Homunculus (15 page)

The carp thrashed suddenly sideways, jerking away from Pule’s hand. He lunged at it and cradled the fish in his arms, feeling the step stool canting over as he did so, aware, suddenly, of a light being trimmed behind him and of the barking of a dog.

“Here now!” came a startled voice as Pule and the fish toppled over sideways into a mess of sodden waterweeds. Trailing anacharis and ambulia, Pule wrenched at his fish, slamming it against the stone monolith as he rolled against it. The dog growled and snatched at his pantleg. Pule yelled obscenities, ululating madly at the dog and his master, hoping that the watchman - an old man with a game leg - wouldn’t be quick to engage an obviously lunatic fish thief. More than that, he hoped that Narbondo would hear the ruckus and get his filthy cart under the window.

He kicked at the dog, clamped now to his pantleg, and managed only to drag it along behind him. Its master limped in, crouched and waving his arms, grappling after the dog as if worried only that Pule might make away with it as well as with the carp. Pule turned, thrusting the fish through the window - there was no way he’d clamber out holding it - and felt it snatched from his grasp. A spray and wind-driven rain stung his eyes as he boosted himself through, easily now, with the dog yammering behind him and the window sill some two feet lower now that he was inside the building rather than outside.

The distance to the ground, however, was greater than he’d calculated, and he found himself, after a wild, thrashing tumble, twisted in the mud between the stones of the building and the wheel of the dogcart. Narbondo cursed wildly, Pule cursed him back, and the watchman clutched his little dog, staring inertly at the two from beyond the open window. The hunchback whipped up the horses as Pule grabbed the sideboard and attempted to hoist himself in, kicking furiously to keep up with the horse and falling in a heap into the bed, face first into the carcass of the great fish.

He was tempted, as he lay gasping and panting, smearing scaly ooze from his cheek with a coat sleeve, to pummel Narbondo senseless with the carp, to pitch the hunchback off the front of the dogcart into the way of the galloping horse, to run across his twisted face with the ironclad cartwheels and leave him to die in the muck of the roadway. But his time would come.

Pule picked up the heavy fish and thrust it into a half keg splashing with water barely deep enough to submerge it. He swam it back and forth to revive it, but the thing was half crushed. The water, in seconds, was a mess of blood and scales.

“He’s done!” shouted Pule at the back of Narbondo’s bouncing head.

The hunchback shouted something, but his words were lost in the wind. The cart bumped and clattered and raced between the shadowy oaks, careering this way and that into potholes, nearly going over into a ditch, the mud flung up from the horse’s hooves spattering around Pule, who hung on with both hands now, satisfied to leave the fish to its own devices. With a suddenness that catapulted Pule into Narbondo’s back, the horse reared to a stop, and in an obscuring deluge of rain, the hunchback clambered over into the back of the cart, jerking his head at Pule.

“Take the bloody reins!” he gasped, throwing open his bag and reaching into it for a scalpel. He paused long enough to fetch Pule a shove that nearly pitched him out of the wagon, and in moments they were away again, Pule driving, the doctor laying the fish open with his blade, muttering under his breath some foul business that was swept behind them on the wind and rain and so lost entirely on Pule, who was filled with his own black thoughts of death and revenge.

T
here was no real reason to be fearful, quite likely. No one suspected her, yet she felt inclined toward darkness, toward venturing out at night. She prayed that the day would soon come that it would be otherwise. Captain Powers would see to it. She hurried along down Shaftesbury Street, hidden in her cloak through nearly empty streets, her umbrella slanted back to stop the wind and rain that drove in from the west. The weather was far too evil for anyone to be out and about, and the hour was late - long after midnight.

Her life of homeless wandering in the Indies, later for three years in South Carolina, and now, finally, in London - the home of her youth, but now the place in the world most laden with suspicion and fear - had been relieved by her having found a single, safe port, as it were, an island in a sea of tumult and remorse. Captain Powers was that island - a man whom nothing could unsettle, who with his peg leg could stride purposefully across heaving decks awash with seawater, could steer a course by the shadows of stars.

