Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [64]
Eventually, he took me at my word. He had no alternative, and I remember thinking that there was no predicament too alien for a keen intellect to confront. I admired the power of his mind, you see, even under such duress. I had not yet glimpsed the depths of his delusion—or of his cunning, depending on your interpretation of subsequent events.
He warned me.
“You will think me certifiable, Michaels, if I tell you the truth. I despaired too, at first, and with good reason: this vile place, with its loathsome inmates and equally loathsome porters, and all that preceded it . . . But then I wondered. Could it possibly be that she sent me here deliberately? You see, I felt something intangible when the door you just came through slammed shut behind me, something profound beyond words. Was this the ‘precipice of light’ Pattinattar wrote of nine hundred years ago? Had I chanced upon the secret of the ancients, which I must find anew or never see her again?”
His eyes had taken on a remote and urgent look, staring beyond the walls of Exeter Vale Asylum toward vistas unknown. I endeavored to bring him back to more immediate mysteries.
“Margaret, do you mean?”
He sank back onto his cot and put his head in his hands. “No, not Margaret. And no, this was not the right place. I tried, but could not follow in the great poet’s footsteps. So here I am, Michaels, at your mercy.”
I had been apprised of the statements he had made upon his arrest. I was aware that another woman might be implicated in the affair, although she had neither come forward nor been named. For your part, Inspector, you know that my purpose that day was to ascertain if this woman existed and, if so, whether she was complicit in the murder of Margaret Gordon. I resolved to be resolute in my pursuit of the truth, lest a great man of science be ruined over something of which he might be completely innocent.
I thought, then, that he might be shielding a jealous mistress. I would come to wonder if injured pride and his fall from grace drove him to perpetrate violent acts on all the women around him.
I do not know what I think now.
“You must tell me what happened,” I said to him.
“Yes, yes—and if I must tell someone, it might as well be a scholar like me.” He raised his head, regarding me with bloodshot but startlingly blue eyes. “I think it was Pattinattar, again, who said: ‘I do not mix with idle, useless men. I do not listen to their speech.’ ”
He was trying to distract me with flattery.
“Tell me who she is, Doctor Gordon. Where did you meet? Where was it she wanted you to go?”
“Such difficult questions! You have no idea what you ask.”
I said nothing.
“Very well.” He shifted so his shoulders rested against the wall. “Her name is Abiha, and Margaret—poor Margaret—thought she was a ghost.”
IT STARTED ON the twenty-fifth (he began, speaking with the clipped precision of one used to addressing the Royal Institution), and I say this, Michaels, with certainty, because it was the night of the lunar eclipse and I had been studying craters by telescope. My thoughts were as full as the face of that distant world. I imagined myself standing upon those jagged, airless mountains, staring up at the darkened globe of the earth. For all the advances we have made in recent decades, our trains, steamers, and airships are no closer to taking us there. We need infinitely more powerful forms of transportation to make these dreams reality, and I, unlike most dreamers, have the means to do just that. I had been working on them that very evening.
It was well past midnight when Margaret came down for me, complaining