The Somnambulist: A Novel

by Jonathan Barnes

  “A poet. Is that so?”

  “Why are you smiling? Does that suggest something to you?”

  Barabbas gurgled. “It’s really too perfect, Edward. I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.”

  “Damn it, man!”

  Barabbas stifled a belch, only half-successfully. He leered at the conjuror through rows of yellow tombstone teeth, flanked by mustache and tangled beard. “You’re in danger of letting this become an obsession. I’ve never seen you so excited. You should calm down. Do something to relax.” A mucus cough. A grin. “How is Mrs. Puggsley, by the way?”

  “You’re the last person to lecture me on morality.”

  “Remember what I told you,” Barabbas confided, his voice dripping with honey, rising and falling with the silken cadences of the practiced liar. “I’m above morality now, beyond good and evil.”

  “The case,” Moon insisted.

  “You know, I don’t think these squalid homicides are the real mystery.”

  “No?”

  “I think they’re a symptom. There is a corrosive influence abroad, Edward. There is a plot against the city and these murders are only the tip of the iceberg.”

  “What do you know?”

  In response, Barabbas moved silently forward, his grotesque frame slithering across the floor like some Brobdingnagian slug. “Let me out, Edward. Help me escape and together we can discover the truth.”

  Moon stepped hurriedly back, falling against the iron bars of the cage. Behind him, Owsley emerged from the shadows.

  “Time’s up,” he said, producing a ring of keys from his pocket with an officious flourish.

  Barabbas wailed and thrust out his hands in supplication. “Edward! Edward!”

  The door was unlocked and Moon stepped sharply back out into the corridor.

  Owsley said, “Your friends are waiting.”

  Barabbas brought his face up to the bars and peered out into the darkness.

  “Edward?”

  Moon turned around.

  “Will you come back?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I hope I’ve been of some small assistance.”

  Moon spoke carefully. “Maybe you have.”

  “All the color has seeped from my life. Next time, bring me scarlet. Bring me violet and vermilion and gold.”

  “I’ll come back,” Moon conceded.

  Barabbas grinned in triumph. “Then you still need me,” he hissed. “Even now.” Overexcited, he suffered a violent fit of coughing. “Edward,” he said more gently, once the attack had passed. “Edward, if I were you I should go home.”

  “Oh?”

  “I should hurry, Edward.”

  Something was needling at the back of his mind. “What do you mean?”

  “Something terrible is happening,” Barabbas said simply. “Go now.” The prisoner’s face vanished from the bars of the cell and he disappeared back into the gloom.

  Moon felt a sudden surge of panic. He turned to Owsley. “Let’s go,” he said, and they set off along the corridor almost at a run.

  They were several streets away from Albion Square when they saw that Barabbas was right.

  The sky was lit up by flashes of crimson. Thick black smoke poured past, as though a storm cloud had been dragged to earth. Seeing that some disaster lay ahead, the coachman refused to take them any further, so Moon leapt from the vehicle and ran on alone to the square. Despite the lateness of the hour, the whole of the East End seemed to be abroad and Moon had to battle through droves of idle onlookers to reach his destination. When he eventually emerged from the gawping masses he saw the truth of it. The Theatre of Marvels was aflame.

  It was horribly clear that nothing could be saved. The blaze must have started shortly after they had left for the prison and now the building was burning down to its skeleton, its flesh and features long since scorched away. It’s windows were empty, blackened sockets, its door a melted heap of slag. Of the sign which had read:

  THE THEATRE OF MARVELS

  starring

  MR EDWARD MOON

  and

  THE SOMNAMBULIST

  BE ASTONISHED!

  BE THRILLED! BE ENLIGHTENED!

  a mere fragment had survived and only the half-word “LIGHTE” was still visible.

  A group of men had formed a line to pass buckets of water to and fro from the disaster site but their valiant efforts were in vain. The theatre was lost, and as the flames began to spread, licking greedily at the adjoining buildings, they were forced to transfer their attention elsewhere.

  A man was standing beside Moon in the crowd. “Pity, isn’t it?” He grimaced, displaying more gaps in his mouth than teeth. “Saw the show there once. Bored to tears, I was.”

  “How did this happen?”

  “Why you asking? You local?”

  Moon pushed him aside and ran toward the theatre. Hammered by waves of heat, stung by smoke, eyes streaming, he staggered helplessly back.

  “Grossmith!” he shouted. “Speight!”

