SIX

BETRAYAL

Captain Powers’ shop was dense with tobacco smoke - indicative, thought St. Ives, of the serious nature of the night’s business. Quantity of pipe smoke, he mused, was proportionate to the nature and intensity of the thoughts of the smoker. The Captain, especially lost in deep musings, puffed so regularly at his pipe that smoke encircled his head like clouds around the moon. They were waiting for Godall, who arrived, finally, laden with beer. St. Ives had told no one of Birdlip’s newly discovered manuscript. There was too much to say to have to repeat the story singly to the members. At eight o’clock, by mutual, nodded consent, the Trismegistus Club came to order.

“I’ve got something interesting in the post,” said St. Ives, sipping from a pint glass and waving the sheaf of foolscap at his companions. “Owlesby’s notebooks, or part of them.”

Keeble, who until that moment had seemed peculiarly withdrawn, bent forward in anticipation. And Jack, sitting beside him, seemed to slump in his chair, fearful, perhaps, that some unwholesome revelation about his unfortunate father was in the offing. Kraken shook his bandaged head sadly. Only the Captain seemed unmoved, and St. Ives supposed that his being unacquainted with Owlesby explained his apparent indifference.

“It would be easiest,” St. Ives insisted, “if I merely read a bit of it aloud. I’m not the chemist or biologist that Owlesby was, and I was unacquainted with the peculiar hold that Narbondo apparently had on him. And that, I fear, was part and parcel of Owlesby’s death.”

Godall closed his left eye and squinted at him at the mention of Narbondo, and St. Ives was struck of a sudden with the peculiar notion that Godall’s look reminded him of something - of being elbowed into the gutter by the nameless old man in the cloak. St. Ives ignored it and went on, warming to his task. “So here it is, in Owlesby’s own hand. There’s too much of it altogether, but the last pages are the telling part.” He cleared his throat and began:

“We’ve had the worst sort of luck all week: Short and Kraken brought in a fresh cadaver - took him off the gibbet themselves - and there he lies, full of fluids but stony dead despite it. If we can’t find a carp and a fresh gland, he’ll decompose before we have a chance at him. A terrible waste. My great fear is that all of this will come to nothing but murder and horror. But I’ve taken the first steps. That’s a lie. First steps be damned. I’m halfway along the road by now, and it’s twisted and turned so that there’s no chance of finding my way back.

“We ate in Limehouse last night. I wore a disguise -a putty nose and a wig - but Narbondo laughed it to ruin. There’s no hope of disguising that damned hump of his. I’m not much given to metaphor, but it seems harder by the day to disguise my own loathsome deformities. It’s the thing in the box, the bottle imp, that’s caused it. If a man weren’t tempted, he wouldn’t fall.

“But such talk is defeatist. That’s what it is. Eternal life is within my grasp. If only we hadn’t bungled so badly in Limehouse. The costerlad was a jewel - wicked as they come. It was a service to dispose of him. I swear it. Damn Narbondo’s bungling. We’ve had a tremendous pair of shears forged at Gleason’s (they think me a tree surgeon) and can snip the head off…”

“And there the narrative breaks,” said St. Ives.

“He was interrupted, perhaps,” said the Captain.

Godall shook his head. “He couldn’t bear it, gentlemen. He couldn’t write the word.”

St. Ives glanced up at Jack, who would have been a child himself at the time that his father had written the confessions. He might be better off not hearing this. God bless Sebastian Owlesby’s doubts, thought St. Ives. They’re at once the horror of this and the man’s only redemption.

“Read the rest,” said Jack stoutly.

St. Ives nodded and resumed the narrative:

“The lad couldn’t have been above seven or eight. There was a fog, and not enough light from the streetlamps to amount to a thing. He was bound for the corner of Lead Street and Drake, I think, to buy a bucket of beer - for someone. For his father, I suppose. He had a pumpkin jack o’lantern, of all things, in his left hand, and the bucket in his right. And we walked in shadow twenty paces behind. The street was silent as it was dark. Narbondo carried the shears from Gleasons. He’d have me along, he said, to share the glory, and would have none of my waiting in the alley off Lead Street in the dogcart, which was, I still insist, the only sensible course.

