Homunculus Read online

  “Now the earth ain’t nothing but bits and pieces, you know, shoved in together.” Kraken followed St. Ives along a trail of sausage smoke toward the bar, crossing his arms in front of his pot. “And think of what would come of it if you just set the whole mess aspin. Like a top, you know, as I said.”

  “Confusion” said St. Ives. “Utter confusion”

  “That’s the very thing. It would all go to smash. Fly to bits. Straightaway. Mountains would sail off. Oceans would disappear. Fish and such would shoot away into the sky like Chinese rockets. And what of you and me? What of us?”

  “Bangers and mash for my friend and me” said St. Ives to the publican, who looked at Kraken’s peapot with disfavor. “And two pints of Newcastle.” The man’s face was enormous, like the moon.

  “What of us, is what I want to know. It’s a little-known fact”

  “What is?” asked St. Ives, watching the moon-faced man spearing up bangers, slowly and methodically with pudgy little fingers, almost sausages themselves.

  “It’s a little-known fact that the equator, you see, is a belt - not cowhide, mind you, but what the doctor called elemental twines. Them, with the latitudes, is what binds this earth of ours. It isn’t as tight as it might be, though, which is good because of averting suffocation. The tides show this - thank you, sir; God bless you -when they go heaving off east and west, running up against these belts, so to speak. And lucky it is for us, sir, as I said, or the ocean would just slide off into the heavens. By God, sir, this is first-rate bangers, isn’t it?”

  St. Ives nodded, licking grease from his fingertips. He washed a mouthful of the dark sausage down with a draught of ale. “Got all this from Owlesby, did you?”

  “Only bits, sir. I do some reading on my own. The lesser-known works, mostly”

  “Whose?”

  “Oh, I ain’t particular, sir. Not Bill Kraken. All books is good books. And ideas, if you follow me, facts that is, are like beans in a bottle. There’s only so many of them. The earth ain’t but so many miles across. I aim to have a taste of them all, and science is where I launched out, so to speak.”

  “That’s where I launched out too,” said St. Ives. “I’ll just have another pint. Join me?”

  Kraken yanked a faceless pocket watch out of his coat and squinted at it before nodding. St. Ives winked and pushed away once more toward the bar. It was an hour yet before closing. A tramp in rags sidled from table to table, uncovering at each the stump of a recently severed thumb. A man in evening clothes lay on the floor, straight out on his side, his nose pressed against a wall, and three stools, occupied by his sodden young friends, propped him up there as if he were a corpse long gone in rigor mortis. There was an even cacophony of sounds, of laughter and clanking dishes and innumerable conversations punctuated at intervals by a loud, tubercular cough. More floor was covered by shoe soles and table legs than was bare, and that which was left over was scattered with sawdust and newspaper and scraps of food. St. Ives mashed the end of a banger beneath his heel as he edged past two tables full of singing men - seafaring men from the look of them.

  Kraken appeared to be half asleep when minutes later St. Ives set the two pint glasses on the tabletop. The pleasant and solid clank of the full glasses seemed to revive him. Kraken set his peapot between his feet. “It’s been a while, sir, hasn’t it?”

  “Fourteen years, is it?”

  “Fifteen, sir. A month before the tragedy, it was. You wasn’t much older’n a bug, if I ain’t out of line to say so.” He paused to drink off half the pint. “Them was troublesome times, sir. Troublesome times. I ain’t told a soul about most of it. Can’t. I’ve cheated myself of the hereafter; I can’t afford Newgate”

  “Surely nothing as bad as that…” began St. Ives, but he was cut short by Kraken, who waved broadly and shook his head, falling momentarily silent.

  “There was the business of the carp,” he said, looking over his shoulder as if he feared that a constable might at that moment be slipping up behind. “You don’t remember it. But it was in the Times, and Scotland Yard even had a go at it. And come close, too, by God! There’s a little what-do-you-call-it, a gland or something, full of elixir. I drove the wagon. Dead of night in midsummer, and hot as a pistol barrel. We got out of the aquarium with around a half-dozen, long as your arm, and Sebastian cut the beggars up not fifty feet down Baker Street, on the run but neat as a pin. We gave the carps to a beggar woman on Old Pye, and she sold the lot at Billingsgate. So good come of it in the end.

