Homunculus

THIRTEEN THE ROYAL ACADEMY

I’ve just witnessed the most amazing spectacle,” said Theophilus Godall with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. Captain Powers hunched forward in his chair to encourage his friend. But he held up his right hand as if to signal for a brief pause and picked up a decanter of port, offering it to Nell Owlesby, who shook her head and smiled at him.

Godall related the story of the animation of the thing on the slab: how he’d watched through the window the sad antics of Bill Kraken; how he’d seen Narbondo enliven a skeleton, dance it about the laboratory; how the thing had gone to bits and Shiloh the evangelist had sunk from view, he and Willis Pule banging about the floor while Narbondo flailed at Kraken with a shovel. Atop the piano had sat the Captain’s box, or one very much like it, and Godall had been in a quandary about how to retrieve it. But his well-laid plan had gone awry when Kraken, obviously a prisoner, had fled, and Godall had gone after him, chasing him half across London only to lose him in Limehouse and come away empty-handed.

The Captain nodded over his pipe, clenching and unclenching his fists so that corded muscles danced along his forearms. “We’ll go in after it, then,” he said finally, squinting across at Godall.

His friend nodded. It seemed, certainly, the only clear course — an emerald, after all, big as a fist. It was Jack and Dorothy’s livelihood — Jack’s inheritance.

Contacting the police would avail them little. Nell would be exposed. And where, they would ask, did this emerald come from? If it was Jack Owlesby’s inheritance, why didn’t he have it? Why all the secrecy, the convolutions? How, in fact, did Dr. Narbondo come to possess it? Were they accusing him of stealing it? No, they weren’t. He took it from the man who stole it. And where was this fellow, this Kraken? No one knew. Somewhere in London, maybe. The police would scratch their chins and give each other looks, and in the end, not only would suspicion fall upon the innocent, but no end of skeletons would be dragged, perhaps literally, from dusty old closets.

No, said the Captain, shaking his head with determination, in for a penny, in for a pound. They’d act tomorrow. Godall produced a pen and paper, poured himself a brandy and water, and began to sketch out a plan of Narbondo’s cabinet, the building it occupied on Pratwell, his own room opposite, and the courtyard between. Nell filled in elements of the laboratory itself that Godall could only speculate on, much of the room being invisible from his curtain slit.

If Narbondo were out, they’d force the door, walk in, and take the box — reduce the room to rubble, if need be, to find it. Narbondo would have to be watched. He might, after all, remove the box to another location. But why should he? Then, if the doctor was in, Godall could resort to disguise to gain entrance — an official from social welfare, a seller of scientific apparatus — that would do nicely. They’d hold him up like burglars. What would he do? Call the authorities? Shout through the windows? It was hardly likely. He’d know, then, what sort of men he’d fallen out with, said the Captain. He’d find that he’d made a mistake.

There was a slamming of a street door opposite, and the Captain broke off his speculating to look out, in the hope that it was William Keeble coming across to chat. It was high time, he realized now, that the Keebles knew of the presence of Nell Owlesby. They would all have to fall together in this thing. There could be no more secrets, no disconnected pieces of the puzzle. No more boxes hidden under floors. It would quite likely take the vigilance of the lot of them and to spare if they weren’t to be borne down by the collective forces of evil.

But it wasn’t William Keeble; it was Jack and Dorothy, setting out hand in hand through the murky morning, the fog swirling round the streetlamps, their shoes clumping on the pavement. Jack held a box beneath his free arm. Nell watched over the Captain’s shoulder. “I’d give anything to call out to them,” she said in a low voice. “Or to run ahead and step out of a doorway and utter his name.” She stopped, watching the pair turn up Spode Street and disappear, and she stood silently for a moment, as if lost in thought. “He’d hate me, I suppose,” she said finally, “for what happened to his father.”

“I think you’d be surprised,” the Captain said, squeezing her hand. “He knows what happened to his father. His death wasn’t the worst of it, not by a sea mile, and he wouldn’t be the lad I know he is if he was blind to what you did, for the reason of it.”

Nell remained silent, watching the door of the Keeble house. Godall pretended to be fiddling intently with his pipe, oblivious to the conversation going on three or four feet away. The Captain slapped his ivory leg and said, “First things first, that’s my way. We’ll pay a visit to this hunchback sawbones first. Get the fun out of the way. There’s time enough for work afterward.” And he turned back to the map and to Godall, gesturing at the open courtyard and reaching for his cold pipe.

