James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

“Perhaps too stupid.” The Professor looked thoughtful. “Rather like dealing with a dozen escaped loonies from Chigwell Hatch. Impossible to read them.”

“You’ve got a point there,” I said. In the heat of the recent victory, however, I was fired up, and determined to be on the offensive for once. “But we can’t simply allow them to storm in waving fizz bombs whenever they feel up to it. After all, there might be dozens of them.”

“I doubt it, sir, if you’ll pardon a word or two,” Hasbro put in. “If there were a quantity of them, they could have overpowered us easily. They are wary, I believe, because there are so few of them.”

“Quite so,” responded St. Ives. “And, more to the point, we’ve really little to fear from the handful we suppose are in the woods, as long, that is, as we stay alert. I believe it was Addison who said something about leaping over single foes to attack entire armies, and that, in fact, is just the point. When one’s roof leaks, one doesn’t merely place a bucket beneath the drip. One climbs atop the roof and jolly well plugs the hole. Do you follow me?”

I said that I did, and we left Hasbro standing guard with his elephant gun and a brass bell to ring if he needed reinforcements. The Professor and I returned to the manor. We were to sail at dusk — blast off, I should say — and we spent the remainder of the afternoon loading supplies and closing up shop. Birdlip’s manuscript caught my eye as I was hauling beakers of water, and I realized that the succulents and begonias were still a mystery to me. I picked the thing up and waved it at St. Ives. “About the manuscript,” I began, but the Professor interrupted me with his inscrutable smile.

“Ah, yes,” said he. “The false clue.”

“Quite,” said I, “but why? Why slip the pig men a worthless book?”

“Birdlip’s manuscript, my dear Owlesby, refers to certain plants — begonias, if you will, of outstanding girth, large as a man’s head, veritable trees. They shimmered, according to Birdlip and Kraken, and were surrounded by a halo, an aura of roseate darkness that suggested the black hole through which the two scientists had made an entrance into the universe where they had very much found themselves. These begonias appeared to be parasitical, attached as they were to the immense tangerine trees of which I have already spoken.”

“Immense?”

“Quite. Fully as large as the greater Norwegian alder, which, I needn’t add, is quite the largest tree on the globe, although it’s worthless for anything but firewood and the carving of figureheads. But do you know what the corker was?”

“I’m ashamed to say I do not.”

“Tangerines were sprouting and growing on the trees like…”

The Professor groped for a word.

“Like banshees,” I said helpfully.

“I don’t follow you,” said he. “The simile conveys no meaning to my mind.”

“It’s a general purpose word that I use for comparison. Works virtually anywhere.”

“Yes,” said he. “Well. Kraken advanced the hypothesis that these begonias were somehow connected to the black hole, and that energy, or something quite like it, was jolly well sailing through the hole from our universe into theirs.”

“A bleed-off, would you call it?”

“Exactly.”

“And that’s why the trees are big as legends and growing fruit like popping corn.” It only has to snow once before Jack Owlesby gets the drift, as my old mother used to say, and I could see in an instant what these filthy alien interlopers were up to and why they’d handed me a fizz bomb for my troubles.

“There you have it,” said St. Ives, shaking snuff onto the edge of his thumb.

“These aliens are drawing off the essential humors,” said I, by way of clarification.

“Filching our essences,” agreed the Professor. “And to bring up their plans with a round turn, I slipped an expurgated edition into the Museum and told old Dr. Lester that he was to release it only to you. The aliens, I found, tried to obtain the thing no less than eight times. Lester supposed it was the same whey-faced man dressed like lunacy each time. In his final attempt he was dressed as a red Indian, feathers protruding from his hat at a dozen angles and painted up like a grandee and wearing a pair of golden Arab slippers with the toes curled back in a point. Lester threatened to set the constable on him, and he fled through a rear exit and never made another attempt.”

“Who first put them on to Birdlip?”

“Kraken’s son, mad Bill.”

“Their agent?”

“I’m afraid so, poor devil. No fault of his own, though. They worked on his mind, what there was of it.”

“Ah,” I said sadly. “That explains the Fauntleroy suit and the wig. It was their idea.”

“Apparently so, though Lord knows why. The note was my own. I knew that you’d fetch the book from Lester, that the aliens would steal it and discover the false clue: that we blast off tomorrow, on the 24th.”

“The night of the full moon.”

“Just so. Actually,” he said, grinning like a grampus, “we blast off tonight.” He checked his pocket watch. “In an hour and a half exactly.”

With that the Professor tucked the unexpurgated copy of Birdlip’s manuscript into his coat and busied himself with a crate of tinned foods and a cask of ship’s biscuit. When we returned to the tower we found Hasbro watering yew sproutlets in the greenhouse on the second level. I was sharp enough from the outset to realize that these shrubs and ferns and such would provide us with the necessary oxygen. St. Ives’s craft was turned out like a ship of the line.

This is the part of the adventure where the minutes drag past like starfish, which, if you follow me, have enough legs to hie along like anything, but instead can do nothing but creep. Night had fallen an hour before, and the weather was exceptional — nothing between us and the hovering stars but vacant space, not even a cloud.

We popped right to it, sealing hatches, zipping up atmosphere bulwarks, setting gyros and elasto-turbans, battening hatches, and all that sort of thing. I was smitten by a sense of adventure, and had there been a bowline or a capstan bar I would have hauled upon it with the heartiest sort of heave-ho, the consummate deckhand. By half past eight we were strapped into cushioned loungettes in the prow. Hasbro unshipped the deadlights and found his way back to his own loungette, all of us silent as we gazed out through the thick glass of the portholes through the top of Chingford Tower, which was unlidded, roofless, open to the elements so as to reveal a circle of sky as through the lens of a telescope.

The Professor jabbed buttons, nodded meaningfully to Hasbro and I, and then reached across and heaved on a bloody great anti-something-or-other crank with silver wires sprouting from it like tentacles. There was a wild crash and clatter and a cacophonous whir reminiscent of a scourge of locusts setting up for a concert. In that moment there was a muffled explosion that brought the Professor up short. “What…?” he began to ask, but the entire tower quivered like a column of aspic, and we jolly well ripped out through the roofless roof like a comet trailing a universe of sparks.

I’ll admit that I myself was smug in my ignorance, and not only about our having given the pig men the slip. I had a hand, you see, in making earth safe from their depredations: we were more than a match for a gaggle of ill-dressed loonies. I could visualize them leaping to their feet about now, from where they were hunkered down in Chingford Forest, punching each other on the shoulder, leaping up and running hatless onto the meadow. Imagine my surprise when that’s precisely what I did see, not forty feet below us.