Homunculus

TWELVE THE ANIMATION OF JOANNA SOUTHCOTE

A panel in the oak wainscot slid abruptly open, and beyond it, tugging weirdly at a pair of shoes, was a bent Willis Pule. He backed into the room, grunting with effort, and Dr. Narbondo appeared behind him, holding up the opposite end of a corpse. Pule dropped it as soon as it was entirely past the wall, as if he were immensely tired. Narbondo kicked the corner of the panel, and it slid shut, cutting off the entrance to what looked to Kraken to be a dark, low hallway. Kraken shrank into his corner, wondering in horror at this new act of villainy, half relieved, however, that it wasn’t him that was being dragged down tunnels.

The panel had just slid shut when there came a fearful pounding at the conventional door. Pule swung it open, and there stood Shiloh the messiah with a look on his face that seemed to imply that he would brook no nonsense, that he’d come for his mother and there would be hell to pay, perhaps literally, if he wasn’t satisfied. Narbondo scowled back at him. “Where is Nell Owlesby?” he asked suddenly.

“She’s safe — safer by far with my flock than with you.”

“Half your flock is my flock,” said Narbondo, “and they’d as soon eat her as give her a tract. Get her.”

“Quite impossible, I assure you.” Shiloh stepped in and closed the door, frowning at the littered room and at Bill Kraken, who, it seemed, was at least as offensive to him as was the corpse on the floor. “I’ll keep my end of the bargain. You don’t need the woman for that. I know where the box is hidden, and have these ten years. If you do as I say, you’ll know too. It’s as simple as that. But you needn’t worry about the woman. She’s worth nothing to you beyond that single bit of knowledge. And that, as we both know, is worth an enormous amount, isn’t it?”

The old man slouched on a stool, obviously enjoying the advantage he held over Narbondo. He removed a snuffbox from his pocket, pinched out a frightful quantity, and inhaled hugely, surrounding his head in a momentary brown cloud. He sneezed voluminously six times in rapid, deflating succession until he was reduced to a bent, wheezing ruin, his face a mask of mixed pain and satisfaction. Dr. Narbondo shook his head in disgust. Shiloh groped for his pocket, replacing the snuffbox, and wiped his eyes with the hem of his robe. His wrinkled forehead alternately relaxed and contracted like an irritated slug, as if he were experiencing after-tremors of his recent snuff-inspired earthquake.

He pulled himself erect and looked straightaway at the Keeble box atop the aquarium; then, before Narbondo could stop him, he stepped across and picked it up. “Very nice article, this.”

The hunchback jerked toward him, snatching the box away. The old man put on a theatrically offended face and then looked in mock surprise at his empty hands. Narbondo scowled and set the box gingerly atop the piano.

The heap of bones and winding sheet on the slab seemed to slump just a bit in response to the box having been moved, and the wisp ofsettling debris struck the grin from Shiloh’s face. He seemed to recall suddenly that it was his mother that lay before him. Narbondo wheeled his misting device past on a tea cart, brushing the old man out of the way. Then he hauled out of a cupboard a low gurney. He and Pule tugged the fresh cadaver onto the gurney and cranked it up level with the slab. From a wooden trough beneath the jar of yellow fluid he pulled a dripping, desultory carp, alive but sluggish, and slapped it onto the gurney beside the corpse. He worked quickly and deftly, but with a contracted brow and sweat-beaded forehead, as if he knew precisely what he was about and knew equally well that what he was about was not at all a simple business.

Pule stood silently by, spurred now and then to grudging action when Narbondo snarled out orders, then falling into inactivity, either out of a lack of comprehension or a general unwillingness to be ordered about. The old man twittered near the window like a bird — the approaching experiment having eliminated any veneer of detached coolness. He gasped suddenly and clutched his breast. “Where,” he cried, pointing. “Her hands… where are her hands? I swear to heaven, Narbondo, ifyou’ve made a hash of this, ifyou’ve…”

“Shut up, old man!” cried Narbondo, clipping him off in midsentence. “Where are Lady Southcote’s beautiful hands?” he asked Pule. Pule stared at him, then looked around, bending to peer under the slab. Kraken quaked in silence on his stool.

“You foul…!” cried the evangelist, unable to think of a word sufficiently foul to express his indignity. “I’ll…” he began again, but this time a wild clattering arose from the direction of the hearth, and a chunk of coal the size of a walnut popped out of the coal bucket onto the floor.

“A rat,” whispered Narbondo, reaching for the poker at the far side of the hearth and raising it over his head.

