Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (21 page)

 
          
 
It was the lunatic son—Willis Pule. He peeked
out coyly, just his head, and his mother had to snatch the door shut because he
didn't want to let go of it. She reached across and pinched him on the ear, and
his coy smile evaporated, replaced by a look of theatrical shock, which
disappeared in turn when he got a really good glimpse at the fright that must
have been plain on my face. Then, suddenly happy, he affected the wide-eyed and
round-mouthed demeanor of the fat man in the comical drawing, the one who has
just that moment noted the approach of someone bearing an enormous plate of
cream tarts. Pule pulled his right hand from behind his back and waved my
elephant at me.

 
          
 
There was a buzzing just then, and the woman
strode across to where the outlet of a speaking tube protruded from the wall.
She slid open its little hatch-cover, jammed her ear against it, listened, and
then, speaking into the tube, she said, "Yes, we've got him." She
listened again and said, "No, in the hallway.'' And after another moment
of listening she snickered out, "Him? Not hardly," and closed the
hatch-cover and shut off the tube.

 
          
 
She had obviously just spoken to the landlady.
The place was a rat's nest. Everything was clear to me as I slumped uninvited
into a stuffed chair. All my detective work was laughable; I'd been toyed with
all along.
Even the elephant under the potted plant—that had
been the work of the landlady too.
She had snatched it away, of course,
when I'd gone out through the door. She was the only one who was close enough
to have got to it and away again before I had come back in. And all the rigamarole
about my mother's cousin with the improbable names . . . She must have taken me
for a child after that, watching me stroll away up the stairs to my probable
doom. "Him,
not hardly
..." I grimaced. I
thought I knew what that meant, and I couldn't argue with it. Well, maybe it
would serve me some good in the end; maybe I could turn it to advantage. I
would play the witless milksop, and then I would strike. I tried to convince
myself of that.

 
          
 
Willis Pule tiptoed across to a pine table
with a wooden chair alongside it. His tiptoeing was exaggerated, this time like
a comic actor being effusively quiet, taking great silent knee-high steps. What
was a madman but an actor who didn't know he was acting, in a play that nobody
else had the script for? He sat in the chair, nodding at me and working his
mouth slowly, as if he were chewing the end of a cigar. What did it all mean,
all his mincing and posing and winking?
Nothing.
Not a
damned thing. All the alterations in the weather of his face were nonsense.

 
          
 
He laid the elephant on the table and removed
its red jumbo pants with a sort of infantile glee. Then he patted his coat
pocket, slipped out a straight razor, and very swiftly and neatly sawed the
elephant's ears off. A look of intense pity and sadness shifted his eyes and
mouth, and then was gone.

 
          
 
I forgot to breathe for a moment, watching
him. It wasn't the ruining of the toy that got to me. I had built the thing,
after all, and I've found that a man rarely regrets the loss of something he's
built himself; he's always too aware of the flaws in it, of the fact that it
wants a hat, but it's too late to give it one. It was the beastly cool way that
he pared the thing up— that's what got to me: the way he watched me out of the
corner of his eye, and looked up once to wink at me and nod at the neat bit of
work he was accomplishing, almost as if to imply that it was merely practice,
sawing up the elephant was. And, horribly, he was dressed just like his mother,
too, still got up in the same florid chintz.

 
          
 
His mother walked past him, ignoring him
utterly. I hoped that she might take the razor away from him. A razor in the
hands of an obvious lunatic, after all . . . But she didn't care about the
razor. She rather approved of it, I think.

 
          
 
"Willis likes to operate on things,"
she said matter-of-factly, the
word operate
effecting
a sort of ghastly resonance in my inner ear. I nodded a little, trying to
smile, as if pleased to listen to the chatter of a mother so obviously proud of
her son. "He cut a bird apart once, and affixed its head to the body of a
mouse."

 
          
 
"Ah," I said.

 
          
 
She cocked her head and favored me with a
horrid grimace of sentimental wistfulness. "It lived for a week. He had to
feed it out of a tiny bottle, poor thing. It was a night-and-day job, ministering
to that helpless little creature.
A night-and-day job.
It nearly wore him out. And then when it died I thought his poor heart would
break, like an egg. He enshrined it under the floorboards along with the
others.
Held a service and all."

 
          
 
I shook my head, wondering at the notion of a
heart breaking like an egg. They were both barmy, and no doubt about it. And
given Pule's years in apprenticeship with Narbondo, all this stuff about
vivisection very likely wasn't just talk. I glanced over at the table. Pule had
managed to stuff a piece of candle through the holes where the beast's ears had
been. He lit it with a match at both ends, so that the twin flames shot out on
either side of its head, melting the wax all over the tabletop and filling the
room with the reek of burning rubber.

 
          
 
"Willis!" shrieked the mother,
wrinkling up her nose at the stink. In a fit of determination she leaped up and
raced toward the sleeping room. She was immediately out again, brandishing a
broad wooden paddle, and her son, suddenly contrite, began to howl and beg and
cry. Then, abruptly, he gave off his pleading and started to yell, "Fire!
Fire!" half giggling, half sobbing, as he slammed away at the
burning elephant with his cap, capering around and around the table and chair
as his mother angled in to swat him with the paddle.