  Even against the roar and crackle of the flames he recognized a horribly familiar sound, one so hateful to him that he would have given anything not to hear it at that moment — a discreet, dry, ticklish cough.

  “Mr. Moon?”

  He spun around.

  “Good evening to you,” said Skimpole.

  The conjuror snarled, “What have you done?”

  “Drastic measures. I did warn you.” Flames reflected in the lenses of his pince-nez, lending his eyes an infernal aspect. Moon lunged forward but the albino stepped nimbly aside. “Your temper does you no credit,” he chided. “Your friends are quite safe. They were removed before the fire was set. The monkey, I’m afraid, refused to leave. No doubt he’s fricasseed quite nicely by now.”

  “You admit to it?” Moon asked furiously. “This was your doing?”

  “I told you we were desperate. By rights you should be flattered.”

  Moon was speechless, choked by rage. “You’ve gone too far,” he managed at last.

  Skimpole flashed a quick smile. “I did think that might be your reaction. So I brought this.” The albino produced a bulky manila file from his briefcase. “Take a look.”

  Moon snatched the thing from Skimpole and riffled through it. As he realized its full significance, even he was momentarily at a loss for words. “How long have you had this?”

  “We’ve kept a dossier on you for years,” Skimpole said coolly. “Of course, I’d hoped never to have to use it — but then you can’t say we didn’t ask nicely.”

  “You wouldn’t use this, surely?”

  “I might. The Puggsley material is here, of course. But some of the other items… Even the release of my records on our mutual friend in Newgate would mean your public ruin and disgrace.”

  Moon cursed, loudly and at length. This is not the place to reproduce such colorful material verbatim.

  “I’ll ask you a final time,” said Skimpole. “Will you help me?”

  The fire was reaching its zenith, throwing out furnace waves in its final rush to consume the last flammable matter. Moon staggered under the blast, dizzy and faint, flailing about to regain his balance.

  “Mr. Moon?” The albino was insistent. “Will you help us?”

  Feebly, the conjuror nodded.

  Skimpole smiled. “Very good,” he said briskly. “We’ll be in touch.” And he strutted away into the crowd. Left alone, gasping for breath as the Theatre of Marvels died before him, Moon tried to run in pursuit of his tormentor only to stumble and fall. Strong arms helped him up, and as Moon staggered to his feet, he looked into the eyes of the Somnambulist.

  “We’ve lost,” he muttered.

  The giant looked gravely back, surveying the ruins of his home. Remarkably, a few tears ran down his cheeks. Behind him, Merryweather emerged from the crowd with Mrs. Grossmith and Speight.

  Moon gripped the Somnambulist’s arm. “Barabbas was right,” he gasped. “It’s over. We’ve lost. Checkmate.”r />
  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 s
omething 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.”

  Moon and the Somnambulist exchanged glances.

  “What I’m about to tell you is known to only half a dozen men in the country, all of whom exist at the pinnacle of our organization. This is a state secret, so I suggest you keep it to yourselves. It’s a snorting great cliché, of course — and I rather wish I didn’t have to say it — but men have died for less. For the past five months, my organization has been receiving vital information from — how shall I put it? From an unorthodox source. A woman. Since one of my people dug her up last year, my colleagues in Whitehall have begun to lean on her somewhat. More, in fact, than may be considered entirely healthy. Her advice is now thought to be so absolutely crucial on certain matters of policy that it would be no exaggeration to say that without her, the last war in which this country took a part would have ended much less happily indeed.” Skimpole looked down at his feet, embarrassed, like a weak-willed schoolboy caught stealing apples. “I fear we’ve let things get a little out of hand.”

  “Her name?” Moon asked.

  Skimpole took a deep breath. “Madame Innocenti.”

  Moon did his best to mask a smile.

  “She’s a medium,” Skimpole finished, his chalk-pale cheeks tinged incongruously with scarlet. “A clairvoyant. Lives in Tooting Bec. Claims to receive messages from the spirit world.”

  Moon steepled his fingers, savoring the moment. “In essence, Mr. Skimpole, what you appear to be telling us is that for the past five months, British Intelligence has allowed itself to be led on the say-so of a backstreet fortune-teller.”

  The albino winced at Moon’s candor. “Are you shocked?”

  “Not at all. There’s something oddly comforting about discovering all one’s worst suspicions to be true.”

  The giant smirked, and Moon pressed home his advantage. “How far does this woman’s influence extend? How high does this go?”