  “But the carp affair was the least of it. I’m ashamed to say more. And it wouldn’t be right to let on that Sebastian was behind the worst. Not by a sea mile. It was the other one. I’ve seen him more than once over the fence at Westminster Cemetery, and late at night too, him in a dogcart on the road and me and Tooey Short with spades in our hand. Tooey died in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, screaming mad, half his face scaled like a fish”

  Kraken shuddered and drained his glass, falling silent and staring into the dregs as if he’d said enough - too much, perhaps.

  “It was a loss when Sebastian died,” said St. Ives. “I’d give something to know what became of his notebooks, let alone the rest of it”

  Kraken blew his nose into his hand. Then he picked up his glass and held it up toward a gaslamp as if contemplating its empty state. St. Ives rose and set out after another round. The moon-faced publican poured two new pints, stopping in between to scoop up mashed potatoes with a blackened banger and shove it home, screwing up his face and smacking his lips. St. Ives winced. An hour earlier a hot banger had seemed paradisial, but four bangers later there was nothing more ghastly to contemplate. He carried the two glasses back to the table, musing on the mutability of appetite and noting through the open door that the rain had let off.

  Kraken met him with a look of anticipation, and almost at once did way with half the ale, wiping the foam from his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt. St. Ives waited.

  “No, sir,” said Kraken finally. “It wasn’t the notebooks I’m sorry for, I can tell you.” Then he stopped.

  “It wasn’t?” asked St. Ives, curious.

  “No, sir. Not the bleeding papers. Damn the papers. They’re writ in blood. Every one. Good riddance, says I.”

  St. Ives nodded expansively, humoring him.

  Kraken hunched over the table, waggling a finger at St. Ives, the little basket of condiments on his neck swaying beneath his face like the gondola of a half-deflated balloon. “It was that damn thing,” whispered Kraken, “what I’d have killed.”

  “Thing?” St. Ives hunched forward himself.

  “The thing in the box. I seen it lift the corpse of a dog off the floor and dance it on the ceiling. And there were more to it than that.” Kraken spoke so low that St. Ives could barely hear him above the din. “Them bodies me and Tooey Short brought in. There was more than one of them as walked out on his own legs.” Kraken paused for effect and sucked down the last half inch of ale, clunking the glass back down onto the oaken tabletop. “No, sir. I don’t rue no papers. And if they’d asked me, I’d ’a’ told them Nell was innocent as a China doll. I loved the young master, and I cry to think he left a baby son behind him, but by God the whole business wasn’t natural, was it? And the filthy shame of it is that Nell didn’t plug that damned doctor after she put one through her brother. That’s what I regret, in a nut”

  Kraken made as if to stand up, his speechifying over. But St. Ives, although shaken by bits of Kraken’s tale, held his hand up to stop his leaving. “I have a note from Captain Powers,” said St. Ives, proffering the crumpled missive to Kraken, “asking me to meet a man in Leicester Square at eight-thirty”

  Kraken blinked at him a moment, then peered over his shoulder toward the door and squinted round the pub, cocking an ear. “Right ho,” he said, sitting back down. He bent toward St. Ives once again. “I ran into the Captain’s man, up in Covent Garden, at the market it was, three days back. And he mentioned the…” Kraken paused and
winked voluminously at St. Ives.

  “The machine?”

  “Aye. That’s the ticket. The machine. Now I don’t claim to know where it is, you see, but I’ve heard tell of it. So the Captain put me onto you, as it were, and said that the two of us might be in a way to do business”

  St. Ives nodded, pulse quickening. He patted his pockets absentmindedly and found a cigar. “Heard tell of it?” He struck a match and held it to the cigar end, puffing sharply. “From whom?”

  “Kelso Drake,” whispered Kraken. “Almost a month ago, it was. Maybe six weeks.”

  St. Ives sat back in surprise. “The millionaire?”

  “That’s a fact. From his very lips. I worked for him, you see, and overheard more than he intended - more than I wanted. A foul lot, them millionaires. Nothing but corruption. But they’ll reap the bread of sorrow. Amen”

  “That they will,” said St. Ives. “But what about the machine -the ship?”

