Homunculus lsi-2

by James P. Blaylock

  His friend nodded. It seemed, certainly, the only clear course — an emerald, after all, big as a fist. It was Jack and Dorothy’s livelihood — Jack’s inheritance.

  Contacting the police would avail them little. Nell would be exposed. And where, they would ask, did this emerald come from? If it was Jack Owlesby’s inheritance, why didn’t he have it? Why all the secrecy, the convolutions? How, in fact, did Dr. Narbondo come to possess it? Were they accusing him of stealing it? No, they weren’t. He took it from the man who stole it. And where was this fellow, this Kraken? No one knew. Somewhere in London, maybe. The police would scratch their chins and give each other looks, and in the end, not only would suspicion fall upon the innocent, but no end of skeletons would be dragged, perhaps literally, from dusty old closets.

  No, said the Captain, shaking his head with determination, in for a penny, in for a pound. They’d act tomorrow. Godall produced a pen and paper, poured himself a brandy and water, and began to sketch out a plan of Narbondo’s cabinet, the building it occupied on Pratwell, his own room opposite, and the courtyard between. Nell filled in elements of the laboratory itself that Godall could only speculate on, much of the room being invisible from his curtain slit.

  If Narbondo were out, they’d force the door, walk in, and take the box — reduce the room to rubble, if need be, to find it. Narbondo would have to be watched. He might, after all, remove the box to another location. But why should he? Then, if the doctor was in, Godall could resort to disguise to gain entrance — an official from social welfare, a seller of scientific apparatus — that would do nicely. They’d hold him up like burglars. What would he do? Call the authorities? Shout through the windows? It was hardly likely. He’d know, then, what sort of men he’d fallen out with, said the Captain. He’d find that he’d made a mistake.

  There was a slamming of a street door opposite, and the Captain broke off his speculating to look out, in the hope that it was William Keeble coming across to chat. It was high time, he realized now, that the Keebles knew of the presence of Nell Owlesby. They would all have to fall together in this thing. There could be no more secrets, no disconnected pieces of the puzzle. No more boxes hidden under floors. It would quite likely take the vigilance of the lot of them and to spare if they weren’t to be borne down by the collective forces of evil.

  But it wasn’t William Keeble; it was Jack and Dorothy, setting out hand in hand through the murky morning, the fog swirling round the streetlamps, their shoes clumping on the pavement. Jack held a box beneath his free arm. Nell watched over the Captain’s shoulder. “I’d give anything to call out to them,” she said in a low voice. “Or to run ahead and step out of a doorway and utter his name.” She stopped, watching the pair turn up Spode Street and disappear, and she stood silently for a moment, as if lost in thought. “He’d hate me, I suppose,” she said finally, “for what happened to his father.”

  “I think you’d be surprised,” the Captain said, squeezing her hand. “He knows what happened to his father. His death wasn’t the worst of it, not by a sea mile, and he wouldn’t be the lad I know he is if he was blind to what you did, for the reason of it.”

  Nell remained silent, watching the door of the Keeble house. Godall pretended to be fiddling intently with his pipe, oblivious to the conversation going on three or four feet away. The Captain slapped his ivory leg and said, “First things first, that’s my way. We’ll pay a visit to this hunchback sawbones first. Get the fun out of the way. There’s time enough for work afterward.” And he turned back to the map and to Godall, gesturing at the open courtyard and reaching for his cold pipe.

  St. James’ Square lay torpid beneath the fog and the chill, as if waiting languidly for the murk to lift. But the fog hovered through the morning, shot through now and again with rays of feeble sunlight that faltered and faded almost as soon as they appeared, rays that thinned the murk momentarily, then abandoned any hope of success and fled. Cabs rattled apace along Pall Mall, pale ghosts with lamps glowing fitfully through the gloom, then winking out, making it seem as if they had been nothing but disembodied rattle and clatter that sprang into and then out of muted clarity.

  The man in the chimney pipe hat stood in the darkness of the very alley in which Bill Kraken had caught St. Ives’ discarded cigar. His hat perched atop a blood-spotted bandage wrapped around his forehead, and threatened to topple at any moment onto the dirt of the pavement. He yawned, deciding that he’d risk stepping across to a tavern in a court opposite for a quick pint. The girl wouldn’t be out on such a day anyway. Her schedule, after all, hadn’t been unvaried. There was some chance that he’d spend another two hours waiting in vain, perhaps be questioned by a constable and sent on his way.

