Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (33 page)

 
          
 
Like a bolt of lightning it struck him: who
was to say that his time traveling wouldn't merely change things for the worse?
What if he had managed to give himself that note, and had gotten away in the machine
in time? Quite likely they would have overtaken Narbondo within the hour. There
would have been no wreck on the
North Road
, no lost day in Crick, no confrontation in
the Seven Dials. The note would then have meant nothing. It would have been
turned into senseless gibberish. And the ghastly irony of the business, he
shuddered to realize, was that his time traveling, his desperate effort to
avert Alice's death, had been the very instrument that set into motion the
sequence of events that would bring about her death. He had killed her, hadn't
he?

 
          
 
Suddenly he began to laugh out loud. The rain
pounded down, washing across his face and down his coat collar as he hooted and
shrieked in the mud, beating his fists against the brass wall of the
time-traveling bathyscaphe until he was breathless, his energy spent. The night
was black and awful, and his shoes were sodden lumps of muck and mud from the
ditch. His chest heaved and his head spun. Slowly, implacably, he forced
himself to crawl back up the rungs to the hatch, shuddering with little spurts
of uncontrollable laughter. "Cottage pie," he said, fumbling with the
latch. "Basil, sage, potatoes ..." The list meant nothing to him, but
he recited it anyway, until, weary and shivering, he sat once again looking out
through the porthole at the night, his laughter finally spent.
"Cheese," he said.

 
          
 
He set the dials and at once activated the
machine. There was the familiar bucking and shuddering and the abruptly
silenced whine, and then once again he was adrift in the well. It wasn't night
when he materialized, though. There was sunlight filtering through murky water.
He was on the bottom of
Lake Windermere
. He had got the location right. The time ought to have been fifty years
past, before he had been born. So there would be no hapless past-time St. Ives
in the process of disappearing. He could take his time now, safe from Parsons,
safe from himself, invisible to anybody but fish. What he wanted was
practice—less hurry, not more of it.

 
          
 
He cast about in his mind, looking for an
adequate test. He had the entirety of history to peek in at—almost too much
choice. He studied the lake bed outside the porthole. There was nothing but mud
and waterweeds. Carefully he manipulated the dials,
then
threw the lever. There was an instant of black night, then water-filtered
sunlight again. He was still on the lake bottom, but in shallow water now, only
partly submerged. A slice of sky shone at the top of the porthole.

 
          
 
Cautiously, he pushed up the hatch and peered
out, satisfied with where he had found himself. Across twenty yards of reeds
lay a grassy bank. Sheep grazed placidly on it, with not a human being in
sight. He shut the hatch, fiddled with the controls, and jumped again, into
full sunlight this time. The machine sat on the meadow now, among the startled
sheep, which fled away on every side. He raised the hatch cover once more and
looked around him. He could see now that there was a house some little way
distant, farther along the edge of the lake. Two women stood in the garden,
picking flowers. One turned suddenly and pointed, shading her eyes. She had
seen him. The other one looked, then threw her hand to her mouth. Both of them
turned to run, back toward the house, and St. Ives in a sudden panic retreated
through the hatch, slamming it behind him, and then once again set the dials,
leaping back down into the bottom of the lake, five years hence, safe from the
eyes of humankind.

 
          
 
Nimbly, he bounced forward once more, and then
back another sixty years, up onto the meadow again. The house was gone, the
fields empty of sheep. He crept forward, a year at a time. Sheep came and went.
There was the house, half-built. A gang of men labored at lifting a great long
roof beam into place. St. Ives crept forward another hour. The beam was
supported now by vertical timbers. The sound of pounding hammers filled the
otherwise silent morning.

 
          
 
He was ready at last. He was bound for the
future, for
Harrogate
and an encounter with Mr. Binger's dog. That
would be the test. Or would it? He thought for a moment. Perhaps a better test
would consist of his not saving Mr. Binger's dog. That might answer his
questions more adequately.
But what then?
Then the dog
would die. The answer to that particular question was evident. Old Furry would
run under the wheels of that carriage. St. Ives had no choice.

 
          
 
He alighted in a yard off
Bow Street
, around the corner from the Crow's Nest.
This time there was no hesitation. He climbed out through the hatch and
sprinted down the sidewalk, slowing as he approached the corner. He could
picture himself bursting out, snatching up the dog, thumbing his nose at
Parsons.

 
          
 
Something was wrong, though. He knew that.
There was no barking. And no dray, either. He was early. Seeing his mistake he
stopped abruptly, swung around, and started back, running toward the machine.
How early was he? He thought he knew, but he couldn't take any chances. He must
know for certain. Abruptly, he angled into the weedy back lot behind the Crow's
Nest, slowing down and sneaking along the wall. Carefully he peered around the
corner, looking in the rear window of the almost-empty restaurant. There he
sat, his past-time self, just then dropping his fork onto his trousers. Slowly
the St. Ives inside the restaurant turned around to face the window, and for a
split second he looked himself straight in the eye, holding his own gaze long
enough for both of him to understand hov/ haggard and drawn and cockeyed he
appeared.

 
          
 
Then with that lesson in mind, he was off and
running again, leaving his past-time self to grapple with the mystery. He
climbed in at the hatch, bumped the time dial forward, and skipped ahead five
minutes. When he opened the hatch it was to the sound of barking dogs. He
climbed hastily down the side, looking up toward the street corner where he
could see the dray already coming along. Christ! Was he too late? He slid to
the ground and started out at a run, but the barking abruptly turned to a
single cut-off yelp, then silence. The driver shouted, and one of the horses
bucked.

