The Somnambulist: A Novel

by Jonathan Barnes

  As Barge walked over to the bed, he reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a surgeon’s knife. Nonchalant as a dentist about to commence his dozenth examination of the day, he leant over the victim.

  In the course of his career, Arthur Barge had killed thirty-four men, thirteen women and two children (twins). During this time he had cultivated certain habits and superstitious rituals, chief amongst which was the fact that he always liked to look into the eyes of his victims before he slit their life away. It made it more real, somehow, gave it a certain tangy flavor.

  With his free hand, he shook Dedlock awake. The man’s eyes flickered open. Bleary and befuddled, he started to struggle up only to be pushed easily back down again. Thrashing about frantically, he tried to call out, but the jug-eared man brought up his knife. Then, like a cow docile before its slaughterer, prescient of the inevitability of the blade, Dedlock fell still. Barge pushed the knife up against his target’s throat and was looking forward to increasing his tally — wondering how many more there would be before he finally retired — when, amid an apocalyptic smashing of glass, something burst through the window.

  Or rather two things.

  Once they had disentangled themselves from the curtain, idly brushing shards of glass from their clothes, two deeply improbable figures stepped into the room.

  “Hullo, sir.”

  “What ho, Arthur!”

  Barge dropped his knife in shock. Dedlock struggled upright in bed, gasping for breath, suddenly hopeful that he might yet live.

  Barge stared at the two intruders, too stupefied at first to speak. “Who are you?” he managed at last.

  “I’m Hawker, sir. He’s Boon.”

  The Prefects grinned as one.

  “Evening, Mr. Dedlock. Beastly sorry to drop in on you like this.”

  Dedlock hugged a stray pillow for comfort. “Did… did the albino send you?”

  “Certainly did, sir. Pal of yours, is he?”

  “He’s an absolute brick, old Skimpers.”

  “Tip-top.”

  It was around this time that some understanding of what was taking place finally dawned on Arthur Barge. He was about to make a run for it when the larger of the two men gripped him by the shoulders and steered him firmly across the room. Barge tried to fight back, only for the stranger — quite casually — to break his right arm. As Barge screamed in agony, Hawker began to whistle.

  “Thank you,” Dedlock said weakly, his words barely audible over the sound of his assailant’s torment.

  Boon touched the brim of his cap. “Pleasure, sir.” He and Hawker bundled Barge swiftly out of the window, then disappeared the same way themselves.

  A moment’s silence, then Dedlock swung himself out of bed and peered through the shattered remains of his bedroom window. The old man with the eyebrows doddered into the room, his hair disheveled and askew. “What happened here? Are you all right?”

  Dedlock barely spared him a glance.

  “There’s the most ghastly mess,” the old man moaned.

  “I was almost murdered in my bed.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  Dedlock snapped, “Fetch the brandy. I’ve an awful feeling today’s about to get worse.”

  A deferential twitch of the eyebrows. “Very good, sir.”

  When Arthur Barge came to, Hawker and Boon were leering over him like a couple of prep-school gargoyles. He was lashed to a chair with twine which cut into his wrists and ankles, drawing blood. Aside from the bright light shining in his face, all was darkness.

  “Good to have you back, sir. Marvelous to see him, isn’t it, Hawker?”

  “Marvelous, Boon.”

  “Who are you?” Barge mewled. “What do you want?”

  “He’s not heard of us, Boon.”

  “Not heard of us? I’m disappointed. Thought we were living legends.”

  “Silly old josser.”

  “How much have you been paid?” Barge asked desperately. “Whatever it is, I’ll double it.”

  “Don’t bandy words with us, sir.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve been told to give you a bit of a wigging.”

  “A… wigging?”

  “A damn good slippering, that’s what he means.”

  “A sound hoofing.”

  Barge began to cry. “Please—”

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “My name?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Arthur Barge. My name is Arthur Barge.”

