The Somnambulist: A Novel

by Jonathan Barnes

  Skimpole sighed. “To the top, Mr. Moon.”

  “Tell me…” Moon was enjoying Skimpole’s discomfort. “What has she to do with us?”

  “For some time, Madame Innocenti has been warning us of a conspiracy directed against the state.”

  “Details?”

  “Nothing specific. Just as you’d expect — vague, oracular warnings, phrased in the most purple and prolix terms. We’d like you to see her for yourself and discover the truth.”

  “I’m afraid I still don’t see why this should interest us.”

  Regretfully, Skimpole stubbed out the ashy tip of his cigar. “Madame Innocenti has mentioned three names in the course of her auguries… Cyril Honeyman, Philip Dunbar.”

  Moon nodded calmly, as if he’d been expecting this.

  Skimpole swallowed hard. “And Edward Moon,” he murmured.

  For the home of a latter-day Cassandra, Madame Innocenti’s house was disappointingly unprepossessing. No doubt it was respectable enough in its own way — a modest two-story semi-detached building which might have been more than acceptable as the property of a schoolteacher, say, or that of a clerk or an accountant, but for a seer of Madame Innocenti’s supposed power and influence, frankly it was almost suspicious. It had a tired, uncared-for look, a forlorn atmosphere of abandonment and decay.

  Moon stepped up to the rotten-looking front door and, as gently as he was able, knocked by means of an ancient brass knocker that looked as though it might at any moment crumble into rust.

  The Somnambulist looked about him at the dreary grayness of the place, the glum homogeneity of Tooting Bec, and wrinkled his nose in distaste. Albion Square, the Theatre of Marvels, Yiangou’s opium den — all of these, however unpleasant they may individually have been, were nonetheless alive with color; they had a glossy, lurid quality redolent of spit and sawdust of the stage. There was none of that about Tooting, this so-called Delphi of London — it was too ordinary, too monochrome, too wearily everyday.

  The door opened and a gangling, nervous man stared out, startled-looking and suspicious. Still young, his hair had begun to recede and he was afflicted with a pair of owlish, too-thick spectacles. “Yes?”

  “I’m Edward Moon and this is my associate, the Somnambulist. I believe we’re expected.”

  “Of course.” The man nodded repeatedly and with such ungainly vigor that Moon wondered if he might not be suffering from the early symptoms of some hideous degenerative disease. “Come through. My wife will join us shortly.”

  He led them down a grimy corridor and through into a darkened reception room, barely illuminated by a dozen or so spasmodically flickering candles. A long, narrow table stood at its center, nine chairs set empty around it.

  “It happens here,” the man said portentously. “Tea?”

  Moon answered for them both; their host bowed and disappeared.

  “Fed up?” Moon asked, but before the Somnambulist could scribble a reply their host bustled back.

  “Tea and milk on its way. In the meantime, allow me to introduce my wife.”

  He stepped back and a woman walked — or seemed, rather, to glide — into the room. She was comfortably into her middle years but looked more striking, more elegant and infinitely more remarkable than any debutante half her age. Feline, sleek, her face framed by a halo of chestnut curls, she was laced into a snug-fitting auburn dress which deliciously accentuated the soft, undulating swell of her breasts. Moon was unsure what he had expected — some toothless Romany, perhaps, a chintzy, obvious fake, gaudy earrings and paste jewelry — but never so exquisite a vision as this.

  She smiled, exposing asset of perfect, pearly teeth. “Mr. Moon. Somnambulist. An honor. You’ll have to forgive me if I seem flustered. I must confess to feeling a little in awe.”

  “Of me?” Moon began, obviously flattered, only to be silenced by a discreet but brutal nudge in the ribs from his companion. He corrected himself. “Of us?”

  “I must have seen your act five times at least. My husband and I were great admirers.” She turned to her balding consort. “Weren’t we, my dove?”

  He mumbled something in the affirmative.

  “Such a pity what happened,” Madame Innocenti mused. “So tragic. You have my condolences.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Moon bowed his head and, remarkably, a hint of a blush appeared to suggest itself.

  “Señor Corcoran has spoken of you. I understand you’re here on behalf of Mr. Skimpole.”

