The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (the adventures of langdon st. ives)

by James P. Blaylock

  “Quite,” said St. Ives, itching to be off. “What detains us then?”

  The Captain knocked his ashes out into a glass ashtray. He blew through his pipe, shoved it into his coat pocket, and stood up. “Not a blessed thing,” he said.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Flight of Narbondo

  It was very little presence of mind that Willis Pule had left. Outrage after outrage had been heaped upon him. And now this last business at Drake’s…He strode along down alleys and byways out of the way of the London populace, grimacing at each jarring step at the pain of the chemical bath that heated his face beneath the sticking plaster. There was a good chance that the mixture would quite simply explode, reducing his head to rubble. Well so be it. He grinned at the thought of him strolling with a will into the presence of his collected enemies and, in the midst of a fine speech, detonating, as if his head were a bomb. It would have been a very nice effect, taken altogether. He laughed outright. He hadn’t lost his sense of humor, had he? It was a sign that he would prevail. He was a man who could keep his head, he thought, while everyone else was…no, that wouldn’t work. He giggled through his bandages, thinking about it, unable to stop giggling. Finally he was whooping and reeling, as if in a drunken passion, laughing down on the occasional loiterer like a madman, sending people scurrying for open doorways.

  A mile of shouting and laughing, however, took it out of him, and he fell into a deepening despair, intermittent giggles turning to sobs until, wretched, homeless, and corroded by active chemicals, he stumbled into the dark public house for which he’d been bound.

  Some few morose and shifty-eyed customers drank at long tables, looking as if they were ready to rise and flee at the slightest provocation. Pule was enough provocation to cause three unrelated loungers to drop their cups and start up, but upon seeing that he was obviously bound for the curtained doorway that communicated with a rear room, they slid back down onto their benches and simply regarded him with hostility.

  The head of a newsboy, just then, was thrust in through the open street door, shouting incoherently the latest horrors that littered the front page of the Times and the Morning Herald. “Corpses!” he yelled. “Viversuction in Soho.”

  Pule slipped beneath the curtain, thinking darkly of corpses and vivisection. If it was corpses the public called for, then by God it was corpses they’d have. He descended a steep, broad stairs into a sub-street shop lit only by sunlight through high transom windows around the perimeter. An enormous man with a beard like that of a Nordic berserker pounded away with a hammer at what looked like an iron sausage casing. Dismantled clocks cluttered the bench around him. He wore on his face such a look of loathing and cynical contempt for the world in general that he was immediately recognizable as a revolutionary of the sort with no fixed philosophy beyond explosions. He built, however, what Pule sought — a dynamite bomb, of the spherical sort, cast of iron and with a short fuse. A “roll ‘n’ run” as they were called by the purveyors of such things. It took a little less than ten minutes before Pule strode along once again, a box under his arm, he and his device bound for Pratlow Street where, if he was lucky, he’d find Narbondo in among his instruments.

  Pule stared at the pavement as he walked, his nostrils flaring, his eyes squinting, counting the bits and pieces of abuse he’d countenanced in the months he’d known Narbondo, raging within at the demise of the well-laid plans he’d carried into London. It wouldn’t do, he thought, to be careless. He must have his revenge on all of them — there wasn’t a one among them who wouldn’t feel his wrath. He would settle Narbondo first, and Drake if he were able. And if he weren’t, then he’d be on hand when the precious blimp landed, and he’d have his pickings then, wouldn’t he? Somehow the chemical preparation vaporized beneath the bandages, and the rising fumes smarted his eyes, generating a steady stream of tears. He mopped at his face. The bandages were loose, unraveling even as he walked along.

  Another newsboy chanted past. Rarely had there been as much news. The headlines were wild with it. “Blimp to land!” shouted the boy, waving a newspaper as if it were a banner. “Man from Mars inside! Alien threat! Harmergideon!”

  Here, thought Pule, what’s this? In a moment he owned a paper, the front page of which was given over equally to the story of the Pratlow Street corpses and the story of the approaching blimp, this last replete with predictions from the Royal Academy itself that the blimp would touch down in Hampstead. The minister of a popular religious sect insisted that aboard the blimp flew an alien creature who would “usher in Armageddon.”

