Homunculus (25 page)

“Murder! Murder!” cried the woman with the howling children. The cry was followed close on by the sound of stamping feet and the shrill blast of a police whistle. As Deener and his companion - a beefy, lard-faced man in shirtsleeves - dragged the inert girl through the yawning door, the mouth of the alley was filled with a growing crowd of dim spirits, peering in, unwilling to follow two seeming murderers into the dim shadows.

Billy Deener eased the door shut, knowing that the general darkness of the alley obscured almost entirely by the fog would serve to hide their movements, and that a subsequent search would reveal nothing more than a crumbled hole below the street, a hole that led into the filthy darkness of the London sewers.

The cellar wall was a tumbled heap of ancient brick some three feet thick, beyond which ran the upper level of the Kermit Street sewer. Mortar had cracked and fallen for a hundred years from hastily pointed joints, and the continual wet of the sewer had caused the wall to slump and the bricks one by one to fall out, until some final bit of mortar or the corner of an ancient brick had decomposed, precipitating the collapse of a long section of sewer wall in a foul-smelling heap of muck.

The sewer was running at low water, but even so, Deener and his accomplice were hard pressed to make headway. They felt their way along planks slimy and rotten with sewage, kicking into the soft surface of the wood with the hobnails of their hoots. A lit candle flickered in a tin holder wrapped around the head of Deener’s companion, and the light danced and shrank, was snuffed out and had to be relit time and time again, both men half expecting the flame to set off an explosion in the dense air. Deener, wary of choke damp, breathed through a kerchief tied over his nose and mouth. They stooped along beneath the low ceiling, watching for the mark that would signal their arrival at the house on Wardour Street.

The Kermit Street sewer was badly in need of leveling, for the general sinking of the ground had created long cesspools, the settling water further decomposing what solid ground remained, so that the foundations of houses above cracked and pitched and loathsome sewer gases drifted up into courtyards. But the cesspools which so hampered leveling and flushing had their own value, were the resting place, in fact, for murdered men, not a few of whom had found their way into the sewers with the help of Billy Deener. Their bodies lay mired in offal and garbage and road sweepings emptied down gulley grates, until the corpses swirled at high water into the Thames where, bloated and faceless, they were declared drowned for lack of any sensible alternative.

But the unconscious girl was a different sort of victim. She should, Deener knew, be the one among them to wear the kerchief over her face, but his service to Kelso Drake only stretched so far. The score of minutes she spent below ground wouldn’t hurt her. She wasn’t even conscious of their passing.

W
hen Dorothy awoke, a tearing pain pounding in her head, the cigar-chewing face of the man who had stood in the entry hall of her house arguing with her father smiled down at her, the cigar rolling from side to side as if it were alive. His smile, however, was void of humor or concern for anything but Kelso Drake. She was certain, even in her fuddled state, that it was a smile of loathsome self-satisfaction, empty of anything but falsehood.

It swam out of focus and then back in. She felt awful. There was a horrible stench in the room, the smell of an open sewer, and it seemed to her as Drake materialized before her that it was he who smelled so foul, he or the bent man who stood beside him, squinting at her as if she were some sort of interesting specimen. Then she lost interest in either of the two men, drifting away into herself and the pain in her head. She moved her arm, intent upon touching the hair beside her ear, which, pressed against a pillow, felt clotted with dried blood. She’d been hit on the head. She remembered part of it. Surely, though, this was no hospital. Bits and pieces of memory filtered in, scrabbling around in her mind until they joined like interlocking pieces of a puzzle to form the picture of Jack lying senseless on the pavement of St. James’ Square, of her struggling with a man in a hat, of a woman screaming over and over, of gaping children, of nothing at all after that.

She tried to push herself up onto her left elbow, to swing her right hand at the face before her. But something got in the way. She couldn’t move, was fastened, somehow, secured to the bed by a sheet tied across her shoulders. The cigar face laughed. A hand removed the cigar. The mouth said, “She’ll do nicely - pay us twice over,” and the face laughed again. “Sedate her,” it said, and disappeared from view.

The hunchback loomed over her, a cup full of violet liquid in his hand. The sheet was loosed briefly, and she was yanked onto her elbows by a balding man in a black coat. She hadn’t the strength to fight. She drank the thin, bitter draught, and very soon swam away into darkness.

