Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [88]
I peered expectantly at him, thinking that he would wave his age-withered arm and Smithers would come striding in from the hall. But no: instead he worked at the clasp of that big wooden box with those trembling fingers of his for what seemed like half an hour, and opened it at last, and lifted the lid and gestured to me to peer in.
Inside lay a bleached skull, sitting atop a jumble of other bones, looking like relics exhumed from some tumulus of antiquity. They were resting on a bed of sand.
“This is Smithers,” he said.
For a moment I could find nothing whatever to say. Then I blurted, “How did he die?”
“He died of extreme age,” Brewster said.
And he told me how, after expending many weeks and months crossing India and bashing around in the Thar, he had finally heard the ghostly singers and the distant drums and gongs again, and they had led him to the hidden valley. There he found Smithers, fluent now in the local lingo and busy with all manner of public-works projects in a full-scale attempt to bring the inhabitants of the valley into the nineteenth century overnight.
He was married, Brewster said, to that lovely long-legged native princess who had been teaching him the language.
“Married?” I repeated foolishly, thinking of mournful Helena, the Adjutant’s beautiful daughter, faithful to him yet, still waiting hopefully for his return.
“I suppose it was a marriage,” said Brewster. “They were man and wife, at any rate, whatever words had been said over them. And seemed very happy together. I spoke to him about returning to his assignment here. As you might suspect, he wasn’t eager to do so. I spoke more firmly to him about it.” I tried to imagine the diffident Brewster speaking firmly to his strong-willed friend about anything. I couldn’t. “I appealed to his sense of duty. I appealed to him as an Englishman. I spoke of the Queen.”
“And did he yield?”
“After a while, yes,” Brewster said, in a strange tone of voice that made me wonder whether Brewster might have made him yield at gunpoint. I could not bring myself to ask. “But he insisted that we bring his—wife—out of the valley with us. And so we did. And here they are.”
He indicated the box, the skull, the bones beneath, the bed of sand.
“Hardly had we passed through the barrier but they began to shrivel and age,” he said. “The woman died first. She became a hideous crone in a matter of hours. Then Smithers went.”
“But how—how?”
Brewster shrugged. “Time moves at a different rate within the valley. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it. The people in there may be living six or eight hundred years ago, or even more. Time is suspended. But when one emerges—well, do you see me? How I look? The suspended years descend on one like an avalanche, once one leaves. I spent a few weeks in that village the first time. I came back here looking ten or twenty years older. This time I was there for some months. Look at me. Smithers had been under the valley’s spell for, what, two or three years?”
“And the woman for her entire life.”
“Yes. When they came out, he must have been a hundred years old, by the way we reckon time. And she, perhaps a thousand.”
How could I believe him? I am an engineer, a builder of railroads and bridges. I give no credence to tales of ghosts and ghouls and invisible specters whose voices are heard on the desert air, nor do I believe that time runs at different rates in different parts of our world. And yet—yet—the skull, the bones, the withered, trembling old man of not quite thirty-seven who stood before me speaking with Brewster’s voice—
I understood now that Brewster had been aware of what going back into that terrible valley to fetch Smithers would do to him. It would rob him of most or all of the remaining years of his life. He had known, but Yule had ordered him to go, and yes he had gone. The poor man. The poor doomed man.
To cover my confusion I reached into the box. “And what is this?” I asked, picking up a pinch of something fine and white that I took for desert sand, lying beneath the little heap of bones like