Homunculus lsi-2

by James P. Blaylock

  He patted his nose gingerly, arranging the sagging bandages. He’d have torn them off, thrown them into a ditch, but the chemicals they’d been soaked in had lent his face an amber-blue tint that was startling and inexplicable. The bandages were less so. And more than that, they seemed to be having a positive effect. The skin on his face felt drawn and tight, and he’d long ago overcome his compulsion to retch at the smell of the anchovy paste. He tugged at the knots in the end of the bandages, loosened them, and pulled the whole works taut, tying it off once again.

  He checked his pocketwatch. It was time to go. He’d simply have to brass it out — there was nothing else to be done, He could hardly sit in the bushes forever, and he’d be caught for sure if he set out down the road. He’d have liked to steal a cart — garrote the owner and make away with the man’s goods, but he was in a deep enough mire as it was. The cost of further mayhem might perhaps be greater than the profit.

  He peered again over the bushes. Surely the mob had tired itself out long since. No one, apparently, was about, save a thin man in knee breeches who cleaned cod at a trough behind a fish shop. Pule stepped through a gap in the shrubbery and strode away purposefully, not at all, he fancied, like a man fearful of pursuit. The cod man slashed away at his fish, oblivious to him. Pule rounded the corner of the fish shop, saw that the street before him was empty, and bolted for the train station, one hand pressed to his head to keep the bandages from flying apart.

  A block from the station he slowed to a walk. He had enough time. It was dangerous to call attention to himself so. There was the open platform, the train chuffing on the track. Some few people climbed aboard. A tired-looking man in a mustache sold scones and coffee through the windows. Pule would kill for a scone — literally, he thought to himself. He was in a regrettable mood, and hunger put an edge on it.

  There were the steel steps into the second-class car, ten feet ahead of him. No one shouted. No one menaced him. He snatched a newspaper from a boy idling on the platform, sprang into the car, found an empty compartment, and hid behind the newspaper. He’d stay there, he decided, until they were at least halfway to London.

  The train edged forward in a hiss of escaping steam, then lurched to a stop. Footsteps rang on the platform. Pule peeked past the edge of his newspaper, horrified to see Langdon St. Ives and his manservant climbing into the train car. Damn! He raised the newspaper. If the door to his compartment opened he’d go out through the window. What else could he do? He hadn’t any weapons. Next time he wouldn’t be caught weaponless. And there would be a next time.

  Narbondo would rail at him for having failed to find the papers. It had taken hours to wring Kraken clean of information. Liquor had done it far more neatly than had torture — although Pule rather preferred the latter; since they had no idea whether Kraken had anything to offer them anyway, torture seemed pretty much an end in itself. He’d been a determined old sod, though, and a sorry one, but he’d divulged it all in the end, weeping into his cups. Pule smiled behind his newspaper. He wondered idly whether St. Ives had taken a compartment on his car or had gone along to the next. What did it matter?

  Pule was overcome by a sudden idea. He could slip off the train, return to St. Ives’ estate, and in the master’s absence, ransack it. Torch the place, if it came to it. He’d been hasty — was on the edge of missing his chance. He arose, casting down his paper, when the train lurched forward again, dumping him backward onto the seat. It seemed certain that the train was at last underway. Pule thrust open the compartment door and shoved out his head, only to see some few yards before him the back of St. Ives’ servant, who stood in the aisle, speaking to his employer through an open door. Pule slid back in as the train lurched once again to a stop. Was he fated to stay on the damned train? To be robbed of a second chance? He shrugged. What did it matter, after all? It was Narbondo who would profit from his returning to the manor. It was always Narbondo who profited.

  “Hot scones!” came a cry from out the window. “Coffee and tea!”

  Pule reached out a shilling. The flour-speckled scone seller shrieked and dropped his pastries, tray and all, onto the platform. Coffee flew. The man shrieked again. “The halien!” he cried, falling backward. “The bloody halien!”

