Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (25 page)

 
          
 
It was then that I saw someone right at the
edge of my vision, down at the far end of the icehouse. I was certain of it.
Someone was prowling around and had come out into the open, I suppose, at the
sound of the gunfire and the scuffle, and then had seen us still standing by
the window, doing nothing, and had darted away again, assuming, maybe, that
there wasn't any immediate alarm.

 
          
 
By the time I nudged Hasbro there was no one
there, and there was precious little reason to go snooping off in that
direction, especially since whoever it was, it wasn't one of our villains; they
were all present and accounted for. It's someone waiting, I thought at the
time—waiting to see how things fell out before making his move, waiting for the
dirty work to be done for him.

 
          
 
And all the while Dr. Narbondo lay there on ice,
seemingly frozen. Willis seemed to see him for the first time. He crept across
to peer into the doctor's face,
then
blanched with
horror at what he saw there. Even in that deep and impossible sleep, Narbondo
terrified poor Willis. And then, as if on cue, the doctor flinched in his cold
slumber and mumbled something, and Pule fell back horrified. He cringed against
the far wall, crossing his arms against his chest and drawing one leg up in a
sort of flamingo gesture, doing as much as he could do to roll up into a ball
and still stay on his feet—so that he could run, maybe, if it came to that.

 
          
 
His mother hunched across, goo-gooing at him,
and rubbed his poor forehead, fluttering her eyeUds and talking the most
loathsome sort of baby talk to comfort him while still holding on to the
revolver and stepping over the captain's splayed legs, straight into the blood
that had pooled up on the floor. She nearly slipped, and she caught on to her
son's jacket for support, giving off the baby talk in order to curse, and then
wiping the bottom of her shoe very deliberately on the captain's shirt. Maybe
Hasbro couldn't see this last bit from where he stood, but I could, and I can
tell you it gave me the horrors, and doubly so when she went straightaway for
her son again, calling him a poor lost thing and a wee birdy and all manner of
pet names. I couldn't get my eyes off that horrifying bloody shoe-smear on the
captain's already gruesome shirtfront. I was sick all of a sudden, and turned
away to glance at Hasbro's
face
. He had taken the
whole business in. His stoic visage was evaporated, replaced by a look of pure
puzzlement and repulsion; he was human, after all.

 
          
 
"Let's find the professor," I
whispered to him. I had no desire to watch what would surely follow; they
wouldn't leave the doctor alive, and his death wouldn't be pretty. These two
were living horrors—but even then, bloodthirsty and hypocritical as it sounds,
somehow I didn't begrudge them their chance to even the score with Narbondo; I
just didn't want to see them
do
it.

 
          
 
We stepped along through the weeds, around to
the door that opened onto what had been Captain Bowker's sleeping quarters. The
door was secured
now,
the hasp fitted with a bolt that
had been slipped through it—enough merely to stop anyone's getting out. We got
in, though, quick as you please, and there was St. Ives, tied up hands and feet
and gagged, lying atop the bed. We got the gag out and him untied, and we
indicated by gestures and whispers what sort of monkey business was going on in
the room beyond. He was up and moving toward the door to the ice room,
determined to stop it. It didn't matter who it was that was threatened. St.
Ives wouldn't brook it; even Narbondo would have his day before the magistrate.

 
          
 
He tugged open the
door,
and you can guess who stood there—Mrs. Pule, grinning Hke a gibbon ape and
holding the gun. I whirled around to the outside door, which still stood open,
ready to leap out into the night, and thinking, of course, that one of us ought
to get out in order to find the constable, to summon aid. Could I help it if it
was always me who was destined for such missions? But there stood Willis, right
outside, looking haggard and wearing the mask of tragedy—and training the
captain's rifle on me with ominously shaking hands. I stopped where I stood and
waited while Mrs. Pule took Hasbro's revolver away from him.
So
much for that.

 
          
 
They marched us back through the ice room, the
floor of which was wet and mucky with meltwater and sopping hay, and smelled
like an ammoniated swamp. I was desperately cold all of a sudden, and thought
about how unpleasant it was to have to face death when you were shaking with
cold and dead tired and it was past three in the morning. The night had been
one long round of wild escapes, followed by my striding back into various
lion's dens and tipping my hat. There was no chance of another go at it now,
though, with one of them in front and one behind.

 
          
 
St. Ives started right in, as soon as he saw
Narbondo lying there on the table. He felt for a pulse, nodded, and raised one
of the doctor's eyelids. Next he examined the bladder apparatus and sniffed the
elixir, and then, as if it was the most natural and unpretentious thing in the
world, he slipped the bottle of elixir into his coat pocket.

 
          
 
"Out with it!" hissed the woman,
tipping the revolver against my head. My eyes shot open in order to better
watch St. Ives remove the bottle.

 
          
 
"Wake him up," she said, removing
the revolver from my temple and gesturing toward the sleeping doctor.

 
          
 
St. Ives shook his head. "I'd love
to," he said. "But I don't know how. It would be the happiest day of
my life if I could animate him in order that he
be
brought to justice."

 
          
 
She laughed out loud. "Them's my
words," she said, referring to that day in Godall's shop.
"Justice!
We'll bring him justice, won't we,
Willis?"

