***
Two evenings earlier, on the night that St. Ives had waylaid Beezer the journalist, the comet had appeared in the eastern sky, ghostly and round like the moon reflected on a frosty window—just a circular patch of faint luminous cloud. But now it seemed fearfully close, as if it would drop out of the heavens toward the earth like a plumb bob toward a melon. St. Ives’s telescope, with its mirror of speculum metal, had been a gift from Lord Rosse himself, and he peered into the eyepiece now, tracking the flight of the comet for no other reason, really, than to while away the dawn hours. He slept only fitfully these days, and his dreams weren’t pleasant.
There was nothing to calculate; work of that nature had been accomplished weeks past by astronomers whose knowledge of astral mathematics was sufficient to satisfy both the Royal Academy and Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives wouldn’t dispute their figures. That the comet would spin dangerously close to the earth was the single point that all of them agreed upon. His desire in watching the icy planetoid, beyond a simple fascination with the mystery and wonder of the thing, was to have a look at the face of what might easily be his last great nemesis, a vast leviathan swimming toward them through a dark sea. He wondered if it was oblivion that was revealed by the turning earth.
Hasbro packed their bags in the manor. Their train left Kirk Hammerton Station at six. Dr. Narbondo, St. Ives had to assume, would discover that same morning that he had been foiled, that Beezer, somehow, had failed him. The morning Times would rattle in on the Dover train, ignorant of pending doom. The doctor would try to contact the nefarious Beezer, but Beezer wouldn’t be found. He’s taken ill, they would say on Fleet Street, repeating the substance of the letter St. Ives had sent off to Beezer’s employers. Beezer, they’d assure Narbondo, had been ordered south on holiday—to the coast of Spain. Narbondo’s forehead would wrinkle with suspicion, and the wrinkling would engender horrible curses and the gnashing of teeth. St. Ives almost smiled. The doctor would know who had thwarted him.
But the result would be, quite likely, the immediate removal of Narbondo and Hargreaves to the environs of northwestern Scandinavia. The chase, thought St. Ives tiredly, would be on. The comet loomed only a few days away, barely enough time for them to accomplish their task.
A door slammed in the manor. St. Ives slipped from his stool and looked out through the west-facing window of his observatory, waving to Hasbro who, in the roseate light of an early dawn, dangled a pocket watch from a chain and nodded to his employer. In a half hour they were away, scouring along the highroad toward the station in Kirk Hammerton, where St. Ives, Hasbro, and Jack Owlesby would leave for Ramsgate and the dirigible that would transport them to the ice and tundra of arctic Norway. If the labors of Bill Kraken were unsuccessful, if he couldn’t sabotage Lord Kelvin’s frightful machine, they would all know about it, along with the rest of suffering humanity, two days hence.
***
Bill Kraken crouched in the willows along the River Nidd, watching through the lacey tendrils the dark bulk of Lord Kelvin’s barn. The device had been finished two days earlier, the ironic result, to a degree, of his own labor—labor he wouldn’t be paid for. But money wasn’t of particular consequence anymore, not like it had been in the days of his squid merchanting or when he’d been rescued from the life of a lowly peapod man by the charitable Langdon St. Ives.
Kraken sighed. Poor St. Ives. There was suffering and there was suffering. Kraken had never found a wife, had never fathered children. He had been cracked on the head more often than he could remember, but so what? That kind of damage could be borne. The sort of blow that had struck St. Ives, though—that was a different thing, and Kraken feared sometimes that it would take a heavy toll on the great man before they all won through. Kraken wanted for nothing now, not really, beyond seeing St. Ives put right again.
In a cloth bag beside him wriggled a dozen snakes, collected from the high grass beyond the manor house. In a wire-screen cage beneath the snakes was a score of mice, hungry, as were the snakes, from days of neglect. A leather bellows dangled from his belt, and a hooded lantern from his right hand. No one else was on the meadow.