  “In a brothel, maybe in the West End. That’s all I know. He owns a dozen. A score. Brothels, I mean to say. There’s nothing foul he don’t have a hand in. He owns a soap factory out in Chingford. I can’t tell you what it is they make soap out of. You’d go mad.”

  “A brothel that might be in the West End. That’s all?”

  “Every bit of it.”

  St. Ives studied the revelation. It wasn’t worth much. Maybe nothing at all. “Still working for Drake?” he asked hopefully.

  Kraken shook his head. “Got the sack. He was afraid of me. I wasn’t like the rest.” He sat up straight, giving St. Ives a stout look. “But I’m not above doing a bit of business among friends, am I? No, sir. I’m not. Not a bit of it.” He watched St. Ives, who was lost in thought. “Not Bill Kraken. No, sir. When I set out to do a man a favor, across town, through the rain, mind you, why it’s, ‘keep your nose in front of your face. Let it rain!’ That’s my motto when I’m setting out on a job like this one.”

  St. Ives came to himself and translated Kraken’s carrying on. He handed across two pound notes and shook his hand. “You’ve done me a service, my man. If this pans out there’ll be more in it for you. Come along to the Captain’s shop on Jermyn Street Thursday evening. There’ll be a few of us meeting. If you can round up more information, you won’t find me miserly.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Kraken, rising and fetching up his peapot. He secured the cloths and tied them neatly about the lip of the pot. “I’ll be there.” He folded the two notes and slipped them into his shoe, then turned without another word and hurried out.

  St. Ives’ cigar wouldn’t stay lit. He looked hard at it for a moment before recognizing it as the damp thing he’d pitched at Kraken an hour and a half earlier. It seemed to be following him around. The man without the thumb loomed in toward him. St. Ives handed him a shilling and the cigar, found his coat on the rack, checked the inside pocket for his parcel - actually a sheaf of rolled paper - and set out into the night.

  Powers’ Pipe and Tobacco Shop lay at the corner of Jermyn and Spode, with long, mullioned windows along both the south and east walls so that a man - Captain Powers, for instance - might sit in the Morris chair behind the counter and, by rotating his head a few degrees, have a view of those coming and going along either street. On the night of the fourth of April, though, seeing much of anything through the utter darkness of the clouded and rainy night was unlikely. The thin glow cast by the two visible gaslamps, both on Jermyn Street, was negligible. And the light that shone from lit windows here and there along the street seemed to have an antipathy to flight, and hovered round its sources wary of the damp night.

  Captain Powers would hear the sound of approaching feet on the pavement long before the traveler would appear in one of the two yellow circles of illuminated pavement, then disappear abruptly into the night, the footsteps clop-clopping away into silence.

  The houses across the street were inhabited by the genteel, many of whom wandered into the pipe shop for a pouch of tobacco or a cigar. It would have been lean times for the Captain, however, if it hadn’t been for his pension. He’d been at sea since he was twelve and had lost his right leg in a skirmish fifty miles below Alexandria, when his sloop sank in the Nile, blown to bits by desert thieves. He had saved a single tusk of a fortune in ivory, and twenty years later William Keeble the toymaker had made him a leg of it, the best by far of any he’d worn. Not only did it fit without taking the skin off that little bit of leg he had left, but it was hollow and held a pint of liquor and two ounces of tobacco. In a pinch he could smoke the entire leg, could press a button at the tip and manipulate a hidden plate, the size of a half crown, which would slide back to reveal the bowl of a pipe. A tube ran up the inside of his pantleg and coat, and he could walk and smoke simultaneously. The Captain had only done so once, largely because of a sort of odd fascination with the idea of Keeble’s having built it. The bewildered stares of passersby, however, had seemed to argue against the wisdom of revealing in public the wonderful nature of the thing. Captain Powers, grizzled from sea weather and stoic from thirty years of discipline before the mast, was a conservative at heart. Dignity was his byword. But friendship precluded him from letting on to Keeble that he had no real desire to be seen smoking a peg leg.

  Keeble’s house, in fact, sat opposite Powers’ store. The Captain looked across the top of his companion’s head at the lamp burning in the attic shop. Below was another room alight - the bedroom of Jack Owlesby; and on the left yet another, the bedroom, quite likely, either of Winnifred - Keeble’s wife - or of Dorothy, the Keeble daughter, home for a fortnight now from finishing school.

