Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [69]
At shortly after four in the morning, I heard footsteps approaching me across the floor of the laboratory. I sat up, but saw no one. My skin tingled. The hair on the back of my hands and neck stood to attention. I smelt something—the faintest hint of another person near me—and felt a puff of air against my cheek
“You are close,” whispered a voice into my ear, “so very close.”
I leapt to my feet, filled with excitement and atavistic dread. I was alone in the laboratory, yet someone was speaking to me. An invisible being, a spirit—a ghost, why not? We don’t have words for such an experience. It is something that calculating machines could not calculate, that analytical engines could not analyze—yet I was experiencing it. I alone!
I flailed about, vainly seeking substance in the empty air. The ghost laughed, as though at the clumsy efforts of a child. One of my hasty pictograms fluttered into the air, and I caught it, crushing it in my fist. I felt taunted, belittled. Angrily, I demanded that the ghost reveal itself to me at once.
“I cannot,” said that faint whisper in my ear. “You must wait, Doctor Gordon.”
“How long?”
“One more night, and then the congress of our worlds will be complete. Will you be here to greet me?”
“Yes,” I said, without hesitation. Who would not? “I will be here.”
“Bring no one else,” the teasing spirit said, and fell silent. She said nothing more that night, and I felt no further sign of her presence.
Yes, I said “she.” The creature haunting my laboratory was plainly a woman, a woman of some intelligence and spirit by the sound of her, although her accent was unfamiliar. There was none of the breathless, echoing death rattles the writers of popular fiction would have us imagine. She clearly was not that kind of ghost.
Naturally, after the encounter, I could not sleep, and I spent the rest of that night and the following day in a fever of anticipation. Margaret was worried. She could sense that something had inflamed my intellectual passion, yet she saw my regular work go ignored. I paced about the laboratory, unwilling to leave, responding only vaguely to her entreaties, barely eating or drinking. I must have seemed like a man possessed; it is a wonder she didn’t accuse me of this very thing. A more credulous mind might have wondered if I had somehow fallen under the ghost’s spell. Not Margaret. She understood my moods as well as I understood hers. She knew when I had been seized by the power of an idea.
But what, really, did I have? Little that would have impressed the overly critical gentlemen of the Royal Institution, those who had jeered and catcalled at my latest presentation. I needed far more if I was to declare a breakthrough of such magnitude—a breaking through, indeed, between different planes of existence. I didn’t for a moment contemplate secreting an observer to witness what might follow that night. If nothing occurred, I would be an instant laughingstock. I needed more evidence before even considering public engagement.
I suppose I am a laughingstock now, Michaels. I expect people whisper terrible things about me and my behavior—that my mind gave way before the derision of my peers and I killed my wife in a moment of mania. If I had braved the possibility of further humiliation, this story might have had a very different conclusion, though I suspect that my visitor would easily have detected an observer and disappeared for good. The truth would have been denied me, and I would forever have wondered what I might have lost.
Again, I dosed poor Margaret so she would not be disturbed. Again, I sealed myself into the laboratory, armed with nothing but my books and my wits. Again, I endured hours of uncertainty before the stillness of the night was broken. Again, I started, but this time not at any mere wisp of air or whispering voice.
I jumped because right in front of me, from absolutely nowhere, appeared the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Not as a ghost or phantasm. There was