  “That’s correct.”

  She gave a sniff of disdain. “Are you friends?”

  “Not friends, ma’am,” Moon replied carefully. “Associates, perhaps. Reluctant colleagues.”

  “So glad. My husband and I can’t stand him. Frightful, whey-faced little man. You must excuse me, I have to prepare. You’re rather early and the others should be along shortly. You don’t mind waiting?”

  “Of course not.”

  “We’re expecting seven tonight — you gentlemen and five others. Have you attended a séance before?”

  “Never, ma’am.”

  “Well, there must be a first time for us all,” Innocenti said, turning to go. “Even for you, Mr. Moon.”

  She drifted out and they were left once again with her husband — as disappointed as though some empress has swept from the throne room, stranding her subjects with a mere footman.

  “Wait here,” he muttered sullenly. “I’ll fetch your tea.”

  Tea was served in a tandem with a plate of unappetizingly dry biscuits, and as Moon and the Somnambulist pecked politely but unenthusiastically at these refreshments, the other guests arrived. They were a curious group, all of them smelling strongly of desperation, all prepared to pay whatever it took to receive Madame Innocenti’s brand of wisdom.

  First to appear were a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Salisbury, both of them settled into the plump, comfortable final stretch of middle age. They were followed by an unusually ugly young woman who introduced herself as Dolly Creed — her face, sagging and acutely unremarkable, further marred by four evenly sized brown warts clustered around her left nostril. After her a Mrs. Erskine appeared — hunched, elderly, walking-sticked yet oddly nimble, she moved with a brittle, scuttling grace. The biscuits had all been eaten and the teapot run dry by the time the final guest fetched up, a gingery, skittish young man who passed out his card to all present — Mr. Ellis Lister, B.A. (Oxon.). He was evasive about his profession, stating only that he worked in a wing of the Civil Service, Moon and the Somnambulist recognized him immediately, however, as a Directorate man.

  Eventually, Innocenti’s husband skulked back into the room.

  “Take your seats. My wife is here.”

  They moved obediently to their chairs, Moon and the Somnambulist careful to place themselves at the head of the table on either side of the seat reserved for Madame Innocenti herself.

  Heralded by the satiny music of her gown, the medium walked through the room, lovelier than ever, basking in the puppy-eyed adoration of her clients. Her husband withdrew to the edge of the room and discreetly pulled shut the door, once again sinking the place into candle-lit gloom.

  “Welcome,” said Madame Innocenti.

  A discreet round of applause ensued as, after a graceful curtsey and a brief fumble of handshakes and kisses, the medium took her place at the head of the table.

  “Death is not the end,” she said soberly. “Life is not snuffed out with our frail physical forms. There are worlds beyond our own, realms inhabited by the dead, planes of existence ruled by forces beyond our comprehension. Believe me, I know. I know that the soul endures. I know because I have seen beyond the veil. I have spoken with the departed and they have chosen me — unworldly vessel that I am — to be their voice in the world of the living.” Innocenti laughed. “But enough. I’ve no wish to bore you. I’m sure you’ve heard that sort of thing before.”

  “Link hands,” her husband instructed, and they all obeyed, each grasping the hands of their neighb
ors, forming around the table a daisy chain of sweaty palms and twitching fingers. Moon and the Somnambulist exchanged glances, checking to make sure they had a firm grip on the medium.

  “You are right to be cautious,” she said. “We understand your unwillingness to believe. The spirits will forgive you.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Moon.

  Madame Innocenti spoke grandly. “I shall leave you now. I will remove myself from the mortal plane and ascend toward the sunlit realms of the dead. When I speak to you again I shall not be alone. My body will become the vessel of another. My spirit guide. A Spaniard from the age of Elizabeth. He is known to us all as Señor Corcoran.”

  Murmurs of earnest assent around the table.

  “Don’t be afraid.” With that, Innocenti sighed deeply and slumped back into her chair.

  The old woman, Mrs. Erskine, cried out in alarm.

  “Don’t break the circle,” hissed the medium’s husband.

