My words seemed to fuel his high humour as much as the alcohol had. His grin grew even more maniacal as he snapped the whip over the head of the dog. The small creature, too, had worked itself into a frenzy, dashing back and forth on the cab's roof, barking louder as if to urge the horse on its exertions. "To Wetwick!" cried the cabby. "For one of your faith – 'tis the new Rome! All roads lead to Wetwick!"
I fell back inside, jostled by a sudden turning that tilted the cab on to one wheel for a moment. A few white faces shot past, pedestrians startled by the vehicle's clattering haste. Above my head, the barking and scrabbling of the small dog seemed to take on a perceptible pattern: when its claws pattered to one side of the roof, the yapping sounding in that direction, the cabby swung the vehicle around correspondingly at the first opportunity. Gaining the window once more, I looked out and recognised the district through which we were passing: the smell of the river was strong, wafting through a region of ramshackle docks and warehouses. We were not far from my own home in Clerkenwell, having apparently travelled about in a circle.
The dog ceased its noise simultaneously – with the hansom pulling to a halt. The cabby pulled open the small hatch in the centre of the roof and leered down at me through the opening. "Your destination, sir," he said with sly insinuation.
I stepped down from the cab and looked about. I had some vague idea of the area, if not this exact street; I at least knew I could find my way back to my shop, within a good walk's distance. Perhaps the cabby was playing me for a fool, driving about with no more idea of how to reach the perhaps-mythical Wetwick than I had. However I was glad to be free of his bone-shaker, and the area in which I had alighted was at least not deserted. Though the street were without lamps, I could discern a considerable number of figures sidling past, close to the shuttered fronts of the buildings.
"What do I owe you?" I called up to the cabby on his perch.
"Ah! You are a card, sir!" Both he and the dog looked down at me. "You know full well I get my whack at the other end – your fare's been paid by Mollie Maud, hasn't it, then?" He whipped the horse into a trot, and had soon vanished into the river's fog.
My quest had seemed to lead me into more inconvenience than adventure thus far – home and bed now appeared to me as the most attractive notion. I stepped across the cobbled street to ask specific directions from one of the passers-by.
As I approached closer, and was able to see them better through the mist that laid its damp velvet against my face, I noted that they all, men and women alike, moved in much the same fashion, a curious hunched-over, sidling motion – as though; crab-like, they moved laterally as much as forward. For a moment I thought the cabby's dog had jumped off the hansom and had run back here, as I spotted a similar animal running ahead of one of the figures; then I saw several of the scrawny terriers, each seeming to lead its shabbily dressed master in the same direction along the pavement.
The sense of being in a dream again enveloped me. I stood a few feet away from the line of pedestrians as they scurried past me. Slowly, I reached out a hand to grab hold of a bent shoulder. The halted man lifted his head and looked round at me. I found myself gazing into the living counterpart of the face on the Saint Monkfish coin.
5
I have need of rest; my hand trembles even as I write these words. To retrieve the past is no great effort, when the events to be recalled are so firmly imprinted on the mind. It is existence in the present, the bleak wreckage and residue of what has gone before, that is so burdensome.
Upon completion of the previous section of these memoirs, I laid down my pen and went out of the house again, hoping to briefly expunge remembered night with the brightness of the current day. Blessedly anonymous in this district, I strolled through the crowds intent on their own business. Lost in their number, I found a moment of peace that was broken only when I thought I saw a familiar face staring at me. Turning towards it, I felt my heart leap up into my throat as I recognised the sloping, exophthalmic, and purse-jawed visage of one of the Wetwick denizens. I staggered backwards, blundering into the people nearest me, fearing that the parishioners of that region had emigrated with me from their former haunts. The appalling vision dissolved when, curious about the rising murmur behind him, a local fishmonger turned about, and I saw that the dreaded physiognomy was no more than that of an unusually large carp he was carrying on his shoulder towards his stall. With my pulse still trembling inside me, I scurried back towards the shelter of my home.
Between that sentence and this lies a good hour of lying on my bed, soothing my fright with a tumblerful of peat-smelling Scotch whisky, a comfort to which I was introduced when marooned on the Hebridean island of Groughay with the increasingly lunatical Scape. All that time, when I had but recently escaped being murdered at the hands of the Godly Army, the brown nectar had been perhaps all that had preserved my own sanity as I had watched my fellow castaway assembling his absurd flying machine from sticks and carrion.
Thus fortified, the warmth of the whisky dispelling both the chill of the air and that of memory, I returned to my labours.
On that dark London street, I saw for the first time in living flesh those features that had been represented to me before only in wax and metal. Though within the possible range of variation of general humanity, they were decidedly placed at the unnerving end of the scale. What would have been described as gross ugliness in one individual was made uncanny by the familial resemblance between the man I had stopped and the others hurrying by us – I could have found myself among no more alien-seeming tribe than if I had stepped into the court of Jenghiz Khan.
The round, protruding eyes gave the man whose shoulder I still grasped a deceptive appearance of stupidity. Certainly, he was in fuller possession of his faculties than I was at the moment. He scowled – or gave as close an approximation of that expression as his slope-browed, chinless face could provide – and twisted his shoulder free, then hurried away on his nocturnal errands.
I stepped back from the pavement to let the others pass by. Though they were all possessed of the same goggling features, the variation among them was as of a parade of human society and its constituents: I saw, in quick order, the young mechanic and tradesman, cloth-capped and with knotted neckerchief, the distinctive sidling gait marked with quick vigour; the elderly, both of rotund corpulence and skeletal wasting, assisted in their sideways progress with walking sticks; women clutching their head-shawls fast beneath their chins, of every age from grannyhood to ingenue, the latter blushing modestly under a stranger's gaze and hurrying close to their families' protection; and children, both wellscrubbed and ragged. These young ones, not yet instructed in their elders' ways, gaped at me openly as their parents dragged them along, their wide mouths falling open like latchless coin purses. In more than one little girl's arm was clutched a simple plaything, a doll with similar features.
One child, momentarily separated from her parents and blinded by her small fists knuckling the tears from her protuberant eyes, blundered into my leg. Moved to pity, I extracted the ugly doll from my own coat pocket and placed it in the child's hands. She gulped down her sobbing long enough to blink in amazement at the unexpected gift; when she looked up at her benefactor, her mouth rounded in a startled O at my face, and she quickly scuttled off in terror.