The Somnambulist: A Novel

by Jonathan Barnes

  Miss Moon gave a beatific smile. “I’m fine. In fact, I’ve never been better. Through I’ll thank you not to call me by my old name.”

  The Somnambulist shot Moon a concerned look.

  “Old name?” Moon said carefully, as though by slowing his conversation down he might somehow delay his fast-approaching realization of the truth.

  “That woman is dead,” his sister said cheerfully. “I’ve been reborn in her place. From now on you must call me Love.”

  Moon was appalled. “Charlotte.”

  “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  Moon edged gingerly away, as if backing off from some savage animal for whom sudden movement would be an incitement to kill. “Oh, yes? Who’s that?”

  “He’s a very, very dear friend. A great leader. A hero. Any my inspiration.”

  At last Moon began to understand what was happening. “Then he’s the man behind it all,” he said, suddenly furious. “The prime mover in the murders of Cyril Honeyman and Philip Dunbar. The mastermind behind the attacks on the Directorate and the plot against the city.”

  “You’ll like him,” Charlotte said sweetly. “I’m sure you’ll get on famously.”

  “What have they done to you?”

  She looked up. “He’s here now, Edward. He’ll explain everything.”

  A stranger glided onto the balcony. He had been waiting outside, biding his time in order to make the most dramatic entrance possible. Slight and narrow-featured, he was an unassuming little man, his skin pockmarked, lined and swollen. But despite these shortcoming he was not without a certain nobility, an innate dignity. When he spoke his voice was soft and low and seemed to pulse with hypnotic power. It was the voice of someone accustomed to being obeyed without question, whose every utterance was treated with reverence and awe.

  “My name,” he said, “is the Reverend Doctor Tan.”

  But you will know me better, dear reader, as your narrator.

  Chapter 18

  I fear I may not have been entirely honest with you.

  Of course you’ll say I ought to have been truthful from the start, that I should have owned up on page one, come clean from the outset. But stay your verdict a while longer; don’t judge me for withholding a few minor details, a name or two, for fudging some of the minutiae.

  I never revealed my true identity to you because I didn’t want you to think The Somnambulist is in any way a biased account. The great majority of what you have read is the absolute, unalloyed truth. Where I have embroidered or embellished, I have admitted it; where I have indulged in fabrication, I have immediately confessed.

  However, you may be able to detect a slight unevenness in my portrayal of one particular character. I have done my utmost to write as impartially as I am able but — sweet Christ — how I hated that man by the end.

  Nonetheless, when the two of us met again in the great hall beneath Love, Love, Love and Love, I tried my best to be civil, though it was with no small difficulty that I resisted the temptation to gloat.

  “Mr. Moon. Delighted you could make it.”

  “Have we met?”

  “Edward,” I chided. “How can you have forgotten?”

  “Reverend Doctor Tan,” he replied (in what I felt to be an unnecessarily sarcastic tone). “Can we assume that’s not your real name?”

  “My title is an honorary one,” I admitted, “but I must say I’m hurt you don’t remember me.”

  Moon spoke to his sister. “Who is this man?”

  I cannot claim the honor of having known her well, but during the course of our all-too-brief acquaintanceship, Miss Moon always struck me as a thoroughly decent sort. Intelligent as well as pretty and (after a few days’ gentle persuasion) no mean convert to our cause.

  “He’s a hero,” she said again. “A leader and a great friend.”

  I blushed at this undeserved praise. “You really don’t remember me?”

  Moon shook his head. “Never seen you before in my life.” He turned to the Somnambulist : “He ring any bells with you?”

  Infuriatingly, the giant merely shrugged.

  I felt cheated. For years, I had looked forward to our meeting, anticipating it with all the sick excitement of a child on Christmas Eve. On so many occasions I had mapped out the ideal version of this conversation — I would be magnanimous in victory, witty, wise and inspirational. I planned to dazzle.

  But then I expected Moon to recognize me at once, for the Somnambulist to shrink back in horror, for both of them to treat me with just a little bit of respect, as a formidable rival, an adversary to be feared. Instead they just gazed blankly at me as they might at some rank stranger accosting them for money on the street.

