offer you a seat but as you can see…” He gestured lazily about him. “I’m a little embarrassed at present.” He pinched a meaty roll of belly fat between forefinger and thumb, then idly released it, watching with glassy fascination as it slopped back amongst the swathes of flesh swaddling his body.
“I see they let you keep your hair,” Moon said mildly.
“Owsley arranged it for me. A small indulgence. One of many. He brings me these little chinks of beauty, lays them before me as tributes. Like offerings to some savage god.”
“He seems to have the run of the place.”
“He’s a persuasive man. Also sickeningly wealthy. In a place like this, such things have influence.” Barabbas coughed painfully on the remnants of his cigarette. “Incidentally, I heard about Clapham.”
Moon flinched.
“Why are you here?” the fat man asked — pleased, it seemed, by Moon’s reaction.
“I need your advice.”
“A case?”
“Of course.”
“You’ve never visited me before.”
Moon looked away. “This… troubles me.”
Barabbas stubbed out the last of his cigarette and tossed the butt carelessly to the floor. “Give me another,” he said. “Then you may tell me everything.”
Moon reached into the inside pocket of his waistcoat, took out his cigarette case and passed it to the condemned man. “There,” he said. “Keep it.”
Barabbas seized it greedily. “Another piece of beauty,” he said. “A bauble for my collection.” He stared at it, then sighed. “You’ll take it back, of course, once I’m dead and gone?”
“Naturally.”
Fumbling, Barabbas prized a cigarette from the box. “Light,” he whispered. Moon struck a match and another flare briefly illuminated the cell, casting Barabbas’s monstrous form into stark relief. The prisoner cackled and sucked in a lungful of smoke. “Now go on,” he said, “my dear fellow.”
“We begin with Cyril Honeyman,” Moon said. “He was a gross, compliant little man, permanently sweaty, whose jowls flapped and quivered as he walked…”
The conjuror told him everything about the murders and his investigation, beginning with Merryweather’s summons and ending with the broken body of the Human Fly. When he had finished, Barabbas sighed. A smile crept halfway along his mouth but was swiftly banished, disappearing as quickly as it had arrived.
“Well?”
“You say he knew you?”
“By name,” Moon said stiffly. “And he mentioned a poet.”
“A poet. Is that so?”
“Why are you smiling? Does that suggest something to you?”
Barabbas gurgled. “It’s really too perfect, Edward. I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.”
“Damn it, man!”
Barabbas stifled a belch, only half-successfully. He leered at the conjuror through rows of yellow tombstone teeth, flanked by mustache and tangled beard. “You’re in danger of letting this become an obsession. I’ve never seen you so excited. You should calm down. Do something to relax.” A mucus cough. A grin. “How is Mrs. Puggsley, by the way?”
“You’re the last person to lecture me on morality.”
“Remember what I told you,” Barabbas confided, his voice dripping with honey, rising and falling with the silken cadences of the practiced liar. “I’m above morality now, beyond good and evil.”
“The case,” Moon insisted.
“You know, I don’t think these squalid homicides are the real mystery.”
“No?”
“I think they’re a symptom. There is a corrosive influence abroad, Edward. There is a plot against the city and these murders are only the tip of the iceberg.”
“What do you know?”
In response, Barabbas moved silently forward, his grotesque frame slithering across the floor like some Brobdingnagian slug. “Let me out, Edward. Help me escape and together we can discover the truth.”
Moon stepped hurriedly back, falling against the iron bars of the cage. Behind him, Owsley emerged from the shadows.
“Time’s up,” he said, producing a ring of keys from his pocket with an officious flourish.
Barabbas wailed and thrust out his hands in supplication. “Edward! Edward!”
The door was unlocked and Moon stepped sharply back out into the corridor.
Owsley said, “Your friends are waiting.”
Barabbas brought his face up to the bars and peered out into the darkness.
“Edward?”
Moon turned around.
“Will you come back?”
“Perhaps.”
“I hope I’ve been of some small assistance.”
Moon spoke carefully. “Maybe you have.”
“All the color has seeped from my life. Next time, bring me scarlet. Bring me violet and vermilion and gold.”
“I’ll come back,” Moon conceded.
Barabbas grinned in triumph. “Then you still need me,” he hissed. “Even now.” Overexcited, he suffered a violent fit of coughing. “Edward,” he said more gently, once the attack had passed. “Edward, if I were you I should go home.”
“Oh?”
“I should hurry, Edward.”
Something was needling at the back of his mind. “What do you mean?”
“Something terrible is happening,” Barabbas said simply. “Go now.” The prisoner’s face vanished from the bars of the cell and he disappeared back into the gloom.
Moon felt a sudden surge of panic. He turned to Owsley. “Let’s go,” he said, and they set off along the corridor almost at a run.
They were several streets away from Albion Square when they saw that Barabbas was right.
The sky was lit up by flashes of crimson. Thick black smoke poured past, as though a storm cloud had been dragged to earth. Seeing that some disaster lay ahead, the coachman refused to take them any further, so Moon leapt from the vehicle and ran on alone to the square. Despite the lateness of the hour, the whole of the East End seemed to be abroad and Moon had to battle through droves of idle onlookers to reach his destination. When he eventually emerged from the gawping masses he saw the truth of it. The Theatre of Marvels was aflame.
It was horribly clear that nothing could be saved. The blaze must have started shortly after they had left for the prison and now the building was burning down to its skeleton, its flesh and features long since scorched away. It’s windows were empty, blackened sockets, its door a melted heap of slag. Of the sign which had read:
THE THEATRE OF MARVELS
MR EDWARD MOON
THE SOMNAMBULIST