 
          
 
It was an appalling sight—one I hope never
again to witness as long as I live. I was up in a shot, and leaping for the
door, getting out while the getting was good. The getting wasn't any good,
though; the door was locked tight, and both the mother and son turned on me
together, he plucking up the razor and she waving the paddle.

 
          
 
I apologized profusely. "Terribly
sorry," I said.
"Terribly, terribly sorry."
I couldn't think of anything else. But all the while I looked around the room,
searching out a weapon, and there was nothing at all close to hand except a
chair cushion. I believe that if I could have got at something with a little
weight to it I would have pounded them both into jelly right then and there,
and answered for the crime afterward. There wasn't a court in all of
England
that would have condemned me, not after
taking a look at that mad pair and another look beneath the floorboards of
their house in
London
.

 
          
 
They advanced a step, so I shouted, "I
know the truth!" and skipped away against the far wall. It was a
nonsensical thing to shout, since I didn't any more know the truth than I knew
the names of my fictitious cousins, but it stopped them cold. Or at least it
stopped her. He, on the other hand, had fallen entirely into the role of being
a menace, and he stalked back and forth eyeing me like a pirate, and she eyeing
him, until, seeing her chance, she walloped him on the posterior with the
paddle, grinning savagely, and very nearly throwing him straight razor and all
into the chair I'd been sitting in.

 
          
 
He crept back to his table tearfully, like a
broken man, whimpering nonsense at her, apologizing. He slumped over the
ravaged elephant, hacking off its feet with the razor and then slicing its legs
to ribbons, the corners of his mouth turned down in a parody of grief and rage.

 
          
 
"Where are they?" she asked.

 
          
 
What are they; that was the question. I ought
to have had the answer, but didn't. It could be she meant people—St. Ives,
maybe, and Hasbro. She thought, perhaps, that they were lurking roundabout,
waiting for me. It didn't sound like that's what she meant, though. I scrambled
through my mind, recalling her conversation at Godall's shop.

 
          
 
"I can lead you to them." I was
clutching at straws, hoping it wasn't as utterly obvious as it seemed to be.

 
          
 
She nodded. The son peered at me slyly.

 
          
 
"But I want some assurances," I
said.

 
          
 
"An affidavit?" she asked, cackling
with sudden laughter. "I’ll give you assurances, Mr.
High-and-mighty."

 
          
 
"And I'll give you this!'' cried the son,
leaping up as if spring-driven and waving his straight razor in the air like an
Afghani assassin. In a sudden fit he flailed away with it at the remains of the
elephant, chopping it like an onion, carving great gashes in the tabletop and
banging the razor against the little gear mechanism inside the ruined toy, the
several gears wobbling away to fall off the table and onto the floor. Then he
cast down the razor, and, snarling and drooling, he plucked up the little jumbo
trousers and tore them in half, throwing them to the carpet, alternately trodding
on them and spitting at them in a furious spastic dance, and meaning to say, I
guess, that the torn pants would be my head if I didn't look sharp.

 
          
 
His mother turned around and slammed him with
the paddle again, shouting "Behavior!" very loud, her face red as a
zinnia. He yipped across the room and sank into the chair, sitting on his hands
and glowering at me.

 
          
 
"Where?" asked the woman.
"And no games."

 
          
 
"At the Crown and Apple," I said.
"In my room."

 
          
 
''Your room."
She squinted at me.

 
          
 
"That's correct. I can lead you there
now.
Quickly."

 
          
 
"You won't lead us anywhere," she
said. "We'll lead ourselves. You'll stay here. There's not another living
soul on this floor, Mr. Who-bloody-is-it, and everyone on the floor below has
been told there's a madman spending the night, given to fits. Keep your lip
shut, and if we come back with the notebooks, we'll go easy on you."

 
          
 
Willis Pule nodded happily. "Mummy says I
can cut out your tripes," he assured me enthusiastically, "and feed
them to the bats."

 
          
 
"The bats," I said, wondering why in
the world he had chosen the definite article, and watching him pocket the
razor. So it was the notebooks . . . Both of them donned webby-look-ing shawls
and toddled out the door like the Bedlam Twins, she covering me all the time
with the revolver. The door shut and the key clanked in the lock.

 
          
 
I was up and searching the place for a window,
for another key, for a vent of some sort—for anything. The room was on the
inside of the hallway, though, and without a window. And although both of them
were lunatics, they were far too canny to leave spare keys roundabout. I sat
down and thought. The Crown and Apple wasn't five minutes' walk. They'd get
into my room right
enough,
search it in another five
minutes, and then hurry back to cut my tripes out. Revolver or no revolver,
they'd get a surprise when they pushed in through the door. She would make him
come through
first,
of course, to take the blow ... I
studied out a plan.

 
          
 
What the room lacked was weapons. She had even
taken the wooden paddle with her. There were a couple of chairs that would do
in a pinch, but I wanted something better. I had worked myself into a
bloodthirsty sort of state, and I was thinking in terms of clubbing people
insensible. Chairs were too spindly and cumbersome for that.