Homunculus (36 page)

Once, as the wagon had banged and rattled up the hill from Hampstead, they’d rounded a corner, pressing through a mob of trudging merrymakers, and among them, a broad-brimmed hat yanked across his eyes, Willis Pule had bent along slowly. He had glanced up, as if to join the bulk of the mob in cursing the wagon, and his eyes might as well have been pinwheels. If ever Keeble had seen a madman, Pule was it, and no mistake. His face was awash with a deadly, green pallor, as if his head were a pocked and cratered ball of green cheese gouged from the moon.

At the sight of the wagon pushing past, the spinning rear wheels sluicing mud onto Pule’s trousers and Pule himself understanding in a rush who it was that rode in the wagon, his mouth twitched open spasmodically, and his suddenly whirling eyes rolled back up under the brim of his hat. He’d lurched forward to grab the wheel, as if to yank the wagon to a stop. But the crowd, finally, had thinned, and the horses leaped forward onto the clear quarter mile of road appearing ahead. Pule was dragged along in a sudden head-over-heels tumble, onto his back like a roach in the mud and moaning unrepeatable curses.

The episode had mystified Keeble. What on earth, he wondered, had befallen Pule to have brought him to such a pass, and why had the sight of the wagon so enraged him? There was much, clearly, in the world that Keeble didn’t understand - much that he didn’t care to understand.

Parsons strode back and forth across the green - ten steps this way, ten steps that. He paused in mid-stride coming and going to address comments to his fellows, remarking on the direction of prevailing winds, the possibility of warm valley air rushing in a dangerous updraft and pushing the blimp along to Chingford or Southgate or farther. Winds, after all, were treacherous things. Like teeth, actually. But if one knew their peculiarities, their habits, they would reveal monumental knowledge and could be read and deciphered, much like the interior winds of the human organism could be relied upon to betray gastrointestinal peculiarities. If only Birdlip, Parsons lamented, had been a different breed of scientist - what the man mightn’t have learned, adrift on the skytides for close onto fifteen years! Ah, but they could hope for little, expect even less. Wish for the worst, he insisted, and one was rarely disappointed. He strode up and down, hauling out his pocketwatch at intervals, then shoving it back into his vest pocket.

A dozen gray beards wagged behind him, and no end of brass telescopes were trained on the empty heavens - empty, that is, but for a wash of stars and a crescent moon risen to the top of the sky. A cry arose, and a finger or two pointed briefly at the ivory slice of moon, but whatever it was that had prompted the cry had disappeared. Something, apparently, had for a brief moment been silhouetted there, but had sailed at once into darkness. Parsons pronounced the mystery a bat, whose nocturnal eating habits accounted for its astonishingly proficient digestive system. Still there was no sign of the blimp.

Parsons wished heartily that the populace would go home. The shouting and singing and general drunkenness were at best a distraction, and certainly had no place at a function of this magnitude. Their presence was due solely to the idiotic posing of the charlatan evangelist, whose apocalyptic tracts had stirred a million Londoners into unwholesome exodus. The man should be in a madhouse. There he stood, one foot planted squarely on the back of each of two kneeling parishioners. What he shouted into the night air was lost in the general cacophony, and Parsons couldn’t fathom a bit of it. The few phrases that blew across the green were tangles of hellfire, final trumpets, avenging angels, and - remarkably - creatures from the stars. This last, under calmer circumstances, would have appealed to Parsons, but it was such utter blather here that to attend to it for ten seconds running was a tiresome business.

The hands of the old evangelist rose slowly over his head, and in them, held for the crowd to appreciate, was a cube of some sort. It was far too dark, despite burning clumps of brush scattered round the green, for Parsons to see clearly what it was - a holy object, no doubt. People pressed in around the evangelist, listening. The starry sky and the distant lights of London winking and glittering on the plain below enlivened the night with a spirit of mysticism.

The evangelist exhorted the crowd. There was an answering shout, a confirmation, it seemed. A scream followed. Hands pointed heavenward. A general shouting arose. Spyglasses were aimed toward where a tiny pinprick of light arced out of the sky, falling toward the Heath and brightening as it fell. The general tumult gave way to an awed silence, broken by the shouting evangelist. “And the name of the star,” he cried, “is Wormwood!”

