Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

Moon persisted. “Can I make an appointment?”

“Of course, sir.” With a crisp flourish, the man produced a sheet of foolscap. “If sir would be so kind as to complete this form… I should add that no one will be available to see you until next Wednesday at the earliest.” He leant forward as if about to confide some great secret. “This is our busiest time of the year.”

Moon was beginning to sound agitated. “I need to see her today. Her name is Charlotte Moon.”

“I’m terribly sorry, sir. We’ve no one here of that name.”

“I know she works here, man. Don’t be obstructive.”

“I assure you, sir, I have never heard the name before in my life and I am intimately acquainted with all nine hundred and ninety-eight of my colleagues. Beside, as you may be aware, here at Love, Love, Love and Love we have dispensed with the cumbersome necessity of surnames. Here we all share the same glorious appellation. I myself am Love two hundred and forty-five. Though I permit my closest intimates to call me 245.”

“My sister is Love nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

The receptionist smiled. “Sir must be mistaken. Love nine hundred and ninety-nine is a writer of sentimental dramas for the stage, formerly known as “Squib’ Wilson.”

“Were you born this aggravating or did you learn it here?”

“I like to think a little of both.”

“Where’s my sister? I’m quite prepared to beat it out of you.”

Love 245 looked pained. “There’s no need for sir to lower himself to threats. I have only to call for attention and a dozen of my colleagues will leap to my aid. You’ll be charged and prosecuted for trespass and threatening an employee. Consequently, we’ll be quite within our legal rights to take punitive action. The last man who asked the wrong questions at my desk spent nine months in a mental hospital. Even now he’s convinced his mother’s Labrador plots to kill him.”

“I wish to see my sister.”

“Sir must be mistaken. Sir’s sister is not here.”

“Is she downstairs, is that it? In those catacombs you’ve got down there?”

The receptionist looked at the Somnambulist. “Is your friend quite well?”

The giant glared back.

“One hesitates to suggest such a thing, of course, but one has to ask — has sir been drinking?”

With an enormous effort of will, Moon swallowed his rage and turned back toward the door. “I shall return,” he called out as he walked away. “I swear I’ll uncover what’s going on here.”

“Goodbye, sir. So sorry I wasn’t able to be more helpful.”

As Moon and the Somnambulist reached the exit, a man walked in from the street, shoving past them in his haste to reach reception. Shiny and smart, a briefcase clutched in one hand, he resembled a black beetle forced 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 is you.”

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.