St. James’ Square lay torpid beneath the fog and the chill, as if waiting languidly for the murk to lift. But the fog hovered through the morning, shot through now and again with rays of feeble sunlight that faltered and faded almost as soon as they appeared, rays that thinned the murk momentarily, then abandoned any hope of success and fled. Cabs rattled apace along Pall Mall, pale ghosts with lamps glowing fitfully through the gloom, then winking out, making it seem as if they had been nothing but disembodied rattle and clatter that sprang into and then out of muted clarity.

The man in the chimney pipe hat stood in the darkness of the very alley in which Bill Kraken had caught St. Ives’ discarded cigar. His hat perched atop a blood-spotted bandage wrapped around his forehead, and threatened to topple at any moment onto the dirt of the pavement. He yawned, deciding that he’d risk stepping across to a tavern in a court opposite for a quick pint. The girl wouldn’t be out on such a day anyway. Her schedule, after all, hadn’t been unvaried. There was some chance that he’d spend another two hours waiting in vain, perhaps be questioned by a constable and sent on his way.

But if he packed it in and she was true to her Thursday morning schedule, what then? Time was short. Drake was in no mood for failure. His returning from Harrogate without the box had almost cost him… he didn’t know what. It didn’t bear thinking about. Time, somehow, was growing short, and Drake’s patience with it. The pint could wait. He’d need it all the more desperately in two hours’ time anyway.

A distant bell chimed eleven o’clock. Footfalls sounded out of the murk, which had suddenly swirled into such obscurity that the tree in the center of the square was blotted out. Two shapes approached. Billy Deener squinted into the gloom. It was she. But who was this with her? Her young man. This was unexpected.

What was even less expected was the thing he held under his arm — a box, one that Deener recognized even through the gloom. A vivid picture of a bandage-wrapped figure flailing at him with an iron rod leaped into his mind, a figure that stole the box and fled. And here, apparently, he was, come round to give the box up. Here were two birds, hand in hand. Deener smiled malignly. He hefted the sap in his right hand, stepped out of the shadows behind the loitering, chattering couple, grasped the girl’s arm, and slammed the sap against Jack’s head, chortling through his nose as his prey fell forward onto his face like a toppled tree.

Dorothy screamed at the sudden clutching hand from the shadows, then screamed again at the solid whump of the cosh and Jack’s collapse onto the roadway. But her second scream was cut off instantaneously by a rough hand. She bit at it, kicking backward and scraping her heel down the shin of the man who twisted her arm around behind her. An almost simultaneous scream broke forth from the lips of a woman who herded a covey of children through the square and who stood open-mouthed, pointing, her children cringing horrorstruck beside her, not so much at the sight of Dorothy being dragged into the alley or of Jack lying senseless on the pavement, as at the sound of their horrified mother’s shriek. Sporadic crying and screaming broke out, one shriek igniting another, the collective squealing fueling itself. Deener backed down the alley. The hue and cry would mean the end of him. In a moment he’d have to abandon the struggling girl and flee. He had only to drag her forty feet down the alley to freedom through a door left purposely ajar. But there on the ground, beside the meddling youth, lay the box he’d been cheated of once. He was damned if he’d be cheated again. He raised his hand, allowing the struggling girl to pull her right hand free and bury her nails into his bruised forehead. A thrill of pain shot along his scalp, and he yelped in rage, swinging the cosh hard enough to end the struggle there and then. He shoved his hand into his mouth, blew through two fingers, and scuttled out of the alley, picking up the fallen box. A head popped out of the open door. Deener shouted a curse at it, and a man, the owner of the head, loped along the alley toward him.

“Murder! Murder!” cried the woman with the howling children. The cry was followed close on by the sound of stamping feet and the shrill blast of a police whistle. As Deener and his companion — a beefy, lard-faced man in shirtsleeves — dragged the inert girl through the yawning door, the mouth of the alley was filled with a growing crowd of dim spirits, peering in, unwilling to follow two seeming murderers into the dim shadows.

Billy Deener eased the door shut, knowing that the general darkness of the alley obscured almost entirely by the fog would serve to hide their movements, and that a subsequent search would reveal nothing more than a crumbled hole below the street, a hole that led into the filthy darkness of the London sewers.

