The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (15 page)
He arose, wrapped himself in a dark and tattered cloak, drained the lees of his claret, and strode toward the tilting stairs, glaring into the eyes of anyone who dared to look at him. The floor above was dark save for the light of a single tallow candle that burned in a greasy wall niche. The smoke-blackened triangle that fanned away on the wall above it was the least of the filth that stained the plaster.
Shiloh kicked loose the stuck door, lifted the edge by the latch, and pushed it in a foot where it stuck fast, wedged against the floor. The room beyond was bare but for a heap of bedclothes in one corner, a tilted wooden chair, and a little gate-leg table leaning against the wall.
He stepped across to the street end of the room and pulled aside a bit of curtain. Beyond were the artifacts of a little shrine: a silver crucifix, a miniature portrait of his mother’s noble face, and a sketch of the man Shiloh knew to he his father, a man who might have danced in the palm of the evangelist’s hand, had Shiloh less an aversion to dancing and had the homunculus not been spirited away and set adrift these last fourteen years. The sketch had been done by James Clerk Maxwell, who, in the months he’d possessed the so-called demon, hadn’t the vaguest notion what it was, no more than did the Abyssinian, dying of some inexplicable wasting disease, who had sold it to Joanna Southcote eighty-two years ago and had set into motion the creaking, leaden machinery of apocalypse.
Shiloh lifted the odds and ends in the shrine, raised a cleverly disguised false bottom, and dumped in the coin. Then he retrieved from the space a bag of finished, plated coin, replaced the floor and the relics, wrapped himself once again in his cloak, and left. He spoke to no one as he made his way toward the street, where a biting wind whistled across the cobbles and persuaded almost everyone to stay indoors. A single stroller, a portly man with a stick and eyepatch, limped along in his wake, his free hand pressed against his cap to stop the wind’s stealing it. Shiloh paid him little heed as he hurried on into Soho.
***
The houses fronting the narrow stretch of Pratlow Street cramped between Old Compton and Shaftesbury were miserable with neglect. Whereas years and weather sometimes soften the faces of buildings, betraying some few elements of passing history, some reflection of the subtle artistry of nature, on Pratlow Street no such effects had been accomplished. Here and there shutters hung canted across windows perpetually dark, their slats held together by nails and screws that were little more than rusty powder. Some feeble attempt had been made once at enlivening a storefront with a gay color of paint, but the painter had had a singularly dull sense of harmony and had, moreover, been dead these past twenty years. His efforts lent the street an even more ghastly and barren personality, if only by contrast, and the glaucous paint, peeling and alligatored over seasons by what little sunlight penetrated the general gloom of the street, popped loose in brittle showers of chips after each rain.
It was perhaps more difficult to find a window pane that remained entire than it was to find one broken, and the only evidence of industry was in the removal of dirty glass shards from some few of the bottom floor windows and the subsequent dumping of the broken glass onto the cobbles of the street. The effort, perhaps, was made to facilitate the sort of person who would crawl in at the window rather than step in at the door, a purely practical matter, since few of the doors hung square on their rusted hinges, and were in such appalling disrepair as to dissuade any honest man from attempting to breach them.
The effect of the place beneath the pall of smoky fog was so unutterably dismal that the man turning onto it from Shaftesbury started in spite of himself. He pulled his eyepatch down toward his nose, as if it were merely a prop and he desired to hide a fraction more of the street from view. He looked straight ahead at the broken stones of the roadway, ignoring the jabber of a ragged child and the appeals of dark shapes hunched in the shadows of ruined stoops. Halfway down the street he unlocked a bolted door and hurried through, climbing the stairs of a dark, almost vertical well. He entered a room that looked out across an empty courtyard at another house, the windows of which were lit with the glow of gaslamps. Fog drifted in the air of the courtyard, now clearing, now thickening, swirling and congealing and allowing him only occasionally a view of the room opposite—a room in which stood a particularly stooped hunchback, peering at a wall chart and holding in his hand a scalpel, the blade glowing in the lamplight.
