Homunculus (5 page)

William Keeble hunched over one, dangling his long fingers in at the mouth of the jar and pulling out a tangle of tobacco that glowed golden and black in the gaslight. He wiggled it into the bowl of his pipe, then peered in at it as if in wonder, working it over from as many angles as possible before setting it aflame. There was much in the gesturing to attract a man of science, and for a moment the poet within St. Ives grappled with the physicist, both of them clamoring for the floor.

St. Ives’ study at Heidelberg under Helmholtz had brought him into contact for the first time with an opthalmoscope, and he could remember having peered through the wonderful instrument into the eye of an artistic fellow student, a man given to long walks in the forest and to gazing at idyllic landscapes. Just as the operation began, the man had seen through an unshuttered window the drooping branches of a flowering pear, and a little tidepool of gadgetry that ornamented the interior of his eye, suddenly enlivened at the sight, danced like leaves in a brief wind. For a frozen moment after St. Ives removed the instrument and before a blink sliced the picture neatly off, the pear blossoms and a sketch of cloud drift beyond were reflected in the lens of the man’s eye. The conclusions St. Ives had drawn tended, he had to admit, toward the poetic, and were faintly at odds with the methods of scientific empiricism. But it was that suggestion of beauty and mystery which attracted him so overwhelmingly to the study of pure science and which - who could say? - compelled him to wander down the crooked avenues that might at last lead him to the stars.

The Captain’s tobacco canisters - no two of them alike, and gathered from distant parts of the globe - reminded him, open as they were, of a candy shop. The feeling was altogether appropriate and accurate. His own pipe had gone dead. Here was the opportunity of having a go at some new mixture. He rose and peeked into a Delft jar containing “Old Bohemia.”

“You won’t be disappointed in that,” came a voice from the door, and St. Ives looked up to see Theophilus Godall pulling off a greatcoat on the threshold. The street door slammed behind him, jerked shut by the wind. St. Ives nodded and tilted his head at the tobacco canister as if inviting Godall’s commentary. There was something about the man, St. Ives decided, that gave him an air of worldliness and undefined expertise - something in the shape of his aquiline nose or in the forthrightness of his carriage.

“That was originally mixed by a queen of the royal house of Bohemia, who smoked a pipe at precisely midnight each evening, then drank off a draught of brandy and hot water in a swallow and retired. It has medicinal qualities that can’t be disputed.” St. Ives could see no way out of smoking a bowl. He began to regret his inability to do justice to the rest of the queen’s example, then saw, out of the corner of his eye, Captain Powers emerge from the rear of his shop carrying a tray and bottles. Godall smiled cheerfully and shrugged.

Behind the Captain, cap in hand, plodded Bill Kraken, his hair a wonder of wind-whipped happenstance. Jack Owlesby bent in through the door behind Godall, bringing the number of people in the room to seven, including St. Ives’ man Hasbro, who sat reading a copy of the
Peloponnesian Wars
and sipped meditatively at a glass of port.

The Captain stumped across to his Morris chair and sat down, waving haphazardly at the collection ofbottles and glasses on the tray.

“Thank you, sir,” said Kraken, bending over a bottle of Laphroaig. “I’ll have a nip, sir, since you ask.” He poured an inch of it into a glass, tossing it off with a grimace. He seemed to St. Ives to be in a bad way - pale, disheveled. Hunted was the word for it. St. Ives regarded him narrowly. Kraken’s hand shook until, with a visible lurch, he shuddered from top to bottom, the liquor taking hold and supplying a steadying influence. Perhaps his pallid and quaking demeanor was a product of the absence of alcohol rather than of the presence of guilt or fear.

The Captain tapped on the countertop with his pipe bowl and the room fell silent. “I was inclined to believe, just like yourselves, that last Saturday night’s intruder was a garret thief, but that’s not the case.”

“No?” asked St. Ives, startled by the abrupt revelation. He’d had such a suspicion himself. There was too much deviltry afoot for it all to be random - too many faces in windows, too many repeated names, too many common threads of mystery for him to suppose that they weren’t part of some vast, complicated weft.

“That’s right,” said the Captain, putting a match to his pipe. He paused theatrically, squinting roundabout. “He was back this afternoon.”