  There was some confusion as to whether the two stories — the ghouls and the blimp — weren’t somehow connected, the ghouls themselves perhaps amounting to aliens in some particularly opaque way. Or, it was equally likely, the ghouls were the first of millions of what Cicero had called the silent majority to rise bodily from their earthly resting place and shake off their shrouds. So said the man called Shiloh, the self-proclaimed messianic figure so common of recent date on London streets, and connected with the recent gatherings at Hyde Park. Why the newly enraptured crowd had chosen to wander down to Pratlow Street and pitch over into the gutter wasn’t made at all clear.

  Pule read while he walked, paying less attention to direction, perhaps, than would under the circumstances have been wise. His bandages were in full mutiny, his face half-exposed when he stumbled out into the sunlight of Charing Cross Road. He neglected the safer byways and alleys out of interest in the newspaper. Indeed, half the street seemed to have the same interest, for papers, it was clear, were in short demand. People read over each other’s shoulders. A great knot of men and women stood in the center of the road, so engrossed in the communal reading of a paper that they were nearly trampled by a hansom cab, the driver of which grappled with a fluttering paper.

  The populace, all in all, wore a fairly horrified look on their collective faces — news of aliens and ghouls being, apparently, the sort of ill wind that blew no one any good. Pule, sobbing out of a green malodorous face, dripping unwound sticking plaster, and slouching into the midst of such an assemblage of fear and suspicion, had a predictable effect. A woman shrieked and pointed. Others joined her. People turned where they stood, gaping at Pule, who was, for a moment, oblivious to the developing turmoil. Looking up, though, he saw at once that he’d been mistaken for something awful. For what, no one could immediately determine, neither Pule nor the horrified populace who fell back shrieking and pointing. Could this perhaps be the alien? A ghoul? Both? Who could say? Something unnatural it very clearly was.

  “It’s running!” squeeked a man in a waistcoat several sizes too small for him. And the cry was taken up by the street, Pule’s flight seeming to be clear evidence that he was, somehow, what they thought him to be.

  He pounded along, ridding himself of newspapers and bandages. If he could have pitched the bomb among them, silenced most of them and given the rest something substantial to shriek about, he would have done so gladly. But they would have been on him before he could act, and he would have been deprived the pleasure of demonstrating the device to Narbondo. The shouts, finally, were fading; no one on the street had been terribly keen on pursuit. It was enough, perhaps, merely to have been a party to the strange events of the day.

  He could see very clearly what he had to do. It was a simple business: slip into the passage through the downstairs closet, climb to the laboratory, slide back the panel, and, without a word, roll the lit bomb into the room. Pule prayed that Narbondo would be there. It would almost be worth extinction to stay, to whisper something to the hunchback just as the bomb detonated, to see the look of futility and fear wash across his face, watch him scramble, perhaps, for the device, only to be blown to evil bits, weeping and shouting for mercy. Pule smiled at the thought. It was almost worth it, except that Narbondo was only one of a half score of people who sorely required comeuppance. And there was, of course, the matter of Dorothy Keeble. He wouldn’t be deprived entirely of her company. Tha
t wouldn’t do at all. He angled along down Pratlow, keeping well in toward the dilapidated façades so that an anxious Narbondo wouldn’t catch sight of him through the casement. He slid through the street door at the base of the stairs, nipped into the closet, and punched the corner of the panel behind which was hidden the spring latch.

  * * *

  It was unlikely that there had ever before been such a crowd in Regent’s Park. A continual stream of people trudged along either side of the Parkway and up Seven Sisters’ Road. Between the human rivers rattled no end of dogcarts and cabrioles and hackney coaches and chaises, clattering and hopping across potholes and ruts, their drivers cursing the masses of people that seemed to flow out into the center of the road on a whim, clogging traffic. Wagons full of people jerked along, then stopped dead for the space of a half-dozen minutes, then jerked along again, only to stop almost at once to avoid running down three score of travelers who, because of a mud puddle, perhaps, had drifted again into the roadway, oblivious to the wagons clamoring to get through. If half of London isn’t on the march, thought Theophilus Godall as he handed a tract to a gaunt man in a pince nez, then I’m a corpse. He certainly did his best to look like one — in a hastily donned suit bought in Houndsditch for a shilling.

