Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [3]
Listen carefully, Jonathan Hobbwright. Attend to every word emerging from the gossamer gates of your phantom mouth. Perhaps on this retelling you will discover some reason not to abandon hope. Even in hell stranger things have happened.
IT IS AT the funeral of his mentor and friend, the illustrious Alastair Wohlmeth, that Jonathan meets the woman whose impeccable intentions are to become the paving-stones on his road to perdition. By the terms of Dr. Wohlmeth’s last will and testament, the service is churchless and austere: a graveside gathering in Saint Sepulchre’s Cemetery, Oxford, not so very far from Wadham College, where Wohlmeth wrought most of his scientific breakthroughs. Per the dead man’s prescription, the party is limited to his one true protégé—Jonathan—plus his valet, his beloved but dull-witted sister, his three most promising apprentices, and the Right Reverend Mr. Torrance.
As the vicar mutters the incantation by which an Englishman once again becomes synonymous with ashes and dust, the mourners contemplate the corpse. Dr. Wohlmeth’s earthly remains lie within an open coffin suspended above the grave, its oblong form casting a jagged shadow across the cavity like the gnomon on an immense sundial. The inscription on the stone is singularly spare: A. F. Wohlmeth, 1803–1881.
To assert that Alastair Wohlmeth was a latter-day Prometheus would not, in Jonathan’s view, distort the truth. Just as the mythic Titan stole fire from the gods, so did Wohlmeth appropriate from nature some of her most obscure principles, transforming them into his own private science, the nascent sphere of knowledge he called vibratology. This new field was for its discoverer a fundamentally esoteric realm, to be explored in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Pythagoreans practicing their cultish geometry. Of course, when the outside world realized that Wohlmeth’s quest had yielded a practical invention—a tuning fork capable of cracking the thickest crystal and pulverizing the strongest metal—the British Society of Engineers urged him to patent the device and establish a corporation dedicated to its commercial exploitation. One particularly aggressive B.S.E. member, a demolitions expert named Cardigan, wanted to market the Wohlmeth Resonator as “an earthquake in a satchel-case,” a miraculous implement auguring a day when “the dredging of canals, the blasting of mines, the shattering of battlements, and the moving of mountains will be accomplished with the wave of a wand.” To Dr. Wohlmeth’s eternal credit, or so Jonathan constructed the matter, he resisted all such blandishments. Until the day he died, Wohlmeth forbade his disciples to discuss the resonator in any but the most opaque mathematical terms, confining the conversation to quarterlies concerned solely with theoretical harmonics. The technical periodicals, meanwhile, remained as bereft of articles about the tuning fork as they did of lyric poetry.
Contrary to Wohlmeth’s wishes, a ninth mourner has appeared at the service, a parchment-skinned crone in a black-hooded mantle. Her features, Jonathan notes, partake as much of the geological as the anatomical. Her brow is a crag, her nose a promontory, her lower lip a protuberant shelf of rock. With impassive eyes she watches while the sexton, a nimble scarecrow named Foote, leans over the open coffin and, in accordance with the deceased genius’s desires, lays a resonator on the frozen bosom, wrapping the stiff fingers around the shank, so that in death Dr. Wohlmeth assumes the demeanor of a sacristan clutching a broom-sized crucifix. An instant later the sexton’s assistants—the blockish Garber and the scrawny Osmond—set the lid on the coffin and nail it in place. Foote works the windlass, lowering Wohlmeth to his final resting place. Taking up their spades, Garber and Osmond return the dirt whence it came, the clods striking the coffin lid with percussive thumps, even as the crone approaches Jonathan.
“Dr. Hobbwright, I presume?” she says in a viscous German accent. “Vibratologist