Jonathan Barnes - The Somnambulist

“Why does it have to be like this?”

Behind us, the old man murmured, “About, about. In reel and rout the death-fires danced at night. The water, like a witch’s oils, burnt green and blue and white.”

“Do you recognize it?” I asked, something of the proud father in my manner. “It’s his own work.”

Moon turned on me. “Do you think he approves? Do you think he’s flattered by what you’ve done?”

“Ask him,” I said simply.

Moon tugged the Chairman away from the parapet, pulled him roughly across to me and pushed his face into mine. I recoiled from the old man’s rank, electric halitosis.

“This thing is not alive,” said Moon. “It’s a corpse, barely animated by your perverted science.”

“He’s still just a child at present. He’s confused.”

Moon forced the old man to look down at the carnage and sneered: “Tell me, sir. Do you approve? Is this a fitting tribute?”

The dreamer gazed glassily, perplexedly at the street. “The many men, so beautiful. And they all dead did lie. And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I.”

“All this,” Moon persisted, “is being done for you.”

For the first time the old man seemed to notice us, to show some real awareness of his surroundings. It was as though he had finally woken up. “For me?” he murmured. “Me?”

Teary-eyed, I flung myself at his feet. “Yes!” I sobbed. “All this for you. For Pantisocracy.”

“Consider well,” Moon said. “Everything that is unfolding beneath us, all this suffering and agony, is being done in your name.”

“The Chairman shook his head. “No, no,” he muttered. “No, no, no. Not like this.”

“Please, sir. You have the power. Stop this.”

The old man seemed to grow in stature before us, becoming taller and broader as though at the mercy of some invisible rack.

“Chairman!” I cried.

He looked at me as if I were a stranger. “I am not your Chairman.” Enraged by Moon’s words, his anger seemed to revitalize him. “No,” he shouted (really shouted, too, not the senile mutterings he had managed till then). “This is not my fault.”

“But it is,” Moon whispered, like Claudius pouring poison into the ear of a better man. “This will be blamed on you.”

And it was then that something extraordinary happened. Given that the day hadn’t been exactly routine so far, you’ll understand that I do not use the word lightly.

The Chairman roared with fury, and as his anger grew, a change began to manifest itself in his body, a fresh transfiguration. Gangrenous streaks of green appeared on his face and hands as though all of his veins were suddenly visible to us, pulsing not with the healthy ruby of life but with something hideous, diseased and dying, his face lit up with phosphorescence.

Edward Moon looked at me in horror. “What have you done?”

I admit that I was surprised by this development. The amniotic fluid which had revivified the old man must have had some special properties I had not forseen. Nowadays, I find myself unable to recall its precise constituents. Perhaps it is for the best — I would not wish for anyone else to repeat these vile experiments.

When I had dug the old man from the ground, his left hand had been severely damaged and I felt I had no choice but to amputate, attaching in its place a hand which had once belonged to one of his closest friends and colleagues, Robert Southey.

But now I noticed that my stitching was coming undone and that the hand had begun to dangle like a child’s mitten from the stump of the old man’s wrist. One by one the stitches popped out and I saw oozing slime where blood and cartilage should have been.

It was around this time that I first began to worry that things were no longer going according to plan.

Since the old man’s rage seemed fueled as much by pain as anger, I became concerned that other stitching may have undone itself on the old man’s person. Sick of the sight of the fighting below, he left the parapet and windmilled his way toward Moon. Unwisely, the conjuror attempted to block his path, the gesture as fruitless as trying to halt a speeding locomotive by standing in its way.

“Wait,” he said. “Please.”

With a single swipe of his good right hand, the Chairman battered Moon aside, displaying far more strength than ought to have been possible. Like a boxer woozy from the fight but determined to beat the bell, Moon stumbled to his feet only for the old man to hit him again, a flicker of green playing across his hand as he did so. This time Moon crumpled to the ground and lay still.

Clearly the amniotic fluid had given the old man far more than mere life, and I considered myself fortunate that it was a comparatively mild-mannered poet whom I had succeeded in resurrecting. Even now I shudder to think of the consequences had I gifted such weird power upon, say, Lord Byron or mad Blake or that oikish fraud Chatterton.

Moon was down, unconscious or worse, and the old man marched away, disappearing back into the Monument, heading toward the streets, imbued with awesome power and purpose. Leaving Moon for dead, I saw no choice but to follow, my dreams in tatters around me.

I moved down through the spiral heart of the building, eldritch light emanating from the Chairman as he descended below me, casting strange green shadows on the walls.

At least, I think that is what I saw. I fear I may not have been in my perfect mind.

What happened next was a series of horrible coincidences.

You needn’t worry yourself about Moon (as if you care). He was merely unconscious. Having betrayed me once that day, then goaded the Chairman into madness, a knock on the head was the very least he deserved. Personally, I should like to have seen him eviscerated.

We’ll leave him lying there for the time being, lost to the world. He’s done enough for now.

At around the time that the Chairman had begun to display the earliest signs of his disintegration, Mr. Maurice Trotman re-enters our story. He had run through the streets for more than an hour, his umbrella clutched fearfully in one hand, his heart clenching and unclenching itself frantically inside him. His supply of courage had been used up, had leaked from him during his long flight like air from a punctured tyre.

It was his bad luck that when he made his escape from the Prefects he ran toward the center of the city, into what he hoped might be the sanctuary of the business district. It was his bad luck that the day he chose to make such a flight was also the day that we at Love finally showed our hand. But it wall of our bad luck that he brought the Prefects with him.

Trotman finally came to a halt halfway down Cannon Street. As he struggled through crowds of flustered clerks and maddened bankers he wondered whether he might not inadvertently have stumbled into a nightmare. People were fighting around him, brawling and scrapping and — good God — was that a body in the street? Like Cyril Honeyman before the end, he toyed with the idea that the events of the morning might have been nothing more than an unusually vivid dream. He wondered, too, if the hysterical warnings of the Directorate could have had some truth in them after all and, for the first time in a life otherwise unimpeded by any color or interest, even considered the possibility that he might be going mad.

Whimpering, his dressing-gown gaping open, he hunkered down onto the pavement, curling up into a fetal ball. He hoped that if he crouched there long enough, he might be ignored and neglected by the mob. No such luck, of course.

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. Refusing to turn around, hoping to deny the inevitable, he squeezed shut his eyes and hugged himself tighter.