St. Ives, however, was distracted by a scuffling and shouting off to his right, beyond the bonfire, which blazed now with increased ferocity, fed by a hail of limbs and forest debris tossed by the enthusiastic mob. St. Ives stepped along toward the scuffle when he saw amid it the head and shoulders of Theophilus Godall. Bill Kraken sprang into view just then, hurrying toward St. Ives, carrying his Keeble box like a trophy.
Willis Pule writhed and grunted, heaving in a tangle of grasping fanatics that included Shiloh the New Messiah. Godall circled round, intent on the box that Pule clutched. Jack Owlesby circled gamely beside him, looking for an opportunity. Pule shrieked; the box jumped out of his hands and was snatched by a beefy young man in a soiled robe. Shiloh hauled the box away from the man and lurched toward clear ground, jabbering excitedly, having no earthly idea which of the many strange boxes he possessed, but certain that the lot of them were somehow holy and somehow rightfully his.
Jack Owlesby strode along after him. The several parishioners who made as if to stop Jack found themselves peering at the business end of Godall’s pistol. Jack reached past the old man and snatched the box, leaping away toward the blimp. Shiloh turned, an unuttered shriek stretching his mouth. Godall, smiling calmly, thrust the Pinkle into the old man’s outstretched hands.
“What!” cried the evangelist, setting in to pitch the thing away. He saw it clearly for the first time even as he threw it. His eyes, yellow in the light of the fire, seemed to expand like balloons. He checked his throw, warbling out a little deflating cry. But it was too late. The Pinkle threw out a spoonful of sparks that whirled around the thrusting rubber head and flew in a wheeling arc into a stand of shadowy bracken and broom that muffled the strange noises and lights emitted by the orb.
The evangelist stiffened, his mouth going suddenly slack. Jack was beyond his reach. The bird he’d had momentarily in hand had flown. But here was another in the bush. He turned, ignoring Godall, who made no move to stop him. In a second he was gone, creeping through the dark shrubs on his hands and knees, as unheeding of the apocalyptic gyrations on the Heath roundabout him as if he’d been one of Narbondo’s ghouls.
The evening, in the space of five minutes, had begun to look very satisfactory to St. Ives. Here was Jack Owlesby, toting a recovered Keeble box. Here was Bill Kraken, toting another. There was Theophilus Godall with yet another. St. Ives smiled at Jack and reached out to shake the lad’s hand. Evil, it was clear, was fairly literally being pummeled. Jack grinned, the flames roared, the Captain shouted, and Bill Kraken, with in alarming suddenness, pitched forward toward the edge of the fire.
Behind him, his face bleeding, his right eye shut, his left arm dangling uselessly, crouched a lunatic Kelso Drake. Kraken shouted and threw out his hands. The Keeble box set sail as if shot from a catapult. St. Ives leaped for it, knocking it askew in its flight, saving it from the fire but sending it cartwheeling toward where the enigmatic ghoul reclined in his chair. The box struck him on the chin, snapped his head down onto his chest, and landed in his lap.
With an oath, Drake limped forward, grimacing murderously. But there was Godall, smiling in the circle of firelight, his pistol drawn and mimed at Drake’s chest. The millionaire lurched to a stop, raising his bands.
A cry arose from the crowd. St. Ives turned toward the blimp, expecting a revelation. But the blimp sat silent and dark on the Heath, surrounded by scientists scribbling in notepads, casting looks at the insistent Captain who held the sputtering Parsons by the collar.
Another cry. Hands pointed. It was the corpse in the chair, stirring. His back straightened; his fists clenched; air gasped through his closed teeth. The Captain released Parsons, who goggled at the corpse as it stood upright, dragging the ropes loose from where they were entangled among the springs of the chair. It held the box aloft, almost with reverence.
“Lord have mercy,” muttered Kraken. Jack stood mute. The ghoul shuffled forward, bearing the Keeble box.
“Homunculus!” whispered St. Ives. Godall nodded beside him, his pistol disappeared. In his right hand now was St. Ives’ aerator, in his left was a handful of Pule’s jacket, the murderous student of alchemy slouching beside him like a man stuffed with rags, his mouth agape. Thousands of pairs of eyes watched the dumb show on the heath.