  Boon looked disappointed. He nodded toward his companion, at which Hawker rooted around in his blazer pocket and retrieved an immensely large knife, two or three times the size of the one with which Arthur Barge had intended to murder Dedlock and far, far too large for the size of the Prefect’s pocket.

  Barge boggled at it in fear, a sticky yellow warmth coursing unchecked down his left leg.

  “Cor! Hawker’s got a wizard new penknife.”

  “It’s a smashing knife, sir. Look — it’s got a bottle-opener and a corkscrew and all sorts.”

  Barge wept.

  “Tell us your name, sir.”

  “I told you. I’m Arthur Barge.”

  Boon raised his voice just ever so slightly. “Don’t be an ass, sir.”

  “Please. Please, I—”

  “Name, please, sir. Your real name.”

  Barge could see no alternative but to tell the truth and submit to the uncertain mercy of these creatures. Strangely, after all these years, it actually felt good to admit it out loud, to own up at last. He groaned: “I’m the Mongoose.”

  Boon beamed. “Thank you, sir. You understand, of course, that we had to make sure.” They laughed. Hawker leant over Mr. Barge and, with enormous gusto, began to saw away at his neck.

  I should put up my hand here and confess that I was, at least in part, responsible for all the unpleasantness. I needed to stop the Directorate becoming too interested in our activities, and following the failure of that old soak Slattery, I set this killer on their trail, a former Okhrana sleeper agent living in deep cover as Arthur Barge. I allowed Donald to take care of the specifics and I fear he may have been a little overzealous in his duties. Certainly, I never intended matters to go so far or for poor Mrs. Grossmith to suffer as she did. But how was I to know? I’m an important fellow, and delegation is a necessary evil of my job.

  Much as I had enjoyed explaining to Moon the ease with which I had manipulated him, I had begun to weary of exposition.

  Moon spluttered, “You want me to join you?” His face had turned an interesting shade of mauve, puce with righteous indignation.

  “When you see what I have to show you, I think you’ll understand.”

  I sauntered from the room, certain that Moon and his companion would follow — led on now not by fear or even simple curiosity but by the most basic and primal desire of all: the need to know how everything will end.

  I have long had a fascination with underground London, her secret subterranean, for the dark places of the earth. Since wresting control of Love, Love, Love and Love from its odious President, Donald McDonald and I had constructed an entire world beneath our headquarters. We had sculpted great vaults and chambers to be a hiding place and refuge from the tumult of the world above.

  I led Moon and the Somnambulist back to the balcony above the great hall. The place had filled up with my people, men and women packed shoulder to shoulder, crammed against the walls. It seethed with life, it brimmed with Love. Standing before us were London’s edge-people, the poor, the ugly and the deformed, the indigent, the dispossessed, the ragged and the hopeless, all the marginalia of the city. At my appearance a mighty roar went up, which I acknowledged as best I could with a modest bow and a diffident wave.

  Moon stared down at the multitude, trying no doubt to spy his sister amongst them, or Thomas Cribb, or Mr. Speight.

  “So many,” he murmured. “I had no idea there’d be so many.”<
br />
  “Love assembled,” I said, unable (I admit it) to entirely hide my pride. “The foot soldiers of Pantisocracy.”

  “Soldiers?” Moon was being contrary again. “Why would Paradise need soldiers? Why the violence? Why the death? Why not simply take your followers and go? Build your Eden by the banks of the Susquehanna and leave the rest of us be.”

  I marveled at the man’s obtuseness. Despite all I had told him, still he hadn’t realized the truth of it. “The Susquehanna?” I tried to keep the contempt from my voice. “You really believe we’re going to America?”

  “That was Coleridge’s plan, was it not?”

  “American is unsuitable. Corrupt.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Here, Edward. Here, in the city.”

  “I thought you hated London.”

  “No city is irredeemable. We shall rebuild. Start again. A new city where we will live as true Pantisocrats. I’m giving London a second chance.”

  “What happens to anyone who doesn’t qualify for your utopia?”

  “I had to be honest. “They shall be put to the sword.”

