nervous laugh.
“Mr. Moon!” It was Innocenti’s husband. “This has gone too far.”
‘Shit,” his wife said conversationally. “Cunty cunt cunt.”
“Break the circle. Let go.”
The party quickly disentangled hands and Madame Innocenti sat bolt upright, a fat gob of saliva dripping from her mouth unchecked. The Salisburys stumbled to their feet and Mrs. Erskine jabbed her forefinger angrily at Moon. “You’re a liability,” she said. “Someone ought to lock you up.”
Innocenti opened her eyes and beamed. “I’m back,” she said in her normal voice, wiping away the spittle which still hung in thick, ropy tendrils from her lips.
Everyone stared at her, astonished.
“I hope I didn’t do anything to embarrass myself,” she said mildly.
They had barely risen the following morning when the albino came to call.
“Anything?”
Moon glared. “I’m not your lackey.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
Slightly chastened, Moon gave his report as Skimpole drummed his slender fingers impatiently on the tabletop, evidently troubled by the news.
“Ten days,” he said thoughtfully, once Moon had finished. “You think she’s genuine?”
The conjuror spoke carefully. “If you’d asked me that yesterday afternoon, I would have said absolutely not. My instinct was that she was a charlatan like the rest of them.”
“But now?”
The Somnambulist scribbled something down.
FLY
Skimpole was irritated by the interruption. “What does he mean?”
Moon confessed. “I asked to speak to the spirit of the Human Fly.”
“And did you?”
Moon blanched. “Yes,” he admitted. “I think perhaps I did.”
Skimpole instructed them to return to Tooting Bec at their earliest opportunity, muttered a muted kind of thanks for their services to the Crown and shuffled to the door. Just as he was about to leave, he turned back. “By the way — there’s a surprise for you in reception.”
Moon and the Somnambulist walked to the ground floor where they found an old friend waiting. She squealed delightedly on their approach. “Mr. Moon!”
Even the conjuror allowed himself a small smile at seeing her again. “Hello, Mrs. Grossmith.”
The Somnambulist, however, showed no restraint at all and he and the housekeeper fell immediately into a tight embrace.
“Skimpole found me,” Grossmith explained, once they had disentangled themselves. “I’m to work for you here now.”
“I see.”
“Aren’t you pleased?”
“I have much to concern me at present.”
Someone coughed. A stranger stood half a dozen paces behind her, an untidy, gangling man some years her senior. Bulbous-nosed and endowed with disproportionately large ears, he had the appearance of an oversized toby jug. He shambled forward, tripped over one of his shoelaces and sprawled onto the floor. Picking himself up, he dusted himself down and asked, in a soft, nervous voice: “Well, Mrs. G. When are you going to introduce us?”
Mrs. Grossmith blushed. “Sorry,” she said, uncharacteristically girlish. “This is Arthur Barge. My landlord. And now… A giggle escaped her and she spoke more shrilly than she had intended — “my special friend.”
A long, awkward silence. Moon eyed the man with disdain and shook his hand half-heartedly.
Arthur Barge shuffled his feet, embarrassed. Mercifully, they were disturbed by the arrival of the hotel’s concierge.
“Mr. Moon?” the man asked, discreet and subservient as ever. “You’ve another visitor. He’s most insistent, I’m afraid.”
“Who?”
Before he could reply, a curious figure strutted into the room. He began to speak almost at once, his words tripping over one another in their haste to be heard. “I hope I haven’t called at a bad time. I’d hate to think I was interrupting a reunion. Still, considering what’s happened, you’re all looking very well.” He stuck out his hand. “Edward. Good to see you again. Care for a stroll?”
It was Thomas Cribb.
Chapter 11
Beneath the city, the old man dreams.
A phrase surfaces from the ether and forms itself in his mind.
“All poets go to hell.”
A strange sentence but one he is certain he has heard somewhere before. Or read, perhaps. Even written it himself.
He dreams that he is back again in his bedroom at Highgate. Dr. Gillman is there, and someone else, a dwarfish figure who hangs back amongst the shadows that crouch malevolently at the edges of the room. Then the stranger steps into the light — the dark figure reveals itself — and the dreamer laughs with relief: it is a small boy not more than ten years old. He recognizes him now. The child has a name and in the dream it swims determinedly toward him. Ned. But the boy’s surname proves elusive and the dream shifts again.
He is on a beach, shoeless, wriggling his toes in the sand, feeling it rear up around his feet and work its way into the crevices of his skin. The wind catches playfully at him, flapping his coat like a cape, and almost succeeds in tipping the hat from his head. He watches an elderly woman stand at the edge of a wooden platform which has been wheeled out into the surf. She totters arthritically down to the shallows, squealing in matronly delight as the cold water touches her for the first time. The old man laughs and suddenly Ned is with him, his hot little hand clasped in his, and he laughs, too, though neither of them is quite sure why. Ned grips his hand tighter and they walk on.
The years roll back but the scene remains the same. The dreamer is on the beach again but now no longer old. The boy has disappeared (doubtless yet to be born) and instead, another man is by his side, someone the dreamer feels certain is important, significant to so many lives beyond his own. They are paddling together, breeches rolled up above their knees, shoes abandoned on the shore and guarded by an anxious entourage. The water laps hungrily at their calves and the dreamer grins at his companion. Suddenly the truth of it hits him. The Prime Minister. Could it be? Too fanciful, her decides, and shifts uncomfortably in his sleep. Could it be that he once paddled with the PM in the sea at Ramsgate?
Probably not. Dreams lie.
The Highgate room again. Gillman and the boy. As usual the old man is talking, rambling incoherently on through another protracted anecdote. “All poets go to hell,” he says, and the child listens intently, but Gillman seems bored — he’s heard it all before, and more than once. Even in his own dreams the old man is aware of his reputation for garrulity.
Then he remembers. “All poets go to hell.” Something said that to him once. Something less than human, not quite alive, its voice papery and insidious like wind through dry leaves.
And then he is young again, still a student, along in his lodgings with this thing that has promised — for a price — to tell him certain secrets. “All poets go to hell,” it says, its eyes like burning coals, and maddeningly, the old man knows that this is all it will ever say, repeating ad nauseum and infinitum this same perplexing phrase.