 
          
 
Already St. Ives was clambering back into the
machine, sweating now, panicked. He backed the dial off slightly, giving
himself twenty seconds. Again he leaped backward, rematerializing in an instant
and leaping without hesitation at the hatch. He was down and running wildly
toward the corner. He could hear the dray again, but this time he couldn't yet
see it. The barking of old Furry, though, seemed to fill the air along with the
snarling of the mastiff.

 
          
 
He leaped straight down off the curb, looking
back at where a stupefied Parsons stared at him in wide-eyed alarm. Reaching
down, he snatched up the dog, nearly slamming into the horses himself. He threw
himself backward, turning, holding the struggling dog, and staggered toward the
curb, where he let the creature go. Then he took one last precious second to
shout like a lunatic at the snarling mastiff, which turned and fled, howling
away down the street to disappear behind a milliner's shop.

 
          
 
"Run," St. Ives said, half out loud.
And he was away up
Bow Street
again, pursued by Parsons, who huffed along with his hand on his hat.
Full of wild energy, St. Ives easily outdistanced the old man, climbing into
the machine and closing the hatch. He knew where he was going, where he had to
go. He had done all the necessary calculations at the bottom of Lake
Windermere.

 
          
 
As he adjusted the dials, he h2ilf expected
Parsons to clamber up onto the bathyscaphe or to peer into the porthole and
shake his fist. But Parsons didn't appear.

 
          
 
Of course he won't, St. Ives thought suddenly.
Parsons was too shrewd for that. He was right then searching out a constable,
commandeering a carriage in order to race up to the manor and beat the silo
door in. St. Ives tripped the lever to activate Lord Kelvin's machine, and once
again he felt himself falling, downward and downward through the creeping
years, until he came to rest once again, in London now, in Lime-house, sometime
in 1835.

 
          
 
A COLD AUTUMN FOG was
Settling
over Limehouse, and St. Ives counted this as a piece of luck, a sign, perhaps,
that his fortunes were turning. The mist would hide his movements on the
rooftop, anyway, although it would also make it tolerably hard to see. There
was a moon, which helped, but which 2ilso would expose his skulking around if
he didn't keep low and out of sight. For the moment, though, he was fascinated
with the scene round about him. He looked down onto Pennyfields and away up
West India Dock Road and watched the flickering of lights in windows and the
movements of people below him—the streets were crowded despite the hour—sailors
mostly, got up in strange costumes. There were Lascars and Africans and
Dutchmen and heaven knew what-all sorts of foreigners, mingling with
coal-backers and ballast-heavers and lumpers and costermongers and the
thousands of destitute rag-bedraggled poor who slept in the streets in fair weather
and under the bridges in foul.

 
          
 
The roof beams beneath his feet sagged under
the weight of the bathyscaphe, but the machine was safe enough for the moment,
and St. Ives intended to stay no longer than he had to.

 
          
 
Had to—he wondered what that meant. He had
been compelled, somehow, to travel to Limehouse, but he found that he couldn't
say why that was, not in so many words. Beneath his feet, in a garret room over
a general shop, lay Ignacio Narbondo, probably asleep. What was he?—three or
four years old? St. Ives couldn't be certain. Nor could he be certain what
emotions had carried him here. He could, without any difficulty at all, murder
Narbondo while he slept, ridding the world of one of its most foul and
dangerous criminal minds . . . But the idea of that was immediately repellent,
and he half despised himself for admitting it into his mind. Then he thought of
Alice, and he despised himself less. Still, murder wasn't in him. What he
wanted was to study his nemesis close at hand, to discover what forces in the
broad universe had conspired to turn him into what he had become.

 
          
 
The rest of Limehouse didn't sleep. The tide
was rising and the harbors navigable, so ships were loading and unloading, with
no regard for the sun or for the lateness of the hour. Directly below him, from
the open door of the shop, light shone out into the foggy street, illuminating
a debris of broken iron, soiled overcoats, dirty bottles and crockery and
linens and every other sort of household refuse that might conceivably find a
use for itself, although it was an effort for St. Ives to imagine how destitute
a man might be before he saw such trash as useful. He was filled, suddenly,
with horror and melancholy and hopelessness, and he realized that his head
ached awfully, and that he couldn't remember entirely when he'd last slept. He
had always had a penchant for confused philosophy when he was tired. He
recognized it as one of the sure signs of mental fatigue.

 
          
 
"Hurry," he muttered, as if speaking
to the woman who sat below, guarding the detritus that spilled out of the shop
as if it were a treasure. He looked down onto the tattered bonnet on her head
and into the bowl of the short pipe that she smoked, and tried to fathom what
it would be like to have one's life circumscribed and defined by a couple of
filthy streets and a glass of bad gin.

 
          
 
Giving it up as a dead loss, he backed away
from the edge of the roof, turning toward a tall garret window that stood
behind him, its glass streaked and dirty and cracked and looking out on the fog
and chimney pots like an occluded eye. He crept toward it across the slates,
hoping that it wasn't latched, but prepared to open it by force if it was. He
had a pocket full of silver, and he wondered what they would make of a
strangely clothed gentleman creeping in at the window in the middle of the
night for no other purpose, apparently, than to give them money—which is
exactly what he intended to do if they caught him coming in at the window. He
liked the idea: tiptoeing around the rooftops of Pennyfields, bestowing
shillings on mystified paupers. The notion became abruptly despicable, though,
a matter more of vanity than virtue. More likely he would have to use the
silver to buy his freedom before the night was through.