Homunculus Read online

  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.

  St. 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.

  “Peas 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 hea
d 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.

  He rolled over to have a look at his companion in the moonlight that illuminated the room. A woman of that stature… He anticipated a monumental revelation. But standing over him was a man, slowly chewing at his own tongue. He wore a black chimney pipe hat, smashed in and perched atop his head like a carton. Raised above it was the peapot. “Deener!” shouted Kraken. The peapot smashed down at him. There was a grunt of effort from the man in the hat. Kraken lurched aside, his left hand shielding his face. His wrist snapped down as the peapot glanced off it, smashing against his cheek. Kraken rolled into a wall. There seemed to be nothing in the tiny room but the villainous bed — nowhere to retreat.

  The man swung the pot by its thong, bouncing it off Kraken’s forehead and hauling it back for another blow. He seemed to be growling through his gaping mouth, and Kraken noticed in a moment of frozen clarity the droplets of spittle that flew in a little arc as the man’s head was tossed backward with the momentum of his next swing.

  Kraken regretted in a mist that his own head seemed to have stopped the peapot very handily, and through eyes suddenly blurred behind a wash of gore from his forehead, he watched with removed wonder as Billy Deener very slowly hauled a pistol from his coat, cocked it, and aimed it.

  The being confronting a sleepy William Keeble chewed at the end of an ostentatious cigar. Keeble didn’t half like his looks. He liked them less, in fact, than he had when the man had visited him once before. It was his moneyed air that was so annoying - an air that betrayed a sort of Benthamite smugness and superiority, that exclaimed its own satisfaction with itself and its faint dissatisfaction with, in this case, William Keeble, who had been surprised in his nightshirt and cloth cap and so was automatically one down.

  Kelso Drake hauled his cigar from his mouth and pried his lips apart into an oily, condescending smile. He wore a MacFarlane coat and a silk hat, both of which had left Bond Street, it was reasonably certain, not more than a week or so earlier. Keeble felt a fool in his cloth pointy-hat - doubly so, for he was wearing the one onto which Dorothy had embroidered a comical face, one eye of which was closer to the sideways nose than was the other, an eccentricity which gave the stitched countenance a look of cockeyed lunacy. Drake wouldn’t understand such a thing. Keeble could see that in a glance.

  The industrialist’s desires hadn’t changed. He was prepared to offer Keeble a sum of money - a substantial sum for the plans to the engine, for the patent. Keeble wasn’t at all interested. Drake’s eyes narrowed. He doubled the sum. Keeble didn’t care for sums. Damn all sums. He was suddenly powerfully thirsty. On the hall table sat a walrus tusk, carved into the semblance of the beast that had sprouted it. Keeble imagined twisting its foolish head off and draining the peaty contents. But he’d have to offer Drake a glass, and he wasn’t about to. Damn Drake and all of his affairs. He and his notion of textile mills run by perpetual motion engines made Keeble sick. The idea of a textile mill alone - a mill of any sort - made Keeble sick. Practicality in general made him sick, and the contrived practicality of Drake’s utilitarian vision instilled in him an inexplicable mixture of indifference and loathing that made him long for his bed and a glass with which to chase Drake into nonexistence.

  Drake champed at his cigar, rolling it in his mouth, his eyes squinting up into tight little slits. This wasn’t, insisted Drake, merely a casual offer. He had certain methods. He had vast resources. He could exert pressure. He could buy and sell Keeble a dozen times. He could ruin him. He could this; he could that; he could the other. Keeble shrugged in his ridiculous cap. The clock on the wall opposite the hall table suddenly went off, pealing in a sort of doleful, leaden tone, utterly out of keeping with the little clockwork apes who charged grinning out of their lair in the interior and banged away with mallets at a bell-shaped iron octopus.

  Drake frowned at it, recoiling slightly. The door opened behind him, and Dorothy, a troubled look on her face, stepped through, stopping in sudden surprise at the sight of the stranger’s back. Keeble motioned with his eyes toward the stairway, but Dorothy hadn’t taken a half st
ep toward them when Drake turned, a broad smile betraying splayed yellow teeth. He clamped his mouth shut at the sight of Dorothy’s involuntary grimace, and bowed slightly, flourishing his hat. “Kelso Drake, ma’am,” he said, rolling his chewed cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Very happy to make your acquaintance.”

  Dorothy nodded and proceeded toward the stairs, saying, “Pleased, I’m sure,” over her shoulder, impolite as it seemed. Her father nodded his head toward the stairs in quick little jerks, stopping abruptly when Drake turned and looked at him quizzically. The questioning look turned once again into a leer, as if Drake’s face naturally molded itself that way out of long practice. “What was I saying?” he asked the toymaker. “I was momentarily,” he paused and pretended to search for a word, then said theatrically, “distracted.”

  “You were just saying good day,” Keeble stated flatly. “You’ve got my answer. There isn’t any room for discussion.”

  “No, I suppose there isn’t. I’m averse to discussion anyway. A waste of time. Very pretty daughter, that one. Fetching, you might say. You have three days.”

  “I don’t need three days.”

  “Thursday, let’s say. And do stay sober. This business will require all of your efforts, regardless of the outcome.” And with that, Drake raised his stick and neatly flipped Keeble’s nightcap from his head, turned, and strode through the yawning door. He climbed into the interior of a waiting brougham and was gone.

  Keeble stood still for a moment, as if his blood had solidified. His neck and face were hot. Without turning his head he plucked up the cap from where it had fallen on the hall table. A door shut with a bang upstairs. Had Dorothy listened? Had she witnessed Drake’s departure? Keeble peered up the stairwell, a forced grin stretching his mouth. The stairs were empty. He pulled on the cloth cap and reached for the walrus tusk. There was really nothing to think about. Drake was all bluff. He wouldn’t dare come meddling round again. He’d be sorry for it if he did. Keeble’s hand shook as he drained the tusk, and he set it back onto the table uncapped. What did he care for threats? He stood thinking for a moment then tottered away up the stairs to bed.