The Somnambulist: A Novel

by Jonathan Barnes

  Innocenti opened her eyes and beamed. “I’m back,” she said in her normal voice, wiping away the spittle which still hung in thick, ropy tendrils from her lips.

  Everyone stared at her, astonished.

  “I hope I didn’t do anything to embarrass myself,” she said mildly.

  They had barely risen the following morning when the albino came to call.

  “Anything?”

  Moon glared. “I’m not your lackey.”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  Slightly chastened, Moon gave his report as Skimpole drummed his slender fingers impatiently on the tabletop, evidently troubled by the news.

  “Ten days,” he said thoughtfully, once Moon had finished. “You think she’s genuine?”

  The conjuror spoke carefully. “If you’d asked me that yesterday afternoon, I would have said absolutely not. My instinct was that she was a charlatan like the rest of them.”

  “But now?”

  The Somnambulist scribbled something down.

  FLY

  Skimpole was irritated by the interruption. “What does he mean?”

  Moon confessed. “I asked to speak to the spirit of the Human Fly.”

  “And did you?”

  Moon blanched. “Yes,” he admitted. “I think perhaps I did.”

  Skimpole instructed them to return to Tooting Bec at their earliest opportunity, muttered a muted kind of thanks for their services to the Crown and shuffled to the door. Just as he was about to leave, he turned back. “By the way — there’s a surprise for you in reception.”

  Moon and the Somnambulist walked to the ground floor where they found an old friend waiting. She squealed delightedly on their approach. “Mr. Moon!”

  Even the conjuror allowed himself a small smile at seeing her again. “Hello, Mrs. Grossmith.”

  The Somnambulist, however, showed no restraint at all and he and the housekeeper fell immediately into a tight embrace.

  “Skimpole found me,” Grossmith explained, once they had disentangled themselves. “I’m to work for you here now.”

  “I see.”

  “Aren’t you pleased?”

  “I have much to concern me at present.”

  Someone coughed. A stranger stood half a dozen paces behind her, an untidy, gangling man some years her senior. Bulbous-nosed and endowed with disproportionately large ears, he had the appearance of an oversized toby jug. He shambled forward, tripped over one of his shoelaces and sprawled onto the floor. Picking himself up, he dusted himself down and asked, in a soft, nervous voice: “Well, Mrs. G. When are you going to introduce us?”

  Mrs. Grossmith blushed. “Sorry,” she said, uncharacteristically girlish. “This is Arthur Barge. My landlord. And now… A giggle escaped her and she spoke more shrilly than she had intended — “my special friend.”

  A long, awkward silence. Moon eyed the man with disdain and shook his hand half-heartedly.

  Arthur Barge shuffled his feet, embarrassed. Mercifully, they were disturbed by the arrival of the hotel’s concierge.

  “Mr. Moon?” the man asked, discreet and subservient as ever. “You’ve another visitor. He’s most insistent, I’m afraid.”

  “Who?”

  Before he could reply, a curious figure strutted into the room. He began to speak almost at once, his words tripping over one another in their haste to be heard. “I hope I haven’t called at a bad time. I’d hate to think I was interrupting a reunion. Still, considering what’s happened, you’re all looking very well.” He stuck out his hand. “Edward. Good to see you again. Care for a stroll?”

  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.

  “Mud,” Cribb said, sounding just as he had on London Bridge, as though in the midst of delivering a sermon. “Glorious mud—”

  “Have you got a light?” Moon asked, fumbling unsuccessfully in his pockets for a cigarette.

  Cribb ignored him. “We’ve passed through the city’s bowels. Now we walk the span of her intestine.”

  “Charming metaphor.”

  “A century from now all this will be torn down, this testament to industry, toil and sweat. In its place great temples are built, monuments to wealth and avarice and power.”

  Moon gazed in front of him, not really listening. A gull screamed overhead.

  Cribb chattered on. “London is an inhibitor. You understand? She trammels and diminishes her inhabitants. The city is a trap.”

  “What’s happening there?” Moon asked, pointing to what appeared to be a large marquee perched incongruously a few feet from the riverbank.

  “Really, Edward. You can be infuriating at times. I’m trying to tell you something important.”

  Cribb tutted in irritation but Moon had already left him and he was forced to break into a run to catch up. He was amused to note Skimpole’s man struggling along behind them, his shoes and trousers already sodden with the slimy jetsam of the river.