But the utterance of the last syllable was followed by a sudden shriek as the evangelist catapulted forward off the backs of his supplicants. The box he held over his head sailed some few feet above the green until it was snatched out of the air by a running figure in a broad-brimmed hat, who dashed among the multitude, knocking people aside like billiard balls and racing as a man possessed toward where Parsons stood before the assembled scientists.

“What in the devil is
this?”
cried Parsons, an utterance that might easily have applied to either mystery - to the glowing orb that plummeted earthward, or to the gibbering, fright-masked lunatic who capered up, yowling at the thing in his hands and lurched to a stop not ten feet in front of the collected Royal Academy. He regarded the cube as if stupefied, betrayed. Parsons could see now that it was built of glass and contained some rattling object. The madman’s mouth worked, gibbering silently. With a sobbing heave, as if the strange cube were perhaps the most inconceivably disheartening thing he’d run across in recent years, he dashed it to the ground, then slumped off unpursued. For the minions of the evangelist, along with the old man himself, watched in growing wonder the thing in the sky - a glowing, spheroid ship, fallen from the stars.

Parsons blinked. He looked at the receding madman. He looked at the approaching starship. He looked at the decayed head, toothy and brown, that rolled to a stop at his feet, peering up at him through empty sockets. Its jaws clacked once, as if in a tired attempt to bite his shoes or to utter some final lamentation. Then it lay still. “What on earth…” murmured Parsons.

S
t. Ives could once again see Greater London spread out below him, but this time it wasn’t spinning like a top. It lay below like jeweled pinpoints flung along the winding dark ribbon of the Thames. To the west the sky was tinged red with dying sunlight, which quickly deepened to purple then blue-black as his craft dropped toward Hampstead Heath. Behind him lay the uncharted oceans of deep space - oceans traversed by comets and moons and planets and asteroids, the vast and lonely sailing ships that plied the trade lanes among the stars, and among which, for a few brief minutes. St. Ives had maneuvered his little coracle of a star vessel.

But he was destined now for Hampstead Heath. The wonders of the heavens would wait for him, of that there could be little doubt. But the machinations of earthbound villainy would not. His friends at that moment were embroiled in God knew what sorts of dangers and intrigues. St. Ives smiled as he diminished the speed of the craft sliding in toward the fires that dotted the hillsides like beacons above the lights of Hampstead.

The great oval green was thick with people who swirled and parted and fell back. There, he could see, was a knot of people on chairs in a cordoned area - the Royal Academy, without a doubt. And before them - that had to be Parsons. St. Ives angled in toward him, looking in vain for his own companions. But there were horse carts aplenty, and one looked pretty much like another from such lofty heights. The ground sailed up at him. Upturned faces, mouths agape, swam into clarity. St. Ives fingered the levers, toyed with them, eased them this way and that, settling, finally, onto the green, dead center between two roaring fires, with no more jarring than if he’d sailed in on a feather.

He arose, flipped open the hatch, thrust out his head, and was amazed to see, sitting directly in front of the ship, its back turned toward him, the upholstered chair from the house on Wardour Street, still tethered to the ship, the luckless ghoul bound into it by three turns of hempen rope. The thing’s hair stood on end -elevated by the spate of rapid travel through space - and its face was pulpy and bent, as if shoved and pummeled by atmospheric pressures. The ghoul seemed to be staring straightaway toward an open-mouthed Parsons, who held in his right hand, of all things, the severed, diminished head of Joanna Southcote.

St. Ives smiled and nodded at Parsons, who, quite apparently, was going to weep. He’d clearly been affected by the glorious issuance of the craft. St. Ives had underestimated Parsons; that much was certain. What was even more certain was that the members had underestimated St. Ives. Their countenances betrayed them.

“Gentlemen!” cried Langdon St. Ives, having prepared a small speech while cavorting through the upper reaches of the atmosphere. But his speech ended as abruptly as it began, for there arose immediately a furious shouting from the direction of the village of Hampstead, a shouting that climbed the hill like an approaching giant. And there, hovering out of the starry distances, sailed the blimp of Dr. Birdlip, swinging slowly on the breeze, making for Hampstead Heath.

As wonderful as St. Ives’ arrival had been, the approach of the wonderful dirigible diminished it. The Royal Academy pushed past the star vessel in a rush, leaving St. Ives to address the back of the head of the thing in the chair. Duty, thought St. Ives, recalling the point of his journey to the Heath. His friends were somewhere nearby, as were his enemies. Birdlip approached, carrying with him the inheritance of Jack Owlesby - independence for Jack and Dorothy, Sebastian Owlesby’s only respectable legacy. And there would be no end of villains afoot with an eye toward it.

