James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

He found his shoes, putting them on this time before going out. Work was the only mainstay. He would let Mrs. Langley stew for a while and then would commute her sentence. She must learn not to treat him like a child. Meanwhile he would concentrate on something that would yield a concrete result. With effort, with self-control, he would have what he wanted within twenty-four hours. Where the machine would take him was an utter mystery. Probably he would be blown to fragments. Or worse yet, the machine would turn out to be so much junk, sitting there in the silo with him at the controls, making noises out of his throat like a child driving a locomotive built out of packing crates. He stood by the window, focusing his mind. There wasn’t time to regret this business with Mrs. Langley. There wasn’t time to regret anything at all. There was only time for action, for movement.

His hands had stopped shaking. As an exercise, he coldly and evenly forced himself to recite the metals in the order of their specific gravities. The cottage-pie recipe was well and good when a man needed a simple mental bracer. But what he wanted now was honing. He needed his edges sharpened. With that in mind, he worked through the metals again, listing them in the order of their fusibility this time, then again backward through both lists, practicing a kind of dutiful self-mesmerization.

Halfway through, he realized that something was wrong with him. He was light-headed, woozy. He held on to the edge of the desk, thinking to wait it out. He watched his hand curiously. It seemed to be growing transparent, as if he had the flesh of a jelly-fish. It was happening to him again — the business on the North Road, the ghostly visitation. His vision was clouded, as if he were under water. He slid to the floor and began to crawl toward the window. Maybe fresh air would revive him. Each foot, though, was a journey, and all at once his arms and legs gave way beneath him and he slumped to the floor, giving up and lying there unhappily in front of the open window, thinking black thoughts until suddenly and without warning he thought no more at all.

And then he awakened. His head reeled, but he was solid again. He stood up and studied his hand. Rock steady. Opaque. How long had he been away? He couldn’t say. He was confused for a moment, trying to make sense of something that didn’t want sense to be made of it. Either that or it already made sense, and he was looking for something that was now plain to him.

Suddenly full of purpose, he straightened his collar and went out into the deepening twilight, having already forgotten about Mrs. Langley but this time wearing his shoes.

His cod had got cold, and the restaurant, the Crow’s Nest in Harrogate, had emptied out. Lunch was over, and only a couple of people lingered at their tables. St. Ives sat in the rear corner, his back to the window, doodling on a pad of paper, making calculations.

He felt suddenly woozy, light-headed. Lack of sleep, he told himself, and bad eating habits. He decided to ignore it, but it was suddenly worse, and he had to shove his feet out in order to brace himself. Damn, he thought. Here it was again — another seizure. This time he would fight it.

He heard muffled laughter from across the room and looked up to see someone staring back at him, someone he didn’t recognize. The man looked away, but his companion sneaked a glance in St. Ives’s direction, his eyes full of furtive curiosity. Nettled, St. Ives nodded at the man and was suddenly aware of his own slept-in clothes, of his frightful unshaven face. His fork, along with a piece of cod, fell from his hand, dropping onto his trousers, and he stared at it helplessly, knowing without trying that his hand would refuse to pick it back up.

In a moment he would pass out. Better to simply climb down onto the floor and be done with it. He didn’t want to, though, not in public, not in the condition he was in. He pressed his eyes shut. Slowly and methodically he began to recite the cottage-pie recipe, forcing himself to consider each ingredient, to picture it, to smell it in his mind. He felt himself recover momentarily, as if he were grounding himself somehow, holding on to things anchored in the world.

Hearing a noise, he slumped around in his chair, looking behind himself at the window. Weirdly, a man’s face stared back in at him, past the corner of the building. He was struck at first with the thought that he was looking at his own reflection — the disheveled hair, the slept-in clothes. But it wasn’t that. It was himself again, just like on the North Road, his coat streaked with muck, as if he had crawled through every muddy gutter between Harrogate and London. The ghost of himself waved once and was gone, and simultaneously St. Ives fell to the floor of the restaurant and knew no more until he awoke, lying in a tangle among the table legs.

The two men who had been staring were endeavoring to yank on him, to pull him free of the table. “Here now,” one of them said. “That’s it. You’ll be fine now.”

St. Ives sat up, mumbling his thanks. It was all right, he said. He wasn’t sick. His head was clear again, and he wanted nothing more than to be on his way. The two men nodded at him and moved off, back to their table, one of them advising him to go home and both of them looking at him strangely. “I tell you he bloody well disappeared,” one man said to the other, staring once more at St. Ives. His companion waved the comment away.

“Disappeared behind the table, you mean.” They went back to their fish, talking between themselves in low voices.

St. Ives was suddenly desperate to reach the sidewalk. These spells were happening too often, and he believed that he understood what they meant, finally. What could he have seen but his future-time self, coming and going, hard at work? He had seen the dominoes falling, catching glimpses of them far down the line. The machine would be a success. That must be the truth. He was filled with optimism, and was itching to be away, to topple that first domino, to set the future into motion.

He left three shillings on the table and nodded his thanks at the two men as he strode toward the door. They looked at him skeptically. He burst out into the sunlight, nearly knocking straight into Parsons, who retreated two steps away, a wild and startled look on his face, as if he had been caught out. Parsons yanked himself together, though, and reached out a hand toward St. Ives. For a moment St. Ives was damned if he would shake it. But then he saw that such a course was unwise. Better to keep up the charade.

“Parsons!” he said, forcing animation into his voice.

“Professor St. Ives. What an unbelievable surprise.”

“Not terribly surprising,” St. Ives said. “I live right up the road. What about you, up on holiday?” He realized that his voice was pitched too high and that he sounded fearful and edgy. Parsons by now was the picture of cheerful serenity.

“Fishing holiday, actually. Lot of trout in the Nidd this time of year. Fly-fishing. Come into town to buy supplies, have you? Going somewhere yourself?” He squinted at St. Ives, taking in the down-at-heels look of him. Parsons couldn’t keep an element of discomfort out of his face, as if he regretted encountering a man who was so obviously out humiliating himself. “You look…tired,” he said. “Keeping late hours?”

“No,” St. Ives said, answering all of Parsons’s questions at once. Actually, he had been keeping late hours. Where he was going, though, he couldn’t rightly say. He knew just where he wanted to go. He had the coordinates fined down to a hair. His mind clouded over just then, and he again felt momentarily dizzy, just as he had the other three times. Some sort of residual effect, perhaps. He couldn’t attend to what Parsons was saying, but was compelled suddenly to concentrate merely on staying on his feet. Basil, potatoes, cheese…he said to himself. It was happening again — the abysmal and confusing light-headedness, as if he would at any moment float straight up into the sky.