“But…” Langton still couldn’t believe it. “I thought the Professor…”
“He’s quite innocent,” Sister Wright said. “I respect him completely and I’ve learned so much from him.”
Now Langton remembered Sister Wright watching the Professor at work in the Infirmary. He remembered her intense expression as she’d gazed down on the exposed skull and brain of the injured steeplejack on the operating table below her.
“Why, Sister? You’re a nurse—you save lives.”
She nodded. “With God’s grace.”
“Then how can you involve yourself with the Jar Boys?”
Sister Wright looked into the open fire. She waited perhaps a minute before she said, “It started in the Transvaal. I’d always shown an interest in the medical profession, a tradition in my family; my grandfather had been a missionary physician in India. Naturally I could not hope to become a doctor, since women are barred from the profession, so I joined the nursing sisters. And, in Africa, God granted me a vision of hell.”
Langton remembered battlefields strewn with the dead and dying; limbs and bloody remnants under the baking red sun. Men struggling to breathe as the corrosive green gas swept along the plains and seeped into the trenches, into eyes and throats and finally lungs.
“I tended the sick,” Sister Wright continued, “and believed I was helping. I was part of some plan that I did not yet understand. And I tended the Boers as well as I tended the British boys; I showed no favoritism. I could even sympathize with the Boers’ cause. I didn’t agree
with their methods, but I tried to put myself in their position. And that’s what made it so hard to understand…”
She looked up at Langton with wide, glistening eyes and said no more than, “Bloemfontein.”
Langton looked away. He didn’t want to imagine Sister Wright in that place. Not after the stories he’d heard.
The British had left only a score of men to defend the field hospital at Bloemfontein. They said the crudely painted Red Cross on its white tin roof would offer protection. The hundred Boer irregulars had ignored the cross as they’d swept down in the night. The most fortunate soldiers had died quickly. Some had taken days, staked out under the sun, sport for knives and dogs and imaginations fed by years of bloodshed.
Some of the nurses had survived, but their treatment had caused even the Boers’ rebel commanders to disown the Orange Free State Irregulars.
Then Langton remembered the tattoos on the faceless man’s body. “Kepler?”
“He must have been one of them,” Sister Wright said. “I didn’t remember him but I knew those tattoos. And half of the time we were blindfolded while they…Good sport, they called it.”
Langton fought the nausea that rose within him. He’d heard what had happened in that place, but it made it somehow more immediate, more
real
, to hear it from someone who’d survived.
“I’m sorry,” he said, ashamed of the pitiful emptiness of his words. “How did that drive you to become Doktor Glass?”
“We worked under Doctor Klaustus,” she said. “A brilliant man with extreme ideas. Extreme to his colleagues, that is. At the time I believed that they couldn’t see the extent of his genius, his imagination. I helped him willingly.”
Langton caught the same note in her voice as when she spoke of the Professor.
She continued, “Klaustus had seen so much; he couldn’t believe
that human life ended with the decay of simple flesh. The spirit—so complex, so
aware
—cannot simply disappear. But Klaustus said he could never capture the final essence. Not until he read of the work of Tesla and Marconi.”
Langton had to concentrate on her words. The atmosphere of the room, with the crackling fire and the everyday surroundings, contradicted Sister Wright’s bizarre explanation.
“Even before the war, Klaustus had experimented with glass carboys, then clay, with different aerials and capacitors, different induction coils. The war itself gave him plenty of opportunity to perfect his machine; he called it an attractor.”
When Langton shook his head, Sister Wright leaned forward and stared into his eyes as if willing his belief. “I saw it, Inspector. I did not believe it at first, either, but I watched as Klaustus connected the attractor to a dying soldier in a Natal dressing station. Afterward, I held the jar’s copper connectors and for a brief moment I
became
that soldier whose body no longer breathed. His spirit lived on. The technique worked, and works still, whether for good or evil.”
His mind whirling, Langton looked into Sister Wright’s open, intense gaze and wondered if she was really insane. He had seen Edith’s essence in that house in Plimsoll Street. He had seen the strange machine, the so-called attractor, and he knew he had to believe, though logic rebelled.