The cellar wall was a tumbled heap of ancient brick some three feet thick, beyond which ran the upper level of the Kermit Street sewer. Mortar had cracked and fallen for a hundred years from hastily pointed joints, and the continual wet of the sewer had caused the wall to slump and the bricks one by one to fall out, until some final bit of mortar or the corner of an ancient brick had decomposed, precipitating the collapse of a long section of sewer wall in a foul-smelling heap of muck.

The sewer was running at low water, but even so, Deener and his accomplice were hard pressed to make headway. They felt their way along planks slimy and rotten with sewage, kicking into the soft surface of the wood with the hobnails of their hoots. A lit candle flickered in a tin holder wrapped around the head of Deener’s companion, and the light danced and shrank, was snuffed out and had to be relit time and time again, both men half expecting the flame to set off an explosion in the dense air. Deener, wary of choke damp, breathed through a kerchief tied over his nose and mouth. They stooped along beneath the low ceiling, watching for the mark that would signal their arrival at the house on Wardour Street.

The Kermit Street sewer was badly in need of leveling, for the general sinking of the ground had created long cesspools, the settling water further decomposing what solid ground remained, so that the foundations of houses above cracked and pitched and loathsome sewer gases drifted up into courtyards. But the cesspools which so hampered leveling and flushing had their own value, were the resting place, in fact, for murdered men, not a few of whom had found their way into the sewers with the help of Billy Deener. Their bodies lay mired in offal and garbage and road sweepings emptied down gulley grates, until the corpses swirled at high water into the Thames where, bloated and faceless, they were declared drowned for lack of any sensible alternative.

But the unconscious girl was a different sort of victim. She should, Deener knew, be the one among them to wear the kerchief over her face, but his service to Kelso Drake only stretched so far. The score of minutes she spent below ground wouldn’t hurt her. She wasn’t even conscious of their passing.

When Dorothy awoke, a tearing pain pounding in her head, the cigar-chewing face of the man who had stood in the entry hall of her house arguing with her father smiled down at her, the cigar rolling from side to side as if it were alive. His smile, however, was void of humor or concern for anything but Kelso Drake. She was certain, even in her fuddled state, that it was a smile of loathsome self-satisfaction, empty of anything but falsehood.

It swam out of focus and then back in. She felt awful. There was a horrible stench in the room, the smell of an open sewer, and it seemed to her as Drake materialized before her that it was he who smelled so foul, he or the bent man who stood beside him, squinting at her as if she were some sort of interesting specimen. Then she lost interest in either of the two men, drifting away into herself and the pain in her head. She moved her arm, intent upon touching the hair beside her ear, which, pressed against a pillow, felt clotted with dried blood. She’d been hit on the head. She remembered part of it. Surely, though, this was no hospital. Bits and pieces of memory filtered in, scrabbling around in her mind until they joined like interlocking pieces of a puzzle to form the picture of Jack lying senseless on the pavement of St. James’ Square, of her struggling with a man in a hat, of a woman screaming over and over, of gaping children, of nothing at all after that.

She tried to push herself up onto her left elbow, to swing her right hand at the face before her. But something got in the way. She couldn’t move, was fastened, somehow, secured to the bed by a sheet tied across her shoulders. The cigar face laughed. A hand removed the cigar. The mouth said, “She’ll do nicely — pay us twice over,” and the face laughed again. “Sedate her,” it said, and disappeared from view.

The hunchback loomed over her, a cup full of violet liquid in his hand. The sheet was loosed briefly, and she was yanked onto her elbows by a balding man in a black coat. She hadn’t the strength to fight. She drank the thin, bitter draught, and very soon swam away into darkness.

Langdon St. Ives sawed away at a grilled cutlet that had the consistency of shoe leather. The gray meat lay like a curled bit of tanned hide between a boiled potato and a collection of thumb-sized peas. A sauce — “Andalouse aux fines herbes,” as the hastily drawn menu had called it — was dribbled stingily over the cutlet, the chef careful not to be so liberal as to allow the liquid to pollute the boiled potato. This last, cold as the plate it sat on, sorely needed the sauce, and St. Ives tried with limited success to spoon a bit onto it. But most of what he scraped from the surface of the cutlet merely glued itself to the spoon in a scum of tomato and pepper, leading St. Ives to curse both the quality and the quantity of it. Rationally, he supposed, he should count himself lucky to be faced with such a meager plateful of the wretched stuff, but eating, like anything else, wasn’t a particularly rational business.