  He’d had to do little to authenticate it; it was almost dirty enough to suffice. A bit of shredding, an energetically executed dance on the heaped garments in the street, some smearing on of mud — all in all it was an effective costume. A putty scar down the center of his forehead and running under his right eye made it seem probable that he’d had a rough and tumble life, which, when paired with the once ostentatious suit, advertised him, perhaps, as a reformed gambler or other sort of rakehell.

  At first he supposed that his fellow ghouls were utterly speechless, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Those who had a comparatively fresh look about them, who, perhaps, had lain in the grave only a day or two before being liberated, could utter some few syllables through rusted vocal chords. They hadn’t, however, any elasticity to them, and the croaking of the ghouls was, like the production of any unnatural sound, difficult for a healthy man to imitate. Godall did his best, remaining mute for the most part.

  The evangelist was inflamed with his usual false spirit, fired by the bellows of approaching apocalypse. Part of him gnashed and cursed the loss of the homunculus box — if that’s what it was. That there was another box of inestimable value aboard the blimp was certain. And he had Pule’s wonderful device — hadn’t he? — the use of which a half hour earlier had brought about a miracle, and a very useful miracle at that. He’d been imbued with the powers of fertility, with the spirit of the Garden, even to the extent of his visage having turned a mysterious pale green, as if he were the incarnation, perhaps, of a vegetable deity. He’d become a walking illustration of the paradox of rebirth — the wrinkles of age giving way to the budding of a new spring, the age of lead wheezing into extinction as the age of gold clambered up out of the wings. And he’d spoken in a curious voice, squeaky and birdlike — frightening at first; there was no denying it.

  But being a vehicle of such cataclysmic change wasn’t, to be sure, an easy business and had never been such. The power that had assumed control of his larynx was quite clearly the spirit of his departed mother, hovering in the London aether like a waiting dove. He could remember the particular timbre of her voice, whispering through the dusty halls of memory. When he’d whirled the crank on the device and been sprayed, as it were, by the curious green dust, he’d been gripped by her spirit; he’d spoken for the space of a long moment in his mother’s sweet voice. He’d been overwhelmed, amazed. He’d doubted, even. But doubt was everywhere; he knew that. Flesh was weak, vilely weak. It had, often, to be satiated. Give it some harmless trifle to placate it, and by so doing beat it down so that the spirit could go on about its business. “Let the filthy yet be filthy,” he said half aloud.

  His mind wandered, from the curious box to the crowds surging behind and around him to a young lady in a muslin dress — one of his particular favorites among the live converts. She reminded him of Dorothy Keeble, a prisoner in Drake’s establishment. He squinted a bit, as if diminishing the scene roundabout him in order to call up a more immediately pleasurable picture.

  His face writhed into something idiotic, a facsimile of a smile. His hands shook and he was gripped by the immediacy of his unspent passion. His chest heaved as he struggled to catch his breath. He reached surreptitiously into his cloak and groped for a flask of medicine — gin and laudanum — the combined wonders of which had a distinctly calming effect. He shuddered and looked round him wondering if, perhaps, he hadn’t ought to crank up the device and treat the captive audience around him to the first of the evening’s bountiful collection of miracles. There before him, smiling benignly, stood one of Narbondo’s animations, bless his enlivened heart. His comparatively uncorrupted countenance suggested that he wasn’t one of the mutes, one of the recovered long-dead.

  “I can see from the cut of your suit that you were of genteel breeding,” said the evangelist benevolently to the man he supposed to be a corpse.

  Godall continued to smile at him with the same vacant, empty-headed smile that resided on the faces of the faithful, both living and dead, who milled through the crowds. He decided to respond, having little to lose, even if he were found out. “I was indeed, master,” said Godall thickly.

