James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

“No?” asked St. Ives, startled by the abrupt revelation. He’d had such a suspicion himself. There was too much deviltry afoot for it all to be random — too many faces in windows, too many repeated names, too many common threads of mystery for him to suppose that they weren’t part of some vast, complicated weft.

“That’s right,” said the Captain, putting a match to his pipe. He paused theatrically, squinting roundabout. “He was back this afternoon.”

Keeble nodded. It had been the same man. Keeble couldn’t have forgotten the back of the man’s head, which is all of him he’d seen this time again. Winnifred had been at the museum, cataloguing books on lepidoptery. Jack and Dorothy, thank God, had been away at the flower market buying hothouse begonias. Keeble had been asleep an hour. He’d been dabbling at the engine, and had put the whole works — the plans, the little cayman device, notes — in a hole in the floor that no one, not another living soul, could sniff out. Then he’d given up the ghost at noon and welcomed the arrival of blinking Morpheus. A crash had brought him out of it. The casement window again. He was sure of it. Footfalls sounded. The cook, who was coming in through the back door with a chicken, was confronted by the thief, and slammed him in the face with the plucked bird before snatching at a carving knife. Keeble had rushed out in his nightshirt and, once again, pursued the man into the street. But dignity demanded he give up the chase. A man in a nightshirt, after all. It wasn’t to be thought of. And his foot — it was barely healed from the last encounter.

“What was he after?” asked Godall, breaking into Keeble’s narration. “You’re certain it wasn’t valuables?”

“He ran past any number of them,” said Keeble, pouring himself a third glass of port. “He could have filled his pockets between the attic and the front door.”

“So nothing was taken?” St. Ives put in.

“On the contrary. He stole the plans for a roof-mounted sausage cooker. I’d intended to try it out in the next electrical storm. There’s something about a lightning storm that puts me immediately in mind of sausages. I can’t explain it.”

Godall, incredulous, plucked his pipe out of his mouth and squinted. “You’re telling us he broke into the house to steal the plans for this fabulous sausage machine?”

“Not a bit of it. I rather believe he was after something else. He’d been at the floor with a prybar. He’d seen me slip the plans into the cache. I’m certain of it. But he couldn’t get at them. I’ve a theory that he balanced the casement open with a stick so as to be able to shove out in a nonce. But the stick slipped, the casement banged home and latched, and in a panic he snatched up the nearest set of plans and ran for it, thinking to be out the back before I awoke. The cook surprised him.”

“What can he do with these plans?” asked the Captain, tapping his pipe out against his ivory leg.

“Not a living thing,” said Keeble.

Godall stood and peered out to where wind-whirled debris danced and flew along Jermyn Street in the night. “For my money Kelso Drake will market such a device within the month. Not for profit, mind you — there wouldn’t be much profit in it — but as a lark, to thumb his nose at us. He was after the perpetual motion engine then?”

Keeble began to assent when a banging at the door cut him off. The Captain was out of his chair at once, his finger to his lips. There was no one beyond the seven of them whom they could trust, and no one, certainly, who had any business at a meeting of the Trismegistus Club. Kraken slipped away into a rear chamber. Godall shoved a hand beneath his coat, an act which startled St. Ives.

At the newly opened door stood a young man who was, largely because of a disastrous complexion, of indeterminate age. He might have been thirty, but was more likely twenty-five: of medium height, paunchy, brooding, and slightly stooped. The smile that played across the corners of his mouth was evidently false and served in no way to animate his cold eyes — eyes ringed and dark from an excess of study under inadequate light. He seemed to St. Ives to be a student. Not a student of anything identifiable or practical, but a student of dark arts, or of the sort who wags his head morosely and knowingly over cynical and woeful poetry and who has ingested opiates and stalked through midnight streets, without destination, but out of an excess of morbidity and bile. His cheeks seemed almost to be sucked inward, as if he were consuming himself or were metamorphosing into a particularly picturesque fish. He needed a pint of good ale, a kidney pie, and a half-dozen jolly companions.

“I am addressing a meeting of the Trismegistus Club,” said he, bowing almost imperceptibly. No one answered, perhaps because he had addressed no one or perhaps because it seemed as if he expected no response. The wind whistled behind him, trifling with the tattered hem of his coat.

“Come in, mate,” said the Captain after a long pause. “Pour yourself a glass of brandy and state your business. This is a private club, you see, and no one with a full deck would want to join, if you follow me. We’re all idle and we have little regard for hands, you might say, looking for a sail to mend.”

The Captain’s speech didn’t wrinkle the man in the least. He introduced himself as Willis Pule, an acquaintance of Dorothy Keeble. Jack’s eyes narrowed. He was certain the claim was a lie. He was familiar with Dorothy’s friends, and even more, he was familiar with the sorts of people who could likely be Dorothy’s friends. Pole wasn’t one of them. He hesitated to say so only out of a spirit of hospitality — it was the Captain’s shop, after all — but the man’s very presence became an immediate affront.

Godall, his hand yet in his coat, addressed Pule, who hadn’t touched a glass despite the Captain’s offer. “What do you suppose we are?” he asked.

The question seemed to take Pule aback. “A club,” he stammered, looking at Godall, then glancing quickly away. “A scientific organization. I’m a student of alchemy and phrenology. I’ve read of Sebastian Owlesby. Very interesting matter.”

Pule chattered on nervously in an unfortunately high voice. Jack was doubly insulted — first at the mention of Dorothy, now at the mention of his father. He’d have to pitch this Pule into the road. But Godall got in before him, waving his free hand and thanking Pole for his interest. The Trismegistus Club, he said, was an organization devoted to biology, to lepidoptery, in fact. They were compiling a field guide to the moths of Wales. Their discussions could be of no use to a student of alchemy. Or of phrenology, for that matter, which, insisted Godall, was a fascinating study. They were awfully sorry. The Captain echoed Godall’s general sorrow, and Hasbro instinctively arose and showed Pole the door, bowing graciously as he did so. A silent moment passed after Pule’s ejection. Then Godall stood, pulled his coat from its hook, and hurried out.

St. Ives was astonished at Godall’s so quickly and handily ejecting Pule, who was, to be sure, not at all the right sort, but who might have been well intentioned. There could be little harm, after all, in his praising Owlesby, though Owlesby’s experimentation was not entirely praiseworthy. In fact, when he considered it, St. Ives wasn’t sure what part of Owlesby’s work Pule had such admiration for. None of the rest of them could enlighten him. No one, apparently, knew this Pule.

Kraken peeked out of the rear chamber, and Captain Powers waved him into the room. Godall and Pule were forgotten for the moment as Kraken, at the Captain’s bidding, spouted the story of his months as a hireling of Kelso Drake, the millionaire, punctuating it with accounts of his readings into scientific and metaphysical matters, the deep waters of which he sailed on a daily basis. And what he found there, he could assure them, would astonish the lot of them. But Kelso Drake — nothing about Kelso Drake would astonish Bill Kraken. Kraken wouldn’t put up with the likes of Drake, not for all the money the man possessed. He gulped at his scotch. His face grew red. He’d been fired by Drake, threatened with a thrashing. He’d see who was thrashed. Drake was a coward, a pimp, a cheat. Let Drake get in his way. Drake would reel from it. Kraken would show him.