James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

“ He needs it,” said Higgins, shaking his head. It was a brave act, considering, for the captain trained the rifle on Higgins again, dead between the eyes now, and started straight in to chuckle. Without an instant’s hesitation, Higgins’s hand went into the pocket of his lab coat and hauled out a corked bottle, which he reached across toward the captain.

The captain grabbed for it, and St. Ives jumped — just when the rifle was midway between Higgins and us. It was the little pleasure in baiting Higgins that tripped the captain up.

“Run, Jack!” shouted St. Ives when he threw himself at the captain. In a storm of arms and legs he was flying forward, into the air, sideways into Captain Bowker’s expansive stomach. The captain smashed over backward, his head banging against the floorboards and the bottle of elixir sailing away toward the stacked ice with Higgins diving after it. I was out both doors and into the night, running again toward the two houses before St. Ives’s admonition had faded in my ears. He had commanded me to run, and I ran, like a spooked sheep. Live to fight another day, I told myself.

And while I ran I waited for the sound of a shot. What would I do if I heard it? Turn around? Turning around wasn’t on my mind. I pounded down the little boardwalk and angled toward the seawall, leaping along like an idiot instead of slowing down to think things out. No one was after me, and I was out of sight of the icehouse, so there was no longer any chance of being shot. It was cold fear that drove me on. And it was regret at having run in the first place, at having left St. Ives alone, that finally slowed me down.

I was walking when I got to the water, breathing like an engine. Fog was blowing past in billows, and the moon was lost beyond it. In moments I couldn’t see at all, except for the seawall, which I followed along up toward the Apple, moving slowly now and listening to the dripping of water off eaves and to what sounded like the slow dip of oars out on the bay. Suddenly it was the heavy silence that terrified me, an empty counterpoint, maybe, to the now-faded sound of gunfire and the moment of shouting chaos that had followed it.

Where was I bound? Back to the Apple to hide? To lie up until I learned that my friends were dead and the villains gone away? Or to confront the Pules, maybe, who were awaiting me in my room, honing their instruments? It was time for thinking all of a sudden, not for running. St. Ives had got me out of the icehouse. I couldn’t believe that his heroics were meant simply to save my miserable life — they were, without a doubt, but I couldn’t admit to it — and so what I needed was a plan, any plan, to justify my being out of danger.

I just then noticed that a lantern glowed out to sea, corning along through the fog, maybe twenty yards offshore; you couldn’t really tell. The light bobbed like a will-o’-the-wisp, hanging from a pole affixed to the bow of a rowboat sculling through the mist. I stopped to finish catching my breath and to wait out my hammering heart, and I watched the foggy lantern float toward me. A sudden gust of salty wind blew the mists to tatters, and the dark ocean and its rowboat appeared on the instant, the boat driving toward shore when the man at the oars out got a clear view of the seawall. The hull scrunched up onto the shingle, the stern slewing around and the oarsman clambering into shallow water. It was Hasbro. His pant legs were rolled and his shoes tied around his neck.

He looped the painter through a rusted iron ring in the wall and shook my hand as if he hadn’t seen me in a month. Without a second’s hesitation I told him about St. Ives held prisoner in the icehouse, about how I was just then formulating a plan to go back after him, working out the fine points so that I didn’t just wade in and muck things up. Captain Bowker was a dangerous man, I said. Like old explosives, any little quiver might detonate him.

“Very good, Mr. Owlesby,” Hasbro said in that stony butler’s voice of his. Wild coincidence didn’t perturb him. Nothing perturbed him. He listened and nodded as he sat there on the wet seawall and put on his shoes. His lean face was stoic, and he might just as well have been studying the racing form or laying out a shirt and trousers for his master to wear in the morning. Suddenly there appeared in my mind a picture of a strangely complicated and efficient clockwork mechanism — meant to be his brain, I suppose — and my spirits rose a sizable fraction. As dangerous as Captain Bowker was, I told myself, here was a man more dangerous yet. I had seen evidence of it countless times, but I had forgot it nearly as often because of the damned cool air that Hasbro has about him, the quiet efficiency.

Here he was, after all, out on the ocean rowing a boat. A half hour ago he was tearing away in a wagon, hauling a diving bell to heaven knows what destination. That was it — the difference between us. He was a man with destinations; it was that which confounded me. I rarely had one, unless it was some trivial momentary destination — the pub, say. Did Dorothy know that about me? Was it clear to the world as it was to me? Why on earth did she humor me day to day? Maybe because I reminded her of her father. But this was no time for getting morose and enumerating regrets. Where had Hasbro been? He didn’t tell me; it was later that I found out.

At the moment, though, both of us slipped along through the fog, and suddenly I was a conspirator again. A destination had been provided for me. I wished that Dorothy could see me, bound on this dangerous mission, slouching through the shadowy fog to save St. Ives from the most desperate criminals imaginable. I tripped over a curb and sprawled on my face in the grass of the square, but was up immediately, giving the treacherous curb a hard look and glancing around like a fool to see if anyone had been a witness to my ignominious tumble. Hasbro disappeared ahead, oblivious to it — or so he would make it seem in order not to embarrass me.

But there, away toward the boardwalk and the pier, across the lawn…It was too damnably foggy now to tell, but some one had been there, watching. Heart flailing again, I leaped along to catch up with Hasbro. “We’re followed,” I hissed after him.

He nodded, and whispered into my ear. “Too much fog to say who it is. Maybe the mother and son.”

I didn’t think so. Whoever it was was shorter than Willis Pule. Narbondo, maybe. He was somewhere about. It wasn’t certain that he was on ice; that was mere conjecture. Narbondo skulking in the fog — the idea of it gave me the willies. But we were in view of the icehouse again, and the sight of it replaced the willies with a more substantial fear. The glow of lamplight filtered through a dirty window, and Hasbro and I edged along toward it, just as St. Ives and I had done an hour earlier.

I kept one eye over my shoulder, squinting into the mists, my senses sharp. I wouldn’t be taken unawares; that was certain. What we saw through the window, though, took my mind off the night, and along with Hasbro I gaped at the three men within — none of whom was St. Ives.

What we were looking at wasn’t a proper room, but was a little niche cut off from the ice room with a canvas drape. It was well lit, and we had a first-rate view of the entire interior, what with the utter darkness outside. The floor was clean of litter, and the whole of the room had a swabbed-out look to it, like a jury-rigged hospital room. On a wheeled table in the middle of it, lying atop a cushion and wearing what appeared to be a rubber all-together suit, was Dr. Narbondo himself, pale as a corpse with snow-white hair that had been cropped short. Frost was a more appropriate name, certainly. Narbondo had met his fate in that tarn; what had risen from it was something else entirely.