Homunculus (39 page)

“For the moment,” said Godall enigmatically. “We haven’t, possibly, seen the last of our millionaire. But I rather believe him to be a spent force. I’ll call upon him myself in a day or two.”

“What ever became of Willis Pule, do you think?” asked St. Ives. “He was utterly mad there at the last.”

Godall nodded. “Madness, I’m certain, is the wages of villainy. He met an old friend, in fact.”

“What’s that?” asked St. Ives, surprised.

“The hunchback.”

“Narbondo!”

Godall nodded. “In a dogcart full of carp. Pule lay face down among them, comatose.”

“Poor devil,” said St. Ives. “I don’t suppose Narbondo had come to his rescue.”

“Not very bloody likely,” said Godall darkly, and the two men hoisted themselves onto the wagon, sitting with their feet dangling over the back so that they faced the sweep of hill on which, two hours earlier, had sat the long-awaited blimp.

Ahead of them, some distance away, trudged half of London, not a man or woman among them with the least understanding of the mysteries that had supplied the evening’s entertainment. What understanding have any of us, wondered St. Ives. Not a nickel’s worth, not really. Not even Godall, for all the man’s intellectual prowess. Intellect wouldn’t answer here, wouldn’t explain why the cold and measured tread of science had strayed from chartered paths and wandered unsuspecting into the curious moonlight of Hampstead Heath. Poor Parsons. What did he make of the blimp now? Would he awaken at midday having somehow clipped the evening apart and reassembled it into a more tolerable pattern, like a man who whistles his way through a dark and lonely night, then abandons his fears in the light of a noonday sun?

St. Ives gazed with sleepy wonder at the empty, receding green as the wagon bumped around a muddy swerve of road into Hampstead, the village dark now and silent. He tried to summon a picture of the blimp riding at anchor, of Dr. Birdlip visible beyond the slats of the wooden gondola, legs wide set to counter the roll of an airy swell. But the Heath lay empty above, the blimp fragmented, disappeared. And it seemed as if the strange craft had never been more than a ghostly will o’ the wisp, a bit of sleepy enchantment woven out of nothing, that whirled and faded now across the back of his closed eyes until he seemed to be sailing with it above the clouded landscape of a dream.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
ames Paul Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and a Philip K. Dick Award, he is currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County School of the Arts, where Tim Powers is Writer in Residence. He is also a professor at Chapman University, where he has taught for twenty years. Blaylock lives in Orange CA with his wife, they have two sons.

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