The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women Part 40

"What's odd?"

The patent officer reappeared, clutching a brown manila file. "Well, there's one application, at least five years old. Nothing after that. Looks like old Frobisher's handwriting he retired last month. Came into some money, unexpected, and moved abroad."

"Did he indeed? Then I'd like to see all the applications he worked on before he had such an unusual stroke of good fortune."

"But ..."

Gairden looked around at the tottering piles of paper. "I'm sure you don't throw anything away, do you? Find them. I'll wait."

The sound of the machines thrummed through Rheese's office, like a heartbeat. The level of brandy in the decanter had fallen; the levels in all the others stayed the same. They gleamed like great flaunting jewels. Gairden stood by the table; Rheese sat, as usual, behind his desk.

"I'm glad to hear you have some information," he said. "Do feel free . . . and pour me one while you're about it."

"Do you have gin, Mr Rheese?"

Rheese paused for a moment. "Wouldn't have put you down for that type, Inspector."

"You do keep it, though?"

"Well, yes, for the staff, you know, or traders. Can't stand the stuff meself. Did you want-"

"No, thank you, sir. I think the decanter may be chipped, in any case."

There was a silence. "Really?" Rheese said. "Why would you think that?"

"Because I think it may have been used as a murder weapon, Mr Rheese."

There was a faint clinking noise, then an odd, crystalline buzzing. The tray on which the decanters stood had begun to vibrate, a rhythmic resonance, silvery and strange.

Rheese rubbed his hands together, with a dry rasping sound. "A murder weapon? Really?"

"I don't like machines, Mr Rheese. I don't like the world's obsession with them. But Jamie Wishart did. He loved them. And he put that love into what he made." Gairden moved to the window, and looked out into the rain. A tiny persistent ringing made him glance down, and he realized that the latch of the window, too, was resonating, beating against the frame like the clapper of a bell. "You applied for a number of patents, did you not, Mr Rheese?"

"I . . . what? Yes. Of course I did. Where is that d.a.m.ned noise coming from?"

"Your father applied for a number, too. A man of great talent, Mr Matthew Rheese. He invented several mechanisms of some significance, I understand."

"Yes . . . yes, he did. What is this to do with the matter at hand?"

"He was fond of Jamie, wasn't he?"

"Really, Inspector ..."

"He gave him the job, and the workshop. He even gave him a watch, for his twenty-first birthday. That must have jarred on you."

"Father had a soft spot for lame dogs, Inspector."

"But Jamie Wishart wasn't a lame dog, was he? Your father recognized that. I wonder if the boy had a touch of the other, a strain of the fey to him; I suppose we'll never know. Either way, Jamie Wishart was a genius. You aren't, Mr Rheese."

"How dare you?" Rheese exclaimed. "What do you know about it?"

Gairden pinned him with his gaze.

"Until Jamie came along, you hadn't applied for a single patent. The patents you applied for after that weren't yours. The inventions weren't yours. They were all Jamie Wishart's. He was too busy making what he loved to realize that you were stealing from him."

"Now look, Inspector, that's complete-" Rheese pushed himself out of the chair, his cheeks flushed, his teeth bared.

"Sit down, Mr Rheese." Gairden's voice was cold as metal.

Rheese slid back into his chair. "Nonsense! No one will ever believe a word of it."

"They'll believe the patent applications, Mr Rheese. You got careless towards the end, once your father was out of the way. You didn't bother copying the original designs; they're still in Jamie's hand, though the applications are in yours."

"I was doing it as a favour to him! The boy had no business sense ..."

"It's enough for people to start looking very carefully. Looking at why the patent officer, Aloysius Frobisher, suddenly became very comfortably off, just before he retired abroad."

"You can't prove anything."

"Oh, I can," Gairden said. "Boot polish, in your office? I wondered why a man such as you was polis.h.i.+ng his own shoes. I realized the stains on your fingers had left smudges those on La.s.siter's are ingrained. He didn't smear the door when he touched it you did. His fingers are dark with dye yours were stained with boot-blacking. But you polished the surface, Mr Rheese, and forgot the sole. Not a bad metaphor, is it? You stamped on Jamie's watch. A childish gesture; the poor man was already dead. I found the minute-hand in the st.i.tching of your shoe. She led me to it, I believe."

