Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (24 page)

 
          
 
Where was I bound?
Back to
the Apple to hide?
To lie up until I learned that my friends were dead
and the villains gone away? Or to confront the Pules, maybe, who were awaiting
me in my room, honing their instruments? It was time for thinking all of a
sudden, not for running. St. Ives had got me out of the icehouse. I couldn't believe
that his heroics were meant simply to save my miserable life—they were, without
a doubt, but I couldn't admit to it—and so what I needed was a plan, any plan,
to justify my being out of danger.

 
          
 
I just then noticed that a lantern glowed out
to sea, coming along through the fog, maybe twenty yards offshore', you
couldn't really tell. The light bobbed like a will-o'-the-wisp, hanging from a
pole affixed to the bow of a rowboat sculling through the mist. I stopped to
finish catching my breath and to wait out my hammering heart, and I watched the
foggy lantern float toward me. A sudden gust of salty wind blew the mists to
tatters, and the dark ocean and its rowboat appeared on the instant, the boat
driving toward shore when the man at the oars got a clear view of the seawall.
The hull scrunched up onto the shingle, the stern slewing around and the
oarsman clambering out into shallow water. It was Hasbro. His pant legs were
rolled and his shoes tied around his neck.

 
          
 
He looped the painter through a rusted iron
ring in the wall and shook my hand as if he hadn't seen me in a month. Without
a second's hesitation I told him about St. Ives held prisoner in the icehouse,
about how I was just then formulating a plan to go back after him, working out
the fine points so that I didn't just wade in and muck things up. Captain
Bowker was a dangerous man, I said. Like old explosives, any little quiver
might detonate him.

 
          
 
"Very good, Mr. Owlesby," Hasbro
said in that stony butler's voice of his. Wild coincidence didn't perturb him.
Nothing perturbed him. He listened and nodded as he sat there on the wet
seawall and put on his shoes. His lean face was stoic, and he might just as
well have been studying the racing form or laying out a shirt and trousers for
his master to wear in the morning. Suddenly there appeared in my mind a picture
of a strangely complicated and efficient clockwork mechanism— meant to be his
brain, I suppose—and my spirits rose a sizable fraction. As dangerous as Captain
Bowker was, I told myself, here was a man more dangerous yet. I had seen
evidence of it countless times, but I had forgot it nearly as often because of
the damned cool air that Hasbro has about him, the quiet efficiency.

 
          
 
Here he was, after all, out on the ocean
rowing a boat. A half hour ago he was tearing away in a wagon, hauling a diving
bell to heaven knows what destination. That was it—the difference between us.
He was a man with destinations; it was that which confounded me. I rarely had
one, unless it was some trivial momentary destination—the pub, say. Did Dorothy
know that about me? Was it clear to the world as it was to me? Why on earth did
she humor me day to day?
Maybe because I reminded her of her
father.
But this was no time for getting morose and enumerating regrets.
Where had Hasbro been? He didn't tell me; it was later that I found out.

 
          
 
At the moment, though, both of us slipped
along through the fog, and suddenly I was a conspirator again. A destination
had been provided for me. I wished that Dorothy could see me, bound on this
dangerous mission, slouching through the shadowy fog to save St. Ives from the
most desperate criminals imaginable. I tripped over a curb and sprawled on my
face in the grass of the square, but was up immediately, giving the treacherous
curb a hard look and glancing around like a fool to see if anyone had been a
witness to my ignominious tumble. Hasbro disappeared ahead, oblivious to it—or
so he would make it seem in order not to embarrass me.

 
          
 
But there, away toward the boardwalk and the
pier, across the lawn ... It was too damnably foggy now to tell, but someone
had been there, watching. Heart flailing again, I leaped along to catch up with
Hasbro. "We're followed," I hissed after him.

 
          
 
He nodded, and whispered into my ear.
"Too much fog to say who it is.
Maybe
the mother and son."

 
          
 
I didn't think so. Whoever it was was shorter
than Willis Pule.
Narbondo, maybe.
He was somewhere
about. It wasn't certain that he was on ice; that was mere conjecture. Narbondo
skulking in the fog—the idea of it gave me the willies. But we were in view of
the icehouse again, and the sight of it replaced the willies with a more
substantial fear. The glow of lamplight filtered through a dirty window, and Hasbro
and I edged along toward it, just as St. Ives and I had done an hour earlier.

 
          
 
I kept one eye over my shoulder, squinting
into the mists, my senses sharp. I wouldn't be taken unawares; that was
certain. What we saw through the window, though, took my mind off the
night,
and along with Hasbro I gaped at the three men
within—none of whom was St. Ives.

 
          
 
What we were looking at wasn't a proper room,
but was a little niche cut off from the ice room with a canvas drape. It was
well lit, and we had a first-rate view of the entire interior, what with the
utter darkness outside. The floor was clean of litter, and the whole of the
room had a swabbed-out look to it, like a jury-rigged hospital room. On a
wheeled table in the middle of it, lying atop a cushion and wearing what
appeared to be a rubber all-together suit, was Dr. Narbondo himself, pale as a
corpse with snow-white hair that had been cropped short. Frost was a more
appropriate name, certainly. Narbondo had met his fate in that tarn; what had
risen from it was something else entirely.

 
          
 
He lay there on his cushion, with fist-sized
chunks of ice packed around him, like a jolly great fish on a buffet table.
Captain Bowker sat in a chair, looking grizzled, tired, and enormous. His rifle
stood tilted against the back corner of the room, always at hand. Higgins
hovered over the supine body of the doctor. He meddled with chemical
apparatus—a pan of yellow cataplasm or something, and a rubber bladder attached
by a coiled tube to a misting nozzle. On a table along the wall sat the bottle
of elixir that Higgins had apparently saved from its flying doom an hour past.

