James Blaylock - Homunculus

His stomach returned to its rightful position, the blood in his veins ceased its racing and settled in apace, and with a keen-minded deliberation, tempered by a vision of the collected, astonished visages of the Royal Academy when he swept in among them at prodigious speeds, and encouraged by the vast canvas of the deepening evening sky, St. Ives eased the lever forward with a subtle pressure from his right hand. He steadied the ship with his left, satisfied with the controlled response. He dipped suddenly, evened her out, and smiled, angling in an increasing rush toward the Dover Strait. The ship slanted upward through thinning atmosphere into the purple heavens. The sky above darkened, brimming suddenly with flickering emerald lamps through the tinted ports, as if he stared into a deep, stellar well, half full of dark water and reflected stars.

From Hampstead Heath, the lights of London winked and glittered in the darkness, an earthbound counterpoint to the stars amid which St. Ives raced in his borrowed ship miles and miles above. Theophilus Godall stood with Captain Powers and Hasbro, alternately watching the wash of lights and the heavens, the first for no practical reason save beauty, the latter for the appearance of the dark bulk of Birdlip’s blimp.

The village of Hampstead was choked with people, slogging in the mud of the streets, jamming the taverns, perching in trees. Pots of ale and cups of gin and rum were carried around by hustling children, who got no farther than a dozen feet from their doors before their wares were snatched away and consumed and a hundred voices called for more of the same. Half the populace of Greater London seemed to have found itself in the vicinity of Hampstead, although a good part of them got no farther than Hampstead Village or Camden Town before encamping, either having little interest in approaching blimps, or, more likely, having little idea what it was that approached, satisfied to be afoot on a warm evening in the carnival atmosphere.

Godall professed to Captain Powers that he hoped the ale and spirits would hold up. And just when he finished the sentence, a great crash sounded from across the green on which they stood, and a low building collapsed in a heap of flying debris. Screams and moaning erupted from a score of people who had moments before been perched atop it and had been singing a tumultuous hymn. A band of robed faithful, two of whom supported a worn but animated Shiloh between them, hurried toward the wrecked shack, pitching handfuls of tracts to the enthusiastic crowds they passed along the way.

The Royal Academy clustered within the confines of a roped-off rectangle on the green onto which had been arranged lawn chairs. The perimeter of the rectangle was threatened roundabout by the pressing multitude. Parsons, a powdered wig canted across the top of his head, shouted over a sheaf of foolscap at his fellows, but his words were one with the general melee, and not a scientist among them had his eyes on anything but the stars.

Godall was faintly surprised to see the evangelist. There seemed to be no end to the perspicacity of a zealot. The old man appeared, however, to be deflated, to have had the wind taken out of his sails. In the glass cube, still clutched under his arm, lay the head of Joanna Southcote, mute now and toppled over onto its side. It was hard to imagine that the evangelist would cause them trouble. It was the blimp he was interested in. When it landed, then they’d have to look sharp. But he’d hardly risk attacking them outright, despite the affront of being manhandled by Godall hours earlier.

Kelso Drake, though, was a different proposition. He’d ridden up minutes after the arrival of the Captain’s wagon, then had vanished immediately — an ominous thing, all in all. Godall would far sooner keep him in sight. It was impossible to say whose ghouls lurched about the Heath, Shiloh’s or Drake’s — quite conceivably both. Kraken was crouched in the upper limbs of a particularly tall alder fifty meters away, a whistle in his teeth. He was on the watch, especially, for the man in the chimney pipe hat. The Keebles were ensconced in the wagon, neither Jack nor Dorothy being in condition to venture out among the multitude. Dorothy, however, was coming round, the haste of their retreat from Wardour Street having chased off some of the effects of the drugs. William Keeble looked about furtively, his right hand on the pistol in his coat, utterly certain that Drake would attempt to repay him for the pummeling in the hallway. Wrapped in a shawl beneath his feet lay the notorious Marseilles Pinkle.

Once, as the wagon had banged and rattled up the hill from Hampstead, they’d rounded a corner, pressing through a mob of trudging merrymakers, and among them, a broad-brimmed hat yanked across his eyes, Willis Pule had bent along slowly. He had glanced up, as if to join the bulk of the mob in cursing the wagon, and his eyes might as well have been pinwheels. If ever Keeble had seen a madman, Pule was it, and no mistake. His face was awash with a deadly, green pallor, as if his head were a pocked and cratered ball of green cheese gouged from the moon.

At the sight of the wagon pushing past, the spinning rear wheels sluicing mud onto Pule’s trousers and Pule himself understanding in a rush who it was that rode in the wagon, his mouth twitched open spasmodically, and his suddenly whirling eyes rolled back up under the brim of his hat. He’d lurched forward to grab the wheel, as if to yank the wagon to a stop. But the crowd, finally, had thinned, and the horses leaped forward onto the clear quarter mile of road appearing ahead. Pule was dragged along in a sudden head-over-heels tumble, onto his back like a roach in the mud and moaning unrepeatable curses.

The episode had mystified Keeble. What on earth, he wondered, had befallen Pule to have brought him to such a pass, and why had the sight of the wagon so enraged him? There was much, clearly, in the world that Keeble didn’t understand — much that he didn’t care to understand.

Parsons strode back and forth across the green — ten steps this way, ten steps that. He paused in mid-stride coming and going to address comments to his fellows, remarking on the direction of prevailing winds, the possibility of warm valley air rushing in a dangerous updraft and pushing the blimp along to Chingford or Southgate or farther. Winds, after all, were treacherous things. Like teeth, actually. But if one knew their peculiarities, their habits, they would reveal monumental knowledge and could be read and deciphered, much like the interior winds of the human organism could be relied upon to betray gastrointestinal peculiarities. If only Birdlip, Parsons lamented, had been a different breed of scientist — what the man mightn’t have learned, adrift on the skytides for close onto fifteen years! Ah, but they could hope for little, expect even less. Wish for the worst, he insisted, and one was rarely disappointed. He strode up and down, hauling out his pocketwatch at intervals, then shoving it back into his vest pocket.

A dozen gray beards wagged behind him, and no end of brass telescopes were trained on the empty heavens — empty, that is, but for a wash of stars and a crescent moon risen to the top of the sky. A cry arose, and a finger or two pointed briefly at the ivory slice of moon, but whatever it was that had prompted the cry had disappeared. Something, apparently, had for a brief moment been silhouetted there, but had sailed at once into darkness. Parsons pronounced the mystery a bat, whose nocturnal eating habits accounted for its astonishingly proficient digestive system. Still there was no sign of the blimp.

Parsons wished heartily that the populace would go home. The shouting and singing and general drunkenness were at best a distraction, and certainly had no place at a function of this magnitude. Their presence was due solely to the idiotic posing of the charlatan evangelist, whose apocalyptic tracts had stirred a million Londoners into unwholesome exodus. The man should be in a madhouse. There he stood, one foot planted squarely on the back of each of two kneeling parishioners. What he shouted into the night air was lost in the general cacophony, and Parsons couldn’t fathom a bit of it. The few phrases that blew across the green were tangles of hellfire, final trumpets, avenging angels, and — remarkably — creatures from the stars. This last, under calmer circumstances, would have appealed to Parsons, but it was such utter blather here that to attend to it for ten seconds running was a tiresome business.