The Somnambulist v-1

by Jonathan Barnes

  “I’m sure he’s genuine,” I insisted, though I could feel the fault lines already widening in my belief. “He was changed.”

  “Nonsense,” Charlotte said briskly. “He’ll betray you. You’ve not sent out a Baptist but a new Judas.” It was an interesting side effect, I noticed, that those faithful who had encountered the Chairman seemed in the wake of the experience to become far wordier and more verbose.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Indubitably.”

  For a moment I was lost. “What do we do?”

  “Bring the plan forward. Forget the fourteen days. Do it now.”

  “We’re not ready.”

  “You’ve been planning this for years. Of course we’re ready. In fact, I’ve already dispatched a crew to stop the trains.”

  “Without my permission?”

  “Forgive me. I thought it best. Time is short. The Underground trains that shan’t trouble us today.” She glanced at my companion. “There’s something else. The Somnambulist. My brother will come back for him. He may prove useful as… leverage.”

  It took twenty men to restrain the Somnambulist once he realized what we were planning, but eventually we succeeded in herding the giant into the main hall, forcing him onto the ground and staking him down. He was practically invulnerable, of course, and we knew that ropes and chains alone would not bind him. In the end it was Mr. Speight who came up with the solution.

  We skewered the Somnambulist twenty-four times over; passed two dozen swords through his body, pressing them deep into the floor below. Stoically, without making a sound, he withstood these multiple lacerations and I wondered again precisely what he was, what nature of being could withstand such torture without shedding the merest drop of blood. As I watched, I found myself reminded of Gulliver staked out on the beach by the Lilliputians, of Galileo’s portrait of man, perverted, pinioned, reduced to the status of a lepidopterist’s specimen.

  Love gathered about the giant, curious and not a little afraid. I called them to order — all nine hundred and ninety-nine of them, the infantry of the Summer Kingdom, my troops of Pantisocracy. I knew these might be the most important words I would ever speak, the culmination of a decade’s dreaming.

  I began by apologizing. “I confess,” I cried, “that I have been misled — betrayed by a man I thought had become one of us. And because of my short-sightedness he has gone to warn our enemies. Thank the Chairman, then, for Love nine hundred and ninety-nine, who opened my eyes before it was too late.” A gratifying cheer at this.

  “But something wonderful has come even out of treachery. Our plans have changed. Pantisocracy begins today. The Summer Kingdom is upon us sooner than we dared to hope.” More whoops and cheers. “Go forth,” I said, my voice rising to a crescendo. “Reclaim the city, eradicate the symbols of impurity and evil. Wreak havoc — but a pure and holy havoc. Use the sword — but sparingly, not as a weapon but as a surgeon’s tool to remove sickness and disease, for we walk amidst a new Eden. I have faith in you.” I looked down at almost a thousand lonely faces, the detritus, the dispossessed of our society, and I felt a great surge of power and affection.

  “I love you all,” I said, before adding mischievously: “God be with you.”

  And with a great roar they ran from the hall, through the tunnels and out onto the streets, antibodies ready to do battle with the city’s cancer.

  Alone, I walked back to the Chairman of the Board and observed him silently through the glass of his womb until the excitement became too much to bear.

  Then I finally did it. I pulled the red lever.

  A shower of sparks flew from the machinery, firecracking across the room. The sphere filled with bubbles and a terrible light shone out from its innards, so piercingly bright that not mere stars but whole galaxies seemed to dance before my eyes.

  The old man’s head jerked upward, his body shuddered and flailed and his hands reached out to claw the inner surface of the sphere. I could hardly credit it that I should be there to see such a sight, akin to witnessing the first birth, Eve’s bewildering heaving and writhing as Cain crawled forth from her womb.

  The old man’s face was mere inches from my own when his eyes flicked open, and it seemed that when he saw me, he smiled.

  The dreamer had awoken.