As if sensing this, Sister Wright stood up and said, “Come.”
“Where?”
“You must see,” she said. “And then perhaps you’ll understand.”
Langton followed her to the door. Fatigue or confusion made him light-headed; he stumbled and almost fell. Sister Wright held out her hand, but Langton refused it. She went to speak, then took a lamp from a side table.
The door opened out onto a wide passage. The windowless sitting room’s normality gave way here to the building’s real form. Old wood and bare brick. Creaking floorboards gouged with decades or more of
nailed boots and trolley wheels. The smell of the Mersey close by. Langton could believe he was in a warehouse now.
He watched out for Reefer Jake, half expecting the lumbering attacker to shuffle from the darkness. He remembered those blank eyes, the fingers digging into his throat.
To his left and right lay empty rooms, caverns of brick with steel hooks hanging from the ceiling. The temperature dropped. Langton pulled his coat tight and found an empty pocket instead of the Webley. He fought the panic that started deep in his stomach and threatened to overwhelm him. This weird journey through the cold warehouse, with the lamp throwing distorted shadows of Sister Wright against the leaning walls, reminded Langton of nightmares. It had that quality of unreality, of imminent horror. He longed to wake up.
Sister Wright led him down a ramp that ended at a solid steel door that showed no signs of rust. She unlocked the two padlocks and slid back the horizontal locking bars. She turned to Langton for a moment, then pushed open the door and waved him inside.
The lamp threw a semicircle of light into the room, but Langton sensed a much larger void beyond the border. Then he heard the click of a switch behind him.
White electric light flooded the space. Langton shielded his eyes. When he blinked them open he saw a square room at least twelve yards high by fifteen square. Caged electric bulbs hung from the ceiling on chains. The light they threw reflected from white walls, white ceiling, white tiled floor. And row after row of white shelving.
And on every shelf, stretching up to the ceiling, stood glazed clay jars. Langton gave up counting. Six, seven hundred? He pulled his jacket tight against the chill.
“We have to keep the storeroom cold,” Sister Wright said, “for the jars. Have you heard of Brownian motion? It’s the agitation of particles, and the essences within these jars become slower at low temperatures. And that means they survive for longer, since they waste less energy.”
She could have been speaking of a simple case at the Infirmary, not of transient souls caught in cold jars. “How many…”
“Almost a thousand, but not all are here,” Sister Wright said. She brushed past Langton and stood at the zinc table in the room’s center. A single brown glazed jar, as apparently unremarkable as the others, waited on that table. “My own collection stood at over six hundred, but Doctor Redfers added another three.”
Langton nodded. “You killed Redfers.”
“I’m afraid I had no choice,” she said, and her sorrow appeared genuine. “When you asked about him at the Infirmary, I realized that he would lead you back to me, and I wasn’t ready then. Besides, I’d already suspected Redfers of deceit; I thought I’d turned him to my cause, but he had started working again for one of the criminal gangs that used the jars for profit.”
“And that’s quite different from you, I suppose.”
Sister Wright shook her head. “Please don’t say that. I gained nothing from the trade in jars. Every penny from my network was used for research.”
That made Langton pause. “Network?”
“Redfers was only one of several doctors who introduced the…clients to the captured essences. And I was not the only supplier. Fortunately, over the past few weeks, I’ve managed to eliminate most of the criminal gangs.”
And therefore most of the competition,
Langton thought. But he still had difficulty picturing Sister Wright as a villain. “If you aren’t in this for profit, then what?”
“The end of suffering,” Sister Wright said, smiling. “It could be even more important than that. Science has now proven the existence of a soul. Instead of fighting against religion, science can bolster it, reinforce it. Science is the tool of God.”
As she said this, her eyes burned just a little brighter. Her hands clasped together almost in prayer.
Carefully, Langton said, “You justify cruelty in the name of God? I suppose you’re not the first.”
For a moment, he thought he’d gone too far: Sister Wright blushed red and her hands tightened into fists. Then she took a breath and let it out slowly. “I can understand your sentiment. I was not happy with the thought of bored old men pawing over the souls of the lost. And then, when I realized that the essences were themselves aware of their condition and of their molesters’ actions…No, I did not enjoy that thought.”
