The Somnambulist: A Novel

by Jonathan Barnes

  Mrs. Honeyman smiled again. “My the Lord have mercy on you.” She nodded at the creature, which leapt obediently to its feet and moved toward its victim, forcing him back against the shattered window. Honeyman screamed in anguish and mortal terror. He tried to mouth some final plea but before he was able to speak the monster was upon him, pushing him further and further back until, with a final, deceptively gentle shove, Honeyman disappeared through the window altogether and sailed out into the cold, merciless air.

  He screamed all the way down. Seconds later, the creature followed suit, leaping out of the room, scuttling down the tower, darting away into the night.

  Upstairs, Mrs. Honeyman and the fallen woman linked hands.

  “God be with you,” said one.

  “God be with you,” echoed the other.

  Hand in hand, they left the tower and vanished into the city.

  Cyril Honeyman was still alive when they found him, his dying moments witnessed by a cluster of curious residents and a single police constable. It passed into local legend that his last words were also that of his final character:

  “O, I am slain! If thou be merciful,

  Open the tomb, lay me with Juliet.”

  A ham, then, to the last.

  Chapter 3

  I do not like handsome men.

  Mostly this is jealousy, I know — this instinctive hatred of mine, this old, irrational animosity. When I compare my swollen flesh and pockmarked features with the supple frames of the young and the beautiful, I find myself achingly wanting. Even today, I am quite unable to look upon a comely youth without wishing to beat his exquisitely proportioned face into a bruised and bloody pulp.

  So you can scarcely imagine my joy when I realized that Mr. Edward Moon was losing his looks.

  All that silken hair, those perfect cheekbones, that preternaturally well-defined jaw — Moon had once been elegance personified, style and dash incarnate. But now, past forty and barreling toward his sixth decade with what felt to him like indecent haste, his appeal seemed at long last to have faded. His hair had started to thin and the keen observer could discern the first few flecks of gray. His face, already sagging and crinkled, had begun to display an inclination toward corpulence, had lost its handsome lineaments as the testimony of his sins and vices wrote itself across his features in lines and furrows and wrinkles.

  The night Cyril Honeyman tumbled to his messy death, Edward Moon was dining with acquaintances (not friends, you’ll notice, never that) at a party in an especially fashionable part of Kensington, surrounded by some of the most prominent of the city’s chattering classes. Time was when he would have sat amongst them as their most honored guest, the evening’s star attraction, but nowadays his hosts seemed content merely to tolerate him, inviting him (he strongly suspected) chiefly out of habit. A few more years and he would be dropped from these gatherings altogether, his name erased from the guest lists, become a non-person, an also-ran.

  Moon swiftly found himself tiring of their company, and at the end of the meal when the women retired to giggle and gossip and the men lit cigars and reached for the port, he excused himself from the table and strolled out into the garden, leaving his companion to fend for himself indoors.

  Moon had once enjoyed a reputation for dressing exquisitely, his wardrobe always just that vital inch ahead of fashion. But now, as his dapperness ebbed away, he had begun to look lost in the new style, had become increasingly to resemble a leftover from the last century, a relic from an earlier, mustier age. His Savile Row jacket had seen far better days and his shoes, handmade and paid for with several months’ earnings, were grown scuffed and weary. He wore a black armband, still in mourning for the Queen though she had passed away some months before. He was a creature of the old century as surely as she.

  The year stood just on that cusp of the seasons when winter begins to clench its fist about the days, and the trees, robbed of their leaves and color, stand stark sentinel like empty hat-stands. The air was clammy and chill; fog had stretched itself out from the lower parts of the city, and illuminated by light streaming from the house, the garden shimmered and shone with a strange luster. Moon strolled away from the building, the long, damp grass soaking his shoes, the bottoms of his trousers, the tops of his socks. He lit a cigarette and inhaled with relief as the smoke percolated through his lungs.

  “Mr. Moon?”

