Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

When I emerged from King William Street Station, the Chairman by my side, I saw a sight very few of us are ever privileged enough to witness — my dearest dreams given form, my hopes made real before me.

Fires had been lit and the sky was illuminated by bursts of scarlet, iridescent even against the watery light of the morning, an anarchist’s Guy Fawkes display. The foot soldiers of Love, the faithful of the Church of the Summer Kingdom, poured through the streets, dispensing justice wherever they could, reveling in their freedom, in the epochal change they were to induce upon the city.

The morning was frosty, our breath fogged up the air like smoke, and to my astonishment I saw that my companion’s exhalations appeared to be tinted a vivid green — a phenomenon I unwisely dismissed at the time as a trick of the light or mild hallucination, brought on by excitement and overwork. The old man looked blearily about him, bewildered by all the sound and fury. “Ned?” he asked hopefully.

“Yes,” I lied. “I’m here.”

“What’s happening?”

“Come with me. We need a better view.”

I took him by the hand and led him to the Monument, up its corkscrew staircase to the top. Lithe and gazelle-like, I scampered up the stairs, but I was often forced to a halt in order to let the old man recover himself. I all but carried him the final leg of the journey. Eventually we emerged into the open air, to witness a Monday morning unlike any other, unique amongst all the centuries of the city’s long life.

“Behold,” I cried (surely you can forgive me some grandiloquence under the circumstances), “the dawn of the Summer Kingdom.”

And from our eyrie, our Wren’s nest, we saw it all. Smoke rose up in mighty plumes. The sounds of war clashed about us and the air was filled with the screams of the dying. Dying? I’m afraid so. When opposing ideologies meet upon the battlefield, some bloodshed is inevitable. No doubt you think such a view harsh but there are people devoid of any potential for redemption. If the city were to be reclaimed I had no choice but to put them to the sword.

The working day had barely begun before it was abruptly and bloodily curtailed. The bankers, the brokers and the clerks, the businessmen, the dealers, the accountants and the moneylenders — all were dragged screaming from their rooms and offices. A few were spared, most were executed. I would like to assure you that their deaths were swift and painless, that they were treated with some measure of dignity at the end, but in truth I doubt that this was so. An orgy of cruelty unfolded below us, a frenzy of murder and bloody reprisal for generations of injustice as the destitute shareholders in Love, my cockney bacchants, reclaimed the streets at last.

As for the bankers and their kind — some of these unfortunates were beaten to death, some cut down by axes, picks and scythes. Others were thrown in the river to drown, and I saw at least one choke to death as members of my flock stuffed his mouth with bag after swollen bag of silver coins.

Of course, I anticipate your objections. But why should these men have been granted mercy when they showed none to their innumerable victims? They had abused the city for far too long. Their time was past, a new age was upon us, and around them London’s topography seemed to reconstitute itself in sympathy.

The great temples to avarice and greed were set alight. The banks were torched to the ground, the too-expensive restaurants and wine bars, the gentlemen’s barbershops and outfitters — all were impregnated with cleansing flame. The gold reserves in the Bank of England were looted and my people hurled their contents carelessly into the blackness of the Thames or threw them deep into the dank recesses of the sewers. One prominent city man was thrashed to death with a shiny ingot of the stuff. The air was thick with the stench of burning currency.

The old man’s voice was hoarse and weak; he gurgled as though he were speaking underwater, but still he managed to murmur a few lines of verse — not his own, alas, but words not entirely without relevance. “The king was in his counting-house, counting out his money. The queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey.”

I squeezed his hand, he squeezed mine (“Ned,” he murmured), and below us the terror raged on.

Moon struggled through the crowd, fending off attacks from the faithful, stepping where he had to over the bloodied corpses of the fallen. He never once stopped to help but strode onward, searching for a single person amid the melee. “Charlotte!” he shouted. “Charlotte!”

He found her eventually, standing demurely by as the chief executive of a large firm of stockbrokers had his arms torn from their sockets. Moon left the man to his fate and grabbed at his sister. “Charlotte. What are you doing?”

She gave him another of her wonderful smiles. “Hello, Edward.” She paused. “You ought not to have lied to us, you know.”

“What’s happened to you?”

“You don’t understand.”

“You’re right. I don’t.”

Behind them the broker gave a final, feeble moan before he expired in a spreading pool of crimson. Charlotte seemed enthused by the sight. “This is the start of something wonderful. A new age. A second chance.”

Moon pointed to the dead man. “There’ll be no second chance for him.”

“But there will be for you,” Charlotte insisted. “You can still be saved.”

Moon pushed her aside in disgust. “Where’s the Somnambulist?”

“Underground. We bound him.”

Moon was defiant. “You know I’ll rescue him.”

She shrugged. “You’re welcome to try. It scarcely matters now.”

“Where’s Tan?”

Charlotte pointed upwards to the Monument, at the pinnacle of which the Chairman and I stood silhouetted against the skyline, emperors of Pantisocracy. Moon left his sister and ran toward us, intent, it seemed, upon a further confrontation.

He emerged minutes later, wheezing, hissing, gasping for breath. He glared at me, fury blazing in his eyes.

“Edward!” I waved. “You’re just in time.” The Chairman and I peered over the parapet. “It seems the cavalry has arrived.”

Below us, help had come to the moneymen’s aid. Several dozen policemen led by the redoubtable Detective Inspector Merryweather and accompanied by a handful of the Directorate’s false Chinamen poured into the financial district.

Now, I saw ‘poured,’ though the description is not entirely an apt one. My men — the troops of Love, Love, Love and Love — now they ‘poured’ onto the streets. They were a great tide breaking at long last upon the city, a dam bursting, spilling open after years of miserable and unnatural confinement. But the police force, the men from the Directorate, they didn’t really ‘pour’ so much as seep and trickle into the fray, dripping over the cobblestones like water from a leaky tap.

But then Moon was complaining again, self-righteous all of a sudden. “Those men don’t stand a chance.”

“By my estimation they are outnumbered approximately ten to one,” I said mildly. “You’re right. They’ll be slaughtered.”

Below us a blue-coated policeman was dragged under a seething tide of Love. His screams carried up to us, 202 feet above ground. Moon was of course tiresomely sententious about the incident. “This blood is on your hands.”

“On the contrary. It was you who betrayed me.”

“I can’t stand by and let you inflict this atrocity upon the city.”

“This is a natural process,” I chided. “Is it not written that the sheep are to be separated from the goats? The meek, the weak, the despised and the forgotten — we’ve been suppressed too long. This is our revenge.”