Homunculus

by James P. Blaylock

  Before him were a plethora of dials and gauges. He’d wage a sum on his being able to guess out the nature of half a dozen of them, but others were a mystery. The dials were mounted under clock crystals, filled, it seemed, with violet liquid. Scattered in between and roundabout were buttons that one might push, fabricated of what appeared to be ivory and ebony. St. Ives had the sudden urge to jab away at them, like a man with no musical training might poke at the keys of a piano. But the discordant result might easily mean his doom - probably would mean his doom. He calculated, trusting to his earlier conclusions about the peculiar but telling affinity of related objects in the universe. His fingers wandered from one switch to the next. Nothing ventured… he told himself, stopping before an ivory button beside which was a sort of hieroglyphic depiction of a sun. He stabbed at it. The dials glowed suddenly through the violet liquid. Emboldened, he pushed another, this one next to a little picture of an aeolus-faced puff of wind. A humming ensued. St. Ives braced himself, then felt, against the back of his neck, a little rush of air. An oxygenator, he thought, smiling at his pair of successes. He jabbed another button and the hatch opened.

  “Damn,” he said, half aloud. He stooped up through the hiatus, grasped the hatch in order to haul it back down, and looked straight into the ruined face of a ghoul, who stood precariously on the upholstered chair. St. Ives shrieked at it, dropping into the craft, bounding up again to clutch at the hatch, the ghoul meanwhile endeavoring to hoist itself in. Its gaping face, hair tumbling over its forehead, loomed in above St. Ives, who pressed his right hand against the thing’s nose and forehead, shoving with all his strength, his feet braced against the deck of the craft. The ghoul stared out stupidly from beneath St. Ives’ fingers, its own hands stubbornly clutching the edges of the circular hatch opening. St. Ives banged at the fingers with the fist of his free hand, then reached past, grasped the hatch, and slammed it down on the back of the thing’s head.

  It lurched forward, eyes widening, then jerked its head out, throwing the hatch open with it. A third hand joined the pair still clutching the ship - another ghoul endeavoring to clamber in. St. Ives banged the hatch down onto the fingers, mashing at them once, then twice, then a third time, grimacing at each blow, expecting a rain of severed fingers. He shut his eyes and slammed the hatch again. It settled into place. Outside were the two ghouls, examining their hands with looks of wonder on their faces, as if having already forgotten how they’d come to be in such a state. Beyond them was another ghoul. Two more slumped in through the door.

  St. Ives gritted his teeth and poked an ebony button. The ship lurched and lay still. He poked another. Nothing at all happened. Two ghouls pushed a sofa toward the craft. Another hauled at an oak secretary. Three more wandered into the room and tugged at a piano, inching it forward, intent upon… what? Scuttling St. Ives’ ship by burying it in furniture? The scientist settled to his work. A heavy rope end flicked past the window. They were tying the craft to the leg of the upholstered chair, then winding it around the leg of the piano. He’d been wrong about the cleaning woman again. Apparently it was common knowledge, even among ghouls, that the craft was a ship of some sort - not at all a bad thing, thought St. Ives. It argued that the craft worked, that Drake had given orders to prevent its being hijacked.

  At the pressing of a button next to the drawing of a spiralling arrow, the ship spun suddenly on its axis, dragging with it the stuffed chair and tearing the rope from the hands of a bent and ragged zombie that crept about under the piano. St. Ives pressed the same button and the movement stopped. He pressed again and the craft resumed its revolution. When he faced the window straight on, he pushed it once again. Then, throwing caution onto the dust heap, he stabbed away at a succession of buttons.

  The ship shuddered, lurched, slid forward a foot. The chair in which he sat tilted back, nearly dumping him onto the floor. A wild hum erupted as the craft lurched again, skittered across the floor, and, in an avalanche of cascading glass and tearing vines, rose in a sudden escalating rush, hauling with it the stuffed chair and a single dangling ghoul whose face, smitten with wonder and confusion, pressed against one of the starboard ports for a quick second or so before sliding away and disappearing.

