Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [32]
We were both freshmen at the University of Pittsburgh in 1955, and my recollection is that, outside of my roommate, Ismail was the first friend I ever made there. He was also the first and only Turk I’ve ever known at all well, and certainly the first Muslim. I remember him as dark and slim and funny, with a great sudden laugh that contrasted intriguingly with his dry, deadpan sense of humor. Ismail found America a reliably constant source of amusement.
What I know of Turkish history and folklore, I know almost entirely from Ismail. We’d sit in the Student Union cafeteria, or go for long walks along Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue on mild spring evenings, and he’d recount the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, and what Tsar Nicholas I meant by calling Turkey “the sick man of Europe.” I remember that we traded our grandmothers’ superstitions and household magics, and discussed the similarities and differences between Bronx rabbis and Istanbul hodjas. I could be wrong, but I think he knew at least as much about rabbinical scholarship as I did. Jews have been in Turkey for a very long time.
When I finally sat down to write “Music, When Soft Voices Die,” after stalling as much as possible (I knew next to nothing of the steampunk genre and was truly terrified of attempting such a story), those old Pittsburgh chats with Ismail began to come back to me: first by slow degrees, and then with a growing rush. Desperation will do that. Mr. Emanetoglu isn’t anything like Ismail as I remember him, but I do hope that Ismail might have recognized him and perhaps approved.
—PETER S. BEAGLE
Terry Dowling
Terry Dowling is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers of the fantastic. He has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine and “Australia’s premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows. His collection Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear won the 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection, earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and is regarded as “one of the best recent collections of contemporary horror” by the American Library Association. The acclaimed Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Terry in its twenty-one-year run than by any other writer.
Dowling’s award-winning horror collections are An Intimate Knowledge of the Night and Blackwater Days, while his most recent titles are Rynemonn, Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder, and his debut novel, Clowns at Midnight, which London’s Guardian newspaper called “an exceptional work that bears comparison to John Fowles’s The Magus.” Major interviews with Terry conducted by Exotic Gothic editor Danel Olson can be found in The New York Review of Science Fiction and in Cemetery Dance Magazine. Terry’s home page can be found at www.terrydowling.com.
TERRY DOWLING
The Shaddowwes Box
ON THE FOURTH night the dream remained the same: our train ran along the banks of the Nile, its locomotive fired by the mummies of cats and kings. There was Akhmet, yet again, insisting that it was true, leaning forward, bright-eyed, gesturing wildly in our hard-won compartment. A new tomb-pit, shallow but vast, had been unearthed in the sands south of Cairo, he was telling me as if he never had before, hundreds of mummified cats to one side, dozens of human pauper mummies to the other.
“There had to be kings among them, Mr. Salteri,” Akhmet said, eyes flashing with the fine joke of it, exactly as they had on the momentous day itself six years earlier when I had made the fateful journey to the Wadi Hatas. “It’s what the reinterment commissions did back in the New Kingdom. They feared looters, professional tombaroli such as you, so they moved the royal mummies, hid them. This field had a small precinct to the west. Probably special mummies there, possibly nobles, queens, even kings! But so many mummies. Too many, you understand? What to do? Sell to