  Overwhelmed with joy, I unscrewed the portholes of the sphere. Waves of fluid crashed about me and I screamed in triumph as the old man lurched forward. I caught him before he fell and he leant against me, struggling for breath. I clapped him hard on the back, he coughed, then breathed in great lungfuls of air. He said nothing but only gurgled and hissed like a leaky pair of bellows, spumes of liquid dribbling from his mouth as I held him in a tight embrace.

  Moon would not defeat me. I had transformed failure into triumph. The dreamer had awoken, the Chairman walked amongst us and Love was loose at last upon the streets of London.

  Chapter 19

  Maurice Trotman was eating breakfast when destiny came knocking at his door. Mr. Trotman, you will recall, was the man from the Ministry, the Civil Servant who had succeeded, where so many others before him had failed, in closing down the Directorate. He was a precise, punctilious man, typical of his breed — those passionless, blank-faced automata who tirelessly maintain the grim machinery of state. His ambitions were limited, his vistas modest and he saw life prosaically, as a ladder, a career, a comfortingly regular sequence of promotions and preferments.

  He was midway through a poached egg when he heard a determined rap at his front door. Still a bachelor, despite his half-hearted wooing of a colleague’s daughter, he had no servants and lived and ate alone. Consequently, still clad in his fawn-colored dressing gown, it was Maurice himself who opened the door onto death.

  “What do you want?” he asked sharply. Like any proper gentleman, he was rarely at his best before eight o’clock.

  His visitors made an outre pair. Grown men, one burly, the other slight, both clad in flannel shorts, their legs knobbly and ridiculous.

  “Morning,” said Boon.

  “What ho,” said Hawker.

  “Awfully sorry to bother you so early.”

  “Couldn’t be helped.”

  “I’m afraid we’re something of a deus ex machina.”

  “Don’t chatter on in Latin, old man. You know it’s all Greek to me.”

  Boon chortled dutifully. “Hawker’s got a wizard new penknife. Corkscrews and bottle-openers and a how-do-ye-do to get stones out of horses’ hooves. Would you like to see it?”

  In the course of their unfeasibly long and bloodstained career, the Prefects had rarely been surprised by much. Strange, then, that they should have been so easily outwitted by a glorified clerk.

  Maurice Trotman had not clambered so far up the Service ladder without learning a good deal of guile along the way. He had recognized the Prefects from the first, and as they stood there trolling through their usual blather, their carefully scripted cross-talk and banter, he was formulating a plan of escape. No good fleeing back into the house, of course. There they’d have him cornered, track him down and finish him off in moments. But out in the open he might still have a chance.

  While Hawker and Boon talked on (something about conkers), Trotman carefully snaked his left arm around the door and toward the umbrella stand where he skillfully extracted a family heirloom — a slender black umbrella three generations old, passed down from father to son through sixty proud years of Civil Service.

  He looked back at the Prefects. Hawker had drawn his knife and was advancing noiselessly upon him when, with surprising dexterity, Trotman produced the umbrella from behind his back and struck the knife from the creature’s hand. Taking advantage of their momentary surprise, he thrust past the Prefects and out into the street where, barely believing his luck, he ran frantically into the center of the city, toward what he mistakenly believed to be safety.

  Whilst Hawker howled in surprise and frustration, Boon merely simmered with rage.

  �
�By the living jingo!” Hawker cried. “He’s done a bunk. Rotter’s gone and scarpered. What’ll we do now?”

  Boon set his face in an expression of grim determination. “We follow. And when we catch him, we clobber the brute to death with that blasted umbrella.”

  The Prefects turned in pursuit and loped silently after their prey, determined as bloodhounds on a scent, implacable as fate.

  I suppose I had better tell you what happened to Moon. For all I know you’ve ignored my warnings and gone and got attached to the man, so it’s just possible you might care.

  No doubt he was feeling mightily pleased with himself as he left the headquarters of Love and sauntered back to the surface by way of King William Street Station. Oh, he must have thought he had me fooled with that play-acting of his, that fraudulent Damascene conversion. But as we have already seen, he had not counted upon the perspicacity of his sister.

