The Somnambulist

Chapter 3

I do not like handsome men.

Mostly this is jealousy, I know — this instinctive hatred of mine, this old, irrational animosity. When I compare my swollen flesh and pockmarked features with the supple frames of the young and the beautiful, I find myself achingly wanting. Even today, I am quite unable to look upon a comely youth without wishing to beat his exquisitely proportioned face into a bruised and bloody pulp.

So you can scarcely imagine my joy when I realized that Mr. Edward Moon was losing his looks.

All that silken hair, those perfect cheekbones, that preternaturally well-defined jaw — Moon had once been elegance personified, style and dash incarnate. But now, past forty and barreling toward his sixth decade with what felt to him like indecent haste, his appeal seemed at long last to have faded. His hair had started to thin and the keen observer could discern the first few flecks of gray. His face, already sagging and crinkled, had begun to display an inclination toward corpulence, had lost its handsome lineaments as the testimony of his sins and vices wrote itself across his features in lines and furrows and wrinkles.

The night Cyril Honeyman tumbled to his messy death, Edward Moon was dining with acquaintances (not friends, you’ll notice, never that) at a party in an especially fashionable part of Kensington, surrounded by some of the most prominent of the city’s chattering classes. Time was when he would have sat amongst them as their most honored guest, the evening’s star attraction, but nowadays his hosts seemed content merely to tolerate him, inviting him (he strongly suspected) chiefly out of habit. A few more years and he would be dropped from these gatherings altogether, his name erased from the guest lists, become a non-person, an also-ran.

Moon swiftly found himself tiring of their company, and at the end of the meal when the women retired to giggle and gossip and the men lit cigars and reached for the port, he excused himself from the table and strolled out into the garden, leaving his companion to fend for himself indoors.

Moon had once enjoyed a reputation for dressing exquisitely, his wardrobe always just that vital inch ahead of fashion. But now, as his dapperness ebbed away, he had begun to look lost in the new style, had become increasingly to resemble a leftover from the last century, a relic from an earlier, mustier age. His Savile Row jacket had seen far better days and his shoes, handmade and paid for with several months’ earnings, were grown scuffed and weary. He wore a black armband, still in mourning for the Queen though she had passed away some months before. He was a creature of the old century as surely as she.

The year stood just on that cusp of the seasons when winter begins to clench its fist about the days, and the trees, robbed of their leaves and color, stand stark sentinel like empty hat-stands. The air was clammy and chill; fog had stretched itself out from the lower parts of the city, and illuminated by light streaming from the house, the garden shimmered and shone with a strange luster. Moon strolled away from the building, the long, damp grass soaking his shoes, the bottoms of his trousers, the tops of his socks. He lit a cigarette and inhaled with relief as the smoke percolated through his lungs.

“Mr. Moon?”

There was a man standing behind him, one of the dinner guests, an American whose name Moon had already allowed himself to forget. The tip of the stranger’s cigar glowed angrily in the half-darkness. “Enjoying the evening?”

Moon ignored the question and took another drag on his cigarette. “What can I do for you,” he asked at length. “Mr….?”

The American gave a lopsided smile. “Stoddart.”

Moon smiled smoothly, meaninglessly back. “Of course.”

“I have a proposition for you. I publish Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Perhaps you’ve heard of us.”

Moon shook his head.

“We’re a periodical — not entirely an unfashionable one, if I may say so. In the past I’ve commissioned some of your most prominent authors. Arthur Doyle contributed-”

“A hack, Mr. Stoddart. A journeyman.”

The American tried again. “Oscar Wilde-”

Moon gave an expansive yawn, refusing to be impressed. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I’d like you to join them.”

“I’m not a writer. I have no stories to tell.”

The publisher tossed aside his cigar and ground out what was left of it with the toe of his boot. “But you do, sir, you do. I’m not asking for a work of fiction. I’m in pursuit of something infinitely more engaging.”