St. Ives was torn. He dared not leave the craft unattended. Who could say what deviltry might be perpetrated against it? Drake, certainly, would attempt to repossess it, Pule to blow it to bits, Shiloh to claim it as a chariot of some peculiar god or another. Still, what could he do? Sit in it? Let the same crowd overrun the blimp, pluck the jewel from their grasp? He bent through the hatch, overbalancing and sliding out onto the riveted shell of the craft, grabbing at a pair of brass protrusions to haul himself free.

The shouting increased in volume. St. Ives slid head first onto the dewy grass of the Heath, then scrambled onto his feet, yanking at his rumpled clothes. A loud crack sounded behind him along with the snap and zing of something ricocheting off the hull of the ship. Another crack rang out, and St. Ives was once again in the grass, scuttling like a lobster around the ship, peering out beneath the lower curve of the thing at a man in the chimney pipe hat -Billy Deener - crouched beneath the spreading limbs of a shadowy oak. A pistol smoked in his hands. Beside him was a horse and wagon, empty, tethered to the tree. Deener took aim with his pistol and stepped forward, as if to stride toward St. Ives in order to flush him out. There could be no doubt that it was murder he intended. And there in the tumult on the Heath he’d get away with it too. They’d find St. Ives stiff as a gaffed fish on the green and half a million Londoners suspect.

St. Ives edged round the far side of the ship. Would it be wise to run, trusting the increasing distance to confound Deener’s aim? He peeked out and a shot banged off the hull of the ship, the bullet singing past his ear. St. Ives contracted like a startled snail. He could, perhaps, clamber into the ship, shut the hatch, and sail away, but the man would be on him like a dog - St. Ives would be found murdered, dangling from the hatch, exterminated in a sorry effort to flee. It was run or nothing. Zigzag - that was the ticket. He’d dash away toward a far stand of trees. He’d keep the ship between them so that Deener would have to fire past it.

St. Ives leaped up and ran for it. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” he shouted, for no purpose other than to alert the night to the ensuing mayhem. He glanced over his shoulder as soon as he was underway, unable to stand the idea of not knowing where the assassin stood.

But there was no assassin - not standing, anyway. A man leaned out of the tree like an ape above Deener, and even as St. Ives watched, he slammed the chimney pipe hat cockeyed with what appeared to be a cricket bat. The hat sailed off end over end as Deener collapsed forward onto his knees. The man dropped from the tree, his own hat tumbling to the ground, and gripping the club with both hands smashed Deener again. Drake’s hireling fell poleaxed onto his face in the weeds.

The man with the bat raised it aloft for another blow. St. Ives set out cautiously toward the ship. This is thick, he thought. There was, after all, such a thing as common decency, even toward a would-be murderer. The cricket bat descended, cracking against Deener’s skull, then again and again, as if the man who wielded it was wild with fury. “Here now!” cried St. Ives, setting off at a run. The man cast the bat haphazardly into the air, turned toward the approaching St. Ives, and bent to pick something up out of the grass. It was the pistol. He leveled it at St. Ives, who lurched to a skipping halt, reversed direction, and weaved away across the green, tempted to run downhill toward the assembled masses below, but fearful that some innocent Londoner might take a bullet intended for him.

St. Ives ducked in once again behind the ship, wondering wildly at the strange course of events that had led Willis Pule to save him from the murderous Billy Deener, for it had been Pule, gibbering mad, who had leaned out of the tree with the cricket bat to pulverize Deener. But why? In order, apparently, to have the pleasure of killing St. Ives himself. But Pule had given up the idea. He strode across to the tethered horse and wagon, rummaged among Deener’s effects, and hauled something out - a Keeble box. Even from a distance there could be no doubting it.

The gun forgotten, St. Ives leaped from his cover and raced toward Pule. Which of the boxes it was that Pule was even then making away with, St. Ives couldn’t say. But visions of the spark-throwing rocket bursting through the silo roof and of Willis Pule smashing about in his study, beating poor Kepler’s bust into pieces, leant St. Ives a sudden disregard for danger. Madness, however, had given the student of alchemy wings, for he paid the advancing St. Ives no heed at all, but raced away into the night, gabbling to himself as he ran, half sobbing, his words utterly indecipherable. Billy Deener, St. Ives discovered, was dead.