  A window slid open in the next compartment. “Brinsing!” shouted a voice. A head shoved out into the morning. Pule, casting secrecy onto the scrapheap, peered out at it. Langdon St. Ives stared back, aghast, speechless. The train bolted. Pule jumped for the door. The scone seller continued to shriek. Hasbro rushed at Pule. Pule grabbed the knob of a compartment door and flung it open into the face of his attacker, throwing his shoulder into it in an effort to knock the man down. Behind him in yet another compartment sat a frail old woman, wide-eyed with terror at the sight of the wrapped Pule. Her feet were propped on a steamer trunk, too heavy, no doubt, to be hefted onto the rack.

  Pule set his feet against the doorjamb, his back against the door open in the aisle, and dragged the trunk from beneath the woman’s feet, cursing it, cursing her, cursing St. Ives. He wedged the trunk against the open door, realizing as he did so that his efforts weren’t worth the time he was wasting. Shouting a parting curse, he leaped out the end of the car and into the next, slowing a bit, wondering where on earth a man could hide on a train.

  Trees and meadows shot past along the tracks. If it came to it, he thought, he’d leap for it. Perhaps he should jump now, before they disentangled themselves from the door and trunk. They’d never suppose him rash enough to attempt such a thing. But the countryside was flying by wonderfully quickly — dangerously so. Pule strode along through the next car and the next, into a third-class car comprising two parallel rows of wooden benches facing the front of the train. The car was empty but for a single man in a chimney pipe hat who dozed in a seat on the aisle.

  In his lap was a Keeble box. Pule nearly strangled. He grabbed a seat for support, gripped by vertigo. What did this mean? What weird offspring of fate had come to meet him so peculiarly here? A shouting arose behind him, along with the splintering sound of wood tearing. If he wasn’t quick he’d fail. And the fault would be his own. He looked about him, barely breathing. Beneath the seats were metal baggage racks in various states of disrepair. He grasped a section of iron bar that had come unbolted and wrenched at it. He waited for the sound of the door slamming open behind, for the shouting to commence, for the man with the box — quite possibly in league with St. Ives — to awaken and cut off his escape. The bar clanked to the floor. Pule seized it as the sleeper stirred. The man opened one eye as Pule flailed at him, a cry wrenching out of his lungs. The iron bar struck the man’s forehead and seemed to settle into it, as if he’d hit a pudding with a wooden spoon. Pule dropped the bar and caught the box as the man fell forward. The door burst in behind him. He was out in a trice, leaping in great hopping strides through a succession of cars, out, finally, into the morning air with no place left to flee. He braced his back against the door, holding it tight. His pursuers clattered hollering up behind. Sheep winked by on a sailing meadow.

  The train tipped into a curve, slowing a bit, and Pule, shutting his eyes, catapulted from the moving car, howling and flailing into high grass and rolling down to the edge of a pond to the astonishment of the chewing sheep. He lay for a moment, imagining the damage he’d done to his spleen or his liver. He jiggled his extremities and pronounced himself fit. Inordinately proud of himself, he stood up and strode away across the pasture with the air of a man who’d done a day’s work. He fancied, as he limped along the highway, his bandages finally relinquished, what St. Ives’ reaction would be if he did slip back up to Harrogate and have another go at the house. It would be what an artist would call a finishing touch. But it would also, he could see at a glance, be unwise. He had a good deal to lose by such heroics all of a sudden, and he was determined that no one — not Narbondo, not St. Ives, not revenge — nothing would deny him the prize he’d so handily won. A moment’s serendipity had turned the disastrous tr
ip into a victory. He stopped to look at the box. It was the same sort they’d wrested from Kraken the day before. All of Keeble’s damned boxes were the same. Was there a second emerald? Was this the fabled homunculus itself?

  Pule considered the brass tube and what appeared to be a little crank device on the side. Kraken’s box hadn’t had any such accoutrements — although their presence certainly didn’t reveal the contents of the box. They could, quite conceivably, be a breathing mechanism of some sort for a creature housed within. Had Owlesby’s manuscript revealed the whereabouts of the creature? Had St. Ives recovered it? Pule’s head swan with unanswerable questions. Only one thing seemed certain — that here was a Keeble box that contained a mystery, quite possibly a valuable mystery. Pule possessed it and would continue to possess it. If worse came to worst, if all of Narbondo’s plans came to naught, Pule would have the box, a much-needed wild card in a game in which Narbondo held the aces. A wagon clattered toward him along the road, and Pule stepped out to meet it, the morning sun shining down on him in an altogether friendly way.

