Homunculus (24 page)

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.

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.

S
t. 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.