The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

She caught the words from him. “The twentieth, wasn’t it?”

With a sharp look at her, he verified, “Yes, the twentieth. Then you did know?”

“I know now.” Her white stare continued to travel past him. “Sunday the twentieth – that was the day he came first.”

Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. “Came here first?”

“Yes.”

“You saw him twice, then?”

“Yes, twice.” She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. “He came first on the twentieth of October. I remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.” She felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have forgotten.

Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.

“We saw him from the roof,” she went on. “He came down the lime-avenue towards the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished.”

“Elwell had vanished?” Parvis faltered.

“Yes.” Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. “I couldn’t think what had happened. I see now. He tried to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough – he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months; and then he came back again – and Ned went with him.”

She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.

“Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned – I told him where to go! I sent him to this room!” she screamed out.

She felt the walls of the room rush towards her, like inward-falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch; she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

“You won’t know till afterward,” it said. “You won’t know till long, long afterward.”

A Silver Music

Gaie Sebold

Inspector Gairden turned up the collar of his coat as a steam velocipede puffed and churned its way past him, filthy water spraying up from beneath its wheels. Its driver hunched under a bowler and greatcoat, rain shedding down his back; its single passenger was no more than a smoky shape behind the yellowed glass. Gairden scowled at the red-glass lantern that marked its retreat.

He crossed the road, picking his way among the puddles. A dead goblin, about the size of a terrier, swollen- bellied, lay face down in the gutter, its tail wavering in the water. He sighed. The things were a damn nuisance, but he had a lingering fondness for them. Some of the lesser sidhe seemed to be adapting to the city, thriving on its debris; others ended like this.

Gairden stood in front of the looming bulk of the Rheese Manufactory. The place roared and fumed in the darkness; shadows moved in the high windows, paper silhouette puppets against a brutal white glare. Rain, snagged by the light, plummeted like steel needles. A rhythmic thudding jarred the paving under his feet. He walked past the great gates to the side door.

Set into the stone surround was the brass opening of a speaking tube supported by two plaster cherubs. Below it, mounted in an elaborately decorated brass surround, a doorbell bore the stern injunction: “Press”.

Inspector Gairden did so.

“Yes?” A muted buzz, stripped of gender, emerged from the tube.

“Inspector Gairden,” he said, wondering how he sounded to his hidden interlocutor. Less like a machine, he hoped.

“One moment, please.”

It was, in fact, a good few moments before someone opened the door, by which point rain was trickling steadily off the brim of the inspector’s hat.

“Apologies for keeping you, sir. Terrible night.” The man beckoned him in. He was a lean fellow in a workman’s uniform of heavy canvas trousers, woollen waistcoat and plain shirt with the sleeves held back by leather bands. His hands were stained with black and brown on the fingers and palms. “Please follow me. It’s up three flights. Sorry for the climb, but the lift isn’t working.”

“May I take your name?”

“Oh, sorry, sir. I’m the foreman. Lassiter. Ben Lassiter.” He shook his head. “Awful thing, it is. Got everyone very shaken. We shall have to be very careful, the next few days, that there aren’t accidents. Nothing like bad nerves for making people careless.”

“Do you have many accidents?” Gairden raised his voice over the noise.

“Not so many in the last five years, since poor Jamie joined us. We do get accidents, yes. But when it happens . . . the machines, they’re not malevolent, if you see what I mean.”

Lassiter glanced through the archway as they passed the factory floor, where the great levers and pistons rose and fell in relentless rhythm, regular as the pumping of a giant heart, the scurrying workers tiny and doll-like. “I suppose so.” Had the machines been malevolent, Gairden would have felt . . . not sympathy, but some capacity for understanding. That was how he worked: by trying to sense something about the hearts, the minds, the spirits of those involved in a case. There was none of that, with a machine.

“The idea of someone actually—” Lassiter wiped his mouth. “Well, it’s not the same, you see.”

“No, you’re right, it isn’t. You knew the young man, then?”

“Oh, everyone knew young Jamie, sir. Not to speak to, so much; he kept himself to himself, you know. But he was a nice lad when you could get him to notice you existed.”

“Preoccupied, was he?”

“You could say that, sir, yes. A bear for his work, he was.”

“An asset to the firm, then.”

“Oh, I don’t think it would be too much to call him a genius, Inspector. We shall be very sorry to lose him.” There was, the inspector thought, the slightest possible emphasis on the we.

The iron stairway shuddered to the regular thudding; bright curls of shaved metal and fragments of dirt jumped about their feet as they climbed. Smells of hot metal and steam surrounded them. Glittering dust hung in the air.

“What was his position here?” Inspector Gairden said.

“Assistant Deviser, sir.”

“And who was he assistant to?”

“That’d be Mr Rheese, sir. The owner.”

“I see.”

The noise lessened slightly as they moved higher. They stepped into a corridor; heavy wooden doors, gas lamps hissing in their lily-petal shades. Lassiter hurried his steps; Gairden speeded up to stay with him.

Lassiter glanced up and down the corridor; pushed open a door. “In here, sir. It’s pretty bad, but I suppose you’ve seen worse, in your line of work.”

Tiny limbs, their sizes carefully graded, hung on the walls. Jars of eyes stared in all directions. A music box stood with gaping lid, the dancer on top poised forever en pointe. Neatly arrayed in trays, on hooks, in boxes, were levers, wheels, cogs. Brass and copper, glass and steel. A vice gripped the edge of a workbench like a parrot waiting for a snack; against one wall was a bed, narrow as a coffin, the sheets and one rough blanket tucked in with an almost military precision.

If it had been a burglary, it was an exceptionally neat one. There was nothing out of place, except the body. It – James Wishart, Gairden reminded himself, not just the body, never just the body – lay face down on the floor.

There wasn’t much left of his head.