The Royal Academy had been glad to be quit of Ignacio Narbondo, who had taken ship for Oslo to effect his preposterous machinations. That was the rumor around Lord Kelvin’s barn. The Academy would reduce his threats to drivel now that the machine was built. Why Narbondo hadn’t followed through with his plan to alert the press no one could say, but it seemed to Secretary Parsons to be evidence that his threats were mere bluff. And that crackpot St. Ives had given up, too, thank God. All this had lightened the atmosphere considerably. A sort of holiday air had sprung up around what had been a business fraught with suspicion and doubt. Now the Academy was free to act without impediment
Kraken bent out from under the willows and set out across the meadow carrying his bundles. It would do no good to run. He was too old to be cutting capers on a meadow in the dead of night, and if he tripped and dropped his mice or knocked his lantern against a stone, his plan would be foiled utterly. In an hour both the moon and the comet would have appeared on the horizon and the meadow would be bathed in light. If he was sensible, he’d be asleep in his bed by then.
The dark bulk of the barn loomed before him, the pale stones of its foundation contrasting with the weathered oak battens above. Kraken ducked along the wall toward a tiny mullioned window beneath which extended the last six inches of the final section of brass pipe—the very pipe that Kraken himself had wrestled through a hole augered into the barn wall on that first day he’d helped Lord Kelvin align the things.
What, exactly, the pipe was intended to accomplish, Kraken couldn’t say, but somehow it was the focal point of the workings of the device. Beyond, some twenty feet from the barn and elevated on a stone slab, sat a black monolith, smooth as polished marble. Kraken had been amazed when, late the previous afternoon, Lord Kelvin had flung a ball peen hammer end over end at the monolith, and the collected workmen and scientists had gasped in wonder when the hammer had been soundlessly reflected with such force that it had sailed out of sight in the general direction of York. That the hammer had fallen to earth again, not a man of them could say. The reversal of the poles was to be accomplished, then, by emanating toward this monolith the collected magnetic rays developed in Lord Kelvin’s machine, thus both exciting and deflecting them in a circuitous pattern, and sending them off, as it were, astride a penny whirligig. It was too much for Kraken to fathom, but Lord Kelvin and his peers were the giants of electricity and mechanics. A job like this had been child’s play to them. Their heads weren’t like the heads of other men.
Kraken squinted through the darkness at the monolith, doubly black against the purple of the starry night sky, and wondered at the remarkable perspicacity of great scientists. Here sat the impossible machine, primed for acceleration on the morrow. Could Kraken, a man of admittedly low intellect, scuttle the marvelous device? Kraken shook his head, suddenly full of doubt. He had been entrusted with little else than the material salvation of humanity…Well, Kraken was just a small man with a small way of doing things. He had seen low times in his life, had mucked through sewers with murderers, and so he would have to trust to low means here. That was the best he could do.
He quit breathing and cocked an ear. Nothing but silence and the distant hooting of an owl greeted him on the night air. He untied the bellows from his belt and shook them by his ear. Grain and broken biscuits rattled within. He shoved the mouth of the bellows into the end of the brass tube and pumped furiously, listening to the debris clatter away, down the tilted pipe. Long after the last of the grain had been blown clear of the bellows, Kraken continued to manipulate his instrument, desperate to send the bulk of it deep into the bowels of the apparatus. Haste would avail him nothing here.
Finally satisfied, he tied the bellows once again to his belt and picked up the mouse cage. The beasts were tumultuous with excitement, stimulated, perhaps, by the evening constitutional, or se
nsing somehow that they were on the brink of an adventure of powerful magnitude. Kraken pressed the cage front against the end of the tube and pulled open its little door. The mice scurried around in apparent amazement, casting wild glances here and there, curious about a heap of shredded newspaper or the pink ear of a neighbor. Then, one by one, they filed away down the tube like cattle down a hill, sniffing the air, intent suddenly on biscuits and grain.