“Oh?”

“I want your autobiography. A life of such vigor and color as your own should make for compelling reading — would even, I fancy, have some considerable historical value.”

“Historical?” Moon grimaced. “Historical?” He turned back toward the house. “My career is not done with yet. I’ve no interests in writing my own eulogy.”

Stoddart chose his next words very carefully. “Let’s not be coy. We both know your best work is behind you. Since Clapham your stock has fallen considerably.”

Moon was defiant. “There is still one last great case.”

The man persisted. “You owe your public the truth. Our readers want to know how you solved the Limmeridge Park Murders. How you tracked down the Fiend. The Adventure of Smugglers’ Bay. The so-called Miracle of Mile End. Your rumored involvement in the Crookback Incursion of Eighty-eight.”

Moon eyed his inquisitor suspiciously. “I wasn’t aware that incident was public knowledge.”

“Name your price,” the publisher replied and suggested a sum which even today would amount to a small fortune.

Moon reached the house and turned back to face the American. “My past is not for sale, Mr. Stoddart. There. You have my answer.” He slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him.

He strode through to the billiard room. His companion sat alone and silent, a glass in one hand, a smoldering cigar in the other, a wide smile spread blissfully across his face.

Moon spoke curtly to their host. “Get me a cab. The Somnambulist and I are leaving.”

To describe the Somnambulist simply as an unusually tall man would hardly do justice to his memory. He was abnormally, freakishly large — indeed, if the rumors which circulated after his death are to be believed, he stood well in excess of eight feet tall. He had a thatch of dark-brown hair, cultivated in a substantial pair of side-whiskers and had about him a likeably innocent air which belied a prodigious strength. More curious still, he carried with him at all times a miniature slate blackboard and a stub of chalk.

The journey home was entirely silent. Exhausted by the effort of maintaining his composure in the face of the evening’s relentlessly cheerful rounds of socializing, Moon said nothing, but as the cab neared the end of its journey the Somnambulist reached into his satchel and drew out his blackboard and chalk. In straggly, childish characters he wrote:

WHAT DID HE ASK

Moon told him.

With a massively oversize thumb, the Somnambulist rubbed out his message and wrote again:

WHAT DID YOU SAY

On hearing the reply, the giant put away his chalk and board and did not write again till morning.

Edward Moon was a conjurer by profession. He owned a small theatre in Albion Square, just at the border of the East End, where every night except Sunday he performed his magic show with the silent, indefatigable assistance of the Somnambulist. Naturally, they were both far more than mere stage magicians, but I shall come to that in time.

Their show was a quiet phenomenon, opening to modest houses in the early 1880s until, at the very acme of his popularity, Moon could count it a disappointing night if the stalls weren’t filled to capacity and half his potential audience turned away for lack of space. At the time, the city had never seen anything quite like the Theatre of Marvels. In a single production, it synthesized magic, melodrama, exoticism and real, heart-stopping spectacle. But the audiences came to see one thing above all others, the mystery at the heart of the performance: the great and silent enigma of the Somnambulist.

The theatre itself was a little over fifty years old, a modest building with the look of a minor college chapel about it. A gaudy hand-painted sign took up half the front wall and proclaimed in foot-high letters:

THE THEATRE OF MARVELS

starring

MR EDWARD MOON

and

THE SOMNAMBULIST

BE ASTONISHED!

BE THRILLED! BE ENLIGHTENED!

By the time of our narrative, the theatre had ceased to be truly fashionable and audiences had begun to dwindle in numbers and enthusiasm.

The night after Moon’s encounter with Stoddart was typical — a small crowd, a half-hearted line outside the entrance, nothing like the glory days when by five o’clock, a full three hours before the performance was due to commence, a queue would start at the box office and snake its way out of the theatre and into the street, stretching as far as the doors of a nearby public house, the Strangled Boy.

