The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (30 page)

Pule considered the brass tube and what appeared to be little crank device on the side. Kraken’s box hadn’t had any such accoutrements—although their presence certainly didn’t reveal the contents of the box. They could, quite conceivably, be a breathing mechanism of some sort for a creature housed within. Had Owlesby’s manuscript revealed the whereabouts of the creature? Had St. Ives recovered it? Pule’s head swan with unanswerable questions. Only one thing seemed certain—that here was a Keeble box that contained a mystery, quite possibly a valuable mystery. Pule possessed it and would continue to possess it. If worse came to worst, if all of Narbondo’s plans came to naught, Pule would have the box, a much-needed wild card in a game in which Narbondo held the aces. A wagon clattered toward him along the road, and Pule stepped out to meet it, the morning sun shining down on him in an altogether friendly way.

***

Bill Kraken had never before felt so low. He’d done some vile things in his life—robbed graves, pinched carp from the aquarium, been drunk more often than he’d been sober. He’d been a merchant of overripe squid, a failed purl man, a reasonably successful pea pod man, and for a two-month period a year or so after his separation from Owlesby, he’d taken up the pure trade, selling dog waste to the tanyards for enough money to keep himself fed—if cabbage broth and black bread were food. But his worst moments since poor Sebastian had fallen were mere nothings compared to the depths to which he had sunk in the last forty-eight hours. He had betrayed everyone who had befriended him. He’d sold them all. And for what? Nothing. Not a farthing. Not even a handful of beans.

He knuckled his brow and immersed himself in self-loathing. It was drink that did it—strong drink. It made a man mad. There was no way round that truth. But then so did the absence of drink, didn’t it? He licked his dry lips. His tongue felt feathered. His hands shook uncontrollably when he held them in front of him. So he sat on them, perched on a stool in a corner of Narbondo’s laboratory. He saw things, too, out of the corner of his eye—things he oughtn’t to see. It was the horrors, is what it was. And if it wasn’t, it would lead to them sure enough, to the gibbering horrors. He hadn’t been so dry in a week, a month.

Now, watching out of the edge of his left eye the thing on the slab that lay not fifteen feet distant, he wondered what in the world it would look like to him if he were drunk. Given half a chance, he’d set out to discover the truth of the matter. He patted his coat pocket and there was Ashbless, bullet hole and all. The problem with the philosophers was that they were short on practical advice. They could reveal little to him about his present circumstance. Better the book were hollow and held a pint of gin.

He mashed his eyes closed and held them so. Time passed fearfully slowly. He remembered, fifteen long years past, having wrestled out of open coffins dead men not much prettier than the thing on the slab. Better his eyes had been plucked out. They quite likely would be. They’d beaten him, but he could stand that. He’d been beaten before. And he’d had the horrors before, too. But those he didn’t want again. He’d given up squid merchanting when he’d found that the creatures inhabited his dreams, all leggy and cold.

For the hundredth time he looked roundabout him for something to consume—spirits of any sort—but saw nothing hut the empty wine glass left with diabolical purpose on a tabletop by the fat boy in curls, along with the carcass of a fowl. The breadth of the glass magnified the depth of the little crimson circle settled in the bottom. In truth there wasn’t enough in it to dribble to the edge when the glass was upturned.

Kraken had tried, to be sure. He’d mopped up the dregs with his fingers, but little of substance was accomplished by it. There was even less in the way of food on the plate—nothing but broken bones—just the gristly burnt carcass of a peculiar game bird, a pea hen with the head on, eyeless and charred.

Pule and Narbondo had gone out, locking the doors and windows. They’d abandoned him hours earlier, before night had fallen. The ghostly light of the gaslamps did nothing to enliven the general gloom of the cabinet—simply cast unpleasant shadows on the walls and floor, like the shadow, thought Kraken, barely able to look at it, of the humped, skeletal pea hen across the edge of the piano. They’d left him a pitcher of water. Perhaps if he got desperate enough…

They’d return, he knew, with a body. Pule’s trip to Harrogate in search of poor Sebastian’s manuscript had ended in a general rage. Curses flew. The doctor had cuffed Pule across the chin, destroyed the pot of carbolic and stewed horsehide that Pule was cooking as a facial treatment. It had smelled awful. Then they’d gone out. The thing on the slab must be vivified, that’s what Narbondo had said. Tonight. They would find a donor. If not, hinted the doctor, Kraken would do nicely. Kraken or Pule, either one of them. Pule had smiled through his tirade, like a cat full of milk.

