Homunculus (30 page)

THE RETURN OF BILL KRAKEN

W
illis Pule rushed up out of unconsciousness all in a moment, becoming aware suddenly of the sound of dripping water and of an almost numbing, clammy cold. He lay, it seemed to him, on a stone slab, or on pavement, and lying there had apparently made him overwhelmingly stiff and sore, for when he moved, his joints and muscles shrieked at him.

He opened his eyes. Far above him was a vaulted, cathedrallike ceiling of gray stone. Gaslamps hissed, each throwing out a diffused yellow radiance in a circle around it, precious little of the light drifting down toward the floor below. The room at first seemed to be enormous - a huge subterranean chamber hewn, possibly, out of rock. Pule craned his neck, wincing at a throbbing headache. The room wasn’t, he determined, as big as all that. It was built of cut stone. Vast porcelain sinks lined one wall, and beneath them sat rows of glass and wood cabinets, several of their doors standing ajar to reveal boxes of surgical instruments - bone saws and knives and clamps. I’m in a hospital, thought Pule groggily. But what sort of a hospital is it that freezes its patients and requires them to sleep on granite mattresses?

Another wall was nothing but great drawers like oversize file cabinets, one of which was pulled open. A foot thrust out sporting a broad paper tag tied to its big toe with a string. This was no hospital, Pule realized with sudden certainty. He was in a morgue. He was dead. But he couldn’t be dead, could he? He was cold as an oyster boat, something a dead man might be, but wouldn’t be conscious of. It occurred to him with a shock of horror that perhaps he’d died and somehow been reanimated by Dr. Narbondo for some despicable purpose.

He could remember the fight with the old evangelist: the pistol shot, grappling at the top of the stairs, being pushed headlong down them. He had no recollection at all of having landed, only of sailing through the air. But he must have landed, mustn’t he? Landed and worse. He was lying on a slab in the morgue, in among what appeared to be an army of corpses, most of which were laid out in a long line on the floor.

How desperate, he wondered, was his situation? On what grounds could he be arrested? None. He had, it’s true, booted his landlord in the ribs and broken the window in his room. But he had no identifying papers on his person. No one here would confront him with that. He was alive and free - that much was clear. But how in the world had he got into the morgue, and what sort of débâcle had occurred to bring about the death of so many people? And why, for God’s sake, did his hands seem to be tinted green?

On a nearby slab lay a man who was turned toward Pule. His mouth hung open and his eyes stared, as if in accusation. Pule stared back at him. It seemed as if he knew the man, as if he’d seen the face before, looking at him in much the same way. Of course he had - not two weeks before in Westminster Cemetery. Pule sat up, began to pass out, and lay back down, breathing heavily, one hand on his cold brow. He tried again, swinging his legs over the edge of the slab, slumping forward with his head between his knees until the rushing and pounding settled.

He squinted at the row of corpses, which waited as if in line to file back into the grave. All of them, every one, had come from Narbondo’s storeroom. There was the woman pulled drowned from the Thames; there was the child run down in the street by a wagon; there was the freshly hanged forger, his neck broken and twisted, stolen from the gibbet by the navvy who had deserted Pule on the night of the recovery of Joanna Southcote. But how on earth? Had the passageway been discovered? That would put an end to Narbondo’s freedom - to his life if they caught him. And what of himself? What of Willis Pule? If Narbondo were jailed, Pule would follow.

The room was empty. Pule slid from his slab and stood erect, swaying, faint. He bent over, resting his head for a moment on the cool slab before turning and shuffling toward the door. If he had to run, his goose was cooked. The line of corpses gaped at him -half of them deprived of the dubious joys of becoming members of the Church of the New Messiah, the other half of going into the unremunerative employ of Kelso Drake. Better, perhaps, to be returned to the ground. It was a far more restful business, anyway, was death.

Pule stopped inside the door, peering through into an ill-lit antechamber beyond, where a lone man sat at a desk, facing away. Pule backed off softly, slipping across to the cabinets and rooting quietly among the debris for a weapon - anything. A bone saw would do. In a moment he was back at the door, which creaked as he pushed it farther open and crept through. The man at the desk turned lazily, expecting, perhaps, a fellow worker back from dinner, but not, certainly, the grimacing corpse that confronted him, green and lurching and waving a bone saw - a corpse fresh from the slab, lately of the London streets, which were rife with rumors of the walking dead. The man arose, a shriek on his lips, and Pule was upon him. He slashed with the saw, the blade snapping almost immediately against the edge of the chair. Pule cast it to the floor, grasping a crystal paperweight from atop a heap of papers, leaping after the bloodied man who was halfway through the door, shrieking down a dark hallway. Pule clubbed at him blindly with the paperweight again and again. The man stumbled and fell. Pule found himself holding half the weight, the thing having cracked neatly in two against the man’s crushed skull.