  Moon said something predictable about my mental state. I told him he was being short-sighted and patiently explained that we could wipe the city clean, begin again.

  “What would your precious Coleridge make of this? I doubt he would ever have condoned such bloodshed.”

  I felt an attack of hysterical laughter surge up inside me and it was only with a Herculean exercise of will that I was able to restrain myself. Calmly, I told Moon that I wanted to introduce him to my superior — the Chairman of the Board.

  “I had assumed you were the Chairman,” he snapped.

  I did not reply, but instead left the balcony, led them away from the hall and deeper into the underground tunnel system, down to the lowest levels, to a large locked room located in the most inaccessible part of Love, our holy of holies. The door was fastened with padlocks and chains, and a small sign was all that proclaimed this to be the province of the

  CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD

  I unlocked the door and ushered my guests over the threshold. Evidently, they had not expected anything so grand as what lay beyond. Even I, who ought to have been inured to the sight, never failed to be awed and humbled by it.

  An enormous metal sphere filled the room, a great iron egg paneled intermittently with glass portholes against which a greasy yellow liquid lapped hungrily. Attached to one side was a small steam engine, its working parts skeletally exposed, its tubes and metal lines snaking umbilically between the two machines. All the awesome modern technology of electricity and steam was at the service of the sphere, all its valves and slides, its crank-pins and pistons, its pumps and its flywheels, its cylinders and packing rings and pillow blocks.

  But it was not the object itself which aroused such wonder but rather what lay inside — its most singular occupant.

  An old man floated in the sphere, dressed in clothes not fashionable for almost a century, his wispy white hair yellowed from nicotine and decay, his skin mottled, torn in places and showing signs of minor putrefaction. He was immediately recognizable nonetheless as the foremost poet of his age.

  Moon realized at once, I think. The Somnambulist took a little longer. A line of poetry sprang unbidden to my mind: “Could I revive within me that symphony and song…”

  Moon gasped, and it was with a small spurt of pleasure that I saw he had finally comprehended the full magnitude of my achievement. “How is this possible?”

  “Galvanism,” I said triumphantly. “The wonders of electricity and steam.”

  The Somnambulist scribbled furiously on his slate.

  GRAVEROBBER

  I shrugged, beyond such petty morality. “I liberated him. No doubt he’ll thank me for it.”

  “He seems… damaged,” Moon said uncertainly.

  The Somnambulist peered through the glass at the old man’s hands.

  STITCHES

  “When I found him,” I explained, “parts of his body had badly deteriorated. They had to be replaced… Of course, we used his friends where we could. His left hand belonged to Robert Southey. Several toes were donated by Charles Lamb. Other organs, best left unspecified, originate from the late Mr. Wordsworth.”

  MONSTER

  “A thing of shreds and patches, perhaps,” I said. “But, no, not a monster. A savior. The lord of Pantisocracy.”

  Moon seemed transfixed. “What is that liquid?”

  “Amniotic fluid. Or at least my best approximation of it. ‘For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.’ ”

  “He’s alive?”

  “Dreaming. Recovering his strength. Often I’ve asked myself what he sees in his dreams. What wonders he must witness in his sleep.” I pointed toward an ostentatiously large red lever at the side of the sphere. “I have the means to awaken him.”

  The three of us looked through the glass at the face of that remarkable individual, that titan of poetry and philosophical thought — the last man, it was said, to have read everything. He floated serenely in the golden liquid, magisterial despite the imperfections wrought by his sojourn in the grave.

  Moon gazed on, tears forming at the corners of his eyes. “I understand,” he breathed. “Forgive me. You were right.”

  You’ll think the less of me for this, I know, but I admit it without shame — when I heard him speak these words, I clapped and I jumped up and down, I cheered and squealed with childish joy.

  Mrs. Grossmith woke again at breakfast time, some hours after her fiancé had departed the house. Groggy, she rubbed her eyes, scratched herself vigorously all over and was about to clamber out of bed to make the first cup of tea of the day when she heard a curious sound emanating from the kitchen: children’s laughter and, mingled with it, male voices, gruff and unfamiliar. She armed herself with the nearest heavy implement (seeing no pokers or vases to hand she was forced to make do with her chamber pot) and tiptoed through into the next room.

