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 destitute 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 mêlée. “Charlotte!” he shouted. “Charlotte!”
He found her eventually, standing demurely by as the chief executive of a large firm of stockbrokers had his arms torn from their sockets. Moon left the man to his fate and grabbed at his sister. “Charlotte. What are you doing?”
She gave him another of her wonderful smiles. “Hello, Edward.” She paused. “You ought not to have lied to us, you know.”
“What’s happened to you?”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
Behind them the broker gave a final, feeble moan before he expired in a spreading pool of crimson. Charlotte seemed enthused by the sight. “This is the start of something wonderful. A new age. A second chance.”
Moon pointed to the dead man. “There’ll be no second chance for him.”
“But there will be for you,” Charlotte insisted. “You can still be saved.”
Moon pushed her aside in disgust. “Where’s the Somnambulist?”
“Underground. We bound him.”
Moon was defiant. “You know I’ll rescue him.”
She shrugged. “You’re welcome to try. It scarcely matters now.”
“Where’s Tan?”
Charlotte pointed upwards to the Monument, at the pinnacle of which the Chairman and I stood silhouetted against the skyline, emperors of Pantisocracy. Moon left his sister and ran toward us, intent, it seemed, upon a further confrontation.
He emerged minutes later, wheezing, hissing, gasping for breath. He glared at me, fury blazing in his eyes.
“Edward!” I waved. “You’re just in time.” The Chairman and I peered over the parapet. “It seems the cavalry has arrived.”
Below us, help had come to the moneymen’s aid. Several dozen policemen led by the redoubtable Detective Inspector Merryweather and accompanied by a handful of the Directorate’s false Chinamen poured into the financial district.
Now, I saw ‘poured,’ though the description is not entirely an apt one. My men — the troops of Love, Love, Love and Love — now they ‘poured’ onto the streets. They were a great tide breaking at long last upon the city, a dam bursting, spilling open after years of miserable and unnatural confinement. But the police force, the men from the Directorate, they didn’t really ‘pour’ so much as seep and trickle into the fray, dripping over the cobblestones like water from a leaky tap.
But then Moon was complaining again, self-righteous all of a sudden. “Those men don’t stand a chance.”
“By my estimation they are outnumbered approximately ten to one,” I said mildly. “You’re right. They’ll be slaughtered.”
Below us a blue-coated policeman was dragged under a seething tide of Love. His screams carried up to us, 202 feet above ground. Moon was of course tiresomely sententious about the incident. “This blood is on your hands.”
“On the contrary. It was you who betrayed me.”
“I can’t stand by and let you inflict this atrocity upon the city.”
“This is a natural process,” I chided. “Is it not written that the sheep are to be separated from the goats? The meek, the weak, the despised and the forgotten — we’ve been suppressed too long. This is our revenge.”
“Why does it have to be like this?”
Behind us, the old man murmured, “About, about. In reel and rout the death-fires danced at night. The water, like a witch’s oils, burnt green and blue and white.”
“Do you recognize it?” I asked, something of the proud father in my manner. “It’s his own work.”
Moon turned on me. “Do you think he approves? Do you think he’s flattered by what you’ve done?”
“Ask him,” I said simply.
Moon tugged the Chairman away from the parapet, pulled him roughly across to me and pushed his face into mine. I recoiled from the old man’s rank, electric halitosis.
“This thing is not alive,” said Moon. “It’s a corpse, barely animated by your perverted science.”
“He’s still just a child at present. He’s confused.”
Moon forced the old man to look down at the carnage and sneered: “Tell me, sir. Do you approve? Is this a fitting tribute?”
The dreamer gazed glassily, perplexedly at the street. “The many men, so beautiful. And they all dead did lie. And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I.”
“All this,” Moon persisted, “is being done for you.”
For the first time the old man seemed to notice us, to show some real awareness of his surroundings. It was as though he had finally woken up. “For me?” he murmured. “Me?”
Teary-eyed, I flung myself at his feet. “Yes!” I sobbed. “All this for you. For Pantisocracy.”
“Consider well,” Moon said. “Everything that is unfolding beneath us, all this suffering and agony, is being done in your name.”
“The Chairman shook his head. “No, no,” he muttered. “No, no, no. Not like this.”
“Please, sir. You have the power. Stop this.”
The old man seemed to grow in stature before us, becoming taller and broader as though at the mercy of some invisible rack.
“Chairman!” I cried.