He pushed the tiresome plate away, listening to the droning voice of an equally tiresome bespectacled gentleman who sat opposite, tearing into his own cutlet indifferently, as if the act of eating were merely a matter of satisfying bodily processes. He might as well consume a plateful of leaves and twigs. The man spoke to St. Ives as he masticated his veal and peas, chomp chomp chomp, over and over like a machine grinding rock into cement.

“The digestion,” he said, waggling his jaw, “is a tricky business. Gastric juices and all that. It takes a vast quantity of stomach-produced chemicals to break down a lump of sustenance like this pea.” And he held a pea aloft for St. Ives’ benefit, as if the thing were a fascinating little world which the two of them could examine.

“Biology has never been my forte,” admitted St. Ives, who couldn’t abide peas under any circumstances.

The man popped the pea into his mouth and ground it up. “Gallons of bodily fluids,” he said, “produced, mind you, at great expense to the system. Now this same pea reduced to pulp can be readied for evacuation by a tenth amount of gastro-intestinal juices…”

St. Ives stared out the window, unable to look at his plate. He couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for bodily talk. He had nothing against physiology; some of his best friends were physiologists. But it was hardly supper conversation — was it? — all this business about fluids and evacuation. And what was it leading to here? It constituted the friendly sort of banter that preceded really serious discussion — the reason he was once again being fed at the Bayswater Club owned by the Royal Academy of Sciences. With all their powers of scientific perception, thought St. Ives, they ought to be able to see that the supposed veal they were served was in fact a slab of old dairy cow — or worse, a paring of horseflesh, bled pale and bleached with chemicals by the knacker.

No one, however, seemed to be eating save he and old Parsons, whose fellow Academist Lord Kelvin owned a barn in Harrogate alongside his summer house, a barn that, since the debacle of the alien starship, hadn’t any roof. He also, according to Hasbro, owned two dead cows, which had suffered the misfortune of having strayed into the barn minutes before the ship caved in the roof.

And now St. Ives would pay the price. He was in a foul humor — he realized that. First the launching of the craft, then the escape of Willis Pule from the train. The man must have been desperate. It was entirely conceivable that he had leaped to his death in the ditch, an unsatisfying thought altogether. Villains, St. Ives considered, ought to be made to account for themselves. Their demise should be both spectacular and humiliating.

“And the molars of a horse can reduce the most surprising weeds to fortifying pulp in moments,” his host intoned, working at a mouthful of his own surprising foodstuffs. “Now, like a human being, a horse has only a single stomach, but his intestine is phenomenally elongated, adapted to the digestion of coarse forages. This is all a fascinating subject, this business of eating. I’ve spent a lifetime studying it. And I’ve found few things more interesting in the eating line than a workhorse — and of the right sort, mind you. Some sorts of hay are superior due to their effects on the bowel.” He waved his fork proudly, as if to illustrate this last statement, and speared up a row of peas.

St. Ives took advantage of the man’s pausing to yank out his pocketwatch, widening his eyes in alarm, as if he’d just now become conscious of the prodigious passage of time. But his intended attempt to hurry the end of the engagement disappeared into a lecture on the bacterial manifestations of intestinal debris. The man paused some few minutes later to drain a great tumbler of distilled water before him, the cleansing effects of which would “leach away poisons,” not at all unlike the exemplary workings of a well-constructed sewage system. He smacked his lips over the water. “Staff of life,” he said.

St. Ives nodded, performing his pocketwatch activity all over again, putting on the same face filled with surprise and haste. His companion, however, wasn’t so easily put off. He removed his spectacles, causing his eyes to undergo a remarkable and instantaneous shrinkage, and he wiped his face thoroughly with his napkin. “Close in here, what?”

St. Ives nodded, humoring the man. Such men, he told himself, must be humored. One had to nod continually in agreement until, when an opening presented itself, one could nod to one’s feet and nod one’s way down the stairs, leaving the zealot with the curious mingling of satisfaction in having been so thoroughly agreed with and wonder at being abandoned. But there was no such opportunity here.

“Dr. Birdlip, then,” said Parsons suddenly. “You were a friend of his.”