  So I told them my real name.

  I shan’t repeat it here. It’s a prosaic, everyday thing which does no justice to a man of my talent and ambition. You may continue to think of me (if you care to think of me at all) as the Reverend Doctor Tan.

  The Somnambulist grinned in recognition, but still Moon looked none the wiser. The giant scribbled something down, and at long last the light of understanding flickered into Edward’s eyes.

  SEWERS

  Moon laughed — the despicable little man actually laughed at me. “Of course,” he said and proceeded to relate a highly exaggerated account of how (as a much younger man) I had attempted to rob the Bank of England but had burrowed mistakenly instead into the London sewer system.

  “I’ve been trying to remember your name for months.” He chortled. “Even Mrs. Grossmith wasn’t able to recall it and she’s always had an excellent memory for nonentities.”

  I think I said something then about the wisdom of Moon taking quite so antagonistic a tone with me when he was trapped in my underground lair, unarmed and entirely at my mercy.

  He demanded an explanation, and as soon as I had recovered my composure, I did my best to answer. I told him that there is a hierarchy even amongst criminals, and that following the regrettable incident outlined above, I had become something of a standing joke amongst my peers. Artfully avoiding self-pity, pitching my tone perfectly between pathos and determination, I told them this: “I wearied of being the pettiest of petty crooks. I saw I had to improve myself. You might say I found religion.” I chuckled at this, thinking it an amusingly ironical quip. Charlotte smiled (dear girl) but the other two stood resolutely stony-faced.

  “We’ve put our society out of joint, Mr. Moon. Here at Love we have a solution.”

  “Tell us, then.” He yawned. “But don’t let’s take too long about it, there’s a good chap.” He spoke to me as one might to a child, and though I bristled at his manner I chose for the time being to let his impertinence slide.

  “You’re a part of it,” I said carefully. “I summoned you here for a reason.”

  “I came here of my own volition. You had nothing to do with it.”

  I confess I was unable to restrain a squeal of delight at his ignorance (though I think I was able to disguise the sound as a light cough). “No, no,” I corrected him softly. “I have brought you here.”

  Three people were waiting by the balcony door for their cue. I beckoned them in.

  Mr. Clemence. Mrs. Honeyman. Thomas Cribb.

  “I laid down the clues, Edward, and you followed them just as I knew you would.”

  Something like fear flickered across his face as the final pieces of the puzzle were pressed into place. I cannot be certain whether it was at this moment that Moon realized the sheer scale of the trap into which he had been expertly led. Certainly he seemed deliciously broken, and as I watched him come to grips with the parameters of his failure I found it almost impossible not to laugh.

  Despite what you might think, I am not entirely devoid of compassion. Moon had experienced a considerable shock, and even the Somnambulist — he of the granite face, the Easter Island visage — now wore a look of stunned surprise at my casual revelations.

  Dismissing Cribb, Charlotte and the rest, I led my guests to
my modest private rooms where I offered them food and drink and promised that when they were ready I would explain it all. The Somnambulist was manifestly grateful for the food, but Moon, rather churlishly, declined. He pushed aside his plate and announced, rather petulantly: “I have questions.”

  “What we’re building here,” I said, “is the future. A new community inspired by the dream of Pantisocracy.”

  “Why does this dream necessitate murder?”

  “My conscience is quite clear. What I do, I do for the poor and the abandoned in this great city of ours, for the indigent who exist at the very precipice of society, forced there by circumstances not of their own making. “The ‘edge-people’, if you like, life’s marginalia, footnotes in flesh and blood. The meek, Mr. Moon — the meek who will inherit the earth.”

  “Men like Speight.”

  “Precisely so.”

  He sounded angry. “The Speight I saw last week was not the man I knew.”

  I tried to make him understand. “He’s changed. He’s found a better way to live.”

  “Whatever you did to him, you’ve done to my sister.”

