Homunculus (29 page)

There was nothing either on the slab or on the table - no corpses to leap up or pea hens to dash at him. And there, atop the piano, lay the Keeble box; he could just see the outline of it in the faint light of the flickering candle he carried. He slipped across toward it, walking on tiptoe. This was no time to dillydally. There was nothing in the accursed laboratory that attracted him. He’d just pluck up the box and nip out the way he’d come. If he heard the doctor or Pule ascending the stairs, he’d simply backtrack to an upper floor and wait for them to enter the laboratory, then bolt for the street.

He squinted into the darkness, fearful that Narbondo would surprise him again by entering through the passage in the wainscot. It wouldn’t do to actually confront the doctor or, for that matter, his loathsome accomplice. He hauled a chair from beneath the table of the pea hen and jammed it under the door latch, wiggling it for good measure.

Waving the candle in the direction of the box, he sent shadows leaping and flickering up the walls in the yellow light. Before him, lying in the pile where they’d fallen, were the grisly, skull-less remains of Joanna Southcote. The sight of them petrified Kraken, froze him into a wide-eyed, half-bent statue. For while he watched, the bones seemed to shudder and collect themselves, half rise, and then collapse again into a disordered pile, making the clacking sound of dominoes.

Quaking, Kraken groped inside his coat for a flask of gin, half of which he poured down his open throat in a hot, leafy rush. The bones made another effort, no more successful than the last, one of the backward hands skittering around the floor like a crab before the whole loose business went limp.

Kraken vowed not to look at it. That was best. If it managed to stand, he could outrun it, or beat it to pieces with the poker that lay now atop the hearth. He was damned if he would allow a heap of bones to frighten him off. He took a last, healthy gulp of the gin, grimaced, and snatched the box from atop the piano. He turned, took a step toward the door, and discovered in horror that the door latch, very softly and slowly, was turning. He heard a shuffling of feet, and saw the faint orange glow of a hooded lantern cast across the threshold.

Kraken backed slowly toward the far wall. What if it were Willis Pule? What if it were Narbondo himself? It would mean the end of him, sure enough, and of any attempt to restore himself in the eyes of Captain Powers and poor Jack Owlesby. Whoever stood without wrestled with the stubborn handle, giving off any attempt at secrecy and wrenching at the thing. Curses rang out in the peculiar, high voice of Willis Pule. There was the sound of a foot kicking the bottom of the door.

Kraken jabbed desperately at the wainscot with his free hand, searching for the moving panel. He pummeled the panels up and down either side, sobbing for breath, listening to the thudding on the door behind him and the sudden scrape of the chair as it pushed across the floor.

With a startling suddenness the smooth panel lurched inward, paused, then slowly swung to. Kraken threw his shoulder against it in desperation. His candle tipped and drowned in its own melted wax as he tumbled into a cold and dusty passage, the panel closing behind him. He lay on the musty floor, stifling his wheezing breath, watching through the diminishing crack the chair with which he’d wedged the door tumble inward, followed by the headlong rush of Willis Pule. Utter darkness followed, but through the wainscot came a sudden raging voice, then Pule’s voice even louder, maniacal. A crashing of chairs, the shouting of curses, and the sudden firing of a pistol gave way to silence. Kraken beat his pockets for a match.

A
t the sound of the pistol shot, Langdon St. Ives and Hasbro froze on the stairs. They had determined to remain in the street. The alley door of the house was nailed shut. Any thieves - whoever they might be - in the house above would have to exit through the street door. There was precious little to be gained in yammering up the stairs after them, bursting unarmed into a room full of desperate men. They’d simply wait at the bottom of the stairs and confront anyone who came out with the box. Whatever odd machinations had brought about the appearance of the evangelist were none of their business.

But the pistol shot put an edge on the mystery. It was possible that Godall had been too concerned with the collection of villains; they seemed bent on exterminating each other. A door slammed above. Another shot banged out, followed by a howl of pain. A door crashed open. Wild shouting ensued. St. Ives bolted down the few stairs they’d ascended, leaping along at Hasbro’s heels. At the bottom landing, just inside the street door, Hasbro ripped open the door of a tiny room - an oversize closet from the look of it - and the two men tumbled in, closing the door but for a crack through which they had a tolerably good view of the stairs. Down those same stairs tumbled, head over heels, a howling Willis Pule, who whumped down onto the landing and lay still. St. Ives could just see Pule’s face. There was something peculiarly wrong with it. In the feeble light that shone through the open street door, Pule’s face appeared to be a ghastly shade of pallid green, as if he were the victim, perhaps, of a tropical disease.

“What on earth…” began St. Ives, staring at the ruined face in horror, when behind him, against the paneled wall of the closet, came such a fearful banging and moaning that Hasbro leaped with a shout against St. Ives’ back, and the two of them would have catapulted out onto the landing if Pule’s body hadn’t blocked the door.

St. Ives gripped the shoulder of the frightened Hasbro and found himself shrieking involuntarily into his ear as the oaken panel slid back slowly to reveal the ghastly, inhuman, eyeless face of a tottering corpse, dank, clotted hair thrusting out around it like a hideous aura. A fetid odor of decay blew out, and another face peered over the shoulder of the first ghoul - the mouths of both working and smacking like cattle chewing cud.

