Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [9]
6 August 1870
I must confess, though with a certain understandable reluctance, that I have found in the Franco-Prussian War a catastrophe of enormous convenience. Approach a man who has just been blown apart by an artillery shell, his viscera spilling forth like turnips from a torn sack, and propose to translate him into a domain where his agony will vanish and his soul endure forever, and he will invariably assent. If you kneel beside a soldier recently trampled during a cavalry charge and offer to sign him up for an eternity of painless existence, he will forthwith beg for a contract and a pen.
This afternoon my creatures and I landed in the Alsatian town of Fröschwiller, where earlier in the day Marshal Patrice de Mac-Mahon’s French brigades had clashed with a combined force of Prussians, Bavarians, Badeners, Württembergens, and Saxons. Perhaps historians will ultimately frame the Battle of Fröschwiller as the cradle of a unified German state, but what I beheld on that ghastly field was not so much a cradle as a mass grave. Each side, I would estimate, lost at least 10,000 men to instant death or irremediable wounds.
Crossing the bloody terrain with a large convoy of tumbrels, the golems collected over five hundred candidates for bezalelite immortality. Thanks to humankind’s affection for mayhem, I shall soon have an army of my own.
3 October 1870
Immediately after the necessary plans and diagrams arrived from Prague, along with a team of master builders, I embarked on a colossal endeavor. Here in the heart of the Schwarzwald we have razed my ancestral manor and begun to assemble in its stead a structure of stupefying splendor. My new abode will replicate the Bohemian castle of Kralkovnik wall for wall, gate for gate, lane for lane, arch for arch, and vault for vault.
Among their many virtues, my golems are extraordinarily diligent laborers. Already the first, second, and third courtyards have been paved. Tomorrow a crew of three hundred and fifty will start erecting Poelsig Tower, even as the remaining seven hundred and twenty-five lay the foundations of the principal château.
A man’s home, it has been remarked, is his castle. By analogy, a man’s castle is his kingdom and his kingdom his empire. I intend to administer my dominion in a manner befitting the first scientist to weld the carnal plane to its spectral counterpart—that is, with a firm but enlightened hand. As Lotte told me this morning, “When the golems undertake to compose their epics, they will sing their creator’s praises in rapturous words, borne by the most sublime music ever heard in heaven or on earth.”
AT FIRST LIGHT Jonathan Hobbwright rises from his canopied bed and, venturing beyond the castle walls, begins his quest for a suitable site on which to stage the golems’ salvation. From seven o’clock until noon he roams the fields and woods, eventually happening upon a clearing so wide it could accommodate a circus act featuring a troupe of elephants. The vibratologist returns to the castle, seeks out Nonentity 157, and enlists its aid in transporting the apparatus to the place where, God willing, he will redeem the Baron’s creatures.
After Nonentity 157 departs, Jonathan bears the Wohlmeth Resonator to the center of the circle. Coils of fog sinuate across the ground like phantom serpents. Meticulously he deploys the tuning fork, prongs pointed upwards in a configuration evoking the Devil’s own trident bursting through the crust of the earth. Next he places the voltaic piles a full hundred yards from the resonator, fearing that without