Inside, the theatre had a grimy, run-down quality, exacerbated by its omnipresent scents of sawdust, liquor and stale gas. Unbeknown to our protagonists, I was there myself that night, seated in the front row, the fourth or fifth such occasion on which I had attended.

As the audiences idled to their seats, a ragtag orchestra played in the pit at the front of the stage, heroically struggling through a medley of popular standards almost physically upsetting in their coarseness and banality. There was a time when audiences had been drawn from all strata of society — from local working-class families to professional men, paupers to priests, doctors to drapers, even on one memorable occasion a minor scion of the royal family — until quite abruptly and without apparent cause the higher orders had ceased to come, leaving only local people, the idle, the curious, those who merely wished to get out of the rain, as well as a peculiar crowd of what can only be described as ‘regulars’. These were a gang of mild obsessives and social misfits who visited the theatre repeatedly, had seen the show a dozen times or more and could (no doubt) recite the act by heart. Always outwardly courteous, privately Moon harbored nothing by contempt for his disciples, despite the fact — or more precisely because of it — that his livelihood appeared increasingly to depend on them.

Mercifully, the orchestra limped to the end of its miniscule repertoire, the lights dimmed, and backed by a persistent drum roll, Edward Moon took the stage. He bowed, to immediate applause. Noticing a phalanx of his fans occupying the entirety of the fifth and sixth rows, he acknowledged their presence with a cursory nod. Then, professional smile in place, he began the well-worn routine, confident that his audience, though small, was sympathetic.

He was careful to eschew what was expected, the staple tricks of the magician. At the Theatre of Marvels there were no rabbits, no hats, no shuffling of cards, no colored handkerchiefs, no rings, cups or balls — Moon’s act was altogether more recherche than that.

To roars of approval from the regulars, he produced from thin air what appeared to be a large Galapagos tortoise and watched it totter its wrinkled way amongst the crowd before it inexplicably disappeared in full view. He brought forth an entire set of encyclopedia from his apparently bottomless pockets, even after a member of the audience had certified them empty. At his command a live ape materialized in a puff of magenta-colored smoke and capered and gibbered delightfully for a time.

In preparation for the first major trick of the evening, the monkey picked a gentleman from the audience who, on Moon’s instructions and accompanied by encouraging whoops and cheers from the stalls, got reluctantly to his feet and made his way onstage. Upon the man’s arrival, Moon snapped his fingers and the ape scampered obediently away.

“Can you tell us your name, sir?” Moon asked, with a wink to the audience who laughed knowingly along, fully cognizant of the fact that one of their number was about to be discomfited, patronized, mocked or — better still — humiliated and openly ridiculed.

“Gaskin,” the man replied in an insouciant, disagreeable tone. “Charlie Gaskin.” He was stocky, barrel-chested and had cultivated (unwisely, in my opinion) a flaccid, patchy approximation of a walrus mustache.

Moon held Gaskin in his gaze. “You are a valet,” he said. “You are married with two children. Your father was a tailor who died of consumption last year. For supper tonight you ate a stale kipper, and you spend many of your leisure hours building and maintaining a collection of antique clocks.”

Gaskin was visibly astonished. “All true,” he said.

The audience burst into applause. The man’s wife, sitting three rows from the front, stumbled to her feet, clapping wildly.

Gaskin laughed, red-faced. “How the devil did you know that?”

Moon arched an eyebrow. “Magic,” he said.

I can imagine you now, all dewy-eyed and eager for an explanation of how it was that Moon had come to know all this, for a detailed post-mortem of his deductive processes. Sad to say, I have to disappoint you. What follows can be no more than a tentative reconstruction of his methods.

As I see it, there are three chief possibilities.

The first is that this uncanny display of insight was a deception, that Gaskin was a plant, that he and Moon had arranged their patter in advance. In short — that it was all a trick. What took place immediately after, however, surely rules this out as a serious supposition.