"Who?"

"Yes, I can prove one murder. Proving the second ..."

"But there wasn't . . . I mean-" Rheese's voice was getting ever louder, as though trying to drown out the soft uncanny music that now seemed to s.h.i.+ver in the very walls.

"You took the gin with you," Gairden said. "Did you think you might have trouble, getting him to give up this particular patent? Did you plan to get him drunk? He never touched the stuff, but you didn't know that. You didn't know him at all. I wonder if anyone did."

Gairden moved away from the window, towards the table where the clock stood, humming with resonance, even though it was broken, s.h.i.+vering with a kind of life.

"You found them together, dancing. He'd created something you never could. Something extraordinary; something that would make you a rich man. But this time, he wouldn't let you take out a patent, would he? What he'd created was more than just a mechanism to him. It was a true labour of love.

"You argued. And the gin was in your hand. A little must have leaked from around the stopper when you swung it at his head, again, and again, and again. I knew it wasn't a regular burglary, you see. Someone there merely to steal his designs, they wouldn't have been angry enough to hit him so many times, poor fellow. But you, Mr Rheese, you hated the mind in his skull, that genius mind you could never match. You had to destroy it. His refusal to give her up was just the excuse you needed.

"When Jamie fell, she fell, too; La.s.siter heard her, though he didn't know what he'd heard. Something in her broke when Jamie died. She wailed, like a long note on a violin, and then she fell." Gairden leaned over, keeping one careful eye on Rheese, and took hold of what lay behind the clock, and pulled it upright.

The automaton drooped against his shoulder like a tired child. She was beautiful in her cool inhuman way. Her face was a smooth s.h.i.+ning oval, her eyes elongated teardrops of blue gla.s.s. "He called her Lalika," Gairden said. "I thought it was his ghost that was trying to speak to me; it was the girl, Mattie, who put that into my head. But it wasn't Jamie's ghost. It was hers.

"She was the one who stopped your machines, not Jamie he wouldn't have stopped them for himself. She made them stop for an hour, because that's what you do when someone dies. And because she knew you would never show him that much respect."

"You're insane."

"He'd made better than he knew better than you or I understood. I can't see you hang for her murder, Mr Rheese, but I'll do my best to see you hang for Jamie Wishart's. Please don't try to leave, I have officers downstairs."

The decanters stilled on the tray. The window latch ceased to ring. The clock gave one last ghost chime, and fell silent. Out of the air a handful of tiny, glimmering cogwheels fell about the two men, frail as b.u.t.terflies, landing without a sound. Then there was nothing but the relentless, hammering pulse of the great machines.

It was well attended, for the funeral of a boy from the workhouse. At least half the factory workers were there, the place having been closed for the day; and there was an old man with a look of Tobias Rheese about him, who stood, grim and silent, leaning on his cane, watching as the six sweating bearers laboured to carry the coffin with dignity to the waiting grave.

Inspector Gairden, who had also attended, braced himself when the old man approached him. "You'll be the inspector."

"Yes, sir."

"I'm Matthew Rheese. A dreadful business." He glanced at the grave, where the diggers were now scooping earth on to the coffin with wet thuds. "One wonders where one went wrong."

Gairden said nothing. What was there to be said?

Rheese nodded, as though he had replied. "A heavy coffin," he said. "Jamie was slight."

"Sir."

"You did the right thing, Inspector. Jamie was the only one she'd dance for, after all." He turned and walked away, with slow, painful dignity.

Gairden followed, turning his collar up against the rain.

A velocipede stood at the gates. "Cab, sir?"

"No, thank you," Gairden said, but laid his hand briefly on the side of the velocipede. The gleaming metal was as warm as flesh.

He turned away towards the station, and as he did so he thought he heard a run of notes, a sound like music played on instruments of silver, music to dance to, fading into the rain.

Biographies.

Kim Lakin-Smith is the author of Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City (Immanion Press, 2007) and Cyber Circus (Newcon Press, 2011). Her fantasy and science-fiction short stories have appeared in Black Static, Interzone, Celebration, Myth-Understandings, Further Conflicts, Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse, and other magazines and anthologies. Kim is a regular guest speaker at writing workshops and conventions.

