Homunculus

by James P. Blaylock

  There was simply no accounting for it. Or rather there was, but he simply couldn’t see it. Something nagged at him -something about the business at Narbondo’s: the hands pounding on the piano, the ill-fated flight of the skeletal bird, his mother’s brief revitalization. What explained it? Surely not the capering hunchback with his yellow vapors. Something more had been in evidence. A spirit - that was it. Some presence had charged the room, had launched the bird. The explanation of it all lay just out of sight around a turning of his memory.

  The box. Had that been it? Of course it had. Narbondo had set the box atop the piano, and straightaway had set off the playing, had stirred the corpse of the bird. What if, wondered Shiloh, squirming in his seat in the glare of sudden illumination, what if the box in Narbondo’s hands were the homunculus?

  Had the hunchback left the thing in sight to mock him? Knowing that the creature in the box was, in fact, Shiloh’s father? A creature with power over life and death? The stinking swine! He’d known all along, hadn’t he? Or had he? Why was he so anxious to get hold of Nell Owlesby? And what of Nell Owlesby? Had she lied to him those long years ago in Jamaica? Impossible. She’d been too sincere, too much a product of her momentary passions. She could, of course, have been mistaken. There had, after all, been two boxes.

  The evangelist stroked his chin. He’d been played, perhaps, for a fool by any number of people. But he’d have the box. That much Narbondo owed him.

  Pratlow Street was silent. No one was about, not even a stray dog or cat. The moon, which had shone for an hour or so between the tilting buildings that lined the street, had long since drifted away. No light burned in Narbondo’s cabinet, the hunchback having departed for the night. His relative success with the remains of Joanna Southcote and knowledge of the whereabouts of the homunculus box had improved his mood, which had suffered from Pule’s failure to obtain Owlesby’s manuscript. Narbondo’s house call at Drake’s Wardour Street address had given him certain ideas, excited certain passions, and he dallied there into the evening.

  The lights of Westminster Bridge were ample to read by; Bill Kraken had read in worse light. And the night sounds - the Thames rushing along beneath the bridge, hurrying toward the sea, the low murmur of conversation from the men who lounged against lampposts - all of it seemed to Kraken to mean something, taken collectively. Especially the river. There was a great deal of talk in Ashbless about rivers. He seemed particularly fond of them, and it was a restful chapter that didn’t call on the river to serve as an illustration for an abstraction which, without the tea-dark, swirling waters of the Thames to color it, would have been a lifeless and pale reflection of the world.

  Kraken had wandered fitfully along the Thames all that day and most of the preceding night, after he’d failed to retrieve the box from the odious doctor. His life seemed to him to be played out. It was empty of substance - hollow. Most of his teeth were gone. His only possession beyond his clothes was the bullet-ridden copy of Ashbless, whose philosophers, try as they might to pour substance into the cavity of his soul, were powerless to help him. He was adrift, and would soon enough float out onto a gray sea.

  He had speculated his way through Holborn and the City and Whitechapel, plodding along, lost in thought, finding himself late in the afternoon below Limehouse, looking out over the London docks. It was unimaginable that such commerce existed, that so many thousands of people labored to some particular end, that the basket of tobacco they hauled out of the hold at midday had to be hauled out just then, because at quarter till midday there had been twenty-five baskets atop it - one leading to another sensibly, each pulled off in turn, by design, according, it seemed, to an unwritten script.

  But what pattern was it, he wondered while watching it all, governed the shambling life of Bill Kraken, squid man, pea pod man, thief. He’d been beaten senseless by criminals and then had become one himself. It didn’t stand to reason.

  He’d ambled back upriver, past St. Katharine Docks and London Bridge and the Old Swan Pier, and everywhere people hurried along about their business, as if their lives were read out of a book, with a second page that followed a first, a twenty-fifth page that followed a twenty-fourth. But the pages of Kraken’s life had somewhere been dumped onto the road. The wind had caught them and blown them hither and thither over the rooftops. He’d tramped around, ever on the watch for them, but they were scattered and flown, and here he was, at the end of his tramp, leaning over the parapet in the center of Westminster Bridge and watching the black water of the Thames roil below.

