Homunculus (11 page)

The front of the desk fell forward on its hinge and cracked him in the head. Loosed from the interior was an assortment of unidentifiable artifacts: an India rubber face with immense, yawning lips; a stupendous corset hung with whalebone stays and brass hooks; a leather halter of some inconceivable sort, attached to a block and tackle affair as if the halter and its wearer could be suspended, perhaps, from the ceiling; and finally, a brass orb the size of a grapefruit from which issued a quick spray of sparks. The butler and the old man went for the orb simultaneously, but the butler snatched it up first and pushed the other away, shoving the orb back into the fallen desk and slamming the front. What on earth, wondered St. Ives, bewildered as much by the unfathomable litter as by the flopping man it now entangled.

The butler, enraged, latched onto the back ofthe old man’s cloak, preventing him from wading in to the injured man’s assistance. “My child,” the old man sobbed. “My boy! My sweet…” But the sentence was left unfinished. Chimney pipe, his face frosted with a vacant grin, shoved his pistol into his coat, bent over, and hauled the man free, dragging him out of the tangle of paraphernalia by his ears, one of which tore off in his hand. He pitched it down in disgust and kicked his victim in the side of the head. No blood flowed from the rent where the ear had been severed. Mystery upon mystery. St. Ives began to think of the alley behind the house. He’d have to remember not to run toward the walled end. No one was going to give him two pounds six for the clock. No one was going to give him anything at all for the clock. His hope was that the old man - whoever he was - and his two strange charges were of more immediate concern to the butler and his vicious accomplice, who, at that moment, was methodically beating the daylights out of the collapsed, half-earless man on the floor.

St. Ives disengaged his arm, surprisingly easily as it turned out, and edged around a chair, holding the heavy clock in both hands.

“Get these scum out of here,” hissed the butler at the old man, who mewled helplessly, clinging to his turbaned friend for support. “Don’t bring them here again. Your privilege doesn’t extend that far.”

The old man pulled himself straight, threw his cloak back theatrically, and began to rage in a hoarse voice about damnation. St. Ives disappeared into the kitchen to the sound of the butler’s cursing and to shouts about who would teach whom about damnation. He sprinted for the back door, but met, halfway there, the leering figure of the toothless, befloured cook, slapping the flat edge of her cleaver onto her meaty palm.

St. Ives wasn’t inclined to chat. He bowled straightaway into her, and the hastily swung cleaver rang off the iron case of the clock, dead between St. Ives’ curled fingers. He shouted inadvertently, dashing the clock to the floor, and burst out into the yard, gathering the hem of his greatcoat with his right hand and leaping over the stile into the alley, loping toward its exit a hundred feet down, lost now in a swirl of fog. And as he ran, not daring to look back, thinking of the pistol in chimney pipe’s coat, he understood suddenly who the bully was - could see that same malevolent face outlined in Keeble’s garret window, a crack of lightning illuminating the rainy night sky around it.

SIX

BETRAYAL

C
aptain Powers’ shop was dense with tobacco smoke - indicative, thought St. Ives, of the serious nature of the night’s business. Quantity of pipe smoke, he mused, was proportionate to the nature and intensity of the thoughts of the smoker. The Captain, especially lost in deep musings, puffed so regularly at his pipe that smoke encircled his head like clouds around the moon. They were waiting for Godall, who arrived, finally, laden with beer. St. Ives had told no one of Birdlip’s newly discovered manuscript. There was too much to say to have to repeat the story singly to the members. At eight o’clock, by mutual, nodded consent, the Trismegistus Club came to order.

“I’ve got something interesting in the post,” said St. Ives, sipping from a pint glass and waving the sheaf of foolscap at his companions. “Owlesby’s notebooks, or part of them.”

Keeble, who until that moment had seemed peculiarly withdrawn, bent forward in anticipation. And Jack, sitting beside him, seemed to slump in his chair, fearful, perhaps, that some unwholesome revelation about his unfortunate father was in the offing. Kraken shook his bandaged head sadly. Only the Captain seemed unmoved, and St. Ives supposed that his being unacquainted with Owlesby explained his apparent indifference.

“It would be easiest,” St. Ives insisted, “if I merely read a bit of it aloud. I’m not the chemist or biologist that Owlesby was, and I was unacquainted with the peculiar hold that Narbondo apparently had on him. And that, I fear, was part and parcel of Owlesby’s death.”