Sarah Pinborough is a horror, thriller and YA author who has had more than ten novels published. Her next release, The Chosen Seed (Gollancz, January 2012), is the last of The Dog-Faced G.o.ds trilogy, which has now been optioned for a television series. Her third urban fantasy YA novel, The London Stone (Gollancz, June 2012), will be published under the name Sarah Silverwood and is the last of The Nowhere Chronicles. After this come Mayhem and Murder from Jo Fletcher Books at Quercus. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and she has a horror film, Cracked, currently in development. She has recently branched out into television writing and is currently writing for New Tricks on the BBC. Sarah was the 2009 winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, and has three times been shortlisted for Best Novel. She has also been shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award. Her novella The Language of Dying (PS Publis.h.i.+ng) was shortlisted for the s.h.i.+rley Jackson Award and won the 2010 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

Kelley Armstrong is the New York Times-bestselling author of the Women of the Otherworld paranormal suspense series and Darkest Powers YA urban fantasy trilogy. She grew up in Ontario, Canada, where she still lives with her family. A former computer programmer, she's now escaped her corporate cubicle and hopes never to return.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (18351915) was the author of more than eighty novels. Today she is chiefly remembered for the furore which her best-selling potboiler Lady Audley's Secret (1862) engendered, but M. E. Braddon (eventually Mrs Maxwell) wrote novels and plays; contributed essays, short stories, and poems to such high-circulation periodicals as Punch and The World; and edited the two literary magazines most closely a.s.sociated with the Sensation Novel, Temple Bar and Belgravia. In the 1860s, the decade that was the high-water mark of Sensation, M. E. Braddon wrote at least twenty novels, sometimes at the rate of three per year, while bearing six children of her own and raising them together with six step-children.

Caitlin R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She is a prolific short-fiction author to date, over 200 short stories, novellas, and vignettes most of which have been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Sh.o.r.es; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan, Vol. 1, was released by Subterranean Press in October 2011, and her next collection, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, will be released (also by Subterranean) in 2012. Kiernan is a four-time nominee for the World Fantasy Award, an honoree for the James Tiptree Jr Award, and has twice been nominated for the s.h.i.+rley Jackson Award. Born in Ireland, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Mary Elinor Wilkins-Freeman (18521930) was born in Randolph, Ma.s.sachusetts, the daughter of strict orthodox Congregationalists. She began writing stories and verse for children as a teenager, and her work quickly saw print. She wrote more than two dozen volumes of published short stories and novels. She is best known for two collections of stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). In April 1926, Freeman became the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died in Metuchen and was interred in Hillside Cemetery in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.

Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper, The Missing, and Audrey's Door. She is currently finis.h.i.+ng her fourth book, Empty Houses. Her work has garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an ALA Award, a New York Times Book Review editor's pick, a PublishersWeekly favourite book of the year selection, and been optioned by The Weinstein Company for film. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and rabbit.

Elizabeth Ma.s.sie is a Bram Stoker Award- and Scribe Award-winning author of horror novels, short horror fiction, media tie-ins, mainstream fiction, historical novels, poetry, and non-fiction. Most recent works include Homegrown (a mainstream novel from Crossroad Press), Playback: Light and Shadow (an e-novella from Random House, prequel to the 2012 horror film Playback), and Sundown (a collection of horror shorts from Necon E-Books.) Ma.s.sie lives in the Shenandoah Valley with ill.u.s.trator Cortney Skinner. She is the founder of Hand to Hand Vision and Circle of Caring on Facebook. She likes snow and hates cheese.

Alex Bell was born in 1986 in Hamps.h.i.+re. Her contemporary supernatural mysteries are published by Gollancz, and her YA comic fantasies are published by Headline. She has travelled widely, is a ferociously strict vegetarian and generally prefers cats to people.

Alison Littlewood lives in West Yorks.h.i.+re, England, where she h.o.a.rds books, dreams and writes fiction mainly in the dark fantasy and horror genres. Alison has contributed to Black Static, Dark Horizons, Not One of Us and the charity anthology Never Again. Her debut novel, A Cold Season, will be out early in 2012 from Jo Fletcher Books at Quercus. Visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.