He looked at me as if I were a stranger. “I am not your Chairman.” Enraged by Moon’s words, his anger seemed to revitalize him. “No,” he shouted (really shouted, too, not the senile mutterings he had managed till then). “This is not my fault.”
“But it is,” Moon whispered, like Claudius pouring poison into the ear of a better man. “This will be blamed on you.”
And it was then that something extraordinary happened. Given that the day hadn’t been exactly routine so far, you’ll un
derstand that I do not use the word lightly.
The Chairman roared with fury, and as his anger grew, a change began to manifest itself in his body, a fresh transfiguration. Gangrenous streaks of green appeared on his face and hands as though all of his veins were suddenly visible to us, pulsing not with the healthy ruby of life but with something hideous, diseased and dying, his face lit up with phosphorescence.
Edward Moon looked at me in horror. “What have you done?”
I admit that I was surprised by this development. The amniotic fluid which had revivified the old man must have had some special properties I had not forseen. Nowadays, I find myself unable to recall its precise constituents. Perhaps it is for the best — I would not wish for anyone else to repeat these vile experiments.
When I had dug the old man from the ground, his left hand had been severely damaged and I felt I had no choice but to amputate, attaching in its place a hand which had once belonged to one of his closest friends and colleagues, Robert Southey.
But now I noticed that my stitching was coming undone and that the hand had begun to dangle like a child’s mitten from the stump of the old man’s wrist. One by one the stitches popped out and I saw oozing slime where blood and cartilage should have been.
It was around this time that I first began to worry that things were no longer going according to plan.
Since the old man’s rage seemed fueled as much by pain as anger, I became concerned that other stitching may have undone itself on the old man’s person. Sick of the sight of the fighting below, he left the parapet and windmilled his way toward Moon. Unwisely, the conjuror attempted to block his path, the gesture as fruitless as trying to halt a speeding locomotive by standing in its way.
“Wait,” he said. “Please.”
With a single swipe of his good right hand, the Chairman battered Moon aside, displaying far more strength than ought to have been possible. Like a boxer woozy from the fight but determined to beat the bell, Moon stumbled to his feet only for the old man to hit him again, a flicker of green playing across his hand as he did so. This time Moon crumpled to the ground and lay still.
Clearly the amniotic fluid had given the old man far more than mere life, and I considered myself fortunate that it was a comparatively mild-mannered poet whom I had succeeded in resurrecting. Even now I shudder to think of the consequences had I gifted such weird power upon, say, Lord Byron or mad Blake or that oikish fraud Chatterton.
Moon was down, unconscious or worse, and the old man marched away, disappearing back into the Monument, heading toward the streets, imbued with awesome power and purpose. Leaving Moon for dead, I saw no choice but to follow, my dreams in tatters around me.
I moved down through the spiral heart of the building, eldritch light emanating from the Chairman as he descended below me, casting strange green shadows on the walls.
At least, I think that is what I saw. I fear I may not have been in my perfect mind.
What happened next was a series of horrible coincidences.
You needn’t worry yourself about Moon (as if you care). He was merely unconscious. Having betrayed me once that day, then goaded the Chairman into madness, a knock on the head was the very least he deserved. Personally, I should like to have seen him eviscerated.
We’ll leave him lying there for the time being, lost to the world. He’s done enough for now.
At around the time that the Chairman had begun to display the earliest signs of his disintegration, Mr. Maurice Trotman re-enters our story. He had run through the streets for more than an hour, his umbrella clutched fearfully in one hand, his heart clenching and unclenching itself frantically inside him. His supply of courage had been used up, had leaked from him during his long flight like air from a punctured tyre.
It was his bad luck that when he made his escape from the Prefects he ran toward the center of the city, into what he hoped might be the sanctuary of the business district. It was his bad luck that the day he chose to make such a flight was also the day that we at Love finally showed our hand. But it wall of our bad luck that he brought the Prefects with him.
Trotman finally came to a halt halfway down Cannon Street. As he struggled through crowds of flustered clerks and maddened bankers he wondered whether he might not inadvertently have stumbled into a nightmare. People were fighting around him, brawling and scrapping and — good God — was that a body in the street? Like Cyril Honeyman before the end, he toyed with the idea that the events of the morning might have been nothing more than an unusually vivid dream. He wondered, too, if the hysterical warnings of the Directorate could have had some truth in them after all and, for the first time in a life otherwise unimpeded by any color or interest, even considered the possibility that he might be going mad.
Whimpering, his dressing-gown gaping open, he hunkered down onto the pavement, curling up into a fetal ball. He hoped that if he crouched there long enough, he might be ignored and neglected by the mob. No such luck, of course.
Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. Refusing to turn around, hoping to deny the inevitable, he squeezed shut his eyes and hugged himself tighter.
“Come on, sir. Play up, play up and play the game.”
Trotman opened his eyes. Hawker and Boon loomed before him, evincing not the slightest sign of fatigue from the long pursuit.
“What ho, Maurice,” said Boon.
“Thanks for the run, old thing. Rather exhilarating.”
Boon snatched the umbrella and Maurice Trotman sobbed.
“Oh, be a man,” chided the smaller of the killers. “Face up to it like one of the chaps.” With this, he held the umbrella high above his head — a commuter’s sword of Damocles.
“Why?” asked the Civil Servant feebly. “Just tell me that.”
“We’re doing it as a favor.”
“Old chum of ours.”
“Real brick.”
“P’raps you know him.”
“Funny little chap.”
“All white and queer-looking.”
“Skimpole?” Trotman managed as, moments before his extinction, understanding flooded too late into his brain.
“Quite right,” said Hawker.
Had he lived longer, Trotman might have protested at the injustice of it all, at the unfairness of being hunted down and murdered for nothing more than doing his job. As it happened, he had no time left to think. Book brought the umbrella down hard upon his chest and its spike entered his body, neatly perforating his heart with a crisp snap. It was, at least, over quickly.
Cackling with delight, Boon pushed the umbrella fully through the body of his victim and force the thing open. Trotman cut a strange, undignified sight, all but naked, an unfurled umbrella sprouting from his chest like a fancy cocktail stick skewering an olive. The Prefects stood back and admired their handiwork.
Hawker clapped politely. “Bravo.”
Boon rummaged around in the pockets of his blazer and drew forth a couple of lollipops. He passed one to his friend and they stood sucking contemplatively for a time, gazing at the carnage unfolding around them with the mild anticipation of men waiting for a late bus.
Hawker pulled the lolly from his mouth, making a slurping noise as he did so. “Looks like a proper scrap.”
Boon crunched and swallowed. “Fancy causing a ruckus? Bit of mischief?”
A fat man came wheezing past them, an axe clutched in one hand, the arterial spray of two dozen prominent bankers congealing on his suit. You may remember his as Donald McDonald, my oldest and most faithful lieutenant.
“I say. “’Scuse me, sir.”
McDonald careered to a stop.
“Could you tell us what the deuce is going on?”
“We’re taking back the city,” my friend gasped. “Reclaiming it from the moneymen. The age of Pantisocracy is here.”
Boon yawned. “Politics.”
“Pantisocracy?” Hawker asked, only mildly interested. “What’s that, then?”
“Freedom, food and poetry
for all,” McDonald replied. “The death of commerce. A new Eden at the heart of the city.”
Hawker smirked. “It’ll never work.”
McDonald began to frame some objection but it was too late. He had already bored them.
“Your turn,” Boon said. The big man turned to McDonald, grabbed him roughly by the throat and with a desultory twitch of his hand — exerting no more force than you or I might employ to open an especially recalcitrant bottle top — snapped the unfortunate fellow’s neck.
“Another?” Hawker asked.
“Why not? Might kill an hour or two.”
They set off into the heart of the fighting, toward the Monument, killing indiscriminately as they went — police, bankers, Love, Directorate men — wild cards gleefully disrupting the game, spreading fear and disaster wherever they trod.
Like I said: a series of horrible coincidences.
Please don’t think I’ve forgotten about the Somnambulist. We left him underground, you’ll remember, deep in the vaults of Love and pinioned to the floor by twenty-four swords. You’ll have realized, of course, that something like this was never going to stop him for long. By the time the Chairman had left me, the giant had already freed himself from a half dozen of the things, tugging them out of himself one by one, like a porcupine pulling out its own quills. He worked steadily, certain that the city was in danger, knowing it was his duty to protect it.
I, meanwhile, was following the Chairman. Puffed-up, bloated and enraged, the old man was wading through the battle, knocking combatants aside regardless of their allegiance. He proved easy to follow, since he left in his wake a trail of body parts (fingers, an ear, lumps of flesh and skin) as well as a lurid green track, like a giant upright snail.
Those members of Love who encountered him were appalled by the sight of a roaring monster in place of their leader and inspiration, and as his rampage continued I could sense, palpable as smoke, the spread of dissent amongst my followers, the crumbling of their collective faith.
The Somnambulist: A Novel Page 29