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

by James P. Blaylock

  “Judge not!” cried the evangelist, waving both hands about his head as if suffering a fit, “lest ye be judged!”

  Godall eyed him coolly. “Don’t press me, villain, or you’ll find yourself respiring through the top of your head. Hear me out. And save your breath; you have a trek before you, carrying all that gear along. You may, I suppose, be mad — I’ve no reason to believe otherwise — and a madman, though he might commit vile acts, can hardly be held entirely accountable for them. The extent of your crimes, moreover, can only be measured by an examination of the damage done in the infection of innocent people with your dubious proclamations. Such people, perhaps, would have fallen prey to someone else had you not been handy. The judging of the thing, then, is beyond my powers. It will have to be the unpleasant duty of a higher authority.

  “But hear me, sir. I have very powerful acquaintances. Your perversions at the house on Wardour Street haven’t gone unnoticed, and the coin you so liberally sprinkle about on your own behalf is transparent, to speak figuratively. If you continue, then, to practice your chicanery publicly, to delude the London innocent, then, sir, you’ll be called out, the disparity between our ages notwithstanding.”

  The evangelist stood rigid as a post, his face purple, his eyes squeezed almost shut. Had he been a jack-in-the-box his lid would have blown off in the next moment. “D-d-do you!” he cried, breathing heavily thereafter and scooping up from the leaves on the ground the foolish head. “Do you know, sir, that you’ve unalterably called down upon you your own vile damnation!” And this last syllable was uttered with such ferocity that Theophilus Godall was certain for a moment that the old man’s tongue would fly out, like the poisonous tongue of a newt. The display, all in all, confirmed Godall’s suspicion that the old man was the most deluded of his entire flock, if the shepherd can be said to occupy such a position.

  Time was wasting. Light was failing. He was an hour and a half out of Hampstead in the borrowed wagon. And if the roads were clogged yet with sightseers, then it would be odds on that the blimp would descend without him. He’d had enough of the old man, and was tempted to tie him to the tree to prevent the possibility of his following along to the heath. But such a course might well burst the man’s head. So without another word, Godall took up the ribands, flicked at the horses with the whip, and set off up the road at a canter followed by the receding figure of Shiloh the New Messiah, who struggled cursing along, toting in one hand the Gladstone coffin and in the other the encased skull, and hoping heartily that some few of his congregation might have followed them out of the city.

  * * *

  The partly shaded lantern threw an amazingly bright shaft of light across the floor of the cupboard. Hasbro and Kraken had carried it up the passage from the street, finding themselves, finally, beyond the wall of Narbondo’s laboratory. The lantern did nothing, however, to generally illuminate the close quarters, and Kraken, bending across to whisper into his companion’s ear, smashed his nose against Hasbro’s shoulder in the process. “Ugh’ whispered Kraken, putting a hand to his face.

  “Ssshh!” said Hasbro, who made an effort to peer through a wire-thin crack that ran along the edge of the moving panel. Lamplight shone from beyond, and every now and then someone — the hunchback surely — passed across in front of the crack.

  “Shall we clip it open and throttle him, then?” whispered Kraken.

  “Patience, sir.”

  “He’s a bad’n, is the doctor. Not a man o’ science, mind you. A different sort. A devil. I’m agoing to pummel him,” whispered Kraken, jolting around for a moment, perhaps practicing his pummeling. Hasbro peered through the crack, undisturbed. “Science don’t slice up dead men,” insisted Kraken in a stage whisper of increasing vehemence. “Science don’t…” he began, but a noise on the stairs behind interrupted him.

  “Sh!” whispered Hasbro, jiggling the covered lamp so that the cloth fell and nipped off the light altogether. The two held their breath. A tramp, scrape, tramp sounded on the stairs. Someone, something approached, ascended toward them. Hasbro squeezed Kraken’s shoulder twice, as if signaling that action was imminent. “As silent as possible,” he murmured into Kraken’s ear.

  “Aye,” breathed Kraken.

  A sputtering light appeared, preceding low giggling and a muffled cough. The light flickered across the landing at the top of the narrow stairs. Both men half expected the appearance on the landing of a ghoul, of one of the walking dead who would shuffle round to face them up the dark corridor. With a last scrape and thud, a knee and a foot appeared; then a head bent into view — the grinning, open-mouthed head of Willis Pule, lit by the unnaturally white light of a sputtering fuse that curled up out of the bowels of an infernal device. He turned and crept toward them, the circle of light cast by the fuse approaching along the floor.