  He opened Ashbless at random. “Least of all the sins,” he read, “is gluttony.” That didn’t help him a bit. He closed his eyes and pointed. “The stone that the builder refused,” promised the text, quoting the Bible, “shall be the cornerstone.” He put the book down and thought about it. What was he, if not that very stone? Here were thousands - millions - of people chiseled just so, fit into a vast and sensible order, while he, wandering through London, could find no niche into which he could wedge himself. He hadn’t been chiseled so.

  But how, he wondered practically, could old Bill Kraken be the cornerstone? What was it that would lend him a ticket to enter Captain Powers’ shop by the door when he’d gone out once by the window? The emerald, of course. That was the only route. But recovering it would almost certainly mean destruction, wouldn’t it? Kraken shoved Ashbless into his coat and set out apace. Destruction, perhaps, was less odious than other fates. His journey that day had made him weary, but his sudden resolution, his discerning purpose, no matter how fleeting or mistaken, drove him on with a steady gait, north up Whitehall toward Soho and Pratlow Street where he would settle a score with himself.

  The cramped room in the Bailey Hotel was sufficient to hold an iron bed, but the bed, unfortunately, wasn’t sufficient to hold Willis Pule. He was sick and tired of kicking the bedstead all night, of jamming his ankle between iron posts. And the gaslamp at the head was always fizzling and sputtering and smelled so overwhelmingly of leaked gas that he had to keep one window jammed open with a pile of books. He longed for the day when he could unbox his library, arrange the volumes along shelves. That’s when his really serious study would begin. He would accomplish something then - exercise his genius.

  He peered at himself in a glass tipped against another little heap of books. The bandage wrap hadn’t accomplished a thing beyond, perhaps, disguising him a bit. His face appeared even in the wan light of the faltering gaslamp to be enflamed. It seemed stretched, almost oily. He picked up a stained copy of Euglena’s Chemical Cures and studied a long discourse on the application of facial washes. He could see nothing in it. He had tried Lord knows how many plasters. At best they seemed to dry him up. That was the problem; he was certain of it. His cranial capacity, his abundant mental activity, drew fluids from other parts of his body - hence his perpetually dry and scaly hands. Perhaps a loathsome complexion was the price of genius.

  He sighed and flopped back onto the creaking bed, cracking his elbow against the wall and cursing. It was his fate to be contained within a body that betrayed him. He felt at times as if he were attached to an enormous vermin - a corrupt physical bag that contained a pure, sensitive, intelligent soul. It was an attitude that might easily produce envy, but in Pule, of course, it didn’t. He saw through the world too clearly. There was little in it to attract him.

  Pule had often lamented the problem inherent to genius: genius simply wasn’t self-evident. It was evident in works, and yet Pule was certain that works were condescending. One hadn’t ought to soil one’s hands. And what was there in the productions of time that wasn’t transparent? That wasn’t pretense? When one possessed - was cursed with - genius, with vision, then one saw too clearly the emptiness of it all. One was aware of the shallowness of it, the false and brittle face of things. Even the stuff of poets was, when one ridded oneself of their romantic foolery, nothing but cleverly painted backdrops hung roundabout to veil a gray and empty world.

  Pule heaved a
sigh and rubbed at the end of his nose. If only he didn’t see things with such insight. And Narbondo! Pule had been tormented by the hunchback on the promise of... of what? Who had waylaid Kraken and got the box? Pule had. Who had organized and carried off the recovery of Joanna Southcote? Pule had. Who was it that fetched the carp from the oceanarium? Pule. Narbondo was one of those officious inferior, self-serving braggarts who had attained a position of imagined power. And he would profit by it too. He’d muddle along, appropriating that which belonged to Willis Pule, using him, and would, in the end, stroll away with the emerald, leaving Willis Pule to explain their activities to the judge. Or so thought the hunchback.

