Homunculus (17 page)

POOR BILL KRAKEN

W
illis Pule leaned against the embankment railing, looking out over the tumult of Billingsgate market. The sun was up, but not far, and it cast an orange, rippling slash along the placid waters of the Thames through parted clouds. The streets were clean and wet. Under other circumstances it would have been a pleasant enough morning, what with masts and ropes of sailing vessels rising above tiers of fishing boats against the lavender sky and hundreds of men landing fish along the docks. But Pule hadn’t slept that night. Narbondo would have another carp, and he’d have it now. His were dead of swim-bladder disease. The oceanarium couldn’t be attempted twice in a single day. There was the chance that breeders from fisheries in Chingford would have carp for sale at Billingsgate. And if they were fresh - if they hadn’t begun to dry out - there was the chance they could restore Joanna Southcote after all.

The hunchback had been tearing his hair since the old man had left with Nell Owlesby. Narbondo was mad to suppose they could do anything with the corpse on the slab - even madder to trust Shiloh to keep his end of the bargain. The evangelist would sell them out. And his power was accumulating. Pule could see a half-dozen of his converts passing out tracts in the market, most of which were immediately put to use wrapping fish. None of the supplicants appeared to be Narbondo’s animated dead men. Even the farthest-fetched, vilest sort of religious cult could develop a sort of fallacious legitimacy through numbers.

Pule wondered whether his prospects wouldn’t be better if he were to throw in with Shiloh, if he were to become a convert. He could do it surreptitiously - keep a hand in with Narbondo -play the one against the other. He stared into his coffee, deaf to the whistles, cries, and shouts of the basket-laden throng around him.

The loss of sleep would play hell with his complexion. He fingered a lump on his cheek. With all the powers of ages of alchemical study at hand, he couldn’t seem to prevent these damned boils and pimples. Camphor baths had nearly suffocated him. Hot towels soaked in rum, vinegar, and - he shuddered to recall it - urine, had merely activated the boils, and it had taken two solid months before he could go abroad without supposing that everyone on the street was whispering and gesturing at his expense. And they probably were, the scum. He rubbed idly at his nose, sniffing at his coffee, the acrid fumes of which just barely disguised the seaweed odors of whelk and oysters and gutted fish - odors that lay like an omnipresent shroud over the market. The smell of fish, of dead, out-of-water fish, sickened him.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up darkly into the face of an earnest youth in a cap and neckerchief. A tract fluttered in his hand. “Excuse me,” said the youth, smiling vacantly. “A wonderful morning, this.” And he looked about him as if he were surrounded by evidence of it. Pule regarded his face with loathing. “I’m here to offer you salvation,” said the youth. “It’s easy to come by, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” responded Pule truthfully.

“It is, though. It’s in the sunrise, in the river, in the bounty of the sea.” And he waved his hand theatrically at a heap of squid laid out on a sledge below. He smiled all the while at the disheveled Pule, who absentmindedly rubbed a rising blemish on the tip of his nose. The youth, apparently satisfied with the squid illustration, rubbed his own nose, although there was no profit in it. “I’m a member of the New Church,” said he, thrusting forth his tracts. “The New Church that won’t have a chance to get old.”

Pule blinked at him.

“Do you know why?”

“No,” said Pule, rubbing at his nose once more.

As if powered by magnetism, the young man was after his own nose again, thinking, perhaps, that something clung to the side of it, a speck that eluded his previous rubbing. Pule noted his behavior and felt his face grow hot. Was the fool having him on? Pule clenched his teeth. “What the hell do you want with me?” he cried.

The violence of Pule’s epithet seemed almost to catapult the youth backward. He recovered, pulled the slack out of himself, and smiled all the more widely. “The end is near,” he announced, grinning. The idea of Armageddon seemed to appeal to him. “You’ve days to save your immortal soul. The New Church, I tell you, is the way. He, Shiloh, the New Messiah, is the way! He raiseth people from the grave! He redeemeth the dead! He…”

But Pule interrupted. “So you’re saying I should become a convert to save myself? Conversion by extortion is it?”

The youth gazed at him, his smile broader, if anything. “I say,” said he, having another innocent go at his nose, “that he who was born of no man can lift you out of misery, can…” and with this, the youth put his hand on Pule’s forehead, as if to heal his soul there and then, in the midst of tramping men carrying baskets of shark heads and eels. The touch of a human hand on the ravaged forehead electrified Pule, but in a way other than had been intended.