  A moment’s silence, then Madame Innocenti sat up. Her eyes remained closed, but whilst to all intents and purposes she seemed the same woman as before, something almost imperceptible had changed about her — some small shift in the alignment of her face, a subtle alteration in the cast of her features. When she spoke again, her voice was deep and rich and tinged with a European accent, maddeningly unclassifiable. “I sense you have many questions. Who amongst you would speak first to the ranks of the departed?”

  Mr. Salisbury spoke up eagerly. “My son. Is he with you?”

  A strained smile passed across Innocenti’s lips. “I need a name,” she said, still speaking in Corcoran’s pseudo-Spanish tones.

  “Albert,” the old man murmured. “Albert Salisbury.”

  “Albert?” There was a long pause. Madame Innocenti screwed up her face, as though she were grappling with some intensely complex problem. “Albert?” She exhaled loudly. “Yes, there is one here called Albert.” For a terrible moment, Innocenti’s body juddered and convulsed, bucking and writhing on her seat as though electricity was being passed through her body. Throughout these contortions Moon and the Somnambulist were careful to keep tight hold of her hands. When she spoke again, it was in the singsong tones of a child. “Papa?” she breathed. “Papa, is that you?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Salisbury sobbed as one. The latter was content to leak her tears discreetly but her husband, half-laughing, half-crying, all but screamed: “Yes, my boy. Yes, it’s me!” There was something pitiable in the sight — bald, bullet-headed, with the look about him of a retired headmaster, the kind of man who’d gleefully have thrashed a classroom’s worth of boys before breakfast — weeping and gnashing his teeth, womanish in his hysteria.

  Madame Innocenti giggled childishly. “Papa,” she squealed. “I’m happy here. The spirits have been so kind. So very kind. It’s warm, Papa, soft and warm and filled with furry animals and little woolen things.”

  The Salisbury’s eyes shone with tears. Moon stifled a yawn.

  “Grandmama is with me,” Innocenti went on. “Grandpapa, too. Every day is Christmas and everything is wonderful. I am floating, Papa, floating in amber and honey. I love you. I love you. But I have to go now. Please. Please, join me soon.”

  The voice stopped. Innocenti slumped forward and when she spoke again it was in her Corcoran persona. “Forgive me,” she said briskly. “We lost contact. Who’s next?”

  Moon caught the Somnambulist’s eye and they exchanged skeptical smiles.

  I’m almost certainly dead by now and your identity matters to me not a whit. But whoever you are, I imagine you to be at best a cynic, at worst a genuine, honest-to-goodness misanthrope. None but the terminally cynical, after all, could have maintained your interest in such a parade of thieves, crooks, fantasists and liars as fill the pages of the present work. Consequently, I doubt anyone with what I take to be your pessimistic view of life has a great deal of time for the table-rapping, ectoplasmic nonsense of mediumship and séance. Am I correct? I thought as much.

  Moon, of course, who had a strongly misanthropic streak only occasionally tempered by acts of charity, would certainly have agreed. Before Mr. Skimpole had destroyed his home and livelihood, he had made his living by gulling people into believing the impossible. Madame Innocenti, it appeared, did rather the same thing, only a good deal more lucratively and (if the albino’s claims of the frequency of the Directorate visits to Tooting were to be believed) with rather more influence.

  If nothing else she was a first-rate performer. Her assumption of different voices — Corcoran the fusty Spaniard, the babyish tones of the infant Salisbury, her own beguiling appearance out of character — all were masterfully played and she possessed the ability (honed no doubt by years of end-of-the-pier mummery and mysticism) to tell her listeners precisely what they wanted to hear, to confirm in a few short lines of nebulous, comforting twaddle all they had ever dreamt and hoped was true.

  After the Salisburys had spoken to their son, Corcoran presented Mrs. Erskine with the shade of her husband (lost at sea these past twenty years) and Miss Dolly Creed with the thin, pedantic voice of her late fiancé. Moon wondered what kind of man would consent to marriage with such a troglodyte and concluded that he must have arranged his own death in order to escape the altar. Trying enough, he thought, to be saddled with such a horse-faced creature in life — worse still to have one’s carefree gamboling through the fields of Elysium interrupted by the same.

  When Ellis Lister’s turn came, however, he asked to speak not — as had all the others before him — to a dead relative, an old lover or a former pet, but to Corcoran himself.

