It was Thomas Cribb.
Chapter 11
Beneath the city, the old man dreams.
A phrase surfaces from the ether and forms itself in his mind.
“All poets go to hell.”
A strange sentence but one he is certain he has heard somewhere before. Or read, perhaps. Even written it himself.
He dreams that he is back again in his bedroom at Highgate. Dr. Gillman is there, and someone else, a dwarfish figure who hangs back amongst the shadows that crouch malevolently at the edges of the room. Then the stranger steps into the light — the dark figure reveals itself — and the dreamer laughs with relief: it is a small boy not more than ten years old. He recognizes him now. The child has a name and in the dream it swims determinedly toward him. Ned. But the boy’s surname proves elusive and the dream shifts again.
He is on a beach, shoeless, wriggling his toes in the sand, feeling it rear up around his feet and work its way into the crevices of his skin. The wind catches playfully at him, flapping his coat like a cape, and almost succeeds in tipping the hat from his head. He watches an elderly woman stand at the edge of a wooden platform which has been wheeled out into the surf. She totters arthritically down to the shallows, squealing in matronly delight as the cold water touches her for the first time. The old man laughs and suddenly Ned is with him, his hot little hand clasped in his, and he laughs, too, though neither of them is quite sure why. Ned grips his hand tighter and they walk on.
The years roll back but the scene remains the same. The dreamer is on the beach again but now no longer old. The boy has disappeared (doubtless yet to be born) and instead, another man is by his side, someone the dreamer feels certain is important, significant to so many lives beyond his own. They are paddling together, breeches rolled up above their knees, shoes abandoned on the shore and guarded by an anxious entourage. The water laps hungrily at their calves and the dreamer grins at his companion. Suddenly the truth of it hits him. The Prime Minister. Could it be? Too fanciful, her decides, and shifts uncomfortably in his sleep. Could it be that he once paddled with the PM in the sea at Ramsgate?
Ramsgate? When did he remember that?
Probably not. Dreams lie.
The Highgate room again. Gillman and the boy. As usual the old man is talking, rambling incoherently on through another protracted anecdote. “All poets go to hell,” he says, and the child listens intently, but Gillman seems bored — he’s heard it all before, and more than once. Even in his own dreams the old man is aware of his reputation for garrulity.
Then he remembers. “All poets go to hell.” Something said that to him once. Something less than human, not quite alive, its voice papery and insidious like wind through dry leaves.
And then he is young again, still a student, along in his lodgings with this thing that has promised — for a price — to tell him certain secrets. “All poets go to hell,” it says, its eyes like burning coals, and maddeningly, the old man knows that this is all it will ever say, repeating ad nauseum and infinitum this same perplexing phrase.
Forty years later he tells the story and Gillman laughs as if it’s just another yarn, another little story outrageously embroidered, but the old man thinks — the old man knows — that this, this is the one.
Above him, as he sleeps, the city roars turbulently on.
There was a faint scent about Mr. Cribb that Moon had never noticed before — not altogether unpleasant, not the smell of perspiration or the musky stink of an unwashed body but something altogether more unusual, comforting, redolent of age and must and damp. He smelt like leaves in October, Moon realized. Of Autumn.
They had walked some distance from the hotel before either of them noticed they were being followed.
“Friend of yours?” the ugly man asked, nodding discreetly toward a stolid gray-suited gentleman skulking half a street behind them.
“My valet,” Moon explained. “My keeper. Skimpole won’t let me out without him.”
Cribb waved with his left, four-fingered hand and, rather sheepishly, the man touched the brim of his bowler in reply.
“How are you finding Mr. Skimpole?”
Moon grimaced.
“I promise you. By the time this is all over, you’ll have come to respect him.”
Moon surprised himself by laughing. “I suppose you’ve seen it all before. In the future.”
“Never forget,” Cribb insisted, comically grave, “I know the plot.”
The detective rolled his eyes.
“Of course, there are rules about this kind of thing, but I can tell you this: Skimpole does not die happy.”
“Shame,” said Moon, sounding anything but upset, at which Cribb unexpectedly roused himself to the albino’s defense.
“He’s not an evil man. He acts from what he believes to be honorable motives.”
The corners of Moon’s mouth turned themselves up into a sneer. “Monsters always do.”
“He’s not a monster.”
Moon looked about him and saw that he was lost. The familiar streets had slipped away, the alien and unknown reared up in their place. “Where are we going?”
“Docklands,” Cribb said, striding on. “Don’t ask me why. I’ll tell you when we get there.”
“Is there a good reason why we can’t hail a cab?
“To understand the city you need to feel her soil beneath your feet, to breathe her air, to sample her infinite variety.”
“You know you’re a remarkably irritating man.”
“It has been mentioned, yes.”
They walked on, oddly content in one another’s company, though dogged the whole time by Mr. Skimpole’s familiar.
“What’s your earliest memory?” Cribb asked at length.
Moon looked sharply at the loping, lopsided figure hunched beside him, this gawky Virgil to his reluctant Dante. “Why?”
“It may be important.”
“My father,” Moon said, “waking me in the night, shaking me awake to tell me my mother had gone.”
Cribb all but rubbed his hands together in glee. “Wonderful!” he chuckled.
“And you?” asked Moon, fairly irritated by his companion’s reaction. “Your earliest memory?”
Cribb frowned. “I sincerely doubt you’ll believe me.”
“Please.”
“I remember the streets in flames. The city visited again by pestilence and fire. The great stone cracked. I am old and I am dying.”
“You’re old?”
“It’s… complicated.”
“I’ve just realized,” Moon said with a start.
“Yes?”
“You really believe all this, don’t you?”
Cribb would only smile in reply, and they walked on.
“I imagine you’ll have met Madame Innocenti by now,” he said a while later.
“Who told you that?”
Cribb brushed the question aside with a languorous wave. “I’m not in league with the Directorate if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“It had crossed my mind.”
“Well, banish it forever. What did you make of her?”
Moon’s throat felt itchy and dry and he swallowed, unwilling to reply.
“You spoke to the Fly, didn’t you?”
“Truthfully? I’m not entirely sure who I spoke to. It was uncanny.”
“You’ll see her again,” Cribb said firmly. “And next time you’ll know the truth of it.”
“How much further?” Moon glanced behind him. “I think our friend’s getting tired.”
“Almost there.”
As they strolled on, the familiar turrets of Tower Bridge loomed into view and beyond them the wharves, warehouses and shipyards of the docklands. They seemed to Moon to resemble some industrial Baghdad, with its blackened spires, its grimy ziggurats and its smog-choked minarets. The Thames threaded her way amongst them, a discarded ribbon, dirty gray, strewn across the landscape.
“Walk closer.”
Ignoring a legion of forbidding notices and signs and heaving themselves over innumerable gates and fences, they eventually clambered down beside the river. Moon wrinkled his nose at the omnipresent smell of decay, treading as carefully as he could along the bank as the filth and muck of the Thames oozed over his shoes.