Homunculus (8 page)

“Dorothy Keeble?” he asked when the girl was some few feet off. Her jersey dress, dark red with ivory lace, narrowed in around her waist in such a way as to make Pule light-headed. She regarded him curiously. Her skin was almost transparent it was so light, and her hair, impossibly black, fell around her shoulders in loose curls. Pule was gripped by an urge to touch it, to fondle the skin of her face, which was, compared to his own, like ivory next to wormwood. He struggled to control himself. “We have, I believe, a mutual friend.”

“Have we?” she asked.

“Jack Owlesby,” said Pule, reciting his prepared lie. “We were in school together. Great friends”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Mr.…”

“Pule,” came the reply. “Willis Pule.”

“Shopping for buns, were you, Mr. Pule? I won’t keep you then. I’ll tell Jack I’ve met you.” She started on her way, and Pule turned to follow, suddenly angry at her obvious indifference.

“I’m a student of arcane history,” he said. “I studied at Leipzig and Munich”

“I’m sure that’s very nice,” said Dorothy, hurrying along. “I’ll tell Jack. He’ll be happy to know what you’ve been up to. Don’t let me interfere with your errand.” She nodded at him and then ignored him. Pule fumed.

“Perhaps you’d take a cup of tea with me?”

“I’m terribly sorry”

“Tomorrow, then”

“I’m afraid not. Thank you awfully.”

“Why not?”

Dorothy gave him a look of surprise. “What a question! Won’t my simple refusal suffice?”

“No, it won’t,” said Pule, clutching at her arm. Dorothy jerked away, prepared to slam him with her bag. His skin seemed to be writhing as he stood gaping at her on the pavement. He sputtered, unable to speak.

“Good day to you,” said Dorothy.

“You’ll see me again,” cried Pule at her back. “And so will your father.” She walked on more quickly, not taking the bait.

“Wait until I’ve played my hand!” Pule yelled. And then he caught himself. He gasped for air and leaned against the brick of a row house. It would do no good to lose his temper now. He would wait. In time - soon - she would see reason. He glanced at a dark window. The sight of his face reflected in it didn’t compose him. His hair was awry, and his mouth, normally sensitive and aloof, was contorted in a rictus of loathing. He made a conscious effort to relax, but his face seemed to have frozen in the grip of a maniacal passion.

A scrawny, half-hairless cat wandered out just then from under a fence. Pule stared at it, hating it. He snatched the cat up by the neck and held it kicking at arm’s length. He sloughed off his jacket, letting it fall down his right arm to envelop the struggling beast, then shoved the burden under his arm and strode away in the direction of Narbondo’s cabinet, visions of the cat dismembered flickering across his mind like etchings on a copper plate.

S
t. Ives let himself in through the front door of the Bertasso Hotel on Belgrave and tramped up two flights of carpeted steps to his room. The red wallpaper, rampant with stylized fleurs-de-lis, almost made his hair stand on end. He despised the current fashion in gaudy furnishings. It was little wonder society was going to bits, surrounding itself as it did with fakery and ugliness. He was beginning to sound like his father. But it was entirely rational - empirical study would bear him out. Men were products of that with which they surrounded themselves. And men of substance could hardly spring from the cracker-box, factory-made trash they cluttered their homes and inns with. He was in a foul mood, he realized, having played the fool all afternoon. The clock gag probably wouldn’t work. He’d be beaten by hired toughs. He’d have been wise to solicit the help of the Captain, who was, admittedly, far more worldly wise than he.

St. Ives himself had strayed within the confines of a house of prostitution only once, when, as a student in Heidelberg, he and a friend wandered into a questionable district after a night of revelry. He hadn’t said a thing at the time. Drink had that effect on him - it thickened his tongue, made him mute. He’d merely grinned foolishly, and the grin had been correctly interpreted by an emaciated old woman in a robe who led him to a room full of painted women. “They were big girls,” his artist friend had said, accurately and with an air of satisfaction as the two of them had returned to their flat near the university. “Yes,” St. Ives had responded, able to add nothing to the pronouncement. Perhaps that was the key here. If he’d arrived drunk and leering on the doorstep of the house on Wardour Street he’d have been admitted. But now he’d have to depend upon masquerading as a clock repair man. The next morning would tell the tale.

He pushed his door open and discovered on a little circular table by his bed a wrapped packet, which had, apparently, just arrived by post. He tore it open and yanked out a sheaf of paper, a hundred fifty pages or so of foolscap, covered in tight handwriting - recognizable handwriting. He sat down hard on his bed. He held in his hands loose papers from the notebooks of Sebastian Owlesby, lost these fifteen years past. He looked at the envelope. It had been posted in London. But by whom? He leafed through it, page by page.