  Moon reached the tent. Its canopy flapped noisily in the wind as though some great bird were trapped beneath the canvas, cyclopean wings beating frantically in an effort to escape. He peered inside and saw that the ground within had been thoroughly excavated, the soil potholed, cratered and covered with little marker flags, the earth itemized and ordered. What caught his attention, however, was a group of men — grubbily genteel, their clothes stained by silt and mud — gathered around a large spherical object placed on a table in the center of the tent. Moon moved closer and it took a moment to acclimatize himself to the sheer peculiarity of the sight, to accept that what he was seeing was real.

  He was looking at what appeared to be an enormous stone head, too large and unwieldy for one man to lift unaided, caked in dirt and river mud but otherwise intact. Giggling and chattering like schoolchildren abandoned by their teachers and left to run riot in the classroom, the men were all far too excited to take much notice of his intrusion.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “British Museum,” one of them hissed. “You press?”

  “Yes,” Moon lied fluently, and the man nodded distractedly in greeting.

  Cribb finally caught up, breathless, a flush of color in his cheeks, its shade an exact match to his hair.

  Moon ignored him and spoke to another of the men. “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s quite remarkable,” the man replied giddily. “It’s got to be…” He turned to one of his colleagues bent over the head, which Moon now saw was made from some primitive sort of metal. “What do you think? Pre-Roman, at least.”

  “Has to be at this depth,” his colleague replied.

  “Look at the craftsmanship,” the man breathed. “The sophistication.”

  “Who is it?” Moon asked as the man began to gently wipe the head clean of mud.

  “Dangerous to theorize ahead of the facts but I might venture some supposition… a local leader, perhaps? Head of the tribe?”

  “Seems too grand for that,” said another, the most elderly of the group. “Too regal.”

  Then a young man spoke up. “A god, perhaps?” His voice was squeaky with nerves. “A king?”

  “Wait,” said another. “There’s a name.”

  As the mud was wiped away from the bottom of the head, a three-letter word emerged.

  The young man read it aloud. “Lud!” he cried. “The founder of London, King of the city.”

  “Impossible,” said one.

  “I can’t believe it,” said another.

  “Lud?” Moon pressed closer as the rest of the clay was brushed aside and he felt an acute, vertiginous sense that he had walked willingly into a trap. The head’s features began to swim queasily into view — something disturbing and familiar brought inexorably into focus. The face revealed at last, several present gasped.
/>   “Here,” the old man said, belatedly suspicious. “Which newspaper did you say you were from?”

  Moon ignored him. “It can’t be,” he murmured.

  The bronze head was clean, history wiped away to reveal — calcified and perfectly preserved — an effigy of the first king of London. Lud unveiled.

  And Edward Moon could only stare hopelessly down at it, biting hard on his lower lip in an effort to stop himself from crying out, as the unforgettably ugly features of Thomas Cribb gazed sightlessly back across the centuries.

  He turned to confront his companion, but, as though in some marvelous illusion, the ugly man had disappeared, vanished back toward the river, leaving nothing behind to prove that he had ever been there at all, nothing to say that he wasn’t merely a figment of the city’s imagination.

  When Moon returned to his hotel, he found Mr. Speight waiting for him in the street outside. The tramp was dressed in his usual filthy suit and his face was covered with fresh sores, only partially hidden by his riotous, scratchy beard. A bottle of something yellow bulged from his jacket pocket and he had propped up before him his trademark placard:

  SURELY I AM COMING SOON

  REVELATION 22:20

  “Afternoon,” he said, ebullient but not yet quite drunk. The doorman gave him a dirty look and Speight nodded back. “This one’s been trying to turn me out for hours.”

  “What are you doing here?” Moon was so bewildered that he felt half-convinced the man before him was a mirage.

  “I’ve tracked you down,” Speight said proudly.

  Moon blinked, still not entirely certain that this exchange was really happening. “What can I do for you?”

  “To be honest… money. Since the theatre… I’ve had nowhere to doss down. Things have got difficult. You were always so kind to me—”

  Moon cut him off, reached into his pocket and passed the man a pound note. “Here. Spend it wisely.”

  “Actually,” Speight admitted, “I’ll only spend it on drink.”

  Moon pushed past him and clambered up the steps to his hotel. “Frankly, Mr. Speight, just at the moment, I’d happily join you.”