James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

He lay there on his cushion, with fist-sized chunks of ice packed around him, like a jolly great fish on a buffet table. Captain Bowker sat in a chair, looking grizzled, tired, and enormous. His rifle stood tilted against the back corner of the room, always at hand. Higgins hovered over the supine body of the doctor. He meddled with chemical apparatus — a pan of yellow cataplasm or something, and a rubber bladder attached by a coiled tube to a misting nozzle. On a table along the wall sat the bottle of elixir that Higgins had apparently saved from its flying doom an hour past.

He showered the doctor with the mist, pulling open either eyelid and spraying the stuff directly in. The interior of the room was yellow with it, like a London fog. Narbondo trembled, as if from a spine-wrenching chill, and shouted something — I couldn’t make out what — and then half sat up, lurching onto his elbows and staring round about him with wide, wild eyes. In seconds the passion had winked out of them, replaced by a placid know-it-all look, and he took up the bottle of elixir, uncorked it with a trembling hand, and drank off half the contents. He glanced at our window, and I nearly tumbled over backward, but he couldn’t have seen us out there in the darkness and the fog.

What to do; that was the problem. Where was St. Ives? Dead? Trussed up somewhere within? More than likely. There were too many issues at stake for them to waste such a hostage as that. I nudged Hasbro with my elbow and nodded off down the dark clapboard wall of the icehouse, as if I were suggesting we head down that way — which I was. I saw no reason not to get St. Ives out of there. Hasbro was intent on the window, though, and he shook his head.

It was the doctor that he watched, Dr. Frost, or Narbondo, whichever you please. He had sat up now and was turning his head very slowly, as if his joints wanted oil; you could almost hear the creak. A startled expression, one of dread and confusion, passed across his face in waves. He was obviously troubled by something, and was making a determined effort to win through it. He slid off onto the floor and stood reeling, turning around with his back to us and with his hands on the table. I saw him pluck up a piece of ice and hold it to his chest, an artistic gesture, it seemed to me, even at the time.

Higgins hovered around like a mother hen. He put a hand on the doctor’s arm, but Narbondo shook it off, nearly falling over and then grabbing the table again to steady himself. He turned slowly, letting go, and then, one step at a time, tramped toward the canvas curtain like a man built of stone, taking three short steps before pitching straight over onto his face and lying there on the floor, unmoving. Captain Bowker stood up tiredly, as a man might who didn’t care a rap for fallen doctors, and he trudged over to where Higgins leaped around in a fit, shouting orders but doing nothing except getting in the way. The captain pushed him against the wall and said, “Back off!” Then he picked the doctor up and laid him back onto his bed while Higgins hovered about, gathering up the ice chunks knocked onto the floor.

“It’s not working!” Higgins moaned, rubbing his forehead. “I’ve got to have the notebooks. I’m so close !”

“Looks like a bust to me,” said the captain. “I’m for making them pay out for the machine. I’m for Paris, is what I’m saying. Your friend here can rot. Say, gimme some more of that ‘lixir now. He won’t be needing no more tonight.”

It was then, while the captain’s back was turned and Higgins was furiously snatching up the bottle of elixir to keep it away from him, that the canvas curtain lifted and into the little room slipped Willis Pule and his ghastly mother, she holding her revolver and he grinning round about him like a giddy child and carrying a black and ominous surgeon’s bag.

Captain Bowker was quick; I’ll give him that. He must have seen them out of the corner of his eye, for he half turned, slamming Willis on the ear with his elbow and knocking him silly, if such a thing were possible. Then he lunged for his rifle; and it’s here that he moved too slowly. He would have got to it right enough if he hadn’t taken the time to hit Willis first. But he had taken the time, and now Mrs. Pule lunged forward with a look of insane glee on her face, shoving the muzzle of the revolver into the captain’s fleshy midsection so that the barrel entirely disappeared and the explosion was muffled when she fired. He managed to knock her away too, even as the bullet kicked him over backward in a sort of lumbering spin. He clutched at his vitals, his mouth working, and he knocked his rifle down as he caved in and sank almost like a ballerina to the floor, where he lay in a heap.

It was the most cold-blooded thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few cold-blooded things in my day. Mrs. Pule turned her gun on Higgins, who couldn’t stand it, apparently, and leaped at the canvas curtain. But Pule, who still sat on the floor, snaked out his arm and clutched Higgins’s leg, and Higgins went over headforemost as if he had been shot. Pule climbed up onto his back and sat there astride him, giggling hysterically and shouting “Horsey! Horsey!” and poking Higgins in the small of the back with his finger, trying to tickle him, as impossible as that sounds, and then cuffing him on the back of the head with his open hand. “Take that! Take that! Take that!” he shrieked, as if the words were hiccups and he couldn’t stop them.

Mrs. Pule saw her chance, and leaned in to slap Willis a good one, shouting, “Behavior!” again, except that this time the word had no effect on her son, and she was forced to box his ears, and so it went for what must have been twenty seconds or so: Willis slapping the back of Higgins’s jerking head and yanking his ears and pulling his hair, and Mrs. Pule cuffing Willis on the noggin, and both of the Pules shouting so that neither of them could make themselves heard. Finally the woman grabbed a handful of her son’s hair and gave it a yank, jerking him over backward with a howl, and Higgins flew to his knees and scrambled for the canvas, his bandages falling loose around his shoulders and fresh blood seeping through them.

They had him by the feet, though, just as quick as you please, and hauled him back in. They jerked him upright and slammed him into the late Captain Bowker’s chair, trussing him up with the captain’s own gaiters.

It was then that I saw someone right at the edge of my vision, down at the far end of the icehouse. I was certain of it. Someone was prowling around and had come out into the open, I suppose, at the sound of the gunfire and the scuffle, and then had seen us still standing by the window, doing nothing, and had darted away again, assuming, maybe, that there wasn’t any immediate alarm.

By the time I nudged Hasbro there was no one there, and there was precious little reason to go snooping off in that direction, especially since whoever it was, it wasn’t one of our villains; they were all present and accounted for. It’s someone waiting, I thought at the time — waiting to see how things fell out before making his move, waiting for the dirty work to be done for him.

And all the while Dr. Narbondo lay there on ice, seemingly frozen. Willis seemed to see him for the first time. He crept across to peer into the doctor’s face, then blanched with horror at what he saw there. Even in that deep and impossible sleep, Narbondo terrified poor Willis. And then, as if on cue, the doctor flinched in his cold slumber and mumbled something, and Pule fell back horrified. He cringed against the far wall, crossing his arms against his chest and drawing one leg up in a sort of flamingo gesture, doing as much as he could do to roll up into a ball and still stay on his feet — so that he could run, maybe, if it came to that.