“So there we were, a musty wind cold as a fish blowing up off the Thames, and the mists swirling deeper by the moment, and the grinning face of that lit jack o’lantern swinging back and forth and back and forth, its face appearing with a dull orange glow at the top of the arc of each swing. There was a sudden gust out of an unsheltered alley, and the lad’s lantern blew out. He disappeared in the night, and we could hear his bucket clank against the cobbles. Narbondo hopped forward. I grasped at his cloak to stop him - I could see the black truth in it, as that yellow, toothy light had blinked out in the pumpkin and on in my head - in my soul.

“I flew after him, and the two of us surprised the lad in the act of relighting his unlikely lantern. He stood up, a scream clipped off by those ghastly shears.

“The rest of it is a nightmare. That I fled out of Limehouse and returned in safety to my cabinet is testimony to the existence of dumb luck (if surviving that night of horror can be considered in any way lucky) and to the all-obscuring darkness and fog. It was as if evil had precipitated out of the solution of night and hid me like a veil. Narbondo wasn’t so lucky, but the beating he took couldn’t have been a result of his crime. If they’d known it, he wouldn’t have been thrown into the river alive. Perhaps he was beaten because of what he is, like a man kills a rat or a roach or a spider.

“So the murder was for naught. And the corpse from the gibbet lies moldering on the slab. Narbondo will go out again tonight - we must have the serum.”

St. Ives paused in his reading to drain half a bottle of ale. The Captain sat paralyzed in his chair, stone-faced. “Owlesby,” said St. Ives hurriedly, glancing first at the Captain, then at Jack, “was out of his wits. What he accomplished - what he committed - can’t be justified, but it can be explained. And in the most roundabout way can be excused - forgiven at least if you keep in mind the poison that had trickled into his soul. His discussion of the night in Limehouse is accurate - to a degree. But he dissembled throughout. That much is clear. He admits it in the pages that follow. And as I say, what he admits is all the more horrifying, but it explains a great deal. Poor Nell!”

The Captain seemed to stiffen even more at the sound of the name, and he clanked his heavy glass onto the wooden arm of his Morris chair, brown ale sloshing out onto the oak. St. Ives noted that Kraken had disappeared during the course of the narrative. Poor man, thought St. Ives, searching for his place in the journals. Even after fifteen years, the story of his master’s decline is too fresh for him. But the story had to be told. There was nothing for it but to go on, now that he’d launched out:

“I’m possessed by the most evil aching of the head - such that my eyes seem to press down to the size of screwholes, so that I see as through a telescope turned wrong end to. Laudanum alone relieves it, but fills me with dreams even more evil than the pain in my forebrain. I’m certain that the pain is my due - that it is a taste of hell, and nothing less. The dreams are full of that Limehouse night, of the toothy grin of that damned pumpkin, swinging swinging swinging in the fog. And I can feel myself decay, feel my tissues drying and rotting like a beetle-eaten fungus on a stump, and my blood pounds across the top of my skull. I can see my own eyes, wide as half crowns and black with death and decay, and Narbondo ahead with that ghastly shears. I pushed him along! That’s the truth of it. I railed at him, I hissed. I’d have that gland, is what I’d have, and before the night was gone. I’d hold in my hand my salvation.

“And when he failed, when he ran down East India Dock Road in that stooped half hop, terrified, it was I who set them on him. It was I who cried out to stop him. He little knows it. He’d outdistanced me. He was certain it was the police who shouted. And when they were beating him, by God I wasn’t slack. I was a ruin of failure and loathing and rot as I stamped on his hands and helped those drunken toughs drag him into the river where it splashed and roiled and slammed itself to fury below the Old Stairs, and I hoped by God to see him dead and picked by fishes.

“But there I was unlucky. Like the ghost at the feast, he came unlooked for in the night as I sat in a waking horror in the cabinet, listening to the thing in the box, staring, half expecting the tread of feet on the stair that would announce the end, the gibbet, the headsman’s axe. There it came. Three in the morning it was. Deadly silent. A tramp, tramp, tramp on the wooden stairs - very heavy - and a shadow across the curtain. A hunched shadow. The door fell open on its hinge, and the hunchback stood against a scattering of lights and a clearing sky with such a look of abomination about him that his collapse onto the tiles failed to eradicate it - just as it failed to eradicate my horror of him.

