Moon gripped the Somnambulist’s arm. “Barabbas was right,” he gasped. “It’s over. We’ve lost. Checkmate.”
Then, for the first time in his life, Edward Moon fainted — swooning into the arms of the Somnambulist.
Grossmith, Speight and the inspector ran toward them. “Mr. Moon!”
Speight still had his perennial sandwich board with him, its cryptic message now the theatre’s sole survivor:
SURELY I AM COMING SOON
REVELATION 22:20
The events of the evening seemed to have roused him into a semblance of sobriety. “Christ,” he said, gazing at the devastation. “What will we do now?”
Chapter 10
Beneath the city, far below the streets and pavements of the everyday, the old man dreams.
Cocooned in the underworld, time is lost to him and he has no notion of the span of his slumbers: years may have passed in the world above or he might have dozed for mere hours.
There is little logic and no pattern discernible to the dreams of this subterranean Rip Van Winkle. At times he thinks he dreams of the past, at others of what seem to him to be shadows of the future. Occasionally he is shown things that appear unrelated to any experience of his own — fragments, shards of memory from other people’s lives.
A thin, reedy snore escapes him; he sighs, rolls over and returns to the past.
He is back during his last years at Highgate. The vision is so vivid and so real he can catch the very scent of his old room, the close, murky stinks of sweat, snuff, dirty linen, stale farts. Gillman is there, fussing about him as usual, medicine bottle in one hand, slop-pot in the other. Another figure, too, dwarfish, silhouetted against the window, his face in shadow. The old man strains to remember, but before he is able to identify the stranger, the scene ebbs away to reveal another, much earlier time. He is young again, in Syracuse — his wife, heavy with child, long since abandoned to the uncertain mercies of family and friends back home. He chances upon an excavation, stands and watches for long, dusty hours, enraptured as men tease and extricate from the earth the headless statue of the Landolina Venus — a thing of beauty returned from dust to the waking world. He sees sand and mud brushed away from the delicate traceries of the madonna’s marbled bust, sees the decapitated, variegated stump where her head once stood — with a face, it was said, of achingly exquisite beauty. Mute, he watches this perfect being, this stone Olympian, raised to the surface.
With an infuriating disregard for chronology, the dream shifts and he is old again, back in that malodorous room, Gillman buzzing about him with medicine and pot, the dwarf at the window still obscured by shadow. Despite the prosaicism of the scene, the dreamer feels sure that this is some flashpoint in his life, some pivotal moment whose true significance has yet to be revealed to him.
The stranger turns, steps into the light and begins to speak.
The old man groans softly and stirs in his sleep. Above him the city roars giddily upwards, oblivious to the threat which slumbers beneath it.
Nine and a half miles away, Prisoner W578 received a visitor.
“Master?”
Barabbas waddled to the bars of his cell. “Have you brought it?”
“It’s here, sir.” Meyrick Owsley’s plump, stubby fingers darted between the bars of the cell to push a small purple box into the hands of its inmate. Barabbas grabbed the thing with all the gluttonous excitement of a spoilt child and disappeared into the corner of his dungeon. Owsley caught a momentary glimmer, a glint of something shiny, metallic and expensive. Barabbas snapped the box shut and added it to his meager store of treasures, bundled up in an oily rag and hidden beneath a loose slab of masonry.
“Another glimpse,” he hissed, quivering with fleshy excitement, “another flicker of beauty.” He wrapped the item up, pushed it back into the wall, then dumped himself onto the floor, exhausted from his brief exertions, his body wracked by long, suety shudders.
“I thought you should know, sir — Moon and the Somnambulist-”
“Yes?” Barabbas suddenly seemed alert, curious, his stash of beauty temporarily forgotten.
“They’re working for Skimpole, sir. Blackmail, if the rumors are true. The Directorate has a reputation. I’m worried he’s getting close.”
The prisoner laughed — a strained, prickly sound.
“Sir? May I advise caution?”
Barabbas seemed oddly jocular. “You may not. I think we can expect another visit from Edward. Don’t you?”
Oswley did not reply, his disapproval obvious.
The fat man grinned, baring his cankered teeth. “I’m going to enjoy this.”
The hotel Skimpole had provided for Moon and the Somnambulist was widely considered to be the most exclusive, and was certainly amongst the most expensive, in the city. Their quarters comprised a small network of rooms, painfully tasteful in their furnishings and design: bedroom, reception room, drawing room, study — all sumptuous and ostentatious, quite beyond anything they had known before. A distinctive scent wafted through the building, a soothing cocktail of wax, polish and the fruity aftertaste of a really good bottle of wine — the old smells of wealth and luxury. On arrival, guests were assigned a personal valet, a servant dedicated to fulfilling their every need, the slightest opportunity to pamper or please sending them into paroxysms of fawning delight.
It was, in short, a horribly gilded cage.
In the three and a half weeks which had passed since the destruction of the Theatre of Marvels, Moon had been allowed out of the hotel on just four occasions — a gentleman’s gentleman who, it transpired, owed his allegiance to Mr. Skimpole. Defeated and humiliated, Moon found himself so trapped in this genteel gaolhouse that the Somnambulist had begun to fear for his friend’s sanity. He was oddly relieved, then, when on their twenty-third day under house arrest, their tormentor came to call.
The albino lowered himself gingerly onto the divan, reached into his pocket and produced an exquisite silver case.
“Cigar?”
Both declined in surly silence.
“Ah, well.” Reverentially, Skimpole helped himself and lit up, something like satisfaction flickering fitfully across his face. “I trust you’re comfortable? For myself, I’ve always found this a charming little hideaway.”
Moon grimaced. “I shan’t forget this.”
“Please,” Skimpole exhaled thin ribbons of smoke from his nostrils. “I’ve come to ask for your help. So sorry I’ve not been able to visit sooner but things have been absolutely frantic. You understand, I’m sure.”
Moon and the Somnambulist glared back.
“To business, then. My profuse apologies for your enforced stay. I know you’ve not been able to pursue your extracurricular activities, Edward, but we had to make certain you wouldn’t renege on our agreement.”
“What do you want?” Moon’s voice was studiedly neutral, the barest intimation of menace discernible.
Skimpole sucked in a lungful of smoke. “My colleagues and I are in possession of information which strongly suggests that a plot is at work against the city.” He spoke baldly, matter-of-factly, as if this were an ordinary conversation, as though disaster were an everyday occurrence, catastrophe the common currency of his life. “We believe that during your investigation into the Honeyman-Dunbar murders you may have stumbled upon some tangential element of this conspiracy, a loose thread in the skein of the thing. A thread which we may yet succeed in tugging loose.”
As if struck by a sudden thought, the Somnambulist scribbled something down.
FLY
Skimpole favored the man with a ghost of a smile. “I don’t think any of us believes the Fly acted alone, my friend. As I understand it, the man was mentally subnormal.”
Skimpole paused a moment and looked the Somnambulist up and down, as though troubled by the thought that he might inadvertently have caused offense. “No,” he continued more firmly, “the feeling is that he was a pawn at best. A minor player. My congratulations on catching him nonetheless. Such a pity he died so abruptly. But his demise is so very typical of what we’ve come to expect from you two. Like something torn from the pages of a penny-dreadful. Needless to say, it would never have happened had you been working for us. We pride ourselves on our prosaicism, our practicality and common sense. There’s no room at the Directorate, gentleman, for melodrama.”