James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

The train edged forward in a hiss of escaping steam, then lurched to a stop. Footsteps rang on the platform. Pule peeked past the edge of his newspaper, horrified to see Langdon St. Ives and his manservant climbing into the train car. Damn! He raised the newspaper. If the door to his compartment opened he’d go out through the window. What else could he do? He hadn’t any weapons. Next time he wouldn’t be caught weaponless. And there would be a next time.

Narbondo would rail at him for having failed to find the papers. It had taken hours to wring Kraken clean of information. Liquor had done it far more neatly than had torture — although Pule rather preferred the latter; since they had no idea whether Kraken had anything to offer them anyway, torture seemed pretty much an end in itself. He’d been a determined old sod, though, and a sorry one, but he’d divulged it all in the end, weeping into his cups. Pule smiled behind his newspaper. He wondered idly whether St. Ives had taken a compartment on his car or had gone along to the next. What did it matter?

Pule was overcome by a sudden idea. He could slip off the train, return to St. Ives’ estate, and in the master’s absence, ransack it. Torch the place, if it came to it. He’d been hasty — was on the edge of missing his chance. He arose, casting down his paper, when the train lurched forward again, dumping him backward onto the seat. It seemed certain that the train was at last underway. Pule thrust open the compartment door and shoved out his head, only to see some few yards before him the back of St. Ives’ servant, who stood in the aisle, speaking to his employer through an open door. Pule slid back in as the train lurched once again to a stop. Was he fated to stay on the damned train? To be robbed of a second chance? He shrugged. What did it matter, after all? It was Narbondo who would profit from his returning to the manor. It was always Narbondo who profited.

“Hot scones!” came a cry from out the window. “Coffee and tea!”

Pule reached out a shilling. The flour-speckled scone seller shrieked and dropped his pastries, tray and all, onto the platform. Coffee flew. The man shrieked again. “The halien!” he cried, falling backward. “The bloody halien!”

A window slid open in the next compartment. “Brinsing!” shouted a voice. A head shoved out into the morning. Pule, casting secrecy onto the scrapheap, peered out at it. Langdon St. Ives stared back, aghast, speechless. The train bolted. Pule jumped for the door. The scone seller continued to shriek. Hasbro rushed at Pule. Pule grabbed the knob of a compartment door and flung it open into the face of his attacker, throwing his shoulder into it in an effort to knock the man down. Behind him in yet another compartment sat a frail old woman, wide-eyed with terror at the sight of the wrapped Pule. Her feet were propped on a steamer trunk, too heavy, no doubt, to be hefted onto the rack.

Pule set his feet against the doorjamb, his back against the door open in the aisle, and dragged the trunk from beneath the woman’s feet, cursing it, cursing her, cursing St. Ives. He wedged the trunk against the open door, realizing as he did so that his efforts weren’t worth the time he was wasting. Shouting a parting curse, he leaped out the end of the car and into the next, slowing a bit, wondering where on earth a man could hide on a train.

Trees and meadows shot past along the tracks. If it came to it, he thought, he’d leap for it. Perhaps he should jump now, before they disentangled themselves from the door and trunk. They’d never suppose him rash enough to attempt such a thing. But the countryside was flying by wonderfully quickly — dangerously so. Pule strode along through the next car and the next, into a third-class car comprising two parallel rows of wooden benches facing the front of the train. The car was empty but for a single man in a chimney pipe hat who dozed in a seat on the aisle.

In his lap was a Keeble box. Pule nearly strangled. He grabbed a seat for support, gripped by vertigo. What did this mean? What weird offspring of fate had come to meet him so peculiarly here? A shouting arose behind him, along with the splintering sound of wood tearing. If he wasn’t quick he’d fail. And the fault would be his own. He looked about him, barely breathing. Beneath the seats were metal baggage racks in various states of disrepair. He grasped a section of iron bar that had come unbolted and wrenched at it. He waited for the sound of the door slamming open behind, for the shouting to commence, for the man with the box — quite possibly in league with St. Ives — to awaken and cut off his escape. The bar clanked to the floor. Pule seized it as the sleeper stirred. The man opened one eye as Pule flailed at him, a cry wrenching out of his lungs. The iron bar struck the man’s forehead and seemed to settle into it, as if he’d hit a pudding with a wooden spoon. Pule dropped the bar and caught the box as the man fell forward. The door burst in behind him. He was out in a trice, leaping in great hopping strides through a succession of cars, out, finally, into the morning air with no place left to flee. He braced his back against the door, holding it tight. His pursuers clattered hollering up behind. Sheep winked by on a sailing meadow.

The train tipped into a curve, slowing a bit, and Pule, shutting his eyes, catapulted from the moving car, howling and flailing into high grass and rolling down to the edge of a pond to the astonishment of the chewing sheep. He lay for a moment, imagining the damage he’d done to his spleen or his liver. He jiggled his extremities and pronounced himself fit. Inordinately proud of himself, he stood up and strode away across the pasture with the air of a man who’d done a day’s work. He fancied, as he limped along the highway, his bandages finally relinquished, what St. Ives’ reaction would be if he did slip back up to Harrogate and have another go at the house. It would be what an artist would call a finishing touch. But it would also, he could see at a glance, be unwise. He had a good deal to lose by such heroics all of a sudden, and he was determined that no one — not Narbondo, not St. Ives, not revenge — nothing would deny him the prize he’d so handily won. A moment’s serendipity had turned the disastrous trip into a victory. He stopped to look at the box. It was the same sort they’d wrested from Kraken the day before. All of Keeble’s damned boxes were the same. Was there a second emerald? Was this the fabled homunculus itself?

Pule considered the brass tube and what appeared to be little crank device on the side. Kraken’s box hadn’t had any such accoutrements — although their presence certainly didn’t reveal the contents of the box. They could, quite conceivably, be a breathing mechanism of some sort for a creature housed within. Had Owlesby’s manuscript revealed the whereabouts of the creature? Had St. Ives recovered it? Pule’s head swan with unanswerable questions. Only one thing seemed certain — that here was a Keeble box that contained a mystery, quite possibly a valuable mystery. Pule possessed it and would continue to possess it. If worse came to worst, if all of Narbondo’s plans came to naught, Pule would have the box, a much-needed wild card in a game in which Narbondo held the aces. A wagon clattered toward him along the road, and Pule stepped out to meet it, the morning sun shining down on him in an altogether friendly way.

Bill Kraken had never before felt so low. He’d done some vile things in his life — robbed graves, pinched carp from the aquarium, been drunk more often than he’d been sober. He’d been a merchant of overripe squid, a failed purl man, a reasonably successful pea pod man, and for a two-month period a year or so after his separation from Owlesby, he’d taken up the pure trade, selling dog waste to the tanyards for enough money to keep himself fed — if cabbage broth and black bread were food. But his worst moments since poor Sebastian had fallen were mere nothings compared to the depths to which he had sunk in the last forty-eight hours. He had betrayed everyone who had befriended him. He’d sold them all. And for what? Nothing. Not a farthing. Not even a handful of beans.