“I should have killed him. I should have slit his throat. I should have cut out the toad under his fifth rib and put it in a cage. But I didn’t. Fear kept me from it. Fear, perhaps, of my own evil. It seemed to me that his face was my own, that he and I were one, that Ignacio Narbondo had somehow drawn part of me in with him, consumed the only part of me that had ever been worth a farthing, and had left a strengthless, malignant pudding, poured into the chair where I sat until half past ten the next morning.

“And it was thus that Nell found me. I begged her to kill me. I hadn’t the courage to perform the deed. I pleaded. I told her of the costerlad. I swore at the same time that I was done with the pursuit - that the creation of life itself wasn’t worth hell. But I lied. The thing in the box can arrest entropy. He can separate tepid water into ice and steam if he likes. He can animate the carcass of a rat dead in a wall for months and dance it about the room like a marionette. He’s prodigiously old, and the only consequence of his thwarting time is his shrunken state. But he must be kept in a box.

“My fitting Keeble’s clever structure with a screen through which I can communicate with him has led, I fear, to my own decay. I can’t say just how I’m bartering with him - knowledge for freedom. If he could but find his craft and a pilot of sufficient stature to navigate it, he’d be lost among the stars in a moment. But that won’t come to pass. Not until I have what I possess -we, I should say, for the hunchback has recovered, and swears he’ll return to Limehouse tonight if the streets are hidden by a sufficiently thick blanket of murk.

“Shall I go with him? Will he draw me along at his heels like a shadow, a daily more fitting shadow? Or will nightfall bring an end to an unhappy and unnatural existence? I can’t for the life of me imagine waking on the morrow. For the first time in my life the morning is cloaked in black.”

“There’s not much more,” said St. Ives, putting a match to his cold pipe with a shaking hand. He’d read the manuscript earlier, but he couldn’t quite get this last part straight in his mind. Nell, it was certain, was without guilt. Even more than that. She was heroic. That the act of shooting her brother, of spiriting away the damned homunculus and giving it to Birdlip to take perpetually aloft, had led to her exile and remorse, was the greatest tragedy. Kraken had been correct. St. Ives dropped the manuscript to the floor. Somehow the act of reading it aloud had emptied him of any desire to look at it again.

The Captain heaved himself to his feet and stumped across to a tobacco jar, yanking off the lid and pulling out two fingersful of curly black tobacco, wadding it into the end of his enormous pipe. “I shipped with a Portagee once,” he said, “who knew of that thing - that bottle imp. He’d owned it straight out for a month and went stark staring mad in a typhoon off Zanzibar. Traded it away to a Lascar on a sloop in the Mozambique Channel.” He shook his head at the enormity of the whole thing and sat back down.

“And the rest of it,” asked Godall keenly. “The other hundred-odd pages - are they as wild as this part?”

“Increasingly so,” said St. Ives. “The decline was swift - almost from the day he bought the thing in the box.”

“In the bottle,” put in Keeble, staring out the window at the street. “There wasn’t any box until I built it.”

St. Ives nodded. “He seemed possessed by the thing - by the idea that he could not only animate the dead, an effect, I gather, that he’d discovered without the aid of the homunculus, but that with it, somehow, he could perpetuate life. Indefinitely. Perhaps that he could create life. And perhaps he could. There’s a reference to a successful experiment in which he spawned mice from a heap of old rags, and another in which he revivified an old man from Chingford, who was dying of general paresis. Sheared forty years from him, according to Owlesby. All of it fearfully alchemical, although, as I say, it’s out of my province.

“He was certain that the spacecraft belonging to the homunculus was in London, and he hoped to find it in order to sell it, as it were, to the damned creature in exchange for power over death and time. Whether his decline into madness and debasement was a result of scientific greed or of slow poisoning due to contact with the homunculus is impossible to say. Even Owlesby, obviously, didn’t know.

“Apparently Owlesby was jealous of owning the thing to the point of refusing to let Narbondo at it. Nell’s absconding with it must have infuriated the hunchback. She snatched the secret of life out of his hands, as it were, and gave it to Birdlip …”

“Who in a matter of weeks might well drop out of the skies on us,” said Godall.

The Captain frowned. St. Ives nodded.

