Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [65]
“Someone has been knocking,” she said. “If not you, then who?”
I could tell that she would not be pacified until the matter had received the attention she believed it deserved. Abandoning the telescope, I went inside to prove to her that there had been no knocking, by me or anyone else. With no one to upbraid, I hoped she would let the matter go, return to her bedroom, and leave me to conclude my observations in peace.
We found no one in the house, no windows open, and no note at the front door. The house was empty and silent.
Yet, as I was leading Margaret back to her rest, there came a sound from below—hard and sharp, a sudden clap as of a book falling face-first onto the floor.
Margaret jumped, and I confess I started too. Barely had the echoes faded than I was on my way back down the stairs, convinced that the sound had originated in the laboratory.
Have you seen my laboratory, Michaels? No? Well, it is as big as a barn, and needs to be, for I have tested engines in there and reconstructed whole sections of airship frames at one-to-one scales. These days, it is full of glass bells much larger than a man, dozens of them, connected by copper wires and containing delicate Faraday cages of my own design. If someone were in there, they would find little they understood, but much that they could damage. It is—
Ah, yes, I forget myself. It’s all gone—and why not? My research will benefit no one now.
Poor Margaret. The irony that she was the one to draw this phenomenon to my attention is not lost on me.
She waited in the doorway as I searched the vast space, leaving no cupboard or nook untouched. I found nothing, and the sound was not repeated. Yet I had heard it: the evidence of my senses was not to be denied.
All I found was a slight crack in my newest bell, a crack that I was certain had not been there before. The bell was spoiled, but I dismissed it as a simple case of thermal compression in the cooling house, coupled with stored stress in the curved glass, suddenly releasing itself. I ascended with Margaret in tow, confident that I had found enough evidence to put her mind at rest. If it occurred to her to ask how a single crack could have made all the other noises she reported, she said nothing.
I slept soundly. I may have dreamed, but I do not recall. I do have a sense of being plagued by my nightmare all that month, and I suppose this will interest you, Michaels: it is what drives me, day and night, in my quest for the perfect transportation device. It is a dream that has haunted me since childhood, a dream of a world poisoned by the fumes of its industry, where inefficient coal boilers spew smoke and char, interminable lines of vehicles choke the streets, and overloaded airships rain ash upon the sickened races below. For all my successes, all my novel advances, my greatest fear is that I have not done enough to prevent this calamity from coming to pass. I am far less afraid of being forgotten than of leaving no one behind to remember my efforts.
(He chuckled at that, without humor, and I reminded him to adhere to the subject.)
Margaret was the first to talk of haunting. I, of course, wouldn’t credit the idea, but it was indisputable that in subsequent days noises were heard in the house that could not be explained away as the servants at work or the walls settling. Strange thumps, scrapes, and sighs came at random intervals, utterly without warning, sometimes seeming near, other times as far away as Selene herself. I told Margaret she was imagining things, but I knew she was not. I could not explain it and would not accept her explanation, and so the phenomenon had to be ignored.
I am embarrassed to admit to the willful disregard of data—data that might have led me much sooner to the understanding I now possess, and might even have prevented the calamity that befell dear Margaret—but there you have it. My mind was fixed on other