  The evangelist gawked at him, surprised. Here was a lively ghoul indeed. Could such a miracle be possible? Of course it could. The end, after all, was drawing nigh. The sea would give up its dead and all would be given tongues so that they might, like lawyers, argue their cases before a holy tribunal. He was fired with the idea. “My son!” he exclaimed into the face of Theophilus Godall. And with that he began to blubber and wheeze, carried away by the sight of London on the march, hurrying toward they knew not what. “Stand beside me, my child! You’ll be called upon to testify!”

  With that admonition, the old man grasped the Keeble box — St. Ives’ aerator — and whirled away at the crank, launching a cloud of green vapors that brought forth, as he had hoped, torrents of exclamation from the pressing crowd. A flat-bed wagon sat abandoned in the road before them, its driver having grown impatient and tramped away toward Hampstead Heath on foot.

  “Kneel, my son,” commanded Shiloh. Godall kneeled. Shiloh placed a foot on his back and boosted himself onto the wagon, waving the spirit box.

  The crowd roundabout fell silent. The press was so thick that the audience, for the moment anyway, was literally captive, and there were no oak trees nearby, thank heaven, to provide shelter for mocking sinners. The evangelist gave the box another crank, bathing his face in the dust of fecundity. “Hear me!” he squeaked in a voice weirdly reminiscent of pipid frogs. He motioned wildly at an attendant who lifted above his head the glass case in which rested the skull of Joanna Southcote. The teeth seemed to hop and chatter just a bit, but the effect was negligible. It was impossible to tell whether the result was a matter of the head’s sudden animation or of the attendant’s having given it a shake.

  Shiloh twisted the crank, shoving the tube into his mouth so as to get the full effect of the emitted holy gases. He staggered under the power of it just as the horse in front of the cart lurched. “The hour,” piped the old man, “hath come! We hasten toward the gate. Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolators…” and halfway through idolators the effects of the gases diminished and with a frightening burst the piping voice gave way to the old man’s creaking shout. He whirled away at the crank with a passion, squirting himself down with vapors, playing the green spray on the multitude who stood in silent wonder. “Come!” he resumed. “Come!” he shrieked.

  Godall realized suddenly that the old man was shouting particularly at him. “Me?” mouthed Godall, looking up questioningly.

  “Yes, my child! Come hither. Leap aboard this chariot!”

  Godall complied. Before them, the ro
ad had cleared, part of the crowd having moved along. Those that hadn’t clustered round the rear of the wagon, watching the prophet in expectation of further miracle. The attendant lay the skull on the wagon, heaving the Gladstone bone-bag up beside it. Godall waved at the crowd, put his foot against the forehead of the erstwhile attendant, and pushed the man down onto the road.

  “Here now!” cried the evangelist turning in surprise upon Godall. But the tobacconist grabbed the flapping cloth of the old man’s robe and, giving it a jerk, hauled him over backward. Shouts arose from the baffled masses. Godall whirled, grabbed the reins, and whipped up the anxious horses. The cart leaped ahead. A handful of the faithful raced after it as if to climb aboard, but the effort was wasted. The horses tore away up the road while Shiloh the evangelist, flopping and shrieking on the wagon, held onto his collected props as the jigging skull of Joanna Southcote chattered and clattered accusingly into his ear.

  Godall raced up Camden Town Road and angled along a narrow, deserted street into comparatively empty countryside, and for ten minutes he rattled along farther and farther from the environs of Hampstead Heath. He reined in the horses, finally, amid the shadows of a scattering of trees and turned on the scrambling missionary, who quaked in fear at the sight of the pistol in Godall’s hand. He squinted into his captor’s face, slow recognition appearing in his own. “You!” he cried.

  Godall nodded. “I should, I suppose, put a bullet into you, mad dog that you are…”

  “On the contrary, sir,” began Shiloh, interrupting.

  “Silence!” cried Godall. “Now, sir. As I say, I’d just as soon drill a hole in your forehead with this pistol as shake your hand. In fact, I’d gladly do the one and wouldn’t consider the other. But it’s not my place to judge another man…”