The gaslamps flickered. Shadows danced. The game bird rattled suddenly on its plate as if it were trying to drag itself away. Kraken started in horror. Silence fell once again. Across the room on a small table beside the fishless aquarium sat the Keeble box. What could Kraken do with it? He could smash out the window and pitch it into the street, then dive out after it. But what would it profit him? He was a hunted man. There could be no doubt about that. Newgate was too good for him. It would mean the gibbet if he were caught.

Outside the window swirled a thick fog, most of it river fog off the Thames. Dirty little rivulets dripped down the panes, pooling up along the mullions and dripping off, one by one, onto the sidewalk below. The street outside was silent. It was the silence, dense as the fog, that bothered him. He’d tried singing and whistling, but in the dim, shadow-haunted room the noise had merely been unnatural. It seemed to him, in fact, that the slightest sound would awaken the thing on the slab.

Its head was twisted toward him, dropped crookedly across its chest. Flesh hung beneath its eyesockets like parchment. It seemed as if a breeze through a broken window pane would turn it to dust. Or perhaps the thing would rise in the draft like a kite to twitch and gibber at him, to lurch along toward him, silhouetted against the light that shone dimly through the curtained window of the room across the courtyard. Earlier he’d seen the shadow of a face peer past the curtain—watching him, perhaps; perhaps one of Narbondo’s agents.

Kraken shut his eyes, but through the lids he could see the dancing shadows animated by gaslight. He pressed his eyes with his hands, but the horrors that swirled into view against the back of his eyelids were worse than the thing on the table. What had Paracelsus said about such emanations? He couldn’t quite recall. Paracelsus was mist in his memory, a product of another age, an age that had ended when he’d stolen the damned emerald from the Captain, the emerald that the smug Narbondo had left so casually beside the aquarium.

On the edge of the slab, as if they had crawled there of their own power, were two skeletal hands, obviously fallen from the hunched corpse behind them. Kraken avoided looking at them. He had been certain an hour earlier that for an instant the things had moved, rattled their fingers atop the table, inched inexorably toward him, and that the ruined pea hen had sighed on its plate, rustling among cold potatoes.

But all had fallen silent. It was the wind through the broken panes, carrying on it the sharp, sooty odor of fog. There lay the hands, almost grasping the edge of the lamplit table, ready, perhaps, to lunge at him. Why in the devil weren’t they attached to the corpse? What unholy thing did their separation betoken?

Kraken peered at them, and was certain for one rigid moment that the index finger of the left hand twitched. Beckoning. He glanced away toward the fogbound window and gasped in horror at his own reflection, hovering in the glass, staring in at him. He edged farther into his corner. If the hands crept from the slab would they shatter when they hit the floor? Or would they fall into shadow, pausing for a moment before scuttling out like crabs toward his feet. Kraken was suddenly fearfully cold. Narbondo, perhaps, wouldn’t return at all. Perhaps they’d gone out, knowing that Kraken would die in horror during the night, that the thing in the shroud would rush at him like a sheet hauled along a clothesline, would envelop him in dust and rot and clacking bones and suffocate him in horror.

On the wall behind him hung a collection of instruments, but there was nothing with which to defend himself against animated corpses. His eyes settled on a pair of elongated tongs, the jaws of which were wrapped in a rubber casing. He stood up slowly, barely breathing, understanding that the thing on the slab was watching, trying, perhaps, to fathom his fear, his intent.

He very slowly removed the tongs and stepped across toward the slab, wheezing with fear, waiting for the hands to fly at him like papery bugs, like leather-winged bats, to clutch at his throat, to reach into his mouth. At the touch of the tongs, surely they’d leap at him as if spring driven. He knew they would.

But they didn’t. He plucked one of the hands up and very gingerly turned, took a step toward the open piano, and shoved the thing onto the silent keys, banging out a wild note with the edge of the tongs and leaping backward, a shriek lodged in his throat. The other hand lay as before. Or did it? Was it turned now? Had it crept about to face him? He clamped the tongs around it, whirled, and dumped it onto the piano keys along with its grisly counterpart, then slammed down the key cover, locking it with a little triangular brass key that lay atop the piano.