  St. Ives, hands flying over the controls in a wild effort to steady the craft, had no time to be concerned with attached zombies. The ship cartwheeled. St. Ives watched in a whirling rush the topsy turvy dome of St. Paul’s spin past, followed by a brief glimpse of the spiraling armchair, lost almost immediately to sight and giving way to what was almost certainly a split-second view of the Kennington Oval. The ship shot away to the south and west, bound, it seemed, for the Channel.

  He was moving prodigiously fast in an utterly uncontrolled flight, pinned to his seat by the laws of physics on a voyage that, he was suddenly certain, was making him sick at his stomach. It would end in disaster. He knew it. He could picture himself catapulting out of hand into the sea. He couldn’t, in fact, picture anything else. It was evident that the slightest manipulation of a pair of curved levers at dead center in front of him would cause the ship to tumble or swerve or skip or in some way run mad. Hesitantly, he prodded one. But he succeeded only in once again cavorting along end over end. There was the sea, the lying chair, what appeared briefly to be a pantleg with a shoeless foot dangling from it, this last entangled in the swinging rope. A prod at the other lever sent him plummeting breathlessly toward the sea, his stomach at once in his throat, the chair rising weirdly past the ports followed by the staring face of the zombie, whose ankle was fouled in the line. The gray swell of the Channel hurtled toward him as he edged the lever back, ever so slowly. The craft swung round in a slow arc, leveling off, then rising once again. It was slow deliberation that was called for - the mere consideration of pressure on a lever was nearly sufficient for a change of course.

  His stomach returned to its rightful position, the blood in his veins ceased its racing and settled in apace, and with a keen-minded deliberation, tempered by a vision of the collected, astonished visages of the Royal Academy when he swept in among them at prodigious speeds, and encouraged by the vast canvas of the deepening evening sky, St. Ives eased the lever forward with a subtle pressure from his right hand. He steadied the ship with his left, satisfied with the controlled response. He dipped suddenly, evened her out, and smiled, angling in an increasing rush toward the Dover Strait. The ship slanted upward through thinning atmosphere into the purple heavens. The sky above darkened, brimming suddenly with flickering emerald lamps through the tinted ports, as if he stared into a deep, stellar well, half full of dark water and reflected stars.

  NINETEEN

  ON THE HEATH

  From Hampstead Heath, the lights of London winked and glittered in the darkness, an earthbound counterpoint to the stars amid which St. Ives raced in his borrowed ship miles and miles above. Theophilus Godall stood with Captain Powers and Hasbro, alternately watching the wash of lights and the heavens, the first for no practical reason save beauty, the latter for the appearance of the dark bulk of Birdlip’s blimp.

  The village of Hampstead was choked with people, slogging in the mud of the streets, jamming the taverns, perching in trees. Pots of ale and cups of gin and rum were carried around by hustling children, who got no farther than a dozen feet from their doors before their wares were snatched away and consumed and a hundred voices called for more of the same. Half the populace of Greater London seemed to have found itself in the vicinity of Hampstead, although a good part of them got no farther than Hampstead Village or Camden Town before encamping, either having little interest in approaching blimps, or, more likely, having little idea what it was that approached, satisfied to be afoot on a warm evening in the carnival atmosphere.

  Godall professed to Captain Powers that he hoped the ale and spirits would hold up. And just when he finished the sentence, a great crash sounded from across the green on which they stood, and a low building collapsed in a heap of flying debris. Screams and moaning erupted fr
om a score of people who had moments before been perched atop it and had been singing a tumultuous hymn. A band of robed faithful, two of whom supported a worn but animated Shiloh between them, hurried toward the wrecked shack, pitching handfuls of tracts to the enthusiastic crowds they passed along the way.

  The Royal Academy clustered within the confines of a roped-off rectangle on the green onto which had been arranged lawn chairs. The perimeter of the rectangle was threatened roundabout by the pressing multitude. Parsons, a powdered wig canted across the top of his head, shouted over a sheaf of foolscap at his fellows, but his words were one with the general mêlée, and not a scientist among them had his eyes on anything but the stars.