L
angdon St. Ives sawed away at a grilled cutlet that had the consistency of shoe leather. The gray meat lay like a curled bit of tanned hide between a boiled potato and a collection of thumb-sized peas. A sauce -
“Andalouse aux fines herbes,”
as the hastily drawn menu had called it - was dribbled stingily over the cutlet, the chef careful not to be so liberal as to allow the liquid to pollute the boiled potato. This last, cold as the plate it sat on, sorely needed the sauce, and St. Ives tried with limited success to spoon a bit onto it. But most of what he scraped from the surface of the cutlet merely glued itself to the spoon in a scum of tomato and pepper, leading St. Ives to curse both the quality and the quantity of it. Rationally, he supposed, he should count himself lucky to be faced with such a meager plateful of the wretched stuff, but eating, like anything else, wasn’t a particularly rational business.

He pushed the tiresome plate away, listening to the droning voice of an equally tiresome bespectacled gentleman who sat opposite, tearing into his own cutlet indifferently, as if the act of eating were merely a matter of satisfying bodily processes. He might as well consume a plateful of leaves and twigs. The man spoke to St. Ives as he masticated his veal and peas, chomp chomp chomp, over and over like a machine grinding rock into cement.

“The digestion,” he said, waggling his jaw, “is a tricky business. Gastric juices and all that. It takes a vast quantity of stomach-produced chemicals to break down a lump of sustenance like this pea.” And he held a pea aloft for St. Ives’ benefit, as if the thing were a fascinating little world which the two of them could examine.

“Biology has never been my forte,” admitted St. Ives, who couldn’t abide peas under any circumstances.

The man popped the pea into his mouth and ground it up. “Gallons of bodily fluids,” he said, “produced, mind you, at great expense to the system. Now this same pea reduced to pulp can be readied for evacuation by a tenth amount of gastro-intestinal juices…”

St. Ives stared out the window, unable to look at his plate. He couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for bodily talk. He had nothing against physiology; some of his best friends were physiologists. But it was hardly supper conversation - was it? - all this business about fluids and evacuation. And what was it leading to here? It constituted the friendly sort of banter that preceded really serious discussion - the reason he was once again being fed at the Bayswater Club owned by the Royal Academy of Sciences. With all their powers of scientific perception, thought St. Ives, they ought to be able to see that the supposed veal they were served was in fact a slab of old dairy cow - or worse, a paring of horseflesh, bled pale and bleached with chemicals by the knacker.

No one, however, seemed to be eating save he and old Parsons, whose fellow Academist Lord Kelvin owned a barn in Harrogate alongside his summer house, a barn that, since the debacle of the alien starship, hadn’t any roof. He also, according to Hasbro, owned two dead cows, which had suffered the misfortune of having strayed into the barn minutes before the ship caved in the roof.

And now St. Ives would pay the price. He was in a foul humor - he realized that. First the launching of the craft, then the escape of Willis Pule from the train. The man must have been desperate. It was entirely conceivable that he had leaped to his death in the ditch, an unsatisfying thought altogether. Villains, St. Ives considered, ought to be made to account for themselves. Their demise should be both spectacular and humiliating.

“And the molars of a horse can reduce the most surprising weeds to fortifying pulp in moments,” his host intoned, working at a mouthful of his own surprising foodstuffs. “Now, like a human being, a horse has only a single stomach, but his intestine is phenomenally elongated, adapted to the digestion of coarse forages. This is all a fascinating subject, this business of eating. I’ve spent a lifetime studying it. And I’ve found few things more interesting in the eating line than a workhorse - and of the right sort, mind you. Some sorts of hay are superior due to their effects on the bowel.” He waved his fork proudly, as if to illustrate this last statement, and speared up a row of peas.

St. Ives took advantage of the man’s pausing to yank out his pocketwatch, widening his eyes in alarm, as if he’d just now become conscious of the prodigious passage of time. But his intended attempt to hurry the end of the engagement disappeared into a lecture on the bacterial manifestations of intestinal debris. The man paused some few minutes later to drain a great tumbler of distilled water before him, the cleansing effects of which would “leach away poisons,” not at all unlike the exemplary workings of a well-constructed sewage system. He smacked his lips over the water. “Staff of life,” he said.

St. Ives nodded, performing his pocketwatch activity all over again, putting on the same face filled with surprise and haste. His companion, however, wasn’t so easily put off. He removed his spectacles, causing his eyes to undergo a remarkable and instantaneous shrinkage, and he wiped his face thoroughly with his napkin. “Close in here, what?”