  Bill Kraken had never before felt so low. He’d done some vile things in his life — robbed graves, pinched carp from the aquarium, been drunk more often than he’d been sober. He’d been a merchant of overripe squid, a failed purl man, a reasonably successful pea pod man, and for a two-month period a year or so after his separation from Owlesby, he’d taken up the pure trade, selling dog waste to the tanyards for enough money to keep himself fed — if cabbage broth and black bread were food. But his worst moments since poor Sebastian had fallen were mere nothings compared to the depths to which he had sunk in the last forty-eight hours. He had betrayed everyone who had befriended him. He’d sold them all. And for what? Nothing. Not a farthing. Not even a handful of beans.

  He knuckled his brow and immersed himself in self-loathing. It was drink that did it — strong drink. It made a man mad. There was no way round that truth. But then so did the absence of drink, didn’t it? He licked his dry lips. His tongue felt feathered. His hands shook uncontrollably when he held them in front of him. So he sat on them, perched on a stool in a corner of Narbondo’s laboratory. He saw things, too, out of the corner of his eye — things he oughtn’t to see. It was the horrors, is what it was. And if it wasn’t, it would lead to them sure enough, to the gibbering horrors. He hadn’t been so dry in a week, a month.

  Now, watching out of the edge of his left eye the thing on the slab that lay not fifteen feet distant, he wondered what in the world it would look like to him if he were drunk. Given half a chance, he’d set out to discover the truth of the matter. He patted his coat pocket and there was Ashbless, bullet hole and all. The problem with the philosophers was that they were short on practical advice. They could reveal little to him about his present circumstance. Better the book were hollow and held a pint of gin.

  He mashed his eyes closed and held them so. Time passed fearfully slowly. He remembered, fifteen long years past, having wrestled out of open coffins dead men not much prettier than the thing on the slab. Better his eyes had been plucked out. They quite likely would be. They’d beaten him, but he could stand that. He’d been beaten before. And he’d had the horrors before, too. But those he didn’t want again. He’d given up squid merchanting when he’d found that the creatures inhabited his dreams, all leggy and cold.

  For the hundredth time he looked roundabout him for something to consume — spirits of any sort — but saw nothing but the empty wine glass left with diabolical purpose on a tabletop by the fat boy in curls, along with the carcass of a fowl. The breadth of the glass magnified the depth of the little crimson circle settled in the bottom. In truth there wasn’t enough in it to dribble to the edge when the glass was upturned.

  Kraken had tried, to be sure. He’d mopped up the dregs with his fingers, but little of substance was accomplished by it. There was even less in the way of food on the plate — nothing but broken bones — just the gristly burnt carcass of a peculiar game bird, a pea hen with the head on, eyeless and charred.

  Pule and Narbondo had gone out, locking the doors and windows. They’d abandoned him hours earlier, before night had fallen. The ghostly light of the gaslamps did nothing to enliven the general gloom of the cabinet — simply cast unpleasant shadows on the walls and floor, like the shadow, thought Kraken, barely able to look at it, of the humped, skeletal pea hen across the edge of the piano. They’d left him a pitcher of water. Perhaps if he got desperate enough…

  They’d return, he knew, with a body. Pule’s trip to Harrogate in search of poor Sebastian’s manuscript had ended in a general rage. Curses flew. The doctor had cuffed Pule across the chin, destroyed the pot of carbolic and stewed horsehide that Pule was cooking as a facial treatment. It had smelled awful. Then they’d gone out. The thing on the slab must be vivified, that’s what Narbondo had said. Tonight. They would find a donor. If not, hinted the doctor, Kraken would do nicely. Kraken or Pule, either one of them. Pule had smiled through his tirade, like a cat full of milk.