Godall closed his left eye and squinted at him at the mention of Narbondo, and St. Ives was struck of a sudden with the peculiar notion that Godall’s look reminded him of something - of being elbowed into the gutter by the nameless old man in the cloak. St. Ives ignored it and went on, warming to his task. “So here it is, in Owlesby’s own hand. There’s too much of it altogether, but the last pages are the telling part.” He cleared his throat and began:

“We’ve had the worst sort of luck all week: Short and Kraken brought in a fresh cadaver - took him off the gibbet themselves - and there he lies, full of fluids but stony dead despite it. If we can’t find a carp and a fresh gland, he’ll decompose before we have a chance at him. A terrible waste. My great fear is that all of this will come to nothing but murder and horror. But I’ve taken the first steps. That’s a lie. First steps be damned. I’m halfway along the road by now, and it’s twisted and turned so that there’s no chance of finding my way back.

“We ate in Limehouse last night. I wore a disguise -a putty nose and a wig - but Narbondo laughed it to ruin. There’s no hope of disguising that damned hump of his. I’m not much given to metaphor, but it seems harder by the day to disguise my own loathsome deformities. It’s the thing in the box, the bottle imp, that’s caused it. If a man weren’t tempted, he wouldn’t fall.

“But such talk is defeatist. That’s what it is. Eternal life is within my grasp. If only we hadn’t bungled so badly in Limehouse. The costerlad was a jewel - wicked as they come. It was a service to dispose of him. I swear it. Damn Narbondo’s bungling. We’ve had a tremendous pair of shears forged at Gleason’s (they think me a tree surgeon) and can snip the head off…”

“And there the narrative breaks,” said St. Ives.

“He was interrupted, perhaps,” said the Captain.

Godall shook his head. “He couldn’t bear it, gentlemen. He couldn’t write the word.”

St. Ives glanced up at Jack, who would have been a child himself at the time that his father had written the confessions. He might be better off not hearing this. God bless Sebastian Owlesby’s doubts, thought St. Ives. They’re at once the horror of this and the man’s only redemption.

“Read the rest,” said Jack stoutly.

St. Ives nodded and resumed the narrative:

“The lad couldn’t have been above seven or eight. There was a fog, and not enough light from the streetlamps to amount to a thing. He was bound for the corner of Lead Street and Drake, I think, to buy a bucket of beer - for someone. For his father, I suppose. He had a pumpkin jack o’lantern, of all things, in his left hand, and the bucket in his right. And we walked in shadow twenty paces behind. The street was silent as it was dark. Narbondo carried the shears from Gleasons. He’d have me along, he said, to share the glory, and would have none of my waiting in the alley off Lead Street in the dogcart, which was, I still insist, the only sensible course.

“So there we were, a musty wind cold as a fish blowing up off the Thames, and the mists swirling deeper by the moment, and the grinning face of that lit jack o’lantern swinging back and forth and back and forth, its face appearing with a dull orange glow at the top of the arc of each swing. There was a sudden gust out of an unsheltered alley, and the lad’s lantern blew out. He disappeared in the night, and we could hear his bucket clank against the cobbles. Narbondo hopped forward. I grasped at his cloak to stop him - I could see the black truth in it, as that yellow, toothy light had blinked out in the pumpkin and on in my head - in my soul.

“I flew after him, and the two of us surprised the lad in the act of relighting his unlikely lantern. He stood up, a scream clipped off by those ghastly shears.

“The rest of it is a nightmare. That I fled out of Limehouse and returned in safety to my cabinet is testimony to the existence of dumb luck (if surviving that night of horror can be considered in any way lucky) and to the all-obscuring darkness and fog. It was as if evil had precipitated out of the solution of night and hid me like a veil. Narbondo wasn’t so lucky, but the beating he took couldn’t have been a result of his crime. If they’d known it, he wouldn’t have been thrown into the river alive. Perhaps he was beaten because of what he is, like a man kills a rat or a roach or a spider.

“So the murder was for naught. And the corpse from the gibbet lies moldering on the slab. Narbondo will go out again tonight - we must have the serum.”