  Pule bent over and groped under the bed, hauling out the Keeble box he’d retrieved from the man on the train. He shook it for the hundredth time, but the box was silent. What in the world, wondered Pule, could be in it? There was apparently no lid to the thing. It was possible, even, that the box was designed in such a way as to foil uninstructed attempts to open it. Perhaps it would explode. It had the look about it, with its spout and crank mechanism, of an infernal device. The clothed animals painted over it argued against such a thing; but mightn’t that be just a clever sort of ruse?

  In the laboratory lay the emerald box, or so Kraken had insisted - drunk, to be sure. Who was to say that this wasn’t the emerald box? The crank, in fact, might be the means of opening the thing. It might, on the other hand, be a detonator - a timed detonator. No one would build a device which would explode in one’s hands. It was no doubt a clock-spring mechanism that could be wound with the crank to a desired tension, then wind down of its own to set off the explosion. Or was it? Who could say? Pule’s mind drifted, converting the clock-spring mechanism of the box to an analog of his life - a life which had, it seemed to him, run down. It was a consequence of growing awareness, of intellect. As one’s understanding of things grew, the things themselves paled, ceased to exist almost. The world hadn’t so much wound down as he had wound up, so to speak, become taut through perception to the point at which he’d shed the world - stood alone, as it were, upon an empty hilltop, the common people scurrying below like bugs, like worms, with little or no consciousness.

  The way, suddenly, was clear. He’d come to a sort of crossroad, to a point at which a choice was required - an action. To act would save him. He plucked up the box, held it in front of him, and began slowly to wind the crank. If the result was the springing open of the box, then he’d know, wouldn’t he, what lay within? If no such result occurred, then he would assume it was a bomb -dynamite perhaps - and he’d simply haul it along the dark streets to Narbondo’s laboratory. Once he got there - if he got there; the thing might easily explode on the street - he’d leave it atop the piano in exchange for Kraken’s box. And if the result was that Narbondo’s cabinet and all of Narbondo’s works were blown to hell, the entire transaction would be eminently satisfactory.

  It would require tremendous will, he mused, to stroll across Soho with a live bomb under his arm. Its detonation would likely cost the lives of any number of people, but so what? In the long run of things, what were their lives worth? Hadn’t he already established that they were worms? There was no crime in stepping on a few of them. And what was crime to him anyway? It was, perhaps, more to the point to pity them the loss of Willis Pule.

  He looked at himself in the mirror one last time, arching his eyebrows to heighten the look of natural intelligence and wit. His mind was set. The effort of will that would crush a lesser being had been summoned in the space of moments, and once it was called into existence, no power on earth could gainsay it.

  Pule spun the crank more rapidly. He could feel tension within the box - a mechanism winding tight. It was as he thought. A grim smile stretched his lips. Would the lid fly up like a jack-in-the-box to betray the existence of the emerald? Was Kraken’s box merely a clever ploy to throw them off the scent? He listened at the spout that thrust out of the front of the box. He could hear the ratchet turnings of the clockworks. He held the box in front of his face so that the light from the gaslamp illuminated the spout. He closed one eye and squinted, following the thread of illumination up the spout and into the interior of the box. There was a click, a whir; Pule jerked back in sudden tenor. Was it a suicide device?

  A jet of gas wheezed out, spraying over his face. Spitting and coughing, he cast the box onto the bed. He’d been poisoned. He knew it. The box wheezed again, and a great cloud of green dust blew out of the spout with such force that although he threw himself over backward onto the floor, the gas enveloped him utterly.

  He rolled, smashing into the wall beneath the open window. The tower of books that propped the window cascaded into the street, and the window crashed down, sealing the room. Pule shrieked, a high, frightful, elflike ululation that reinforced his fear that he’d been poisoned. The air had been suddenly dyed a livid green. He would choke on poison gas! He’d been tricked. It had been a plot to eliminate the hunchback, and his betrayal of the monster had brought about his own ruin.

  He yanked on the window, batting at the frame. It wouldn’t budge. He looked wildly about him and lunged for the door, catching sight of his coat on a nail driven into the jamb. Lunging for it, he tore the coat free and flung it over the still-spouting box, smothering the escaping gases. He picked up the mirror and the books in a single heap and flung the lot of them through the closed window, shoving his head out into the night air, breathing great gulps of it and watching books and glass shards cascade onto the street four stories below.