The ghoul hunched toward Parsons, who stepped back, regretting suddenly that he’d gotten rid of the severed head he’d been given earlier. Would this ghoul demand it? Or would it hand Parsons yet another inexplicable item? What, for God’s sake, was in the damned box?
But the ghoul strode past him unhindered, toward the gondola where stood the strident Birdlip. Only Captain Powers had the temerity to follow him. Parsons said nothing. The Captain fell in behind, hearing as he did the incessant demanding voice that jabbered from the Keeble box in the ghoul’s hand.
Dr. Birdlip, suddenly, seemed to shake himself. Those on the edge of the crowd gasped. Was it the wind? A trick of moonlight? Birdlip released his hold on the wheel — a grip he’d maintained without pause for a decade. Finger bones picked at the rotted cords that lashed him to the gondola. The cords fell. Birdlip turned, jerking forward toward the little swinging stile door fallen back on its hinge. Firelight danced and leaped. Parsons gaped. St. Ives barely breathed. Godall stood bemused. The Captain nodded politely to the skeleton of Doctor Birdlip, then bent suddenly and picked something up from the floor of the gondola. St. Ives knew what it was. Birdlip seemed to heed nothing — nothing but the proferred box, which the ghoul relinquished, seeming to deflate almost and stagger just a bit, backwards, stepping toward the stuffed chair as if suddenly fatigued to the point of collapse. Parsons began to step along after him, wondering at the nature of the animate corpse that gaped at him, opening and shutting its mouth like a conger eel.
“Speak, man!” cried the biologist.
The corpse dropped dead into the chair.
Birdlip jerked down onto the green in quick little lurching, stiff-jointed steps, holding the Keeble box, his skull canted sideways as if in perplexity. The dead silence was broken by the utterance of an immense sob, as Willis Pule, taking the startled Godall by surprise, twisted out of his coat in a rush. Pule sailed down on Birdlip, ducking under a murderous blow aimed at him by the stalwart Captain. But Pule, apparently, hadn’t theft in mind as a motive. All such practical pursuits had been abandoned; it was mayhem and ruin he coveted, gibbering destruction, the mindless, drooling desire to tear the weary world to bits.
In an instant he snatched the box from Birdlip, who tottered there on the green, suddenly enervated. Pule raised the box overhead and smashed it to the green. The clever joinery of the Keeble box flew asunder as the thing cracked against a stone. The lid wheeled away into the astonished crowd. Ten thousand mouths gaped in wide wonder to see a tiny man tumble forth — the fabled homunculus — and leap to his feet on the green free of his prison at long last. Even though he wore a hat he couldn’t have been eight inches tall.
What, wondered the treetop crowds and the staring masses on the heath, what thing was this that ran dead away toward the skeletal Birdlip, past the goggling Parsons, through spring grasses that waved round his ears, step by tiny step? It clearly had a destination in mind. What, conceivably, could it desire?
Willis Pule clutched at his head, his wild loathing played out. He was reduced to a thing as empty as the airy gondola sitting like the bleached bones of a dinosaur on the green behind the teetering Birdlip. Theophilus Godall watched Pule creep away into shadow. He’d allow the spent thing to wander away unpursued, to take up a life, perhaps, of begging or of geeking in some low sideshow. A great wind blew up out of the south, buffeting the dark dirigible, which swayed on its makeshift moorings, threatening to tumble over onto its side like a wounded beast. The crowd gasped and surged away, fearful of being crushed. The homunculus confronted Doctor Birdlip, spoke to him, pointed, it seemed, toward the heavens. It doffed its clever little hat and gestured animatedly with it. Then, with a startling alacrity, it leap
ed onto the swaying skeleton, grappling its way into the doctor’s ribcage, peering out as if through the bars of Newgate Prison. Birdlip took a tentative step forward, animate once again, and, to the degree that a skull can reflect emotion, he seemed smitten with sudden elation, perhaps a flowering of the sense of wanderlust that had motivated his journey through the heavens.
A cheer arose from those close enough to perceive this sudden illumination. Jack Owlesby, perhaps, cheered most loudly of all, but his cheer was cut short when, with a sudden whump, he was struck in the small of the back, and the box that he carried flew from his hands. Kelso Drake, having gone down the same twisted road as Willis Pule, shrieked past Godall into the firelight and endeavored to dance on the box, to smash it up. He was stopped cold, however, by the simultaneous effort of Godall and St. Ives, and by the curious behavior of the fallen box.