  Above-ground again, he hailed the first cab he saw and instructed the driver to deliver him directly to the Yard, promising a sovereign if the fellow could get him there in a quarter of an hour. In the event it took almost double that time, the detective drumming his fingers impatiently all the while. Once he arrived he dashed straight to the office of an old friend, flung open the door without knocking and cried: “Merryweather!”

  The inspector looked up from his desk, surprised. “Edward. What is it?”

  Desperate to get out his story but uncertain where to begin, Moon sounded like a human telegram, his message fragmented and nonsensical: “Conspiracy… underground… Love assembled… the dreamer… Somnambulist…”

  “Calm down. Tell me slowly what happened.”

  Moon took a deep breath. “Underground, a man calling himself the Reverend Doctor Tan has assembled an army. He has some crackpot scheme to destroy the city, to reduce it to ashes and begin again.”

  I suppose I should feel some slight at the ‘crackpot’ description. But I’m a bigger man than that. Prophets, after all, are never recognized in their own country.

  As Moon finished speaking, a bulky shadow stepped from the corner of the room. “So it’s begun,” he stated flatly.

  Merryweather rose to his feet. Moon was later to say that this was one of the very few occasions that he had spent any length of time with the inspector when he had not seen him laugh or smile or crack some faintly inappropriate joke. In the face of brutal crimes and fearful murders, assassinations, bloody riots and deliriously horrible killing sprees, Detective Inspector Merryweather had never once lost his sense of humor. That today he was unable to manage even the ghost of a smile was perhaps some measure of the situation’s gravity.

  He introduced the stranger. “This is Mr. Dedlock.”

  The scarred man made a nominal inclination of his head. “I work with Skimpole.”

  Moon stared and seemed to sniff the air, like a fox sensing the approach of the hunt. “You’re Directorate,” he spat. “What are you doing here?”

  “Ex-Directorate,” Merryweather murmured.

  “The agency has been closed down,” Dedlock admitted. “This morning an attempt was made upon my life. Skimpole’s gone missing. I’ve had to come to the police for assistance.” He wrinkled his nose in distaste.”

  “Love has outwitted you,” Moon said (and I confess to feeling some pride at the casual certainty with which he made the claim). “They’re ready to make their move. Two weeks from now they’ll burst from underground to destroy everything in their path. The city’s in terrible danger.”

  “Sounds incredible,” Merryweather said. He was interrupted by a brisk tap at the door. A police constable, flushed and out of breath, peered nervously into the room. “Sorry to bother you, sir.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve had reports of a… disturbance in the financial district. Fighting in the streets. Fires and rioting. It sounds like-” The boy swallowed hard. “It sounds like an invasion.”

  Rather unfairly, Dedlock rounded on Moon. “You’ve been tricked. Two weeks! You bloody fool. It starts today.”

  Merryweather shouted orders. “Get every man we have down there at once. Everyone.”

  Moon was appalled. “You don’t understand the scale of it. These people are armed to the teeth. You’re sending truncheons and whistles against an army.”

  The inspector swore. “We should have been prepared.” He turned to Dedlock. “How many men can you raise?”

  “Twenty. Thirty, maybe, who might still be loyal.”

  “Twenty or thirty!” Moon exclaimed. “My God, they’ll be slaughtered.”

  Dedlock looked afraid. “I’m sorry…” he whispered. “I’ve no power any more.”

  The detective turned toward the door. “Do what you can. I’m going back.”

  Merryweather stepped in his way. “Edward, you can’t stop this on your own.”

  “The Somnambulist is with them. My sister, too. I owe it to them both to try.” He clasped the inspector’s hand, then pushed past him. “Good luck.”

  He left the Yard at a run, heading back toward the heart of the city.

  No cab would take him anywhere near the scene. He was forced to hire the temporary use of a hansom and drive there himself, careering lunatically through the streets, little caring what damage he caused as he drove. As he drew closer, his path became blocked by fleeing and panicked crowds and he could go no further. Abandoning the cab he ran on, racing ever closer to disaster.