  Godall was faintly surprised to see the evangelist. There seemed to be no end to the perspicacity of a zealot. The old man appeared, however, to be deflated, to have had the wind taken out of his sails. In the glass cube, still clutched under his arm, lay the head of Joanna Southcote, mute now and toppled over onto its side. It was hard to imagine that the evangelist would cause them trouble. It was the blimp he was interested in. When it landed, then they’d have to look sharp. But he’d hardly risk attacking them outright, despite the affront of being manhandled by Godall hours earlier.

  Kelso Drake, though, was a different proposition. He’d ridden up minutes after the arrival of the Captain’s wagon, then had vanished immediately - an ominous thing, all in all. Godall would far sooner keep him in sight. It was impossible to say whose ghouls lurched about the Heath, Shiloh’s or Drake’s - quite conceivably both. Kraken was crouched in the upper limbs of a particularly tall alder fifty meters away, a whistle in his teeth. He was on the watch, especially, for the man in the chimney pipe hat. The Keebles were ensconced in the wagon, neither Jack nor Dorothy being in condition to venture out among the multitude. Dorothy, however, was coming round, the haste of their retreat from Wardour Street having chased off some of the effects of the drugs. William Keeble looked about furtively, his right hand on the pistol in his coat, utterly certain that Drake would attempt to repay him for the pummeling in the hallway. Wrapped in a shawl beneath his feet lay the notorious Marseilles Pinkle.

  Once, as the wagon had banged and rattled up the hill from Hampstead, they’d rounded a corner, pressing through a mob of trudging merrymakers, and among them, a broad-brimmed hat yanked across his eyes, Willis Pule had bent along slowly. He had glanced up, as if to join the bulk of the mob in cursing the wagon, and his eyes might as well have been pinwheels. If ever Keeble had seen a madman, Pule was it, and no mistake. His face was awash with a deadly, green pallor, as if his head were a pocked and cratered ball of green cheese gouged from the moon.

  At the sight of the wagon pushing past, the spinning rear wheels sluicing mud onto Pule’s trousers and Pule himself understanding in a rush who it was that rode in the wagon, his mouth twitched open spasmodically, and his suddenly whirling eyes rolled back up under the brim of his hat. He’d lurched forward to grab the wheel, as if to yank the wagon to a stop. But the crowd, finally, had thinned, and the horses leaped forward onto the clear quarter mile of road appearing ahead. Pule was dragged along in a sudden head-over-heels tumble, onto his back like a roach in the mud and moaning unrepeatable curses.

  The episode had mystified Keeble. What on earth, he wondered, had befallen Pule to have brought him to such a pass, and why had the sight of the wagon so enraged him? There was much, clearly, in the world that Keeble didn’t understand - much that he didn’t care to understand.

  Parsons strode back and forth across the green - ten steps this way, ten steps that. He paused in mid-stride coming and going to address comments to his fellows, remarking on the direction of prevailing winds, the possibility of warm valley air rushing in a dangerous updraft and pushing the blimp along to Chingford or Southgate or farther. Winds, after all, were treacherous things. Like teeth, actually. But if one knew their peculiarities, their habits, they would reveal monumental knowledge and could be read and deciphered, much like the interior winds of the human organism could be relied upon to betray gastrointestinal peculiarities. If only Birdlip, Parsons lamented, had been a different breed of scientist - what the man mightn’t have learned, adrift on the skytides for close onto fifteen years! Ah, but they could hope for little, expect even less. Wish for the worst, he insisted, and one was rarely disappointed. He strode up and down, hauling out his pocketwatch at intervals, then shoving it back into his vest pocket.

  A dozen gray beards wagged behind him, and no end of brass telescopes were trained on the empty heavens - empty, that is, but for a wash of stars and a crescent moon risen to the top of the sky. A cry arose, and a finger or two pointed briefly at the ivory slice of moon, but whatever it was that had prompted the cry had disappeared. Something, apparently, had for a brief moment been silhouetted there, but had sailed at once into darkness. Parsons pronounced the mystery a bat, whose nocturnal eating habits accounted for its astonishingly proficient digestive system. Still there was no sign of the blimp.

