James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

We arrived in the twentieth century, in the familiar cave on the Salisbury Plain. All of us, since St. Ives’ remonstrances, were leery of what we’d find. Stonehenge, we feared, would be whisked away and replaced by a picket fence enclosing a pumpkin patch. The wagon load of tourists bound for Wiltshire would have their hats on backward or would wear spectacles the size and shape of starfish. When one thought about it, it seemed almost a miracle that no such incongruity confronted us when we peered out of the door of that cave. There was the plain, dusty and hot, Marlborough to the north, Andover to the east, London, for aught we could determine, bustling along the shores of the Thames some few miles away, beyond the horizon.

I, for one, breathed a hearty sigh of relief. The last third of our mission had been ticked off the list, and another chapter in the great book of the adventures of Langdon St. Ives had come to a happy close. His camera was full of photographs. His time machine was faultless. There lay our cart and tarpaulin. We had only to load the device and the gear and away. The Royal Academy was a plum for the plucking.

I hefted my bag, grinning. For the moment. Something, however, seemed to be tugging at the corners of my mouth, effacing the grin. What was it? I gave St. Ives a look, and he could see quite clearly, from the puzzlement on my face, that something was amiss. I felt, abruptly, like a caveman smitten across the noggin with a stone.

My toiletries kit — I’d left it by the spring! There wasn’t a thing in it, beyond a comb and brush, a bar of soap and a bottle of rose oil for the hair. I tore open my bag, hoping, in spite of my certain knowledge to the contrary, that I was wrong. But such wasn’t the case. The kit was gone, lost in the trackless centuries of the past.

Our first thought was to retrieve it. But that wouldn’t do. As fine as St. Ives’s calculations were, we might as easily arrive a week early or a week late. We might appear, as I’ve said, while the cave painter was at work, and have to knock him senseless in order to squelch the news of our scissoring at the fabric of time. The universe mustn’t get onto us, although, as I pointed out to St. Ives, it already had, due to my incalculable stupidity. St. Ives pondered for a moment. Returning would, quite likely, compound the problem. And there was our wagon, wasn’t there? The universe hadn’t gone so far afoul as to have eradicated our wagon. Surely the Romans had arrived after all. Surely the megatherium had nosed a sufficient quantity of roots out of the dirt to satisfy itself and the universe both. The toad had eaten his bug and all was well. The panic had been for nothing.

We turned, intending to dismantle the ship, to hoist it onto the wagon prepara-tory to returning to Harrogate via London. There on the wall before us was the cave painting — the likeness of the artist himself, the scattered beasts beyond. We stood gaping at it, unbelieving. I blinked and stepped forward, running my hand across the time-dried paint. Was this some monstrous hoax? Had some grinning devil had a go at the painting at our expense while we dawdled in pre-history?

The painting was wonderfully detailed — his broad nose, his overhung brow, his squinty little pig eyes. But instead of that troubled frown, his face was arched with a faint half smile that Da Vinci would have paid to study. His hair, in another lifetime shaggy and wild, was parted down the center and combed neatly over his ears. The artist had been clever enough to capture the sheen of rose oil on it, and the passing centuries hadn’t diminished it. His beard, still monumental by current standards, was combed out and oiled into a cylinder like the beard of a pharaoh. My comb was thrust into it by way of ornament. He held my brush in one hand; in the other, gripped at the neck and drawn with reverential care, was the bottle of hair oil, tinted pink and orange in the dying sunlight.

I fear that after the shock of it had drained the color from my face, I pitched over onto that same article and had to be hauled away bodily in the cart. The rest you know. The cave on the Salisbury plain is no more, and, happily, the tenuous and brittle fabrication of the universe isn’t quite so tenuous and brittle after all. Or so I tell myself. With the cave went the great mass of St. Ives’s evidence. His photographs were cried down as frauds — waxwork dummies covered in horsehair. He’s planning another journey, though. He’s found the foreleg of a dinosaur in a sandpit in the forest near Heidelberg, and he intends to compel it to spirit us back to the Age of Reptiles.

Whether I accompany him or stay in Harrogate to look after the tropical fish is a matter I debate with myself daily. You can understand what an unsettling thing it must be to teeter on the brink of bringing down the universe in a heap, and then to be snatched away at the last moment by the timely hand of Providence. And besides, I’m thinking of writing a monograph on the Crusoe matter — a little business regarding the civilizing influences of a good tortoiseshell comb. Desperate as it was, the incident of the toiletries bag has rather revived my interest in the issue. The truth of it, if I’m any judge, has been borne out quite nicely.

Rain had been falling for hours, and the North Road was a muddy ribbon in the darkness. The coach slewed from side to side, bouncing and rocking, and yet Langdon St. Ives was loathe to slow the pace. He held the reins tightly, looking out from under the brim of his hat, which dripped rainwater in a steady stream. They were two miles outside Crick, where they could find fresh horses — if by then it was fresh horses that they needed.

Clouds hid the moon, and the night was fearfully dark. St. Ives strained to see through the darkness, watching for a coach driving along the road ahead. There was the chance that they would overtake it before they got into Crick, and if they did, then fresh horses wouldn’t matter; a coffin for a dead man would suffice.

His mind wandered, and he knew he was tired and was fueled now by hatred and fear. He forced himself to concentrate on the road ahead. Taking both the reins in his left hand, he wiped rainwater out of his face and shook his head, trying to clear it. He was foggy, though. He felt drugged. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head again, nearly tumbling off the seat when a wave of dizziness hit him. What was this? Was he sick? Briefly, he considered reining up and letting Hasbro, his gentleman’s gentleman, drive the coach. Maybe he ought to give it up for the rest of the night, get inside and try to sleep.

His hands suddenly were without strength. The reins seemed to slip straight through them, tumbling down across his knees, and the horses, given their head, galloped along, jerking the coach behind them as it rocked on its springs. Something was terribly wrong with him — more than mere sickness — and he tried to shout to his friends, but as if in a dream his voice was airy and weak. He tried to pluck one of the reins up, but it was no use. He was made of rubber, of mist…

Someone — a man in a hat — loomed up ahead of the coach, running out of an open field, up the bank toward the road. The man was waving his hands, shouting something into the night. He might as well have been talking to the wind. Hazily, it occurred to St. Ives that the man might be trouble. What if this were some sort of ambush? He flopped helplessly on the seat, trying to hold on, his muscles gone to pudding. If that’s what it was, then it was too damned bad, because there was nothing on earth that St. Ives could do to save them.

The coach drove straight down at the man, who held up a scrap of paper — a note, perhaps. Rainwater whipped into St. Ives’s face as he slumped sideways, rallying his last few remnants of strength, shoving out his hand to pluck up the note. And in that moment, just before all consciousness left him, he looked straight into the stranger’s face and saw that it wasn’t a stranger at all. It was himself who stood at the roadside, clutching the note. And with the image of his own frightened face in his mind, St. Ives fell away into darkness and knew no more.