Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [97]
The weight seemed now entirely gone from our limbs. I suppose because the attraction of the other world counterbalanced the attraction of gravity. There was no light, except the faint shine of the plague-lights on our breasts, and as we watched, holding our breath, these suddenly floated upward.
“They have left us!” Phyllis cried. “The love-lights! Don’t love me any less.”
“I shall always love you, Phyllis,” I assured her, “if there is no light left in the world.” But she fainted and did not hear me.
I think I must have fainted too, for it felt as if time had passed when next I remembered anything. Through the window I saw the dark world still hurrying by, escorted by battalions of tiny twinkling lights. I could not see if they were still in triangles of three. They were — thank God! — Too far. In the room it was inky dark. A few of the patients, come to their senses, were calling in feeble, frightened voices to ask what had happened, and where they were.
“The lights have gone,” the doctor was telling them. “I do not know what the darkness may bring. But we are in the Hands of God, dear friends — the hands of God!”
It was the morning of the 19th of June when the sun shone again on the pale, enfeebled people who were left — humans, men and women as before. The Royal Commission has narrated in Appendices xxiv to xxxii how the work of the world was put together again, like a map that had been dissected for a puzzle. I only know the small happenings around me. We tottered about getting food and drink. Some who had met during the plague settled down where we were, and many who had parted went off to seek those they had lost. Children came down from their homes to find their parents, and parents went off to look for their children, and we smiled and wiped our eyes. Presently some went off to the churches and set the bells ringing, and all of us gathered there.
We shuddered still as we looked after the black mass passing away in the sky above, drawing after it a misty aurora of light; the plague-lights that had invaded our earth, struggled with us, and slain; and failed after all. Henceforth we were left our own little world, and the world of each is small. Mine is larger than some for I am Phyllis’s and she is mine.
Indeed I am tempted to say that ours is a world of four since the doctor and Doris and we are almost as inseparable as if we were still bound by our stars; but they struggle no longer since the evil went.
It was in a pause from our work of helping those who were feebler than ourselves that we understood this. We were sitting down together to the crusts and water that we had collected for lunch, and the doctor placed Doris a chair touching his.
“You aren’t bound to sit beside me now,” he said, laughing cheerfully, and wiping his forehead with his handkerchief he had worked very hard among the sick. “You can order me to the opposite side of the table — or the world if you wish.”
“But I can’t wish.” Doris said softly; and suddenly he put his hand under her chin and lifted up her face, and she looked up at him smilingly, and held gently to the sides of his coat. Phyllis and I took up our fragments of lunch, and went out in the garden and ate it under a tree. “God bless them,” I said, “and all on earth that live and love.”
“Amen!”
Phyllis put her arm through mine, and gazed where the dead world, with its trail of pale light, was growing dim afar.
“Perhaps He sent them — the love-lights — to teach us to love. Who knows if they were a blessing, after all!”
That is the lesson that we have learnt from the plague of lights. It is not included in the forty-three recommendations of the Royal Commission, and that is why I have written this story.
WHAT THE RATS BROUGHT
Ernest Favenc
This story brings together two related period threads. One is world catastrophe, which we have already touched on. The other is the vampire. The fascination with the