It shuddered there in front of the teetering Birdlip, in front of the astonished Parsons, clearly illuminated in the fireglow. Dr. Birdlip jerked round and stood still. Kelso Drake stepped a pace back toward the fire. The top of the box sprang away with a suddenness that brought a cry from any of a number of treetops. And very slowly and majestically there arose from the depths of the box the bird-eating cayman, snatching up one then another and another and another of the little fowl before sinking again into his tomb.
“Hooray!” shouted a hundred voices, a thousand. The cheer was taken up by the multitude, who could have no earthly idea what it was they cheered. And with the salutory cries fueling his departure, Dr. Randal Birdlip, himself piloted now by the little man within him, clacked jerkily over the grass, Parsons at his heels. He stopped at the side of the starship, turned and gazed one last long moment at the jeweled lights of London, bent over and unknotted the rope from round one of the little feet of the starship and clambered woodenly into the open hatch. The hatch slammed shut. Emerald lights burned suddenly within the ship. The ground seemed to shudder momentarily, and in the wink of an eye the ship was nothing but a speck of fire in the vast heavens, the intrepid Dr. Birdlip piloting the craft of the homunculus among the countless stars that hung suspended above the streetcorners of space like gaslamps.
Epilogue
St. Ives didn’t rue the loss of the ship for a moment. He’d had his voyage. And the future, he was certain, held the promise of more. Here was Dorothy Keeble, recovered, clutching Jack’s arm, the two of them smiling at the Captain, who held before them an open Keeble box in which lay a tremendous emerald, big as a fist and seeming to burn green and immense in the firelight.
A moaning filled the night. Branches tossed on the trees. The tall grasses blew in undulating waves. The blimp canted sideways, mooring lines snapped, and people scurried like bugs, running to get out of the way. Slowly and majestically the blimp toppled over, tearing itself to bits, escaping gases whooshing through rents in the fabric of the thing. The ribby gondola, hauled onto its side, broke apart like a wooden ship beaten against rocks by high seas. And first one, then twenty, then a hundred onlookers rushed in to salvage a bit of it as a souvenir. Wood snapped. Fabric ripped. Great sheets of deflated blimp were stripped loose, clutched at by uncounted hands and rent to fragments. Within moments the once rotund blimp was nothing but a flattened bit of wreckage that had disappeared beneath an antlike swarm of Londoners. An hour later, when the crowds, finally, abandoned their pursuit of relics and surged wearily homeward at last, not a fragment, not a scrap of Birdlip’s craft remained on the heath.
St. Ives and his companions kicked through the grass, gazing at the place where the blimp had lain. Bill Kraken said that the loss of it was shameful. William Keeble wondered at the fate of its engine, carried happily away in pieces by drunken green-grocers and costermongers and beggars who hadn’t the foggiest notion of the magic it had once contained. Jack and Dorothy gazed at each other with an intensity of expression that seemed far removed from any wondering over disappeared blimps, an expression very like the one shared by Captain Powers and Nell Owlesby, who stood hand in hand beside Jack and Dorothy.
Ten paces away sat Parsons, astride the arm of the stuffed chair, the corpse slumped beside him, restful now and refusing to respond to Parson’s chatter. “Sheep,” the biologist insisted, “aren’t like you and me. They produce vast quantities of methane gas. Very inflammatory, I assure you…”
St. Ives strode across and laid a hand on the poor man’s shoulder. Parsons grinned at him. “Telling this fellow about the gaseous mysteries of grass feeders.”
“Fine,” said St. Ives. “But he seems to have fallen asleep.”
“His eyes, though…” began Parsons, glancing at the aerator box that St. Ives held in the crook of his arm. He shuddered, as if gripped by a sudden chill. “You don’t mean to open that here, do you?”
St. Ives shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “Wouldn’t think of it.”
Parsons seemed relieved. “Tell me,” he said slowly, looking askance at the head of Joanna Southcote, which lay now up to its nonexistent ears in weeds beside the stuffed chair, “does the night seem uncommonly full of dead men and severed heads to you?”