The second is that our hero was an unusually brilliant observer of minutiae, a man of rare deductive skill, a master in intuitive ratiocination cut from the same cloth already stitched and darned by Sir Arthur and Mr. Poe. If the second conjecture is correct, then this — an extrapolation from the few known facts — is my attempt to re-create his methodology.

That the man was a valet was obvious from his air of sullen servility; that he was married from his wedding ring; that he had two children from the toffee-apples bulging stickily from his pockets, purchased (one presumes) as gifts for the little ones. That his father was a tailor was clear from the quality of his jacket (unnaturally fine when set against the threadbare quality of the rest of his clothes); and that the unfortunate parent had died from consumption was elucidated by the faint graveyard scent of mildew and disease which still lingered insidiously about it. A distinct whiff of fish on Gaskin’s breath, and behind it an undercurrent of decay, made the man’s supper simple to deduce, and the distribution on his fingertips of a rare oil used only in the restoration of antique clocks rendered his chief pastime as plain as if he had tattooed the same upon his forehead.

But doubtless you will say that such things happen only in cheap novels and upon the stage. Perhaps I have allowed myself to become unduly influenced by the yellow-backed vulgarities of sensational fiction.

The third possibility seems on the face of it still less persuasive. Namely, that Edward Moon possessed powers beyond the understanding of conventional science, that he saw into Gaskin’s soul and somehow understood him, that — bizarre and outre though I know it must seem written down — he really was a mind-reader.

The applause died away.

“Mr. Gaskin? I must ask you something.”

“Anything.”

“When did you intend to tell your wife?”

A shadow passed across the man’s face. “I don’t understand.”

Moon addressed his next remark to the unenviable Mrs. Gaskin who still stood in the third row of stalls, puce-faced and flushed with pride. “My sympathies, ma’am,” he said. “It gives me no pleasure to inform you that your husband is a liar, a cheat, and an adulterer.”

A few delighted sniggers from the audience.

“For the last eleven months he has been engaged in intimate relations with a scullery maid. And for the past fortnight they have begun to worry that she has fallen pregnant.”

A hush descended on the theatre and the smile fled from Mrs. Gaskin’s lips. She looked imploringly at her husband and stuttered something unintelligible.

Gaskin snarled. “Damn your eyes!” he cried and made as if to spring at Moon. Before he could strike, a figure glided onstage and moved wordlessly between the two antagonists, like some animate portcullis lowered in the magician’s defense.

Gaskin looked up to realize that he was standing opposite the Somnambulist, his face approximately level with the giant’s sternum. The big man shielded Moon, as silent and impassive as an uprooted Easter Island statue. In the face of so irresistible a force, so immovable an object, the man sloped swiftly and shamefacedly away, gabbling his apologies and leaving stage and theatre at a craven trot. His wife followed soon after.

Moon allowed himself a private, faintly malicious smile at their departure before flinging wide his arms. “Applause,” he cried, “for the city’s most remarkable man! Asleep! Awake! The celebrated sleepwalker of Albion Square! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the Somnambulist!”

The audience bellowed their approval and the giant managed a stiff, embarrassed bow.

At the back of the stalls, somebody called out, “The swords!” His fellows took up the cry. “The swords! The swords!” Soon most of the audience were chanting the same.

Moon clapped the Somnambulist affectionately on the back.

“Come along,” he said. “We mustn’t disappoint our public.” Sotto voce he added: “Thank you.”

Moon disappeared, returning with half a dozen wicked-looking swords (borrowed on long loan from Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards). The orchestra struck up a familiar melody, and at this signal the Somnambulist removed his jacket to reveal his spotless, starched white shirt.