  Two extraordinary figures slouched before the stove — grown men dressed as schoolboys. They were playing with a soft, round object, kicking it between them as though it were a football. It made a squelching sound as they did so.

  The burlier of the two men grinned when he saw her. “What ho, Mrs. G.”

  “Hullo, miss,” said the other, rather more politely.

  “Hope we didn’t wake you. We were just having a kick-around.”

  “Playing keepy-uppy.”

  It was then that Grossmith saw the true nature of the ‘football’. Strange, she thought distantly, as though she were somehow divorced from the horror of the thing, how a human head could look so much smaller when removed from its body than it did when securely in place on top of a good pair of shoulders. She tried to scream but no sound would come.

  “Bad news, I’m afraid, miss,” Boon said courteously. “Your fiancé was a professional assassin known to his masters as the Mongoose. ’Fraid Hawker and I had to give him a bit of a wigging.”

  “Sawed his head for.” Hawker sniggered. “We fairly howled with laughter.”

  “Still.” Boon brightened. “I wouldn’t worry. Sometimes life’s just like that.”

  It was around this time that I made my first mistake.

  A change had come over Moon. The cynic in him had vanished before my eyes; the logician, the proselytizer for ratiocination and reason, all that had made him what he was, evaporated as I looked on. In his place stood a convert to our cause, a new Saint Paul, with Cannon Street as his Damascus.

  Such a reaction on encountering the Chairman was far from unique. Speight, Cribb and Moon’s own sister had all seen the light only when setting eyes upon the dreamer.

  “I see it,” Moon said softly. “I see it.”

  Feeling much as Jesus must have felt once Thomas had finished rummaging about in His ghostly wounds, I tried hard not to seem smug. “So you understand now?”

  Moon seemed oddly deferential toward me, all trace of h
is earlier disrespect gone. Perhaps I should have realized then that all was not as it appeared to be, but at the time it just seemed so right.

  Astonished at his friend’s volte-face, the Somnambulist seemed about to write something down, some objection, some weasel words of doubt, but, wisely, he stood back and kept his own counsel.

  “I’m flattered,” said Moon, then more forcefully, as though I might doubt his sincerity, “Really. I’m flattered. Everything you’ve done for me… To bring me face-to-face with this. All this trouble just to show me the truth. I’m in your debt.”

  I licked my lips. “I have a mission for you.”

  He grinned. “I thought you might.”

  Quivering with excitement, I explained what I wanted him to do. I intended the conjuror to be the voice of Pantisocracy in the outside world, chief propagandist for the new order, spokesman for the Summer Kingdom. Who would listen to me: failed thief, former gaolbird, serial incompetent? I know first-hand the cruelty of popular opinion, its perverse, bovine insistence not on listening to the message but on ridiculing the messenger.

  Moon was different. They would listen to him, a celebrated detective, star of the Theatre of Marvels, once a fixture of society.

  It’s that ‘once’ of course which was important. I hoped he retained enough influence to be heard, but it was the marginalization of the man which intrigued me. He was turning into an edge-person. Whether he knew it or not, Edward Moon was becoming one of us.

  “Let me go,” he said. “Please. Let me spread the word. The people must be prepared. The city must be made ready for Pantisocracy.”

  It was a convincing performance and I’ve no doubt it came easily to him. Probably you think I was a fool to be taken in at all, but since I was overwhelmed by righteousness at the time, you’ll have to forgive me.

  So I let him go.

  I gave him fourteen days to spread the word, a fortnight in which to prime the city. But even in my sublime state of belief I was not entirely without guile — doubts lingered at the corners of my mind. “You’ll go alone,” I said, and as Moon started to protest, I cut him off with a gesture. “The Somnambulist has yet to be converted. He’ll stay with us here until he sees the truth of things.”