  There was a man standing behind him, one of the dinner guests, an American whose name Moon had already allowed himself to forget. The tip of the stranger’s cigar glowed angrily in the half-darkness. “Enjoying the evening?”

  Moon ignored the question and took another drag on his cigarette. “What can I do for you,” he asked at length. “Mr….?”

  The American gave a lopsided smile. “Stoddart.”

  Moon smiled smoothly, meaninglessly back. “Of course.”

  “I have a proposition for you. I publish Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Perhaps you’ve heard of us.”

  Moon shook his head.

  “We’re a periodical — not entirely an unfashionable one, if I may say so. In the past I’ve commissioned some of your most prominent authors. Arthur Doyle contributed—”

  “A hack, Mr. Stoddart. A journeyman.”

  The American tried again. “Oscar Wilde—”

  Moon gave an expansive yawn, refusing to be impressed. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’d like you to join them.”

  “I’m not a writer. I have no stories to tell.”

  The publisher tossed aside his cigar and ground out what was left of it with the toe of his boot. “But you do, sir, you do. I’m not asking for a work of fiction. I’m in pursuit of something infinitely more engaging.”

  “Oh?”

  “I want your autobiography. A life of such vigor and color as your own should make for compelling reading — would even, I fancy, have some considerable historical value.”

  “Historical?” Moon grimaced. “Historical?” He turned back toward the house. “My career is not done with yet. I’ve no interests in writing my own eulogy.”

  Stoddart chose his next words very carefully. “Let’s not be coy. We both know your best work is behind you. Since Clapham your stock has fallen considerably.”

  Moon was defiant. “There is still one last great case.”

  The man persisted. “You owe your public the truth. Our readers want to know how you solved the Limmeridge Park Murders. How you tracked down the Fiend. The Adventure of Smugglers’ Bay. The so-called Miracle of Mile End. Your rumored involvement in the Crookback Incursion of Eighty-eight.”

  Moon eyed his inquisitor suspiciously. “I wasn’t aware that incident was public knowledge.”

  “Name your price,” the publisher replied and suggested a sum which even today would amount to a small fortune.

  Moon reached the house and turned back to face the American. “My past is not for sale, Mr. Stoddart. There. You have my answer.” He slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him.

  He strode through to the billiard room. His companion sat alone and silent, a glass in one hand, a smoldering cigar in the other, a wide smile spread blissfully across his face.

  Moon spoke curtly to their host. “Get me a cab. The Somnambulist and I are leaving.”

  To describe the Somnambulist simply as an unusually tall man would hardly do justice to his memory. He was abnormally, freakishly large — indeed, if the rumors which circulated after his death are to be believed, he stood well in excess of eight feet tall. He had a thatch of dark-brown hair, cultivated in a substantial pair of side-whiskers and had about him a likeably innocent air which belied a prodigious strength. More curious still, he carried with him at all times a miniature slate blackboard and a stub of chalk.

  The journey home was entirely silent. Exhausted by the effort of maintaining his composure in the face of the evening’s relentlessly cheerful rounds of socializing, Moon said nothing, but as the cab neared the end of its journey the S
omnambulist reached into his satchel and drew out his blackboard and chalk. In straggly, childish characters he wrote:

  WHAT DID HE ASK

  Moon told him.

  With a massively oversize thumb, the Somnambulist rubbed out his message and wrote again:

  WHAT DID YOU SAY

  On hearing the reply, the giant put away his chalk and board and did not write again till morning.

  Edward Moon was a conjurer by profession. He owned a small theatre in Albion Square, just at the border of the East End, where every night except Sunday he performed his magic show with the silent, indefatigable assistance of the Somnambulist. Naturally, they were both far more than mere stage magicians, but I shall come to that in time.

  Their show was a quiet phenomenon, opening to modest houses in the early 1880s until, at the very acme of his popularity, Moon could count it a disappointing night if the stalls weren’t filled to capacity and half his potential audience turned away for lack of space. At the time, the city had never seen anything quite like the Theatre of Marvels. In a single production, it synthesized magic, melodrama, exoticism and real, heart-stopping spectacle. But the audiences came to see one thing above all others, the mystery at the heart of the performance: the great and silent enigma of the Somnambulist.