The theatre was silent as everyone waited for what they knew was coming. A member of the audience was brought up to test the genuine nature of the weapons and to certify that the Somnambulist himself was not wearing any padding, device or piece of mechanical trickery. This accomplished, Moon drew out one of the swords. Under the pitiless gaze of the lights and in full view of the crowd, he plunged the blade deep into the Somnambulist’s chest. The tip entered the giant’s body with a slippery, sucking sound before emerging seconds later, with stomach-churning inevitability, from the center of his back. The Somnambulist did not so much as blink in response. Some of the audience cheered, some gasped, others stared on in goggle-eyed amazement. Several ladies (and more than one gentleman) were seen to swoon at the sight of it.

Another drum roll and Moon renewed his attack, this time pushing the blade deep into the thick of the Somnambulist’s neck and out through the back of his head. Without respite, he did the same again, now skewering the man’s thigh, now his chest, and lastly, and most painfully of all, his groin.

Like a bored commuter waiting for his train, the Somnambulist yawned in response. He remained still for the whole of his ordeal, immune to what must surely have been the most exquisite agony. Any other man would have fallen long ago but the giant stood resolute throughout.

Perhaps the most startling scene of the performance arrived at its conclusion. As Moon removed the swords from his assistant’s body and held them up for inspection, I saw that not only was there not a trace of blood discernible on any of the blades but also the Somnambulist’s shirt, though pierced and torn, remained an unsullied white.

Both men bowed, to genuine applause. The most celebrated part of their act, it had not disappointed.

No doubt the audience assumed that what they had seen was an optical illusion. Some may have speculated idly about trick swords, elaborate sleight of hand, gimmicked shirts, smoke and mirrors, but whatever their theories they never doubted that what they had seen had been anything other than an unusually impressive piece of prestidigitation. It was a parlor game, surely. A conjuring trick.

The truth, as you shall see, was infinitely stranger.

The remainder of the performance took place without incident and the audience seemed to go home satisfied.

But still Edward Moon was unhappy. He had tired years ago of giving the same routine every night and went on with it now only in an attempt to stave off ennui. He was chronically, terminally, dangerously bored.

After the show, it had long been his habit to leave by the stage door and stand in the street, to smoke and watch his audience disperse. Well-wishers sometimes lingered on and he was happy enough to spend a moment or two with each of them, making small talk and acknowledging their compliments. A small knot of admirers waited that night and he dealt with them all with his customary courtesy. One woman stayed longer than the rest. Moon stretched and yawned. He wasn’t tired, but in those days and months when boredom took him in its grip he would often sleep his days away, slumbering twelve or thirteen hours at a time. “Yes?” he asked.

The woman seemed incongruous in Albion Square. Patrician, elegantly middle-aged, she had an aloofness about her, a haughty froideur. In her salad days, he thought, she must have been a considerable beauty.

“I am Lady Glendinning,” she began. “But you may call me Elizabeth.”

Moon, doing his best not to look impressed, affected a nonchalant expression. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“I enjoyed the performance.”

He shrugged. “Thank you for coming.”

“Mr. Moon?” She paused. “I’ve heard rumors about you.”

The conjurer raised an eyebrow. “What have you heard?”

“That you’re more than a magician. That you investigate.”

“Investigate?”

“I have a problem. I need your help.”

“Go on.”

Lady Glendinning made a strange snuffling sound. “My husband is dead.”

Moon managed a reasonable simulacrum of sympathy. “My condolences.”

“He was murdered.”

That last, heady word had a tremendous effect on the conjuror. Moon felt giddy at the sound of it and it was only with an enormous effort of will that he was able to stifle a grin.

“I’m determined to see justice done,” she continued, “but the police are quite hopeless. I’m sure they’ll bungle the whole business. So I thought of you. I confess that, as a girl, I was quite an admirer of your adventures.”

Moon’s vanity got the better of him. “As a girl? ” he asked incredulously. “How long ago was that?”

“Some few years. But one finds one rather grows out of detective stories, doesn’t one?”

“One does?” said Moon, who had never felt any such thing.

Lady Glendinning gave him a chilly smile. “Will you help me?”

