Free Ghosts by Gaslight by Jack Dann

after a bit of this gabble. Remarkable, rather.”
    Only Scheuch continued to spend any considerable time in Angelos’s rooms, frequently—as Angelos was forced to admit—to the project’s benefit. He proved to have the most discerning hearing of all four men, often catching phrases completely opaque to Angelos himself, and learning to react to tones rather than guessing at literal meaning. Crouching as close to the “carbon button” as he could, he would mutter, “ Couldn’t make out a bloody word, but there’s a sweet voice she’s got . . .” and, later, “What’re they all on about, then? Sounds like my mum’s whole family on Christmas morning . . . That chap’s an idiot. You don’t have to understand an idiot to know he’s an idiot . . . Oh, that poor bugger’s in trouble—that one’s in awful trouble, poor soul—you can hear it. I wish . . .”
    He always made his comments in the present tense, without exception. When Angelos pointed out to him that if his theory was correct, the chances were that almost every voice he was hearing—if not, indeed, every single one—was of someone long dead, Scheuch answered simply, “I know that, old fellow. But I can’t know that, if you follow me. Just can’t, that’s all.” Angelos never raised the matter again.
    Vordran did come once, quite late at night, to ask directly when Angelos opened the door, “Do you ever hear the same voice twice? Do you ever recognize a voice you might have heard before?”
    Angelos frowned. “What could the odds be? It would be like recognizing the same fish in a school that swam past you—lord, even an hour ago. Vordran, it’s as I told you, we could be sweeping up the remains of every word that’s ever been uttered—perhaps only in England, only in London, perhaps only within a few square miles of this house. And even so . . .”
    “And even so . . .” Vordran nodded. “I understand. London is very old. I was only wondering.” He stood looking down at Angelos for a moment. “I am impressed, Angelos. You have taught yourself a great deal in a short time.” He paused, frowning. “Do you find the voices louder than they were?”
    “Louder?” Angelos shook his head. “I don’t think so. A bit more intelligible, yes—that’s the carbon button—but louder? I only wish they were.”
    “Perhaps you do not. Remember what I told you about eavesdroppers.” Vordran paused, seemingly waiting for an answer or a further question. He got neither and left.
    Yet as spring aged into a patchy, dusty London summer, one at least, of all the numberless voices, was indeed growing clearer in Angelos’s rooms, and steadily more familiar as well, if no louder. It was a woman’s voice, though low enough in timbre that Angelos at first took it for the sobs of a man in soul-strangling anguish. He could never determine its language or nationality, no matter how carefully he listened, nor how piercingly pleading the voice became. Never swelling in volume, it did not pass on like the others, but only continued to wail in soft desperation: a cry like wind over stone at first, though later it took on the sound of a torture victim long beyond screaming for mercy, broken and barely whining with each turn of the rack. At other times, it— she— sounded as though she were making love with a demon, which terrified Angelos and made him squeeze his eyes shut until they hurt. There were words in it then, but none he knew.
    No one heard it beyond his rooms, at first. There were times when he was certain that the little homemade amplifier could not possibly contain the terrible crying; that it existed only in his riven head. He shut down the generator altogether, sometimes for days, but the voice continued whimpering in the walls of his rooms when he tried forlornly to sleep, and followed him pitilessly when he dragged himself to lectures at Christ’s Hospital. It came to grieve, finally, through his entire life, and he wept nightly