A light glowed behind the things, revealing, impossibly, a dancing collection of the grim apparitions, in the middle of which stood a wild-eyed Bill Kraken, looking mightily like a corpse himself, frozen in mid-stride, a piercing, inhuman shriek issuing from his open mouth. The first of the ghouls, heaving breaths rattling from his throat, his hands clutching, utterly blind, lurched forward into Hasbro. St. Ives was propelled against the door, pinned by Pule, who flopped a bit farther out onto the landing. St. Ives pushed, the ghoul howling in his ear. Hasbro reached past St. Ives, pounding with both fists on the door. Pule budged farther; St. Ives shoved again - threw his shoulder into it; and Shiloh the evangelist, flanked by the turbaned man on the one side and the earless man on the other, appeared suddenly on the stairs, the old man carrying a Keeble box in one hand and an open Gladstone bag stuffed with bones in the other. The evangelist paused, squinted with obvious amazement at the trapped St. Ives, who was pressed against the door jamb by a closetful of gibbering ghouls, and shouted at his two companions. The two hurled themselves against the door, forcing it shut in the face of St. Ives’ protestations. The whump of Pule being rolled once more against the door followed, and St. Ives turned to see Hasbro fending off a score of shambling ghouls in various states of decomposition, the lot of them jigging and jibbering pointlessly as if they were marionettes dangled by a lunatic puppeteer. St. Ives smashed against the door, fighting for footing, and inch by inch once again shoved an inert Pule across the landing. He squeezed out, tripping over Pule’s legs, and stumbled against the far wall. In a nonce, Hasbro was out beside him, wheezing and doubled up.

Two arms shot through the hiatus. A shoulder followed along with a foot, two ghouls trying simultaneously to squeeze out through the door. St. Ives placed his foot beneath the knob and shoved, thinking to trap the struggling creatures within the closet. But he suddenly remembered poor Kraken, and heard, it seemed to him, a smothered, purposeful cry from within. He abandoned his efforts, turning instead to the supine Pule. In a trice, St. Ives hauled him away. St. Ives and Hasbro sprang onto the stairs, and a veritable rush of ghouls hobbled, leaped, and crawled through the open closet door, the lot of them fleeing into the open night. Among them, slit-eyed and gibbering like a ghoul himself, strode Bill Kraken.

“Stop him!” shouted St. Ives, but Hasbro could do no more than his master to intercept the determined student of philosophy, who, shielded by ghouls, raced into the street and away, clutching in his arms a Keeble box. Hasbro and St. Ives followed, caught up in a tangle of animated corpses, some few of which had already begun to wind down and collapse - one on the stoop, one across the curb, another on the pavement, his legs splayed out like scissors as if they had tried to walk two directions at once.

Around the corner, kicking up sparks from the pavement and clattering like an express train in the still night, drove the evangelist’s brougham, dead away down the center of the street, bowling through a little knot of ghouls that flew like ninepins. One door hung open, and the turbaned ghoul, his cap knocked back off his head but hanging yet by a chin strap, dangled out the door. He bounced along until the brougham canted round the distant corner, where he sailed out onto the roadway and rolled to a stop in the gutter. St. Ives could do nothing but watch the coach race away, carrying within it his aerator box. Lord knew what the old man thought he had.

A shout sounded from behind them, down the street in the direction from which the brougham had just appeared. And there, limping along slowly, were Theophilus Godall and Captain Powers, the Captain clutching a bloody shoulder.

“Shot, by God!” shouted St. Ives to no one, and not stopping to wonder why it was that his two stalwart friends should have suddenly appeared out of the night. He and Hasbro reached them simultaneously, and found, happily, that the Captain’s shoulder had merely been creased by a bullet fired haphazardly by the old evangelist when the two had sought to grab the reins and stop the brougham’s escape.

It was an hour later. The company slumped in chairs in Captain Powers’ shop, before the general furor of the night’s doings drained out of them and it was revealed to St. Ives what the second Keeble box had contained. St. Ives, in turn, related how in the tumult Kraken had fled once again into the City, seemingly deranged by his bout with the ghouls.

“So that,” muttered St. Ives, “is what the man stole.” He shook his head. “Do you suppose he was trapped in the passage with the ghouls ever since? No wonder he was gibbering mad.”

Godall shook his head and related to St. Ives some few of the intrigues of the past three days. “I knew,” said Godall, “that a good number of bodies had been brought to the house. Narbondo must have used the passage as a sort of storehouse. Fancy them all coming round together like that. This is a strange business.”

“Cut and run; that’s my motto,” said the Captain, poking gingerly at his shoulder.

Hasbro shook his head. “The papers will be full of this,” he said. “We’ve stirred up a curious nest of bugs, and not a single gain was made in the process.”

No one in the shop could deny it as they sat tired and hungry and watching the early morning sky pale with the dawn. The entire business had become woefully complicated, and the Pratlow Street failure took some of the pleasure out of St. Ives’ meeting, after fifteen long years, Nell Owlesby.

The arrival of Parsons, pounding on the door hours later, did little to enliven St. Ives’ mood. He cursed himself for having told the man that he could be contacted through Powers’ shop, and it took a half hour of lying before the scientist could be dissuaded from knocking up Keeble himself. Even Parsons’ revelation that the blimp had been sighted over Limerick, looping over the Irish west coast in a long half elipse that would aim it, they were certain, toward London - even that merely added to the general confusion and early morning muddle. Somehow, it seemed to them, the arrival of Birdlip would be the natural culmination of the tangle of plots they’d become involved in, that the appearance of the blimp, a dot in the distant sky, would place a period, an end mark, to their confused and fruitless efforts to slay the various dragons.

It was hours after dawn, the streets long since awake, when there came a new and furious pounding on the door, startling St. Ives, who dozed in a stuffed chair. His companions were awake, making and discarding plans. Hasbro threw the door open, and there stood Winnifred Keeble, disheveled and tired. “Jack’s coming round,” she said, then turned and hurried back across the street, the collected members of the Trismegistus Club hauling on coats and following in her wake.

SIXTEEN