For a moment their basket still tossed on the surface of the water. Then it was tugged down into the depths, where it hung suspended just below the surface. The still-moored balloon flattened itself against the sea, humping across the rolling swell, the gasses inside snapping the seams apart with Gatling-gun bursts of popping, the hot air inside whooshing into the atmosphere as if a giant were treading the thing flat.
Within minutes the deflated canvas followed the basket down like a fleeing squid and was gone, and St. Ives and Hasbro trod water, dubious about their obvious success. If it weren’t for the sloop sending a boat out after them, they would have drowned, and no doubt about it. Parsons, seeing that clearly, welcomed them aboard with a hearty lot of guffawing through his beard.
“Quite a display,” he said to St. Ives as the professor slogged toward a forward cabin. “That was as profitable an example of scientific method as I can remember. I trust you took careful notes. There was a look on your face, man—I could see it even at such a distance as that—a look of pure scientific enlightenment. If I were an artist I’d sketch it out for you...” He went on this way, Parsons did, laughing through his beard and twigging St. Ives all the way back to Dover, after leaving the area encircled with red-painted buoys.
At the very moment that they were aloft over the Strait, I was aloft in the dirigible, watching the gray seas slip past far below, and captain of nothing for the moment but my own fate. I was bound for Sterne Bay. The business of the icehouse had become clear to me while I lounged in Norway. Days had passed, though, since my confrontation with Captain Bowker, and in that time just about anything could have happened. I might rush back to find them all gone, having no more need of ice. On the other hand, I might easily find a way to do my part.
At the Crown and Apple I discovered that St. Ives and Hasbro hadn’t yet returned from their balloon adventure. Parsons was gone too. I was alone, and that saddened me. Parsons’s company would have been better than nothing. I sat on the edge of the bed contemplating a pint or two and a nap, wanting to escape my duty by going to sleep—drink and sleep being a substitute, albeit a poor one, for company. Sitting there reminded me of that last fateful knock on the door, though—reminded me that while I slept, no end of frightful business might be transpiring. Who could say that the door mightn’t swing open silently and an infernal machine, fuse sputtering, mightn’t roll like a melon into the center of the floor...
A nap was out of the question. But what would I do instead? I would go to the icehouse. There was no percentage in my pretending to be Abner Benbow any longer. Might I disguise myself? A putty nose and a wig might accomplish something. I dismissed the idea. That was the sort of thing they would expect. My only trump card was that they would have no notion of my having returned to Sterne Bay.
Still, I wouldn’t take any unnecessary risks. I was ready for them now. I went out through the second-story door at the back of the inn, and down rickety steps that led out past a weedy bit of garden and through a gate, right to the edge of the bay. A half score of rowboats were serried along a dock of rotting wooden planks that ran out into the water fifty good yards or so before becoming a mere thicket of broken pilings. There was no one about.
The tide was out, leaving a little stretch of shingle running along beside a low stone seawall. I clambered down and picked my way along the shingle, thinking to emerge into the village some distance from the Apple, so that if they were onto me, and someone was watching the inn, I’d confound them.
Some hundred yards down, I slipped back over the seawall and followed a narrow boardwalk between two vine-covered cottages, squeezing out from between them only a little ways down from where my beggar man was shot before he could borrow any money from me. I hiked along pretty briskly toward the icehouse, but the open door of The Hoisted Pint brought me up short.
I had never discovered whether my rubber elephant inhabited a room there, largely because I had been coy, playing the detective, and was overcome by the woman behind the counter, who, I was pretty sure, had taken me for a natural fool. The truth of it is that I’m too easily put off by an embarrassment. This time I wouldn’t be. I angled toward the door, up the steps, and into the foyer. She stood as ever, meddling with receipts, and seemed not to recognize me at all. My hearty, “Hello again,” merely caused her to squint.
She pushed her spectacles down her nose and looked at me over them. “Yes?” she said.
