James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

St. Ives itched to be after them, but here he sat, becalmed in a small brick railway station. He stared impatiently out the window at the nearly empty station. A delay of a minute seemed an eternity, and each sighing release of steam from the waiting train carried upon it the suggestion of the final, fateful explosion. Hasbro, St. Ives could see, was equally uneasy at their motionless state, for he sat hunched forward on his seat as if trying to compel the train into flight. Finally, amid tooting and whooshing and three false starts, they were away again, St. Ives praying that the engineer had understood his translated request that they make an unscheduled stop on the deserted tundra adjacent to Mount Hjarstaad. Surely he would; he had accepted the little bag of assorted coffee tablets readily enough. What could he have understood them to be but payment?

Darkness had long since fallen, and with it had fled the last of the scattered rain showers. Ragged clouds pursued by arctic wind capered across the sky, and the stars shone thick and bright between. The train developed steam after puffing along lazily up a steepening grade, and within a score of minutes was hurtling through the mountainous countryside.

St. Ives was gripped once more with the excitement and peril of the chase. He removed his pocket watch at intervals, putting it back without so much as glancing at it, then loosening his already-loosened collar, peering out across the rocky landscape at the distant swerve of track ahead when the train lurched into a curve, as if the engine they pursued must surely be visible a half mile farther on.

The slow labored climb of steep hills was almost instantly maddening and filled him again with the fear that their efforts would prove futile, that from the vantage point of the next peak they would witness the detonation of half of Scandinavia: crumbling mountainsides, hurtling rocks. But then they would creep, finally, to another summit void of trees, where the track was wafered onto ledges along unimaginable precipices. And the train would plunge away again in a startling rush of steam and clatter.

They thundered through shrieking tunnels, the starry sky going momentarily black and then reappearing in an instant only to be dashed again into darkness. And when the train burst each time into the cold Norwegian night, both St. Ives and Hasbro were pressed against the window, peering skyward, relieved to see the last scattered clouds fleeing before the wind. Then all at once, as if waved into existence by a magic wand, the lights of the aurora borealis swept across the sky in lacey showers of green and red and blue, like a semitransparent Christmas tapestry hung across the wash of stars.

“Yes!” cried St. Ives, leaping to his feet and nearly pitching into the aisle as they rushed howling into another tunnel. “He’s done it! Kraken has done it!”

“Indeed, sir?”

“Absolutely,” said St. Ives, his voice animated. “Without the shadow of a doubt. The northern lights, my good fellow, are a consequence of the earth’s electromagnetic field. It’s a simple matter — no field, no lights. Had Lord Kelvin’s machine done its work, the display you see before us would have been postponed for heaven knows how many woeful years. But here it is, isn’t it? Good old Bill!” And on this last cheerful note, they emerged once again into the aurora-lit night, hurtling along beside a broad cataract that tumbled down through a boulder-strewn gorge.

Another hour’s worth of tunnels, however, began to make it seem finally as if there were no end to their journey, as if, perhaps, their train labored around and around a clever circular track, that they had been monumentally hoaxed one last fateful time by Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. Then, in an effort of steam, the train crested yet another treeless summit, and away to the west, far below them, moonlight shimmered on the rippled surface of a fjord, stretching out to the distant Norwegian Sea. Tumbling down out of the rocky precipices to their right rushed the wild river they had followed for what seemed an age, the torrent wrapping round the edge of Mount Hjarstaad and disappearing into shadow where it cascaded, finally, into the vast emptiness of an abyss. A trestle spanned the cataract and gave out onto a tundra-covered plain, scattered with the angular moon shadows of tilted stones.

Ahead of them, some ten yards from the track and clearly visible in the moonlight, lay a strange and alien object — an empty steamer trunk, its lid thrown back and its contents removed. Beyond that, a hundred yards farther along, lay another, also empty and yanked over onto its side. The train raced past both before howling to a steam-shrieking stop that made St. Ives wince. So much for subtlety, he thought, as Hasbro pitched their bags onto the icy plain and the two leaped out after them, the train almost immediately setting forth again, north, toward Hammerfest, leaving the world and the two marooned men to their collective fate.

St. Ives hurried across the plain toward the slope of Mount Hjarstaad. A footpath wound upward along the edge of the precipice through which the river thundered and roiled. The air was full of cold mist and the booming of water. “I’m afraid we’ve announced our arrival through a megaphone,” St. Ives shouted over his shoulder.

“Perhaps the roar of the falls…,” said Hasbro at St. Ives’s back. But the rest of his words was lost in the watery tumult as the two men hurried up the steepening hill, keeping to the edge of the trail and the deep shadows of the steep rocky cliffs.

St. Ives patted his coat, feeling beneath it the hard foreign outline of his revolver. He realized that he was cold, almost numbed, but that the cold wasn’t only a result of the wet arctic air. He was struck with the overwhelming feeling that he was replaying his most common and fearful nightmare, and the misty water of the falls seemed to him suddenly to be the rain out of a London sky. He could hear in the echoing crash the sound of horse’s hooves on paving stones and the crack of pistols fired in deadly haste.

The revolver in his waistband suddenly was almost repulsive to him, as if it were a poisonous reptile and not a thing built of brass and steel. The notion of shooting it at any living human being seemed both an utter impossibility and an utter necessity. His faith in the rational and the logical had been replaced by a mass of writhing contradictions and half-understood notions of revenge and salvation that were as confused as the unfathomable roar of the maelstrom in the chasm.

There was a shout behind him. A crack like a pistol shot followed, and St. Ives was pushed from behind. He rolled against a carriage-sized boulder, throwing his hands over his head as a hail of stones showered down around him, and an enormous rock, big as a cartwheel, bounded over his head, soaring away into the misty depths of the abyss.

He pushed himself to his knees, feeling Hasbro’s grip on his elbow, and he peered up into the shadowy gloom above. There, leaping from perch to rocky perch, was a man with wild hair and beard — Hargreaves, there could be little doubt. Hasbro drew his revolver, steadied his forearm along the top of a rock, and fired twice at the retreating figure. His bullets pinged off rocks twenty feet short of their mark, but the effect on the anarchist was startling — as if he had been turned suddenly into a mountain sheep. He disappeared on the instant, hidden by boulders.

St. Ives forced himself to his feet, pressing himself against the stony wall of the path. Hasbro tapped his shoulder and gestured first at himself and then at the mountainside. St. Ives nodded as his friend angled away up a rocky defile, climbing slowly and solidly upward. He watched Hasbro disappear among the granite boulders, and for a moment he felt the urge to sit down right there in the dirt and wait for him.