Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

Moon explained. “This is Charlotte.”

Miss Moon smiled as winningly as she was able. “I’m delighted to meet you.”

The Somnambulist frowned. He felt strangely as though he were in the midst of some elaborate practical joke and began to hope that his friend and the stranger would burst out laughing, slap him on the back and thank him for playing along. He sat patiently and waited for the punch line.

“Is he really a mute?” Charlotte asked, rather rudely.

“He’s never spoken to me. Nonetheless, it’s one of my fondest hopes that one day he shall. And I’ve little doubt that when he does he will astonish us all.”

She gave the Somnambulist a cursory glance and seemed unimpressed. “Not as handsome as his predecessor.”

“Believe me,” said Moon, sounding pained, “if you saw him now you would no longer call him that.”

“I suppose not.”

“The Somnambulist is a brilliant illusionist,” said Moon, doing his best not to sound patronizing. “Did you ever see the show?”

“Three times,” Charlotte said lightly. “Once as an old woman, once as a drunken Pole and once as a dwarf. That last was rather a challenge, I admit. It’s not joke taking three feet off your height for hours at a time.” She paused and chewed her lower lip awkwardly. “I’m sorry about what happened to the theatre.”

“Skimpole,” Moon said, as if that explained it all.

“He really doesn’t like you, does he?”

Moon looked away. “You never told me you were affiliated with the Committee.”

“You never told me what happened in Clapham. I had to read about it in the papers.”

“Must have slipped my mind.”

The silence was broken by the familiar tap of chalk on board. The Somnambulist had begun to feel left out.

DRINK

“Capital suggestion,” Moon exclaimed, in an abrupt and unexpected burst of jollity. “Charlotte?”

“Just a small one,” she said doubtfully. “Nothing too strong.”

But Moon was already out of earshot and racing hungrily over to the bar. As he gave his extensive, expensive order, he offered the bartender his sharkiest smile. “Make sure,” he grinned, “that you bill all this to Mr. Skimpole.”

Limehouse, unique amongst the districts of the city, does not belong to England. The curious smells which fill its streets are resolutely foreign in nature, its placards, signs and boardings are thick with hieroglyphics baffling to the uninitiated, and its people, whilst welcoming and well-mannered enough, are nonetheless alien and sallow-skinned to a man. If you’ve ever walked along its frantic, lurid streets, you will doubtless think of the place much as I do — as a piece of some exotic metropolis sliced from the Far East and set down wholesale amongst the boroughs of London, a vision of an impossible England where the Empire has fallen and the Orient is king.

Strange, then, to see Mr. Skimpole walk with such confidence and ease through those selfsame streets — his appearance quite as outre as ever, pince-nez perched upon his nose, his hair and skin bleached graveyard white. One might reasonably assume that he could not be more out of place amongst these multitudinous yellow faces, but they seemed happy to accept him as one of their own and he attracted no open curiosity, no inquisitive stares, no muffled laughter.

Less than half an hour after leaving the hotel, the albino reached his destination, coming to a halt outside a dilapidated butcher’s shop. It was the kind of place which looked as though it had existed for years without customers, its windows cobwebbed and soot-streaked from neglect, filthy with the greasy rime of oil and what appeared to be dried blood. A bird was roasting on a spit in the window, its featherless cadaver turning slowly in the light, browning and crisping for passers-by to gawp at. Skimpole could not be entirely certain what species of fowl it had been in life — a duck, perhaps, or a chicken, or some other, nameless bird unique to the peoples of the East — but as he watched the thing revolve plumply behind the glass he thought unwillingly of Mrs. Puggsley and felt a momentary flicker of guilt. Struggling with his conscience, kicking against the tug of the past, he thrust the image from his mind and stepped inside. As he pushed open the front door a bell rang and a young Chinaman materialized, greeting him with a bow and the words, “a pleasure to see you again, sir.”

“Good day,” Skimpole said imperiously. He had never bothered to learn the name of his host or that of the young man’s father, who had owned and run this place before him. The albino saw no reason to defy tradition at this late stage. Sins of the father and all that.

He strode through the shop. Slabs of meat, salted and of indeterminate origin, hung on hooks behind the counter; something old and sour bubbled and boiled in a pot and the smell of blood was all-pervasive. Skimpole ignored it, too familiar with the place to allow himself to be unsettled by its magic-lantern menace, its storybook smoke and mirrors. “Is he here?” he asked.

“He’s waiting,” the Chinaman said, unfailingly placid and respectful.

Skimpole noticed a fluffy down on the man’s upper lip. “Trying a mustache?” he asked sarcastically.

The Chinaman blushed.

“Good luck,” Skimpole smirked. “Incidentally, is that a chicken in the window?”

The proprietor looked confused.

“Chicken,” Skimpole repeated, becoming irritated at the man’s apparent lack of comprehension. “Chick-en.” Still entertaining the long-standing misapprehension that his host had only the most tenuous grasp of English, the albino did his best to mime the actions of a chicken, flapping his arms like a bird and squawking.

The man did not seem to react, so Skimpole took his leave of him and walked through a door at the back of the shop. Incongruously, there was an elevator behind it. A Chinaman squeezed into a tight red uniform stood inside. He hauled back the metal grille when he saw Skimpole approach. “Morning, sah.”

“Good morning.”

“Noughth Level?”

“Thank you, yes.”

The man operated the controls and, with a nauseating heave, the lift lurched downwards, eventually reaching its destination with a creak and shudder.

“Noughth Level,” the man said in a toneless, mechanical voice.

“Thank you,” Skimpole snapped. “I can see that.” He stepped out into a well-furnished room, smart, modern, dominated by a vast and ostentatious circular table. This, then, was the Directorate.

A bulky, broad-shouldered man strode forward to meet him, four or five Orientals standing deferentially behind him.

“Skimpole!” There was a warmth to his voice which suggested he was pleased to see him, but the albino knew it to be feigned for courtesy’s sake — suspected that it also masked a lifetime of disdain, even loathing.

Without thinking, he deployed a sleek, professional smile. “Dedlock.”

They shook hands. Skimpole’s palm was damp and sticky from his exertions and Dedlock was far from successful in masking his discomfort.

“Forgive me,” Skimpole said, taking off his coat and passing it without a glance to a hovering lackey. “I had business at the hotel.”

“Ah.” Dedlock’s eyes glittered with undisguised inquisitiveness. “Mr. Moon?”

“That’s right,” Skimpole replied stiffly.

“Sit down, old man, and tell me all about it.” His curiosity had dissipated and Dedlock sounded bluff and jolly again, like a retired colonel proposing nothing more vexatious than a post-prandial round of gin rummy.

They sat opposite one another at the round table, Dedlock busying himself rustling a sheaf of official-looking papers, Skimpole reaching for a cigar and lighter only to return them reluctantly to his pocket when he remembered that he had already enjoyed his little piece of luxury for the day.