James Blaylock - Homunculus

The hunchback had been tearing his hair since the old man had left with Nell Owlesby. Narbondo was mad to suppose they could do anything with the corpse on the slab — even madder to trust Shiloh to keep his end of the bargain. The evangelist would sell them out. And his power was accumulating. Pule could see a half-dozen of his converts passing out tracts in the market, most of which were immediately put to use wrapping fish. None of the supplicants appeared to be Narbondo’s animated dead men. Even the farthest-fetched, vilest sort of religious cult could develop a sort of fallacious legitimacy through numbers.

Pule wondered whether his prospects wouldn’t be better if he were to throw in with Shiloh, if he were to become a convert. He could do it surreptitiously — keep a hand in with Narbondo — play the one against the other. He stared into his coffee, deaf to the whistles, cries, and shouts of the basket-laden throng around him.

The loss of sleep would play hell with his complexion. He fingered a lump on his cheek. With all the powers of ages of alchemical study at hand, he couldn’t seem to prevent these damned boils and pimples. Camphor baths had nearly suffocated him. Hot towels soaked in rum, vinegar, and — he shuddered to recall it — urine, had merely activated the boils, and it had taken two solid months before he could go abroad without supposing that everyone on the street was whispering and gesturing at his expense. And they probably were, the scum. He rubbed idly at his nose, sniffing at his coffee, the acrid fumes of which just barely disguised the seaweed odors of whelk and oysters and gutted fish — odors that lay like an omnipresent shroud over the market. The smell of fish, of dead, out-of-water fish, sickened him.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up darkly into the face of an earnest youth in a cap and neckerchief. A tract fluttered in his hand. “Excuse me,” said the youth, smiling vacantly. “A wonderful morning, this.” And he looked about him as if he were surrounded by evidence of it. Pule regarded his face with loathing. “I’m here to offer you salvation,” said the youth. “It’s easy to come by, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” responded Pule truthfully.

“It is, though. It’s in the sunrise, in the river, in the bounty of the sea.” And he waved his hand theatrically at a heap of squid laid out on a sledge below. He smiled all the while at the disheveled Pule, who absentmindedly rubbed a rising blemish on the tip of his nose. The youth, apparently satisfied with the squid illustration, rubbed his own nose, although there was no profit in it. “I’m a member of the New Church,” said he, thrusting forth his tracts. “The New Church that won’t have a chance to get old.”

Pule blinked at him.

“Do you know why?”

“No,” said Pule, rubbing at his nose once more.

As if powered by magnetism, the young man was after his own nose again, thinking, perhaps, that something clung to the side of it, a speck that eluded his previous rubbing. Pule noted his behavior and felt his face grow hot. Was the fool having him on? Pule clenched his teeth. “What the hell do you want with me?” he cried.

The violence of Pule’s epithet seemed almost to catapult the youth backward. He recovered, pulled the slack out of himself, and smiled all the more widely. “The end is near,” he announced, grinning. The idea of Armageddon seemed to appeal to him. “You’ve days to save your immortal soul. The New Church, I tell you, is the way. He, Shiloh, the New Messiah, is the way! He raiseth people from the grave! He redeemeth the dead! He…”

But Pule interrupted. “So you’re saying I should become a convert to save myself? Conversion by extortion is it?”

The youth gazed at him, his smile broader, if anything. “I say,” said he, having another innocent go at his nose, “that he who was born of no man can lift you out of misery, can…” and with this, the youth put his hand on Pule’s forehead, as if to heal his soul there and then, in the midst of tramping men carrying baskets of shark heads and eels. The touch of a human hand on the ravaged forehead electrified Pule, but in a way other than had been intended.

Pule screamed an oath, dropped his cup and with both hands tore the tracts from the youth and flung them in a heap to the stones of the embankment. “Filthy… blathering… scum!” shrieked Pule, dancing on the tracts, scuffling and tearing at them with the soles of his shoes. He bent, grabbed a handful, and flung them over the railing, the wind sailing them merrily away like penny whirligigs. Pule cut another half-dozen capers, his eyes like saucers, his mouth twisted in rage. The youth, his smile gone with his vanishing tracts, edged backward a step at a time, until, certain that Pule was too far away to leap on him, he cut and ran toward the embankment stairs, cries of “Scum-sucking pig!” and “Damnable filth!” lending him wings. Pule grasped at the railing, oblivious to the stares of passersby, who gave him a wide berth, anxious not to set him off. He had called attention to himself, to his livid face. They would speak to each other, nudge each other, twigging him. He stared into his retrieved cup, chest heaving, until he saw, beneath his feet, a last tattered tract, smeared with gravel and rainwater footprints. He picked the thing up. On it, sketched rudely by someone whose understanding of perspective was nonsense, was an elongated dirigible, sailing among the clouds. And above it, streaming across a progressively darkening sky, a flaming comet, strangely phallic, arched in toward the flat earth. “The time is at hand!” shouted the caption below the illustration. But what time it was that was at hand wasn’t at all clear, lost as it was in the unfortunate footprint. Pule folded the tract and shoved it into the pocket of his coat, then stepped away down the stairs into the interior of the market, the wooden rambling barn packed with shouting vendors and so thick with fish that it seemed impossible that the oceans hadn’t been stripped clean.

A woman strung with codfish pushed past, smearing Pule with bloody slime. Directly after came a fat man leering up out of Oyster Street with a basket full of gray shells, shouting so vociferously in Pule’s face that for a moment the world seemed to him nothing but a great nose, an open mouth, and a shower of spittle. Pule shrank back in disgust. Fish vendors pushed in on him from all sides. Octopi the size of bumboats seemed to be hovering over him, grasping at him with warty tentacles. Baskets of eels appeared, pushed along on a cart, wriggling out over the sides of their prison only to be ignominiously shoved back in and buried beneath a ballast of cabbage leaves.

Pule gagged. It was close as a tanyard. He’d faint if he didn’t have air. “Carp! Carp! Carp!” came a sudden cry. “Who’ll have these ha-a-an-some carp! All alive! Alive O! Prime carp! Carp o’ the gods!” Pule steered toward the voice, groping for his purse. He wouldn’t haggle. This was no time for haggling. He’d have his carp and away. He stumbled, slipped on the carcass of a fish trod to slime by a hundred shoes. In front of him was a plank piled with enormous reddish shrimp, like impossible bugs, their eyes staring on stalks from out of brittle carapaces, huge feelers waving like antennae. Pule rocked against a wagon of squid, nearly upsetting it. “’Ere now!” came a cry, and he was shoved along. There were the carp — seven of them, submerged in a trough of water.

“Fresh as any daisy!” cried the vendor, noting Pule’s evident interest.

“How much?”

“Two pounds buys the lot.”

Pule produced the money and waved it blindly at the man, who snatched it away and winked at a seller of dried herring beside him. “Want them all, then?”