But what particularly suited her was the Captain’s obvious regard for curious, frivolous things. In the midst of his stony practicality was a litter of oddities - his ridiculous smoking leg, a monkey-tooth necklace he’d been given by a jungle explorer in exchange for two bottles of Scotch, a pipe that burned tobacco and emitted soap bubbles simultaneously, a collection of trifles purported to yield good luck and which he carried in his pocket. “I’ve got my luck in my pocket,” he’d say, displaying the collection to a stranger, holding in the palm of his hand a red and black bean from Peru, a red agate marble, a tiny ivory ape, and an Oriental coin with a hole drilled through it. He could tell a good deal about a man, he would say, by the nature of the man’s reaction. William Keeble and Langdon St. Ives had seen the value of it all straight off.

Nell surprised herself to discover that she was only a block from the smoke shop. It was early yet, for her particular purposes; the club meeting would no doubt still be underway. If she could find some sort of shelter she would wait. It wasn’t at all unpleasant watching the rain if one were safely out of it. She turned down Regent Street toward St. James’ Park. She’d sit under the shelter and imagine a concert, or imagine nothing at all, but simply hide behind the darkness and the weather.

The rain diminished briefly, and the night fell silent but for her footfalls on the pavement. Behind her, clattering slowly down Regent, came a brougham, its lamp burning yellow in the misty night. It drew up apace and slowed, as if shadowing her. The driver, however, paid her no heed, but slouched on his seat looking ahead of him, the ribands slack in his hands, as if the vehicle were simply slowing down out of inertia. Nell forced herself to ignore it. She pulled her cloak around her and strode on. She debated whether to turn off down the approaching alley or simply to pursue her way toward the park.

She glanced quickly at the brougham. Two men rode within, both of them staring out at her. One was lost in shadow, the other clearly visible. He seemed to have half a face. There was something in their staring that convinced her, suddenly and completely, that they weren’t casually passing in the night, that they were watching her. She stepped into the narrow alley, tall buildings tilting away above and blocking the driven rain, which ran down the wall to her left, glazing the dirty bricks and flowing into a muddy stream along the center of the alley. She lifted her skirts and ran. There was nothing to do but splash through the ankle-deep rill. She would double back when she found the end of the alley - run all the way to Jermyn Street if need be. The hour didn’t matter. Better to betray herself to friends at the Trismegistus Club than to summon a constable. But better anything than to fall into the hands of whoever it was rode in the brougham. And she had a fair idea who it was.

She never reached the end of the alley. It seemed to hover there beyond a haze of rain some hundred yards distant, yellow in the glow of a gaslamp. Into the feeble light stepped a tall figure in a cloak, bent as if with age. Nell slowed, then stopped. She was suddenly certain that whoever it was stood in the mouth of the alley, it wasn’t Ignacio Narbondo. She’d been wrong, but the realization didn’t console her. She slowed to a walk, shrinking against the comparatively dry right wall, brushing the moist bricks with the back of her hand. She turned. Lightning cracked the sky above her, turning the two slouched figures that approached her into dense shadows against a suddenly bright backdrop. No windows, no doors presented themselves. The walls were steep and slippery. The night was one tumultuous rush of noise, and her scream was lost in a roar of thunder which threatened to collapse the sheer, crumbling bricks above her.

A hand closed over her mouth, then jerked away when she bit it. She stumbled and kicked blindly at the man in the cloak. He cursed and stepped back in a little bent hop, as if he were infirm with age. She blinked rainwater out of her eyes, unwilling to believe what she saw. But it was so. A moment of weakness years earlier had come round to betray her.

A ruined face, the face of a corpse, loomed in front of her, and the ghoul who possessed it slammed her back into the wall, dragging a flour sack over her head. She spun around, tumbled onto her knees in the water, and was jerked upright and pushed forward.

