James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

“Shoot!” St. Ives shouted, but a shot was out of the question unless he himself backed away, out of the line of fire. He scrambled back down the path toward the bend in the trail as Narbondo leaped along in great springing strides behind him, wild to escape, his face contorted now with fear and wonderment as he hurtled uncontrollably toward St. Ives. The scientist stopped to face him, but saw at once that Narbondo would run him down like an express train.

St. Ives turned and hurried downward, hearing Narbondo’s footsteps slamming along and knowing he would be overtaken in seconds. The path widened just then, but turned sharply at the edge of the cliff, and St. Ives saw below him the waters of the starlit tarn, deadly still in the moonlight. In an instant he took it all in — Narbondo was moving too quickly. He would plummet off the edge of the path where it turned, hurtling into the abyss below. There was no hope for him.

And good riddance, St. Ives thought. But then, almost instinctively, he braced himself against two rocks, and as Narbondo raged past, St. Ives reached out to pull him down. He bulled past like a runaway express, though, and St. Ives, meaning to grab him by the arm, was slammed sideways instead, back into the rocks, managing only to knock Narbondo off-balance. His feet stuttered as he tried to stop himself, and then with a shriek he catapulted forward, away from the abyss, head over heels, caroming against a rock and then somersaulting like a circus acrobat across the steep scree-slippery slope until he plunged into the black waters of the tarn. The reflection of the moon and stars on the surface of the water disintegrated, the bits and pieces dancing wildly. But by the time Hasbro had made his way down to where St. Ives stood staring into the depths of the pool, the surface was lapping itself placid once again.

“He’s gone,” said St. Ives simply.

“Will he float surfaceward, sir?”

“Not necessarily,” replied the scientist. “The fall must have knocked the wind from him. It might have killed him outright. He’ll stay down until he bloats with gasses — until he begins to rot. And the water, I fear, is cold enough to slow the process substantially, perhaps indefinitely. We could wait a bit, just to be certain, but I very much fear that I’ve done too much waiting in my life.”

Hasbro was silent.

“I might have saved him, there at the last,” St. Ives said.

“Very doubtful, sir. I would cheerfully have shot him. And there’d be no use in saving him for the gallows. He wouldn’t escape Newgate Prison a second time.”

“What I wanted was to grab his arm, pull him down. But it seems I gave him a shove instead.”

“And a very propitious shove, to my mind.”

St. Ives looked at him tiredly. “I’m not sure I understand any of it,” he said. “But it’s over now. This part is.” And with that St. Ives nodded at the horizon where glowed a great arc of white fire. As the two men watched, the flaming orb of the comet crept skyward, enormous now, as if it were soaring in to swallow the puny earth at a gulp.

Hasbro nodded quietly. “Shall we fetch their equipment, sir?”

“We’ll want the lot of it,” said St. Ives. “And to all appearances, we’ll want it quickly. We’ve a long and wearisome journey ahead of us before we see the mountains of Peru.” He sighed deeply. His shoulder began suddenly to ache. He turned one last time toward the tarn in which Narbondo had found an icy grave. His confrontation with Narbondo had rushed upon him, the work of a confused second, and had found him utterly unprepared, his actions futile. It almost seemed choreographed by some chaotic higher authority who meant to show him a thing or two about confusion and regret and what most often happened to man’s best-laid plans.

Hasbro stood in silence, waiting, perhaps, for St. Ives to come once again to life. Finally he set off up the path toward the summit, to fetch Narbondo’s apparatus and leaving St. Ives to welcome Jack Owlesby, whose hurried footfalls scuffed up the trail behind them.

Bill Kraken leaned against the parapet on Waterloo Bridge and grinned into the Thames. Four pints of Bass Ale had banked and stoked the fires of good cheer within him. Tomorrow would see the return of his companions; tonight would see the ascent of the diminishing comet. It was nearing midnight as he finished reading the last half paragraph in his ruined copy of Ashbless’s Account of London Scientists, happy to note that although the Royal Academy had never publicly recognized the genius of his benefactor, Ashbless had devoted the better half of his book to accounts of St. Ives’s successes and adventures.

Kraken closed and pocketed the book. The adventure of Lord Kelvin’s machine had ended nicely, if strangely, three afternoons past. The mice and snakes that had rained on Leeds like a Biblical plague had mystified the populace, from the unbelieving Lord Kelvin to the man in the street, taking flight in wondering speculation. The newspapers had been full of it. Every reporter with, perhaps, the exception of Beezer had set out to investigate the incident, but the Royal Academy had put the cap on it — had hushed it up, had hauled away the clogged machine in the night to dismantle it in secret.

Poor Lord Kelvin, thought Kraken, shaking his head. The odd sight of the rocketing beasts had rather unnerved him — perhaps more so even than the ruination of his device. And the muck clogging the tube just before the explosion…Kraken giggled. But his success wasn’t entirely a cause for celebration. There were questions of a philosophic nature to be asked, for sure — questions concerning his lordship’s manufactured failure and the sleepless nights of vain speculation that failure would engender, questions of the expendability of dumb animals for the sake of saving mankind. Kraken wasn’t sure he liked either notion, but he liked the idea of a mutant future even less.

These scientists, thought Kraken, there was no telling what sorts of tricks they’d get up to, scampering like so many grinning devils astride an engine, laboring to turn the old earth inside out like a pair of trousers, one of them yanking at a pant leg with a calipers while another filled the pockets with numbers and gunpowder. And here on the horizon, slipping as if by magic into the sky, rose the comet, the stars paling roundabout like lanterns enfeebled by sudden daylight.

Kraken tipped his hat at the sky and set out. He trudged past Westminster Pier and the Houses of Parliament and climbed into a waiting dogcart, pausing just a moment to look once again over his shoulder at the ascending comet. He took up the reins and shrugged, then reached out to pat the flank of his horse. Success, he thought to himself as he set out at a leisurely canter toward Chingford, is a relative business at best.

I was coming along down Holborn Hill in December, beneath a lowering sky and carrying a tin of biscuits and a pound of Brazilian coffee, when a warehouse exploded behind Perkins inn. Smoke and lumber and a twisted sheet of iron, torn nearly in half from the blast, blew out of the mouth of the alley between Kingsway and Newton Street and scattered the half-dozen pedestrians like autumn leaves.

I was clear of it, thank God, but even so the concussion threw me into the gutter, and I dropped the biscuits and coffee and found myself on the seat of my pants, watching a man stagger away from the explosion, out of the mouth of the alley to collapse bloody on the pavement.

I jumped up and ran for the man on the ground, thinking to help but really not thinking at all, when a second blast ripped through and slammed me against a bakery storefront. Glass shattered where my elbow went through the window, and then the rest of me followed, snapping the mullions and tumbling through in an avalanche of buns.