Somehow the notion of her having forgotten me, after all the rigamarole just a few days earlier, put an edge on my tone. I was through being pleasant. I can’t stand cheeky superiority in people, especially in clerks and waiters, who have nothing to recommend them but the fact of their being employed. What was this woman but a high-toned clerk? Perhaps she owned the inn; perhaps she didn’t. There was nothing in any of it that justified her putting on airs.
“See here,” I said, leaning on the counter. “I’m looking for a woman and her son. I believe they’re staying here or at any rate were staying here last week. They look remarkably alike, frighteningly so, if you take my meaning. The son, who might be as old as thirty, carries with him an India-rubber elephant that makes a noise.”
“A noise?” she said, apparently having digested nothing of the rest of my little speech. The notion of an elephant making a noise, of my having gone anatomical on her, had shattered her ability to understand the clearest sort of English, had obliterated reason and logic.
“Never mind the noise,” I said, losing my temper. “Disregard it.” I caught myself, remembering St. Ives’s dealings with the landlady at the Crown and Apple. Tread softly, I reminded myself, and I forced a smile. “That’s right. It’s the woman and her son that I wanted to ask you about. She’s my mother’s cousin, you see. I got a letter in the post, saying that she and her son—that would be, what? my cousin twice removed, little Billy, we used to call him, although that wasn’t his name, not actually—anyway, that she’s here on holiday, and I’m anxious to determine where she’s staying.”
The woman still looked down her nose at me, waiting for me to go on, as if what I had said so far hadn’t made half enough sense, couldn’t have begun to express what it was I wanted.
I winked at her and brassed right along. “I asked myself, ‘Where in all of Sterne Bay is my mother’s favorite cousin likely to stay? Why, in the prettiest inn that the town has to offer. That’s the ticket.’ And straightaway I came here, and I’m standing before you now to discover whether she is indeed lodged at this inn.”
That ought to have made it clear to the woman, and apparently it did, for the next thing she said was, “What is the lady’s name?” in a sort of schoolteacher’s voice, a tone that never fails to freeze my blood—doubly so this time because I hadn’t any earthly idea what the woman’s name was.
“She has several,” I said weakly, my brain stuttering. “In the Spanish tradition. She might be registered under Larson, with an o.”
I waited, drumming my fingers on the oak counter as she perused the register. Why had I picked Larson? I can’t tell you. It was the first name that came to mind, like Abner Benbow.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at me.
“Perhaps...” I said, gesturing toward the book. She hesitated, but apparently couldn’t think of any good reason to keep it away from me; there was nothing in what I asked to make her suspicious, and she wouldn’t, I suppose, want to insult the favored cousin several times removed of one of her registered guests. So she pushed her glasses back up her nose, sniffed at me, and turned the book around on the counter.
Fat lot of good it would do me. I didn’t know what the woman’s name was. What sort of charade was I playing? The rubber elephant had been my only clue, and that hadn’t fetched any information out of her. If I brought it back into the conversation now, she’d call the constable and I’d find myself strapped to a bed in Colney Hatch. I was entirely at sea, groping for anything at all to keep me afloat.
I gave the list a perfunctory glance, rea
dy to thank her and leave. One of the names nearly flew out at me: Pule, Leona Pule.
Suddenly I knew the identity of the madman in the coach. I knew who the mother was. I seemed to know a thousand things, and from that knowledge sprang two thousand fresh mysteries. It had been Willis Pule that had stolen my elephant. I should have seen it, but it had been years since he had contrived a wormlike desire for my wife Dorothy, my fiancée then. You wouldn’t call it love; not if you knew him. He went mad when he couldn’t possess her, and very nearly murdered any number of people. He was an apprentice of Dr. Narbondo at the time, but they fell out, and Pule was last seen insane, comatose in the back of Narbondo’s wagon, being driven away toward an uncertain fate.
I noted the room number. They hadn’t left. They might be upstairs at the moment. The nonsense in the coach—his taking the elephant—was that a charade? Was that his way of toying with me? Was it Willis Pule that had shot my beggar man? I thanked the woman at the counter and stepped away up the shadowy stairs, half thinking to discover whether from room 312 a man might have a clear rifle shot down toward the green.
