James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

There was no latch on the window at all, which was jammed shut with a folded-up bunch of paper torn out of a book. Without hesitation he wiggled it open and bent quietly down into the dark interior, wishing he had brought along a lantern and nearly recoiling from the fetid smell of sickness in the close air of the room. He held on to the window frame and felt around for the floor with his foot, kicking something soft, which shifted and let out a faint moan. Abruptly he pulled his foot back, perching on the sill like an animal ready to bolt. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the darkness, which, despite the thickening fog, was still lit by pale moonlight.

The room was almost empty of furniture. There was an old bed against one wall, a couple of wooden chairs, and a palsied table. Against another wall was a broken-down sideboard, almost empty of plates and glasses, as if it had no more day-today reason to exist than did the two sleeping humans who inhabited the room. A book lay open on the table, and more books were scattered and piled on the floor, looking altogether like superfluous wealth, an exotic treasure heaped up in a dark and musty pirates’ cavern. The rags beneath his feet moved again and groaned, and then shook as the child covered by them was convulsed with coughing. On the bed someone lay sleeping heavily, unperturbed by the coughing.

Carefully now, St. Ives reached his foot past the sleeping form on the floor and pushed himself into the room, swinging the window shut behind him. He stepped across to the table to examine one of the books, which was moderately new. He was only half surprised to find that it was a volume of the Illustrated Experiments with Gilled Beasts, compiled by Ignacio Narbondo senior. St. Ives shook his head, calculating how long ago it must have been that Narbondo senior had been transported for the crime of vivisection. Not long — a matter of a couple of years. This collection of books seemed to be the only thing he had left to his abandoned family, except for his taste for corrupt knowledge. And now the son, young as he was, already followed in the father’s bloody footsteps.

The little boy sleeping on the floor began to breathe loudly — the labored, hoarse wet breathing of someone with congested lungs. St. Ives bent over the convulsed form, gently pulling back the dirty blanket that covered it. He lay stiffly on his side, neck straight, as if he were endeavoring to keep his throat open. His arms were sticklike, and his pallid cheeks sagging. St. Ives ran his hand lightly down the child’s spine, looking for the bow that would develop one day into a pronounced hump.

Strangely, there was no bow; the back was ramrod stiff, the flesh feverish. Through the thin blanket he could feel the air gurgling in and out of the child’s lungs. St. Ives stood up, looking around the room again, and then immediately stepped across and fetched a glass tumbler from the sideboard. He stooped again and pressed the open end to the child’s back, then listened hard to the closed end. The lungs sounded like a troubled cesspool.

The boy was taken with another coughing fit, hacking up bloodstained froth as St. Ives jerked away and stood up again. Clearly, he was far gone in pneumonia. There could be no doubt about it. He had been nauseated, too. In his weakened condition the child would die. The sudden knowledge of that washed over St. Ives like a dam breaking. Murder wasn’t in the cards at all. Even if such a thing had appealed to St. Ives, it would be a redundant task. Nature and circumstance and the poverty of a filthy and overcrowded city would kill Narbondo just as surely as a bullet to the brain. St. Ives had only to crouch back out through the window and lose himself in the future.

And yet the idea of it ran counter to what he knew to be the truth. How could Narbondo die without St. Ives’s helping him to do it? A man might alter the future, but how could the future alter itself? He examined the child’s face, thinking things through. He needed light. Hurrying to the sideboard again, he carefully opened cupboard doors until he found candles and sulphur matches. The woman on the bed wouldn’t awaken. She was lost in gin, snoring loudly now, her head covered with blankets. He struck a match and lit the candle, bending over the child and studying his face, looking for a telltale rash. There was nothing, only the sweating pale skin of an undernourished sick child.

Surely it hadn’t a chance of survival. The boy would be dead tomorrow. Two days, maybe. Pneumococcal meningitis — that was his guess. It was a hasty candlelight-and-glass-tumbler diagnosis, but the pneumonia was certain, and alone was enough to kill him. He stood for a moment thinking. Meningitis could explain the hump. If Narbondo lived, the spinal damage might easily pull him into a stoop that would become permanent over the years.

It really didn’t matter how accurately he understood the child’s condition. The boy was doomed; of that St. Ives was certain. He pulled the blanket back up, taking off his coat and laying that too over the sleeping child, who exhaled now like a panting dog, desperately short of breath. St. Ives couldn’t bring himself to equate the suffering little human with the monster he had shot in the Seven Dials. They simply were not the same creature. “Time and chance…,“ he thought, then remembered that he’d said the same thing not six months back — about himself and what he had become, and the feelings of melancholy and futility washed over him again.

He had a vision of all of humanity struggling like small and frightened animals in a vast black morass. It was easy to forget that there had ever been a time when he was happy. Surely this dying child couldn’t remember any such happiness. St. Ives sighed, rubbing his forehead to drive out the fatigue and doom. That sort of thinking accomplished nothing. It was better to leave it to the philosophers, who generally had the advantage of having a bottle of brandy nearby. Right now all abstractions were meaningless alongside the fact of the dying child. Abruptly, he made up his mind.

He left his three silver coins on the table and stepped out through the window, pulling it shut, leaving his coat behind. If he failed to return, they could have the coat and the silver both; if he did return, they could have it anyway. He shivered on the rooftop, hurrying across toward the bathyscaphe, no longer interested in the early morning bustle below.

As he stepped into the study through the open French window — all still very much as he remembered it — he half expected to see himself as an old man, disappearing into the atmosphere. But by now he would already have vanished. It had taken that long to get out through the window of the silo and sneak across to the manor. He might be long ago dead, of course. It was 1927, a date he had struck upon randomly. The manor might have a new owner, perhaps a man with a rifle loaded with bird shot. The interior of the silo, however, argued otherwise. It was full of faintly mystifying apparatus now, but it was the sort of apparatus that only a scientist like St. Ives would possess, and it wasn’t rusty and scattered, either; instead it was orderly, not the ghastly mess that he had let it decline to back…when? For a moment he was disoriented, unable to recall the date.

The study was neatened up, too — no books scattered around, no jumbled papers. He thought guiltily of Mrs. Langley, and then quickly pushed the thought from his mind. Muddling himself up wouldn’t serve. Mrs. Langley would wait. There were interesting and suggestive changes in the room around him. From the study ceiling hung the wired-together skeleton of a winged saurian, and leaning against one wall, braced by a couple of wooden pegs, was the femur of a monstrous reptile, something the size of a brontosaurus. So he had followed his whims, had he? He had taken up paleontology. How so? Had he utilized the time machine? Traveled back to the Age of Reptiles? A thrill of anticipation surged through him along with the knowledge, once again, that things, ultimately, must have fallen out for the best. Here was evidence of it — the well-apportioned room of a man in possession of his faculties.