when the events to be recalled are so firmly imprinted on the mind. It is existence in the present, the bleak wreckage and residue of what has gone before, that is so burdensome.
Upon completion of the previous section of these memoirs, I laid down my pen and went out of the house again, hoping to briefly expunge remembered night with the brightness of the current day. Blessedly anonymous in this district, I strolled through the crowds intent on their own business. Lost in their number, I found a moment of peace that was broken only when I thought I saw a familiar face staring at me. Turning towards it, I felt my heart leap up into my throat as I recognised the sloping, exophthalmic, and purse-jawed visage of one of the Wetwick denizens. I staggered backwards, blundering into the people nearest me, fearing that the parishioners of that region had emigrated with me from their former haunts. The appalling vision dissolved when, curious about the rising murmur behind him, a local fishmonger turned about, and I saw that the dreaded physiognomy was no more than that of an unusually large carp he was carrying on his shoulder towards his stall. With my pulse still trembling inside me, I scurried back towards the shelter of my home.
Between that sentence and this lies a good hour of lying on my bed, soothing my fright with a tumblerful of peat-smelling Scotch whisky, a comfort to which I was introduced when marooned on the Hebridean island of Groughay with the increasingly lunatical Scape. All that time, when I had but recently escaped being murdered at the hands of the Godly Army, the brown nectar had been perhaps all that had preserved my own sanity as I had watched my fellow castaway assembling his absurd flying machine from sticks and carrion.
Thus fortified, the warmth of the whisky dispelling both the chill of the air and that of memory, I returned to my labours.
On that dark London street, I saw for the first time in living flesh those features that had been represented to me before only in wax and metal. Though within the possible range of variation of general humanity, they were decidedly placed at the unnerving end of the scale. What would have been described as gross ugliness in one individual was made uncanny by the familial resemblance between the man I had stopped and the others hurrying by us – I could have found myself among no more alien-seeming tribe than if I had stepped into the court of Jenghiz Khan.
The round, protruding eyes gave the man whose shoulder I still grasped a deceptive appearance of stupidity. Certainly, he was in fuller possession of his faculties than I was at the moment. He scowled – or gave as close an approximation of that expression as his slope-browed, chinless face could provide – and twisted his shoulder free, then hurried away on his nocturnal errands.
I stepped back from the pavement to let the others pass by. Though they were all possessed of the same goggling features, the variation among them was as of a parade of human society and its constituents: I saw, in quick order, the young mechanic and tradesman, cloth-capped and with knotted neckerchief, the distinctive sidling gait marked with quick vigour; the elderly, both of rotund corpulence and skeletal wasting, assisted in their sideways progress with walking sticks; women clutching their head-shawls fast beneath their chins, of every age from grannyhood to ingenue, the latter blushing modestly under a stranger's gaze and hurrying close to their families' protection; and children, both wellscrubbed and ragged. These young ones, not yet instructed in their elders' ways, gaped at me openly as their parents dragged them along, their wide mouths falling open like latchless coin purses. In more than one little girl's arm was clutched a simple plaything, a doll with similar features.
One child, momentarily separated from her parents and blinded by her small fists knuckling the tears from her protuberant eyes, blundered into my leg. Moved to pity, I extracted the ugly doll from my own coat pocket and placed it in the child's hands. She gulped down her sobbing long enough to blink in amazement at the unexpected gift; when she looked up at her benefactor, her mouth rounded in a startled O at my face, and she quickly scuttled off in terror.
For a moment I had thought that the cabby's terrier had abandoned him and returned to this spot, as I sighted what seemed to be the exact same creature frisking about one of the pedestrians barking with the same highpitched yap and darting a few feet ahead and returning as though guiding its new master in the desired direction. Then I noted the creature's double, and yet more like it, all darting in amongst the sidling steps, barking in ragged unison and dashing back and forth in a sheepherder's manner. In total there must have been over a dozen of the small dogs along just the short stretch of pavement that I could see, varying only in the colours and spots of their coats.
The novelty of the situation in which I had found myself abated after a few minutes. While the individuals passing by were not of comely appearance, neither were they the most repulsive I had ever seen; indeed, there was more disorientation aroused by their resemblance to each other than any other factor, akin to the odd confusion brought on by the sight of identical twins or triplets, where the eye itself seems to be somehow stuttering as it passes from one face to its exact match. Perhaps having encountered that distinctly ichthyoid shaping of the skull in the form of the ugly doll and the Saint Monkfish coin had prepared me somewhat for its appearance in vivo. At any rate it was with only small and easily suppressed shudders that I stepped up to one of them again, intent on renewing my inquiries.
'I beg your pardon – but is this the borough of Wetwick?'
The figure I addressed made his face even uglier with a scowl, and brushed rudely by me without returning so much as a word. I repeated the question to the next behind, and received the same brusque silence. These seemed a very peculiar breed of Londoner: most of the city's residents expressed their ill manners through the coarseness of their volubility, seizing any chance to fill an unfortunate stranger's ear with their unsolicited philosophies on any subject possible. Even if money were required to free their tongues and produce the information required; the transaction was forthrightly indicated with the sign of an open palm; the faces of the most shabbily dressed of these folk had glared at me with outright hostility and distrust.
The thought of money sparked a notion in my brain. I heard again the cabby's words: a single coin… of course, it has to be the right coin… I drew the Saint Monkfish sovereign from my waistcoat pocket and contemplated it. The odd coin had produced a surprising measure of service from the cabby; perhaps it was the key here as well. I could not see what I had to lose by the venture.
'My good man.' I held out the coin, gripped at its edge by finger and thumb; the glint of bright metal was sufficient under the thin starlight to catch the attention of the next passer-by. 'I wonder if you could give me some assistance.'
The experiment met with success. At the sight of the coin, the eyes of the young man widened beyond their already extraordinary circularity. He pulled his cap off, holding it against his shirt front with his work-roughened hands as he respectfully awaited my query. The servile response seemed more suited to a village rustic than a denizen of the city.
Pleased with the talisman's efficacy, I repeated the question that had previously elicited no answer. 'Is this the borough of Wetwick?'
The fellow nodded dumbly.
'I'm looking for a man named Fexton; I've been informed he lives in this district. Do you know of him?'
Another nod.
My heart lightened; at last I was making some progress in this quest. I only hoped that the silent responses did not mean I was talking to a total mute. 'Then can you tell me where I can find this Fexton?'
He grasped my arm and dragged me a few yards to a narrow alley branching off the street. Jabbing his blunt finger towards the Stygian darkness, he said, 'There' – or so I understood him: the sound was closer to Nyuhair, as if the speaker were struggling with a malformed palate.
'Mr Fexton lives down there?' I could barely discern the outlines of the building terminating the courtyard to which the alley gave entrance.
The nod was even more vigorous; the fellow had perhaps assumed that I was some person of considerable rank, engaged on official business. 'Upstairs' – uh'snyairs – with the finger now indicating a dimly lit window some distance above.
'Many thanks.' My informant, perceiving that my questions were at an end, scurried off after his fellows, manifestly grateful that the encounter was over.
I made my way down the alley, cautious against any hands that might try to lay hold of me. The night's dampness had combined with the decaying refuse on the cobblestones, resulting in a footing both precarious and odorous beneath my bootsoles. Placing a hand against the wall for balance, I snatched it back in disgust, having felt something with the yielding pulpiness of rotten fruit; in the dark, I had the uncanny illusion of whatever it had been,