I’ll admit it: right then I was foolishly proud of myself for being “on the case,” and was half wondering about the connection between Pule’s grandfather and the elder Narbondo, which mirrored, if I saw things aright, the relationship between Pule and the doctor. How did Higgins fit, though? Had he discovered references to the lost alchemical papers that had ruined Mrs. Pule’s family? Had he thought to revive Narbondo in order to enlist his aid in finding them? And now they were all skulking about in Sterne Bay, perhaps, carrying out their deadly plans for the machine, waiting for the ransom, thawing Narbondo out slowly at the icehouse.
I felt awfully alone at the moment, and wished heartily that St. Ives and Hasbro weren’t off doing whatever they were doing. The stairs creaked. The evening sunlight filtering through the landing windows was insufficient, and the deepening shadows above me seemed to be a waiting ambush as I stepped cautiously out onto the dim third-floor landing.
An empty hallway stretched away in either direction. Room 312 was either up or down; it didn’t matter to me, for it was clear at once that the landing window would suffice if what you wanted to do was shoot a man. The iron hinges of the double casement were rusted. I got onto my hands and knees and peered at the floor in the failing light. It was swept clean, except for right along the floor moldings, where flakes of rust dusted the very corner. The window wasn’t opened very often; but it had been recently. The varnished wood of the sill was etched with a scraped indentation where someone had forced open the jammed casement, the wood beneath the scratch still fresh and clean, barely even dusty.
I slipped the latch and pulled, but the old window, swollen by sea air and the wet spring weather, was jammed shut. I wiggled it open just far enough to wedge my fingers in behind it, and then it was easy enough to work the window open, scraping it again across the sill. I leaned out then, peering through the gloom toward the green where the beggar had died.
The sounds of the village settling into evening struck me as being very pleasant, and the rush of sea wind in my face awakened me from the morbid reverie of dread that I’d slipped into while climbing the darkened stairs. I could even see the lights of the Crown and Apple, and they reminded me of supper and a pint. But then I looked down three long stories to the paving stones of the courtyard below, and with a dreadful shudder I was reminded of danger in all its manifold guises, and I bent back into the safety of the hallway, imagining sudden hands pushing against the small of my back, and me tumbling out and falling headlong... Being handed a bomb in a basket has that effect on me.
I knew what I had to know. Confrontations would accomplish nothing, especially when I had no idea on earth what it was, exactly, I would discover upon knocking on the door of the Pules’ room. Better to think about it over supper.
I forced the window shut, then stood up and turned around, thinking to steal back down the stairs and away. But I found myself staring into the face of the ghastly Mrs. Pule, the woman in Godall’s shop.
MY ADVENTURE AT THE HOISTED PINT
I gasped out a sort of hoarse yip while she grinned out of that melon face of hers—a hollow grin, empty of any real amusement. She pointed a revolver at me.
Down the hall we went. I would be visiting their room after all, and I’ll admit that I didn’t like the notion a bit. What would St. Ives do? Whirl around and disarm her? Talk her out of whatever grisly notion she had in mind? Prevail upon her better judgment? I didn’t know how to do any of that. St. Ives wouldn’t have gotten himself into this mess in the first place.
She knocked twice on the door of the room, then paused, then knocked once. It swung open, but nobody stood there; whoever had opened the door was hidden behind it, not wanting to be seen. Who would it be? Captain Bowker, perhaps, waiting to lambaste me with a truncheon. I couldn’t have that. Ignoring the revolver, I ducked away to the left into the room and spun around to face whoever it was that would emerge when the door swung shut.
It was the lunatic son—Willis Pule. He peeked out coyly, just his head, and his mother had to snatch the door shut because he didn’t want to let go of it. She reached across and pinched him on the ear, and his coy smile evaporated, replaced by a look of theatrical shock, which disappeared in turn when he got a really good glimpse at the fright that must have been plain on my face. Then, suddenly happy, he affected the wide-eyed and roundmouthed demeanor of the fat man in the comical drawing, the one who has just that moment noted the approach of someone bearing an enormous plate of cream tarts. Pule pulled his right hand from behind his back and waved my elephant at me.