Pule screamed an oath, dropped his cup and with both hands tore the tracts from the youth and flung them in a heap to the stones of the embankment. “Filthy… blathering… scum!” shrieked Pule, dancing on the tracts, scuffling and tearing at them with the soles of his shoes. He bent, grabbed a handful, and flung them over the railing, the wind sailing them merrily away like penny whirligigs. Pule cut another half-dozen capers, his eyes like saucers, his mouth twisted in rage. The youth, his smile gone with his vanishing tracts, edged backward a step at a time, until, certain that Pule was too far away to leap on him, he cut and ran toward the embankment stairs, cries of “Scum-sucking pig!” and “Damnable filth!” lending him wings. Pule grasped at the railing, oblivious to the stares of passersby, who gave him a wide berth, anxious not to set him off. He had called attention to himself, to his livid face. They would speak to each other, nudge each other, twigging him. He stared into his retrieved cup, chest heaving, until he saw, beneath his feet, a last tattered tract, smeared with gravel and rainwater footprints. He picked the thing up. On it, sketched rudely by someone whose understanding of perspective was nonsense, was an elongated dirigible, sailing among the clouds. And above it, streaming across a progressively darkening sky, a flaming comet, strangely phallic, arched in toward the flat earth. “The time is at hand!” shouted the caption below the illustration. But what time it was that was at hand wasn’t at all clear, lost as it was in the unfortunate footprint. Pule folded the tract and shoved it into the pocket of his coat, then stepped away down the stairs into the interior of the market, the wooden rambling barn packed with shouting vendors and so thick with fish that it seemed impossible that the oceans hadn’t been stripped clean.

A woman strung with codfish pushed past, smearing Pule with bloody slime. Directly after came a fat man leering up out of Oyster Street with a basket full of gray shells, shouting so vociferously in Pule’s face that for a moment the world seemed to him nothing but a great nose, an open mouth, and a shower of spittle. Pule shrank back in disgust. Fish vendors pushed in on him from all sides. Octopi the size of bumboats seemed to be hovering over him, grasping at him with warty tentacles. Baskets of eels appeared, pushed along on a cart, wriggling out over the sides of their prison only to be ignominiously shoved back in and buried beneath a ballast of cabbage leaves.

Pule gagged. It was close as a tanyard. He’d faint if he didn’t have air. “Carp! Carp! Carp!” came a sudden cry. “Who’ll have these ha-a-an-some carp! All alive! Alive O! Prime carp! Carp o’ the gods!” Pule steered toward the voice, groping for his purse. He wouldn’t haggle. This was no time for haggling. He’d have his carp and away. He stumbled, slipped on the carcass of a fish trod to slime by a hundred shoes. In front of him was a plank piled with enormous reddish shrimp, like impossible bugs, their eyes staring on stalks from out of brittle carapaces, huge feelers waving like antennae. Pule rocked against a wagon of squid, nearly upsetting it. “’Ere now!” came a cry, and he was shoved along. There were the carp - seven of them, submerged in a trough of water.

“Fresh as any daisy!” cried the vendor, noting Pule’s evident interest.

“How much?”

“Two pounds buys the lot.”

Pule produced the money and waved it blindly at the man, who snatched it away and winked at a seller of dried herring beside him. “Want them all, then?”

“I gave you enough, didn’t I?”

“No,” said the vendor, “you were a pound shy. What’re you up to? Precious sort of fellow, aren’t you, trying to cheat a poor carp man like me.”

Pule looked up at him, astonished, far too tired and frightened to argue. The man dangled a single pound note from his fingers. Pule gave him a look and got another look in return. “How many for a pound?” he whispered.

“What’s that?”

“For a pound? What do I get for a pound?”

“One bleeding fish, is what. We had an agreement. Me mate here heard it from your very face, and an unnatural sort of pocky face it is, if I says so myself.” And with that he leered across at the herring dealer, who nodded widely and finally.

Pule dug out another pound. “I want the trough too,” he said weakly.

“That’ll cost you another, carbuncle,” said the carp vendor. Pule nodded, his fear and embarrassment metamorphosing into anger. “Here, you!” he cried, gesturing to a costerlad who sat in an empty barrow. “Five shillings to transport this tub of carp out to Soho.”