Keeble nodded. It had been the same man. Keeble couldn’t have forgotten the back of the man’s head, which is all of him he’d seen this time again. Winnifred had been at the museum, cataloguing books on lepidoptery. Jack and Dorothy, thank God, had been away at the flower market buying hothouse begonias. Keeble had been asleep an hour. He’d been dabbling at the engine, and had put the whole works - the plans, the little cayman device, notes - in a hole in the floor that no one, not another living soul, could sniff out. Then he’d given up the ghost at noon and welcomed the arrival of blinking Morpheus. A crash had brought him out of it. The casement window again. He was sure of it. Footfalls sounded. The cook, who was coming in through the back door with a chicken, was confronted by the thief, and slammed him in the face with the plucked bird before snatching at a carving knife. Keeble had rushed out in his nightshirt and, once again, pursued the man into the street. But dignity demanded he give up the chase. A man in a nightshirt, after all. It wasn’t to be thought of. And his foot - it was barely healed from the last encounter.

“What was he after?” asked Godall, breaking into Keeble’s narration. “You’re certain it wasn’t valuables?”

“He ran past any number of them,” said Keeble, pouring himself a third glass of port. “He could have filled his pockets between the attic and the front door.”

“So nothing was taken?” St. Ives put in.

“On the contrary. He stole the plans for a roof-mounted sausage cooker. I’d intended to try it out in the next electrical storm. There’s something about a lightning storm that puts me immediately in mind of sausages. I can’t explain it.”

Godall, incredulous, plucked his pipe out of his mouth and squinted. “You’re telling us he broke into the house to steal the plans for this fabulous sausage machine?”

“Not a bit of it. I rather believe he was after something else. He’d been at the floor with a prybar. He’d seen me slip the plans into the cache. I’m certain of it. But he couldn’t get at them. I’ve a theory that he balanced the casement open with a stick so as to be able to shove out in a nonce. But the stick slipped, the casement banged home and latched, and in a panic he snatched up the nearest set of plans and ran for it, thinking to be out the back before I awoke. The cook surprised him.”

“What can he do with these plans?” asked the Captain, tapping his pipe out against his ivory leg.

“Not a living thing,” said Keeble.

Godall stood and peered out to where wind-whirled debris danced and flew along Jermyn Street in the night. “For my money Kelso Drake will market such a device within the month. Not for profit, mind you - there wouldn’t be much profit in it - but as a lark, to thumb his nose at us. He was after the perpetual motion engine then?”

Keeble began to assent when a banging at the door cut him off. The Captain was out of his chair at once, his finger to his lips. There was no one beyond the seven of them whom they could trust, and no one, certainly, who had any business at a meeting of the Trismegistus Club. Kraken slipped away into a rear chamber. Godall shoved a hand beneath his coat, an act which startled St. Ives.

At the newly opened door stood a young man who was, largely because of a disastrous complexion, of indeterminate age. He might have been thirty, but was more likely twenty-five: of medium height, paunchy, brooding, and slightly stooped. The smile that played across the corners of his mouth was evidently false and served in no way to animate his cold eyes - eyes ringed and dark from an excess of study under inadequate light. He seemed to St. Ives to be a student. Not a student of anything identifiable or practical, but a student of dark arts, or of the sort who wags his head morosely and knowingly over cynical and woeful poetry and who has ingested opiates and stalked through midnight streets, without destination, but out of an excess of morbidity and bile. His cheeks seemed almost to be sucked inward, as if he were consuming himself or were metamorphosing into a particularly picturesque fish. He needed a pint of good ale, a kidney pie, and a half-dozen jolly companions.

“I am addressing a meeting of the Trismegistus Club,” said he, bowing almost imperceptibly. No one answered, perhaps because he had addressed no one or perhaps because it seemed as if he expected no response. The wind whistled behind him, trifling with the tattered hem of his coat.

“Come in, mate,” said the Captain after a long pause. “Pour yourself a glass of brandy and state your business. This is a private club, you see, and no one with a full deck would want to join, if you follow me. We’re all idle and we have little regard for hands, you might say, looking for a sail to mend”

The Captain’s speech didn’t wrinkle the man in the least. He introduced himself as Willis Pule, an acquaintance of Dorothy Keeble. Jack’s eyes narrowed. He was certain the claim was a lie. He was familiar with Dorothy’s friends, and even more, he was familiar with the sorts of people who could likely
be
Dorothy’s friends. Pule wasn’t one of them. He hesitated to say so only out of a spirit of hospitality - it was the Captain’s shop, after all - but the man’s very presence became an immediate affront.

