The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (27 page)

The Keeble box was anchored firmly, the ridiculous hippos and apes carved into the rosewood top grinning out at St. Ives, absolute Keeble trademarks. He pushed the tester button with his finger and a little spray of green chlorophyll dust shot out, carried on a mixture of helium and oxygen. The gauge once again gave a brief leap, then settled as the oxygen dissipated in the general atmosphere of the cabin. St. Ives nodded.

As he clumped back down the stairs, he noted with satisfaction that there wasn’t a single compelling reason to return to London. No word had come regarding the endeavors of the Trismegistus Club. Certainly they could carry on without him for a week. It was entirely likely that the wayward Kraken had been found, that Kelso Drake had heeded the Captain’s warning and scuttled like a beetle into his dark satanic mills. Godall was a marvel—inscrutable, capable. Captain Powers was a rock. The two alone could defend London against a siege of zombies and millionaires. What were they all fooling about with, anyway? What dreary machinations were worth St. Ives’ abandoning the spacecraft, which would, early next morning, angle out through the heavens above West Yorkshire, above the astonished populace of Wetherby and Leeds, to describe its flaming halo in the thin air of the twilit sky and plummet homeward that same evening, already the stuff of legend, to its berth on the moor beyond Robb’s Head?

London could wait for him. They’d have him soon enough. But for the moment they’d play second fiddle. It was the consequence of the scientific fates, and—he thought to himself while regarding from the open doorway of the silo the finny sweep of the wings and the brass and silver of the polished hull—of the scientific muses. He set out across the lawn. It was three in the afternoon by his pocketwatch. Late enough by any reckoning for a glass of Double Diamond. Two, perhaps.

But he wasn’t halfway to the house when, from the direction on the River Nidd, two shots rang out, echoing against the afternoon stillness. St. Ives began to run, redoubling his pace at the sight of Hasbro, a rifle smoking in his hands, standing among the willows. Hasbro threw the rifle to his shoulder, and settled his cheek against the stock. He jerked just a bit with the recoil, then crouched and peered away east into the foliage along the river.

“What the devil!” cried St. Ives, racing up. He could see nothing among the willows and shrubs.

“A prowler, sir,” replied Hasbro, ready, it seemed, to let fly another round if given the least opportunity. “I caught him in the study, and he was out the open window before I could have a go at him. My fetching the rifle, I fear, gave him time to make away along the riverbank. He’d been at your papers, sir—strewed them across the floor, emptied drawers in the press. He was still at it when I happened in—and a lucky circumstance that was—so I’m in hopes he hadn’t found what it was he was after.”

St. Ives was loping across the lawn when these last words were uttered, leaving Hasbro to poke among the riverside shrubs for the prowler. He burst in through the open front door, past the disheveled study and into the library. He hauled out his copy of
Squires’ Complications
and thrust his hand into the broad hiatus left by the stout volume. Behind was the familiar bulk of Owlesby’s manuscript, undiscovered.

He sighed with relief, wondering at the same time who it was had been after it. For it had to be Owlesby’s manuscript the prowler sought. Like it or not, he thought despairingly, London would have him. Mohammed had refused to go the mountain, so here was the mountain, dragging round to Harrogate to kick apart his personal effects. He couldn’t shake the machinations after all. He returned
Squires’
to
its niche and walked into the study where Hasbro, having lost his man on the riverbank, was just then stepping in through an open French window.

The study, as Hasbro had promised, was ransacked. What had been heaps of paper were no longer heaped, but were scattered across the plank floor. Books lay higgledy-piggledy. Drawers were yanked from chests, their contents flung and kicked. A plaster bust of Kepler lay split in two, clubbed, apparently, with a heavy Waterford decanter, shards of which glistened in the afternoon sunlight that poured through the windows. Half the destruction was clearly a matter of a wild and hasty search for the manuscript; half of it was pure, irrational villainy.

St. Ives rolled Kepler’s broken head with his toe. “Did you get a good look at this man?”

“Tolerably, sir, but he was clothed so strangely that his features were effectively hidden.”

“Disguise was it?”

Hasbro shrugged, then shook his head. “Bandages, it seemed to me, swaddling his head. He peered at me through eyeslits, for all the world like one of the Pharaohs at the museum in Cairo. And he reeked of some chemical—carbon tetrachloride, if I’m not mistaken, and something that very much resembled anchovy paste.”