Pule dropped the chunk of glass onto the floor, stepped across the dead man, and found himself afoot in the London night, heading for Wardour Street where Ignacio Narbondo awaited his fate. He had been promised Dorothy Keeble as a prize if his sojourn to Harrogate were successful. Well, success was a relative business at best. He’d been swindled of the emerald, swindled of his dreams. But before the day was out, he’d have what was his.

W
illiam Keeble sat in the corner of the room, his brandy untouched on a table beside him, his head in his hands. He looks done in, thought St. Ives, condemning himself for having been sporting in Harrogate while Dorothy Keeble was being kidnapped in London. The sun was high in the sky, lightening the shadowy room. Keeble rose to draw the drapes tighter, to dim the room, but Winnifred followed behind, pulling them entirely apart, flooding the room with spring sunlight.

“We’ve enough gloom,” she said simply. “We can study this out as easily in the light of day as we can in darkness.”

“There’s nothing to study out!” cried poor Keeble, gripped by a despair which was deepened by two sleepless nights. “If I hadn’t been so damned pig-headed with the engine, if I’d given it over, she’d be here now, wouldn’t she? And Jack’s head wouldn’t be split like a melon, would it? Drake would have pocketed another fortune - so what? Would I be any the worse off for another man’s fortune?”

“We all would…” began Theophilus Godall, rising out of a deep, tobacco-enshrouded study. But Keeble, it was clear, wasn’t keen on reason, on thrashing it out. He seemed to spiral down into himself and sat poking at the end of a sort of brass grapefruit, each poke precipitating from out of the opposite end the grinning rubber head of a man with enormous ears. Smoke and spark accompanied each issuance.

The device reminded St. Ives, somehow shamefully, of the strange pornographic debris that had fallen out of the drop-front desk at the house on Wardour Street. He found himself wondering how on earth it could - whether this wasn’t evidence of some deformity in his own rusted moral apparatus. He needed sleep. He could blame peculiarities of intellect on the lack of it. Then he remembered. The thing Keeble toyed innocently with was the odd device the old man had scrambled after and which had been snatched away from him by the butler. “What is that business?” he asked idly, pointing at the orb and the idiotic rubber man that shot from it.

“Some piece of rot left last night by that man Drake,” said Winnifred Keeble. “Heaven knows what it signifies. I would have thrown it in his face if I knew then what Jack has told us since. But I didn’t.”

“Kelso Drake?” muttered Godall, standing up. “He left this, did he?”

“He asked if William could build him a hundred of the same, then laughed like a man insane. He’s utterly daft, if you want my opinion. I wouldn’t wonder, though, if there’s not some darker purpose in this that I don’t see.” With that she left the room, up the stairs to the second floor where Jack lay, ministered by his aunt, Nell Owlesby.

Godall bent over St. Ives. “I don’t like the look of this at all.” he said.

“Of the device there?” asked St. Ives.

“Yes. It’s imported, of course, from France.”

“I didn’t know that,” said St. Ives. “What, exactly, is it used for?”

Godall shook his head darkly, as if the Queen’s English hadn’t the sorts of syllables necessary to reveal the grim truth of the matter. “We’ve got to get it away from Keeble. If Captain Powers awakens and sees it… well, he’s too good a man, too simple and uncorrupted to stand for it. He’ll want to beat the stuffing out of someone, and he’ll do it too, shoulder or no shoulder.”

“What in the world…” began St. Ives, looking once again at the curious device, which was covered, he could see, with nodules of some sort and a little porthole door that opened on either side to reveal what looked for all the world to be glass eyes, staring out from within the ball. Keeble stabbed at the end of it and out popped the rubber man, a puff of smoke and sparks erupting from extended, elephantine ears. A whistle of air poofed from rubber lips. The thing’s eyes whirled crazily, and in an instant he was gone, swallowed by the orb. The portholes clamped shut; the sparking stopped; and the thing sat silent and treacherous.

