Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (18 page)

 
          
 
Parsons is a good man. I'll say that in the
interests of fair play. He and St. Ives have had their differences, but they've
both of them been after the same ends, just from different directions. Parsons
couldn't abide the notion of people being shot at, even people who tired him as
much as I did. So in the end, he told us:

 
          
 
"It was a man named Higgins."

 
          
 
"Leopold Higgins!" cried St. Ives.
"The ichthyologist.
Of course."
St. Ives somehow always seemed to know at least half of everything—which is a
lot, when you add it up.

 
          
 
Parsons nodded wearily.
"
Oxford
man.
Renegade academician.
They're a dangerous breed when they go feral, academics are. Higgins was a
chemist, too.
Came back from the Orient with insane notions
about carp.
Insisted that they could be frozen and
thawed out, months later, years.
You could keep them in a deep freeze,
he said. Some sort of glandular excretion, as I understand it, that drained
water out of the cells, kept them from bursting when they froze. He was either
an expert in cryogenics or a lunatic. It's your choice. He was clearly off his
head, though. I think it was opium that did it. He claimed to dream these
things.

 
          
 
"Anyway, it was a glandular business with
carp. That was his theory. All of it, mind you, was wrapped up in the notion
that it was these secretions that were the secret of the astonishing longevity
of a carp. He hadn't been back from
China
a year when he disappeared. I saw him, in
fact, just two days earlier, in
London
, at the club. He burst in full of wild
enthusiasm, asking after old—after people I'd never heard of, saying that he
was on the verge of something monumental. And then he was gone—out the door and
never seen .again."

 
          
 
"Until now," said St. Ives.

 
          
 
"Apparently so."

 
          
 
St. Ives turned to Hasbro and myself and said,
"Our worst fears have come to pass," and then he bowed to Parsons,
thanked him very much, and strode out with us following, down the hallway and
straightaway to the train station.

 
          
 
WE SPENT THE NIGHT on the Ostende ferry. I
couldn't sleep, thinking about the Landed Catch sinking like a brick just to
the south of the very waters we were plowing, and I was ready at the nod of a
head to climb into a lifeboat and row away. The next day found us on a train to
Amsterdam
, and from there on into
Germany
and
Denmark
, across the Skaggerak and into
Norway
. It was an appalling trip, rushing it like
that, catching little bits of hurried sleep, and the only thing to recommend it
was that there was at least no one trying to kill me anymore, not as long as I
was holed up in that train.

 
          
 
St. Ives was in a funk. A year ago he had made
this same weary journey, and had left Narbondo for dead in a freezing tarn near
Mount
Hjarstaad
, which rises out of the
Norwegian Sea
. Now what was there but evidence that the
doctor was alive and up to mischief? It didn't stand to reason, not until
Parsons's chatter about cryogenics. Two things were bothering St. Ives, wearing
him thinner by the day. One was that somehow he had failed once again.
Thwarting Narbondo and diverting the earth from the course of that ghastly
comet had stood as his single greatest triumph; now it wasn't a triumph
anymore. Now it was largely a failure, in his mind, anyway. Just like that.
White had become black. He had lived for months full of contradictions of
conscience. Had he brought about the doctor's death, or had he tried to prevent
it? And never mind that— had he tried to prevent it, or had he attempted to
fool himself into thinking he had? He couldn't abide the notion of working to
fool himself. That was the avenue to madness. So here, in an instant, all was
effaced. The doctor was apparently alive after all and embarked on some sort of
murderous rampage. St. Ives hadn't been thorough enough. What Narbondo wanted
was a good long hanging.

 
          
 
And on top of that was the confounding
realization that there wasn't an easier way to learn what we had to learn. St.
Ives knew no one in the wilds of
Norway
. He couldn't just post a letter asking
whether a frozen hunchback had been pulled from a lake and revived. He had to
find out for himself. I think he wondered, though, whether he
hadn't ought
simply to have sent Hasbro about the business,
or me, and stayed behind in
Sterne
Bay
.

 
          
 
We were in
Trondheim
, still hurtling northward, when the news
arrived about the sinking of the other two ships, just below where the first
had disappeared. Iron-hulled vessels, they'd gone down lickety-split, exactly
the same way. The crew had abandoned the first one, but not the second. Ten men
were lost in all. It had been Godall who sent the cable to
Norway
. He had prevailed upon the prime minister
to take action.

 
          
 
St. Ives was furious with himself for having
done nothing to prevent the debacle.

 
          
 
What could he have done, though? That's what I
asked him. It was useless to think that he could have stopped it. Part of his
fury was directed at the government. They had been warned, even before Godall
had tackled them. Someone— Higgins, probably—had sent them a monumental ransom
note. They had laughed it away, thinking it a hoax, even though it had been
scrawled in the same hand as had
Captain !

 
          
 
Bowker's note, and warned them that more ships
would be sunk. The
Royal
Academy
should have urged them to take it
seriously, but they had mud on their faces by now, and had hesitated. All of
them had been fools.