Could he bear to do the same with the thing’s head—yank it loose and hide it somewhere? Perhaps shove the top of the piano aside and toss it in? He forced himself to look at it, to imagine clamping the tongs against the ivory cheekbones and twisting the head until it snapped. The thought paralyzed him, but he had to do it. He steeled himself. He couldn’t be stared at any longer. He stepped toward it, reaching out with the tongs, slowly drawing the jaws apart. He daren’t get the tongs in the thing’s mouth; it would snap the steel rods like twigs.

The tongs inched closer. Kraken shook so that the loose rivet about which the tongs swiveled rattled like a locust. He gasped for breath. The horrible eye sockets seemed to stare through him—through his forehead beaded with cold sweat, a great salty drop of which rolled into his right eye, nearly blinding him. The tongs settled in against the cheekbones, and, with a thrum of settling bones, the thing on the table gave a quick lurch, as if shaking off the rubber clamp.

Kraken hooted in fear, dropped the tongs onto the top of the slab, and trod backwards toward his corner, slamming into the game bird’s table with his right foot. The spindly table leg buckled, and the skeletal bird rolled from the plate in a little cascade of peas and fell to the floor. Kraken watched it in horror, half expecting the thin gray bones of the wings to vibrate and the bird to sail off like a great moth toward the flame of the gaslamp. The tongs banged down on the floor beside it.

This wouldn’t do. He couldn’t abide the idea of the bird out of sight on the floor behind the table. He must know its movements, if there were any. If it flew out of nowhere at him, he’d simply drop dead. He bent suddenly, summoning his strength. He grasped the tongs, plucked the bird from the floor, and tossed it, tongs and all, into a coal bucket on the hearth next to the piano. The bird whumped into the bucket in a cloud of coal dust; the tongs banged against the wall and dropped onto the hearth tiles. Kraken whirled around at the sound of a sudden scuffling behind him, expecting to find himself confronted by the handless skeleton. But there it sat, unmoving. The scuffling issued from beyond the wall across the room. Something pawed at the wall, trying to get in at him. Kraken slumped backward toward his stool in the corner.

TWELVE
The Animation of Joanna Southcote

A panel in the oak wainscot slid abruptly open, and beyond it, tugging weirdly at a pair of shoes, was a bent Willis Pule. He backed into the room, grunting with effort, and Dr. Narbondo appeared behind him, holding up the opposite end of a corpse. Pule dropped it as soon as it was entirely past the wall, as if he were immensely tired. Narbondo kicked the corner of the panel, and it slid shut, cutting off the entrance to what looked to Kraken to be a dark, low hallway. Kraken shrank into his corner, wondering in horror at this new act of villainy, half relieved, however, that it wasn’t him that was being dragged down tunnels.

The panel had just slid shut when there came a fearful pounding at the conventional door. Pule swung it open, and there stood Shiloh the messiah with a look on his face that seemed to imply that he would brook no nonsense, that he’d come for his mother and there would be hell to pay, perhaps literally, if he wasn’t satisfied. Narbondo scowled back at him. “Where is Nell Owlesby?” he asked suddenly.

“She’s safe—safer by far with my flock than with you.”

“Half your flock is
my
flock,” said Narbondo, “and they’d as soon eat her as give her a tract. Get her.

“Quite impossible, I assure you.” Shiloh stepped in and closed the door, frowning at the littered room and at Bill Kraken, who, it seemed, was at least as offensive to him as was the corpse on the floor. “I’ll keep my end of the bargain. You don’t need the woman for that.
I
know where the box is hidden, and have these ten years. If you do as I say, you’ll know too. It’s as simple as that. But you needn’t worry about the woman. She’s worth nothing to you beyond that single bit of knowledge. And
that,
as we both know, is worth an enormous amount, isn’t it?”

The old man slouched on a stool, obviously enjoying the advantage he held over Narbondo. He removed a snuffbox from his pocket, pinched out a frightful quantity, and inhaled hugely, surrounding his head in a momentary brown cloud. He sneezed voluminously six times in rapid, deflating succession until he was reduced to a bent, wheezing ruin, his face a mask of mixed pain and satisfaction. Dr. Narbondo shook his head in disgust. Shiloh groped for his pocket, replacing the snuffbox, and wiped his eyes with the hem of his robe. His wrinkled forehead alternately relaxed and contracted like an irritated slug, as if he were experiencing after tremors of his recent snuff-inspired earthquake.