Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [5]
15 March 1868
After many arduous years of research into the dubious science of spiritualism, I have reached six conclusions concerning so-called ghosts.
1. There is no great beyond—no stable realm where carefree phantoms gambol while awaiting communiqués from turban-topped clairvoyants sitting in candlelit parlors surrounded by the dearly departed’s loved ones. Show me a medium, and I’ll show you a mountebank. Give me a filament of ectoplasm, and I’ll return a strand of taffy.
2. There is life after death.
3. Once a specter has elected to vacate its fleshly premises, no ordinary barrier of stone or metal will impede its journey. A willful phantom can easily escape a Pharaoh’s tomb, a potentate’s mausoleum, or a lead casket buried six feet underground.
4. With each passing instant, yet another quantum of a specter’s incorporeal substance scatters in all directions. Once dissipated, a ghost can never reassemble itself. The post-mortem condition is evanescent in the extreme, not to be envied by anyone possessing an ounce of joie de vivre.
5. Despite the radical discontinuity between the two planes, a specter may, under certain rare circumstances, access the material world prior to total dissolution—hence the occasional credible account of a ghost performing a boon for the living. A deceased child places her favorite doll on her mother’s dresser. A departed suitor posts a letter declaring eternal devotion to his beloved. A phantom dog barks one last time, warning his master away from a bridge on the point of collapse.
6. In theory a competent scientist should be able at the moment of death to encapsulate a person’s spectral shade in some spiritually impermeable substance, thus canceling the dissipation process and creating a kind of immortal soul. The question I intend to explore may be framed as follows. Do the laws of nature permit the synthesis of an alloy so dense as to trap an emergent ghost, yet sufficiently pliant that the creature will be free to move about?
17 May 1868
For the past two months I have not left my laboratory. I am surrounded by the music of science: burbling flasks, bubbling retorts, moaning generators, humming rectifiers. Von Helmholtz, Mendeleyev, and the rest—my alleged peers—will doubtless aver that my quest partakes more of a discredited alchemy than a tenable chemistry. When I go to publish my results, they’ll insist with a sneer, I would do better submitting the paper to the Proceedings of the Paracelsus Society than to the Cambridge Journal of Molecularism. Let the intellectual midgets have their fun with me. Let the ignoramuses scoff. Where angels fear to tread, Baron Nachtstein rushes in—and one day the dead will extol him for it.
If all goes well, by this time tomorrow I shall be holding in my hand a lump of the vital material. I intend to call it bezalelite, in honor of Judah Löew ben Bezalel, the medieval rabbi from Prague who fashioned a man of clay, giving the creature life by incising on its brow the Hebrew word Emeth—that is, truth.
Although Judah Löew’s golem was a faithful servant and protector of the ghetto, the rabbi was naturally obliged to prevent it from working on the Sabbath, a simple matter of effacing the first letter of Emeth, the Aleph, leaving Mem and Taw, characters that spell Meth—death. But one fateful Friday evening Löew forgot to disable his brainchild. In consequence of this inadvertent sacrilege, the golem ran amok all day Saturday, and so, come Sunday, the heartsick rabbi dutifully ground the thing to dust.
I shall not lose control of my golems. From the moment they come into the world, they will know who is the puppet and who the puppeteer, who the beast and who the keeper, who the slave and who the master.
9 July 1868
At long last, following a deliriously eventful June, I have found time to again take pen in hand. Not only did I fashion the essential alloy, not only did I learn how to produce it in quantities commensurate with my ambitions, but I have managed to coat living tissue with thin and malleable layers