Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

“Rather that than a born sniveler, Boon.”

“Pipsqueak.”

“Beast.”

“Hog.”

Skimpole could only stand there and blink in bemusement at this remarkable exchange. Briefly, he toyed with the idea that these apparitions might be some by-product of his illness, phantasms conjured by his febrile mind as his body sped toward total shutdown.

Boon broke away from his argument and turned back to the albino. “Awfully sorry, sir,” he said. “You must think us the most fearful asses to stand here joshing like third-formers.”

“Jolly decent of you to call,” Hawker said, their spat seemingly forgotten as quickly as it had flared up. “Boon and me had been bored to tears on our hols and we’d been simply dying to bunk off for a bit of fun.”

“Why here?” Skimpole asked.

“We thought it apposite, sir,” Boon replied.

“ Apposite ,” Hawker mused. “Good word. Might write that down. Boon’s a veritable thesaurus, Mr. S., once he’s in the mood. Oh yes, he knows how many beans make five. Though I’ve never been so hot at study myself. Between the two of us, I’m rather a prize dunce. Boon here rags me raw about it.”

Skimpole tried to steer the most bizarre conversation of his life back toward some semblance of normality. “I meant to ask about the book-” he began.

“Confused you, did it, sir?”

“Baboozled, were we? All of a fluster?”

Skimpole struggled to understand. “It’s blank, apart from the page which had this address on it.”

“Devilish tricky thing, that book,” Hawker said, with faux gravitas.

Boon agreed. “Can’t let it out of your sight, sir. Heaven knows what mischief it gets up to when we’re not around.”

“I don’t understand,” Skimpole said weakly.

“All you needed was an address,” Boon said. “We got your telegram and hey presto, here we are. In this day and age there’s no need for anything more complicated.”

Hawker brought out a bright, green apple, rubbed it against the lapel of his blazer and took a big, crunchy bite. “Course, in other times and places it might have looked different. Might have been stuffed with funny symbols and sigils and squiggles and suchlike.”

“Or rows and rows of numbers,” Boon added helpfully.

“Do you always…” Skimpole whispered. “Do you always look like this?”

“I’ve always looked like this, haven’t I, Boon?”

“More’s the pity. You’re the ugliest man in the first fifteen.”

“Bosh, tiffle and pish.” Hawker punched Boon playfully on his shoulder and the little man reciprocated in kind.

“Please,” Skimpole said, “we haven’t much time.” He coughed again.

“Nasty cough you’ve got there, sir.”

“Hacking, sir. Positively grisly, if I might say so.”

“You ought to get that looked at, sir. Go along to Matron and let her take a gander. Might get a chit for games.”

“Please,” Skimpole muttered.

“Quite right, sir,” Boon said.

“Awfully sorry. Just horsing around,” Hawker added.

“We might seem like a couple of young scamps to you,” Boon insisted, “but believe me, ask us to run an errand and we’ll do it better than any other boy in school. They didn’t make us Prefects for nothing. Spill the beans, Mr. Skimpole. We’re dying to know — what can we do for you?”

Before Skimpole replied there was a pause in which he considered for the very last time the possibility of taking another path, making a different choice, a quieter, more mellow death. But he ignored the screaming of his conscience and pressed on. “There are men I want… removed,” he said. “I need you to murder them for me.”

Thomas Cribb opened his eyes.

By virtue of his curious existence, memory must have worked rather differently for him than it does for the rest of us. Presumably he was able to remember what was about to happen to him rather than what had already taken place. Assuming, of course, that you believe him.

Whatever the truth, when he opened his eyes and saw where he was, he had no idea how he had got there. “There,” as it happened, was completely unfamiliar to him. A gloomy room, dank and airless, its walls peeling, sweaty and blistered.

“Hello?” he said, not really expecting an answer. “Anyone there?”

Nothing happened. Feeling foolish, he fell silent.

Numbed by pain, cold and the journey, only now did it come to his attention that he was sitting upright, somehow stuck to a chair. Experimentally, he tried to move a leg.

No good, of course — he was bound tight. His hands, too, were trussed to the chairs arms, rope cutting hard into his wrists, sensation fading from his extremities. Evidently he was being held captive and, strangely, he wasn’t altogether surprised by the fact — in the course of his long, long existence he had made innumerable enemies. He had a sensation of weightlessness, a woozy, floating feeling as though he had been removed from his life and was staring down at it from some great distance.

He heard a thundering rumble, painfully loud and coming from somewhere nearby. A train? He couldn’t be sure.

Suddenly he was aware of another presence. A match flared before him in the gloom, a lamp was lit and he saw exposed at last the grim dimensions of his cell. He wasn’t altogether certain he didn’t prefer it in the dark.

A woman’s face, familiar but maddeningly nameless, swam in front of him. “Mr. Cribb,” it said. “Welcome to the Summer Kingdom.”

He managed a defiant kind of mumble. “What do you want?”

“We want to help you,” she said in a singsong voice. “We want to show you Love.”

Cribb remembered. “You’re Charlotte Moon.”

The face gave a sweet, seraphic smile. “You must be mistaken,” she said, still in that same hypnotic tone. “My name is Love.”

It was then that Cribb heard himself scream. During that impossibly long night it was to be the first of many.

Hawker and Boon — known collectively as the Prefects — had long been objects of terror in the city: implacable, remorseless purveyors of death and destruction to anyone foolish or unwary enough to cross their path. Nobody had ever suffered their ire and survived. Even criminals — the worst, most brutal and perverted recidivists the city had to offer — all were scared to death of those two men. The smallest rumor of a sighting set the underworld quivering as one.

I should add that their notoriety was far from being restricted to London. Baba Abu, the infamous Bombay assassin of the last century, was said on one occasion to have vomited copiously at his dinner table at the mere mention of their names.

It was two living legends, then, with whom Mr. Skimpole found himself confronted in the playground of Gammage’s School for Boys. By right, their appearance ought to have been comical — the albino should have had great difficulty keeping a straight face — and yet the emotion evoked upon encountering these curious men-children was not laughter but its polar opposite. There was something horribly, indescribably wrong about the pair of them. They seemed to exist a little outside reality, hovering an inch or two above the real world.

Hawker chortled in agreement. “Topping.”

During their long and highly successful career, the Prefects had encountered men and women who had seen fit to laugh at their speech patterns, to mock the unmistakable patois of the playground, their trademark idiolect. Needless to say, few of these would-be satirists were ever able to laugh again. Dribble, yes. A thin moan, perhaps. Blink their eyes once for yes and twice for no, without a doubt. But laugh? Never.

Mr. Skimpole did not feel like cracking so much as a smile. His clothes were soaked with sweat, those parts of his body which were covered in lesions wept and itched abominably. “Please,” he said. “I’m in deadly earnest. I need you to kill two men.”