Kraken hadn’t exaggerated. Not a bit. There were discussions of vivisection, of the animation of corpses. It was Owlesby’s self-documented decline into madness - a day-by-day account, describing how, some few weeks before his death, he implored his sister to kill him. His experimentation had taken a nasty turn, urged on by the self-seeking Ignacio Narbondo until, in late May of 1861, his ghastly experimentation had required the brain of a living man, and Owlesby and an unnamed accomplice had clipped with a great pair of bone cutters the head from a sleeping indigent in St. James’ Park and borne the bloody prize home in a sack.

Owlesby had been certain that the homunculus had the power to arrest entropy, to reverse, at least superficially, the process of decay, and had managed to make use of it at the expense of his own sanity. The reasons for his decline were vague. He himself only half understood them. St. Ives became convinced that it was the decay of Owlesby’s soul, the slide into deviltry, that hammered away at the shell of sanity until it began to crumble.

Moments of rationality had staggered Owlesby. Nell must kill him if he lapsed again into madness. He had withdrawn his interests in the West African Gem Company in the form of a great emerald, his son Jack’s inheritance, and had prevailed upon Keeble to build a box to house it - a box almost identical to the lead-lined cube that held the homunculus.

The notebooks rambled. Owlesby fell into irrationality. There was mention of a second murder, of a brush with Scotland Yard, of the departing of the faithful Kraken, and in the end, of the necessity of obtaining certain glands - youthful glands, and of a nightmarish journey one foggy night into Limehouse. Narbondo had been pitched into the Thames and had swum to the opposite shore. Owlesby had prayed for the hunchback’s death, but fate wasn’t so kind. They’d have to try again, perhaps feed a stray child opiates. The entries stopped, a day before Owlesby’s death. St. Ives was aghast. He dropped the papers onto the tabletop as if they had become suddenly the dried, scaly carcass of a rat. At the end of the journal, in a different hand - a woman’s hand - were the words, “I gave the box to Birdlip,” and nothing more.

St. Ives was astonished. The box to Birdlip! But which box? The emerald box? Which of the two, the emerald or the homunculus, was aloft in Birdlip’s blimp? And who, besides himself, was aware of the whereabouts of the box? Narbondo, certainly, would be interested. St. Ives thought about it. The hunchback would kill to know where the box lay. What had all of this to do with Narbondo’s lurking in the shadows of Jermyn Street opposite the Captain’s shop? Nothing? Impossible. St. Ives knuckled his brow. Strange things were afoot - that was sure. But as compelling as the mystery of Birdlip’s descent and of the blimp’s alien passenger might be, St. Ives was doubly determined to find the thing’s spacecraft. Failing that, he’d return to Harrogate straightaway to outfit his own craft with the oxygenator box that Keeble was even then working away on. First things first, after all. For fifteen years Birdlip had taken care of himself, and apparently, one of the boxes. He could be trusted to carry on. But it was a damnable and enticing mystery nonetheless. St. Ives packed tobacco into his pipe, held a match to it, and puffed away, the rising clouds of smoke bumping against the low ceiling and flattening in a general haze.

“P
eas here!” shouted Bill Kraken, thumping along down Haymarket toward Orange Street. It was nearing midnight, and Haymarket and Regent Street were mobbed with an assortment of revelers, made up in a large part by prostitutes on the arms of newly met gentlemen, strolling out of the Argyle Rooms and the Alhambra Music Hall. The weather was startlingly warm. A sort of trade wind had blown for three days and the air was tropical and clean. A wash of stars shone overhead, and the effect of the weather and the night sky and the coming of summer seemed to lend the city a breezy spirit.

Kraken could feel it himself. He was almost jaunty with it, and had sat into the morning reading metaphysics in a tuppenny copy of Ashbless’
Account of London Philosophers
that he’d bought at Seven Dials. The bugs that infested its spine had reduced a good portion of the Morocco cover to dust, but had, apparently, failed to reduce the philosophers themselves. Kraken had the volume in his coat pocket. There was no telling how many idle hours he would spend before he discovered what he sought.

