James Blaylock: The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

He climbed through the hatch into the wind. It was sunny and fine with just the hint of a smoky autumn chill in the air. He pulled his coat straight and fiddled with his tie, realizing that he was a wet and dirty mess. But he felt fit, somehow, as if a great weight had fallen away from him, and then, in a confused shudder of memory, it occurred to him that he couldn’t bear eating eggplant again. Not once more.

His head reeled, and he nearly fell over. Eggplant? It was starting. His memories would depart like rats from a ship. Disconcerted, he hurried through the window, into the study, and there stood Hasbro, staring at him strangely.

“We’ll have to move the time machine into the silo,” St. Ives said to him. “I wasn’t sure whether it was empty or not.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“The machine on the meadow,” St. Ives said. “We’ll want to get it into the silo, out of the weather.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t aware that Dr. Frost had returned it. This comes as a surprise. I was under the impression that he had stolen it from Secretary Parsons. He’s brought it here, has he?”

“Stolen it?” St. Ives was gripped by vertigo just then. His memory shifted. He fought to hold on to it, afraid to let pieces of it go completely. “Of course,” he said. “It’s a mystery to me, too, but there it sits.” He gestured out the window, where the machine glinted in the sunlight.

Narbondo had taken it! That was funny, hilarious. Now St. Ives had reappeared with it, and that meant that Narbondo’s copy was in the process of disappearing, out from under his nose, and stranding him, St. Ives hoped, in some distant land. Either that or the villain was gone somewhere in time, and would someday perhaps return, and then St. Ives’s machine would disappear. Time and chance, he reminded himself.

And then new memories, like wraiths, drifted into his mind, shifting old memories aside. “Alice!” he cried. “Is she here then?”

“She’s still in the parlor, sir,” Hasbro said, looking skeptical again. “Where you left her moments ago. I really must advise you against that suit, by the way. The tailor is certifiable. Perhaps if I laid something else out…”

“Yes,” St. Ives said, hurrying through the door. “Lay something out.”

He was dizzy, foggy with memories, drunk on them. And as if he were literally drunk, he felt free of the depressing guilt and worry that had plagued him…for how long? And why? He couldn’t entirely remember. It seemed so long ago. His mind was a confusion of images now, stolen from the man whose ghost was where? Blowing away on the wind, across the meadow? Would he remain to haunt the manor, exercising a ghostly grudge against his other-time self for having returned to supplant him?

Mrs. Langley loomed out of the kitchen, her hands white with baking flour.

“I’ve taken your advice, Mrs. Langley,” he said.

“Beg pardon, sir? What advice?”

“I…” What advice, indeed? He didn’t know. He pulled at the collar of his shirt, which was too tight for him. “Nothing,” he said. “Never mind. I was thinking out loud.” She nodded, baffled, and he forced himself along, walking toward the parlor. Steady on, he told himself. Keep your mouth closed. There’s too much you don’t know yet, and too much of what you do know is nonsense.

And then there sat Alice, reading a book. He was astonished by the sight of her. She hasn’t aged a day, he thought joyfully, and then he wondered why on earth he thought any such thing, and a garden of memories, like someone else’s anecdotes, sprung fully bloomed in his mind. His head swam, and he sat down hard on a chair. Maybe he ought to have waited, to have grappled with the business of memory before wading in like this. But he hadn’t, and now that he got a good look at Alice, with her dark hair done up in a ribbon, he was happy that he hadn’t wasted another moment.

“I’m sorry about the eggplant,” she said to him, just then glancing up from her book. She squinted at the sight of him, looking unhappily surprised, and he grinned back at her like a drunken man. “That awful suit of clothes,” she said. “You look rather like a dirty sausage in them, don’t you? I’ve seen those before…

“I’m just getting set to burn them,” St. Ives said hurriedly. “They’re a relic, from the future. A sort of…costume.”

“Well,” she said. “The trousers might look better if you hadn’t waded across the river in them. But I am sorry about the eggplant. I don’t mean to make you eat it every night, but Janet’s cook, Pierre, is apparently fixing it for us this evening. Will you be ready to leave in a half hour? You looked wonderful just moments ago.”

“Eggplant? Janet?” His mind fumbled with the words. Then through the parlor window he saw Alice’s garden, laid out in neat rows. Purple-green eggplants hung like lunar eggs from a half-dozen plants.

“Oh, Janet,” he said, nodding broadly. “From the Harrogate Women’s Literary League!”

“What on earth is wrong with you? Of course that Janet, unless you’ve got another one hidden somewhere. And don’t go on about the eggplant this time, will you?”

Suddenly he could taste the horrible sour stuff. He had eaten it last night mixed up with ground lamb. And the night before, too, stewed up with Middle Eastern spices. He had been on a sort of eggplant diet, a slave to the vegetable garden.

“You could use a bath, too, couldn’t you? At least a wash up. And your hair looks as if you’ve been out in the wind for three days. What have you been up to?”

“I…old Ben,” he began. “Mud. Up to his blinkers.”

But then he was interrupted by a sort of banshee wail from somewhere off in the house. It rose to a crescendo and then turned into a series of squalling hoots.

He stood up, looking down at Alice in alarm. “What…”

“It’s not all that bad,” she said, nearly laughing. “Look at you! Anyone would think you hadn’t ever changed his nappies before. They can’t be a tremendous lot dirtier than your trouser cuffs, can they?”

The baby’s crying had very nearly inundated him with fresh memories. Little Eddie, his son. He smiled broadly. It was his turn to change the nappies. They had agreed against a nanny, were bringing up the child themselves, spoon-feeding it with stuff mashed up out of the garden. Eddie wouldn’t eat eggplant either, wouldn’t touch it on a bet. “Good old Eddie!” he said out loud.

“That’s the right attitude,” Alice said.

And now in the shuffle of the old being washed out by the new, he saw it all clearly for one last long moment. His fears for the future had come to nothing. Alice was safe. They had a son. The garden was growing again. They were happy now. He was happy, nearly delirious. He found that he couldn’t think in terms of future-time selves and past-time selves any longer. None of his other selves mattered to him at all.

There was only he and Alice and Eddie and…rows and rows of eggplant. He nearly started to whistle, but then the baby squalled again and Alice widened her eyes, inviting him to do something about it.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said, heading for the stairs. “I love eggplant.” And he very nearly meant it, too.

Titles have never been easy for me, but they were a special problem twenty or thirty years ago when I was writing my Steampunk stories. Chekhov once stated that he could write a story about anything — that if a person asked him to write a story about a bottle, he’d do it, and he’d call it “The Bottle.” I, on the other hand, would set out to write a story about a bottle, and before it was done it would also be about apes and severed heads and doughnut-eating skeletons, and the simple title wouldn’t work. One day a couple of lifetimes ago I was sitting around at Fullerton College, where I was teaching at the time, and I happened to be holding a copy of Homunculus , which had just recently been published — a novel that had come dangerously close to being titled (on Tim Powers’s recommendation) And Your Winged Crocodiles , a phrase that Tim had found in a poem by Byron. A woman sitting nearby tried unsuccessfully to puzzle out the pronunciation. “What’s it mean”? she asked. “It means ‘little man,’” I told her. “In Latin.” She nodded and asked if I’d written any other books, and I told her that my previous book had been titled The Digging Leviathan . “And what does that mean,” she asked (unimpressed), “ big man?” “Pretty much,” I said, and it came into my mind that if I combined the two into a third novel I could call it Little Big Digging Man , except that it might be confused with the Thomas Berger novel unless it was rendered into Latin. Maybe a novel about a time-traveling beatnik: Little Man Digging Big …