Moon took the woman’s hand and kissed it. “Madam,” he said, “it would be an honor.”

Edward Moon and the Somnambulist lived, rather improbably, in a cellar beneath the theatre. They had converted the basement into a comfortable living space with the result that two bedrooms, a well-equipped kitchen, a drawing room, a considerable if hopelessly cluttered library and all conceivable conveniences lay below the Theatre of Marvels. Needless to say, their audience remained entirely ignorant of this subterranean domesticity, this sunken home-from-home.

Moon said goodbye to Lady Glendinning with a promise to visit her the following day. The prospect of relief from boredom cheered him no end and as he strode toward the strategically placed rhododendrons which masked the wooden steps leading down to his lodgings, something like a smile hovered discreetly about his lips.

As usual, Mr. Speight sat, or rather slouched, upon the steps.

Speight was a derelict, a pauper whose presence Moon had long tolerated, allowing him over time to become something of a fixture. Unkempt and raggedly bearded, the man was hunched inside a filthy suit, a stack of empty bottles nestling miserably by his feet. Propped up beside him was the wooden placard which he spent his days carrying through the streets of the city. Its message had begun to fade but it still read, in thick, gothic letters:

SURELY I AM COMING SOON

REVELATION 22:20

Moon had never asked Speight why he found it necessary to carry this notice wherever he went nor why he had chosen that particular piece of scripture as his motto. Frankly, he rather doubted he would have understood the answer. Speight slurred a bleary “Good evening.” The conjuror responded as politely as he was able, stepped over the vagrant and let himself indoors.

Inside, beside a pot of tea simmering automatically on the stove, Mrs. Grossmith was waiting for him. A diminutive, maternal woman, she took Moon’s coat and poured him a cup of Earl Grey.

Moon sank gratefully into his chair. “Thank you.”

She shuffled deferentially. “A successful performance?”

He sipped his tea. “I think they liked it.”

“I see our Mr. Speight’s outside again tonight.”

“As he surely will be till the End. You don’t mind?”

Mrs. Grossmith sniffed disparagingly. “I suppose he’s harmless enough.”

“You’re not convinced.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Frankly, Mr. Moon… he smells.”

“Should I invite him in? Offer him a bath? Is that what you’d like?”

Grossmith rolled her eyes in exasperation.

“Where’s the Somnambulist?”

“I believe he’s already retired to bed.”

Moon got to his feet and placed his tea, not half-finished, upon the table. “Then I think perhaps I should join him. Goodnight, Mrs. Grossmith.”

“Your usual breakfast in the morning?”

“Make it early. I’m going out.”

“Something interesting?”

“A case, Mrs. Grossmith. A case!”

Moon walked through to the bedroom he shared with the Somnambulist. They slept in bunk beds, Moon on top, the giant below.

The Somnambulist had changed into a set of striped pajamas (due to his excessive size, these had to be produced for him bespoke) and was sitting up in bed, chalk and blackboard by his side, engrossed in a slim volume of verse.

He was also entirely bald.

Every morning, using an especially tenacious brand of spirit gum, the Somnambulist applied a wig to his scalp and false whiskers to either side of his face. Each night before bed he removed them. On this point, I wish to make myself absolutely, unequivocally clear: the Somnambulist was more than simply bald — he was utterly hairless, unnaturally smooth, billiard ball-like in his depilation. It was a secret he and Moon had guarded fiercely for years. Even Mrs. Grossmith had only found out by accident. The giant was not without his own, unnatural vanity.

As Moon entered the room, the Somnambulist put aside his book and looked up with drowsy eyes. His bald pate shone comfortingly in the gloom.

The conjuror was barely able to contain his excitement. “We have a case!” he cried.

The Somnambulist smiled lethargically, but before his friend could explain any further he rolled over, closed his eyes and went to sleep.

His dreams, their precise contents and nature sadly beyond my jurisdiction.