “It is loud enough.” Pausing momentarily on the stair to catch his breath, he added, “Loud enough to shake the sun loose in the sky. I sometimes wonder why this has never happened.” Scheuch did not know how to respond.
At the top floor, prowling in Angelos’s rooms, Hodja Abbas moved impatiently from instrument to instrument, device to homemade device, muttering to himself as a curious counterpoint to the haunting, horrible wailing that rose and fell and rose, and never went away. Mr. Emanetoglu, embarrassed but determined, stayed on his heels, translating a jeweled chaplet of Turkish obscenities as Hodja Abbas cursed several generations of Angelos’s ancestors backwards and forwards for bringing such an imbecile to birth. Angelos himself, not knowing the language, and being more exhausted than even he recognized, only smiled feebly and made sounds that he was certain were words. It was Mr. Emanetoglu who finally plucked up enough courage to demand of the hodja, “What has he done, after all? What crime have his experiments committed?”
The two old men looked at each other for a long moment before Hodja Abbas spoke again—this time, surprisingly in hoarse, limited, but comprehensible English. “Sorrow . . . Heart of Sorrow . . . he have prowoke—awake—no . . .” He shook his head irritably, groping for the right word. “Touch. He have touch in deep, deep place, world place. The Sorrowheart. We call.” He turned toward Hodja Cenghiz for confirmation.
Griffith, having seated himself in the one armchair when Angelos opened his rooms, had promptly fallen asleep, mouth open and his hands futilely covering both ears, since the voice was always more pervasive here, though no stronger. Hodja Cenghiz said, “What you are hearing—what Mr. Angelos has reached, roused, by accident—is the grief at the center, the heart of the world. It is just as old as human beings, to the minute, and it is always a woman’s voice. We Turks call it Sorrowheart—other times, other languages, some other name. But always a woman.” He bowed to Angelos, slightly but unmistakably. “How Mr. Angelos reached it, touched it with his little electrical researches, I have no idea—only a very few of our poets have ever done that before. Most of them went mad.” He sighed and shrugged. “I sincerely congratulate you, Mr. Angelos.”
In the silence, Scheuch’s sharp ears heard Angelos’s laughter begin, impossibly deep in his belly, well before it ever billowed into daylight. It was not loud laughter, nor did it last very long; but it woke Griffith, and caused even Hodja Abbas to take a step backward and regard him with the same anxiety—though less of it—as Mr. Emanetoglu. Angelos said at last, “So. Let me understand. We here, we will all continue to hear these voices?” The two hodjas looked at each other and then back to him without answering. Angelos asked, “Forever?”
Vordran echoed him. “Forever? For the rest of our lives?”
Hodja Cenghiz answered him slowly, “Not all the voices. Only the one. And not all of you: only for him.” Angelos stared back at him, not laughing now, his tired