Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (23 page)

 
          
 
St. Ives considered, looked at his pocket
watch, and said, "Fair enough.
Stroke of
midnight
.
We'll be across the hall, just in case
anyone comes sneaking around."

 
          
 
"Knock me up with fifteen minutes to
spare," I said, getting up. And with that I toddled off to my room and
fell asleep in my clothes.

 
          
 
THE NIGHT WAS howling cold and the sky clear
and starry. There was a moon, but just enough to hang a coat on. We had slipped
out the back and taken my route along the seawall, none of us speaking and with
the plan already laid out. Hasbro carried a revolver and was the one among us
most capable of using it.

 
          
 
Absolutely no one was about. Lamps flickered
here and there along the streets, and a single light glowed in one of the
windows of The Hoisted Pint—Willis Pule turning Higgins into an amphibian,
probably. The shadowy pier stretched out into the moonlit ocean, and the
icehouse loomed dark and empty in the weeds—very ominous, it seemed to me.

 
          
 
We wafered ourselves against the wall and
waited, listening, wondering what lay within. After a moment I realized that
Hasbro was gone. He had been behind me and now he wasn't; just like that. I
tugged on St. Ives's coat, and he turned around and winked at me, putting a finger
to his lips and then motioning me forward with a wave of his hand.

 
          
 
We crept along, listening to the silence and
ducking beneath a bank of dirty windows, hunching a few steps farther
to
where St. Ives stopped outside a door. He put
a
fmger to his lips and a hand on the latch, easing the
latch down gently. There sounded the hint of a click, the door swung open
slowly, and we were through, creeping along across the floor of a small room
with a broken-down desk in it.

 
          
 
Some little bit of moonlight filtered in
through the window —enough to see by now that our eyes had adjusted. Carefully,
St. Ives pushed open another heavy door, just a crack, and peered through,
standing as if frozen until he could make out what lay before him. He turned
his head slowly and gave me a look—just a widening of the eyes—and then pushed
the door open some more.

 
          
 
I caught the sound of snoring just then, low
and labored like that of a hibernating bear, and when I followed St. Ives into
the room, both of us creeping along, I looked for Captain Bowker, and sure
enough there he was, asleep on a cot, his head turned to the wall. We slipped
past him, through his little chamber and out into the open room beyond.

 
          
 
It was fearfully cold, and no wonder. Great
blocks of ice lay stacked in the darkness like silvery coffins beneath the high
ceiling. They were half covered with piled straw, and there was more straw
littering the floor and a pair of dumpcarts and a barrow and a lot of shadowy
odds and ends of tongs and tools and ice saws along the wall—none of it
particularly curious, considering where we were.

 
          
 
St. Ives didn't hesitate. He knew what he was
looking for, and I thought I did too. I was wrong, though. What St. Ives was
after lay beyond the ice, through a weighted door that was pulled partly open.
We stepped up to it, dropping to our hands and knees to peer beneath it.
Beyond, in a square slope-ceilinged room with a double door set in the far
wall, was a metal sphere, glowing dully in the moonlight and sitting on four
squat legs.

 
          
 
It's Lord Kelvin's machine!—I said to myself,
but then saw that it wasn't. It was a diving bell, a submarine explorer, built
out of brass and copper and ringed with portholes. Mechanical armatures thrust
out, with hinged elbows so that the device looked very jaunty, as if it might
at any moment shuffle away on its piggy little legs. We rolled under the door,
not wanting to push it open farther for fear of making a noise. And then all of
a sudden, as we got up to dust ourselves off, there was noise to spare—the
rattling and creaking of a wagon drawing up beyond the doors, out in the night.

 
          
 
A horse snorted and shook its head, and there
was the sound of a brake clacking down against a wheel. I dropped to the
ground, thinking to scramble under and into the ice room again before whoever
it was in the wagon unlocked the outside doors and confronted us there. St.
Ives grabbed my coat, though, and shook his head, and in a moment there was a
fiddling with a lock and I stood up slowly, ready to acquit myself like a man.

 
          
 
The doors drew back, and between them, pulling
them open, stood the remarkable Hasbro. St. Ives didn't stop to chat. He put
his shoulder against one of the doors, pushing it fully open while Hasbro saw
to the other one, and then as St. Ives latched on to the harness and backed the
horses and dray around and through the doors, Hasbro clambered up onto the bed,
yanked loose the wheel brake, and began to unlatch a clutch of chain and line
from the post of a jib crane bolted to the bed.

 
          
 
I stood and gaped until I saw what it was we
were up to, and then I hitched up my trousers and set to. Lickety-split, passing
the line back and forth, looping and yanking, we tied the diving bell in a sort
of basket weave. Hasbro hoisted it off the ground with the jib crane, which
made the devil's own creaking and groaning, and St. Ives and I guided it by the
feet as it swung around and onto the bed of the dray, clunking down solidly.
Hasbro dropped down onto the plank seat, plucked up the ribands, clicked his
tongue, and was gone in a whirl of moonlit dust, cantering away into the night.