“Damn me!” shouted the old man, enraged that Narbondo had abandoned his mother to chase a rat. Narbondo hunched toward the coal bucket, a finger to his lips. A wild rattling issued from it. Coal dust rose in a cloud. The bucket tipped over with a clang, cascading a little delta of clinkers onto the hearth, atop which rode the blackened remains of the pea hen, its broken wings working furiously, its head swiveling from side to side. And, as if in accompaniment, the piano erupted into discordant play, as if someone were beating randomly on the concealed keys. Kraken crossed himself. Shiloh threw open the window over the courtyard and perched one foot onto the sill, ready to leap. Narbondo swung the poker wildly at the hopping pea hen, slamming it into the piano leg. The bird rose into the air, a thin whistling sound chirping from its stretched throat where ragged, charred skin still clung in patches. The box atop the piano danced in tune to the wild playing, and the pea hen shot off like a stone out of a sling, straight into the wall above the aquarium, smearing coal dust and grease onto the yellowed plaster, then dropping with a splash into the water, sinking slowly to the gravel and staring out at them mournfully before collapsing onto its side.

The piano, meanwhile, banged away. Narbondo, emboldened by the demise of the pea hen and certain that a properly objective attitude would explain away the phenomenon of the mysterious piano, lunged at the instrument and pushed back the lid. He picked up his poker, raised it ceilingward, and peered in to find nothing but flying hammers. Squinting at Pule, who had retreated toward Kraken’s end of the room, he pulled gingerly on the key cover. It was locked. Mystified, he found the key, unlocked the cover, threw it back, and shouted in surprise at the weird scene before him — the crabbed, skeletal hands of Joanna Southcote, thumping pointlessly on the keys. They flailed across the keyboard in an agitated whirl, hopping onto the floor where they twitched and danced.

“Her hands!” Shiloh shouted, repeating himself, more horrified at their spectacular reappearance than he had been at their absence.

Narbondo lunged for Kraken’s fallen tongs, grappling each hand in turn, flopping them onto the slab. The first leaped off immediately, and Narbondo was on it at once, avidly now, slamming it back beside its mate. The two, finally, lay still.

“This is an outrage!” sputtered Shiloh, his mouth working spasmodically.

“This is powerful alchemy!” whispered Narbondo, as much to himself as to anyone else, and he immediately trained his sprayer onto the corpse. She seemed to stretch. Joints crackled. Her neck swiveled and rose a half inch off her chest. “Damn!” cried Narbondo, remembering her hands. He yanked out a roll of thin, braided wire from a box on his desk and affixed her wayward hands to her wrists. Her jaws clacked as if in satisfaction. Kraken was stupefied with terror. He grabbed suddenly for the water pitcher, swallowed a great draught, choked, and collapsed onto the floor, coughing and sputtering. Pule kicked him out of a lack of anything else to do, and Kraken scuttled in behind the stool, holding it in front of him to ward off the detested Pule.

Yellow mist clouded the room, swirling round in the draft as Narbondo excised the carp gland. “Her hands!” cried Shiloh again. “You’ve got them on backward!”

“Silence!” shouted the hunchback, beside himself with success. He capered back and forth beside the slab, dancing round the edge of the gurney, spraying mist, affixing coiled tubing into a slit cut in the trachea of the dead man that Pule and he had dragged in through the secret door. He shoved it into his lungs, crying out to Pule to hold the sprayer, to prop up Joanna Southcote, to measure out a beaker of fluids.

“Her thumbs point outward!” whined the evangelist tiresomely, obsessed with Narbondo’s mistake.

“She’s lucky to have hands at all,” responded the doctor, leaping and jigging. “I’ll put the hands of an ape on her!”

And as if in response to this last threat, the corpse of Lady Southcote loomed up out of the mist like a marionette in a fever dream, jaws clacking, wavering there atop the slab as if she were adrift on a current of air.

“Mother!” cried Shiloh, collapsing onto his knees. From his robe he produced a stoppered bottle. He twisted it open and shook it liberally at the creature which slouched down the slab toward him. He intoned a nasal prayer, crossing himself, waving and gesturing. Narbondo sprayed on, stamping at a bladder on the ground that pumped something — Lord knew what — from the lungs of the dead man into the shrouded chest cavity of Joanna Southcote. The escaping gases whistled eerily, like wind through the gap under a door.

“Speak!” implored the evangelist.

“Whee, whee, whee!” hooted the creeping skeleton before dropping off the end of the slab in a clatter of bones.

