was being passed through her body. Throughout these contortions Moon and the Somnambulist were careful to keep tight hold of her hands. When she spoke again, it was in the singsong tones of a child. “Papa?” she breathed. “Papa, is that you?”
Mr. and Mrs. Salisbury sobbed as one. The latter was content to leak her tears discreetly but her husband, half-laughing, half-crying, all but screamed: “Yes, my boy. Yes, it’s me!” There was something pitiable in the sight — bald, bullet-headed, with the look about him of a retired headmaster, the kind of man who’d gleefully have thrashed a classroom’s worth of boys before breakfast — weeping and gnashing his teeth, womanish in his hysteria.
Madame Innocenti giggled childishly. “Papa,” she squealed. “I’m happy here. The spirits have been so kind. So very kind. It’s warm, Papa, soft and warm and filled with furry animals and little woolen things.”
The Salisbury’s eyes shone with tears. Moon stifled a yawn.
“Grandmama is with me,” Innocenti went on. “Grandpapa, too. Every day is Christmas and everything is wonderful. I am floating, Papa, floating in amber and honey. I love you. I love you. But I have to go now. Please. Please, join me soon.”
The voice stopped. Innocenti slumped forward and when she spoke again it was in her Corcoran persona. “Forgive me,” she said briskly. “We lost contact. Who’s next?”
Moon caught the Somnambulist’s eye and they exchanged skeptical smiles.
I’m almost certainly dead by now and your identity matters to me not a whit. But whoever you are, I imagine you to be at best a cynic, at worst a genuine, honest-to-goodness misanthrope. None but the terminally cynical, after all, could have maintained your interest in such a parade of thieves, crooks, fantasists and liars as fill the pages of the present work. Consequently, I doubt anyone with what I take to be your pessimistic view of life has a great deal of time for the table-rapping, ectoplasmic nonsense of mediumship and seance. Am I correct? I thought as much.
Moon, of course, who had a strongly misanthropic streak only occasionally tempered by acts of charity, would certainly have agreed. Before Mr. Skimpole had destroyed his home and livelihood, he had made his living by gulling people into believing the impossible. Madame Innocenti, it appeared, did rather the same thing, only a good deal more lucratively and (if the albino’s claims of the frequency of the Directorate visits to Tooting were to be believed) with rather more influence.
If nothing else she was a first-rate performer. Her assumption of different voices — Corcoran the fusty Spaniard, the babyish tones of the infant Salisbury, her own beguiling appearance out of character — all were masterfully played and she possessed the ability (honed no doubt by years of end-of-the-pier mummery and mysticism) to tell her listeners precisely what they wanted to hear, to confirm in a few short lines of nebulous, comforting twaddle all they had ever dreamt and hoped was true.
After the Salisburys had spoken to their son, Corcoran presented Mrs. Erskine with the shade of her husband (lost at sea these past twenty years) and Miss Dolly Creed with the thin, pedantic voice of her late fiance. Moon wondered what kind of man would consent to marriage with such a troglodyte and concluded that he must have arranged his own death in order to escape the altar. Trying enough, he thought, to be saddled with such a horse- faced creature in life — worse still to have one’s carefree gamboling through the fields of Elysium interrupted by the same.
When Ellis Lister’s turn came, however, he asked to speak not — as had all the others before him — to a dead relative, an old lover or a former pet, but to Corcoran himself.
“Mr. Lister?” Innocenti spoke in the Spaniard’s dusty voice. “We have met before, I think.”
“We have indeed, senor. I’m flattered you remember me.”
“From the Service, yes?”
Lister smiled tightly. “Not something I like to advertise.”
“Of course not. I myself dabbled in the intrigues of the secret world. I remember its etiquette too well.”
Moon realized that he had started to forget Madame Innocenti’s skill as a mimic and was beginning to accept her Corcoran voice as a separate and autonomous persona. He told himself in the sternest terms not to be so ridiculous.
“How may I be of assistance?”
“I need a name. We suspect a young man in our employ has been turned by foreign powers.”
Madame Innocenti nodded sagely. “Okhrana?”
Lister was swift to shush her. “We are not alone.”
“Indeed not.”
“Can you tell me who it is?”
“Give me their names.”
Obviously embarrassed, Lister gave the medium the Christian names of his five chief suspects.
Innocenti listened and fell silent. “Your man,” she said at last, “is…” And with the slightly disdainful air of a local dignitary pulling the winning ticket from a tombola at the church fete, she repeated the third of the names. “He’s been compromised for months.”
“I’m in your debt, Senor Corcoran.”
“Treat him mercifully. He is young and callow and not entirely to blame.” She sighed. “I’m tired. But there is one here who has yet to speak. Mr. Moon? Is there somebody with whom you wish yet to converse? A loved one, perhaps? A parent or a sweetheart passed beyond the veil?”
The Somnambulist was visibly shocked when Moon answered: “Yes.”
“The name?” Madame Innocenti asked.
“His real name is not known to me, but when he was alive he called himself the Human Fly.”
A sharp pause, then: “There is one here who identifies himself as such. I must warn you, sir, that the Fly is not at peace. He is angry, an unquiet spirit.”
“Nonetheless, I wish to speak with him.”
A shadow passed across Madame Innocenti’s face. “As you wish.” She squealed, her head jerked upwards and she squirmed in her chair as if in the grip of some invisible force. All at once her face crumpled and contorted itself as she transformed before their eyes into a slavering monster, the beast of Tooting Bec. To the shock of the assembled faithful, all traces of her former eloquence vanished and Madame Innocenti actually
“Hello,” said Moon with a nonchalance he did not entirely feel. “Remember me?”
“Moon,” the medium muttered, her voice rattling and guttural. “Moon.”
“How did you know my name?”
“Part of the pattern.”
“Pattern? What pattern?”
“Did it easy. Enjoyed it. Like squashing a pea. A shove and a push and they tumbled into air. Easy. Easy.”
Very little was capable of surprising Edward Moon, but Innocenti’s performance seemed to stop him short. Slack-jawed and ashen-faced, he asked: “Who are you?”
“Prophet,” Madame Innocenti gurgled. “Baptist. Lay straight the ways.”
Moon recovered his composure. “Tell me more.”
Innocenti grinned. In the semi-darkness it seemed as though her mouth was filled with far too many teeth. “Got a warning.”
“A warning? For me?”
“Ten days till the trap is sprung. Till London burns and city falls.”
Moon leant forward. “Explain.”
A long pause. Then: “Fuck.” Madame Innocenti seemed to relish the word, swilling it around her mouth as though she were savoring the first sip of an unfeasibly expensive wine.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Fuck.” Innocenti was being quite deliberate. “Fuck. Piss. Cunt.” She spat out that last word with particular delight.
The Salisburys were appalled. Dolly Creed merely bemused, while Mr. Lister tried his best to suppress a