Godall shook his head again grimly. “It’s called a Marseilles Pinkle. You can imagine, I’m sure, what the thing is. Only the excesses of a southern climate could have produced it.”

“Ah,” said St. Ives, wondering at his own unworldliness.

“Keeble, blessedly, hasn’t a notion. It was widely used in the last century, after the abduction of young French and Italian noblewomen into white slavery. It was sent to their homes - an announcement, I fear, that no ransom would suffice to return them. Even the most coldhearted royalty have been known to fly head foremost into lunacy at the receiving of one, and, tragically, to disgrace themselves utterly with the device despite their grief. The gesture is wasted here, of course. It’s merely a sign of Drake’s monumental wantonness and conceit, probably intended in some roundabout and perverse way to parody poor Keeble’s attraction to toys. It’s also, perhaps, a mistake. It tells us something, I believe, of Dorothy’s whereabouts.”

Before the conversation had gone forward another inch, there came a terrible knocking at the door, which, when thrown back by a surprised Theophilus Godall, revealed Bill Kraken tottering on the stoop. “Kraken!” cried St. Ives from his chair, but the man had no opportunity to reply - he pitched forward like a dead man onto the carpet.

St. Ives and Godall sprang to his assistance, and even Captain Powers, who was startled out of sleep by St. Ives’ shout, bent in to help. It seemed entirely possible that Kraken’s sudden appearance betokened his return to right-mindedness.

“Give him air, mates,” said the Captain, loosening the dirty kerchief round Kraken’s neck. Then, with Godall supporting Kraken’s head, Captain Powers poured a thin stream of brandy into his mouth, which St. Ives contrived to open by pinching Kraken’s cheeks. “Damn me,” said the Captain in a low voice, and wrinkling his nose. “He’s covered with sewer muck, isn’t he? Get them shoes off him and pitch ’em out the door.”

The effects of the brandy were such, though, that Kraken awoke of his own accord as St. Ives wrestled with his shoes. Braced by a mouthful of the elixir, he managed to wave St. Ives away and remove the shoes himself. The result was a small improvement in his general odor, and he was obliged to remove one by one the rest of his outer garments and to suffer the Captain’s pouring a bucket of water over his head as he sat in a galvanized tub. Wrapped finally in shawls, he was recovered enough to be fit company. His clothes were sent out to be burnt.

“And so,” he was saying to the collected party - including Winnifred Keeble, who had come downstairs for news of her daughter — “I come around at last. It was them ghouls what set it off, is what I think - a state o’ shock is what it’s called. If you ain’t in one, then such a sight puts you there. If you’re already sufferin’ some sort of brain fever, then the particular sight of all them dead men has the opposite effect. A cure is what it is then.

“I studied it out myself when I come out of the George and Pigmy up in Soho. I’d been shouting, they tell me, about dead men slouched in the walls, when I was hit from behind by a pint mug that fell off the shelf. It was like I woke up - like I been out o’ my mind since bein’ beat on the head a week past, kind of in a mist, you know. Liquor didn’t help - sober was worse. And then I went and fetched away the Captain’s box - don’t ask me why. I don’t know. I been through hell, gentlemen, but I’ve come back now. That crack on the noggin in the Pigmy, comin’ on top o’ the corpses, was like a bracer. ‘Let me out,’ says I. ‘Show me the road!’ And off I went, straight as a die, and didn’t stop neither, till I drew up at Wardour Street - you know the house, sir.”

And with that he nodded at St. Ives, who did, indeed, know the house. They tried to waken Keeble, who snored in his chair, oblivious to Kraken’s timely return. He slept so profoundly, however, that their efforts were in vain. Kraken was in a state - much more the old Kraken, thought St. Ives, than the tired, morose Kraken who had drifted in and out of the front room in Captain Powers’ shop Thursday last. St. Ives listened in astonishment to Kraken’s strange tale - how when crouched in the passage off Narbondo’s laboratory he had overheard Pule and Shiloh exchanging words, Pule offering to give up his Keeble box if the old evangelist would see him right in the business of Dorothy Keeble - would use his influence to get Pule an audience with her, so to speak, at Drake’s house on Wardour Street. The old man had raged about sin and damnation. Shots had been fired and Shiloh had said that he’d just
take
the box, thank you. Then out Kraken had gone, into the depths of the passage where there was no end of dead men, dirt from the grave in their hair, and the lot of them stirring there in the candlelight and rising up and starting for him until he’d just about gone mad, and…