St. Ives nodded, humoring the man. Such men, he told himself, must be humored. One had to nod continually in agreement until, when an opening presented itself, one could nod to one’s feet and nod one’s way down the stairs, leaving the zealot with the curious mingling of satisfaction in having been so thoroughly agreed with and wonder at being abandoned. But there was no such opportunity here.

“Dr. Birdlip, then,” said Parsons suddenly. “You were a friend of his.”

St. Ives steeled himself for the inevitable conversation, the same that had occurred weeks earlier, the afternoon of the night he’d been surprised by Kraken in the rain. The Royal Academy was vastly interested in Dr. Birdlip’s flight and its implications in terms of technologic advance and were prevailing upon St. Ives to help elucidate the nature of the doctor’s wonderful flight. Birdlip, of course, was not the real genius behind the perpetually propelled craft. They knew that. He was a sort of mystic - wasn’t he? - a man who fancied himself a philosopher. More than that, he was a seeker after mysteries. He’d published, to his credit, a strange paper entitled, “The Myth of the Foggy London Night,” followed by a paper speculating on the construction of spectacles through which one could see successive layers of passing time like translucent doors opening and shutting along a corridor. What was that one titled? “Time Considered as a Succession of Semi-closed Doors.” Yes, said Parsons, it was all terribly - how should he put it -“theoretical,” wasn’t it? Poetic, almost. Perhaps he’d missed his true calling. The titles alone betrayed the peculiar bent of his mind. Genius it might he, said Parsons, but genius of a speculative and, mightn’t we say, of a non-productive nature. Certainly not the sort of thing that would produce an engine such as the one that drives the dirigible. Parsons smiled up at St. Ives ingratiatingly, prodding a pea across his plate with the end of his fork, driving it into a little pool of dried sauce.

“Are you aware,” he asked, squinting at St. Ives, “of the religious cult that has sprung up around the sporadic appearances of this blimp? It’s rumored that there is some connection between Dr. Birdlip and this self-styled holy man who calls himself Shiloh. There’s nothing more dangerous, mind you, than a religious fanatic. They presume to define morality, and their definitions are made at the expense of everyone but themselves.”

“I can assure you,” said St. Ives, looking first at Parsons, then glancing out the window at activities transpiring three floors below, “that Dr. Birdlip is unacquainted with the mystic. He…”

But Parsons cut him off, his spectacles dropping of their own accord to the tip of his nose. “Rumor has it, my good fellow, that Dr. Birdlip’s craft carries aboard it a talisman of some sort, perhaps a device, that the cultists find sacred - a god, as they have it, that resides in a curious box. Scotland Yard has, of course, infiltrated their organization. They’re a dangerous lot, and they’ve got an eye on the dirigible. It’s generally unknown whether they wish to destroy it or make a temple of it, but I can assure you that the Academy intends to allow neither.”

On the street, wading out of Kensington Gardens through Lancaster Gate, came a tremendous milling throng of people, shouting something in unison - hosannas, St. Ives decided -pushing up toward Sussex Gardens, choking the street below the club. There could be no doubt about it - at the head of the throng strode the old, robed missionary, the nemesis of the Royal Academy.

Parsons recognized him at the same time, and struck his fist upon the tabletop, the sudden appearance of the evangelist having driven home his point. “What I mean to say,” he whispered, gesturing at the street, “is that this is no time for foolish misconceptions about friendships, or whatever you’d call it, to interfere with vital scientific study. You’re a scientist yourself, man. The projectile that you launched into Lord Kelvin’s barn was a remarkable example of heavier-than-air flight. Your purposes haven’t been fully understood, perhaps, by the Academy, but I assure you that if you could prevail upon this toy-maker on Jermyn Street to cooperate with us… that’s right,” he said, holding up his hand to silence St. Ives, “I told you we were certain that Birdlip himself could not have built the engine. If you could prevail upon this man Keeble to communicate with us, I think you’d find us inclined to consider this last imbroglio with the spirit of scientific inquiry. Reputations are at stake here - you can see that - and much more besides. Religious lunatics gibber in the streets; rumors of blood sacrifices performed in squalid Limehouse taverns filter up from the underworld. Tales of pseudo-scientific horror, of alchemy and vivisection, are daily on the increase. And sailing into it all, like some long-awaited sign, some apocalyptic generator, comes the blimp of Dr. Birdlip.