Ghouls

Ghouls are the reanimated dead created through Ignacio Narbondo’s experiments, turning his pursuit of renewed life into a spreading and unstable presence. They are not restored people: their movements and speech remain impaired, and their brief bursts of activity can end in collapse. When they gather in numbers, however, their confused behavior becomes a force that obstructs Langdon St. Ives, enables Bill Kraken’s escape with a box, and intrudes upon St. Ives’s attempt to leave London.

Origins and the cost of reanimation

The ghouls’ existence grows out of experiments conducted by Sebastian Owlesby under the influence of Ignacio Narbondo. Owlesby’s notebooks document work on the animation of corpses and a decline in judgment that culminated in the use of material taken from a living indigent man. The notes also connect the experiments to the Homunculus, which Owlesby believed could arrest or reverse decay, and to his conviction that he might achieve eternal life. In this history, reanimation is bound to exploitation rather than healing: the dead are treated as experimental subjects, and the search for further material crosses into murder.

The process depends on a fresh Carp gland, described as containing an elixir. Bill Kraken recalls driving a wagon during a nighttime theft from the oceanarium: Sebastian Owlesby cut up roughly half a dozen Carp, which were then passed to a beggar woman to sell at Billingsgate Market. The episode presents the supply chain behind the experiments as both clandestine and opportunistic. What appears to be a minor theft in Kraken’s recollection is part of the practical infrastructure required to keep the work going.

Owlesby’s diary makes that dependence stark. A cadaver taken from a gibbet remains inert despite being filled with fluids; without a Carp and a fresh gland, he expects it to decompose before it can be used. The experiment’s failure does not prompt a retreat. Instead, Owlesby records himself as already too far along to find his way back, while Narbondo continues seeking the serum. A later attempt to obtain experimental material in Limehouse ends with the death of a young costerlad, yet the corpse taken from the gibbet still lies unused. The repeated failure and renewed pursuit expose the gulf between the promise of overcoming decay and the violence required to pursue it.

What the ghouls are like

The ghouls are recognizably human in form but markedly impaired in action. Langdon St. Ives encounters them behind a sliding closet panel: one advances blindly, while others crowd behind it, their mouths moving without intelligible speech. Their presence is sufficient to make St. Ives and Hasbro recoil, but their chief danger lies less in deliberate strategy than in their numbers and unpredictable movement. They press through openings, jostle one another, and turn a confined passage into an obstacle that is difficult to escape.

Their speech varies with how recently they have been buried. Theophilus Godall, disguised among them, observes that those who had been dead only a day or two can force out a few syllables through their damaged voices. The sounds have little flexibility, however, and prove difficult for a living person to imitate. Godall therefore remains mostly silent while trying to pass as one of the group. This contrast gives the ghouls a narrow trace of recognizable human capacity without suggesting that their former identities or understanding have returned.

Their movement is similarly limited. In the house, some ghouls hobble, leap, or crawl out into the night; others soon wind down and collapse where they have wandered. Their animation is temporary and uneven, not a stable restoration of life. They may act together in a crowd, but the account does not present them as organized or purposeful in the way living people are.

The outbreak and the stolen box

During the confrontation at the house, a closet opens onto a crowd of ghouls, with Bill Kraken caught among them. St. Ives initially tries to shut the creatures inside, then hears what he takes to be a deliberate cry from Kraken and changes course to pull him away from the danger. That choice lets the ghouls pour into the open, and Kraken leaves with a Keeble box. The crowd’s escape thus becomes the cover for a consequential theft: its confusion helps Kraken evade capture while he carries the box into the street.

The commotion also allows Shiloh and his companions to depart with another box in a coach. St. Ives is left watching them go with what he believes to be his aerator box, while the ghouls spill into the night and begin to collapse at scattered points. Their presence changes the outcome of the pursuit without any clear indication that they understand the contest over the boxes. They are at once a physical obstruction, an accidental screen for escape, and evidence that Narbondo’s work has escaped the boundaries of the laboratory.

The spacecraft and the limits of control

The ghouls later surround St. Ives’s alien craft as he attempts to operate it. When he opens the hatch, one tries to climb in, and he has to force the hatch shut against it. More gather in the room, pushing furniture toward the craft; others tie it to a chair and a piano. Their actions impede St. Ives, but their purpose remains uncertain. He interprets the attempt to secure the craft as evidence that Kelso Drake has ordered it prevented from being taken, while the scene leaves open how much the ghouls themselves understand.

St. Ives eventually makes the craft spin and then rise, carrying a chair and one dangling ghoul briefly alongside it before the creature slips away. The episode makes the difference between mechanical control and bodily animation especially clear: St. Ives can learn enough of the craft’s controls to escape, while the ghouls’ activity remains awkward, unstable, and dependent on their surroundings. One later sits placidly in a stuffed chair as Birdlip’s dirigible arrives, an incongruous stillness amid the crowd’s excitement. Across these scenes, the ghouls embody the failure of reanimation to deliver renewed life: the dead move again, but movement alone does not restore coherence, agency, or permanence.