Godall, his hand yet in his coat, addressed Pule, who hadn’t touched a glass despite the Captain’s offer. “What do
you
suppose we are?” he asked.

The question seemed to take Pule aback. “A club,” he stammered, looking at Godall, then glancing quickly away. “A scientific organization. I’m a student of alchemy and phrenology. I’ve read of Sebastian Owlesby. Very interesting matter.”

Pule chattered on nervously in an unfortunately high voice. Jack was doubly insulted - first at the mention of Dorothy, now at the mention of his father. He’d have to pitch this Pule into the road. But Godall got in before him, waving his free hand and thanking Pule for his interest. The Trismegistus Club, he said, was an organization devoted to biology, to lepidoptery, in fact. They were compiling a field guide to the moths of Wales. Their discussions could be of no use to a student of alchemy. Or of phrenology, for that matter, which, insisted Godall, was a fascinating study. They were awfully sorry. The Captain echoed Godall’s general sorrow, and Hasbro instinctively arose and showed Pule the door, bowing graciously as he did so. A silent moment passed after Pule’s ejection. Then Godall stood, pulled his coat from its hook, and hurried out.

St. Ives was astonished at Godall’s so quickly and handily ejecting Pule, who was, to be sure, not at all the right sort, but who might have been well intentioned. There could be little harm, after all, in his praising Owlesby, though Owlesby’s experimentation was not entirely praiseworthy. In fact, when he considered it, St. Ives wasn’t sure what part of Owlesby’s work Pule had such admiration for. None of the rest of them could enlighten him. No one, apparently, knew this Pule.

Kraken peeked out of the rear chamber, and Captain Powers waved him into the room. Godall and Pule were forgotten for the moment as Kraken, at the Captain’s bidding, spouted the story of his months as a hireling of Kelso Drake, the millionaire, punctuating it with accounts of his readings into scientific and metaphysical matters, the deep waters of which he sailed on a daily basis. And what he found there, he could assure them, would astonish the lot of them. But Kelso Drake - nothing about Kelso Drake would astonish Bill Kraken. Kraken wouldn’t put up with the likes of Drake, not for all the money the man possessed. He gulped at his Scotch. His face grew red. He’d been fired by Drake, threatened with a thrashing. He’d see who was thrashed. Drake was a coward, a pimp, a cheat. Let Drake get in his way. Drake would reel from it. Kraken would show him.

Had Kraken news of the machine, asked St. Ives delicately. Not exactly, came the answer, it was in the West End, in one of Drake’s several brothels. Was St. Ives aware of that? St. Ives was. Did Kraken know which of the brothels it might be in? Kraken did not. Kraken wouldn’t go into Drake’s brothels. They wouldn’t hold Drake and him at once. They’d explode. Bits of Drake would fall on London like a blighted rain.

St. Ives nodded. The evening would reveal nothing about the alien craft. He might have guessed it. Kraken was proud of himself, of the stuff he was made of. He launched suddenly into a vague dissertation on the backward spinning of a spoked wheel, then broke off abruptly to address Keeble. “Billy Deener,” he seemed to say.

“What?” asked Keeble, taken by surprise.

“I say, Billy Deener. The chap who broke in at the window.”

“Do you know him?” asked Keeble, startled. The Captain sat up and ceased drumming his fingers on the countertop.

“Know him!” cried the slumping Kraken. “Know him!” But he didn’t bother to elaborate. “Billy Deener is who it was, I tell you. And if you’re sharp, you won’t get within a mile of him. Works for Drake. So did I, once. But no more. Not for the likes of him.” And with that Kraken reached once again for the Scotch. “A man needs a drink,” he said, meaning, St. Ives supposed, men in general and intending to do right by all men who weren’t there to satisfy that particular need. Moments later he slid into a chair and began to snore so loudly that Jack Owlesby and Hasbro hauled him into the back room on the Captain’s orders and arrayed him on a bed, shutting the door behind them on their return.

“Billy Deener,” said St. Ives to Keeble. “Does it mean anything to you?”

“Not a blessed thing. But it’s Drake. That much is clear. Godall was right.”

Keeble seemed to pale at the idea, as if he’d rather it weren’t Drake. A common garret thief was far preferable. Keeble poured out a draught of the Scotch left in the bottle, then clacked the bottle down onto the tray just as Theophilus Godall slipped back in out of the night, easing the door shut behind him.