James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

His mother hunched across, goo-gooing at him, and rubbed his poor forehead, fluttering her eyelids and talking the most loathsome sort of baby talk to comfort him while still holding on to the revolver and stepping over the captain’s splayed legs, straight into the blood that had pooled up on the floor. She nearly slipped, and she caught on to her son’s jacket for support, giving off the baby talk in order to curse, and then wiping the bottom of her shoe very deliberately on the captain’s shirt. Maybe Hasbro couldn’t see this last bit from where he stood, but I could, and I can tell you it gave me the horrors, and doubly so when she went straightaway for her son again, calling him a poor lost thing and a wee birdy and all manner of pet names. I couldn’t get my eyes off that horrifying bloody shoe-smear on the captain’s already gruesome shirtfront. I was sick all of a sudden, and turned away to glance at Hasbro’s face. He had taken the whole business in. His stoic visage was evaporated, replaced by a look of pure puzzlement and repulsion; he was human, after all.

“Let’s find the professor,” I whispered to him. I had no desire to watch what would surely follow; they wouldn’t leave the doctor alive, and his death wouldn’t be pretty. These two were living horrors — but even then, bloodthirsty and hypocritical as it sounds, somehow I didn’t begrudge them their chance to even the score with Narbondo; I just didn’t want to see them do it.

We stepped along through the weeds, around to the door that opened onto what had been Captain Bowker’s sleeping quarters. The door was secured now, the hasp fitted with a bolt that had been slipped through it — enough merely to stop anyone’s getting out. We got in, though, quick as you please, and there was St. Ives, tied up hands and feet and gagged, lying atop the bed. We got the gag out and him untied, and we indicated by gestures and whispers what sort of monkey business was going on in the room beyond. He was up and moving toward the door to the ice room, determined to stop it. It didn’t matter who it was that was threatened. St. Ives wouldn’t brook it; even Narbondo would have his day before the magistrate.

He tugged open the door, and you can guess who stood there — Mrs. Pule, grinning like a gibbon ape and holding the gun. I whirled around to the outside door, which still stood open, ready to leap out into the night, and thinking, of course, that one of us ought to get out in order to find the constable, to summon aid. Could I help it if it was always me who was destined for such missions? But there stood Willis, right outside, looking haggard and wearing the mask of tragedy — and training the captain’s rifle on me with ominously shaking hands. I stopped where I stood and waited while Mrs. Pule took Hasbro’s revolver away from him. So much for that.

They marched us back through the ice room, the floor of which was wet and mucky with meltwater and sopping hay, and smelled like an ammoniated swamp. I was desperately cold all of a sudden, and thought about how unpleasant it was to have to face death when you were shaking with cold and dead tired and it was past three in the morning. The night had been one long round of wild escapes, followed by my striding back into various lion’s dens and tipping my hat. There was no chance of another go at it now, though, with one of them in front and one behind.

St. Ives started right in, as soon as he saw Narbondo lying there on the table. He felt for a pulse, nodded, and raised one of the doctor’s eyelids. Next he examined the bladder apparatus and sniffed the elixir, and then, as if it was the most natural and unpretentious thing in the world, he slipped the bottle of elixir into his coat pocket.

“Out with it!” hissed the woman, tipping the revolver against my head. My eyes shot open in order to better watch St. Ives remove the bottle.

“Wake him up,” she said, removing the revolver from my temple and gesturing toward the sleeping doctor.

St. Ives shook his head. “I’d love to,” he said. “But I don’t know how. It would be the happiest day of my life if I could animate him in order that he be brought to justice.”

She laughed out loud. “Them’s my words,” she said, referring to that day in Godall’s shop. “Justice! We’ll bring him justice, won’t we, Willis?”

Willis nodded, wild with happiness now — partly, I thought, because of St. Ives’s insisting that the doctor couldn’t be awakened. Pule didn’t want him awake. He picked up his bag of instruments and set it on the table. When he opened it, I could smell burnt rubber, and sure enough, he pulled out the hacked and charred fragments of the toy elephant and the little collection of gears, put back together now. “This is what I did to his elephant,” he said, nodding at me, but looking at Higgins.

“Elephant?” Higgins said, casting me a terrified and wondering glance. This obscure reference to the elephant must have struck him as significant in some unfathomable way, largely because what Pule held in his hand no longer had anything to do with elephants. It was simply a limp bit of flayed rubber and paint.

I shrugged at Higgins and started to speak to the poor man, but Willis cut me off, shouting, “Shut up!” in a lunatic falsetto and blinking very fast and hard. He wasn’t interested in hearing from me. He was caught up in his own twisted story, and he happily set about laying out an array of operating instruments — scalpels and clamps and something that looked a little like a bolt cutters and a little like a pruning shears and was meant, I guess, for clipping bone.

He made a bow in our direction, and, gesturing at Narbondo, he said, as if he were addressing a half score of students in a surgery, “I intend to affix this man’s head to the fat man’s body, and then to wake him up and make him look at himself in a mirror and see how ugly he is. Then I’m going to install this mechanism” — and here he plucked up the reassembled gears from the elephant — “in his heart, so that I can control him with a lever. And this man,” Pule said, pointing at poor terrified and befuddled Higgins, “I’m going to cut apart and put together backward, so that he has to reach behind himself to button his shirt, and then I’m going to sell him to Mr. Happy’s Circus.”

Pule was madder than I thought him. What on earth did he mean by nonsense like “put him together backward”? It was clear that he could actually accomplish none of this. What real evidence was there that he had any skills in vivisection at all? None, and never had been — only his association with Narbondo, which proved nothing, of course, except that he was capable of committing vile acts. He was simply going to hack three men up — two of them alive at the moment — for the same utterly insane reasons that he had hacked up my elephant or that he chopped apart birds and hid them under the floorboards of his house. And he would do it all with relish — I was certain of it.

Poor Higgins was even more certain, it seemed, for just as soon as Pule mentioned this business about selling him to Mr. Happy’s Circus, he began to utter a sort of low keening noise, a strange and mournful weeping. His eyes rolled back up into his head just as he slumped forward, tugging at the gaiters that held him to the chair, his voice rising another octave.

Mrs. Pule handed Willis the revolver, and he shifted the rifle to his left hand, not wanting to put it down. She picked up the dish of yellow chemical and advised Higgins to pipe down. But he couldn’t, and so she splashed the stuff into Higgins’s face, at which Higgins lurched upright, spitting and coughing, and she slapped him one, catching him mostly on the nose because of his twitching around. “Did you hear him?” she hissed.