James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

A half hour later the wagon had doubled back through Soho, St. Ives having set such a course toward Chingford that Beezer couldn’t begin to guess it out from within his trunk. Hasbro, always prepared, had uncorked a bottle of whiskey, and each of the three men held a glass, lost in his own thoughts about the warm April night and the dangers of their mission. “Sorry to bring you in on this, Jack,” said St. Ives. “There might quite likely be the devil to pay before we’re through. No telling what sort of a row our man Beezer might set up.”

“I’m not complaining,” Jack said.

“It was Dorothy I was thinking about, actually. We’re only weeks finished with the pig incident, and I’ve hauled you away again. There she sits in Kensington wondering what sort of nonsense I’ve drummed up now. She’s a stout woman, if you don’t mistake my meaning.”

Jack nodded, glancing sideways at St. Ives, whose voice had gotten heavy with the sound of regret. St. Ives seemed always to be on the edge of a precipice, standing with his back to it and pretending he couldn’t see that it was there, waiting for him to take an innocent step backward. Work furiously — that had become the byword for St. Ives, and it was a better thing, perhaps, than to go to pieces, except that there was something overwound about St. Ives sometimes that made Jack wonder if it wouldn’t be better for him to try to see into the depths of that pit that stretched out behind him, to let his eyes adjust to the darkness so that he might make out the shadows down there.

But then Jack was settled in Kensington with Dorothy, living out what must look to St. Ives like a sort of storybook existence. The professor couldn’t help but see that Dorothy and Alice had been a lot alike, and Jack’s happiness must have magnified St. Ives’s sorrow. If Dorothy knew, in fact, what sort of business they pursued this time, she probably would have insisted on coming along. Jack thought of her fondly. “Do you know…,” he began, reminiscing, but the sound of Beezer pummeling the sides of the trunk cut him off.

“Tell the hunchback!” shrieked a muffled voice, “that I’ll have him horsewhipped! He’ll be sulking in Newgate Prison again by the end of the week, by God! There’s nothing about him I don’t know!”

St. Ives shrugged at Hasbro. Here, perhaps, was a stroke of luck. If Beezer could be convinced that they actually were agents of Narbondo, it would go no little way toward throwing the man off their scent when the affair was over, especially if he went to the authorities with his tale. Beezer hadn’t, after all, committed any crime, nor did he contemplate one — no crime, that is, beyond the crime against humanity, against human decency. “Narbondo has authorized us to eliminate you if we see fit,” said St. Ives, hunching over the trunk. “If you play along here you’ll be well paid; if you struggle, you’ll find yourself counting fishes in the rocks off Southend Pier.” The journalist fell silent.

Early in the predawn morning the wagon rattled into Chingford and made for the hills beyond, where lay the cottage of Sam Langley, son of St. Ives’s longtime cook. The cottage was dark, but a lamp burned through the slats in the locked shutters of a low window in an unused silo fifty yards off. St. Ives reined in the horses, clambering out of the wagon at once, and with the help of his two companions, hauled the steamer trunk off the tailgate and into the unfastened door of the silo. Jack Owlesby and Hasbro hastened back out into the night, and for a moment through the briefly open door, St. Ives could see Sam Langley stepping off his kitchen porch, pulling on a coat. The door shut, and St. Ives was alone in the feebly lit room with the trunk and scattered pieces of furniture.

“I’m going to unlock the trunk…,” St. Ives began.

“You sons of…,” Beezer started to shout, but St. Ives rapped against the lid with his knuckles to silence him.

“I’m either going to unlock the trunk or set it afire,” said St. Ives with great deliberation. “The choice is yours.” The trunk was silent. “Once the trunk is unlocked, you can quite easily extricate yourself. The bag isn’t knotted. You’ve probably already discovered that. My advice to you is to stay absolutely still for ten minutes. Then you can thrash and shriek and stamp about until you collapse. No one will hear you. You’ll be happy to know that a sum of money will be advanced to your account, and that you’ll have a far easier time spending it if you’re not shot full of holes. Don’t, then, get impatient. You’ve ridden out the night in the trunk; you can stand ten minutes more.” Beezer, it seemed, had seen reason, for as St. Ives crouched out into the night, shook hands hastily with Langley, leaped into the wagon, and took up the reins, nothing but silence emanated from the stones of the silo.

Two evenings earlier, on the night that St. Ives had waylaid Beezer the journalist, the comet had appeared in the eastern sky, ghostly and round like the moon reflected on a frosty window — just a circular patch of faint luminous cloud. But now it seemed fearfully close, as if it would drop out of the heavens toward the earth like a plumb bob toward a melon. St. Ives’s telescope, with its mirror of speculum metal, had been a gift from Lord Rosse himself, and he peered into the eyepiece now, tracking the flight of the comet for no other reason, really, than to while away the dawn hours. He slept only fitfully these days, and his dreams weren’t pleasant.

There was nothing to calculate; work of that nature had been accomplished weeks past by astronomers whose knowledge of astral mathematics was sufficient to satisfy both the Royal Academy and Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives wouldn’t dispute their figures. That the comet would spin dangerously close to the earth was the single point that all of them agreed upon. His desire in watching the icy planetoid, beyond a simple fascination with the mystery and wonder of the thing, was to have a look at the face of what might easily be his last great nemesis, a vast leviathan swimming toward them through a dark sea. He wondered if it was oblivion that was revealed by the turning earth.

Hasbro packed their bags in the manor. Their train left Kirk Hammerton Station at six. Dr. Narbondo, St. Ives had to assume, would discover that same morning that he had been foiled, that Beezer, somehow, had failed him. The morning Times would rattle in on the Dover train, ignorant of pending doom. The doctor would try to contact the nefarious Beezer, but Beezer wouldn’t be found. He’s taken ill, they would say on Fleet Street, repeating the substance of the letter St. Ives had sent off to Beezer’s employers. Beezer, they’d assure Narbondo, had been ordered south on holiday — to the coast of Spain. Narbondo’s forehead would wrinkle with suspicion, and the wrinkling would engender horrible curses and the gnashing of teeth. St. Ives almost smiled. The doctor would know who had thwarted him.

But the result would be, quite likely, the immediate removal of Narbondo and Hargreaves to the environs of northwestern Scandinavia. The chase, thought St. Ives tiredly, would be on. The comet loomed only a few days away, barely enough time for them to accomplish their task.

A door slammed in the manor. St. Ives slipped from his stool and looked out through the west-facing window of his observatory, waving to Hasbro who, in the roseate light of an early dawn, dangled a pocket watch from a chain and nodded to his employer. In a half hour they were away, scouring along the highroad toward the station in Kirk Hammerton, where St. Ives, Hasbro, and Jack Owlesby would leave for Ramsgate and the dirigible that would transport them to the ice and tundra of arctic Norway. If the labors of Bill Kraken were unsuccessful, if he couldn’t sabotage Lord Kelvin’s frightful machine, they would all know about it, along with the rest of suffering humanity, two days hence.