 
          
 
Shipping now was suspended in the area, from
the mouth of the
Thames
to Folkestone, at an inconceivable expense
to the Crown and to private enterprise. Half of
London
trade had slammed to a halt, according to
Godall. It was a city under siege, and no one seemed to know who the enemy was
or where he lay . . .St. Ives was deadly silent, frustrated with our slow
travel northward, with the interminable rocky landscape, the fjords, the pine
forests.

 
          
 
What could he do but carry on? That's what I
asked him. He could turn around, that's what. He made up his mind just like
that. We were north of
Trondheim
and just a few hours from our destination. St. Ives would take Hasbro
with him. I would go on alone, and see what I could see. He and Hasbro would
rush back to
Dover
where St. Ives would assemble scientific apparatus. He had been a fool,
he said, a moron, a nitwit. It was he and he alone who
was
responsible for the death of those ten men. He could have stopped it if he
hadn't been too muddleheaded to see. That was ever St. Ives's way, blaming
himself
for all the deviltry in the world, because he hadn't
been able to stop it. The sheer impossibility of his stopping all of it never
occurred to him.

 
          
 
Hasbro gave me a look as they hefted their
luggage out onto the platform. St. Ives was deflated, shrunken almost, and
there shone in his eyes a distant gleam, as if he were focused on a single
wavering point on the horizon—the leering face of Ignacio Narbondo—and he would
keep his eyes fixed on that face until he stared the man into oblivion.

 
          
 
Hasbro took me aside for a moment to tell me
that he would take care of the
professor, that
I
wasn't to worry, that we would all win through in the end. All I had to do was
learn the truth about Narbondo. St. Ives must be desperately certain of the
facts now; he had become as methodical as a clockwork man. But like that same
man, he seemed to both of us to be running slowly down. And for one brief
moment there on the platform, I half hoped that St. Ives would never find
Narbondo, because, horrible as it sounds, it was Narbondo alone that gave
purpose to the great man's life.

 
          
 
Narbondo had had a long and curious criminal
history: vivisection, counterfeiting, murder—a dozen close escapes capped by
his fleeing from Newgate Prison very nearly on the eve of his intended
execution. There was nothing vile that he hadn't put his hand to. He dabbled in
alchemy and amphibian physiology, and there was some evidence that, working
with the long-forgotten formulae of Paracelsus, he had developed specifics that
would revive the dead. His grandfather, the elder Narbondo, had elaborated the
early successes of those revivification experiments in journals that had been
lost long ago. And those, of course, were the papers alluded to by the woman in
Godall's shop.

 
          
 
It was a mystery, this business of the lost
journals—a far deeper mystery than it would seem on the surface, and one that
seemed to have threads connecting it to the dawn of history and to the farthest
corners of the earth. And it was a mystery that we wouldn't solve. We would
tackle only the current manifestation of it, this business of Higgins the
academician and Captain Bowker and the revived Narbondo and the ships sinking
in the
Dover
Strait
. There was enough in that to confound even
a man like St. Ives.

 
          
 
It was St. Ives's plan to resort again to the
dirigible. I would proceed to
Mount
Hjarstaad
by train and make what discoveries I could,
while waiting for the arrival of the dirigible, which would put out of
Dover
upon St. Ives's return to that city.
Ferries were still docking there, but only if they had come in from the north:
Flanders
and
Normandy
ferries had stopped running altogether. So
St. Ives would send the dirigible for me, in an effort to fetch me back to
England
in time to be of service.

 
          
 
We should have hired the dirigible in the
first place, lamented St. Ives, standing on the platform in the cold arctic
wind. We should have this, we should have that. I muttered and nodded, never
having seen him in such despair. There was no arguing with him there in that
rocky landscape, which did its part to freeze one's hope. I would have to go on
with as stout a heart as I could fabricate.

 
          
 
And so away they went south, and I north, and
I didn't learn another thing about their adventures until I met up with them
again, days later, back in Sterne Bay, the dirigible rescue having come off
without a hitch and skived at least a couple of days off my wanderings about
Norway, but having sailed me into Dover too late to join my comrades in their
dangerous scientific quest. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. It's what I
found out in Hjarmold, near the
mountain, that
signifies.

 
          
 
Narbondo had been fished out of his watery
grave
,,
all right —by a tall thin man with a baldhead.
It had to have been Leopold Higgins, although he had registered at the hostel
under the name Wiggins, which was evidence either of a man gone barmy or of a
man remarkably sure of himself I got all this from the stableboy, whose room
lay at the back of the stables, and who had seen a good deal of what transpired
there. No real effort had been made for secrecy. Higgins and an accomplice—
Captain Bowker, from the description of him—had ridden in late one afternoon
with Narbondo lying in the back of the wagon, stiff as a day-old fish. They
claimed that he had just that morning fallen into the
lake,
that
they had been on a climbing expedition. There was nothing in their
story to excite suspicions. Higgins had professed to be a doctor and had
stopped them from sending up to Bod0 for the local medicine man.