The boy leaped up and grappled with the heavy trough, spilling water. Pule cuffed him on the side of the head.

“Here’s a brave one!” shouted the carp man, pocketing the most recent pound note. “Look at moony beat this here lad!” And he burst into laughter, reached across the trough, and jerked Pule’s cap off, dipping it full of squid from a passing basket. He shoved the cap back onto the head of the fleeing and humiliated Pule, who, with the barrow at his heels, burst out into the chilly morning sunlight and pitched the cap, squids and all, into the Thames.

“Say!” cried the lad with the barrow. For a moment he looked as if he were going to leap in after them. “That were a good hat, weren’t it?” he asked innocently, marveling, perhaps, at the apparent wealth of a man who would throw such a hat into the river. “And they was prime squid too.” He shook his head and sloshed along in Pule’s wake.

Some hundred yards down the embankment, the cries and odors of Billingsgate market having receded behind him, Pule noticed a sleeping figure, hunched out of the wind beneath a little stony outcropping that had been, before it crumbled, a decorative granite buttress on an ancient bit of river wall. It wasn’t the reclining figure that caught his eye so much as the half-exposed object that protruded from a pillowcase which the sleeper cradled in his arms.

Pule slowed and squinted at it. He looked at the man’s face. It appeared to be Bill Kraken. And the box? It was a Keeble box. He’d seen Narbondo’s sketches. There wasn’t any question about it: the grinning face of the clothed hippo that peered out from the folds of the pillowcase, the dancing apes carved into the exposed lid. What rare piece of serendipity
was
this, he asked himself. Could this be heavenly repayment for his recent ill-use?

He studied the sleeping Kraken. He was unacquainted with the man, literally speaking, but perhaps knew enough about him to turn the happenstance of their meeting to profit. He addressed the costerlad: “Run along down the way,” he said, “and buy me a bottle of brandy, heated, will you? And two glasses.” He gave the boy three shillings. “There’s another for you if you come back.” He realized as he watched the boy run off that he hadn’t had to offer him a bribe to return. He’d have come back after his barrow sure enough. Perhaps he could cheat him of it somehow. Pule turned his attention to Kraken, who snored volubly and held on to his prize.

The sun peeked over the treetops below London Bridge, casting its rays full into Kraken’s face. He recoiled in the glare of it, blinking and squinting, then seemed to realize what it was he clutched to his chest, and clutched it all the more tightly, as if it were a beast of some sort that might leap from his arms and run. In an instant he pushed it away, hoping, it seemed, that it would run, then yanked it to him again. He stopped his odd tug of war, however, when he noted Pule, bent over the barrow of carp.

“Good morning to you,” said Pule pleasantly, one eye cocked for the approach of the lad with his brandy. Kraken sat in silence. “Cold enough this morning.”

“That it is,” said Kraken suspiciously.

“Bit of hot brandy would be the ticket.”

Kraken swallowed hard. He ran a dry tongue over his lips and regarded Pule. “Have a bit of fish there, have you?”

“That’s it. Fish. Carp, actually.”

“Carp is it? They say carp is… What do they say? Immortal. That’s it.”

“Do they?” asked Pule, feigning deep interest.

“Science does. They’ve studied ’em. In China mainly. Live forever and grow as big as the pool they’re kept in. That’s a fact. Read up your Bible - it’s all there. Loads of talk about the leviathan - the devil’s own fish. Shows up as a serpent here, a crocodile there — they can’t keep him straight. But he’s a carp, sure enough, with his tail in his own mouth. And soon - weeks they say - he’s going to let loose and come up out of the sea like one of them monsoons. I’m a man of science and the spirit both, but I don’t trust to neither one entirely. There’s no affidavit you can sign. That’s my thinking.”

Pule was momentarily awash. He nodded vehement agreement. “Spirit, is it?” he asked, seeing that the brandy bottle approached at a run from up the embankment. The brandy was delivered, Pule was relieved of another shilling, and the boy pushed the barrow twenty yards farther along and waited.

“Glass of Old Pope?” asked Pule, pouring half a tumbler full for Kraken before he had an answer.

“I am dry, thank you. And I haven’t had breakfast yet. What did you say you were?” Kraken sipped at the brandy. Then, as if in rushing relief, he drained half of it, gasping and coughing.

“I’m a naturalist.”

“Are you?”

“That’s right. I’m an associate of the noted Professor Langdon St. Ives.”