To describe the Somnambulist simply as an unusually tall man would hardly do justice to his memory. He was abnormally, freakishly large — indeed, if the rumors which circulated after his death are to be believed, he stood well in excess of eight feet tall. He had a thatch of dark-brown hair, cultivated in a substantial pair of side-whiskers and had about him a likeably innocent air which belied a prodigious strength. More curious still, he carried with him at all times a miniature slate blackboard and a stub of chalk.
The journey home was entirely silent. Exhausted by the effort of maintaining his composure in the face of the evening’s relentlessly cheerful rounds of socializing, Moon said nothing, but as the cab neared the end of its journey the Somnambulist reached into his satchel and drew out his blackboard and chalk. In straggly, childish characters he wrote:
WHAT DID HE ASK
Moon told him.
With a massively oversize thumb, the Somnambulist rubbed out his message and wrote again:
WHAT DID YOU SAY
On hearing the reply, the giant put away his chalk and board and did not write again till morning.
Edward Moon was a conjurer by profession. He owned a small theatre in Albion Square, just at the border of the East End, where every night except Sunday he performed his magic show with the silent, indefatigable assistance of the Somnambulist. Naturally, they were both far more than mere stage magicians, but I shall come to that in time.
Their show was a quiet phenomenon, opening to modest houses in the early 1880s until, at the very acme of his popularity, Moon could count it a disappointing night if the stalls weren’t filled to capacity and half his potential audience turned away for lack of space. At the time, the city had never seen anything quite like the Theatre of Marvels. In a single production, it synthesized magic, melodrama, exoticism and real, heart-stopping spectacle. But the audiences came to see one thing above all others, the mystery at the heart of the performance: the great and silent enigma of the Somnambulist.
The theatre itself was a little over fifty years old, a modest building with the look of a minor college chapel about it. A gaudy hand-painted sign took up half the front wall and proclaimed in foot-high letters:
THE THEATRE OF MARVELS
MR EDWARD MOON
THE SOMNAMBULIST
By the time of our narrative, the theatre had ceased to be truly fashionable and audiences had begun to dwindle in numbers and enthusiasm.
The night after Moon’s encounter with Stoddart was typical — a small crowd, a half-hearted line outside the entrance, nothing like the glory days when by five o’clock, a full three hours before the performance was due to commence, a queue would start at the box office and snake its way out of the theatre and into the street, stretching as far as the doors of a nearby public house, the Strangled Boy.
Inside, the theatre had a grimy, run-down quality, exacerbated by its omnipresent scents of sawdust, liquor and stale gas. Unbeknown to our protagonists, I was there myself that night, seated in the front row, the fourth or fifth such occasion on which I had attended.
As the audiences idled to their seats, a ragtag orchestra played in the pit at the front of the stage, heroically struggling through a medley of popular standards almost physically upsetting in their coarseness and banality. There was a time when audiences had been drawn from all strata of society — from local working-class families to professional men, paupers to priests, doctors to drapers, even on one memorable occasion a minor scion of the royal family — until quite abruptly and without apparent cause the higher orders had ceased to come, leaving only local people, the idle, the curious, those who merely wished to get out of the rain, as well as a peculiar crowd of what can only be described as ‘regulars’. These were a gang of mild obsessives and social misfits who visited the theatre repeatedly, had seen the show a dozen times or more and could (no doubt) recite the act by heart. Always outwardly courteous, privately Moon harbored nothing by contempt for his disciples, despite the fact — or more precisely because of it — that his livelihood appeared increasingly to depend on them.
Mercifully, the orchestra limped to the end of its miniscule repertoire, the lights dimmed, and backed by a persistent drum roll, Edward Moon took the stage. He bowed, to immediate applause. Noticing a phalanx of his fans occupying the entirety of the fifth and sixth rows, he acknowledged their presence with a cursory nod. Then, professional smile in place, he began the well-worn routine, confident that his audience, though small, was sympathetic.
He was careful to eschew what was expected, the staple tricks of the magician. At the Theatre of Marvels there were no rabbits, no hats, no shuffling of cards, no colored handkerchiefs, no rings, cups or balls — Moon’s act was altogether more recherche than that.
To roars of approval from the regulars, he produced from thin air what appeared to be a large Galapagos tortoise and watched it totter its wrinkled way amongst the crowd before it inexplicably disappeared in full view. He brought forth an entire set of encyclopedia from his apparently bottomless pockets, even after a member of the audience had certified them empty. At his command a live ape materialized in a puff of magenta-colored smoke and capered and gibbered delightfully for a time.
In preparation for the first major trick of the evening, the monkey picked a gentleman from the audience who, on Moon’s instructions and accompanied by encouraging whoops and cheers from the stalls, got reluctantly to his feet and made his way onstage. Upon the man’s arrival, Moon snapped his fingers and the ape scampered obediently away.
“Can you tell us your name, sir?” Moon asked, with a wink to the audience who laughed knowingly along, fully cognizant of the fact that one of their number was about to be discomfited, patronized, mocked or — better still — humiliated and openly ridiculed.
“Gaskin,” the man replied in an insouciant, disagreeable tone. “Charlie Gaskin.” He was stocky, barrel- chested and had cultivated (unwisely, in my opinion) a flaccid, patchy approximation of a walrus mustache.
Moon held Gaskin in his gaze. “You are a valet,” he said. “You are married with two children. Your father was a tailor who died of consumption last year. For supper tonight you ate a stale kipper, and you spend many of your leisure hours building and maintaining a collection of antique clocks.”
Gaskin was visibly astonished. “All true,” he said.
The audience burst into applause. The man’s wife, sitting three rows from the front, stumbled to her feet, clapping wildly.
Gaskin laughed, red-faced. “How the devil did you know that?”
Moon arched an eyebrow. “Magic,” he said.
I can imagine you now, all dewy-eyed and eager for an explanation of how it was that Moon had come to know all this, for a detailed post-mortem of his deductive processes. Sad to say, I have to disappoint you. What follows can be no more than a tentative reconstruction of his methods.
As I see it, there are three chief possibilities.
The first is that this uncanny display of insight was a deception, that Gaskin was a plant, that he and Moon had arranged their patter in advance. In short — that it was all a trick. What took place immediately after, however, surely rules this out as a serious supposition.
The second is that our hero was an unusually brilliant observer of minutiae, a man of rare deductive skill, a master in intuitive ratiocination cut from the same cloth already stitched and darned by Sir Arthur and Mr. Poe. If the second conjecture is correct, then this — an extrapolation from the few known facts — is my attempt to re- create his methodology.
That the man was a valet was obvious from his air of sullen servility; that he was married from his wedding
