Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (30 page)

 
          
 
He climbed back into the room, rewrapping the
plaster casts and closing them up in the drawer. Then, pulling on his coat, he
strode out across the meadow once again like a man with a will, noticing only
when he was halfway to the River Nidd that he still wasn't wearing any shoes.

 
          
 
HE RETURNED LATE that aftemoon in an improved
mood, although he felt agitated and anxious. He had spent three hours with Lord
Kelvin. The great scientist had come to understand that tragedy had turned St.
Ives into a natural fool. He had even patted St. Ives on the head once, which
had been humiliating, but to some little extent St. Ives had been grateful for
it—a sign, he realized, of how dangerously low his spirits had fallen. But
things were looking up now. His efforts weren't doomed after all, although he
was certain that he was running a footrace with Parsons and the Royal Academy.
When they were sure of themselves, they would merely break down the silo
door—come out with a dozen soldiers and checkmate him. The game would be at an
end.

 
          
 
The idea of it once again darkened his
thoughts. His elation at having swindled Lord Kelvin out of certain tidbits of
information suddenly lapsed, and he slumped into his chair feeling fatigued and
beaten. He seemed to swing between two extremes—doom and utter confidence.
Middle
ground,
had become the rarest sort of real
estate. What he needed, desperately, was to be levelheaded, and here he was
atilt again, staggering off course.

 
          
 
Tomorrow, though, or the next day, he would
set out. Right now he would rest. Lord Kelvin had taken pity on him this
afternoon. That was the long and the short of it. One look at St. Ives's face,
at his disheveled clothes, and Lord Kelvin had been ready to discuss anything
at all, as if he were talking to the village idiot. The man had a heart like a
hay wagon, to be sure. St. Ives's wandering over without any shoes on had
probably done the trick. Kelvin had finally warmed to the subject of time
travel, and St. Ives had led him through a discussion of the workings of the
machine itself as if he were a trained ape.

 
          
 
That was clever, he told himself, going out
shoeless was. He half believed it for a moment. Then he knew that it hadn't
been clever at all; he had gone out shoeless without meaning to, and in late
autumn, yet. He would have to watch that sort of thing. They'd have him tied
down in Colney Hatch if he wasn't careful. He was too close to success. He
couldn't chance a strait-waistcoat. Seeing things clearly for the moment, he
looked at himself in the cheval glass on the desk. A haircut wouldn't be a bad
idea, either. Perhaps if a man affected sanity carefully enough . . .

 
          
 
Almost happy again, he stepped into his
slippers and lit a pipe, sitting back and puffing on it.
Failure—that's
what had squirreled him up.
Too much failure made a hash of a man's mind
. . . He thought for a moment about his manifold failures, and suddenly and
inexplicably he was awash with fear, with common homegrown panic. He found that
he could barely keep his hands still.

 
          
 
Immediately, he tried to recite the
cottage-pie recipe, finding that he couldn't remember it. He pulled a scrap of paper
from his shirt pocket and studied the writing on it. There it was—sage and
sweet basil. Not sweetbread. He could feel his heart flutter like a bird's
wings, and he felt faint and lightheaded. Desperately, he breathed for a moment
into a sack until the light-headedness began to abate.
Sweetbread?
Why had he thought of sweetbread? That was some kind of gland, wasn't it?
Something the French ate, probably out of buckets and without the benefit of
forks.

 
          
 
With an unpleasant shock, he noticed just then
that someone had cleaned up his desk. The debris on the floor was separated
into tidy piles against the wall. The papers were shuffled, and the books
stacked. The glass and ceramic figurines were dusted and lined up together. The
neatened desk baffled him for a moment. Then, slowly, a dark rage began to rise
in him, and the whole business of an orderly desk became an affront.

 
          
 
He bent down and tossed together the stuff on
the floor, mixing it into a sort of salad. Then he kicked through it, sending
it flying, winding himself up. He turned to the desk itself, methodically
picking up books and shaking out the loose leaves so that they fluttered down
higgledy-piggledy. He picked up a heavy iron elephant paperweight and one by
one smashed his quill pens, accidentally catching the squared-off edge of the
crystal ink bottle and smashing it too, so that ink spewed out across his
shirtfront. The shock of smashing the glass made him bite down hard on the stem
of his pipe. He heard and felt the stem crack, and quickly let up on it. The
pipe fell neatly into two pieces, though, so that the stem stayed in his mouth
and the bowl fell down onto the desktop, wobbling around in the ink and broken
glass like a drunkard. Furious, he picked up the elephant again and smashed the
pipe, over and over and over, until he noticed with a deep rush of demoralizing
embarrassment that Mrs. Langley stood in the open door of the room, her eyes
wide open with horror and disbelief.

 
          
 
Coldly, he put the elephant down and turned to
her, realizing without knowing why that she had become an obstruction to him.
Somehow, his rage had been transferred en masse to the housekeeper, to Mrs.
Langley. He had no need for a housekeeper. He saw that clearly. What he had a
need for was to be left alone. His desk, his books, his things, wanted to be
left alone. Soon he would be gone altogether, perhaps never to return. A page
in his life was folding back, a chapter coming to a close. The world was rife
with change.

 
          
 
And this wasn't the first time that she had
cut this sort of caper. He had spoken to her about it before. Well, the woman
had been warned, hadn't she? There wouldn't be any need to speak to her about
it again. ''As of this moment, Mrs. Langley," he said to her flatly,
"you are relieved of your duties. You'll have three months' severance
pay."

