Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (9 page)

 
          
 
"That they would, sir. And a loaf of
bread, I might add, to provide bulk."

           
 
"A sound suggestion," said St. Ives,
striding toward the woman and removing his hat.
He Hked the
look of her immediately.
She was stooped and heavy and wore a dress like
a tent, and it seemed as if all the comets in the starry heavens couldn't knock
her off her pins. She dumped mussels, black and dripping, into a cleverly
folded newspaper basket, heaping up the shells until they threatened to cascade
to the floor. She winked at St. Ives, fished an enormous mussel from the pot,
slid her thumbs into the hiatus of its open shell, and in a single swift
movement pulled the mollusk open, shoved one of her thumbs under the orange
flesh, and flipped the morsel into her open mouth. "Some don't chew
them," she said, speaking English, "but I do. What's the use of
eating at all if you don't chew them?
Might as well swallow a
toad."

 
          
 
"Indubitably," said St. Ives, happy
enough to make small talk. "It's the same way with oysters. I never could
stand simply to allow the creatures to slide down my throat. I fly in the face
of custom there."

 
          
 
"Aye," she said. "Can you
imagine a man's stomach, full of beasts such as these, whole, mind you, and
sloshin' like smelts in a bucket?" She dipped again into the caldron,
picked out another mussel, and ate it with relish, then grimaced and rooted in
her mouth with a finger. "Mussel pearl," she said, holding up between
thumb and forefinger a tiny opalescent sphere twice the size of a pinhead. She
slid open a little drawer in the cart on which sat the caldron of mussels, and
dropped the pearl in among what must have been thousands of the tiny orbs.
"Can't stand debris," she said, grimacing.

 
          
 
The entire display rather took the edge off
St. Ives's appetite, and the heap of mussels in his basket, reclining beneath a
coating of congealing butter and bits of garlic and
shallot,
began to remind him of certain unfortunate suppers he'd consumed at the Bayswater
Club. He grinned weakly at the woman and looked around at the hurrying crowds,
wondering if he and Hasbro
hadn't ought
to join them.

 
          
 
"Man in here this afternoon ate one shell
and all," she said, shaking her head. "Imagine the debris involved.
Must have given his throat bones some trouble, I daresay."

 
          
 
"Shell and all?" asked St. Ives.

 
          
 
"That's the exact case. Crunched away at
the thing like it was a marzipan crust, didn't he? Then he took another, chewed
it up about halfway, saw what he was about, and spit the filthy thing against
the wall there. You can see bits of it still, can't you, despite the birds
swarming round. There's the smear of it against the stones. Do you see it there?—bit
of brown paste is all it amounts to now."

 
          
 
St. Ives stared at the woman.
"Big man?"

 
          
 
"Who?"

 
          
 
"This fellow who ate
the shells.
Big, was he, and with a beard? Seemed ready to fly into a
rage?"

 
          
 
"That's your man, gents. Cursed vilely,
he did, but not at the shells. It was at the poor birds, wasn't it, when they
come round to eat up what your man spit onto the wall there. You can see it
there, can't you? I never ..."

 
          
 
"Was he in the company of a
hunchback?"

 
          
 
"Aye," said the woman, giving her pot
a perfunctory stirring.
' 'Greasy
little man with a
grin. Seemed to think the world is a lark. But it ain't no lark, gentlemen.
Here you've been, wasting my time this quarter hour, and not another living
soul has bought a shell. You've frightened the lot of them off, is what I
think, and you haven't paid me a penny.'' She glowered at St. Ives,
then
glowered at Hasbro.

 
          
 
"What time this afternoon?" asked
St.
Ives.

 
          
 
"Three hours past, say,
or four.
Might have been five.
Or less."

 
          
 
"Thank you." St. Ives reached into
his pocket for a coin. He dumped a half crown into her outstretched hand and
left her blinking, he and Hasbro racing through the terminal toward the distant
exit, each of them clutching a bag in one hand and a paper satchel of mussels
in the other. The streets were wet outside, but the clouds were broken overhead
and taking flight in the gray dusk, and the wind had simmered down to a billowy
breeze. A bent man shambled past in trousers meant for a behemoth, clutching at
a buttonless coat.

 
          
 
St. Ives thrust his mussels at the
man,
meaning to do him a good turn, but his gesture was
mistaken. The man cast him a look of mingled surprise and loathing, fetching
the basket a swipe with his hand that sent the entire affair into the gutter.
St. Ives hurried on without a word, marveling at misunderstood humanity and at
how little space existed between apparent madness and the best of intentions.

 
          
 
In a half hour they were aboard a train once
again, in a sleeping car bound for
Amsterdam
,
Hamburg
, and finally, to Hj0rring, where on the
Denmark
ferry they'd once again set sail across the
North Sea
, up the Oslofjord into
Norway
.

 
          
 
St. Ives was determined to remain awake, to
have a look at the comet when it sailed in over the horizon sometime after
midnight
. But the sleepless nights he had spent in
the observatory and the long hours of travel since had worn him thin, and after
a tolerable meal in the dining car, and what might likely turn out to be, on
the morrow, a regrettable lot of brandy, he dropped away at once into a deep
sleep, and the comet rose in the sky and fell again without him, slanting past
the captive earth.