The snakes were a comparatively easy case. A round dozen of the beasts slithered away down the tube in the wake of the mice, anxious to be quit of their sack. Kraken wondered if he hadn’t ought to wad the sack up and shove it into the tube, too, in order to make absolutely sure that the beasts remained trapped inside. But the dangers of doing that were manifold. Lord Kelvin or some particularly watchful guard might easily discover the stopper before Kraken had a chance to remove it. They mustn’t, said St. Ives, discover that the sabotage had been the work of men—thus the mice and snakes. It might easily seem that the natural residents of the barn had merely taken up lodgings there, and thus the hand of Langdon St. Ives would go undetected.
It was very nearly within the hour that Bill Kraken climbed into bed. But his dreams were filled that night with visions of mice and snakes dribbling from the end of the tube and racing away into the darkness, having consumed the grain and leaving nothing behind sufficient to foul the workings of the dread machine. What could he do, though, save trust to providence? The shame of his failure—if failure it should be—would likely be as nothing next to the horrors that would beset them after Lord Kelvin’s success. God bless the man, thought Kraken philosophically. He pictured the aging lord, laboring night and day to complete his engine, certain that he was contributing his greatest gift yet to humankind. His disappointment would be monumental. It seemed almost worth the promised trouble to let the poor man have a try at it. But that, sadly, wouldn’t do. The world was certainly a sorrowful and contradictory place.
Norway
The bright April weather had turned stormy and dark by the time St. Ives and Hasbro had chuffed into Dover, and the North Sea was a tumult of wind-tossed waves and driving rain. St. Ives huddled now aboard the Ostende ferry, out of the rain beneath an overhanging deck ledge and wrapped in an oilcloth, legs spread to counter the heaving swell. His pipe burned like a chimney, and as he peered out at the roiling black of the heavens, equally cloudy thoughts drew his eyes into a squint and made him oblivious to the cold and wet. Had this sudden turn of arctic weather anything to do with the experimentation of the Royal Academy? Had they effected the reversal of the poles prematurely and driven the weather suddenly mad? Had Kraken failed? He watched a gray swell loom overhead, threatening to slam the ferry apart, only to sink suddenly into nothing as if having changed its mind, and then tower up once again overhead, sheets of flying foam torn from its crest and rendered into spindrift by the wind.
His plans seemed to be fast going wrong. The dirigible he had counted upon for transport had been “inoperable.” The fate of the earth itself hung in the balance, and the filthy dirigible was “inoperable.” They would all be inoperable by the end of the week. Jack Owlesby had stayed on in Ramsgate where a crew of nitwits fiddled with the craft, and so yet another variable, as the mathematician would say, had been cast into the muddled stew. Could the dirigible be made operable in time? Would Jack, along with the flea-brained pilot, find them in the cold wastes of arctic Norway? It didn’t bear thinking about. One thing at a time, St. Ives reminded himself. They had left Jack with a handshake and a compass and had raced south intending to follow Narbondo overland, trusting to Jack to take care of himself.
But where was Ignacio Narbondo? He must have set sail from Dover with Hargreaves hours earlier, apparently under a false name—except that the ticket agent could find no record of his having boarded the Ostende ferry. St. Ives had described him vividly: the hump, the tangle of oily hair, the cloak. No one could remember having seen him board. He might have got on unseen in the early morning, of course.
It was conceivable, just barely, that St. Ives had made a monumental error, or that Narbondo had tricked the lot of them, had been one up on them all along. He might at that moment be bound, say, for Reykjavik, intent on working his deviltry on the volcanic wastes of the interior of Iceland. He might be sitting in a comfortable chair in London, laughing into his hat. What would St. Ives do then? Keep going, like a windup tin soldier on the march. He could imagine himself simply ambling away into Scandinavian forests, circling aimlessly through the trees like a dying reindeer.
But then in Ostende the rain let up and the wind fell off, and the solid ground beneath his feet once again lent him a steadiness of purpose. In the cold station, a woman stirred a caldron of mussels, dumping in handfuls of shallots and lumps of butter. Aromatic steam swirled out of the iron pot in such a way as to make St. Ives lightheaded. “Mussels and beer,” he said to Hasbro, “would revive a body.”
“That they would, sir. And a loaf of bread, I might add, to provide bulk.”