  Hasbro crouched there, waiting, ready to spring the moment they were revealed. Kraken shook beside him, his teeth rattling audibly. Pule stopped, canted his head, squinting through the gloom, suspicious.

  “Lord!” howled Kraken. “He’ll blow us to finders!” And with that he launched himself at the horrified Pule, who made as if to heave the bomb full into Kraken’s face. The two went down in a heap of arms and legs, both shouting, Kraken rolling astride Pule and flailing away at him with both fists. The bomb bounced on the wooden floorboards, Hasbro scooping it up and pinching at the fuse, which, despite his efforts, sputtered continually to life.

  “This won’t do,” he said aloud, and he pitched the bomb along the corridor. It bounced, rolled, caromed off the wall and down the stairs, bump, bump, humping along. The corridor was cast into sudden darkness.

  “Ow!” cried Kraken. “Filthy animal!”

  Hasbro whipped the cloth from atop the lamp and punched at the oak panel before him. Expecting an explosion that would literally bring the house down, he stepped through into an empty laboratory, the door standing ajar. Kraken sprang in beside him, blood pouring down his arm.

  “You’ve been injured, sir,” said Hasbro as he strode toward the gaping door.

  “Filthy blighter bit me,” heaved Kraken, laboring for breath. “So I kicked him down the well.”

  “Bravo!” cried Hasbro, leaping up the stairs two at a time toward the upper floors.

  “He went up, did he?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” shouted Hasbro over his shoulder. “But the house might, if it’s going up you want.”

  “Oh Lord, yes!” hooted Kraken, close at Hasbro’s heels. In a trice they found the door to the roof, and without slackening pace, leaped across to the next roof, neither pausing to question the possibility of slowing up, but leaping instead to a third just as the expected explosion boomed up from the street. Both men dropped instinctively; then, realizing that the roof they stood on was yet solid, they crept across and peered between chimney pots. In the center of Pratlow Street was a smoking crater. Half a block down, high-stepping toward Holborn as if pursued by goblins, flew a desperate Willis Pule, foiled once again.

  “It must ha’ gone out the door,” observed Kraken.

  “I believe you’re correct. A pity, really, that it didn’t destroy the laboratory.”

  “We can have a go at that one ourselves,” Kraken shouted, the idea clearly appealing to him. “We can smash it and smash it and smash it!”

  Hasbro considered Kraken’s suggestion, recalling, perhaps, the broken Kepler. “It’s growing a bit late,” he began, only to cut himself off and shout, for there, half a dozen rooftops away, springing suddenly out of hiding, leaped Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, a satchel in either hand.

  Without a word the two were after him, neither knowing what it was they intended to do with him if they caught him, but remarkably keen on the catching.

  It was clear, though, before the chase was six minutes old, that the doctor had taken to those same rooftops more than once in the past, for it seemed that he gained two each time the two pursuers crossed one, sliding along gables, clattering across copper sheathin
g, skidding on the scree of decomposing chimneys and all the time falling farther behind.

  They paused, finally, some two blocks from Old Compton, listening to what sounded for all the world like distant laughter ring over the rooftops. For the slice of a moment the doctor appeared at what seemed to be an impossible distance, standing before the brick front of a steep garret, an orange sun beyond him dropping across the afternoon sky. Then he was gone.

  EIGHTEEN

  On Wardour Street

  Langdon St. Ives and William Keeble crouched in the darkness of an ill-lit hallway on the second floor of the house on Wardour Street. Their short journey through the sewers had been both unpleasant and uneventful. It had been such an easy business gaining access to the house, in fact, that last week’s song and dance with the clock crystal seemed an idiotically bad idea. Where they were to go now that they were inside, however, remained to be seen.

  The air was almost unnaturally still and quiet. There had to have been any number of people within earshot, but in the heavy, somnolent atmosphere, it seemed as if most were asleep — not at all an unlikely thing, given that most of their business was transacted during the night. There was some stirring and banging downstairs, from the kitchen, possibly. Muted voices could be heard, one of which sounded as if it might be the voice of Winnifred Keeble, who, dressed as a washerwoman, might well have gained entrance through the back door. The thought of her confronting the flour-faced cook was bothersome, but Winnifred had insisted. And cleaver or no cleaver, the cook would find Winnifred Keeble a difficult case.

