James Blaylock - Homunculus

Kraken shut his eyes, but through the lids he could see the dancing shadows animated by gaslight. He pressed his eyes with his hands, but the horrors that swirled into view against the back of his eyelids were worse than the thing on the table. What had Paracelsus said about such emanations? He couldn’t quite recall. Paracelsus was mist in his memory, a product of another age, an age that had ended when he’d stolen the damned emerald from the Captain, the emerald that the smug Narbondo had left so casually beside the aquarium.

On the edge of the slab, as if they had crawled there of their own power, were two skeletal hands, obviously fallen from the hunched corpse behind them. Kraken avoided looking at them. He had been certain an hour earlier that for an instant the things had moved, rattled their fingers atop the table, inched inexorably toward him, and that the ruined pea hen had sighed on its plate, rustling among cold potatoes.

But all had fallen silent. It was the wind through the broken panes, carrying on it the sharp, sooty odor of fog. There lay the hands, almost grasping the edge of the lamplit table, ready, perhaps, to lunge at him. Why in the devil weren’t they attached to the corpse? What unholy thing did their separation betoken?

Kraken peered at them, and was certain for one rigid moment that the index finger of the left hand twitched. Beckoning. He glanced away toward the fogbound window and gasped in horror at his own reflection, hovering in the glass, staring in at him. He edged farther into his corner. If the hands crept from the slab would they shatter when they hit the floor? Or would they fall into shadow, pausing for a moment before scuttling out like crabs toward his feet? Kraken was suddenly fearfully cold. Narbondo, perhaps, wouldn’t return at all. Perhaps they’d gone out, knowing that Kraken would die in horror during the night, that the thing in the shroud would rush at him like a sheet hauled along a clothesline, would envelop him in dust and rot and clacking bones and suffocate him in horror.

On the wall behind him hung a collection of instruments, but there was nothing with which to defend himself against animated corpses. His eyes settled on a pair of elongated tongs, the jaws of which were wrapped in a rubber casing. He stood up slowly, barely breathing, understanding that the thing on the slab was watching, trying, perhaps, to fathom his fear, his intent.

He very slowly removed the tongs and stepped across toward the slab, wheezing with fear, waiting for the hands to fly at him like papery bugs, like leather-winged bats, to clutch at his throat, to reach into his mouth. At the touch of the tongs, surely they’d leap at him as if spring-driven. He knew they would.

But they didn’t. He plucked one of the hands up and very gingerly turned, took a step toward the open piano, and shoved the thing onto the silent keys, banging out a wild note with the edge of the tongs and leaping backward, a shriek lodged in his throat. The other hand lay as before. Or did it? Was it turned now? Had it crept about to face him? He clamped the tongs around it, whirled, and dumped it onto the piano keys along with its grisly counterpart, then slammed down the key cover, locking it with a little triangular brass key that lay atop the piano.

Could he bear to do the same with the thing’s head — yank it loose and hide it somewhere? Perhaps shove the top of the piano aside and toss it in? He forced himself to look at it, to imagine clamping the tongs against the ivory cheekbones and twisting the head until it snapped. The thought paralyzed him, but he had to do it. He steeled himself. He couldn’t be stared at any longer. He stepped toward it, reaching out with the tongs, slowly drawing the jaws apart. He daren’t get the tongs in the thing’s mouth; it would snap the steel rods like twigs.

The tongs inched closer. Kraken shook so that the loose rivet about which the tongs swiveled rattled like a locust. He gasped for breath. The horrible eye sockets seemed to stare through him — through his forehead beaded with cold sweat, a great salty drop of which rolled into his right eye, nearly blinding him. The tongs settled in against the cheekbones, and, with a thrum of settling bones, the thing on the table gave a quick lurch, as if shaking off the rubber clamp.

Kraken hooted in fear, dropped the tongs onto the top of the slab, and trod backward toward his corner, slamming into the game bird’s table with his right foot. The spindly table leg buckled, and the skeletal bird rolled from the plate in a little cascade of peas and fell to the floor. Kraken watched it in horror, half expecting the thin gray bones of the wings to vibrate and the bird to sail off like a great moth toward the flame of the gaslamp. The tongs banged down on the floor beside it.

This wouldn’t do. He couldn’t abide the idea of the bird out of sight on the floor behind the table. He must know its movements, if there were any. If it flew out of nowhere at him, he’d simply drop dead. He bent suddenly, summoning his strength. He grasped the tongs, plucked the bird from the floor, and tossed it, tongs and all, into a coal bucket on the hearth next to the piano. The bird whumped into the bucket in a cloud of coal dust; the tongs banged against the wall and dropped onto the hearth tiles. Kraken whirled around at the sound of a sudden scuffling behind him, expecting to find himself confronted by the handless skeleton. But there it sat, unmoving. The scuffling issued from beyond the wall across the room. Something pawed at the wall, trying to get in at him. Kraken slumped backward toward his stool in the corner.

A panel in the oak wainscot slid abruptly open, and beyond it, tugging weirdly at a pair of shoes, was a bent Willis Pule. He backed into the room, grunting with effort, and Dr. Narbondo appeared behind him, holding up the opposite end of a corpse. Pule dropped it as soon as it was entirely past the wall, as if he were immensely tired. Narbondo kicked the corner of the panel, and it slid shut, cutting off the entrance to what looked to Kraken to be a dark, low hallway. Kraken shrank into his corner, wondering in horror at this new act of villainy, half relieved, however, that it wasn’t him that was being dragged down tunnels.

The panel had just slid shut when there came a fearful pounding at the conventional door. Pule swung it open, and there stood Shiloh the messiah with a look on his face that seemed to imply that he would brook no nonsense, that he’d come for his mother and there would be hell to pay, perhaps literally, if he wasn’t satisfied. Narbondo scowled back at him. “Where is Nell Owlesby?” he asked suddenly.

“She’s safe — safer by far with my flock than with you.”

“Half your flock is my flock,” said Narbondo, “and they’d as soon eat her as give her a tract. Get her.”

“Quite impossible, I assure you.” Shiloh stepped in and closed the door, frowning at the littered room and at Bill Kraken, who, it seemed, was at least as offensive to him as was the corpse on the floor. “I’ll keep my end of the bargain. You don’t need the woman for that. I know where the box is hidden, and have these ten years. If you do as I say, you’ll know too. It’s as simple as that. But you needn’t worry about the woman. She’s worth nothing to you beyond that single bit of knowledge. And that, as we both know, is worth an enormous amount, isn’t it?”

The old man slouched on a stool, obviously enjoying the advantage he held over Narbondo. He removed a snuffbox from his pocket, pinched out a frightful quantity, and inhaled hugely, surrounding his head in a momentary brown cloud. He sneezed voluminously six times in rapid, deflating succession until he was reduced to a bent, wheezing ruin, his face a mask of mixed pain and satisfaction. Dr. Narbondo shook his head in disgust. Shiloh groped for his pocket, replacing the snuffbox, and wiped his eyes with the hem of his robe. His wrinkled forehead alternately relaxed and contracted like an irritated slug, as if he were experiencing after-tremors of his recent snuff-inspired earthquake.