Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

I like to think that a small portion of him really did believe, that despite his cynical play-acting, some fragment of decency recognized the truth. Naive, I know. Naive and too trusting. But that’s the kind of chap I am. The cynical perfidy of a man like Moon could never come easily to me.

I left the Chairman still sleeping and ordered the detective to be escorted to the surface (Donald McDonald and Elsie Bayliss, a one-armed former charlady, did the honors). We shook hands warmly before we parted.

“Fourteen days?” he asked, apparently still effusive, supercharged with belief.

“Two weeks. You have my word.”

He thanked me and strode away. The Somnambulist watched him go, his silent eyes betraying the barest scintilla of fear. “Don’t worry,” I said, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “You’ll see the truth before long.”

We walked back to the Chairman of the Board. Despite his sleeping state I hoped that he was aware of my presence, that he understood who I was and thanked me for it. Sometimes I even dared to hope he loved me. I spoke softly into the glass. “Fourteen days. Then you shall walk through the Summer Kingdom.”

A brisk tap on the door. “Reverend Doctor.”

I turned to face a vision in chiffon and lace. “Charlotte.”

She managed a thin smile. “Call me Love.”

“Of course,” I said, slightly embarrassed.

“I’m concerned.” She spoke in that enchanting singsong voice of hers — the kind of voice, I mused, which might in earlier times have led mariners to their deaths, lured generations of sailors onto the rocks. “My brother. Have you let him go?”

“He’s one of us now. Love one thousand has returned to the surface to spread the good news.”

Charlotte seemed impatient. “He was feigning. He’s lied to you.”

“What?”

“I know my brother. He hasn’t gone back to spread the word. He’ll have the police down here, the army. They’ll wipe us out. You’ve humiliated him and he’ll want revenge.”

“I’m sure he’s genuine,” I insisted, though I could feel the fault lines already widening in my belief. “He was changed.”

“Nonsense,” Charlotte said briskly. “He’ll betray you. You’ve not sent out a Baptist but a new Judas.” It was an interesting side effect, I noticed, that those faithful who had encountered the Chairman seemed in the wake of the experience to become far wordier and more verbose.

“You’re sure?”

“Indubitably.”

For a moment I was lost. “What do we do?”

“Bring the plan forward. Forget the fourteen days. Do it now.”

“We’re not ready.”

“You’ve been planning this for years. Of course we’re ready. In fact, I’ve already dispatched a crew to stop the trains.”

“Without my permission?”

“Forgive me. I thought it best. Time is short. The Underground trains that shan’t trouble us today.” She glanced at my companion. “There’s something else. The Somnambulist. My brother will come back for him. He may prove useful as… leverage.”

It took twenty men to restrain the Somnambulist once he realized what we were planning, but eventually we succeeded in herding the giant into the main hall, forcing him onto the ground and staking him down. He was practically invulnerable, of course, and we knew that ropes and chains alone would not bind him. In the end it was Mr. Speight who came up with the solution.

We skewered the Somnambulist twenty-four times over; passed two dozen swords through his body, pressing them deep into the floor below. Stoically, without making a sound, he withstood these multiple lacerations and I wondered again precisely what he was, what nature of being could withstand such torture without shedding the merest drop of blood. As I watched, I found myself reminded of Gulliver staked out on the beach by the Lilliputians, of Galileo’s portrait of man, perverted, pinioned, reduced to the status of a lepidopterist’s specimen.

Love gathered about the giant, curious and not a little afraid. I called them to order — all nine hundred and ninety-nine of them, the infantry of the Summer Kingdom, my troops of Pantisocracy. I knew these might be the most important words I would ever speak, the culmination of a decade’s dreaming.

I began by apologizing. “I confess,” I cried, “that I have been misled — betrayed by a man I thought had become one of us. And because of my short-sightedness he has gone to warn our enemies. Thank the Chairman, then, for Love nine hundred and ninety-nine, who opened my eyes before it was too late.” A gratifying cheer at this.

“But something wonderful has come even out of treachery. Our plans have changed. Pantisocracy begins today. The Summer Kingdom is upon us sooner than we dared to hope.” More whoops and cheers. “Go forth,” I said, my voice rising to a crescendo. “Reclaim the city, eradicate the symbols of impurity and evil. Wreak havoc — but a pure and holy havoc. Use the sword — but sparingly, not as a weapon but as a surgeon’s tool to remove sickness and disease, for we walk amidst a new Eden. I have faith in you.” I looked down at almost a thousand lonely faces, the detritus, the dispossessed of our society, and I felt a great surge of power and affection.

“I love you all,” I said, before adding mischievously: “God be with you.”

And with a great roar they ran from the hall, through the tunnels and out onto the streets, antibodies ready to do battle with the city’s cancer.

Alone, I walked back to the Chairman of the Board and observed him silently through the glass of his womb until the excitement became too much to bear.

Then I finally did it. I pulled the red lever.

A shower of sparks flew from the machinery, firecracking across the room. The sphere filled with bubbles and a terrible light shone out from its innards, so piercingly bright that not mere stars but whole galaxies seemed to dance before my eyes.

The old man’s head jerked upward, his body shuddered and flailed and his hands reached out to claw the inner surface of the sphere. I could hardly credit it that I should be there to see such a sight, akin to witnessing the first birth, Eve’s bewildering heaving and writhing as Cain crawled forth from her womb.

The old man’s face was mere inches from my own when his eyes flicked open, and it seemed that when he saw me, he smiled.

The dreamer had awoken.

Overwhelmed with joy, I unscrewed the portholes of the sphere. Waves of fluid crashed about me and I screamed in triumph as the old man lurched forward. I caught him before he fell and he leant against me, struggling for breath. I clapped him hard on the back, he coughed, then breathed in great lungfuls of air. He said nothing but only gurgled and hissed like a leaky pair of bellows, spumes of liquid dribbling from his mouth as I held him in a tight embrace.

Moon would not defeat me. I had transformed failure into triumph. The dreamer had awoken, the Chairman walked amongst us and Love was loose at last upon the streets of London.

Maurice Trotman was eating breakfast when destiny came knocking at his door. Mr. Trotman, you will recall, was the man from the Ministry, the Civil Servant who had succeeded, where so many others before him had failed, in closing down the Directorate. He was a precise, punctilious man, typical of his breed — those passionless, blank-faced automata who tirelessly maintain the grim machinery of state. His ambitions were limited, his vistas modest and he saw life prosaically, as a ladder, a career, a comfortingly regular sequence of promotions and preferments.

He was midway through a poached egg when he heard a determined rap at his front door. Still a bachelor, despite his half-hearted wooing of a colleague’s daughter, he had no servants and lived and ate alone. Consequently, still clad in his fawn-colored dressing gown, it was Maurice himself who opened the door onto death.