  Parsons wished heartily that the populace would go home. The shouting and singing and general drunkenness were at best a distraction, and certainly had no place at a function of this magnitude. Their presence was due solely to the idiotic posing of the charlatan evangelist, whose apocalyptic tracts had stirred a million Londoners into unwholesome exodus. The man should be in a madhouse. There he stood, one foot planted squarely on the back of each of two kneeling parishioners. What he shouted into the night air was lost in the general cacophony, and Parsons couldn’t fathom a bit of it. The few phrases that blew across the green were tangles of hellfire, final trumpets, avenging angels, and - remarkably - creatures from the stars. This last, under calmer circumstances, would have appealed to Parsons, but it was such utter blather here that to attend to it for ten seconds running was a tiresome business.

  The hands of the old evangelist rose slowly over his head, and in them, held for the crowd to appreciate, was a cube of some sort. It was far too dark, despite burning clumps of brush scattered round the green, for Parsons to see clearly what it was - a holy object, no doubt. People pressed in around the evangelist, listening. The starry sky and the distant lights of London winking and glittering on the plain below enlivened the night with a spirit of mysticism.

  The evangelist exhorted the crowd. There was an answering shout, a confirmation, it seemed. A scream followed. Hands pointed heavenward. A general shouting arose. Spyglasses were aimed toward where a tiny pinprick of light arced out of the sky, falling toward the Heath and brightening as it fell. The general tumult gave way to an awed silence, broken by the shouting evangelist. “And the name of the star,” he cried, “is Wormwood!”

  But the utterance of the last syllable was followed by a sudden shriek as the evangelist catapulted forward off the backs of his supplicants. The box he held over his head sailed some few feet above the green until it was snatched out of the air by a running figure in a broad-brimmed hat, who dashed among the multitude, knocking people aside like billiard balls and racing as a man possessed toward where Parsons stood before the assembled scientists.

  “What in the devil is this?” cried Parsons, an utterance that might easily have applied to either mystery - to the glowing orb that plummeted earthward, or to the gibbering, fright-masked lunatic who capered up, yowling at the thing in his hands and lurched to a stop not ten feet in front of the collected Royal Academy. He regarded the cube as if stupefied, betrayed. Parsons could see now that it was built of glass and contained some rattling object. The madman’s mouth worked, gibbering silently. With a sobbing heave, as if the strange cube were perhaps the most inconceivably disheartening thing he’d run across in recent years, he dashed it to the ground, then slumped off unpursued. For the minions of the evangelist, along with the old man himself, watched in growing wonder the thing in the sky - a glowing, spheroid ship, fallen from the stars.

  Parsons blinked. He looked at the receding madman. He looked at the approaching starship. He looked at the decayed he
ad, toothy and brown, that rolled to a stop at his feet, peering up at him through empty sockets. Its jaws clacked once, as if in a tired attempt to bite his shoes or to utter some final lamentation. Then it lay still. “What on earth…” murmured Parsons.

  St. Ives could once again see Greater London spread out below him, but this time it wasn’t spinning like a top. It lay below like jeweled pinpoints flung along the winding dark ribbon of the Thames. To the west the sky was tinged red with dying sunlight, which quickly deepened to purple then blue-black as his craft dropped toward Hampstead Heath. Behind him lay the uncharted oceans of deep space - oceans traversed by comets and moons and planets and asteroids, the vast and lonely sailing ships that plied the trade lanes among the stars, and among which, for a few brief minutes. St. Ives had maneuvered his little coracle of a star vessel.

  But he was destined now for Hampstead Heath. The wonders of the heavens would wait for him, of that there could be little doubt. But the machinations of earthbound villainy would not. His friends at that moment were embroiled in God knew what sorts of dangers and intrigues. St. Ives smiled as he diminished the speed of the craft sliding in toward the fires that dotted the hillsides like beacons above the lights of Hampstead.

  The great oval green was thick with people who swirled and parted and fell back. There, he could see, was a knot of people on chairs in a cordoned area - the Royal Academy, without a doubt. And before them - that had to be Parsons. St. Ives angled in toward him, looking in vain for his own companions. But there were horse carts aplenty, and one looked pretty much like another from such lofty heights. The ground sailed up at him. Upturned faces, mouths agape, swam into clarity. St. Ives fingered the levers, toyed with them, eased them this way and that, settling, finally, onto the green, dead center between two roaring fires, with no more jarring than if he’d sailed in on a feather.