  When I emerged from King William Street Station, the Chairman by my side, I saw a sight very few of us are ever privileged enough to witness — my dearest dreams given form, my hopes made real before me.

  Fires had been lit and the sky was illuminated by bursts of scarlet, iridescent even against the watery light of the morning, an anarchist’s Guy Fawkes display. The foot soldiers of Love, the faithful of the Church of the Summer Kingdom, poured through the streets, dispensing justice wherever they could, reveling in their freedom, in the epochal change they were to induce upon the city.

  The morning was frosty, our breath fogged up the air like smoke, and to my astonishment I saw that my companion’s exhalations appeared to be tinted a vivid green — a phenomenon I unwisely dismissed at the time as a trick of the light or mild hallucination, brought on by excitement and overwork. The old man looked blearily about him, bewildered by all the sound and fury. “Ned?” he asked hopefully.

  “Yes,” I lied. “I’m here.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Come with me. We need a better view.”

  I took him by the hand and led him to the Monument, up its corkscrew staircase to the top. Lithe and gazelle-like, I scampered up the stairs, but I was often forced to a halt in order to let the old man recover himself. I all but carried him the final leg of the journey. Eventually we emerged into the open air, to witness a Monday morning unlike any other, unique amongst all the centuries of the city’s long life.

  “Behold,” I cried (surely you can forgive me some grandiloquence under the circumstances), “the dawn of the Summer Kingdom.”

  And from our eyrie, our Wren’s nest, we saw it all. Smoke rose up in mighty plumes. The sounds of war clashed about us and the air was filled with the screams of the dying. Dying? I’m afraid so. When opposing ideologies meet upon the battlefield, some bloodshed is inevitable. No doubt you think such a view harsh but there are people devoid of any potential for redemption. If the city were to be reclaimed I had no choice but to put them to the sword.

  The working day had barely begun before it was abruptly and bloodily curtailed. The bankers, the brokers and the clerks, the businessmen, the dealers, the accountants and the moneylenders — all were dragged screaming from their rooms and offices. A few were spared, most were executed. I would like to assure you that their deaths were swift and painless, that they were treated with some measure of dignity at the end, but in truth I doubt that this was so. An orgy of cruelty unfolded below us, a frenzy of murder and bloody reprisal for generations of injustice as the d
estitute shareholders in Love, my cockney bacchants, reclaimed the streets at last.

  As for the bankers and their kind — some of these unfortunates were beaten to death, some cut down by axes, picks and scythes. Others were thrown in the river to drown, and I saw at least one choke to death as members of my flock stuffed his mouth with bag after swollen bag of silver coins.

  Of course, I anticipate your objections. But why should these men have been granted mercy when they showed none to their innumerable victims? They had abused the city for far too long. Their time was past, a new age was upon us, and around them London’s topography seemed to reconstitute itself in sympathy.

  The great temples to avarice and greed were set alight. The banks were torched to the ground, the too-expensive restaurants and wine bars, the gentlemen’s barbershops and outfitters — all were impregnated with cleansing flame. The gold reserves in the Bank of England were looted and my people hurled their contents carelessly into the blackness of the Thames or threw them deep into the dank recesses of the sewers. One prominent city man was thrashed to death with a shiny ingot of the stuff. The air was thick with the stench of burning currency.

  The old man’s voice was hoarse and weak; he gurgled as though he were speaking underwater, but still he managed to murmur a few lines of verse — not his own, alas, but words not entirely without relevance. “The king was in his counting-house, counting out his money. The queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey.”

  I squeezed his hand, he squeezed mine (“Ned,” he murmured), and below us the terror raged on.

  Moon struggled through the crowd, fending off attacks from the faithful, stepping where he had to over the bloodied corpses of the fallen. He never once stopped to help but strode onward, searching for a single person amid the melee. “Charlotte!” he shouted. “Charlotte!”