***
Ignacio Narbondo pondered the corpse before him on the table. It was a sorry thing—two weeks dead, of a blow to the face that had removed its nose and eye and so mangled its jaw that yellowed teeth gaped through a wide rent, their gums shrunk back alarmingly. Animating it would accomplish little. What in the devil would it do if it could walk again, beyond horrifying the populace? It could beg, Narbondo supposed. There was that. It could be passed off by the charlatan Shiloh as a reformed sinner, far gone in the ravages of pox but walking upright by a miracle of God. Narbondo grunted with laughter. His limp, oily hair hung in wormy curls to his twisted shoulders, which were covered by a smock stained ochre with old blood and dirt.
Along one wall were heaps of chemical apparatus: glass coils, beakers, bell jars, and heavy glass cubes, some empty, some half-filled with amber liquid, one encasing the floating head of an enormous carp. The eyes of the fish were clear, unglazed by death, and seemed to swivel on their axes, although this last might have been an optical trick of the bubbling fluid in the jar. A human skeleton dangled by a brass chain in a corner, and above it, perched along a wide shelf, were oversize specimen bottles containing fetuses in various stages of growth.
Vast aquaria bubbled against the wall opposite, thick with elodea and foxtail and a half-dozen multi-colored koi the length of a man’s arm. Narbondo gave up looking at the corpse and limped across to the aquaria, regarding the fish carefully. He reached into a tin bucket and pulled out a clot of brown, threadlike worms, knotted and wriggling, and dumped them onto the surface of the water. Five of the koi lashed about, mouths working, sucking down little clumps of worms. Narbondo watched for a moment the sixth carp, which paid no attention to the meal, but swam along the surface, gulping air, listing to one side, resting now and then until beginning to sink into the weeds, then lurching once more with a great effort toward the surface.
The hunchback snatched up a broad net from a box beneath the aquaria. He pushed back a glass top, stood atop a stool, and with a single, quick sweep, scooped up the struggling fish, tucked the middle finger of his free hand under its gill, and plucked the great fish from the water, slamming it down at once onto a cork board a foot from the head of the supine corpse and nailing its tail and head to the board with pushpins. The fish writhed helplessly for the few seconds it took Narbondo to slice it open. He paused briefly to spray it with fluid from a glass bottle, then scooped out its intestines and organs, clipping them loose and sweeping them into a box at his feet.
There was a sudden pounding at the door. Narbondo cursed aloud. The door swung open to reveal Shiloh the evangelist, cloaked and holding his leather bag. Narbondo ignored him utterly, prodding a little pulsing, bean-shaped gland out of the organ cavity of the carp. He nipped through the threads that held it, slid a thin spatula under it, and lifted it into a vial of amber liquid, corking it and setting it alongside the fetuses. He yanked the gutted carp from the cork board and dropped it into the box below, kicking it under the table. He leered up at the old man, who watched the affair with a mixture of wonder and loathing. “Cat food,” said Narbondo, nodding at the dead fish.
“A tragic waste,” said Shiloh. “God’s children starve for want of bread.”
“Feed the multitude with it, then,” cried Narbondo, suddenly enraged at the old man’s hypocrisy. He yanked the fish out by the tail and waved it in the air, droplets of blood spattering the floor. “A half-dozen more of these and you can feed Greater London.”
Shiloh stood silent, grimacing at the blasphemy. “People hunger on this very street—hunger and die.”
“And I,” croaked Narbondo, “make them walk again. But you’re right. It’s a filthy shame. There but for fortune, and all.”
He stepped across and unlatched the casement that faced the street, swung the window open, and tossed the carp onto the pavement below, the fish bursting in a shower of silver scales. Narbondo emptied the box of entrails after it, nearly onto the head of two men and an ancient old woman who had already begun to fight over the fish. Cries and curses rose from the street. Narbondo cut them short by slamming closed the window. He turned contemptuously and without warning snatched the leather bag from the old man’s hand.
The evangelist cried out in surprise, caught himself, and shrugged. “Who is this poor brother?” he asked, nodding at the corpse.
“One Stephanus Biddle. Run over two weeks back by a hansom cab. Stomped to bits by the horses, poor bastard. But dead is dead, I always say. We’ll enliven the slacker. He’ll be passing round tracts with the best of them by midday tomorrow, if you’ll kindly trot along and leave me alone.” Narbondo emptied the bag onto the table, then inspected one of the coins. “You’d make money by selling these to the utterer yourself instead of making me do it. You pay dearly for my time, you know.”