St. Ives steeled himself for the inevitable conversation, the same that had occurred weeks earlier, the afternoon of the night he’d been surprised by Kraken in the rain. The Royal Academy was vastly interested in Dr. Birdlip’s flight and its implications in terms of technologic advance and were prevailing upon St. Ives to help elucidate the nature of the doctor’s wonderful flight. Birdlip, of course, was not the real genius behind the perpetually propelled craft. They knew that. He was a sort of mystic — wasn’t he? — a man who fancied himself a philosopher. More than that, he was a seeker after mysteries. He’d published, to his credit, a strange paper entitled, “The Myth of the Foggy London Night,” followed by a paper speculating on the construction of spectacles through which one could see successive layers of passing time like translucent doors opening and shutting along a corridor. What was that one titled? “Time Considered as a Succession of Semi-closed Doors.” Yes, said Parsons, it was all terribly — how should he put it — “theoretical,” wasn’t it? Poetic, almost. Perhaps he’d missed his true calling. The titles alone betrayed the peculiar bent of his mind. Genius it might he, said Parsons, but genius of a speculative and, mightn’t we say, of a non-productive nature. Certainly not the sort of thing that would produce an engine such as the one that drives the dirigible. Parsons smiled up at St. Ives ingratiatingly, prodding a pea across his plate with the end of his fork, driving it into a little pool of dried sauce.

“Are you aware,” he asked, squinting at St. Ives, “of the religious cult that has sprung up around the sporadic appearances of this blimp? It’s rumored that there is some connection between Dr. Birdlip and this self-styled holy man who calls himself Shiloh. There’s nothing more dangerous, mind you, than a religious fanatic. They presume to define morality, and their definitions are made at the expense of everyone but themselves.”

“I can assure you,” said St. Ives, looking first at Parsons, then glancing out the window at activities transpiring three floors below, “that Dr. Birdlip is unacquainted with the mystic. He…”

But Parsons cut him off, his spectacles dropping of their own accord to the tip of his nose. “Rumor has it, my good fellow, that Dr. Birdlip’s craft carries aboard it a talisman of some sort, perhaps a device, that the cultists find sacred — a god, as they have it, that resides in a curious box. Scotland Yard has, of course, infiltrated their organization. They’re a dangerous lot, and they’ve got an eye on the dirigible. It’s generally unknown whether they wish to destroy it or make a temple of it, but I can assure you that the Academy intends to allow neither.”

On the street, wading out of Kensington Gardens through Lancaster Gate, came a tremendous milling throng of people, shouting something in unison — hosannas, St. Ives decided — pushing up toward Sussex Gardens, choking the street below the club. There could be no doubt about it — at the head of the throng strode the old, robed missionary, the nemesis of the Royal Academy.

Parsons recognized him at the same time, and struck his fist upon the tabletop, the sudden appearance of the evangelist having driven home his point. “What I mean to say,” he whispered, gesturing at the street, “is that this is no time for foolish misconceptions about friendships, or whatever you’d call it, to interfere with vital scientific study. You’re a scientist yourself, man. The projectile that you launched into Lord Kelvin’s barn was a remarkable example of heavier-than-air flight. Your purposes haven’t been fully understood, perhaps, by the Academy, but I assure you that if you could prevail upon this toy-maker on Jermyn Street to cooperate with us… that’s right,” he said, holding up his hand to silence St. Ives, “I told you we were certain that Birdlip himself could not have built the engine. If you could prevail upon this man Keeble to communicate with us, I think you’d find us inclined to consider this last imbroglio with the spirit of scientific inquiry. Reputations are at stake here — you can see that — and much more besides. Religious lunatics gibber in the streets; rumors of blood sacrifices performed in squalid Limehouse taverns filter up from the underworld. Tales of pseudo-scientific horror, of alchemy and vivisection, are daily on the increase. And sailing into it all, like some long-awaited sign, some apocalyptic generator, comes the blimp of Dr. Birdlip.

“Two men in a balloon tracked it over the Sandwich Islands weeks ago. There can be no doubt that it is steadily losing altitude at a rate that will soon put an end to its journey. Our mathematicians have it touching down within Greater London. But what will it do? Will it smash through the suburbs, causing great ruin, exploding in an inferno of igniting gases, ending all efforts to establish an understanding of its motivation? Will it drop into the Atlantic to be reduced by storms to sinking debris?”