“Well,” said Keeble, topping off his glass from an open bottle of ale, “this is all a very sad business, very sad. If I were asked, I’d say meet the dirigible when it lands - and I’ll bet my ape clock it touches down on Hampstead Heath where it launched -and snatch the box. Between the lot of us such a thing would be nothing. Then we tie it into a bag full of stones and drop it off the center of Westminster Bridge when the river’s in flood. The box isn’t tight, I can attest to that. Regardless of the thing’s powers, it’s got to breathe, hasn’t it? It’s not a fish; it’s a little man. I’ve seen it. We’ll drown it like a cat, if only to keep it out of the clutches of this humpback doctor.” Keeble paused, his chin in his hand. “And for what it did to Sebastian. I’ll kill it for that. But there’s no use, really, hashing over this Limehouse business. It’s water under the bridge is what it is. Nothing more than that. And murky water too. So I’ll just change the subject for a moment here, gentlemen, and call your attention to the date. It’s Jack’s birthday is what it is, and I’ve got a bit of something to give him.”

Jack blushed, disliking, even among friends, being the center of attention. St. Ives grimaced in spite of himself. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been waving Sebastian’s memoirs about so freely. On his son’s birthday, for God’s sake. Well, this was the Trismegistus Club, and the ends they pursued would lead them along grim paths -there was no doubt of that. There was nothing to be accomplished by pretense and timidity. Better to clear the air with the truth straightaway. Far better to do that than to hide things and make them seem even more despicable and terrifying by doing so.

St. Ives wished, though, that he had known it was Jack’s birthday so as to have some trifle wrapped up. But he could remember no one’s birthday - not even his own most of the time. Keeble produced a square parcel about the size and shape of a jack-in-the-box. St. Ives was fairly certain he knew what it was, that he’d witnessed the rising of its clockwork cayman not too many days past.

“A toast to young Mr. Owlesby,” said Godall heartily, raising his glass. The rest of the company followed suit, giving Jack three cheers.

From the shadows of the back room, Kraken raised his own glass - or flask, rather, which was two-thirds empty of gin. It seemed to Kraken to be perpetually in that state. How it could be more often empty than full was an utter mystery. Kraken hadn’t delved particularly widely into the mathematics, and so he was willing to admit that there were forces at work on his gin that he couldn’t yet fathom. He’d be after them though. He’d seek them out. Like beans in a bottle, he said to himself. Facts were nothing more. And mathematics were facts, weren’t they? Numbers on a page were like bugs on a paving stone. They looked a mess, scurrying around. But they were a matter of nature. And nature had her own logic. Some of the bugs were setting about gathering supper - bits and pieces of this and that. Lord knew what they ate, elemental matter, most likely. Others were laying out trails, hauling bits of gravel to build a mound, measuring off distances, scouting out the land, all of them here and there on the pavement - a mess to the man ignorant of science, but an orchestrated bit of music to… to a man like Kraken.

He wondered if someday he couldn’t write a paper on it. It was… what was it? An analogy. That’s what it was. And it must, thought Kraken, explain the business of disappeared gin in a flask. The beauty of science was that it made things so clear, so logical. The cosmos, that was what science was after - the whole filthy cosmos. He smiled to think that he understood it. He’d only just run across the word in Ashbless. He’d seen it a hundred times, of course. Such were words. You were blind to them for years. Then one reached out and slammed you, and bingo, like lit candles in a dark room, it turned out they were everywhere - cosmos, cosmos, cosmos. The order of things. The secret order, hidden to most. A man had to get down on his knees and peer at the paving stones to see the bugs that hurried there, navigating about their little corner of the Earth with the certainty of a mariner setting a course by the immutable patterns of the stars.

A thrill shot up his spine. He’d rarely seen things so clearly, so… so… cosmically. That was the word. He shook his flask. There was a dram or so sloshing in the bottom. Why the devil was it more often empty than full? If a quantity could be poured in, the same quantity could be poured out. He’d filled it that very morning down at Whitechapel - brim full. But it hadn’t stayed full for a half hour. It had been mostly empty all day. Hours of emptiness. And if it weren’t for the bottle of whisky under the bed, he’d be powerfully dry by now.

Kraken grappled with the problem. It didn’t seem fair to him. Like bugs, he reminded himself, screwing his eyes shut and imagining a scurrying lot of number-shaped bugs on a piece of gray slate. It didn’t seem to do any good. He couldn’t quite apply the bugs to the problem of the flask. He squinted through the open door into the room beyond.