“Was it, do you suppose, one of our ghouls?”

“I’d hesitate to say so, sir. He was far too energetic—in the act of beating poor Kepler so altogether viciously that I took him at once for a madman. The rifle, I could see straightaway, was the ticket.”

St. Ives nodded. It certainly seemed so, given the mess. Damned foolish way to go about thievery—smashing things up for sport in the middle of the afternoon. St. Ives stiffened, the sudden picture of the man with the chimney pipe hat flickering unbidden into his mind. “Did he wear a hat?”

“No, sir.”

“Fairly short, was he? Lank, oily hair? Yellow shirt, perhaps, and a leather coat with the sleeves out at the elbows?”

Hasbro shook his head. “On the stout side, sir, running to fat. Blondish hair in curls.”

St. Ives was relieved. He didn’t at all
want
it to have been Keeble’s garret thief. And what on earth would the man have been after?
Keeble
had the plans to the engine, after all. Blond, curly hair—the description was maddeningly familiar somehow. A face swaddled in chemical-soaked bandages. St. Ives snapped his fingers, then slammed his hand into his open fist. Narbondo’s assistant! What was his name? Pigby…Peebles…Publes. St. Ives routed through his mind. Pule! That was it. Willis Pule. Of course it was he. Narbondo had set him to it. But how in the world, he wondered, did the doctor know that St. Ives possessed the papers? “Let’s have a look along the river, shall we? Lock the house up and tell Mrs. Langley to shriek like a banshee from the kitchen window if she hears so much as a floorboard creak.”

And in moments the two men, each carrying a rifle loaded with birdshot, thrashed among shore grasses and willows, following Pule’s evident footprints northwest along the Nidd until, some mile down, they disappeared into the waters of the river itself their quarry having, apparently, swum for it. A man named Binger ferried the two across in a little rowboat, promising, on the strength of a half crown’s reward, to return to the manor and keep Mrs. Langley company in the kitchen, and to retrieve the two of them from the opposite shore when they’d worked their way back down.

But across the Nidd there were no footprints at all, and their chances of success declined with the settling dusk. Pule, apparently, had sloshed along in the shallows, perhaps doubled back upriver to confuse them. There were endless boats swirling past and here and there one anchored along shore. He might easily have clambered into one and rowed away downriver to Kirk Hammerton. And who was to say he had no accomplices? Narbondo himself might have been waiting beyond the hill in a wagon. Narbondo! The thought of him sobered St. Ives, who had been caught up in the idea of pursuing Pule, of running him down and delivering the scoundrel to the magistrate.

He’d taken a bit for granted, leaving his cook alone in the manor and merely sending an old man along to her when none of them had any idea what sort of foe it was they hunted. He’d been rash. Pule, after all, hadn’t gotten away with a thing. The threat of future danger certainly outweighed the necessity of pursuit.

Stars had flickered on in the evening sky. The lights of Harrogate shown in the west. St. Ives shouldered his rifle, and the two men set out apace for the manor, St. Ives breaking into a jog at the idea of poor Mrs. Langley confronting the hunchbacked doctor or a band of his blood-eating zombies. He and Hasbro were scouring along the last quarter-mile of riverside when the sky beyond the willows changed without warning from deep twilight purple to bright yellow, and a thunderous explosion rocked the meadows.

***

The man in the chimney pipe hat sat in the branches of a willow, squinting in wondering assessment at the fleeing figure whose head was a mess of loose rags. Through an open window stepped a tall, balding man in a dark suit, a rifle over his shoulder. Billy Deener hadn’t any liking for guns if they were in someone else’s hands and here was one in the hands of a man who quite apparently knew what he was about. He threw the weapon to his shoulder and emptied both barrels at the retreating figure, who stumbled, rolled back to his feet, and ran all the faster, weaving back and forth through knee-high grass, white filaments of loosening bandages trailing behind him as if he were an unraveling mummy.

Deener wondered who this interloper was—a common thief? Not at all likely, not with a head wrapped in rags. Countryside thieves wouldn’t go abroad dressed so. It was easier by far simply to wear a mask. Whoever the man was, he hadn’t been carrying the box, more’s the pity. It would have been an easy thing to strangle him with his own loose bandages.