Nina Allan's stories have appeared regularly in the magazines Black Static and Interzone, and have featured in the anthologies Catastrophia, House of Fear, Best Horror of the Year #2 and Year's Best SF #28. A first collection of her short fiction, A Thread of Truth, was published by Eibonvale Press in 2007, followed by the story cycle The Silver Wind in 2011. Twice shortlisted for the BFS and BSFA Award, Nina's next book, Stardust, will be available from PS Publis.h.i.+ng in autumn 2012. An exile from London, she lives and works in Hastings, East Suss.e.x.

Lisa Tuttle made her first professional sale forty years ago with the short story "Stranger in the House" now the t.i.tle story in Stranger in the House, Vol. 1 of her collected supernatural fiction, published by Ash-Tree Press. Perhaps best known for her short fiction, which includes the International Horror Guild Award-winning tale "Closet Dreams", she is also the author of several novels, including The Pillow Friend, The Mysteries and The Silver Bough, as well as books for children and non-fiction works. Although born and raised in America, she has been a British resident for the past three decades, and currently lives with her family in Scotland.

Nancy Holder is a multiple award-winning, New York Times bestselling author (the Wicked Series.) Her two new YA dark fantasy series are Crusade and Wolf Springs Chronicles. Crusade: Vanquished and Wolf Springs Chronicles: Hot Blooded are on the shelves now. She has won four Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers a.s.sociation, as well as a Scribe Award for Best Novel (Saving Grace: Tough Love). Nancy has sold over eighty novels and a hundred short stories, many of them based on such shows as Highlander, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and others. She lives in San Diego with her daughter, Belle, two Corgis, and three cats. You can visit Nancy online at www.nancyholder.com Yvonne Navarro lives in southern Arizona, where by day she works on historic Fort Huachuca. She is the author of twenty-two published novels and well over a hundred short stories, and has written about everything from vampires to psychologically disturbed husbands to the end of the world. Her work has won the HWA's Bram Stoker Award plus a number of other writing awards. Visit her at www.yvonnenavarro.com and look her up on Facebook, to keep up with interludes in a crazy life that includes a military spouse, three Great Danes, a people-loving parakeet named BirdZilla, painting, and lots of white zinfandel and ice cream.

Mary Cholmondeley (18591925) was the eldest daughter and third child of a family of eight, and from an early age made up stories to tell to her brothers and sisters for their entertainment. She began to write seriously in her late teens and her first novel was Her Evil Genius, followed by The Danvers Jewels in 1886. In 1899 Mary's best-known novel Red Pottage was published and caused something of a sensation at the time because of its pointed satire. In addition to novels, Mary wrote essays, articles and short stories.

Marion Arnott is a teacher working in Scotland and a writer when she can be. Her work has appeared in Peninsular Magazine, QWF, West Coast, Northwords, Books Ireland, Hidden Corners, Chapman Magazine, Scottish Child, Solander, Crimewave 4& 6, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2002, Best British Mysteries, The Alsiso Project, Elastic Press Book of Numbers, Nova Scotia, New Scottish Speculative Fiction, Elastic Press Book of Extended Play, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (j.a.pan), Roadworks magazine, Midnight Street and Scottish Momentist Fiction 2006, and her collection, Sleepwalkers (Elastic Press, 2003). She won the Philip Good Memorial Prize for Fiction (QWF), CWA Short Dagger, and has been shortlisted for the same award twice more. She was also nominated for the British Fantasy Society's Best Short Story Award.

Lilith Saintcrow is the author of several urban fantasy and (as Lili St Crow) YA series. She lives in Vancouver, Was.h.i.+ngton, with her children and several other strays.

Award-winning author Nancy Kilpatrick has published eighteen novels, two hundred short stories, one non-fiction book, and has edited a number of anthologies including Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead (2010) and Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (2011). Upcoming books include a graphic novel, Nancy Kilpatrick's Vampyre Theater (Brainstorm Comics); as editor, the anthology Danse Macabre: Close Encounters With the Reaper; and a new collection of her short fiction and novellas Vampyric Variations (both from Edge SF&F Publis.h.i.+ng). Check her website for details (www.nancykilpatrick.com) and she invites you to join her on Facebook.