  “Mr. Lister?” Innocenti spoke in the Spaniard’s dusty voice. “We have met before, I think.”

  “We have indeed, señor. I’m flattered you remember me.”

  “From the Service, yes?”

  Lister smiled tightly. “Not something I like to advertise.”

  “Of course not. I myself dabbled in the intrigues of the secret world. I remember its etiquette too well.”

  Moon realized that he had started to forget Madame Innocenti’s skill as a mimic and was beginning to accept her Corcoran voice as a separate and autonomous persona. He told himself in the sternest terms not to be so ridiculous.

  “How may I be of assistance?”

  “I need a name. We suspect a young man in our employ has been turned by foreign powers.”

  Madame Innocenti nodded sagely. “Okhrana?”

  Lister was swift to shush her. “We are not alone.”

  “Indeed not.”

  “Can you tell me who it is?”

  “Give me their names.”

  Obviously embarrassed, Lister gave the medium the Christian names of his five chief suspects.

  Innocenti listened and fell silent. “Your man,” she said at last, “is…” And with the slightly disdainful air of a local dignitary pulling the winning ticket from a tombola at the church fête, she repeated the third of the names. “He’s been compromised for months.”

  “I’m in your debt, Señor Corcoran.”

  “Treat him mercifully. He is young and callow and not entirely to blame.” She sighed. “I’m tired. But there is one here who has yet to speak. Mr. Moon? Is there somebody with whom you wish yet to converse? A loved one, perhaps? A parent or a sweetheart passed beyond the veil?”

  The Somnambulist was visibly shocked when Moon answered: “Yes.”

  “The name?” Madame Innocenti asked.

  “His real name is not known to me, but when he was alive he called himself the Human Fly.”

  A sharp pause, then: “There is one here who identifies himself as such. I must warn you, sir, that the Fly is not at peace. He is angry, an unquiet spirit.”

  “Nonetheless, I wish to speak with him.”

  A shadow passed across Madame Innocenti’s face. “As you wish.” She squealed, her head jerked upwards and she squirmed in her chair as if in the grip of some invisible force. All at once her face crumpled and contorted itself as she t
ransformed before their eyes into a slavering monster, the beast of Tooting Bec. To the shock of the assembled faithful, all traces of her former eloquence vanished and Madame Innocenti actually growled.

  “Hello,” said Moon with a nonchalance he did not entirely feel. “Remember me?”

  “Moon,” the medium muttered, her voice rattling and guttural. “Moon.”

  “How did you know my name?”

  “Part of the pattern.”

  “Pattern? What pattern?”

  “Did it easy. Enjoyed it. Like squashing a pea. A shove and a push and they tumbled into air. Easy. Easy.”

  Very little was capable of surprising Edward Moon, but Innocenti’s performance seemed to stop him short. Slack-jawed and ashen-faced, he asked: “Who are you?”

  “Prophet,” Madame Innocenti gurgled. “Baptist. Lay straight the ways.”

  Moon recovered his composure. “Tell me more.”

  Innocenti grinned. In the semi-darkness it seemed as though her mouth was filled with far too many teeth. “Got a warning.”

  “A warning? For me?”

  “Ten days till the trap is sprung. Till London burns and city falls.”

  Moon leant forward. “Explain.”

  A long pause. Then: “Fuck.” Madame Innocenti seemed to relish the word, swilling it around her mouth as though she were savoring the first sip of an unfeasibly expensive wine.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Fuck.” Innocenti was being quite deliberate. “Fuck. Piss. Cunt.” She spat out that last word with particular delight.

  The Salisburys were appalled. Dolly Creed merely bemused, while Mr. Lister tried his best to suppress a nervous laugh.

  “Mr. Moon!” It was Innocenti’s husband. “This has gone too far.”

  ‘Shit,” his wife said conversationally. “Cunty cunt cunt.”

  “Break the circle. Let go.”

  The party quickly disentangled hands and Madame Innocenti sat bolt upright, a fat gob of saliva dripping from her mouth unchecked. The Salisburys stumbled to their feet and Mrs. Erskine jabbed her forefinger angrily at Moon. “You’re a liability,” she said. “Someone ought to lock you up.”