St. Ives nodded, searching for words with which to respond to Parson’s very earnest question. His search, though, came to an abrupt end with the sudden issuance of Shiloh the New Messiah, his face haggard, his cloak stained and mired, the ghastly Marseilles Pinkle tooting in his grip, its rubber head shooting in and out, throwing sparks like a pinwheel and smelling of burnt rubber and unidentifiable decay. With a mad cry the old man fell forward onto his face and lay still, his torn and soiled robes splayed out around him. Dead, apparently, he hopped once or twice as the Pinkle, trapped beneath him, continued to sputter and whir before rolling free.
St. Ives shook his head. Parsons arose and very slowly stepped across to where the Pinkle spun itself out on the green, the rubber head tooting out a final, blubbery whistle. Parsons shook his head ponderously and wandered away into the dark, weaving toward Hampstead like a rudderless boat.
St. Ives watched him in silence, wondering whether his own reputation as a scientist had in any way been cemented by the night’s odd events, and determining finally that he didn’t really care a rap one way or the other. The evening had taken its toll, certainly, on the good as well as the wicked. His companions trudged along toward the wagon, on the seat of which sat a placid Hasbro. St. Ives was suddenly dead tired. The morrow would see him at Harrogate. There was work ahead; that was sure. “Well,” he said to Godall, “so ends the earnest endeavors of the Trismegistus Club. And with a modicum of success, too.”
“For the moment,” said Godall enigmatically. “We haven’t, possibly, seen the last of our millionaire. But I rather believe him to be a spent force. I’ll call upon him myself in a day or two.”
“What ever became of Willis Pule, do you think?” asked St. Ives. “He was utterly mad there at the last.”
Godall nodded. “Madness, I’m certain, is the wages of villainy. He met an old friend, in fact.”
“What’s that?” asked St. Ives, surprised.
“The hunchback.”
“Narbondo!”
Godall nodded. “In a dog cart full of carp. Pule lay face down among them, comatose.”
“Poor devil,” said St. Ives. “I don’t suppose Narbondo had come to his rescue.”
“Not very bloody likely,” said Godall darkly, and the two men hoisted themselves onto the wagon, sitting with their feet dangling over the back so that they faced the sweep of hill on which, two hours earlier, had sat the long-awaited blimp.
Ahead of them, some distance away, trudged half of London, not a man or woman among them with the least understanding of the mysteries that had supplied the evening’s entertainment. What understanding have any of us, wondered St. Ives. Not a nickel’s worth, not really. Not even Godall, for all the man’s intellectual prowess. Intellect wouldn’t answer here, wouldn’t explain why the cold and measured tread of science had strayed from chartered paths and wandered unsuspecting
into the curious moonlight of Hampstead Heath. Poor Parsons. What did he make of the blimp now? Would he awaken at midday having somehow clipped the evening apart and reassembled it into a more tolerable pattern, like a man who whistles his way through a dark and lonely night, then abandons his fears in the light of a noonday sun?
St. Ives gazed with sleepy wonder at empty, receding green as the wagon bumped around a muddy swerve of road into Hampstead, the village dark now and silent. He tried to summon a picture of the blimp riding at anchor, of Doctor Birdlip visible beyond the slats of the wooden gondola, legs wide set to counter the roll of an airy swell. But the Heath lay empty above, the blimp fragmented, disappeared. And it seemed as if the strange craft had never been more than a ghostly will o’ the wisp, a bit of sleepy enchantment woven out of nothing, that whirled and faded now across the back of his closed eyes until he seemed to be sailing with it above the clouded landscape of a dream.
Two Views of a Cave Painting
I’m opposed to giving advice and making weighty statements on general principle; we’re wrong as often as not, and look like fools. But it’s safe to say this: ruination, utter ruination, might be as close to us now as is the proverbial snake, and but for the grace of the Deity and the cleverness of friends, we might at any moment find that by a slip of memory we’ve brought about the collapse of worlds.
I wouldn’t have thought it so. I’ve believed that there was room in our lives for casual error, that we could shrug and grin and suffer mild regret and the world would wag along for better or worse. Well, no more; recent events have proven me wrong. The slightest slip of the hand, the forgetting of the most trivial business, the uttering of an unremarkable bit of foolishness might plunge us, as Mr. Poe would have it, into the maelstrom. It fell out like this:
The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (the adventures of langdon st. ives) Page 35
