upright and dressed by Savile Row. Every inch the Love employee — but not, as it happened, a stranger.
Moon shouted his name. “Speight!”
The man turned back to reveal a face no longer unkempt but clean-shaven, even handsome, the grime of the doorstep wiped away. He stared at the conjuror and the giant as though they were a couple of acquaintances he hadn’t seen for years, their faces faintly familiar but their names impossible to recall. “Can I help you?”
“I shouldn’t trouble yourself, sir,” muttered the receptionist.
“No trouble.”
“Speight!” Moon cried again. “It
The man walked back toward them. “Mr Moon, isn’t it? And the Somnambulist.”
“Surely you remember us.”
“I’d rather you call me nine hundred and three,” Speight said flatly.
“I prefer Speight.”
“Then we have an impasse.”
The Somnambulist scribbled on his board.
WHY YOU HERE
“I’m working,” the man said tersely. “This is a busy time for the corporation.”
“So I’m told. But what I don’t understand is why.”
“Good day, gentlemen. Pleasant though it is to stand here and chatter, I’m afraid I am required elsewhere.”
“Tell me what you’re planning.”
“Be careful,” he hissed, his blank face momentarily replaced by something approximating the Speight of old. “A great tide is about to break upon the city. Stand aside, sir. Or be drowned.” And with this, the ex-tramp strode away, vanishing into the depths of the building.
Moon walked out into the street, utterly bemused by what had just taken place.
WHAT NOW
“Back to Ned. There are questions I need answered. After that… You’ve no objection to breaking the law, I take it?”
The Somnambulist shook his head.
“Well, then. Tonight we break into Love.”
Something had changed when they arrived back at Ned Love’s hermitage. Everything seemed the same — the windows were still boarded up, the place tightly sealed, locked and barred — but with one notable exception: the front door gaped wide open.
“I suppose he might have gone out,” Moon said doubtfully.
The Somnambulist shot him a cynical look and pushed past into the house. If there was to be danger, the giant always insisted on being the first to face it.
The place seemed undisturbed at first, but as they moved back along the corridor, Moon felt a growing conviction that something was not as it ought to be.
Consequently, neither man was surprised when they found the body.
Poor Ned Love, an empty whisky bottle in his hand, lay slumped against the wall, crooked, ugly and unnatural in death. Moon thought he heard movement when he entered the room. It was only later he realized that this almost certainly denoted the scurrying departure of those rats and other vermin which had come already to nibble on the corpse.
“Mr. Love?” Moon crouched down beside the body. “Ned?” For tradition’s sake he checked the body’s pulse.
DEAD
“Afraid so.”
FROTTLED
Moon tried hard not to sound impressed. “How can you tell?”
The Somnambulist gestured toward the pinkish marks at the man’s throat, fading but still visible.
“Wouldn’t have been difficult given the amount he’d drunk. Evidently he said too much.”
LOVE
“I’d put money on it.”
Leaving poor Ned where he lay, they strode back out into the open air. “This is it,” said Moon once they were outside, perversely sounding almost cheerful. “Time for the end-game.”
Beneath the city, the old man dreams, turning uncomfortably on his steel cot, drifting out of sleep and into a strange half-wakefulness, an unhappy hallucinatory consciousness. Faintly, he becomes aware of movement around him, of faces glimpsed through the murk of sleep, lips forming his name, eyes watching. Often he feels that he is being scrutinized and observed and that the manner of those who watch him is weirdly reverential — pilgrims at the foot of his bed come like the Magi to pay homage and to worship.
As before, his dreams are filled with the boy Ned, with glimpses from his past, but now they seem to darken, showing him old mistakes come back to him in evil new shapes. Old hopes, too, the paradise of Pantisocracy turned sulphurous and rank. He sees a feverish mob of Pantisocrats careering through the streets, eager for blood, slaughtering all who stand in their path. And others with them, strange, incongruous figures, monsters in the skin of schoolboys who turn upon the dreamers and rip them to shreds. A world he barely recognizes congealing into bloodshed.
Pity the dreamer! If only he had known what was unraveling above him. If only he had known what Mr. Skimpole was about to set into motion, of the serpent who had entwined himself around poor Grossmith, of the dark path down which Moon and the Somnambulist were traveling. Had he but known the scope of what awaited him, I have little doubt but that he would have remained safely underground, away from the corruption of the surface. He would have stayed asleep. He would have stayed, blissfully, in Love.
Chapter 17
A little over an hour after the death of Ned Love, two advertisements appeared in the personal columns of the
The first read:
INFORMATION WANTED
SUBSTANTIAL REWARD
Apply in person to Mr. M.
There then followed the address of a celebrated city hotel which, for obvious reasons, I have elected to censor.
The second, far shorter and enigmatic entry ready simply:
LUD
Come at once. Much at stake.
Regrettably, the man for whom this last, cryptic message was intended never had an opportunity to read it. At the time of its publication he was being detained against his will in a manner he had entirely failed to predict.
Cribb had been walking alone, his head full of a jumble of ill-considered thoughts and half-digested
