The Somnambulist

“Lucky? How?”

“He survived, Mr. Moon. He survived.”

Philip Dunbar lay close to death. He may once have been a handsome man but now it was almost impossible to tell — teeth smashed, face ruined, he writhed helplessly on the bed, its sheets already stiff with sweat, blood and urine, more like some shattered beast than a young man whose whole life had stretched uncomplicatedly before him only hours earlier.

“How long has he got?” Moon asked.

“Doctor says it could be any time now. Frankly it’s a miracle he’s still with us at all.”

Dunbar thrashed about, muttering indistinctly.

“Poor devil’s delirious. From what we can make out he says he was attacked by some sort of creature. A kind of ape, he says, its face covered in scales.”

“Scales?”

“The doctors have given him a hefty dose of morphine. We can hardly blame him for getting a little fanciful.”

“Anything else?”

Keeps talking about his mother. Said he’d seen her.”

“His mother?” Moon gave the policeman a curious look.

“First person a chap calls for, I imagine, when he’s in a spot like this.”

Dunbar shouted again, the words more distinguishable this time. “God be with you.”

“What?” Moon seemed almost alarmed. “What was that?”

Shuddering, the man struggled to sit up. “God be with you,” he muttered. “God be with you.” He let out a feeble moan and fell back into bed, silent but still breathing, the cord which tethered him to life frayed and worn.

Merryweather sighed. “He’s too far gone. Sooner it’s over for him now the better.”

Mon turned and walked away. “I want to know when he dies.”

Merryweather protested. “You mustn’t take this personally.”

“There’s a pattern here. Why can’t I see it?”

Outside, the Somnambulist was still dozing in the coach. The driver shivered on top.

“Take us home.”

The man nodded.

“Inspector?”

“Mr. Moon?”

“I want to see Honeyman’s body.”

“I’m afraid the family had it cremated last week.”

“Cremated?”

“I’m sorry.”

Moon frowned. “I’ll be in contact again soon.”

“You realize we’ve got to stop this,” Merryweather insisted. “It has to end.”

Moon told the coachman to drive. “Give me time,” he called out. “Give me time.”

Philip Dunbar passed away an hour or so after Merryweather had wished him a speedy death, screaming out his agony to the last. Regrettably, Moon’s response was to throw himself back into the coils of degeneracy. Two days later, he returned to the house of Mrs. Puggsley.

Deliciously exhausted, he lay stretched out on a couch in the reception room, his modesty covered only by a woman’s filmy dressing gown. Mina, the girl with the beard and the vestigial limb, placed a lit cigarillo between his lips and shimmied demurely from the room. The procuress beamed and rubbed her hands together in delight. “I trust Mina proved satisfactory?”

“Admirable. She’s quite become my favorite.”

Sitting around the room were three other girls, former favorites all, and at Moon’s remark they affected distress, pulling mock-disgusted faces. One of them, a pinhead named Clara, crawled across to him and began to softly stroke his neck. Moon tossed her a few farthings and she gamboled happily away.

“Must be a slow night for so few of your girls to be working.”

“Oh it is, sir. It is. You’ve been our first john all evening. Point of fact, it’s been a rather slow week.”

“Really?” Moon made an unsuccessful attempt to blow smoke rings, much to the amusement of the women, a gray-faced creature with a painful-looking skin condition and flippers for hands. Mrs. Puggsley chided her softly. “Mr. Gray” was a regular customer and was not to be openly mocked.

“No doubt business will pick up soon.”

Puggsley shook her massive frame in what was probably intended as a shrug. “Not till the travelers leave,” she muttered, and the others murmured in assent.

Moon sat up, pulled the negligee tight about him and stubbed out his cigarette. “Travelers?” he said.

I once put it to Moon that his patronage of Mrs. Puggsley’s bawdy house was a reprehensible lapse in an otherwise approximately moral character, that his perverse attraction to these poor discarded accidents of nature was a predilection utterly unworthy of him. In reply, he maintained that these liaisons were the mark of an inquisitive mind and an experimental spirit and (somewhat more persuasively) that Puggsley’s was not in itself evil but merely a symptom of an unjust society. Mrs. Puggsley, he argued, provided a sanctuary for these girls from a world which would otherwise hate and fear them.

As it turned out, he was right about society. It was our society, of course, and not Mrs. Puggsley that was responsible for forcing these vulnerable women into their unfortunate positions. I believe I may have remarked something to the effect that I would give my life to change that society, to improve and re- engineer it for the better. But whatever philanthropic qualities Puggsley may have possessed, one thing is certain — that night she provided the key to the Honeyman-Dunbar killings.

“Tell me about the travelers.”

One of the girls tittered.

“They’re show people,” Puggsley explained. “A carnival. Novelties and funfair rides mostly. But some of their freaks turn tricks on the side. I don’t mind telling you, they’re hurting my business.”

“What are they like?”

Mrs. Puggsley groaned. “They’ve got all sorts down there — mermaid and midgets and a girl who can blow balloons up with her eyes. How can we possibly compete with that?”

Mina came back into the room. “We shouldn’t have to,” she said, absently running a comb through her beard. “It’s a proper disgrace, the way they’ve muscled in on our business.” She sat down beside Moon, gave him a perfunctory, passionless kiss on the cheek and returned to the disentanglement of her facial hair.

Moon barely noticed. “How long have they been here?”

“Rolled in about a month ago.”

“Are there acrobats? Gymnasts? Tumblers? Anyone who’d be able to scale buildings?”

“I shouldn’t care to say,” Mrs. Puggsley said haughtily. “I’ve no wish to visit such a place.”

Clara, the pinhead, spoke up. “I’ve been,” she said. “I saw this man there do this act where he climbs a church steeple and dances on top. He can crawl up anything, they say. They call him ‘the Human Fly’ because of it — and on account of the fact he doesn’t quite look right.”

“Describe him.”

“It’s horrible to see, sir. He got these scales all over his face-”

“Scales? Are you sure?”

Clara nodded vigorously.

Moon got to his feet. Showing no obvious signs of shame, he flung the negligee aside and hurriedly dressed himself before the assembly of women. “Where is this fair?”

“Is it important?” Clara asked.

“More than you could know,” he replied, struggling with his cuff links.