  But if he packed it in and she was true to her Thursday morning schedule, what then? Time was short. Drake was in no mood for failure. His returning from Harrogate without the box had almost cost him… he didn’t know what. It didn’t bear thinking about. Time, somehow, was growing short, and Drake’s patience with it. The pint could wait. He’d need it all the more desperately in two hours’ time anyway.

  A distant bell chimed eleven o’clock. Footfalls sounded out of the murk, which had suddenly swirled into such obscurity that the tree in the center of the square was blotted out. Two shapes approached. Billy Deener squinted into the gloom. It was she. But who was this with her? Her young man. This was unexpected.

  What was even less expected was the thing he held under his arm — a box, one that Deener recognized even through the gloom. A vivid picture of a bandage-wrapped figure flailing at him with an iron rod leaped into his mind, a figure that stole the box and fled. And here, apparently, he was, come round to give the box up. Here were two birds, hand in hand. Deener smiled malignly. He hefted the sap in his right hand, stepped out of the shadows behind the loitering, chattering couple, grasped the girl’s arm, and slammed the sap against Jack’s head, chortling through his nose as his prey fell forward onto his face like a toppled tree.

  Dorothy screamed at the sudden clutching hand from the shadows, then screamed again at the solid whump of the cosh and Jack’s collapse onto the roadway. But her second scream was cut off instantaneously by a rough hand. She bit at it, kicking backward and scraping her heel down the shin of the man who twisted her arm around behind her. An almost simultaneous scream broke forth from the lips of a woman who herded a covey of children through the square and who stood open-mouthed, pointing, her children cringing horrorstruck beside her, not so much at the sight of Dorothy being dragged into the alley or of Jack lying senseless on the pavement, as at the sound of their horrified mother’s shriek. Sporadic crying and screaming broke out, one shriek igniting another, the collective squealing fueling itself. Deener backed down the alley. The hue and cry would mean the end of him. In a moment he’d have to abandon the struggling girl and flee. He had only to drag her forty feet down the alley to freedom through a door left purposely ajar. But there on the ground, beside the meddling youth, lay the box he’d been cheated of once. He was damned if he’d be cheated again. He raised his hand, allowing the struggling girl to pull her right hand free and bury her nails into his bruised forehead. A thrill of pain shot along his scalp, and he yelped in rage, swinging the cosh hard enough to end the struggle there and then. He shoved his hand into his mouth, blew through two fingers, and scuttled out of the alley, picking up the fallen box. A head popped out of the open door. Deener shouted a curse at it, and a man, the owner of the head, loped along the alley toward him.

  “Murder! Murder!” cried the woman with the howling children. The cry was followed close on by the sound of stamping feet and the shrill blast of a police whistle. As Deener and his companion — a beefy, lard-faced man in shirtsleeves — dragged the inert girl through the yawning door, the mouth of the alley was filled with a growing crowd of dim spirits, peering in, unwilling to follow two seeming murderers into the dim shadows.

  Billy Deener eased the door shut, knowing that the general darkness of the al
ley obscured almost entirely by the fog would serve to hide their movements, and that a subsequent search would reveal nothing more than a crumbled hole below the street, a hole that led into the filthy darkness of the London sewers.

  The cellar wall was a tumbled heap of ancient brick some three feet thick, beyond which ran the upper level of the Kermit Street sewer. Mortar had cracked and fallen for a hundred years from hastily pointed joints, and the continual wet of the sewer had caused the wall to slump and the bricks one by one to fall out, until some final bit of mortar or the corner of an ancient brick had decomposed, precipitating the collapse of a long section of sewer wall in a foul-smelling heap of muck.

  The sewer was running at low water, but even so, Deener and his accomplice were hard pressed to make headway. They felt their way along planks slimy and rotten with sewage, kicking into the soft surface of the wood with the hobnails of their hoots. A lit candle flickered in a tin holder wrapped around the head of Deener’s companion, and the light danced and shrank, was snuffed out and had to be relit time and time again, both men half expecting the flame to set off an explosion in the dense air. Deener, wary of choke damp, breathed through a kerchief tied over his nose and mouth. They stooped along beneath the low ceiling, watching for the mark that would signal their arrival at the house on Wardour Street.

