trickling down her beard.
She left Goodge Street and was some way toward Tottenham Court Road when she saw the smoke, stopped and thought of going back. Her loyalty was about to win out over her instinct for self-preservation when a gang of men rolled rowdily out of a nearby tavern and began to point at her and laugh. Her decision made for her, she did her best to ignore their derision and hurried onwards in the hope of finding some sanctuary in the city. As she walked she felt a cold, implacable certainty that, whilst the pale man was even now returning home, Mrs. Puggsley had never left her chair and sat there still, the flames licking about her feet, toying with her hungrily, her great fat frame shuddering and sweltering in anticipation of the inevitable roast.
Moon woke three hours after he had lost consciousness, stumbled to his feet and vomited copiously in the basin. He washed the worst of it away and as the yellowed water spiraled down the plughole it seemed to mock him, chuckling quietly. He sank back onto his bed and surrendered himself to the pain, the interior of his skull assailed by battering rams, limbs rubbery like blancmange, mouth Sahara dry.
When he opened his eyes again, the physical pain had subsided but the tempest in his head was worse than ever. All at once the events of the past few months seemed to round upon him, jeering and ridiculing, crowding out his thoughts. He looked at the spotless, soulless luxury of his bedroom and under the influence of an ineluctable compulsion began — quite deliberately and with clinical precision — to smash it all up.
Mr. Skimpole arrived an hour later, perspiring, ill-tempered and smelling faintly of smoke. He was greeted at reception by the hotel’s manager and by the man he had assigned to watch Moon. What they had to tell him did not raise his spirits.
He knocked at Moon’s door but, predictably, got no reply. He tried again (still no answer), then gestured to his man to break it down. Ignoring the shrill protestations of the manager, the fellow did so in a single attempt.
“Mr. Moon?” Skimpole called out irritably. “Please come out. I’m not in an especially patient mood.”
Moon emerged, not entirely without guilt, from the bathroom.
The suite was almost unrecognizable — glass strewn indiscriminately about the floor, lamps smashed, curtains gouged and torn, paintings brutalized and defaced, the carpet pulled from its fitting and thrown against the wall like a great wave lapping at the corners of the room.
Skimpole’s tone was careful and even but masked a controlled fury. “What have you done?”
“You’re holding me against my will.”
Skimpole sighed. “We’re on the same side. I acted as I did only because you left me with no other choice. Most of us would kill to live in this kind of luxury. You should see my house. This is a palace by comparison.”
“It’s a prison.”
The albino looked exasperated. “I know you had a difficult time of it yesterday. Clearly you’ve had some kind of falling-out with your new friend. Mr…. Cribb, is it?” Skimpole turned to his man to check the name. “Well, then. I’ll have this room cleaned up and we’ll say no more about it. Surely you want to solve this case as much as any of us?”
“One condition: get rid of that ghoul.” Moon pointed toward Skimpole’s man. “I can’t abide being followed everywhere. It’s not even as though he’s very good at it.”
“Very well. But that’s my only concession. You must stop acting like this, Edward. All I ask is for you to solve this one problem and then you can go back to your old life. If Madame Innocenti is correct we have just eight days left.”
Moon collapsed into the room’s only surviving chair. “If she is correct,” he muttered. “
“May I offer some advice?” Skimpole said gently. “You should do as I do whenever I’m confronted by the weird, by the uncanny, by the unexplained.”
“What’s that?”
“My job.”
Skimpole turned to leave and, as he did so, the Somnambulist appeared behind him in the doorway. Seeing Moon and the carnage which surrounded him, the giant shook his head sadly, pushed past the albino and moved slowly away down the corridor. Moon did not even try to stop him.
When he finally emerged from his bedroom, the events of the past few hours were already receding happily into the past. His encounter with Cribb had the unconvincing quality of fiction about it, like something that had happened to someone else entirely. He washed, shaved, combed back his thinning hair and started gratefully for the Stacks.
The Archivist, at least, seemed pleased to see him. “Heard you’d been recruited,” she said, once Moon had been ushered down into the basement by another nameless librarian. “Government work, is it? Mr. Skimpole’s boys?”
Moon had learnt years before not to be surprised by the Archivist’s apparent omniscience, but even he could not help but be startled by the coolly authoritative manner with which she delivered the specifics of his predicament.
“Yes, ma’am. Do you…” He hesitated.
“Yes?” The woman’s sightless eyes seemed to swivel curiously in his direction.
“Do you know Mr. Skimpole, ma’am? Does he… come here?”
The Archivist turned away and began to search a shelf stacked high with moldering copies of
“What you mean by that, I suppose, is ‘yes’?”
“I can’t prevent you from drawing your own conclusions.”
“No,” Moon said pensively. “You can’t.”
“What are you looking for today?”
“Anything you have on a Madame Innocenti. Clairvoyant in Tooting Bec.”
The Archivist said nothing, disappeared and returned shortly after with two slim volumes. “This is all I have. Seems she’s fallen foul of the law once or twice before.”
Moon thanked her and took them. “Archivist?”
“Yes?”
He paused uncertainly. “Have you ever heard of a man named Thomas Cribb?”
There was no reply. Moon had convinced himself that she had not heard him and was about to repeat his query when the Archivist spoke again, an unfamiliar, quavering tenor to her voice. “One moment. I may have something for you.”
When she returned she was pushing a trolley piled high with records, reports, ledgers, dossiers and sheaves of what looked like nineteenth-century newsprint. She wheezed her way toward him, gripping his shoulder with surprising force to steady herself. Half a dozen pamphlets and a vast, dictionary-sized volume toppled from the trolley.
“What is this?”
“This?” The Archivist gasped for breath. “This is just the beginning. I’ve five times this amount waiting for you.”
“Surely this can’t
“I’m afraid so.”
Moon picked up some of the records and stifled a sneeze at the clouds of dust that mushroomed from the pile. “How far back do these go?”
The Archivist swallowed hard. “Over a century. Seems your friend has been with us longer than you thought.”
The silence that followed, tense and oppressive, was broken only when Moon lit a cigarette, fumbling desperately in his pockets for box and lighter like a man deprived of tobacco for days. He told me later that it was the only time the Archivist had ever asked to join him, her aged, knotted hands shaking with quiet, unspoken