“Then why do it? Why continue?”
“In order to destroy the practice,” she said. “When I have every last jar in my possession, every poor trapped soul, and they have fulfilled their final destiny, I shall release them unto the ether and into His hands.”
Langton recognized the tone of the True Believer. He knew then that Sister Wright would be capable of anything in her pursuit of what she thought right and just. With some, that goal was religious. With her, it was a bizarre mixture of science and theology. But what did she mean by “final destiny”?
Sister Wright continued, “I honestly believed it was our duty to capture their quintessence, their very soul, and relieve their pain.”
The image of Sarah rocked Langton on his heels. He could almost hear her voice. “I can think of nothing more cruel—if it’s possible—than trapping a person’s spirit.”
“I can understand that, Matthew,” Sister Wright said. “In time I came to that same realization. But perhaps we should consider your poor wife’s wishes.”
Langton, almost whispering, said, “She would never have agreed to this…imprisonment.”
Sister Wright smiled and rested a hand on the jar standing on the zinc table. “Why don’t you ask her?”
* * *
S
URPRISE ROBBED
L
ANGTON
of words. He stared at the jar, at Sister Wright. His heart froze, and his throat tightened as if Reefer Jake once again gripped it.
“Redfers had her,” Sister Wright said. “He performed the transfer at the Infirmary. I knew of it then, but I had not yet met you. When I discovered that Redfers had been lending her out, as well as other souls, well…he gave me no choice.”
Langton hardly heard her voice. He took one slow step toward the table, then another. Could that plain earthenware jar really contain Sarah’s essence, her soul?
Sister Wright stepped away from the table. “You simply grasp the two copper connectors, one in each hand.”
He saw the smooth copper connectors jutting from the lid. Some of the wax that sealed the lid had dribbled down the jar’s side and set in place like dried green blood. Langton took another step. He stood at the table’s edge, his hands open at his sides. His heart raced.
Could he do this? For months, he had dreamed about talking to Sarah one last time; he could say all the things he should have said when she was alive. And all the things he would have said as she slipped away from him. He should have been there at the end, instead of Redfers with his apparatus, his machine. Now he had his chance.
Sarah’s passing had left a void that screamed out inside Langton, urging him to grasp those connectors. No more guilt; no more pain; no more loneliness. He would be complete again.
He looked at Sister Wright, still unable to call her Doktor Glass, and saw no outward signs of manipulation. She watched him with a look of sadness, perhaps even of tenderness, like a protective mother prompting her child.
He reached out trembling hands. He could almost feel those smooth, cold connectors. Remembering young Edith’s essence, he imagined the bright mist inside the jar rushing to complete the circuit. The charged particles streaming through the darkness. The surge as they clung to the submerged metal. Sarah’s essence.
His hands moved closer. Closer.
Langton fell to his knees on the cold tiled floor. He wrapped his arms around his body and bowed his head. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”
“It’s all right, Matthew.” Sister Wright stroked his head. “It’s all right. Don’t worry.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know. I know.”
As Sister Wright pressed his head into her skirts, Langton breathed in the comforting Infirmary smells of disinfectant, flowers, freshly laundered clothes. He closed his eyes as tears trickled down his face.
Sister Wright continued stroking his hair, soothing him as she’d probably soothed so many patients. Then, very quietly, she said, “There is another way I can help you…”
Langton pulled away from her and looked up. After so many shocks, so many surprises, he really had no idea what to expect.
“Your wife is not yet lost,” Sister Wright said, smiling. “I can bring her back. A new life, Matthew. A new life in a new body.”
* * *
T
HE COLD OF
the jars’ storeroom had eaten into Langton’s bones. He sat huddled in the sitting room before the stoked fire. He watched the flames dancing in the grate, blue and yellow, as Sister Wright calmly spoke of madness.
“You saw it yourself with Reefer Jake,” she said. “We broke a small pane in his cell window and lowered the connectors and a syringe. After he injected the poison, we caught his essence in an attractor and retreated. Later, two of my men took his body from your morgue and brought him here. The transfer was straightforward: Within three hours of his ‘death’ he was sitting in this room.”