  The gaslamps flickered. Shadows danced. The game bird rattled suddenly on its plate as if it were trying to drag itself away. Kraken started in horror. Silence fell once again. Across the room on a small table beside the fishless aquarium sat the Keeble box. What could Kraken do with it? He could smash out the window and pitch it into the street, then dive out after it. But what would it profit him? He was a hunted man. There could be no doubt about that. Newgate was too good for him. It would mean the gibbet if he were caught.

  Outside the window swirled a thick fog, most of it river fog off the Thames. Dirty little rivulets dripped down the panes, pooling up along the mullions and dripping off, one by one, onto the pavement below. The street outside was silent. It was the silence, dense as the fog, that bothered him. He’d tried singing and whistling, but in the dim, shadow-haunted room the noise had merely been unnatural. It seemed to him, in fact, that the slightest sound would awaken the thing on the slab.

  Its head was twisted toward him, dropped crookedly across its chest. Flesh hung beneath its eyesockets like parchment. It seemed as if a breeze through a broken window pane would turn it to dust. Or perhaps the thing would rise in the draft like a kite to twitch and gibber at him, to lurch along toward him, silhouetted against the light that shone dimly through the curtained window of the room across the courtyard. Earlier he’d seen the shadow of a face peer past the curtain — watching him, perhaps; perhaps one of Narbondo’s agents.

  Kraken shut his eyes, but through the lids he could see the dancing shadows animated by gaslight. He pressed his eyes with his hands, but the horrors that swirled into view against the back of his eyelids were worse than the thing on the table. What had Paracelsus said about such emanations? He couldn’t quite recall. Paracelsus was mist in his memory, a product of another age, an age that had ended when he’d stolen the damned emerald from the Captain, the emerald that the smug Narbondo had left so casually beside the aquarium.

  On the edge of the slab, as if they had crawled there of their own power, were two skeletal hands, obviously fallen from the hunched corpse behind them. Kraken avoided looking at them. He had been certain an hour earlier that for an instant the things had moved, rattled their fingers atop the table, inched inexorably toward him, and that the ruined pea hen had sighed on its plate, rustling among cold potatoes.

  But all had fallen silent. It was the wind through the broken panes, carrying on it the sharp, sooty odor of fog. There lay the hands, almost grasping the edge of the lamplit table, ready, perhaps, to lunge at him. Why in the devil weren’t they attached to the corpse? What unholy thing did their separation betoken?

  Kraken peered at them, and was certain for one rigid moment that the index finger of the left hand twitched. Beckoning. He glanced away toward the fogbound window and gasped in horror at his own reflection, hovering in the glass, staring in at him. He edged farther into his corner. If the hands crept from the slab would they shatter when they hit the floor? Or would they fall into shado
w, pausing for a moment before scuttling out like crabs toward his feet? Kraken was suddenly fearfully cold. Narbondo, perhaps, wouldn’t return at all. Perhaps they’d gone out, knowing that Kraken would die in horror during the night, that the thing in the shroud would rush at him like a sheet hauled along a clothesline, would envelop him in dust and rot and clacking bones and suffocate him in horror.

  On the wall behind him hung a collection of instruments, but there was nothing with which to defend himself against animated corpses. His eyes settled on a pair of elongated tongs, the jaws of which were wrapped in a rubber casing. He stood up slowly, barely breathing, understanding that the thing on the slab was watching, trying, perhaps, to fathom his fear, his intent.

  He very slowly removed the tongs and stepped across toward the slab, wheezing with fear, waiting for the hands to fly at him like papery bugs, like leather-winged bats, to clutch at his throat, to reach into his mouth. At the touch of the tongs, surely they’d leap at him as if spring-driven. He knew they would.

  But they didn’t. He plucked one of the hands up and very gingerly turned, took a step toward the open piano, and shoved the thing onto the silent keys, banging out a wild note with the edge of the tongs and leaping backward, a shriek lodged in his throat. The other hand lay as before. Or did it? Was it turned now? Had it crept about to face him? He clamped the tongs around it, whirled, and dumped it onto the piano keys along with its grisly counterpart, then slammed down the key cover, locking it with a little triangular brass key that lay atop the piano.