Muriel Gray is a writer and broadcaster. From an early career as an ill.u.s.trator, then exhibition designer in Scotland's National Museum of Antiquities, she carved out a career in the media as a well-known television and radio presenter before forming her own production company, which became the biggest independent in Scotland. Her pa.s.sion for horror and fantasy is lifelong, and in addition to publis.h.i.+ng several non-fiction books, her three novels, The Trickster, Furnace, and The Ancient, are all supernatural thrillers. Stephen King described the latter as "scary and unputdownable". She has written many short stories for anthologies and comics, and is currently finis.h.i.+ng a script for a horror film, beginning production in 2012, ent.i.tled Behind You. She lives in Scotland with her family.

Cynthia Asquith (18871960) is best known as an early anthologist of supernatural tales, persuading many of her literary friends to contribute stories to her books. She was also a writer of ghost stories. The daughter of the 11th Earl of Wemyss, and daughter-in-law of British prime minister Herbert Asquith, she worked for many years as secretary to J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, who left his literary estate (except for Peter Pan) to her upon his death.

Amelia B. Edwards (18311892) was a journalist, novelist, and noted Egyptologist in her time. She was also an active supporter of the Suffrage movement. The daughter of an army officer turned banker and an Irish mother, Amelia was home schooled for most of her childhood. Her first published work, the poem "The Knights of Old", was written when she was just seven. A friend of Charles d.i.c.kens, many of her short stories were published in his magazines, notably the Christmas annuals. Among her many novels were The Ladder of Life, Half a Million of Money, and Lord Breckenburg.

Elizabeth Gaskell (18101865) was a Victorian novelist, born in London, the daughter of a Unitarian minister. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, and they settled in the industrial city of Manchester. Motherhood and the obligations of a minister's wife kept her busy. However, the death of her only son inspired her to write her first novel, Mary Barton, which was published anonymously in 1848. It was an immediate success, winning the praise of authors such as Charles d.i.c.kens and Thomas Carlyle. d.i.c.kens invited her to contribute to his magazine Household Words, where her next major work, Cranford, appeared in 1853. North and South was published the following year. Gaskell's work brought her many friends, including the novelist Charlotte Bronte. When Charlotte died in 1855, her father, Patrick Bronte, asked Gaskell to write her biography, The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Gaskell died on 12 November 1865, leaving her longest work, Wives and Daughters, incomplete.

Gail Z. Martin is the author of The Summoner, The Blood King, Dark Haven and Dark Lady's Chosen (The Chronicles of the Necromancer series). She is also the author of The Fallen Kings Cycle from Orbit Books with Book One: The Sworn and Book Two: The Dread, and the upcoming Ascendant Kingdoms Saga. For book updates, tour information and contact details, visit www.ChroniclesoftheNecromancer.com. Gail is the host of the Ghost in the Machine Fantasy Podcast, and you can find her on Facebook, GoodReads, BookTour, BookMarketing.ning, Shelfari and Twitter. She blogs at www.DisquietingVisions.com. She is also the author two non-fiction series. The Thrifty Author's Guide series (Comfort Publis.h.i.+ng) includes Launching Your Book Without Losing Your Mind and Author Web Sites that Wow Readers and Impress Reporters. The 30 Day Guide Series (Career Press) includes 30 Days to Social Media Success and 30 Days to Online PR & Marketing Success. Gail's short fiction has been featured in two anthologies: Rum and Runestones from Dragon Moon Press and The Bitten Word from New Con Press.

Edith Wharton (18621938) belonged to an aristocratic New York family with ancestry dating back three centuries. In 1885 she married Teddy Wharton, who was twelve years older than she was. Between 1900 and 1938, Wharton wrote many novels and wrote many ghost stories. The publication of The House of Mirth in 1905 marked the true beginning of her literary career. She continued to publish rapidly, producing, among others, Ethan Frome in 1911. Wharton continued writing until her death in 1938. She is buried in the American Cemetery at Versailles.

Gaie Sebold was born in the US, lives in South East London, and works for a social change charity. She has had several short stories and a book of poetry published. Her debut novel Babylon Steel is due out from Solaris in January 2012. She has been known to run around in woods. .h.i.tting people with latex swords and declaim poetry in public, though not usually at the same time. She gardens inefficiently, reads obsessively, and is currently working on a novel collaboration with her partner, writer Dave Gullen, along with rather too many other projects. She is gradually being crowded out of her living room by plants. www.gaiesebold.com.

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