Parsons grimaced through his spectacles, giving St. Ives ample opportunity to imagine the wrack and ruin the fated return of the blimp would cause if he — that is to say, if Keeble — would not turn out and share with them his knowledge of the workings of Birdlip’s craft. The glory of the sciences, said Parsons, was its cold rationality, the absence of the illogical fervor that drove the crowd in the street at this very instant to inexplicable passions. Why did St. Ives hesitate? The toymaker would listen to him. What was the nature of his hesitation if not the same sort of illogical manifestations that fueled the crowds in the street? It was reason, scientific philosophy, practical reality, that must prevail at times such as these. Surely St. Ives…

But St. Ives couldn’t quite see it that way. The entire subject was tedious. Keeble would do as he pleased. Birdlip’s blimp would do as it pleased. St. Ives would do the same — that is to say, not the same thing as Birdlip and Keeble — what he would do was find Willis Pule and beat the dust out of him. After that, he’d hunt up the spacecraft of the homunculus. He’d find this last or find evidence that put an end to the legends of its existence. But, he said to Parsons, he would talk to Keeble, mention it all to him, feel him out. If the toymaker balked, there would be an end to it.

Parsons was delighted. Such an attitude was reason personified. And why on earth had St. Ives launched the projectile through the roof of Lord Kelvin’s barn? The scientific community had been once again mystified.

St. Ives shrugged. It had been set off accidentally, without adjustment, without being properly motivated. Parsons nodded, understanding now, able to take the long view. He held out a limp hand, which St. Ives understood to be a signal that the lunch was at an end. There was no further need of talk, not until Keeble had been broached on the subject of his engine.

They want the engine and nothing more, thought St. Ives as he left the room. If Keeble handed it to them tomorrow they’d abandon any interest in Birdlip, about whom they were absolutely correct. Birdlip was engaged in a mission which couldn’t be charted and graphed. His pursuit of truth, such as it was, had taken him on a course that paralleled, figuratively speaking, the wind-blown, haphazard course of his blimp. But by God, it had led him home again, hadn’t it? Its means were unfathomable, inexplicable, but the ends weren’t entirely so, not if you looked at it through the right pair of spectacles — which Parsons, of course, didn’t own.

St. Ives trotted down the last half-dozen carpeted steps and out the entry hall into the street, where wind had blown the fog away and where a milling crowd strained to hear something. Scores of them sat in trees; some sat astride the shoulders of others; carriages were parked along the street, and atop the carriages stood what seemed to St. Ives to be a moderate portion of the citizenry of London, all of them listening, their ears cocked, to the wind that blew along the silent afternoon street.

There was a brief chattering, like a woodpecker, perhaps, striking a particularly brittle tree. A roar arose from the crowd. Silence followed, then another clacking and a fresh roar. St. Ives pushed his way toward the front, toward where he could see the head of the evangelist above the horizon of the masses. The old man stood, clearly, atop a crate.

He held something before him with both hands. St. Ives couldn’t quite make out what it was — a transparent box of some sort. The sea of onlookers parted in front of him. He was struck with the pervasive religious atmosphere that lay heavily over the street. How many people were there? Enough to constitute a multitude, certainly. And here was the Red Sea, parting before him, a miraculous narrow avenue opening up for some few feet. St. Ives edged down it. A man trod on his toe. Another jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow. The wall of people behind him pressed forward suddenly, shoving him nose first into the greasy hair of a woman in what appeared to be a nightshirt. His apology went unheard. “Beg your pardon,” he said, twisting through a gap an inch or so wide. Not far ahead of him stood the evangelist, peering at the sky, muttering indecipherably, perhaps speaking in tongues.

A moment later, the victim of hard looks and a pair of rapid-fire curses, St. Ives stood at the front of the crowd — no one before him but a man so short as to be negligible. The old missionary exhorted a glass cube in which sat, St. Ives was horrified to see, a partially mummified head, dusty and brown from the grave.

The thing’s teeth were huge — Parsons would have admired them. What the evangelist intended to do with the head wasn’t at all clear. St. Ives looked about him at the expectant faces, which seemed to betray that they, too, weren’t sure of the nature of the spectacle they were about to witness.

