It was unlikely that there had ever before been such a crowd in Regent’s Park. A continual stream of people trudged along either side of the Parkway and up Seven Sisters Road. Between the human rivers rattled no end of dogcarts and cabrioles and hackney coaches and chaises, clattering and hopping across potholes and ruts, their drivers cursing the masses of people that seemed to flow out into the center of the road on a whim, clogging traffic. Wagons full of people jerked along, then stopped dead for the space of a half-dozen minutes, then jerked along again, only to stop almost at once to avoid running down three score of travelers who, because of a mud puddle, perhaps, had drifted again into the roadway, oblivious to the wagons clamoring to get through. If half of London isn’t on the march, thought Theophilus Godall as he handed a tract to a gaunt man in a pince nez, then I’m a corpse. He certainly did his best to look like one — in a hastily donned suit bought in Houndsditch for a shilling.
He’d had to do little to authenticate it; it was almost dirty enough to suffice. A bit of shredding, an energetically executed dance on the heaped garments in the street, some smearing on of mud — all in all it was an effective costume. A putty scar down the center of his forehead and running under his right eye made it seem probable that he’d had a rough-and-tumble life, which, when paired with the once-ostentatious suit, advertised him, perhaps, as a reformed gambler or other sort of rakehell.
At first he supposed that his fellow ghouls were utterly speechless, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Those who had a comparatively fresh look about them, who, perhaps, had lain in the grave only a day or two before being liberated, could utter some few syllables through rusted vocal cords. They hadn’t, however, any elasticity to them, and the croaking of the ghouls was, like the production of any unnatural sound, difficult for a healthy man to imitate. Godall did his best, remaining mute for the most part.
The evangelist was inflamed with his usual false spirit, fired by the bellows of approaching apocalypse. Part of him gnashed and cursed the loss of the homunculus box — if that’s what it was. That there was another box of inestimable value aboard the blimp was certain. And he had Pule’s wonderful device — hadn’t he? — the use of which a half hour earlier had brought about a miracle, and a very useful miracle at that. He’d been imbued with the powers of fertility, with the spirit of the Garden, even to the extent of his visage having turned a mysterious pale green, as if he were the incarnation, perhaps, of a vegetable deity. He’d become a walking illustration of the paradox of rebirth — the wrinkles of age giving way to the budding of a new spring, the age of lead wheezing into extinction as the age of gold clambered up out of the wings. And he’d spoken in a curious voice, squeaky and birdlike — frightening at first; there was no denying it.
But being a vehicle of such cataclysmic change wasn’t, to be sure, an easy business and had never been such. The power that had assumed control of his larynx was quite clearly the spirit of his departed mother, hovering in the London aether like a waiting dove. He could remember the particular timbre of her voice, whispering through the dusty halls of memory. When he’d whirled the crank on the device and been sprayed, as it were, by the curious green dust, he’d been gripped by her spirit; he’d spoken for the space of a long moment in his mother’s sweet voice. He’d been overwhelmed, amazed. He’d doubted, even. But doubt was everywhere; he knew that. Flesh was weak, vilely weak. It had, often, to be satiated. Give it some harmless trifle to placate it, and by so doing beat it down so that the spirit could go on about its business. “Let the filthy yet be filthy,” he said half aloud.
His mind wandered, from the curious box to the crowds surging behind and around him to a young lady in a muslin dress — one of his particular favorites among the live converts. She reminded him of Dorothy Keeble, a prisoner in Drake’s establishment. He squinted a bit, as if diminishing the scene roundabout him in order to call up a more immediately pleasurable picture.
His face writhed into something idiotic, a facsimile of a smile. His hands shook and he was gripped by the immediacy of his unspent passion. His chest heaved as he struggled to catch his breath. He reached surreptitiously into his cloak and groped for a flask of medicine — gin and laudanum — the combined wonders of which had a distinctly calming effect. He shuddered and looked round him wondering if, perhaps, he hadn’t ought to crank up the device and treat the captive audience around him to the first of the evening’s bountiful collection of miracles. There before him, smiling benignly, stood one of Narbondo’s animations, bless his enlivened heart. His comparatively uncorrupted countenance suggested that he wasn’t one of the mutes, one of the recovered long-dead.
“I can see from the cut of your suit that you were of genteel breeding,” said the evangelist benevolently to the man he supposed to be a corpse.
Godall continued to smile at him with the same vacant, empty-headed smile that resided on the faces of the faithful, both living and dead, who milled through the crowds. He decided to respond, having little to lose, even if he were found out. “I was indeed, master,” said Godall thickly.
The evangelist gawked at him, surprised. Here was a lively ghoul indeed. Could such a miracle be possible? Of course it could. The end, after all, was drawing nigh. The sea would give up its dead and all would be given tongues so that they might, like lawyers, argue their cases before a holy tribunal. He was fired with the idea. “My son!” he exclaimed into the face of Theophilus Godall. And with that he began to blubber and wheeze, carried away by the sight of London on the march, hurrying toward they knew not what. “Stand beside me, my child! You’ll be called upon to testify!”
With that admonition, the old man grasped the Keeble box — St. Ives’ aerator — and whirled away at the crank, launching a cloud of green vapors that brought forth, as he had hoped, torrents of exclamation from the pressing crowd. A flat-bed wagon sat abandoned in the road before them, its driver having grown impatient and tramped away toward Hampstead Heath on foot.
“Kneel, my son,” commanded Shiloh. Godall kneeled. Shiloh placed a foot on his back and boosted himself onto the wagon, waving the spirit box.
The crowd roundabout fell silent. The press was so thick that the audience, for the moment anyway, was literally captive, and there were no oak trees nearby, thank heaven, to provide shelter for mocking sinners. The evangelist gave the box another crank, bathing his face in the dust of fecundity. “Hear me!” he squeaked in a voice weirdly reminiscent of pipid frogs. He motioned wildly at an attendant who lifted above his head the glass case in which rested the skull of Joanna Southcote. The teeth seemed to hop and chatter just a bit, but the effect was negligible. It was impossible to tell whether the result was a matter of the head’s sudden animation or of the attendant’s having given it a shake.