St. Ives paused in his reading to drain half a bottle of ale. The Captain sat paralyzed in his chair, stone-faced. “Owlesby,” said St. Ives hurriedly, glancing first at the Captain, then at Jack, “was out of his wits. What he accomplished - what he committed - can’t be justified, but it can be explained. And in the most roundabout way can be excused - forgiven at least if you keep in mind the poison that had trickled into his soul. His discussion of the night in Limehouse is accurate - to a degree. But he dissembled throughout. That much is clear. He admits it in the pages that follow. And as I say, what he admits is all the more horrifying, but it explains a great deal. Poor Nell!”

The Captain seemed to stiffen even more at the sound of the name, and he clanked his heavy glass onto the wooden arm of his Morris chair, brown ale sloshing out onto the oak. St. Ives noted that Kraken had disappeared during the course of the narrative. Poor man, thought St. Ives, searching for his place in the journals. Even after fifteen years, the story of his master’s decline is too fresh for him. But the story had to be told. There was nothing for it but to go on, now that he’d launched out:

“I’m possessed by the most evil aching of the head - such that my eyes seem to press down to the size of screwholes, so that I see as through a telescope turned wrong end to. Laudanum alone relieves it, but fills me with dreams even more evil than the pain in my forebrain. I’m certain that the pain is my due - that it is a taste of hell, and nothing less. The dreams are full of that Limehouse night, of the toothy grin of that damned pumpkin, swinging swinging swinging in the fog. And I can feel myself decay, feel my tissues drying and rotting like a beetle-eaten fungus on a stump, and my blood pounds across the top of my skull. I can see my own eyes, wide as half crowns and black with death and decay, and Narbondo ahead with that ghastly shears. I pushed him along! That’s the truth of it. I railed at him, I hissed. I’d have that gland, is what I’d have, and before the night was gone. I’d hold in my hand my salvation.

“And when he failed, when he ran down East India Dock Road in that stooped half hop, terrified, it was I who set them on him. It was I who cried out to stop him. He little knows it. He’d outdistanced me. He was certain it was the police who shouted. And when they were beating him, by God I wasn’t slack. I was a ruin of failure and loathing and rot as I stamped on his hands and helped those drunken toughs drag him into the river where it splashed and roiled and slammed itself to fury below the Old Stairs, and I hoped by God to see him dead and picked by fishes.

“But there I was unlucky. Like the ghost at the feast, he came unlooked for in the night as I sat in a waking horror in the cabinet, listening to the thing in the box, staring, half expecting the tread of feet on the stair that would announce the end, the gibbet, the headsman’s axe. There it came. Three in the morning it was. Deadly silent. A tramp, tramp, tramp on the wooden stairs - very heavy - and a shadow across the curtain. A hunched shadow. The door fell open on its hinge, and the hunchback stood against a scattering of lights and a clearing sky with such a look of abomination about him that his collapse onto the tiles failed to eradicate it - just as it failed to eradicate my horror of him.

“I should have killed him. I should have slit his throat. I should have cut out the toad under his fifth rib and put it in a cage. But I didn’t. Fear kept me from it. Fear, perhaps, of my own evil. It seemed to me that his face was my own, that he and I were one, that Ignacio Narbondo had somehow drawn part of me in with him, consumed the only part of me that had ever been worth a farthing, and had left a strengthless, malignant pudding, poured into the chair where I sat until half past ten the next morning.

“And it was thus that Nell found me. I begged her to kill me. I hadn’t the courage to perform the deed. I pleaded. I told her of the costerlad. I swore at the same time that I was done with the pursuit - that the creation of life itself wasn’t worth hell. But I lied. The thing in the box can arrest entropy. He can separate tepid water into ice and steam if he likes. He can animate the carcass of a rat dead in a wall for months and dance it about the room like a marionette. He’s prodigiously old, and the only consequence of his thwarting time is his shrunken state. But he must be kept in a box.

“My fitting Keeble’s clever structure with a screen through which I can communicate with him has led, I fear, to my own decay. I can’t say just how I’m bartering with him - knowledge for freedom. If he could but find his craft and a pilot of sufficient stature to navigate it, he’d be lost among the stars in a moment. But that won’t come to pass. Not until I have what I possess -
we
, I should say, for the hunchback has recovered, and swears he’ll return to Limehouse tonight if the streets are hidden by a sufficiently thick blanket of murk.

“Shall I go with him? Will he draw me along at his heels like a shadow, a daily more fitting shadow? Or will nightfall bring an end to an unhappy and unnatural existence? I can’t for the life of me imagine waking on the morrow. For the first time in my life the morning is cloaked in black.”