James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

“Apparently Owlesby was jealous of owning the thing to the point of refusing to let Narbondo at it. Nell’s absconding with it must have infuriated the hunchback. She snatched the secret of life out of his hands, as it were, and gave it to Birdlip…”

“Who in a matter of weeks might well drop out of the skies on us,” said Godall.

The Captain frowned. St. Ives nodded.

“Well,” said Keeble, topping off his glass from an open bottle of ale, “this is all a very sad business, very sad. If I were asked, I’d say meet the dirigible when it lands — and I’ll bet my ape clock it touches down on Hampstead Heath where it launched — and snatch the box. Between the lot of us such a thing would be nothing. Then we tie it into a bag full of stones and drop it off the center of Westminster Bridge when the river’s in flood. The box isn’t tight, I can attest to that. Regardless of the thing’s powers, it’s got to breathe, hasn’t it? It’s not a fish; it’s a little man. I’ve seen it. We’ll drown it like a cat, if only to keep it out of the clutches of this humpback doctor.” Keeble paused, his chin in his hand. “ And for what it did to Sebastian. I’ll kill it for that. But there’s no use, really, hashing over this Limehouse business. It’s water under the bridge is what it is. Nothing more than that. And murky water too. So I’ll just change the subject for a moment here, gentlemen, and call your attention to the date. It’s Jack’s birthday is what it is, and I’ve got a bit of something to give him.”

Jack blushed, disliking, even among friends, being the center of attention. St. Ives grimaced in spite of himself. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been waving Sebastian’s memoirs about so freely. On his son’s birthday, for God’s sake. Well, this was the Trismegistus Club, and the ends they pursued would lead them along grim paths — there was no doubt of that. There was nothing to be accomplished by pretense and timidity. Better to clear the air with the truth straightaway. Far better to do that than to hide things and make them seem even more despicable and terrifying by doing so.

St. Ives wished, though, that he had known it was Jack’s birthday so as to have some trifle wrapped up. But he could remember no one’s birthday — not even his own most of the time. Keeble produced a square parcel about the size and shape of a jack-in-the-box. St. Ives was fairly certain he knew what it was, that he’d witnessed the rising of its clockwork cayman not too many days past.

“A toast to young Mr. Owlesby,” said Godall heartily, raising his glass. The rest of the company followed suit, giving Jack three cheers.

From the shadows of the back room, Kraken raised his own glass — or flask, rather, which was two-thirds empty of gin. It seemed to Kraken to be perpetually in that state. How it could be more often empty than full was an utter mystery. Kraken hadn’t delved particularly widely into the mathematics, and so he was willing to admit that there were forces at work on his gin that he couldn’t yet fathom. He’d be after them though. He’d seek them out. Like beans in a bottle, he said to himself. Facts were nothing more. And mathematics were facts, weren’t they? Numbers on a page were like bugs on a paving stone. They looked a mess, scurrying around. But they were a matter of nature. And nature had her own logic. Some of the bugs were setting about gathering supper — bits and pieces of this and that. Lord knew what they ate, elemental matter, most likely. Others were laying out trails, hauling bits of gravel to build a mound, measuring off distances, scouting out the land, all of them here and there on the pavement — a mess to the man ignorant of science, but an orchestrated bit of music to…to a man like Kraken.

He wondered if someday he couldn’t write a paper on it. It was…what was it? An analogy. That’s what it was. And it must, thought Kraken, explain the business of disappeared gin in a flask. The beauty of science was that it made things so clear, so logical. The cosmos, that was what science was after — the whole filthy cosmos. He smiled to think that he understood it. He’d only just run across the word in Ashbless. He’d seen it a hundred times, of course. Such were words. You were blind to them for years. Then one reached out and slammed you, and bingo, like lit candles in a dark room, it turned out they were everywhere — cosmos, cosmos, cosmos. The order of things. The secret order, hidden to most. A man had to get down on his knees and peer at the paving stones to see the bugs that hurried there, navigating about their little corner of the Earth with the certainty of a mariner setting a course by the immutable patterns of the stars.

A thrill shot up his spine. He’d rarely seen things so clearly, so…so…cosmically. That was the word. He shook his flask. There was a dram or so sloshing in the bottom. Why the devil was it more often empty than full? If a quantity could be poured in, the same quantity could be poured out. He’d filled it that very morning down at Whitechapel — brim full. But it hadn’t stayed full for a half hour. It had been mostly empty all day. Hours of emptiness. And if it weren’t for the bottle of whisky under the bed, he’d be powerfully dry by now.

Kraken grappled with the problem. It didn’t seem fair to him. Like bugs, he reminded himself, screwing his eyes shut and imagining a scurrying lot of number-shaped bugs on a piece of gray slate. It didn’t seem to do any good. He couldn’t quite apply the bugs to the problem of the flask. He squinted through the open door into the room beyond.

He’d spent the last half hour with his hands over his ears, pressing out the sad business of Sebastian Owlesby’s memoirs. He knew it all well enough — too well. He drained the flask, reached under the bed, and drew out the whisky. He was a gin man, truth to tell, but in a pinch…

Young Jack was waving some sort of box. Kraken squinted at it. He was certain he’d seen it before. But no, he hadn’t. Here came some sort of business from inside — a beast of some sort, and tiny birds. The beast — a crocodile apparently tore at one of the birds, gobbled it up, then sank out of sight. Kraken puzzled over it, unsure, exactly, of the purpose of it. He sat for a moment, knuckling his brow, then got up off his bed and edged across to the open door.

Off to his left was another, dark room — the room where lay the sea chest. His heart raced. There was a tumult of talk and laughter as everyone gathered round Jack’s birthday present, Keeble’s engine. Kraken sidled into the dark room, drawn by bleary curiosity. He stubbed his toe into the chest before he saw it, grunting in such a way that he was certain would turn heads in the outer room. But no heads turned. Everyone, apparently, was far too keen on the marvelous toy.

Kraken bent over the chest, running his hands over the front until he found the flat, circular iron hasp. He fiddled with it, not knowing entirely how the mechanism worked and uncertain, even, what in the world he was after — certainly not the emerald. He’d have to be silent as a beetle. It wouldn’t do to be heard. Lord knows what the Captain would think to see him rummaging in the chest. The hasp snapped up suddenly, rapping across Kraken’s knuckles. He shoved three fingers into his mouth. They’d suppose him a common thief, of course. Or worse — they’d suppose he was in league with whomever it was they were at odds with.

Light from the rooms without lay feebly across the contents of the trunk. Kraken rummaged through them, shushing them to silence each time they rattled and swished, and shushing himself for good measure. He shoved his head amid the objects, which he’d managed to push to either side of the trunk. The cold brass of the spyglass pressed his cheek, and the smell of oak and leather and dust rose about his ears — very pleasant smells, in fact. It would be nice to remain so, his head buried like the head of an ostrich among fabulous things. He could easily have gone to sleep if he weren’t standing up. He could hear blood rushing through his head — ebbing and flowing like the tides, as Aristotle would have it — and in among the general roaring of it he could just hear something else, a voice, it seemed, coming from somewhere very far away.