Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

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. “ If .” He groaned. “In the past few days I’ve seen things I know shouldn’t be true, things against the order of the world. Things that have no place in a rational universe.”

“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 Punch , jaundiced WANTED posters and creaking, leather-bound encyclopediae. “Now, now,” she chided. “You know I have to be discreet.”

“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 all concern Mr. Cribb?”

“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 desperation.

When Moon returned home the Somnambulist sat waiting for him. Rows of empty glasses stained with milky residue snaked their way along his table, the detritus of a long and lonely evening.

Even more than Moon, the giant had been damaged by the destruction of the theatre — the ancien regime had passed away, but under Skimpole’s new republic Moon was at least given mysteries to unravel, missions to fulfill, the ongoing puzzle of the Honeyman business to divert him, whilst the Somnambulist had sunk into what might in any other man have seemed a profound melancholia. Communication between them had always been fragmentary at best, conducted via sign, gesture and the staccato correspondence of the chalkboard, but Moon had begun to suspect that the giant missed the performances — his nightly dose of spot-lit approbation — far more than he would ever admit.

He risked a pallid smile and the Somnambulist nodded sullenly back.

“I saw Speight yesterday. He seemed well. By which I mean, of course, not exactly well . But much as he always was.”

The giant shrugged theatrically.

“I’ve spent the day in the Stacks. Uncovered a good deal on Madame Innocenti.”

The giant shot him a reproachful look, sulky, like a child refusing to eat his greens. Moon pressed on regardless. “It would appear she’s not been entirely truthful with us. Her real name is Ann Bagshaw. Before she became a prophet she used to be a seamstress — had a little shop by the Oval.”

The Somnambulist scribbled something on his board and Moon, relieved at last to be getting some response, leant forward to read it:

SEE HER AGAIN