“Christ!” shouted Narbondo, genuinely dismayed at this new turn. A loose foot slid past him, out of sight under the piano, and a leg, severed from its pelvis, wobbled storklike in the settling mist before collapsing slowly forward, bouncing just a bit when it hit the ground, then clattering into silence. Only the skull, its toothy mouth working, remained animate, chattering round and round in a tight little circle on the slab.

“Command me, Mother!” cried the evangelist, grabbing for it, then stopping suddenly in mid-grab, as if he were reconsidering his actions. “She’s a ruin!” he wept, hitting tiredly at Narbondo, who stood nearby, breathing heavily.

Shiloh looked around suddenly, wildly. “She’ll come with me!” he cried.

“Gladly,” said the doctor, pulling down one of the cast glass cubes. “This is spade work.” He turned, humped across to a closet, flung it open, grabbed a dirty spade from among a half-dozen of the things, and turned to see Kraken, eyes whirling with fear, reaching for the box atop the piano.

Narbondo swung the spade at Kraken, who fended it off with his arm, howling in pain and hopping away from the piano. The hunchback spun around, recovered, and set himself to bash Kraken once again, but his quarry had abandoned the box and bolted toward the stairs. Narbondo leaped after him, paused at the top of the dark landing, listening to Kraken pound in wild steps toward the street. He turned once again into the room, where Pule crawled on his hands and knees, scuttling into the path of the skull, which jabbered along toward the street wall. The evangelist leaped back and forth, shouting orders.

“Get out of the way!” shouted Narbondo, storming past both of them and shoveling the head into the glass jar. In a moment Joanna Southcote was captive, the gibbering evangelist snatching a broad volume from a bookshelf and slamming it atop the square mouth of the jar, fearful, perhaps, that the skull, giddy with animation, would clamber out to resume its skittering journey across the oak plank of the floor.

The old man sat wheezing, cradling the prize in his lap. He stared mournfully at the heap of disconnected bone that had, for some few moments, shown such promise. With her he could have astonished the populace of London. Converts would have flocked in. The eyes of kings and dukes would have shot open. The doors of treasuries would have swung to. And here it was, a ruin.

Then again… He peered in at the head, considering. Its mouth worked silently. Without the aid of the air-filled bladder it could say nothing. But what would it take, he wondered, to provide it with a voice, from offstage, perhaps. It seemed like a blasphemy, to trump up a voice for the holy article, but the work mustn’t languish. It must go on at any cost. She would have been the first to agree. It looked to him as if she were nodding agreement from within her box, voicing her approval.

He stood up and moved toward the door. Narbondo and Pule stood talking in low tones near the courtyard window, but on perceiving Shiloh’s intent, they stepped along after him.

“It’s useless,” said Narbondo, reaching the door ahead of the tired evangelist. “I’ve done what I could. No man alive could have done more. If I had the box, there’s no telling what sort of restoration we could accomplish. Where is it?”

The old man glared at him. “You can hardly be serious. You’ve purposely made a mess of this. Out of spite. Out of evil and nothing else. I owe you nothing at all, nothing.”

“Then you’re a dead man,” replied the doctor, drawing his pistol. “Take the head,” he snapped at Pule.

“Wait!” cried Shiloh. “This is no time for haste, my son. Perhaps we can reach an agreement — twenty-five converts, shall we say, in recompense for the damage you’ve done tonight.”

“I’ll graft her head onto a carp — or better yet, a pig — and show her in carnivals. Take the head!” He waved with the pistol at Pule.

Shiloh glared at the hunchback. “You leave me no choice,” he said.

Narbondo nodded, rolling his eyes. “That’s correct. No choice at all. Not a bit. There’s nothing I’d like more than to shoot you and turn the both of you into some sort of instructive sideshow attraction. Where is the box?”

“Aboard the blimp of Dr. Birdlip. Nell Owlesby gave it to him the night of her brother’s death. There’s your accursed information — fat lot of good it will do you. When the blimp…”

But Narbondo turned his back and walked toward the courtyard window, stroking his chin. “Of course it is,” he muttered.

“Let me say,” began the evangelist, catching sight of Willis Pule as if for the first time. He stopped, gazing with sudden astonishment at the sight of Pule’s ravaged and discolored face. “My son,” he began again, “your countenance is as an open book, the pages recounting a life of degradation. It is not too late. It is…” But what it was, finally, was left unsaid, for Pule lashed out at the proselytizing evangelist with his open palm, swatting him on the forehead and sending him sprawling through the doorway waving the bottled head. The door slammed shut between them.