  “She came to us willingly. When she realized that she had spent her life in darkness, Love led her into the light. All we desire is to live our lives according to Pantisocratic principles. And we’re very close to achieving our dream. How many men in history have been able to say as much? We’re going to build Paradise on Earth, Mr. Moon. Why do you persist in opposing us?”

  “Because you have murdered and cheated and corrupted. Because you are a twisted failure deluded into thinking you can recreate the world in your image.”

  I smarted a little at these harsh words and Moon pressed home his momentary advantage. “You had Barabbas killed.”

  “We asked him to join us.”

  “Join you? What place does a killer have in Paradise?”

  “You never believed him to be irredeemable. Neither did we.”

  “But he refused?”

  “It seems he was happy to die in the dark.”

  “And Meyrick Owsley?”

  “Meyrick was placed there to watch over him. Barabbas knew a great deal about our operation.”

  “Is that why you had him killed?”

  “It wasn’t that he was telling you the truth. It was the speed at which he was doing it. I must admit to being surprised,” I said, “that you haven’t asked me about Cyril Honeyman. It was his death, after all, which first set you on this path.”

  Moon glared resentfully at me.

  “No theories?” I asked lightly. “No elegant suppositions? No brilliant deductions pulled out of the hat at the last moment?”

  He all but shouted, “Tell me!”

  “It was a hook, Edward. A wicked, grotesque crime which was bound to attract your attention. A piece of theatre we knew you couldn’t resist. As a means of drawing you to us it could scarcely fail.”

  “Are you saying all this was for me? A set-up?”

  “Essentially, yes, that’s true.”

  “Men have died,” Moon spat, “so that we can have this idle conversation?”

  “There’s no need to be quite so self-centered. Mrs. Honeyman and Mrs. Dunbar had little love for their feckless sons. They wanted those blights on their lives removed, lopped off as harmlessly as one might an unsightly mole. I think they rather enjoyed the experience.”

  “Mrs. Honeyman. Mrs. Dunbar. Hardly edge-people, are they?”

  “I confess, there have been times when Love has not been entirely solvent. We needed money. They were useful assets.”

  “Were?”

  “They’re not fit to enter Paradise,” I admitted quietly.

  “And the Fly? Why him?”

  “The kind of deliriously improbable touch I thought might appeal to you. How were we to know you’d kill him?”

  “So you have me here at last. What do you want? Has this just been about my humiliation?”

  “Oh, I shan’t say I haven’t enjoyed it. But this is about more than revenge.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Why, Edward.” I smiled. “I want you to join us.”

  Mrs. Grossmith (soon to be Mrs. Barge) woke suddenly just before dawn with no immediate idea of why she had done so. The room was silent, though she could hear the birds in the garden trilling their perennial songs, their avian arias, their feathered canticles and hymns. For much of her life, Grossmith had wondered precisely what it was they had to be so cheerful about first thing in the morning. Since meeting Arthur she finally knew. A small sigh of pleasure escaped her at the thought of him, something between a conscious snore and a moan of satisfaction. She reached out her hand to touch him but found only empty bed-sheets, still warm but distressingly devoid of fiancé. “Arthur?”

  Now, if you’ve any Victorian qualms about a loving couple sharing a bed out of wedlock then I trust you’ll keep them to yourself. I’ve no truck with such antiquated prudery and I can assure you that in the new state of Pantisocracy there’ll be no place for your morality. The repressive codes of our parents and grandparents will be swept away to be replaced with something far more organic, more beautiful and true. Liberated from the cages society has constructed for itself with such self-defeating ingenuity, human nature will flourish and prosper. In the new age, we shall all be as Emmeline Grossmith and Arthur Barge.

  The housekeeper felt uneasy at her lover’s absence. She sensed the first faint intimation that the day ahead was about to go horribly wrong, and all at once the merry chirping at the birdbath ceased to seem quite so inspirational. She sat up in bed, pushed the pillows behind her and brushed from her eyes that hard, flaky substance which accumulates during sleep. Unable to resist, she deposited a crumb of the stuff in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully, although, unusually, this ritual failed to improve her mood. She called again. “Arthur?”