He’d spent the last half hour with his hands over his ears, pressing out the sad business of Sebastian Owlesby’s memoirs. He knew it all well enough - too well. He drained the flask, reached under the bed, and drew out the whisky. He was a gin man, truth to tell, but in a pinch…

Young Jack was waving some sort of box. Kraken squinted at it. He was certain he’d seen it before. But no, he hadn’t. Here came some sort of business from inside - a beast of some sort, and tiny birds. The beast - a crocodile apparently tore at one of the birds, gobbled it up, then sank out of sight. Kraken puzzled over it, unsure, exactly, of the purpose of it. He sat for a moment, knuckling his brow, then got up off his bed and edged across to the open door.

Off to his left was another, dark room - the room where lay the sea chest. His heart raced. There was a tumult of talk and laughter as everyone gathered round Jack’s birthday present, Keeble’s engine. Kraken sidled into the dark room, drawn by bleary curiosity. He stubbed his toe into the chest before he saw it, grunting in such a way that he was certain would turn heads in the outer room. But no heads turned. Everyone, apparently, was far too keen on the marvelous toy.

Kraken bent over the chest, running his hands over the front until he found the flat, circular iron hasp. He fiddled with it, not knowing entirely how the mechanism worked and uncertain, even, what in the world he was after - certainly not the emerald. He’d have to be silent as a beetle. It wouldn’t do to be heard. Lord knows what the Captain would think to see him rummaging in the chest. The hasp snapped up suddenly, rapping across Kraken’s knuckles. He shoved three fingers into his mouth. They’d suppose him a common thief, of course. Or worse - they’d suppose he was in league with whomever it was they were at odds with.

Light from the rooms without lay feebly across the contents of the trunk. Kraken rummaged through them, shushing them to silence each time they rattled and swished, and shushing himself for good measure. He shoved his head amid the objects, which he’d managed to push to either side of the trunk. The cold brass of the spyglass pressed his cheek, and the smell of oak and leather and dust rose about his ears - very pleasant smells, in fact. It would be nice to remain so, his head buried like the head of an ostrich among fabulous things. He could easily have gone to sleep if he weren’t standing up. He could hear blood rushing through his head - ebbing and flowing like the tides, as Aristotle would have it - and in among the general roaring of it he could just hear something else, a voice, it seemed, coming from somewhere very far away.

He puzzled over it, aware that the gash on his forehead had begun to throb. He couldn’t for the life of him determine what to do next. Why am I standing here with my head in the chest, he asked himself. But only one answer was forthcoming: strong drink. Kraken smiled. “Whisky is risky,” he said half aloud, listening to his voice echo up out of the chest. He was mad to drink whisky. Gin didn’t do this to a man - make a fool of him. He was suddenly desperately afraid. How long had he been here, stooped over the chest? Was the room behind him filled with the faces of his friends, all of them stretched with loathing?

He extricated his head slowly, careful not to start an avalanche of nautical debris. In his hands he held the hidden box. A thrill of fear and excitement rushed along in his veins, washing away all rational thought. There it was again - the voice, tiny and distant, as if someone were trapped, perhaps, in the wall. He could understand none of it. He wasn’t sure, suddenly, that he wanted to understand it, and was smitten with the wild certainty that the voice spoke from within his own head - a devil.

He was possessed. He’d read Paracelsus. It struck him at once that this was almost certainly a matter of Mumia, that the woman who’d lured him to the den where he’d been beaten was a witch. She’d used him, sensing that he was burdened with Mumia from the bodies he’d carted about London in the night. The sins of his past were rising like spectres, pointing at him. He shook with fear. It was more whisky he required, not less. He silenced the tiny voice, clacking his teeth to shut out the noise, then leaped in sudden horror as the noise turned into a fearful shouting.

He banged down the lid of the chest and jumped clear. The outer room was a tumult. That’s where the noise had come from! Kraken peered around the doorjamb, only to lurch back into the comparative safety of the dark room. Kelso Drake stood without, in the open doorway of the shop. He’d come at last. Having Kraken beaten and shot hadn’t satisfied him. He’d come to finish the job. Kraken pressed back into the room, bumping against a closed window. He unhooked the latch, swung it open, and crawled out across the sill and slid into the mud of the alley, where he lay breathing heavily. He stood up, casting a glance over his shoulder at Spode Street, then loped away toward Billingsgate. In a few hours the thronging crowd at the fishmarket would hide him and his prize from his enemies.