 
          
 
In Oslo Hargreaves had beaten a man half
senseless with the man's own cane. In
Trondheim
, two hours before the arrival of St. Ives
and Hasbro on the express, he had run mad and threatened to explode a
greengrocer's cart, kicking the spokes out of one of the wheels before Narbondo
had hauled him away and explained to the authorities that his companion was a
lunatic bound for a sanitorium in Narvik.

 
          
 
St. Ives itched to be after them, but here he
sat, becalmed in a small brick railway station. He stared impatiently out the
window at the nearly empty station. A delay of a minute seemed an eternity, and
each sighing release of steam from the waiting train carried upon it the
suggestion of the fmal, fateful explosion. Hasbro, St. Ives could see, was
equally uneasy at their motionless state, for he sat hunched forward on his
seat as if trying to compel the train into flight. Finally, amid tooting and
whooshing and three false starts, they were away again, St. Ives praying that
the engineer had understood his translated request that they make an
unscheduled stop on the deserted tundra adjacent to
Mount
Hjarstaad
. Surely he would; he had accepted the
little bag of assorted coffee tablets readily enough. What could he have
understood them to be but payment?

 
          
 
Darkness had long since fallen, and with it
had fled the last of the scattered rain showers. Ragged clouds pursued by
arctic wind capered across the sky, and the stars shone thick and bright
between. The train developed steam after puffing along lazily up a steepening
grade, and within a score of minutes was hurtling through the mountainous
countryside.

 
          
 
St. Ives was gripped once more with the
excitement and peril of the chase. He removed his pocket watch at intervals,
putting it back without so much as glancing at it, then loosening his
already-loosened collar, peering out across the rocky landscape at the distant
swerve of track ahead when the train lurched into a curve, as if the engine
they pursued must surely be visible a half mile farther on.

 
          
 
The slow labored climb of steep hills was
almost instantly maddening and filled him again with the fear that their
efforts would prove futile, that from the vantage point of the next peak they
would witness the detonation of half of
Scandinavia
: crumbling mountainsides, hurtling rocks.
But then they would creep, finally, to another summit void of trees, where the
track was wafered onto ledges along unimaginable precipices. And the train
would plunge away again in a startling rush of steam and clatter.

 
          
 
They thundered through shrieking tunnels, the
starry sky going momentarily black and then reappearing in an instant only to
be dashed again into darkness. And when the train burst each time into the cold
Norwegian night, both St. Ives and Hasbro were pressed against the window,
peering skyward, relieved to see the last scattered clouds fleeing before the
wind. Then all at once, as if waved into existence by a magic wand, the lights
of the aurora borealis swept across the sky in lacey showers of green and red
and blue, like a semitransparent Christmas tapestry hung across the wash of
stars.

 
          
 
"Yes!" cried St. Ives, leaping to
his feet and nearly pitching into the aisle as they rushed howling into another
tunnel. "He's done it! Kraken has done it!"

 
          
 
"Indeed, sir?"

 
          
 
"Absolutely," said St. Ives, his
voice animated.
"Without the shadow of a doubt.
The northern lights, my good fellow, are a consequence of the earth's
electromagnetic field. It's a simple matter—no field, no lights. Had Lord
Kelvin's machine done its work, the display you see before us would have been
postponed for heaven knows how many woeful years. But here it is, isn't it?
Good old Bill!" And on this last cheerful note, they emerged once again
into the aurora-lit night, hurtling along beside a broad cataract that tumbled
down through a boulder-strewn gorge.

 
          
 
Another hour's worth of tunnels, however,
began to make it seem finally as if there
were no end
to their journey, as if, perhaps, their train labored around and around a
clever circular track, that they had been monumentally hoaxed one last fateful
time by Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. Then, in an effort of steam, the train crested
yet another treeless summit, and away to the west, far below them, moonlight
shimmered on the rippled surface of a fjord, stretching out to the distant
Norwegian Sea
. Tumbling down out of the rocky precipices
to their right rushed the wild river they had followed for what seemed an age,
the torrent wrapping round the edge of Mount Hjarstaad and disappearing into
shadow where it cascaded, finally, into the vast emptiness of an abyss. A
trestle spanned the cataract and gave out onto a tundra-covered plain,
scattered with the angular moon shadows of tilted stones.

 
          
 
Ahead of them, some ten yards from the track
and clearly visible in the moonlight, lay a strange and alien object—an empty
steamer trunk, its lid thrown back and its contents removed. Beyond that, a
hundred yards farther along, lay another, also empty and yanked over onto its
side. The train raced past both before howling to a steam-shrieking stop that
made St. Ives wince. So much for subtlety, he thought, as Hasbro pitched their
bags onto the icy plain and the two leaped out after them, the train almost
immediately setting forth again, north, toward
Hammerfest
, leaving the world and the two marooned men
to their collective fate.

 
          
 
St. Ives hurried across the plain toward the
slope of
Mount
Hjarstaad
. A footpath wound upward along the edge of
the precipice through which the river thundered and roiled. The air was full of
cold mist and the booming of water. "I'm afraid we've announced our
arrival through a megaphone," St. Ives shouted over his shoulder.