 
          
 
It was a neat bit of work, although I had no
real notion of its purpose. If the machine in the Strait was guarded by Her
Majesty's navy, then our villains had no real use for the diving bell anyway;
that part of their adventure, it seemed to me, had already drawn to an
unsuccessful close. But who was I to question St. Ives? He was damned glad to
get the bell out of there; I could see that in his face.

 
          
 
But we weren't done yet; I could see that too.
Why hadn't we ridden out of there with Hasbro? Because St. Ives was in a sweat
to see what else lay in that icehouse. Narbondo himself was in there somewhere,
and St. Ives meant to find him. We bellied straightaway under the weighted
door, back into the ice room, St. Ives first and me following, and stood up to
peer into the grinning face of the jolly Captain Bowker, who stood two yards
distant, staring at us down the sights of his rifle.

 
          
 
HE wouldn't miss this time. I was determined
to play the part of the cooperative man, the man who doesn't want to be shot.
The
door slammed up and open
behind us, and there
stood Higgins, dressed in a lab coat, his head bandaged and him winded and
puffing. Tufts of hair poked through the bandage. He smelled awful, like a dead
fish in a sack.

 
          
 
"Leopold Higgins, I presume," said
St. Ives, bowing. "I am Langdon St. Ives."

 
          
 
"I know who you bloody well are," he
said, and then he looked at me for a cold moment, smiled, and said, "How
did you like the fruit?"

 
          
 
Clearly he didn't know it was me who had
beaned him at The Hoisted Pint when he was sneaking into the Pules' room. That
was good; he wouldn't have been making jokes otherwise. Despite the gloom of
the icehouse I could see that his face was bruised pretty badly. That must have
been the work of the wonderful Pules.

 
          
 
"Catch it?" asked the captain, still
training the rifle on us.

 
          
 
"Got away right enough," said
Higgins. "What sort of watch was that you were keeping? Napping is what I
call it. Sleeping like a baby while these two ..."

 
          
 
The captain swiveled the rifle around and—blam!—fired
a round past Higgins's ear. I leaped straight off my feet, but not nearly so
far off them as Higgins did. He threw himself facedown into the straw on the
floor, mewling like a wet cat. Captain Bowker chuckled until his eyes watered
as Higgins, pale and shaken, struggled back up, fear and fury playing in his
eyes.

 
          
 
"Who cares?" said the captain.

 
          
 
Higgins worked his mouth, priming his throat.
"But the diving bell ..."

 
          
 
"Who cares about the filthy bell? It
ain't worth a nickel to me. You ain't worth a nickel to me. I'd just as leave
kill the three of you and have done with it. You'll get your diving bell back
when the tall one finds out we've got his friends."

 
          
 
This last added an optimistic flavor to the
discussion. "The tall one" was clearly Hasbro, who, of course, would
happily trade a dozen diving bells for the lives of dear old Jack and the
professor. I didn't at all mind being held for ransom; it was being dead that
bothered me.

 
          
 
"Or one of his friends,
anyway."
The captain shifted his gaze from one to the other of us,
as if coming to a decision. There went the optimism. I was surely the
most
expendable of the two of us, since I knew the least.
Captain Bowker sniffed the air and wrinkled up his face.
'
'Gimme
the 'lixir,'' he said to Higgins.

 
          
 
''He needs it," said Higgins, shaking his
head. It was a brave act, considering, for the captain trained the rifle on
Higgins again, dead between the eyes now, and started straight in to chuckle.
Without an instant's hesitation, Higgins's hand went into the pocket of his lab
coat and hauled out a corked bottle, which he reached across toward the
captain.

 
          
 
The captain grabbed for it, and St. Ives
jumped—just when the rifle was midway between Higgins and us. It was the little
pleasure in baiting Higgins that tripped the captain up.

 
          
 
"Run, Jack!" shouted St. Ives when
he threw himself at the captain. In a storm of arms and legs he was flying
forward, into the air, sideways into Captain Bowker's
expansive
stomach. The captain smashed over backward, his head banging against the floorboards
and the bottle of elixir sailing away toward the stacked ice with Higgins
diving after it. I was out both doors and into the night, running again toward
the two houses before St. Ives's admonition had faded in my ears. He had commanded
me to run, and I ran, like a spooked sheep. Live to fight another day, I told
myself.

 
          
 
And while I ran I waited for the sound of a
shot. What would I do if I heard it? Turn around? Turning around wasn't on my
mind. I pounded down the little boardwalk and angled toward the seawall,
leaping along like an idiot instead of slowing down to think things out. No one
was after me, and I was out of sight of the icehouse, so there was no longer
any chance of being shot. It was cold fear that drove me on. And it was regret
at having run in the first place, at having left St. Ives
alone,
that
finally slowed me down.

 
          
 
I was walking when I got to the water,
breathing like an engine. Fog was blowing past in billows, and the moon was
lost beyond it. In moments I couldn't see at all, except for the seawall, which
I followed along up toward the Apple, moving slowly now and listening to the
dripping of water off eaves and to what sounded like the slow dip of oars out
on the bay. Suddenly it was the heavy silence that terrified me, an empty
counterpoint, maybe, to the now-faded sound of gunfire and the moment of
shouting chaos that had followed it.