As for the bankers and their kind — some of these unfortunates were beaten to death, some cut down by axes, picks and scythes. Others were thrown in the river to drown, and I saw at least one choke to death as members of my flock stuffed his mouth with bag after swollen bag of silver coins.
Of course, I anticipate your objections. But why should these men have been granted mercy when they showed none to their innumerable victims? They had abused the city for far too long. Their time was past, a new age was upon us, and around them London’s topography seemed to reconstitute itself in sympathy.
The great temples to avarice and greed were set alight. The banks were torched to the ground, the too-expensive restaurants and wine bars, the gentlemen’s barbershops and outfitters — all were impregnated with cleansing flame. The gold reserves in the Bank of England were looted and my people hurled their contents carelessly into the blackness of the Thames or threw them deep into the dank recesses of the sewers. One prominent city man was thrashed to death with a shiny ingot of the stuff. The air was thick with the stench of burning currency.
The old man’s voice was hoarse and weak; he gurgled as though he were speaking underwater, but still he managed to murmur a few lines of verse — not his own, alas, but words not entirely without relevance. “The king was in his counting-house, counting out his money. The queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey.”
I squeezed his hand, he squeezed mine (“Ned,” he murmured), and below us the terror raged on.
Moon struggled through the crowd, fending off attacks from the faithful, stepping where he had to over the bloodied corpses of the fallen. He never once stopped to help but strode onward, searching for a single person amid the melee. “Charlotte!” he shouted. “Charlotte!”
He found her eventually, standing demurely by as the chief executive of a large firm of stockbrokers had his arms torn from their sockets. Moon left the man to his fate and grabbed at his sister. “Charlotte. What are you doing?”
She gave him another of her wonderful smiles. “Hello, Edward.” She paused. “You ought not to have lied to us, you know.”
“What’s happened to you?”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
Behind them the broker gave a final, feeble moan before he expired in a spreading pool of crimson. Charlotte seemed enthused by the sight. “This is the start of something wonderful. A new age. A second chance.”
Moon pointed to the dead man. “There’ll be no second chance for him.”
“But there will be for you,” Charlotte insisted. “You can still be saved.”
Moon pushed her aside in disgust. “Where’s the Somnambulist?”
“Underground. We bound him.”
Moon was defiant. “You know I’ll rescue him.”
She shrugged. “You’re welcome to try. It scarcely matters now.”
“Where’s Tan?”
Charlotte pointed upwards to the Monument, at the pinnacle of which the Chairman and I stood silhouetted against the skyline, emperors of Pantisocracy. Moon left his sister and ran toward us, intent, it seemed, upon a further confrontation.
He emerged minutes later, wheezing, hissing, gasping for breath. He glared at me, fury blazing in his eyes.
“Edward!” I waved. “You’re just in time.” The Chairman and I peered over the parapet. “It seems the cavalry has arrived.”
Below us, help had come to the moneymen’s aid. Several dozen policemen led by the redoubtable Detective Inspector Merryweather and accompanied by a handful of the Directorate’s false Chinamen poured into the financial district.
Now, I saw ‘poured,’ though the description is not entirely an apt one. My men — the troops of Love, Love, Love and Love — now they ‘poured’ onto the streets. They were a great tide breaking at long last upon the city, a dam bursting, spilling open after years of miserable and unnatural confinement. But the police force, the men from the Directorate, they didn’t really ‘pour’ so much as seep and trickle into the fray, dripping over the cobblestones like water from a leaky tap.
But then Moon was complaining again, self-righteous all of a sudden. “Those men don’t stand a chance.”
“By my estimation they are outnumbered approximately ten to one,” I said mildly. “You’re right. They’ll be slaughtered.”
Below us a blue-coated policeman was dragged under a seething tide of Love. His screams carried up to us, 202 feet above ground. Moon was of course tiresomely sententious about the incident. “This blood is on your hands.”
“On the contrary. It was you who betrayed me.”
“I can’t stand by and let you inflict this atrocity upon the city.”
“This is a natural process,” I chided. “Is it not written that the sheep are to be separated from the goats? The meek, the weak, the despised and the forgotten — we’ve been suppressed too long. This is our revenge.”
“Why does it have to be like this?”
Behind us, the old man murmured, “About, about. In reel and rout the death-fires danced at night. The water, like a witch’s oils, burnt green and blue and white.”
“Do you recognize it?” I asked, something of the proud father in my manner. “It’s his own work.”
Moon turned on me. “Do you think he approves? Do you think he’s flattered by what you’ve done?”
“Ask him,” I said simply.
Moon tugged the Chairman away from the parapet, pulled him roughly across to me and pushed his face into mine. I recoiled from the old man’s rank, electric halitosis.
“This thing is not alive,” said Moon. “It’s a corpse, barely animated by your perverted science.”
“He’s still just a child at present. He’s confused.”
Moon forced the old man to look down at the carnage and sneered: “Tell me, sir. Do you approve? Is this a fitting tribute?”
The dreamer gazed glassily, perplexedly at the street. “The many men, so beautiful. And they all dead did lie. And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I.”
“All this,” Moon persisted, “is being done for you.”
For the first time the old man seemed to notice us, to show some real awareness of his surroundings. It was as though he had finally woken up. “For me?” he murmured. “Me?”
Teary-eyed, I flung myself at his feet. “Yes!” I sobbed. “All this for you. For Pantisocracy.”
“Consider well,” Moon said. “Everything that is unfolding beneath us, all this suffering and agony, is being done in your name.”
“The Chairman shook his head. “No, no,” he muttered. “No, no, no. Not like this.”
“Please, sir. You have the power. Stop this.”
The old man seemed to grow in stature before us, becoming taller and broader as though at the mercy of some invisible rack.
“Chairman!” I cried.
He looked at me as if I were a stranger. “I am not your Chairman.” Enraged by Moon’s words, his anger seemed to revitalize him. “No,” he shouted (really shouted, too, not the senile mutterings he had managed till then). “This is not my fault.”
“But it is,” Moon whispered, like Claudius pouring poison into the ear of a better man. “This will be blamed on you.”
And it was then that something extraordinary happened. Given that the day hadn’t been exactly routine so far, you’ll understand that I do not use the word lightly.
The Chairman roared with fury, and as his anger grew, a change began to manifest itself in his body, a fresh transfiguration. Gangrenous streaks of green appeared on his face and hands as though all of his veins were suddenly visible to us, pulsing not with the healthy ruby of life but with something hideous, diseased and dying, his face lit up with phosphorescence.