Catcalls erupted from a gang of toughs slouching in the limbs of a great, drooping oak. “Make er sing!” came the shout. “Make er eat somethin,” came another. “A bug!” shouted someone else, close on. “Ave er eat bugs!” After that came a roar of laughter from the tree, followed by the screaming fall of one of the toughs, who had come unseated. More laughter erupted from the tree as well as from the crowd, which seemed to be fast losing its patience with the holy man and his posturing. A handful of people passed out tracts, some of the supplicants horribly mutilated and wasted, as if from loathsome disease. Their very presence seemed to lend an air of authenticity to Shiloh’s performance. It was hard to argue with people who were so obviously what they claimed to be.

Just as the laughter fell away, the woodpecker chattering resumed, very rapid, from the direction of the old man. St. Ives started. The head in the glass cube had suddenly become animated. Its jaw clacked as if they were driven by an engine. What was this but a clever bit of parlor magic? The skull hopped and bumped with the force of its clacking, stringy hair flopping in time.

“Speak, Mother!” shouted the old man. “What is it that you hear! That you see! Lift the veil that obscures the future, the scales of filth and degradation that stifle and blind us! Speak, we implore thee!” And with this last falsetto petition a hoarse voice squeaked out, as if it were carried on the breeze that whirled leaves up Bayswater Road, as if it were part of that breeze, of the natural turnings of the universe. The crowd fell instantly silent, leaning forward as one, straining to hear the words of the oracle. Silence followed. Then, shattering the silence, the cry: “Get thee to a nunnery! Go!” rang out amid screams of wild laughter, the product of a particularly educated lad in the oak tree.

Shiloh cast the laughing toughs a look of mixed venom and pity, waiting with theatrical patience for silence to descend. Again the teeth chattered, clearly taking the startled evangelist by surprise.

“Hear me… ee… ee!” came the eerie wavering voice.

“Speak!” commanded Shiloh of the dancing teeth.

“Listen to my words!” ululated the head.

“Kiss my arse!” shouted the oak tree.

The skull fell silent.

“You’ve ruined it!” shouted the lady in the nightshirt, directly into St. Ives’ ear, obviously enraged at the crowd in the tree.

“Shut up, will you!” shouted a man at St. Ives’ elbow, but it was impossible to tell whether the command was directed at the lady in the nightshirt or the laughing toughs. The head began to chatter again. St. Ives wondered exactly how the thing was supposed to be talking when it lacked flesh on its neck, when it lacked, for that matter, a neck of any sort, fleshed or otherwise. Perhaps the crowd was no more interested in physiology than St. Ives had been when sharing leather cutlets with Parsons a half hour earlier. Maybe it was the wind vibrating the bones in its chin — a sort of Aeolian harp effect.

Just as the voice started up again, the teeth gave out, seeming to take the voice by surprise, for it continued momentarily, uttering something about dread things in the sea before closing off like a faucet. Each effort by the toothy skull seemed more tired than the last. Shiloh peered in at it, shaking it just a bit as if fearing that the thing was running down — which it very apparently was, for away it went one last time, getting off a half-dozen staccato chatters before slowly playing out and, whether of its own accord or because of a misstep of the evangelist, falling over onto its side and giving up the ghost.

The crowd pressed forward to have a closer look, all of them, no doubt, feeling cheated of the show they expected, of the revelations that had a half-dozen times clearly been pending. A shower of acorns launched from the oak tree rained around the evangelist, who, St. Ives could see, was clearly puzzled and chagrined. Whatever it was he’d been attempting to accomplish hadn’t entirely been a fake, and it had the unmistakable stamp on it of Ignacio Narbondo.

The old man, seeing that the head had given out, attempted to preach to the crowd from atop his crate. But the masses surged forward, anxious to get a look at the deflated prophet, and the old man’s supporters rallied round, linking hands in an effort to keep the mob away from their master and his oracle. Easily two-thirds of the supplicants had eaten blood pudding in the last twenty-four hours, St. Ives determined. Parsons’ fears of the growing army of cultists weren’t as terrifying as they might be — it was an army that could be starved out of existence overnight.

Their linking of arms to hold back the throng was futile; St. Ives could see that at a glance. People pushed past him. Without moving he drifted toward the rear of the crowd. Shiloh, in growing dread, made away up the street, surrounded by his supporters. A brougham careered around the corner from the direction of Leinster Terrace, pulled to a halt half a block up from the charging throng, swallowed the evangelist and three of his allies, and galloped off, bearing away the chattering head, the performance of which, thought St. Ives, would not get favorable reviews.