“A sound suggestion,” said St. Ives, striding toward the woman and removing his hat. He liked the look of her immediately. She was stooped and heavy and wore a dress like a tent, and it seemed as if all the comets in the starry heavens couldn’t knock her off her pins. She dumped mussels, black and dripping, into a cleverly folded newspaper basket, heaping up the shells until they threatened to cascade to the floor. She winked at St. Ives, fished an enormous mussel from the pot, slid her thumbs into the hiatus of its open shell, and in a single swift movement pulled the mollusk open, shoved one of her thumbs under the orange flesh, and flipped the morsel into her open mouth. “Some don’t chew them,” she said, speaking English, “but I do. What’s the use of eating at all if you don’t chew them? Might as well swallow a toad.”
“Indubitably,” said St. Ives, happy enough to make small talk. “It’s the same way with oysters. I never could stand simply to allow the creatures to slide down my throat. I fly in the face of custom there.”
“Aye,” she said. “Can you imagine a man’s stomach, full of beasts such as these, whole, mind you, and sloshin’ like smelts in a bucket?” She dipped again into the caldron, picked out another mussel, and ate it with relish, then grimaced and rooted in her mouth with a finger. “Mussel pearl,” she said, holding up between thumb and forefinger a tiny opalescent sphere twice the size of a pinhead. She slid open a little drawer in the cart on which sat the caldron of mussels, and dropped the pearl in among what must have been thousands of the tiny orbs. “Can’t stand debris,” she said, grimacing.
The entire display rather took the edge off St. Ives’s appetite, and the heap of mussels in his basket, reclining beneath a coating of congealing butter and bits of garlic and shallot, began to remind him of certain unfortunate suppers he’d consumed at the Bayswater Club. He grinned weakly at the woman and looked around at the hurrying crowds, wondering if he and Hasbro hadn’t ought to join them.
“Man in here this afternoon ate one shell and all,” she said, shaking her head. “Imagine the debris involved. Must have given his throat bones some trouble, I daresay.”
“Shell and all?” asked St. Ives.
“That’s the exact case. Crunched away at the thing like it was a marzipan crust, didn’t he? Then he took another, chewed it up about halfway, saw what he was about, and spit the filthy thing against the wall there. You can see bits of it still, can’t you, despite the birds swarming round. There’s the smear of it against the stones. Do you see it there?—bit of brown paste is all it amounts to now.”
St. Ives stared at the woman. “Big man?”
“Who?”
“This fellow who ate the shells. Big, was he, and with a beard? Seemed ready to fly into a rage?”
“That’s your man, gents. Cursed vilely, he did, but not at the shells. It was at the poor birds, wasn’t it, when they come round to eat up what your man spit onto the wall there. You can see it there, can’t you? I never…”
“Was he in th
e company of a hunchback?”
“Aye,” said the woman, giving her pot a perfunctory stirring. “Greasy little man with a grin. Seemed to think the world is a lark. But it ain’t no lark, gentlemen. Here you’ve been, wasting my time this quarter hour, and not another living soul has bought a shell. You’ve frightened the lot of them off, is what I think, and you haven’t paid me a penny.” She glowered at St. Ives, then glowered at Hasbro.
“What time this afternoon?” asked St. Ives.
“Three hours past, say, or four. Might have been five. Or less.”
“Thank you.” St. Ives reached into his pocket for a coin. He dumped a half crown into her outstretched hand and left her blinking, he and Hasbro racing through the terminal toward the distant exit, each of them clutching a bag in one hand and a paper satchel of mussels in the other. The streets were wet outside, but the clouds were broken overhead and taking flight in the gray dusk, and the wind had simmered down to a billowy breeze. A bent man shambled past in trousers meant for a behemoth, clutching at a buttonless coat. St. Ives thrust his mussels at the man, meaning to do him a good turn, but his gesture was mistaken. The man cast him a look of mingled surprise and loathing, fetching the basket a swipe with his hand that sent the entire affair into the gutter. St. Ives hurried on without a word, marveling at misunderstood humanity and at how little space existed between apparent madness and the best of intentions.
The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 41