 
          
 
Willis nodded, wild with happiness now—partly,
I thought, because of St. Ives's insisting that the doctor couldn't be
awakened. Pule didn't want him awake. He picked up his bag of instruments and
set it on the table. When he opened it, I could smell burnt rubber, and sure
enough, he pulled out the hacked and charred fragments of the toy elephant and
the little collection of gears, put back together now. "This is what I did
to his elephant," he said, nodding at me, but looking at Higgins.

 
          
 
"Elephant?"
Higgins said, casting me a terrified and wondering glance. This obscure
reference to the elephant must have struck him as significant in some
unfathomable way, largely because what Pule held in his hand no longer had
anything to do with elephants. It was simply a limp bit of flayed rubber and
paint.

 
          
 
I shrugged at Higgins and started to speak to
the poor man, but Willis cut me off, shouting, "Shut up!" in a
lunatic falsetto and blinking very fast and hard. He wasn't interested in
hearing from me. He was caught up in his own twisted story, and he happily set
about laying out an array of operating instruments—scalpels and clamps and
something that looked a little like a bolt cutters and a little like a pruning
shears and was meant, I guess, for clipping bone.

 
          
 
He made a bow in our direction, and, gesturing
at Nar-bondo, he said, as if he were addressing a half score of students in a
surgery, "I intend to affix this man's head to the fat man's body, and
then to wake him up and make him look at himself in a mirror and see how ugly
he is. Then I'm going to install this mechanism"—and here he plucked up
the reassembled gears from the elephant—"in his heart, so that I can
control him with a lever. And this man," Pule said, pointing at poor
terrified and befuddled Higgins, "I'm going to cut apart and put together
backward, so that he has to reach behind himself to button his shirt, and then
I'm going to sell him to Mr. Happy's Circus."

 
          
 
Pule was madder than I thought him. What on
earth did he mean by nonsense like "put him together backward"? It
was clear that he could actually accomplish none of this. What real evidence
was there that he had any skills in vivisection at all? None, and never had
been—only his association with Nar-bondo, which proved nothing, of course,
except that he was capable of committing vile acts. He was simply going to hack
three men up—two of them alive at the moment—for the same utterly insane
reasons that he had hacked up my elephant or that he chopped apart birds and
hid them under the floorboards of his house. And he would do it all with
relish—I was certain of it.

 
          
 
Poor Higgins was even more certain, it seemed,
for just as soon as Pule mentioned this business about selling him to Mr.
Happy's Circus, he began to utter a sort of low keening noise, a strange and
mournful weeping. His eyes rolled back up into his head just as he slumped
forward, tugging at the gaiters that held him to the chair, his voice rising
another octave.

 
          
 
Mrs. Pule handed Willis the revolver, and he
shifted the rifle to his left hand, not wanting to put it down. She picked up
the dish of yellow chemical and advised Higgins to pipe down. But he couldn't,
and so she splashed the stuff into Higgins's face, at which Higgins lurched
upright, spitting and coughing, and she slapped him one, catching him mostly on
the nose because of his twitching around. "Did you hear him?'' she hissed.

 
          
 
"What! What! What!" cried Higgins,
out of his mind
now.

 
          
 
"You can save yourself," she said.
"Or else ..." She hunched over and whispered the rest of the sentence
in his ear.

 
          
 
"Merciful Jesus!
I'm what?" he shouted. "You're going to what?
Mr.
Happy!"
His voice cracked. He began to gibber and moan.

 
          
 
They had gone too far. She had wanted to
bargain with him, but she had made the mistake of driving him mad first, and
now he was beyond bargaining. So she hit him again, twice—slap, slap—and he sat
up straight and listened harder.

 
          
 
"The notebooks," she said.
"Where are they?"

 
          
 
St. Ives cleared his throat, and very
cheerfully, as if he were talking to a neighbor over the garden wall, he said,
"I don't believe that the man knows ..."

 
          
 
"Shut up!" she cried, turning on the
three of us.

 
          
 
"Shut up!" cried her son, rapidly
opening and closing his eyes and training the revolver on me, of all people; /
hadn't said anything. I shrugged, very willing to shut up.

 
          
 
St. Ives was a different kettle of fish.
"I mean to say, madam," he said, calmly and deliberately, "that
Professor Higgins is utterly ignorant of the whereabouts of the notebooks. It
was he who posted that letter to you, after he had revived the doctor. And
since then he hasn't found them, although he's made a very pretty effort.
Your
torturing him now won't accomplish a thing, unless, as
I suspect, you're torturing him for sport."

 
          
 
"You filthy . . .," she said,
leaving it unfinished, and in a wild rage she snatched the revolver away from
her son and pointed it at the professor.
"You
scum-sucking pig!
You know nothing. I'll start with you, Mr. Hooknose,
and then Willis will make a scarecrow of you."

 
          
 
She croaked out a laugh just as I lunged at
her; don't ask me why I did it—making up for lost opportunities, maybe. I threw
myself onto the revolver and grabbed it by the barrel, hitting her just as hard
as I could on the jaw, which was plenty hard enough to knock her over backward.

 
          
 
Willis grappled with the rifle, but hadn't
gotten it halfway up before Hasbro clipped him neatly on the side of the head,
and he sank to his knees and slumped forward.

 
          
 
It was over, just like that. I'd had to hit a
woman to accomplish it, but by heaven I would hit her once more, harder, if I
had it to do again.