An enormous full moon, harvest orange in the warm sky, hung directly overhead, grinning down on the throng and illuminating the white satin bonnets and silk coats of courtesans and the grimed faces of shoe blacks and crossing sweepers. Music tumbled out of cafes as if it were blood coursing through the arteries and veins of the West End, and even Kraken, tired from a day that had added miles to his wanderings about London, felt as if his own blood pulsed to the heat and noise of the moonlit street. The scent of coffee whirled past him in a rush, and four French girls, wide-eyed and chattering among themselves, stepped gaily from the door of a Turkish divan, nearly treading on his toes. For a moment he considered addressing them. But the moment passed, and just as well. What would they say to a pea pod man? Nothing he’d want to hear; that was certain. But the night was warm and almost magic with suggestion, and his mission on behalf of Langdon St. Ives and Captain Powers had been faithfully if unsuccessfully executed since eight that same morning.

He leered momentarily at his reflection in the unlit window of a hatter’s shop and pulled the bill of his cap down over his left eye, considered it, then cocked it back onto his head with the air of a man satisfied with himself and faintly contemptuous of the rest of the populace.

Beside him materialized the face of a grinning woman. She’d been there for a bit, he was certain, but he’d just that moment focused on her. He winked. In his coat pocket, such as it was, lay a tin flask of gin he’d bought from a river vendor under Blackfriars Bridge. It was two thirds empty - or one third full, from the long view. It was a good night for optimism. Kraken winked at the reflection again and held the bottle aloft, raising his eyebrows in a silent query.

The woman nodded and smiled. She hadn’t, Kraken noticed, any front teeth. He poured a warm, juniper-tinged trickle down his throat, smacked his lips, and turned, handing across the flask. What were a few teeth? Several of his own were gone. She wasn’t, taken altogether, utterly unappealing. That is to say, there was something about her, in the pleasant pudding of her cheeks, perhaps, or in the way she fleshed out the tattered merino gown she wore so thoroughly - almost as if she’d been poured into it from a bucket. A large bucket, to be sure. She’d seen better days in some distant time. But haven’t we all, thought Kraken, buoyed by the Socratic wisdom of the London Philosophers.

The woman handed the tin back empty. She had a nose like a peach. She caught Kraken’s forearm in the crook of her meaty elbow, pinioned it, and hauled him away down Regent toward Leicester Square in a fit of romantic cackling, lifting the lid from the peapot and plunging her free right hand in among the peas. Let her eat, thought Kraken generously. He patted her arm.

“Do you know anything about the stars?” he asked, settling on an appropriate subject.

“Heaps,” she replied, dipping once again into the peas.

“There aren’t but a few,” said Kraken, gazing heavenward. “Sixty or eighty. The heavens are a great mirror, you see. It’s a matter of atmosphere, is what it is, of the reflected light of the sun, which…”

“A looking glass, is it? Heaven?”

“In a manner of speaking, miss. The sun, you see, and the moon…”

“A bleedin’ looking glass? The moon? You’ve been sufferin’, love, haven’t you?” She steered him down Coventry past a line of cafes. Kraken searched for the right words. The concept was a broad one for someone less schooled in the scientific and metaphysical arts than he. “It’s astronomy is what it is.”

“The moon’s nothing but astronomy,” agreed the woman, prying among her remaining teeth for a peapod string. “Drives them all mad.” And she indicated with a sweep of her hand the entire street.

“The
‘spiritus vitae cerebri,’”
intoned Kraken agreeably, “is attracted to the moon in the same manner as the needle of the compass is attracted toward the Pole.” He was proud of his storehouse of quotations from Paracelsus, although they were quite likely wasted here. The woman gave his arm a squeeze, screwed her face up awfully so that her eyes seemed to disappear behind the flesh of her nose. She gouged Kraken playfully with a bent finger.

Before them was a lit house, on the door of which hung a sign reading, “Beds to be had within” Kraken found himself in a state of mingled desire and regret, being dragged up the stoop and finally into a darkened room little bigger than a pair of end to end closets. He stumbled against a disheveled bed and collapsed onto his face, hunched over his peapot, the lid of which sailed off and clattered into the opposite wall.

The bedclothes wanted perfume - a tubful. He pushed himself up. “Miss,” he said, peering around him in the dark. A hand shoved him roughly down again. She was frolicsome, Kraken had to admit. “If you’ve a drop of something,” he began, wondering if he were reading aright the heavy breathing and shuffling behind him. A warm hand grasped the thong round his neck, and, as he once again began to clamber onto his elbows, yanked the peapot from under him - rather roughly, he thought. He collapsed sideways when his right hand flopped up to allow the pot to travel beneath it. He’d have to be a bit more forward. That was the ticket.