  St. Ives and Keeble tiptoed down the hallway, half wondering which room to peer into. Opening the wrong door would be disastrous. Kraken had supposed that Dorothy was somewhere on the third floor, guarded, no doubt, by Drake’s toughs, perhaps by Drake himself. So there was no real need to start peeking into doorways on the second floor, except that the doors presented themselves. Who could say what lay behind them?

  They approached the wooden balustrade that fronted the great open hall which St. Ives had been deprived of seeing on his previous visit. There, Kraken had said, lay the starship. Would it be merely an empty hull, stripped and rusted by the centuries? And what purpose did Drake put it to? Was it enough just to possess it, or was there, as rumor had it, some darker, foul purpose? St. Ives thought momentarily of the dreaded Marseilles Pinkle, wrapped in a shawl, lying in the Captain’s wagon on the street. There were, apparently, no limits to the perversions concocted by desperate men. What might such men do with the space vehicle of the homunculus? St. Ives couldn’t imagine.

  A sudden sobbing erupted from beyond the door to their right, followed by the utterance of a low laugh. Keeble straightened, his eyes wide. “Dorothy,” he called, half aloud, reaching for the door handle.

  St. Ives’ attempt to stop him was in vain. He grabbed the back of Keeble’s coat, whispered, “Wait!” and was pulled into the room along with the toymaker. On a narrow, unmade bed sat a pasty-faced woman wearing what appeared to be a fruit bowl for a hat. Crawling on his hands and knees on the floor was a man in kneebreeches and a striped topcoat, this last being hauled up over his head, the tails caught up and tied with a broad strip of dotted ribbon. On his feet were pointed, women’s shoes, turned around backward and wedged on awkwardly. It was the man on the floor who sobbed in girlish tones.

  At the raging issuance of Keeble and St. Ives, the woman on the bed shrieked, and without a second’s hesitation, plucked up a glass vase full of wilted roses and pitched the entire affair at the horrorstruck Keeble. The man on the floor stopped his capering at the sound of the shriek and shouted: “What? Who is it!” He struggled, pinioned helplessly in his coat and shoes and bombarded by the fruit that cascaded from the woman’s hat. She shrieked again, even though her first shriek had driven Keeble halfway back out into the hallway.

  Looking desperately for concealment, St. Ives hauled the toymaker along. Doors slammed on the floor below. Two half-dressed, bearded men thrust their heads through a suddenly opened door, then fled toward the stairs, perhaps assuming that St. Ives and Keeble, rushing at them along the hallway, were police officers. Another door shot open and out dashed an enormous gentleman in ventilated rubber trousers, a sheet of newspaper in front of his face. He too bowled away down the stairs toward the street.

  Within moments, it seemed, the cry had gone round the house, and the air was full of shouts and pounding feet and the slamming of doors. Behind St. Ives raged the man with the coat over his head, shouting curses, threatening through a mouthful of tweed. His ridiculous twisted shoes lay on the carpet behind. A head, shouting a fearful string of venomous oaths, shot through the gathered coat, the dotted ribbon and coattails encircling his neck like a clown’s collar, his arms cocked up, trapped and thrashing as if he wore a makeshift straightjacket. It was Kelso Drake.

  At the sight of Keeble and St. Ives, Drake blanched. His mouth writhed. He flailed away within the confines of his woolen prison. Keeble stopped, dumbstruck. He hesitated a quarter of a second, pondering Drake’s bound state, then slid past St. Ives in a rush and struck the industrialist on the nose. Drake was propelled backward, struggling in his coat, in fear now as well as anger. Keeble struck him again. He grasped a handful of coat front, slapped Drake three or four times on the cheek, then tweaked both his ears. Keeble capered and yodeled before his helpless victim as St. Ives, anxious to conclude their business and he away, hauled at the toymaker’s collar.