  His chest heaved; his head cleared; his equilibrium and sense of proportion returned. Of course it wasn’t a poisoned gas device. There would have been no conceivable way to have calculated the odd events that had led him to board that train in Harrogate. His enemies weren’t half that clever. This was something else. It was just possible that he’d been a victim of his own zealous actions. What if, he wondered, the box had contained an emerald, and was designed so that uninformed tampering would destroy the gem? Was it emerald dust that filled the room? But why in the devil would a man build such a box, or have it built? Had Owlesby been a lunatic who would rather the emerald be destroyed than profit a thief? Or was there more to it? Had Owlesby been a smuggler?

  Of course he had. And here, it seemed certain, was a way by which to utterly destroy and disperse evidence that had fallen into the wrong hands. It was frightfully ingenious if it was so.

  Pule bent back into the room. Idle speculation was getting him nowhere. One way or another, the box was worth nothing to him. It might, however, give Narbondo a few trying moments. And Narbondo’s box - Pule would have that. He tucked the coat around the still-whirring box and stepped out through the door, passing on the stairs his hurrying landlord who began to address him, then fell silent, staring at him in horror.

  “Damn you!” cried Pule, pushing the man out of the way and drawing himself up as if to flail at him. Pule stood heaving with wrath, the man cowering against the banister, his countenance frozen. “What are you staring at, idiot!” shrieked Pule. “You soulless halfwit!” Pule choked. He couldn’t breathe. The man’s face seemed to be inflating like a balloon, the shocked look in his eyes testimony to Pule’s condition. Blood rushed in Pule’s ears. His heart smashed in his chest. His face burned.

  With a snarl of released rage he kicked the man in the ribs, possessed by the desire to beat him senseless, to flail at him with the heavy box, to bash him through the tilted railing and watch him fall down the vortex between the spiraling stairs the thirty-odd feet to the distant floor below.

  The man’s face loosened. He screamed, and the sound of it propelled Pule down the stairs in great leaping strides, hollering curses over his shoulder. An old man stepped out from a door onto a landing as if to detain Pule. He gasped and fled back inside, slamming the door behind him. A bolt rattled into place. At the ground floor Pule crashed through the street door, surprising two women who were just that moment stepping in. They shrieked in unison, one fainting,
one leaping across toward a half-open closet as if to hide.

  Pule gritted his teeth. His foes were falling before him. And they’d continue to fall. There’d be no stopping him. On the street he took to his heels, fleeing through the black night, neither running from anything nor toward anything, just running, holding the box beneath his arm, beset, it seemed to him, by no end of devils. He slowed, finally, gasping and sweating, outside a low tavern on Drury Lane. A group of men lounged in the gutter, tossing coins at a target chalked on the street. They paid him little heed. As he walked past, a coin rebounded off his heel.

  “Hey, mate!” shouted an exasperated, accusing voice.

  Pule turned on him. The man blanched, croaked out a halfmouthed curse, and fled into the open door of the tavern. His companions, themselves looking up, shouted, rose in a body, and followed the first man, the door of the tavern sailing shut with such force that rust from the hinges sprayed out into the lamplit road. The sound of scraping tables and benches could be heard from within, clunking against the door.

  Pule turned slowly and resumed his journey, pondering darkly the revenge he’d have on them all - the well-placed anarchist bomb blowing to shreds the likes of such idlers along with the leering carp dealers of the world. He set a course for Pratlow Street.

  FIFTEEN

  TURMOIL ON PRATLOW STREET

  Shiloh the New Messiah leaned against the wall in a straight-backed oak chair, all of the joints of which were loose, the glue having dried to dust years before. He sat in silent meditation - hadn’t moved for half an hour. The curtain had been pulled back from the little shrine across the room, and in it, sitting beside the miniature portrait of Joanna Southcote, was the head of the lady herself in its aquarium.