  The Kermit Street sewer was badly in need of leveling, for the general sinking of the ground had created long cesspools, the settling water further decomposing what solid ground remained, so that the foundations of houses above cracked and pitched and loathsome sewer gases drifted up into courtyards. But the cesspools which so hampered leveling and flushing had their own value, were the resting place, in fact, for murdered men, not a few of whom had found their way into the sewers with the help of Billy Deener. Their bodies lay mired in offal and garbage and road sweepings emptied down gulley grates, until the corpses swirled at high water into the Thames where, bloated and faceless, they were declared drowned for lack of any sensible alternative.

  But the unconscious girl was a different sort of victim. She should, Deener knew, be the one among them to wear the kerchief over her face, but his service to Kelso Drake only stretched so far. The score of minutes she spent below ground wouldn’t hurt her. She wasn’t even conscious of their passing.

  When Dorothy awoke, a tearing pain pounding in her head, the cigar-chewing face of the man who had stood in the entry hall of her house arguing with her father smiled down at her, the cigar rolling from side to side as if it were alive. His smile, however, was void of humor or concern for anything but Kelso Drake. She was certain, even in her fuddled state, that it was a smile of loathsome self-satisfaction, empty of anything but falsehood.

  It swam out of focus and then back in. She felt awful. There was a horrible stench in the room, the smell of an open sewer, and it seemed to her as Drake materialized before her that it was he who smelled so foul, he or the bent man who stood beside him, squinting at her as if she were some sort of interesting specimen. Then she lost interest in either of the two men, drifting away into herself and the pain in her head. She moved her arm, intent upon touching the hair beside her ear, which, pressed against a pillow, felt clotted with dried blood. She’d been hit on the head. She remembered part of it. Surely, though, this was no hospital. Bits and pieces of memory filtered in, scrabbling around in her mind until they joined like interlocking pieces of a puzzle to form the picture of Jack lying senseless on the pavement of St. James’ Square, of her struggling with a man in a hat, of a woman screaming over and over, of gaping children, of nothing at all after that.

  She tried to push herself up onto her left elbow, to swing her right hand at the face before her. But something got in the way. She couldn’t move, was fastened, somehow, secured to the bed by a sheet tied across her shoulders. The cigar face laughed. A hand removed the cigar. The mouth said, “She’ll do nicely — pay us twice over,” and the face laughed again. “Sedate her,” it said, and disappeared from view.

  The hunchback loomed over her, a cup full of violet liquid in his hand. The sheet was loosed briefly, and she was yanked onto her elbows by a balding man in a black coat. She hadn’t the strength to fight. She drank the thin, bitter draught, and very soon swam away into darkness.

  Langdon St. Ives sawed away at a grilled cutlet that had the consistency of shoe leather. The gray meat lay like a curled bit of tanned hide between a boiled potato and a collection of thumb-sized peas. A sauce — “Andalouse aux fines herbes,” as the hastily drawn menu had called it — was dribbled stingily over the cutlet, the chef careful not to be so liberal as to allow the liquid to pollute the boiled potato. This last, cold as the plate it sat on, sorely needed the sauce, and St. Ives tried with limited success to spoon a bit onto it. But most of what he scraped from the surface of the cutlet merely glued itself to the spoon in a scum of tomato and pepper, leading St. Ives to curse both the quality and the quantity of it. Rationally, he supposed, he should count himself lucky to be faced with such a meager plateful of the wretched stuff, but eating, like anything else, wasn’t a particularly rational business.

  He pushed the tiresome plate away, listening to the droning voice of an equally tiresome bespectacled gentleman who sat opposite, tearing into his own cutlet indifferently, as if the act of eating were merely a matter of satisfying bodily processes. He might as well consume a plateful of leaves and twigs. The man spoke to St. Ives as he masticated his veal and peas, chomp chomp chomp, over and over like a machine grinding rock into cement.

  “The digestion,” he said, waggling his jaw, “is a tricky business. Gastric juices and all that. It takes a vast quantity of stomach-produced chemicals to break down a lump of sustenance like this pea.” And he held a pea aloft for St. Ives’ benefit, as if the thing were a fascinating little world which the two of them could examine.

  “Biology has never been my forte,” admitted St. Ives, who couldn’t abide peas under any circumstances.