The stumbling, blind walk back down the alley to the waiting brougham seemed endless, yet didn’t afford her time for thought. Her second scream was silenced by a jerk at the sack that had been twisted round her neck. She saw two rapid lightning flashes, and automatically, out of sheer numbness, counted the six seconds that followed. The thunder still boomed in the low skies when a hand was laid against the small of her back and she was precipitated into the brougham. She remained on her knees on the floor. She heard the click of the door latch and listened as the coach careered away into the rainy night to the sound of the wheezing, rattling breath of her two strange captors. She grappled with her memory in an effort to find an explanation of her fate. There was none. What she knew, Shiloh knew. She had been, those long years past, a briefly willing convert, who had confessed thoroughly and truthfully. But the knowledge she had revealed, of her guilt and of the whereabouts of the thing in the box, hadn’t altered. She could be of no further use to him. Unless it was something else they were after. Would they attempt to use her against the Captain? Was it Jack’s emerald they sought? She searched her mind. Had she revealed the existence of the emerald? She almost wished she had, for if they sought to meddle with Captain Powers through her, then they made a mistake - and she heartily wished, as the brougham jerked to a stop minutes later, that it was just such a mistake they’d made.

D
r. Narbondo carried the mutilated carp up the narrow stairs toward his laboratory above Pratlow Street, Willis Pule slouching along behind. The gland he excised was a pitiful thing, itself half ruined by Pule’s clumsy foolery. He’d have to mug up some sort of show to satisfy the damned missionary - have Pule hook Joanna Southcote up to the ceiling and dance her like a marionette. The old man would be loath to part with his money - worthless as it was - if he got no satisfaction at all. In fact, there was no telling what tricks the crazy old man mightn’t be up to if his precious mother didn’t rise from the slab.

Narbondo, his hands full of fish viscera, kicked the door open and stepped into his cabinet. The lamp above his empty aquarium was alight. Below it, his face half in shadow, stood Shiloh himself, gaunt, haggard, and dripping water onto the floor beside the slab. Dr. Narbondo could see that the old man was far from satisfied. Joanna Southcote wasn’t an inspiring sight. She lay in a comfortable heap on the slab, partly disassembled, a rickety, fleshless, collapsed framework of dirt and dust and bones. Tangled wisps of hair were clotted with leaves. Her winding sheet lay in an ignominious heap beside the slab.

A dissecting board onto which was pinned an enormous, flayed toad had been swept from the slab onto the floor along with a sheaf of notes, an ink bottle, and a quill pen. The hunchback dropped the fish onto the slab and pulled off his dripping greatcoat in silence. Shiloh, stupefied with anger, threw out his arm and shoved the fish onto the floor atop the toad. The violence of the effort jarred the slab, and the bones of his mother danced briefly, her jaws clacking shut as if she were admonishing her clumsy son.

“She speaks!” cried the evangelist, lurching forward and grasping her forearm as if to entreat her to continue. Her hand fell off onto the slab. Shiloh stepped back in horror, covering his eyes. Narbondo grunted in disgust, turned to hang his coat on a hook. He stopped, a smile spreading across his face.

“Nell Owlesby,” he said. “And after so many long years. What has it been? Fifteen years now since you shot your poor brother, hasn’t it?” He paused momentarily and licked his lips. “A very pretty shot, that one. Straight into his heart. Knicked a rib going in and lodged in the left ventricle. Quite a mess. I worked on him for three hours after chasing you half across London, but I couldn’t save him. I animated him, though, for a week, but he wasn’t worth keeping. Lost his sense. Wept the day out. I cut him to bits, finally - used a piece of him here, a piece of him there.”

Nell sat tight-lipped in her corner, staring at the rainwater that beat against the window. “That’s a lie,” she said finally. “I saw him buried at Christchurch myself. His bones are still there. My mistake was to not shoot you instead of him. I know that now. I knew it an hour after. But the deed was done.”

“You’re right, of course.” Narbondo stooped to pick up his toad. He lay it on a table, repinning one rubbery leg that had fallen loose. He pointed then at the ruined carp. “Your mother’s soul,” he said, turning to Shiloh, “resides in this carp. It’s been beaten. It’s a pity, really, but it couldn’t be helped. My assistant here pulverized it against a window sill. But it’s worlds away healthier than this, eh?” He nodded at the skeleton before frowning just a bit as if not entirely satisfied with it. He stepped slowly across to the window, flung it open, and sailed the carp out into the night.

The old missionary leaped toward him, his cloak flying behind. Narbondo flourished his right hand in front of his face, as if he were a magician uncovering a palmed coin. Between his thumb and forefinger was the little kidney-shaped gland, glistening pink. He winked at the old man, who stopped abruptly. “This is worth two hundred fifty pounds.” Narbondo squinted at it, holding it to the light.