Deener climbed out of his willow and sprinted toward the silo recently vacated by St. Ives. In a moment he was in at the door, out of sight of the two on the riverbank. Luck was with him. They’d be caught up in the pursuit of the bandaged man. It was a perfect diversion. He couldn’t have planned a better one.

Before him sat the rocket, the space vehicle perched atop it, almost lost in the shadows of the windowless upper reaches of the silo. Deener climbed the stairway toward the domed ceiling. A rare smile flickered along the set line of his lips. Here was something worth meddling with. Worth smashing up. Worth destroying. He’d have the box for Drake and some fun besides, at the expense of the tweed-coated phony with the idiot false mustache. He was tired of the man and his showy friends. He’d fix the filthy lot of them if he could, starting now. He fiddled with the hatch, twisting at the cone with both hands until, with a sigh of escaping air, it clicked counter clockwise half a turn and the circular hatch popped open like the lid of a jack-in-the-box, narrowly missing his outthrust chin. All was dark inside. He fumbled in his coat pocket for a match, struck it against his shoe, and thrust it into the interior. The light illuminated the cabin briefly, and when it flickered out, Deener lowered himself in, struck a second match, and lit a pair of little gaslamps, one on either side of the cabin.

The interior of the craft was a gothic wonder of potted plants and machinery. Deener scratched his head at it, not knowing where to begin. Best to start at the start, he thought wisely. That had always been his way. It was the box he was after first, or at least it was the box that Drake was after. And there it was, affixed to the wall next to his left ear.

He patted his pantleg, feeling beneath the fabric the flat surface of a prybar and the round bulk of a ballpeen hammer. In a moment he had them out and tapped the prybar under the edge of the box with the hammer. A grinning hippo watched him from the front of the box. He raised the hammer in a sudden rage; he’d beat the thing from the wall. Smash the offending hippo. Reduce the thing beside it to splinters. What the hell was it anyway? A sea monster? An octopod? He’d beat it to bits. He’d…but Drake. What would Drake do to him? He lowered the hammer and breathed heavily for a moment, staring at the loathsome box. Then once again he shoved his bar in under it, gave it a heave, and caught the box as it fell to the floor. He shook it, but nothing rattled inside. He searched for a latch, but there was none. All six sides of the box were identical, aside from the carvings and a cigar-shaped brass pipe issuing from the mouth of a winking basilisk seated on a divan, a tiny book open on a table beside him. A brass crank thrust out from the ear of the basilisk.

Deener shrugged in momentary resignation, shoved through the hatch, and lay the box on the landing outside, then lowered himself back in. Drooping spikes of orchid flowers caught his eye. Flowers offended him almost as much as the hippo foolery of the box. He slashed at a stem, severing it. Then he hacked at another. They were astonishingly brittle. He swept his arm back and slashed at the little forest of stems. Blossoms flew. He stamped at them, danced on them, pummeling the broad leaves of begonias until they sailed like scattered paper in an autumn wind.

The reflection of his face in a porthole window caught his eye, and he lashed out at it, smashing the curved end of the bar against the heavy glass, which thudded with the blow but refused to shatter. That wouldn’t do. He smashed at it again and then again, cursing it, wheezing for breath. He threw down the bar and plucked up the hammer. Indestructible, was it? He’d see about that. He grabbed an iron rung on the curved wall of the ship and edged in around a cushioned seat. He couldn’t seem to get the right angle. Glancing blows wouldn’t do. The damned seat was square in the way. He beat at the chair, the hammerhead ripping into the soft leather. He kicked at it, shrieking, whipping around as if to surprise the window and delivering against it one final blow. The handle of the hammer split as a spider web of cracks sprang into the heavy glass, breaking the reflection of his sweating face into fragments. He threw down the rest of the handle and pulled himself through the hatch, losing his hat in the process. It bounced once on the landing, rolled onto the stairs, and sailed into the diminishing light of the silo, tumbling groundward end over end.

In a rage, he threw his prybar after it, then stooped, grabbed the box, and raised it over his head as if to smash it down too, to reduce it to rubble on the cobbled floor forty feet below. He stood just so, heaving with exertion, animal noises issuing past his teeth, and then slowly lowered the box, visions of Kelso Drake winking into focus across the tangled confusion of his mind. He turned and leaped wildly down the stairs, three at a time, his breath escaping in mewling grunts with each jolt.