Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [67]
Already I knew that the phenomena came at all hours, not just during the night; and that apart from the dishes and the cracked glass bell—both of which might have been coincidence—they consisted solely of sensory impressions. Nothing concrete had been detected. What other data we had were as elusive as the atoms of my imaginary river.
I told Margaret that I was going to make camp in the laboratory that night, in order to study the phenomenon more closely. She told me I was addled even to consider it, but I was adamant. The manifestations were confined to the ground floor, so it made sense to conduct the experiment in situ. I gathered a decanter of sherry and several books from the library to pass the time. Exhausted though I was, I planned to stay awake the entire night and record what I experienced.
Ah, Michaels, if only my notes survived! One sheet would provide you with all the evidence you need, although perhaps you would interpret it as the product of a deranged psyche. You would see in those notes my keenest observations, with each incident dutifully timed and described, accompanied by speculations as to cause, where such was not immediately obvious.
Of the sounds, many were mechanical, such as tiny clicks and whirrs that came at irregular intervals, as though a vast and invisible calculating machine surrounded me. Others were natural: once, for instance, I swear I heard a birdcall, and there were the faintest hints of voices, coming and going at the very fringe of perception.
I monitored several thermometers and recorded numerous wide swings in temperature. Different parts of the room often disagreed by several degrees, and I was forever loosening and tightening my cravat.
At least twice, I swear, something poked me gently, once between the shoulder blades and once in my chest. Nothing at all was to be seen.
I accumulated several pages of notes over the course of the night, but came to no conclusions. My attention wandered back to my work, and to the books I had brought with me for the long vigil. They were translations, mostly, of texts dismissed in these enlightened days, but in which I hoped to find a gleam of inspiration. For thousands of years, you see, alchemists have written of moving in ways that would seem magical to us. Lu Yen’s Chu T’ang Shu described traversing the tapestry of stars to the edge of day—that is in third-century China, when the most famous Chinese alchemist of all, Ko Hung, believed that he could fly to heaven by mounting the air and treading on light, echoing the Daoist Dance of Yu, where adepts physically trace out the constellations in order to travel to the stars. Such apparently preposterous claims are not confined to China, by any means. Egyptians believed that certain words provided people with the power to travel safely through different worlds after death, while The Coffin Texts claim that one can learn how to cross over the sky and explore the entire universe. Thoth boasted of descending to the earth with secrets belonging to the horizon, and that claim was later taken up by the Greeks: in Corpus Hermeticum, Hermes Trismegistus instructs students to fly into the heavens without wings. Scholars have often suspected that there was something these venerable philosophers understood that we have forgotten; my intention was not to recover that supposedly lost knowledge, but instead to make it a reality and put it to the salvation of our civilization. If people dreamed thus, once upon an age, then I could make them dream again.
When dawn arrived, the carafe was empty and I was utterly exhausted. The maidservant found me asleep at my drafting table with my head on my arms when she knocked gently at the locked door to see if I required breakfast.
I roused myself and told her that, yes, I would require something even heartier than normal to get the day properly under way. I did not reveal to her that my quest