a mere fragment had survived and only the half-word “LIGHTE” was still visible.
A group of men had formed a line to pass buckets of water to and fro from the disaster site but their valiant efforts were in vain. The theatre was lost, and as the flames began to spread, licking greedily at the adjoining buildings, they were forced to transfer their attention elsewhere.
A man was standing beside Moon in the crowd. “Pity, isn’t it?” He grimaced, displaying more gaps in his mouth than teeth. “Saw the show there once. Bored to tears, I was.”
“How did this happen?”
“Why you asking? You local?”
Moon pushed him aside and ran toward the theatre. Hammered by waves of heat, stung by smoke, eyes streaming, he staggered helplessly back.
“Grossmith!” he shouted. “Speight!”
Even against the roar and crackle of the flames he recognized a horribly familiar sound, one so hateful to him that he would have given anything not to hear it at that moment — a discreet, dry, ticklish cough.
“Mr. Moon?”
He spun around.
“Good evening to you,” said Skimpole.
The conjuror snarled, “What have you done?”
“Drastic measures. I did warn you.” Flames reflected in the lenses of his pince-nez, lending his eyes an infernal aspect. Moon lunged forward but the albino stepped nimbly aside. “Your temper does you no credit,” he chided. “Your friends are quite safe. They were removed before the fire was set. The monkey, I’m afraid, refused to leave. No doubt he’s fricasseed quite nicely by now.”
“You admit to it?” Moon asked furiously. “This was
“I told you we were desperate. By rights you should be flattered.”
Moon was speechless, choked by rage. “You’ve gone too far,” he managed at last.
Skimpole flashed a quick smile. “I did think that might be your reaction. So I brought this.” The albino produced a bulky manila file from his briefcase. “Take a look.”
Moon snatched the thing from Skimpole and riffled through it. As he realized its full significance, even he was momentarily at a loss for words. “How long have you had this?”
“We’ve kept a dossier on you for years,” Skimpole said coolly. “Of course, I’d hoped never to have to use it — but then you can’t say we didn’t ask nicely.”
“You wouldn’t use this, surely?”
“I might. The Puggsley material is here, of course. But some of the other items… Even the release of my records on our mutual friend in Newgate would mean your public ruin and disgrace.”
Moon cursed, loudly and at length. This is not the place to reproduce such colorful material verbatim.
“I’ll ask you a final time,” said Skimpole. “Will you help me?”
The fire was reaching its zenith, throwing out furnace waves in its final rush to consume the last flammable matter. Moon staggered under the blast, dizzy and faint, flailing about to regain his balance.
“Mr. Moon?” The albino was insistent. “Will you help us?”
Feebly, the conjuror nodded.
Skimpole smiled. “Very good,” he said briskly. “We’ll be in touch.” And he strutted away into the crowd. Left alone, gasping for breath as the Theatre of Marvels died before him, Moon tried to run in pursuit of his tormentor only to stumble and fall. Strong arms helped him up, and as Moon staggered to his feet, he looked into the eyes of the Somnambulist.
“We’ve lost,” he muttered.
The giant looked gravely back, surveying the ruins of his home. Remarkably, a few tears ran down his cheeks. Behind him, Merryweather emerged from the crowd with Mrs. Grossmith and Speight.
Moon gripped the Somnambulist’s arm. “Barabbas was right,” he gasped. “It’s over. We’ve lost. Checkmate.”
Then, for the first time in his life, Edward Moon fainted — swooning into the arms of the Somnambulist.
Grossmith, Speight and the inspector ran toward them. “Mr. Moon!”
Speight still had his perennial sandwich board with him, its cryptic message now the theatre’s sole survivor:
SURELY I AM COMING SOON
REVELATION 22:20
The events of the evening seemed to have roused him into a semblance of sobriety. “Christ,” he said, gazing at the devastation. “What will we do now?”
Chapter 10
Beneath the city, far below the streets and pavements of the everyday, the old man dreams.
Cocooned in the underworld, time is lost to him and he has no notion of the span of his slumbers: years may have passed in the world above or he might have dozed for mere hours.
There is little logic and no pattern discernible to the dreams of this subterranean Rip Van Winkle. At times he thinks he dreams of the past, at others of what seem to him to be shadows of the future. Occasionally he is shown things that appear unrelated to any experience of his own — fragments, shards of memory from other people’s lives.
A thin, reedy snore escapes him; he sighs, rolls over and returns to the past.
He is back during his last years at Highgate. The vision is so vivid and so real he can catch the very scent of his old room, the close, murky stinks of sweat, snuff, dirty linen, stale farts. Gillman is there, fussing about him as usual, medicine bottle in one hand, slop-pot in the other. Another figure, too, dwarfish, silhouetted against the window, his face in shadow. The old man strains to remember, but before he is able to identify the stranger, the scene ebbs away to reveal another, much earlier time. He is young again, in Syracuse — his wife, heavy with child, long since abandoned to the uncertain mercies of family and friends back home. He chances upon an excavation, stands and watches for long, dusty hours, enraptured as men tease and extricate from the earth the headless statue of the Landolina Venus — a thing of beauty returned from dust to the waking world. He sees sand and mud brushed away from the delicate traceries of the madonna’s marbled bust, sees the decapitated, variegated stump where her head once stood — with a face, it was said, of achingly exquisite beauty. Mute, he watches this perfect being, this stone Olympian, raised to the surface.
With an infuriating disregard for chronology, the dream shifts and he is old again, back in that malodorous room, Gillman buzzing about him with medicine and pot, the dwarf at the window still obscured by shadow. Despite the prosaicism of the scene, the dreamer feels sure that this is some flashpoint in his life, some pivotal moment whose true significance has yet to be revealed to him.
The stranger turns, steps into the light and begins to speak.
The old man groans softly and stirs in his sleep. Above him the city roars giddily upwards, oblivious to the threat which slumbers beneath it.
Nine and a half miles away, Prisoner W578 received a visitor.
“Master?”
Barabbas waddled to the bars of his cell. “Have you brought it?”
“It’s here, sir.” Meyrick Owsley’s plump, stubby fingers darted between the bars of the cell to push a small purple box into the hands of its inmate. Barabbas grabbed the thing with all the gluttonous excitement of a spoilt child and disappeared into the corner of his dungeon. Owsley caught a momentary glimmer, a glint of something shiny, metallic and expensive. Barabbas snapped the box shut and added it to his meager store of treasures, bundled up in an oily rag and hidden beneath a loose slab of masonry.
“Another glimpse,” he hissed, quivering with fleshy excitement, “another flicker of beauty.” He wrapped the item up, pushed it back into the wall, then dumped himself onto the floor, exhausted from his brief exertions, his body wracked by long, suety shudders.