  The door to the bedroom opened and her fiancé appeared, scrubbed, clean-shaven and fully dressed. “Yes, my dove, my angel?”

  “It’s early. What are you doing?”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Arthur, I’m worried.”

  “No need, my dear. I’m just going out for an hour or so. There’s a little matter requiring my attention. A chore I’ve been putting off. Nothing for you to concern yourself over.”

  The cool, deliberate manner with which he said it, the studied nonchalance of his tone, immediately convinced her that the reverse was true — that whatever the love of her life was getting up so early for was something she should worry over and, more than that, that it was worth getting frightened about.

  Barge wandered over to the bed, sat down beside her and stroked her cheek. “Go back to sleep. I shan’t be long. And I’ll have a surprise for you when I come back.”

  “A surprise?”

  He put a finger to his lips. “Wait and see.”

  Mrs. Grossmith allowed herself to be soothed and reassured, and for a time she was even able to ignore that persistent sense of imminent catastrophe.. Arthur left to carry out his mysterious errand and she retreated back under the bedclothes to let sleep wash over her. As she dozed, she dreamt, and her dreams were restless and black.

  Bad enough that dear lady should suffer nightmares at all — worse still that their vague, amorphous horror should be eclipsed upon her waking by terrors of the real world.

  Arthur Barge hailed a cab and instructed the driver to take him to Piccadilly Circus. His errand had long been delayed — a reprehensible lapse in a man who had always prided himself on his professionalism and timekeeping.

  Once in Piccadilly, Barge stopped the cab and stepped out onto the street. The object of his errand did not lie there, of course, but he had no wish to give the driver an exact address. He passed his fare up to the cabbie and, as he did so, turned his face away. It wouldn’t do for the man to be able to identify him later.

  He stepped away from the cab, waited until it had driven out of sight, then set off toward St. James’s Park. It was early morn
ing, just light, and the streets were largely empty, save for those unfortunates who spent their evenings crumpled in the doorways and gutters of our metropolis. Barge strode past them all without a second glance — understandable enough, given the ubiquity of such sights, but it’s worth noting, perhaps, that these things would never occur in a Pantisocratic state.

  Barge reached the borders of St. James’s Park, headed down a narrow avenue just off Pall Mall and paused before a modest house situated halfway along the street. The plaque hanging by the doorbell read:

  THE SURVIVORS’ CLUB

  STRICTLY MEMBERS ONLY

  Needless to say, Barge was not a member.

  He pulled a spindly metal tool from his jacket pocket, a thin, delicate thing bristling with sharp, serrated edges. With the stealthy ease of a man who has performed the action many times before, he inserted the instrument into the keyhole, turning it first one way and then the other until the lock sprang open with a solid clunk. As quietly as he could, he pulled the door open and crept inside.

  He edged his way down the corridor. Ahead of him lay the Smoking Room, out of which emanated a stream of ear-shattering snores and wheezes. Barge peered inside to see an old man asleep in one of the armchairs, yesterday’s Times open in his lap, a half-empty decanter of brandy by his feet.

  Barge turned away and moved toward the end of the corridor where he knew Mr. Dedlock’s quarters to be situated. He had been observing the club for weeks, eventually coming to the conclusion that membership must be restricted to the very oddest men in London. Everyone he had seen entering or leaving the premises looked like an escaped detail from a painting by Hogarth, barely three-dimensional, so grotesque they were scarcely believable. Once he had glimpsed Dedlock himself, strutting naked around the Smoking Room. That he appeared to be the most normal person present spoke volumes for his fellow members.

  Barge tried the handle to Dedlock’s room — stupidly left unlocked, it opened easily. The joint chief of the Directorate lay prone on his bed, sweating, turning, mumbling in his sleep. The bed stood close to a large bay window, its curtains billowing suggestively in the early-morning breeze. Bed-sheets were strewn over his naked form and his thick white chest-scars were visible even in the gloom.