  His companion cleared his throat as if about to speak, so Captain Powers let his gaze fall from the window to his friend’s face. It had the unmistakable look of nobility to it, of royalty, but it was the face of Theophilus Godall of the Bohemian Cigar Divan in Rupert Street, Soho, a face that at that moment was drawing on an old meerschaum pipe. Carved on either side of the bowl was the coat of arms of the royal family of Bohemia, a house long since scattered and flown from a fallen country. The pipe had had, no doubt, a vast and peculiar history before passing into the hands of Godall, and who knew what sort of adventures had befallen it since?

  “I was with Colonel Geraldine,” Godall was saying, “in Holborn. Incognito. It was late and the evening had proven fallow. All we’d accomplished was to have spent too much good money on bad champagne. We’d had a pointless discussion with a fellow who had a promising story about a suicidal herb merchant on Vauxhall Bridge Road. But the fellow - the second fellow, that is, the herb merchant - turned out to be already dead. Hanged himself these six months past with his own gaiters, and the first fellow turned out to be uninteresting. I wish I could say he meant well, but what he meant was to drink our champagne.

  “Before he left, though, in came two of the most extraordinary men. Obviously bound for the workhouse but neither had any color to him. They had the skin of frog bellies. And they had no notion of where they were. Not the foggiest. They had a sort of dazed look about them, as if they’d been drugged, you might say. In fact that’s what I thought straightaway. Geraldine spoke to the larger of the two, but the man didn’t respond. Looked at him in perfect silence. Not insubordinately, mind you. There was none of that. There was simply no hint of real consciousness.”

  The Captain shook his head and tapped the ashes of his pipe into a brass bowl. He looked at the clock under the counter - nearly ten-thirty. The rain had slackened. He could see none at all falling across the illuminated glass of the streetlamp. Footsteps approached slowly, drawing up along Jermyn Street. They stopped altogether. Captain Powers winked at Theophilus Godall, who nodded slightly. The footsteps resumed, angling away across the road toward Keeble’s house. It was just possible that it was Langdon St. Ives, come round to Keeble’s to discuss his oxygenator box. But no, St. Ives would have stopped in if he’d seen a light. He’d have spoken to Kraken by now and be full of alien starships. This was someone else.

  A hun
ched shadow appeared on the pavement opposite -the shadow of a hunchback, to be more exact - and hurried past the gaslamp into darkness, but the Captain was certain that he’d stopped beyond it. He had for five nights running. “There’s your man across the road,” said the Captain to Godall.

  “Are you certain of it?”

  “Aye. The hunchback. It’s him all right. He’ll hang round till I switch out the lights.”

  Godall nodded and resumed his story. “So Geraldine and I followed the two, halfway across town into Limehouse where they went into a pub called the Blood Pudding. We stayed long enough to see that it was full of such men. The two of us stood out like hippopotami. But I can’t say we were noticed by any but him” And Godall shrugged back over his shoulder at the street. “He was a hunchback, anyway. And although I’m not familiar with this fellow Narbondo, it could conceivably have been he. He was eating live birds, unless I’m very much mistaken. The sight of it on top of champagne and kippers rather put us off the scent, if you follow me, and I’d have happily forgotten him completely if it weren’t for your having got me onto this business of yours. Is he still there?”

  The Captain nodded. He could just see the hunchback’s shadow, still as a bush, cast across a bit of wall.

  A new set of steps approached, accompanied by a merry bit of off-key whistling.

  “Get your hat!” cried Captain Powers, standing up. He stepped across and turned down the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. There, striding purposefully up toward Keeble’s door carrying his packet of papers was Langdon St. Ives, explorer and inventor.

  In an instant the hunchback - Dr. Ignacio Narbondo - had vanished. Theophilus Godall leaped for the door, waved hastily at Captain Powers, and made away into the night, east on Jermyn toward Haymarket. Across the street, William Keeble threw back the door and admitted St. Ives, who squinted wonderingly at the dark, receding figure that had hurried from the suddenly darkened tobacco shop. He shrugged at Keeble. The Captain’s doings were always a mystery. The two of them were swallowed up into the interior of Keeble’s house.