There was a buzzing just then, and the woman strode across to where the outlet of a speaking tube protruded from the wall. She slid open its little hatch-cover, jammed her ear against it, listened, and then, speaking into the tube, she said, “Yes, we’ve got him.” She listened again and said, “No, in the hallway.” And after another moment of listening she snickered out, “Him? Not hardly,” and closed the hatch-cover and shut off the tube.
She had obviously just spoken to the landlady. The place was a rat’s nest. Everything was clear to me as I slumped uninvited into a stuffed chair. All my detective work was laughable; I’d been toyed with all along. Even the elephant under the potted plant—that had been the work of the landlady too. She had snatched it away, of course, when I’d gone out through the door. She was the only one who was close enough to have got to it and away again before I had come back in. And all the rigamarole about my mother’s cousin with the improbable names... She must have taken me for a child after that, watching me stroll away up the stairs to my probable doom. “Him, not hardly...” I grimaced. I thought I knew what that meant, and I couldn’t argue with it. Well, maybe it would serve me some good in the end; maybe I could turn it to advantage. I would play the witless milksop, and then I would strike. I tried to convince myself of that.
Willis Pule tiptoed across to a pine table with a wooden chair alongside it. His tiptoeing was exaggerated, this time like a comic actor being effusively quiet, taking great silent knee-high steps. What was a madman but an actor who didn’t know he was acting, in a play that nobody else had the script for? He sat in the chair, nodding at me and working his mouth slowly, as if he were chewing the end of a cigar. What did it all mean, all his mincing and posing and winking? Nothing. Not a damned thing. All the alterations in the weather of his face were nonsense.
He laid the elephant on the table and removed its red jumbo pants with a sort of infantile glee. Then he patted his coat pocket, slipped out a straight razor, and very swiftly and neatly sawed the elephant’s ears off. A look of intense pity and sadness shifted his eyes and mouth, and then was gone.
I forgot to breathe for a moment, watching him. It wasn’t the ruining of the toy that got to me. I had built the thing, after all, and I’ve found that a man rarely regrets the loss of something he’s built himself; he’s always too aware of the flaws in it,
of the fact that it wants a hat, but it’s too late to give it one. It was the beastly cool way that he pared the thing up—that’s what got to me: the way he watched me out of the corner of his eye, and looked up once to wink at me and nod at the neat bit of work he was accomplishing, almost as if to imply that it was merely practice, sawing up the elephant was. And, horribly, he was dressed just like his mother, too, still got up in the same florid chintz.
His mother walked past him, ignoring him utterly. I hoped that she might take the razor away from him. A razor in the hands of an obvious lunatic, after all... But she didn’t care about the razor. She rather approved of it, I think.
“Willis likes to operate on things,” she said matter-of-factly, the word operate effecting a sort of ghastly resonance in my inner ear. I nodded a little, trying to smile, as if pleased to listen to the chatter of a mother so obviously proud of her son. “He cut a bird apart once, and affixed its head to the body of a mouse.”
“Ah,” I said.
She cocked her head and favored me with a horrid grimace of sentimental wistfulness. “It lived for a week. He had to feed it out of a tiny bottle, poor thing. It was a night-and-day job, ministering to that helpless little creature. A night-and-day job. It nearly wore him out. And then when it died I thought his poor heart would break, like an egg. He enshrined it under the floorboards along with the others. Held a service and all.”
I shook my head, wondering at the notion of a heart breaking like an egg. They were both barmy, and no doubt about it. And given Pule’s years in apprenticeship with Narbondo, all this stuff about vivisection very likely wasn’t just talk. I glanced over at the table. Pule had managed to stuff a piece of candle through the holes where the beast’s ears had been. He lit it with a match at both ends, so that the twin flames shot out on either side of its head, melting the wax all over the tabletop and filling the room with the reek of burning rubber.
Lord Kelvin's Machine (Langdon St. Ives) Page 12
