James Blaylock - Homunculus

Pule struggled once again at the window — physical strength had never been his forte. He loathed it, in fact. It was beneath him. All of this intrigue was beneath him. Soon, though, when certain things were in his possession… He found himself teetering across the sill, flailing his legs to keep from tumbling back into the night. He tipped head foremost, finally, into the building. His coat caught on the hinge of the casement, yanking him sideways. Debris clattered from his pocket onto the stone floor, and he cursed as he saw dimly his half candle roll under the iron legs of an aquarium. Moments later he was on his hands and knees on the damp floor groping for it.

The air was heavy with the musty smell of aquaria and water weeds and the salt that crusted glass lids from the fine spray of aerating bubbles. Pule could hear the echoing drip of leaking tanks and the swish of bubbles on the otherwise still surface water. Thank God his matches hadn’t fallen into any puddles. He crouched behind a vast, rectangular stone monolith that supported a bank of dark aquaria, and he struck a match against the rough granite in a hiss of igniting sulphur. He lit the piece of candle, shoving it securely into a brass candlestick.

He peered out into the dark room, satisfied that he was alone, then rose and stepped across toward the opposite wall.

He’d strolled about that same room a half-dozen times in the last month, familiarizing himself with the islands of aquaria, with the position and nature of closets of nets and siphons and buckets and the great rubber bladders that fed air into the tanks. He found a broad, square net and a step stool, and hauled them both back to the center of the room. He waved his candle at a long, low tank, squinting through the glare off the glass, and watching the silver bulk of the great carp that lay barely moving among the rocks and weed.

Pule stepped to the top of the stool. He pulled the glass top from the tank, then climbed down and laid it carefully onto the floor. In a moment he was up again, dipping his net into the aquarium. He’d have to be quick. If the carp were given half a chance, they’d sail to the far end of the tank and hover there, and he’d have to move the stool to get at them. That wouldn’t do. He carefully yanked out clumps of weed, dropping them with a wet splat to the floor. There was no use tangling his net in them. It was a carp he wanted, not a mess of greenery. Through the dim water he could see one resting on the gravel, a mottled koi some foot and a half in length. That would suffice. Pule eased the net into the water, wiggled it to unfurl the corners, and with a sudden lunge, swept it down and over the tail of the sleeping fish, yanking it out of the water before it had a chance to awaken. He groped for its head, trying to hook a finger under a gill. Water splashed out of the aquarium, drowning the front of his coat.

The carp thrashed suddenly sideways, jerking away from Pule’s hand. He lunged at it and cradled the fish in his arms, feeling the step stool canting over as he did so, aware, suddenly, of a light being trimmed behind him and of the barking of a dog.

“Here now!” came a startled voice as Pule and the fish toppled over sideways into a mess of sodden waterweeds. Trailing anacharis and ambulia, Pule wrenched at his fish, slamming it against the stone monolith as he rolled against it. The dog growled and snatched at his pantleg. Pule yelled obscenities, ululating madly at the dog and his master, hoping that the watchman — an old man with a game leg — wouldn’t be quick to engage an obviously lunatic fish thief. More than that, he hoped that Narbondo would hear the ruckus and get his filthy cart under the window.

He kicked at the dog, clamped now to his pantleg, and managed only to drag it along behind him. Its master limped in, crouched and waving his arms, grappling after the dog as if worried only that Pule might make away with it as well as with the carp. Pule turned, thrusting the fish through the window — there was no way he’d clamber out holding it — and felt it snatched from his grasp. A spray and wind-driven rain stung his eyes as he boosted himself through, easily now, with the dog yammering behind him and the window sill some two feet lower now that he was inside the building rather than outside.

The distance to the ground, however, was greater than he’d calculated, and he found himself, after a wild, thrashing tumble, twisted in the mud between the stones of the building and the wheel of the dogcart. Narbondo cursed wildly, Pule cursed him back, and the watchman clutched his little dog, staring inertly at the two from beyond the open window. The hunchback whipped up the horses as Pule grabbed the sideboard and attempted to hoist himself in, kicking furiously to keep up with the horse and falling in a heap into the bed, face first into the carcass of the great fish.

He was tempted, as he lay gasping and panting, smearing scaly ooze from his cheek with a coat sleeve, to pummel Narbondo senseless with the carp, to pitch the hunchback off the front of the dogcart into the way of the galloping horse, to run across his twisted face with the ironclad cartwheels and leave him to die in the muck of the roadway. But his time would come.

Pule picked up the heavy fish and thrust it into a half keg splashing with water barely deep enough to submerge it. He swam it back and forth to revive it, but the thing was half crushed. The water, in seconds, was a mess of blood and scales.

“He’s done!” shouted Pule at the back of Narbondo’s bouncing head.

The hunchback shouted something, but his words were lost in the wind. The cart bumped and clattered and raced between the shadowy oaks, careering this way and that into potholes, nearly going over into a ditch, the mud flung up from the horse’s hooves spattering around Pule, who hung on with both hands now, satisfied to leave the fish to its own devices. With a suddenness that catapulted Pule into Narbondo’s back, the horse reared to a stop, and in an obscuring deluge of rain, the hunchback clambered over into the back of the cart, jerking his head at Pule.

“Take the bloody reins!” he gasped, throwing open his bag and reaching into it for a scalpel. He paused long enough to fetch Pule a shove that nearly pitched him out of the wagon, and in moments they were away again, Pule driving, the doctor laying the fish open with his blade, muttering under his breath some foul business that was swept behind them on the wind and rain and so lost entirely on Pule, who was filled with his own black thoughts of death and revenge.

There was no real reason to be fearful, quite likely. No one suspected her, yet she felt inclined toward darkness, toward venturing out at night. She prayed that the day would soon come that it would be otherwise. Captain Powers would see to it. She hurried along down Shaftesbury Street, hidden in her cloak through nearly empty streets, her umbrella slanted back to stop the wind and rain that drove in from the west. The weather was far too evil for anyone to be out and about, and the hour was late — long after midnight.

Her life of homeless wandering in the Indies, later for three years in South Carolina, and now, finally, in London — the home of her youth, but now the place in the world most laden with suspicion and fear — had been relieved by her having found a single, safe port, as it were, an island in a sea of tumult and remorse. Captain Powers was that island — a man whom nothing could unsettle, who with his peg leg could stride purposefully across heaving decks awash with seawater, could steer a course by the shadows of stars.

But what particularly suited her was the Captain’s obvious regard for curious, frivolous things. In the midst of his stony practicality was a litter of oddities — his ridiculous smoking leg, a monkey-tooth necklace he’d been given by a jungle explorer in exchange for two bottles of Scotch, a pipe that burned tobacco and emitted soap bubbles simultaneously, a collection of trifles purported to yield good luck and which he carried in his pocket. “I’ve got my luck in my pocket,” he’d say, displaying the collection to a stranger, holding in the palm of his hand a red and black bean from Peru, a red agate marble, a tiny ivory ape, and an Oriental coin with a hole drilled through it. He could tell a good deal about a man, he would say, by the nature of the man’s reaction. William Keeble and Langdon St. Ives had seen the value of it all straight off.