“I pay for the speedy recovery of God’s kingdom,” came the reply, “and as for selling the coin myself, I have neither the desire for risk nor the inclination to hobnob with criminals of that sort. I…”
But Narbondo cut him short with a hollow laugh. He shook his head. “Come round tomorrow noon,” he said, nodding toward the door. And just as he did so, it swung to and in walked Willis Pule with an armload of books, nodding ingratiatingly at Shiloh and holding out a moist hand that had, a moment earlier, been fingering a promising boil on Pule’s cheek. The evangelist strode through the open door, disre-garding the proffered hand, a look of superiority and disgust on his face.
The window curtains in the second floor of the building across the courtyard slid shut, unseen by Pule and Narbondo, who bent over the still form on the table. A moment later the street door of that same building opened, and the man in the eyepatch tapped down the half-dozen stairs of the stoop and into the street, hurrying away in the wake of the receding evangelist, who pursued a course toward Wardour Street, bound for the West End.
***
Langdon St. Ives trudged along through the evening gloom. The enlivening effects of the oysters and champagne he’d foolishly consumed for lunch had diminished and been replaced by a general despair, magnified by his fruitless search for a brothel, of all things, that he wouldn’t be able to recognize if he stumbled upon it. And he had undertaken the embarrassing errand on the advice of a man addled by years of drink, who understood the earth to wear a belt for the purpose of supporting a pair of equatorial trousers.
It was the song and dance of getting round to the nub that was most bothersome—of making the proprietor understand that it wasn’t just casual satiation that he desired, that the act must somehow involve machinery—a particular machine, in fact. Lord knows what conclusions were drawn, what criminal excesses were even at that moment being heaped onto the doorstep of technology. More champagne would, perhaps, have been desirable. Halfway measures weren’t doing the trick. If he were drunk, staggering, then his ears wouldn’t burn quite so savagely at each theatrical and idiotic encounter. And if, in the future, he were to run across one of his would-be hosts in public, he could blame the entire sordid affair on drink. But here he was sober.
On the advice of a cabbie he approached a door with a little sliding window, knocking thrice and stepping back a foot or two so as not to seem unnaturally anxious. The door swung open ponderously and a jacketed butler peered out, slightly offended, apparently. The man looked overmuch like Hasbro, who St. Ives heartily wished were along on this adventure. The look on the man’s face seemed to suggest that St. Ives, with his pipe and tweed coat, should be knocking on the rear door off the alley. “Yes?” he said, drawing the word out into a sort of monologue.
St. Ives inadvertently pushed at the false beard glued to his chin, a beard which perpetually threatened to succumb to the pull of gravity and drop ignominiously to the ground. It seemed firm enough. He smashed his eye socket around his monocle, squinting up his free eye and staring through the clear lens of the glass. He affected a look of removed and distinguished condescension.
“The cab driver,” he said, “advised me that I might find some satisfaction here.” He harrumphed into his fist, regretting almost at once his choice of words. What in the world would the man make of his desire for satisfaction? A challenge, perhaps, to a duel? A coarse reference to satisfied lusts?
“Satisfaction, sir?”
“That’s correct,” said St. Ives, brassing it out. “Not to put too fine a point on it, it was suggested to me that you could put me in the way of, shall we say, a particular machine.”
“Machine, sir?” The man was maddening. With a suspicion that at once became certainty, St. Ives understood that he was being had on, either by the cabbie or by this leering, mule-faced man, whose chin appeared to have been yanked double with a tongs. The man stood silent, peering at St. Ives through the half-shut door.
“Perhaps you’re unaware, my good fellow, to whom you speak.” Silence followed this. “I have certain…desires, shall we say, involving mechanical apparatus. Do you grasp my meaning?” St. Ives squinted at aim, losing his monocle in the process. It clanked against a coat button on his chest. He shoved at his beard.
“Ah,” said the suddenly voluble man in the doorway. “If you’ll use the alley door next time. Wait a moment.” The door eased shut. Footsteps receded. The door once again swung open and the butler handed out a parcel. St. Ives took it, and opened it unable to think of anything else to do, and found himself possessed of an eight-hour clock sporting a pair of iron gargoyles on either side of a cracked oval glass.