  The man popped the pea into his mouth and ground it up. “Gallons of bodily fluids,” he said, “produced, mind you, at great expense to the system. Now this same pea reduced to pulp can be readied for evacuation by a tenth amount of gastro-intestinal juices…”

  St. Ives stared out the window, unable to look at his plate. He couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for bodily talk. He had nothing against physiology; some of his best friends were physiologists. But it was hardly supper conversation — was it? — all this business about fluids and evacuation. And what was it leading to here? It constituted the friendly sort of banter that preceded really serious discussion — the reason he was once again being fed at the Bayswater Club owned by the Royal Academy of Sciences. With all their powers of scientific perception, thought St. Ives, they ought to be able to see that the supposed veal they were served was in fact a slab of old dairy cow — or worse, a paring of horseflesh, bled pale and bleached with chemicals by the knacker.

  No one, however, seemed to be eating save he and old Parsons, whose fellow Academist Lord Kelvin owned a barn in Harrogate alongside his summer house, a barn that, since the debacle of the alien starship, hadn’t any roof. He also, according to Hasbro, owned two dead cows, which had suffered the misfortune of having strayed into the barn minutes before the ship caved in the roof.

  And now St. Ives would pay the price. He was in a foul humor — he realized that. First the launching of the craft, then the escape of Willis Pule from the train. The man must have been desperate. It was entirely conceivable that he had leaped to his death in the ditch, an unsatisfying thought altogether. Villains, St. Ives considered, ought to be made to account for themselves. Their demise should be both spectacular and humiliating.

  “And the molars of a horse can reduce the most surprising weeds to fortifying pulp in moments,” his host intoned, working at a mouthful of his own surprising foodstuffs. “Now, like a human being, a horse has only a single stomach, but his intestine is phenomenally elongated, adapted to the digestion of coarse forages. This
is all a fascinating subject, this business of eating. I’ve spent a lifetime studying it. And I’ve found few things more interesting in the eating line than a workhorse — and of the right sort, mind you. Some sorts of hay are superior due to their effects on the bowel.” He waved his fork proudly, as if to illustrate this last statement, and speared up a row of peas.

  St. Ives took advantage of the man’s pausing to yank out his pocketwatch, widening his eyes in alarm, as if he’d just now become conscious of the prodigious passage of time. But his intended attempt to hurry the end of the engagement disappeared into a lecture on the bacterial manifestations of intestinal debris. The man paused some few minutes later to drain a great tumbler of distilled water before him, the cleansing effects of which would “leach away poisons,” not at all unlike the exemplary workings of a well-constructed sewage system. He smacked his lips over the water. “Staff of life,” he said.

  St. Ives nodded, performing his pocketwatch activity all over again, putting on the same face filled with surprise and haste. His companion, however, wasn’t so easily put off. He removed his spectacles, causing his eyes to undergo a remarkable and instantaneous shrinkage, and he wiped his face thoroughly with his napkin. “Close in here, what?”

  St. Ives nodded, humoring the man. Such men, he told himself, must be humored. One had to nod continually in agreement until, when an opening presented itself, one could nod to one’s feet and nod one’s way down the stairs, leaving the zealot with the curious mingling of satisfaction in having been so thoroughly agreed with and wonder at being abandoned. But there was no such opportunity here.

  “Dr. Birdlip, then,” said Parsons suddenly. “You were a friend of his.”

  St. Ives steeled himself for the inevitable conversation, the same that had occurred weeks earlier, the afternoon of the night he’d been surprised by Kraken in the rain. The Royal Academy was vastly interested in Dr. Birdlip’s flight and its implications in terms of technologic advance and were prevailing upon St. Ives to help elucidate the nature of the doctor’s wonderful flight. Birdlip, of course, was not the real genius behind the perpetually propelled craft. They knew that. He was a sort of mystic — wasn’t he? — a man who fancied himself a philosopher. More than that, he was a seeker after mysteries. He’d published, to his credit, a strange paper entitled, “The Myth of the Foggy London Night,” followed by a paper speculating on the construction of spectacles through which one could see successive layers of passing time like translucent doors opening and shutting along a corridor. What was that one titled? “Time Considered as a Succession of Semi-closed Doors.” Yes, said Parsons, it was all terribly — how should he put it — “theoretical,” wasn’t it? Poetic, almost. Perhaps he’d missed his true calling. The titles alone betrayed the peculiar bent of his mind. Genius it might he, said Parsons, but genius of a speculative and, mightn’t we say, of a non-productive nature. Certainly not the sort of thing that would produce an engine such as the one that drives the dirigible. Parsons smiled up at St. Ives ingratiatingly, prodding a pea across his plate with the end of his fork, driving it into a little pool of dried sauce.