  With a rip of rending material, Drake was suddenly free of the restricting garment, and, with the cry of a madman, he launched himself at Keeble, punching and flailing at the toymaker, who, with a deliberation and sobriety that startled St. Ives, pulled from his coat a leather truncheon, and slammed the industrialist on the side of the head, felling him to the carpet. Keeble replaced the truncheon, apparently satisfied, and turned toward St. Ives a face pale and beaded with sweat. “I don’t suppose I should kill him,” he said slowly.

  “No!” cried St. Ives, hauling Keeble once again along the hallway toward the stairs. Jolting up from the ground floor raged two men, obviously not customers. One, St. Ives realized with a shock of horror, was the man with the chimney pot hat, who held in his hand a carving knife. His companion scrabbled in his coat, perhaps after a gun.

  “The bench!” cried St. Ives, grappling with the end of the carved Jacobean trestle bench that sat on the landing. Keeble went for the opposite end. The two men swung it in a quick arch, then let it go, Keeble a second or so ahead of St. Ives. Chimney pot flattened himself against the balustrade as Keeble’s end of the heavy bench swung round, grazing his forehead, plowing into the neck and chest of his companion, who had, to his own great misfortune, been peering into his coat. The man screamed and pitched over backwards, he and the bench skidding together down the stairs. Chimney pot was after them, waving the knife.

  St. Ives skipped up the stairs, Keeble beside him, both men running headlong into a surprised Winnifred Keeble who supported Dorothy around the shoulders with her left arm. In her right hand she clutched a revolver. “Where on earth…” she began before catching sight of the murderous chimney-pipe. “I have your gun!” she cried, pointing the weapon in his general direction.

  He slowed momentarily, cocked his head as if debating the extent of the threat, then rushed heedlessly on. Winnifred pushed Dorothy in William’s direction, grasped the revolver with both hands, and fired off three or four shots, one after the other, eyes closed. St. Ives dove onto his chest, rolling against the wall of the stairwell, as he watched Billy Deener sail over backward and tumble to the floor below, then roll six feet toward the center of the room, his hands over his head, before scrambling away toward the kitchen. The back door slammed in his wake. Kelso Drake staggered into the room below, then abruptly disappeared after he looked up to see the smoking pistol in the hands of Winnifred Keeble.

  The Keebles ushered a stumbling and bewildered Dorothy along to the now empty room, all of them intent only on reaching the street. Fearf
ul that they wouldn’t be quick enough, Keeble bent over and scooped the drugged girl into his arms, tilting dangerously for a moment before tossing her just a bit so that she settled in and balanced. St. Ives crouched halfway up the second floor stairs, watching the toymaker and his wife disappear below. He turned, bolted for the top landing, and burst out onto a deserted corridor, lit dimly by gaslamps in the shape of brass cupids, clinging at intervals along the wall.

  Twenty feet along, the corridor opened onto the great hall that St. Ives had been denied a look at ten days earlier. He stepped toward it, wafering himself against the wall to peer out over the high, open room, fearful that he’d be seen from below. No one, however, was in the room save Kelso Drake, who limped along across the floor, his head now swathed in bandages. A low murmur arose, as if he were cursing under his breath. Then he shouted at someone unseen about bringing the brougham around. There sounded an answering shout, then a grunt from Drake, then another shout about Deener having “taken the other box.”

  “Good!” cried Drake, struggling to open a leather bag, the clasp of which refused to cooperate. The millionaire flung it against the back of a velvet couch with a fury that astonished St. Ives, and set to kicking the bag about the room like a football, dancing atop it until he’d stomped the clasp into submission. Then, yanking open the bag, he tore apart the doors of a broad, mirrored buffet, and yanked out a Keeble box, dropping it into the bag and hurrying out of sight. A moment later the front door banged shut and silence reigned. The house, no doubt, contained any number of people, hidden away from daylight and activity like bats in caves.

  St. Ives wasted no time. He had no desire to confront murderers or to hide behind potted plants. He would find a way into the strange ship that sat toadlike in the center of the room below. It was apparently nothing more than a curious ornament, like a china vase or a marble cupid, the peculiar bric-a-brac of a millionaire, polished, no doubt, by a cleaning woman with a rag, who assumed it to be some sort of inexplicable and filthy contrivance for the gratification of the abhorrent appetites of wealthy customers. It was thought to be a sort of giant Pinkle, perhaps, the uses of which were veiled from the sight of the uncorrupted.