 
          
 
He showered the doctor with the mist, pulling
open either eyelid and spraying the stuff directly in. The interior of the room
was yellow with it, like a
London
fog. Narbondo trembled, as if from a spine-wrenching chill, and shouted
something —I couldn't make out what—and then half sat up, lurching onto his
elbows and staring round about him with wide, wild eyes. In seconds the passion
had winked out of them, replaced by a placid know-it-all look, and he took up
the bottle of elixir, uncorked it with a trembling hand, and drank off half the
contents. He glanced at our window, and I nearly tumbled over backward, but he
couldn't have seen us out there in the darkness and the fog.

 
          
 
What to do; that was the problem. Where was
St. Ives?
Dead?
Trussed up somewhere
within?
More than likely.
There were too many
issues at stake for them to waste such a hostage as that. I nudged Hasbro with
my elbow and nodded off down the dark clapboard wall of the icehouse, as if I
were suggesting we head down that way—which I was. I saw no reason not to get
St. Ives out of there. Hasbro was intent on the window, though, and he shook
his head.

 
          
 
It was the doctor that he watched.
Dr. Frost, or Narbondo, whichever you please.
He had sat up
now and was turning his head very slowly, as if his joints wanted oil; you
could almost hear the creak. A startled expression, one of dread and confusion,
passed across his face in waves. He was obviously troubled by something, and
was making a determined effort to win through it. He slid off onto the floor
and stood reeling, turning around with his back to us and with his hands on the
table. I saw him pluck up a piece of ice and hold it to his chest, an artistic
gesture,
it seemed to me, even at the time.

 
          
 
Higgins hovered around like a mother hen. He
put a hand on the doctor's arm, but Narbondo shook it off, nearly falling over
and then grabbing the table again to steady
himself
.
He turned slowly, letting go, and then, one step at a time, tramped toward the
canvas curtain like a man built of stone, taking three short steps before
pitching straight over onto his face and lying there on the floor, unmoving.
Captain Bowker stood up tiredly, as a man might who didn't care a rap for
fallen doctors, and he trudged over to where Higgins leaped around in a fit,
shouting orders but doing nothing except getting in the way. The captain pushed
him against the wall and said, "Back off!" Then he picked the doctor
up and laid him back onto his bed while Higgins hovered about, gathering up the
ice chunks knocked onto the floor.

 
          
 
"It's not working!" Higgins moaned,
rubbing his forehead. “I’ve got to have the notebooks. I'm so close/''

 
          
 
"Looks like a bust to me," said the
captain. "I'm for making them pay out for the machine. I'm for
Paris
, is what I'm saying. Your friend here can
rot. Say, gimme some more of that 'lixir now. He won't be needing
no
more tonight."

 
          
 
It was then, while the captain's back was
turned and Higgins was furiously snatching up the bottle of elixir to keep it
away from him, that the canvas curtain lifted and into the little room slipped
Willis Pule and his ghastly mother, she holding her revolver and he grinning
round about him like a giddy child and carrying a black and ominous surgeon's
bag.

 
          
 
Captain Bowker was quick; I'll give him that.
He must have seen them out of the corner of his eye, for he half turned, slamming
Willis on the ear with his elbow and knocking him silly, if such a thing were
possible. Then he lunged for his rifle; and it's here that he moved too slowly.
He would have got to it right enough if he hadn't taken the time to hit Willis
first. But he had taken the time, and now Mrs. Pule lunged forward with a look
of insane glee on her face, shoving the muzzle of the revolver into the
captain's fleshy midsection so that the barrel entirely disappeared and the
explosion was muffled when she fired. He managed to knock her away too, even as
the bullet kicked him over backward in a sort of lumbering spin. He clutched at
his vitals, his mouth working, and he knocked his rifle down as he caved in and
sank almost like a ballerina to the floor, where he lay in a heap.

 
          
 
It was the most cold-blooded thing I've ever
seen, and I've seen a few cold-blooded things in my day. Mrs. Pule turned her
gun on Higgins, who couldn't stand it, apparently, and leaped at the canvas
curtain. But Pule, who still sat on the floor, snaked out his arm and clutched
Higgins's leg, and Higgins went over headforemost as if he had been shot. Pule
climbed up onto his back and sat there astride him, giggling hysterically and
shouting "Horsey! Horsey!" and poking Higgins in the small of the
back with his finger, trying to tickle him, as impossible as that sounds, and
then cuffing him on the back of the head with his open hand. "Take that!
Take that! Take that!" he shrieked, as if the words were hiccups and he
couldn't stop them.

 
          
 
Mrs. Pule saw her chance, and leaned in to
slap Willis a good one, shouting, "Behavior!" again, except that this
time the word had no effect on her son, and she was forced to box his ears, and
so it went for what must have been twenty seconds or so: Willis slapping the
back of Higgins's jerking head and yanking his ears and pulling his hair, and
Mrs. Pule cuffing Willis on the noggin, and both of the Pules shouting so that
neither of them could make themselves heard. Finally the woman grabbed a
handful of her son's hair and gave it a yank, jerking him over backward with a
howl, and Higgins flew to his knees and scrambled for the canvas, his bandages
falling loose around his shoulders and fresh blood seeping through them.

 
          
 
They had him by the feet,
though,
just as quick as you please, and hauled him back in. They jerked him upright
and slammed him into the late Captain Bowker's chair, trussing him up with the
captain's own gaiters.