Homunculus by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

been fraught with disaster and portent, but recent months had little to recommend themselves beyond the crowning of the Queen as Empress of India and a spate of lackluster scuffling in Turkestan. The next month would see changes, though - that was certain -changes that would knock the Earth askew of its axis and which, Shiloh knew, would reveal the truth of his monumental birth and the identity of his natural, or unnatural, father. It had been twelve years since he’d confronted Nelvina Owlesby on a balcony in Kingston, a blooming trumpet flower vine behind her, shading the two of them from a noon sun. She, in a passion of momentary spiritual remorse, had confessed to him the existence and the fate of the tiny creature in the box. But she was unfaithful. She had recanted, and disappeared into the Leeward Islands that night, and for a dozen years he had waited to see if she had cheated him. The day was nigh. And in the long night to come no end of people would pay. In fact, it was easier to count the few who wouldn’t, scattered here and there about London, passing out tracts, doing his work. Bless the lot of them, thought Shiloh, tossing another coin into the heap. “As ye sow,” he said, half aloud.
    More than anything he would have liked to see the ruination of those who had condemned his mother, who had diagnosed her dropsical when she knew that she carried within her the messiah; those who had denied his very existence, who scoffed at the notion of the union of woman and god. But they were dead, the filth, long years since - beyond his grasp. And so he carried out his father’s work. He was certain that the tiny man in the box, the homunculus possessed by Sebastian Owlesby, had been his father. Let the doubting Thomases doubt. There was no end of gibbets in hell.
    Idly he snipped a gat with a scissors, rubbing the slick coin with his fingers and gazing out toward the street at the hovering fog. If there was the slightest chance, the remotest chance, that the hunchback could resurrect his mother, Joanna Southcote, whose body lay beneath the loam of Hammersmith Cemetery - if the vanished flesh could be regained, revitalized… Shiloh clutched at his basket, overwhelmed at the thought. The act would be worth a thousand of Narbondo’s animated corpses, a million of them. They weren’t, after all, ideal converts, but they worked without protest, demanded nothing, and thought not at all. Perhaps they were ideal converts. Shiloh sighed. The last of his coins was clean.
    He arose, wrapped himself in a dark and tattered cloak, drained the lees of his claret, and strode toward the tilting stairs, glaring into the eyes of anyone who dared to look at him. The floor above was dark save for the light of a single tallow candle that burned in a greasy wall niche. The smoke-blackened triangle that fanned away on the wall above it was the least of the filth that stained the plaster.
    Shiloh kicked loose the stuck door, lifted the edge by the latch, and pushed it in a foot where it stuck fast, wedged against the floor. The room beyond was bare but for a heap of bedclothes in one corner, a tilted wooden chair, and a little gate-leg table leaning against the wall.
    He stepped across to the street end of the room and pulled aside a bit of curtain. Beyond were the artifacts of a little shrine: a silver crucifix, a miniature portrait of his mother’s noble face, and a sketch of the man Shiloh knew to he his father, a man who might have danced in the palm of the evangelist’s hand, had Shiloh less an aversion to dancing and had the homunculus not been spirited away and set adrift these last fourteen years. The sketch had been done by James Clerk Maxwell, who, in the months he’d possessed the so-called demon, hadn’t the vaguest notion what it was, no more than did the Abyssinian, dying of some inexplicable wasting disease, who had sold it to Joanna Southcote eighty-two years ago and had set into motion the creaking, leaden machinery of