  The theatre itself was a little over fifty years old, a modest building with the look of a minor college chapel about it. A gaudy hand-painted sign took up half the front wall and proclaimed in foot-high letters:

  THE THEATRE OF MARVELS

  starring

  MR EDWARD MOON

  and

  THE SOMNAMBULIST

  BE ASTONISHED!

  BE THRILLED! BE ENLIGHTENED!

  By the time of our narrative, the theatre had ceased to be truly fashionable and audiences had begun to dwindle in numbers and enthusiasm.

  The night after Moon’s encounter with Stoddart was typical — a small crowd, a half-hearted line outside the entrance, nothing like the glory days when by five o’clock, a full three hours before the performance was due to commence, a queue would start at the box office and snake its way out of the theatre and into the street, stretching as far as the doors of a nearby public house, the Strangled Boy.

  Inside, the theatre had a grimy, run-down quality, exacerbated by its omnipresent scents of sawdust, liquor and stale gas. Unbeknown to our protagonists, I was there myself that night, seated in the front row, the fourth or fifth such occasion on which I had attended.

  As the audiences idled to their seats, a ragtag orchestra played in the pit at the front of the stage, heroically struggling through a medley of popular standards almost physically upsetting in their coarseness and banality. There was a time when audiences had been drawn from all strata of society — from local working-class families to professional men, paupers to priests, doctors to drapers, even on one memorable occasion a minor scion of the royal family — until quite abruptly and without apparent cause the higher orders had ceased to come, leaving only local people, the idle, the curious, those who merely wished to get out of the rain, as well as a peculiar crowd of what can only be described as ‘regulars’. These were a gang of mild obsessives and social misfits who visited the theatre repeatedly, had seen the show a dozen times or more and could (no doubt) recite the act by heart. Always outwardly courteous, privately Moon harbored nothing by contempt for his disciples, despite the fact — or more precisely because of it — that his livelihood appeared increasingly to depend on them.

  Mercifully, the orchestra limped to the end of its miniscule repertoire, the lights dimmed, and backed by a persistent drum roll, Edward Moon took the stage. He bowed, to immediate applause. Noticing a phalanx of his fans occupying the entirety of the fifth and sixth rows, he acknowledged their presence with a cursory nod. Then, professional smile in place, he began the well-worn routine, confident that his audience, though small, was sympathetic.

  He was careful to eschew what was expected, the staple tricks of the magician. At the Theatre of Marvels there were no rabbits, no hats, no shuffling of cards, no colored handkerchiefs, no rings, cups or balls — Moon’s act was altogether more recherché than that.

  To roars of approval from the regulars, he produced from thin air what appeared to be a large Galápagos tortoise and watched it totter its wrinkled way amongst the crowd before it inexplicably disappeared in full view. He brought forth an entire set of encyclopedia from his apparently bottomless pockets, even after a member of the audience had certified them empty. At his command a live ape materialized in a puff of magenta-colored smoke and capered and gibbered delightfully for a time.

  In preparation for the first major trick of the evening, the monkey picked a gentleman from the audience who, on Moon’s instructions and accompanied by encouraging whoops and cheers from the stalls, got reluctantly to his feet and made his way onstage. Upon the man’s arrival, Moon snapped his fingers and the ape scampered obediently away.

  “Can you tell us your name, sir?” Moon asked, with a wink to the audience who laughed knowingly along, fully cognizant of the fact that one of their number was about to be discomfited, patronized, mocked or — better still — humiliated and openly ridiculed.

  “Gaskin,” the man replied in an insouciant, disagreeable tone. “Charlie Gaskin.” He was stocky, barrel-chested and had cultivated (unwisely, in my opinion) a flaccid, patchy approximation of a walrus mustache.

  Moon held Gaskin in his gaze. “You are a valet,” he said. “You are married with two children. Your father was a tailor who died of consumption last year. For supper tonight you ate a stale kipper, and you spend many of your leisure hours building and maintaining a collection of antique clocks.”

