the future, the scales of filth and degradation that stifle and blind us! Speak, we implore thee!” And with this last falsetto petition a hoarse voice squeaked out, as if it were carried on the breeze that whirled leaves up Bayswater Road, as if it were part of that breeze, of the natural turnings of the universe. The crowd fell instantly silent, leaning forward as one, straining to hear the words of the oracle. Silence followed. Then, shattering the silence, the cry: “Get thee to a nunnery! Go!” rang out amid screams of wild laughter, the product of a particularly educated lad in the oak tree.
Shiloh cast the laughing toughs a look of mixed venom and pity, waiting with theatrical patience for silence to descend. Again the teeth chattered, clearly taking the startled evangelist by surprise.
“Hear me…ee…ee!” came the eerie wavering voice.
“Speak!” commanded Shiloh of the dancing teeth.
“Listen to my words!” ululated the head.
“Kiss my arse!” shouted the oak tree.
The skull fell silent.
“You’ve mined it!” shouted the lady in the nightshirt, directly into St. Ives ear, obviously enraged at the crowd in the tree.
“Shut up, will you!” shouted a man at St. Ives’ elbow, but it was impossible to tell whether the command was directed at the lady in the nightshirt or the laughing toughs. The head began to chatter again. St. Ives wondered exactly how the thing was supposed to be talking when it lacked flesh on its neck, when it lacked, for that matter, a neck of any sort, fleshed or otherwise. Perhaps the crowd was no more interested in physiology than St. Ives had been when sharing leather cutlets with Parsons a half hour earlier. Maybe it was the wind vibrating the bones in its chin — a sort of Aeolian harp effect.
Just as the voice started up again, the teeth gave out, seeming to take the voice by surprise, for it continued momentarily, uttering something about dread things in the sea before closing off like a faucet. Each effort by the toothy skull seemed more tired than the last. Shiloh peered in at it, shaking it just a bit as if fearing that the thing was running down — which it very apparently was, for away it went one last time, getting off a half-dozen staccato chatters before slowly playing out and, whether of its own accord or because of a misstep of the evangelist, falling over onto its side and giving up the ghost.
The crowd pressed forward to have a closer look, all of them, no doubt, feeling cheated of the show they expected, of the revelations that had a half-dozen times clearly been pending. A shower of acorns launched from the oak tree rained around the evangelist, who, St. Ives could see, was clearly puzzled and chagrined. Whatever it was he’d been attempting to accomplish hadn’t entirely been a fake, and it had the unmistakable stamp on it of Ignacio Narbondo.
The old man, seeing that the head had given out, attempted to preach to the crowd from atop his crate. But the masses surged forward, anxious to get a look at the deflated prophet, and the old man’s supporters rallied round, linking hands in an effort to keep the mob away from their master and his oracle. Easily two-thirds of the supplicants had eaten blood pudding in the last twenty-four hours, St. Ives determined. Parson’s fears of the growing army of cultists weren’t as terrifying as they might be — it was an army that could be starved out of existence overnight.
Their linking of arms to hold back the throng was futile; St. Ives could see that at a glance. People pushed past him. Without moving he drifted toward the rear of the crowd. Shiloh, in growing dread, made away up the street, surrounded by his supporters. A brougham careered around the corner from the direction of Leinster Terrace, pulled to a halt half a block up from the charging throng, swallowed the evangelist and three of his allies, and galloped off, bearing away the chattering head, the performance of which, thought St. Ives, would not get favorable reviews.
FOURTEEN
Pule Sets Out
The New Messiah rode along into Mayfair with his eyes clamped shut so tightly that little flickers of yellow lightning shot out across the back of his eyelids each time the brougham bounced over a dip in the road. What, he wondered, could have gone wrong? What conceivable force could be responsible for the failing of the spirit of his poor, misused mother? She’d been declining — he could see that — ever since he’d brought her away from the laboratory of the accursed Narbondo. It was as if she had fallen asleep, as if whatever animating force she’d been imbued with had drained away. Was this a sign, an indication that his own vanity had to be curbed? But he was selfless, blameless. He hadn’t chosen to be what he was — the son of whom he was the son of. Had he? It had been thrust upon him, and he’d suffered for it, long years of deprivation. And here, when he had the means to sway great masses of people, when success lay within his grasp, the machinery of the spirit failed, ran down, fell mute.
He pressed his temples and looked up at the man next to him — a droopy-eyed, pasty man, one of Narbondo’s ghouls. The sight of him was tiresome, uncharitable as this might be. Shiloh couldn’t suffer it, wouldn’t suffer it. He pushed his head out through the curtain and railed at the driver. “Stop!” he shrieked. “Stop, you bleeding fool!
The brougham lurched to a halt. The evangelist threw open the door on the street side. “Out!” he said tiredly. “All of you.” They stared at him stupidly. He picked up a heap of tracts on the floor and pitched them out into the dirt. “Fetch those.” The man beside him rose obediently, stepping out through the open door. The others followed, the last sailing face first into the road on the heel of the evangelist’s boot. The old man reached out and pulled the door shut. “Drive on!” he cried, and away the brougham raced, the old man alone now, contemplating his failure.
There was simply no accounting for it. Or rather there was, but he simply couldn’t see it. Something nagged at him — something about the business at Narbondo’s: the hands pounding on the piano, the ill-fated flight of the skeletal bird, his mother’s brief revitalization. What explained it? Surely not the capering hunchback with his yellow vapors. Something more had been in evidence. A spirit — that was it. Some presence had charged the room, had launched the bird. The explanation of it all lay just out of sight around a turning of his memory.
The box. Had that been it? Of course it had. Narbondo had set the box atop the piano, and straightaway had set off the playing, had stirred the corpse of the bird. What if, wondered Shiloh, squirming in his seat in the glare of sudden illumination, what if the box in Narbondo’s hands were the homunculus?
Had the hunchback left the thing in sight to mock him? Knowing that the creature in the box was, in fact, Shiloh’s father? A creature with power over life and death? The stinking swine! He’d known all along, hadn’t he? Or had he? Why was he so anxious to get hold of Nell Owlesby? And what
The evangelist stroked his chin. He’d been played, perhaps, for a fool by any number of people. But he’d have the box. That much Narbondo owed him.
Pratlow Street was silent. No one was about, not even a stray dog or cat. The moon, which had shone for an hour or so between the tilting buildings that lined the street, had long since drifted away. No light burned in Narbondo’s cabinet, the hunchback having departed for the night. His relative success with the remains of Joanna Southcote and knowledge of the whereabouts of the homunculus box had improved his mood, which had suffered from Pule’s failure to obtain Owlesby’s manuscript. Narbondo’s house call at Drake’s Wardour Street address had given him certain ideas, excited certain passions, and he dallied there into the evening.
The lights of Westminster Bridge were ample to read by; Bill Kraken had read in worse light. And the night sounds — the Thames rushing along beneath the bridge, hurrying toward the sea, the low murmur of conversation from the men who lounged against lampposts — all of it seemed to Kraken to mean something, taken collectively. Especially the river. There was a great deal of talk in Ashbless about rivers. He seemed particularly fond of them, and it was a restful chapter that didn’t call on the river to serve as an illustration for an abstraction which, without the tea-dark, swirling waters of the Thames to color it, would have been a lifeless and pale reflection of the world.
