Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [96]
The lights seemed to have more power to weaken us while we were separated from the doctor and Doris, and similarly they were more affected while we were absent. So we kept together in the evening. We were all too exhausted to say much. Phyllis and I sat hand-in-hand the others sat a little way apart, but they had ceased to quarrel
“You have gained my great respect and admiration, Miss Fane,” the doctor told her, and she bowed and wiped her eyes.
“I am glad that I shall die with a man,” she said.
We had little sleep that night. Several of our patients died. Their stars grew larger and brighter and more substantial — they felt like a spot of mist if you touched them — and at the end they went off-together.
The third day more died, and the rest were in a stupor. The air was fill of showers of lights that fell in a long rain of triangles. They were the outskirts of a dissolving world that was falling upon us, a shriveled old gentleman, who had escaped attack, declared. There was probably a more material core, he said, that would come soon. That would be the end of things. He was a scientist whom men had called great, he told us but his name did not matter. These things did not matter now. He went on slowly, leaning on his stick, towards Beckenham. Someone whom he loved had been buried there for thirty years, he told us, and the “love-lights” (he called them so) would be waiting for him on her grave, he hoped.
More of our patients died in the afternoon. Phyllis and I went always arm in arm when we were not attending to them. The doctor and Doris kept away from us as much as possible because their ghostly masters struggled with ours, and they wished to save us from annoyance during these last sad hours.
“You lucky people!” Doris said. “Don’t look like that, doctor! You and I are luckier than some. Let us do our work together, dear friend, and hope for the best.”
“God bless you, dear, brave girl,” he said, and kissed her hand
There were only twenty-two of our patients left at the close of the afternoon, and these did not understand anything that we said. Doris fainted from overwork, and Phyllis seemed in a sort of coma. The doctor and I had to feed them also. He and I were so weak that we could scarcely move, and, the four of us seemed bound closely together by the lights. He and Doris were unable to resist them any longer, and drew closer and closer together as they sat on the sofa, after she had revived from her faintness.
“It isn’t my fault, Miss Fane,” he apologized. “I am sorry if it causes you annoyance.”
“No,” she smiled up at him. “It doesn’t. I think it is near the end, doctor. I am glad to be with you.”
He drew her head down on his shoulder. “It is near the end,” he said. “You will be more comfortable so.”
We sat very still for half an hour. There was no sound except when the stars of those who had died fluttered by. We could hear them now. They seemed growing into substantial bodies, and we into unsubstantial spirits. Then gradually everything seemed to change. We found that we could move more freely, not that we were stronger, but because our bodies had less weight. The air seemed fill of something that we could not see, only feel; and it grew swiftly dark, an hour before sunset.
“What is coming, Frank?” Phyllis asked, in an awed whisper.
“The end of all things, dear,” I said. “I suppose it is the ‘core’ of the dead world coming upon us, as he said. We are together, dear. It has not been without its happiness, this sad time.”
“No, dear. I have been with you.”
The darkness grew suddenly darker, and looking out of the open window — we were in the long room where most of our remaining patients were — we saw a shapeless mass overhead, shutting out the sight of the sky; a bluish, ashy grey, with portions bulging out like low mountains, and black gaps between, where seas might have been. The Blue Books