  Gaskin was visibly astonished. “All true,” he said.

  The audience burst into applause. The man’s wife, sitting three rows from the front, stumbled to her feet, clapping wildly.

  Gaskin laughed, red-faced. “How the devil did you know that?”

  Moon arched an eyebrow. “Magic,” he said.

  I can imagine you now, all dewy-eyed and eager for an explanation of how it was that Moon had come to know all this, for a detailed post-mortem of his deductive processes. Sad to say, I have to disappoint you. What follows can be no more than a tentative reconstruction of his methods.

  As I see it, there are three chief possibilities.

  The first is that this uncanny display of insight was a deception, that Gaskin was a plant, that he and Moon had arranged their patter in advance. In short — that it was all a trick. What took place immediately after, however, surely rules this out as a serious supposition.

  The second is that our hero was an unusually brilliant observer of minutiae, a man of rare deductive skill, a master in intuitive ratiocination cut from the same cloth already stitched and darned by Sir Arthur and Mr. Poe. If the second conjecture is correct, then this — an extrapolation from the few known facts — is my attempt to re-create his methodology.

  That the man was a valet was obvious from his air of sullen servility; that he was married from his wedding ring; that he had two children from the toffee-apples bulging stickily from his pockets, purchased (one presumes) as gifts for the little ones. That his father was a tailor was clear from the quality of his jacket (unnaturally fine when set against the threadbare quality of the rest of his clothes); and that the unfortunate parent had died from consumption was elucidated by the faint graveyard scent of mildew and disease which still lingered insidiously about it. A distinct whiff of fish on Gaskin’s breath, and behind it an undercurrent of decay, made the man’s supper simple to deduce, and the distribution on his fingertips of a rare oil used only in the restoration of antique clocks rendered his chief pastime as plain as if he had tattooed the same upon his forehead.

  But doubtless you will say that such things happen only in cheap novels and upon the stage. Perhaps I have allowed myself to become unduly influenced by the yellow-backed vulgarities of sensational fiction.

  The third possibility s
eems on the face of it still less persuasive. Namely, that Edward Moon possessed powers beyond the understanding of conventional science, that he saw into Gaskin’s soul and somehow understood him, that — bizarre and outré though I know it must seem written down — he really was a mind-reader.

  The applause died away.

  “Mr. Gaskin? I must ask you something.”

  “Anything.”

  “When did you intend to tell your wife?”

  A shadow passed across the man’s face. “I don’t understand.”

  Moon addressed his next remark to the unenviable Mrs. Gaskin who still stood in the third row of stalls, puce-faced and flushed with pride. “My sympathies, ma’am,” he said. “It gives me no pleasure to inform you that your husband is a liar, a cheat, and an adulterer.”

  A few delighted sniggers from the audience.

  “For the last eleven months he has been engaged in intimate relations with a scullery maid. And for the past fortnight they have begun to worry that she has fallen pregnant.”

  A hush descended on the theatre and the smile fled from Mrs. Gaskin’s lips. She looked imploringly at her husband and stuttered something unintelligible.

  Gaskin snarled. “Damn your eyes!” he cried and made as if to spring at Moon. Before he could strike, a figure glided onstage and moved wordlessly between the two antagonists, like some animate portcullis lowered in the magician’s defense.

  Gaskin looked up to realize that he was standing opposite the Somnambulist, his face approximately level with the giant’s sternum. The big man shielded Moon, as silent and impassive as an uprooted Easter Island statue. In the face of so irresistible a force, so immovable an object, the man sloped swiftly and shamefacedly away, gabbling his apologies and leaving stage and theatre at a craven trot. His wife followed soon after.

  Moon allowed himself a private, faintly malicious smile at their departure before flinging wide his arms. “Applause,” he cried, “for the city’s most remarkable man! Asleep! Awake! The celebrated sleepwalker of Albion Square! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the Somnambulist!”