 
          
 
She put her hand to her mouth, and he realized
that his eye was twitching badly and that every muscle in his body was stiff
with tension, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. He gestured toward the
window, the open road. ''Must you stare so?" he demanded of her.

 
          
 
"He's gone stark," she muttered
through her fingers.

 
          
 
He clenched his teeth. "I have not gone
stark," he said. "Understand that! I have not gone stark!" Even
as he said it, there flickered across his mind a vague understanding of what it
meant—that he had gone mad, utterly. He wasn't quite sane enough to admit it,
though, to hold on to the notion. He was too far around the bend to see it
anymore, but could merely glimpse its shadow. He knew only that he couldn't
have Mrs. Langley meddling with his things, chasing after him with a dust mop
as if he wanted a keeper. He watched her leave, very proudly, with her head up.
She wasn't the sort to forgive easily. She would be gone, up to her sisters.
Well . . . For a moment he nearly called her back, but was having difficulty
breathing again. He put his head into the sack.

 
          
 
After a moment he sat back down in his chair
and contrived to rearrange the four objects amid the clutter on the desktop.
His hand shook violently, though, and he accidentally uncorked the glass shoe,
spilling out half the sugar crystals. Then he knocked the Humpty Dumpty over
twice. He concentrated, making himself breathe evenly, placing the objects just
so. Surely, if he could get them right, he would regain that moment of
indefinable satisfaction that he had felt a few hours past. It would settle him
down, restore a sense of proportion. It wouldn't work, though. He couldn't
manage it.

 
          
 
He forced himself to concentrate on the
desktop again. There was something in the arrangement that was subtlely wrong.
The figurines stood there as ever, the dog with his head on the shoe, the
Humpty Dumpty gazing longingly at the ballerina. But there was no pattern any
longer, no art to it. It was as if the earth had turned farther along its axis
and the shadows were different.

 
          
 
He found his shoes, putting them on this time
before going out. Work was the only mainstay. He would let Mrs. Langley stew
for a while and then would commute her sentence. She must learn not to treat
him like a child. Meanwhile he would concentrate on something that would yield
a concrete result. With effort, with self-control, he would have what he wanted
within twenty-four hours. Where the machine would take him was an utter
mystery. Probably he would be blown to fragments. Or worse yet, the machine
would turn out to be so much junk, sitting there in the silo with him at the
controls, making noises out of his throat like a child driving a locomotive
built out of packing crates. He stood by the window, focusing his mind. There
wasn't time to regret this business with Mrs. Langley. There wasn't time to
regret anything at all. There was only time for action, for movement.

 
          
 
His hands had stopped shaking. As an exercise,
he coldly and evenly forced himself to recite the metals in the order of their
specific gravities. The cottage-pie recipe was well and good when a man needed
a simple mental bracer. But what he wanted now was honing. He needed his edges
sharpened. With that in mind, he worked through the metals again, listing them
in the order of their fusibility this time, then again backward through both
lists, practicing a kind of dutiful self-mesmerization.

 
          
 
Halfway through, he realized that something
was wrong with him. He was light-headed, woozy. He held on to the edge of the
desk, thinking to wait it out. He watched his hand curiously. It seemed to be
growing transparent, as if he had the flesh of a jellyfish. It was happening to
him again—the business on the North Road, the ghostly visitation. His vision
was clouded, as if he were under water. He slid to the floor and began to crawl
toward the window. Maybe fresh air would revive him. Each foot, though, was a
journey, and all at once his arms and legs gave way beneath him and he slumped
to the floor, giving up and lying there unhappily in front of the open window,
thinking black thoughts until suddenly and without warning he thought no more
at all.

 
          
 
And then he awakened. His head reeled, but he
was solid again. He stood up and studied his hand.
Rock
steady.
Opaque.
How long had he been away? He
couldn't say. He was confused for a moment, trying to make sense of something
that didn't want sense to be made of it.
Either that or it already
made sense, and
he was looking for something that was now plain to him.

 
          
 
Suddenly full of purpose, he straightened his
collar and went out into the deepening twilight, having already forgotten about
Mrs. Langley but this time wearing his shoes.

 
          
 
HIS COD HAD got cold, and the restaurant, the
Crow's Nest in Harrogate, had emptied out. Lunch was over, and only a couple of
people lingered at their tables. St. Ives sat in the rear corner, his back to
the window, doodling on a pad of paper, making calculations.

 
          
 
He felt suddenly woozy, light-headed. Lack of
sleep, he told himself, and bad eating habits. He decided to ignore it, but it
was suddenly worse, and he had to shove his feet out in order to brace himself.
Damn, he thought. Here it was again— another seizure. This time he would fight
it.

 
          
 
He heard muffled laughter from across the room
and looked up to see someone staring back at him, someone he didn't recognize.
The man looked away, but his companion sneaked a glance in St. Ives's
direction, his eyes full of furtive curiosity. Nettled, St. Ives nodded at the
man and was suddenly aware of his own slept-in clothes, of his frightful
unshaven face. His fork, along with a piece of cod, fell from his hand,
dropping onto his trousers, and he stared at it helplessly, knowing without
trying that his hand would refuse to pick it back up.

 
          
 
In a moment he would pass out. Better to
simply climb down onto the floor and be done with it. He didn't want to,
though, not in public, not in the condition he was in. He pressed his eyes
shut. Slowly and methodically he began to recite the cottage-pie recipe,
forcing himself to consider each ingredient, to picture it, to smell it in his
mind. He felt himself recover momentarily, as if he were grounding himself
somehow, holding on to things anchored in the world.