Thirteen Phantasms (5 page)

“Pardon me?”

“What? Oh, yes. The driver says we might go to the Black Hills at that. It didn’t seem certain though.”

“What do you mean, young man. Are you having me on again? A poor old lady like me?”

Monty slouching low in the seat, trying to assure her otherwise. Perhaps best just to keep a tight lip. Don’t give them anything to hold on to. Nothing to poke and jab at. There’s Tweedledee and the green man, staring back. Must try to smile. Nod politely as they glance at each other and smirk. My but they’re clever, those two. Like the rest of them back home. If they can’t throw rocks they throw other things at you with their eyes.

“Excuse me sir,” says Monty to the dwarf, always apologizing.

“Yes sir. It’s a fine night out, isn’t it?”

“Mmmm.”

Monty snaps open his leather bag and pulls out a book, rather dog-eared and homey looking. Forget this dwarf. Plunge into the pages of this book like I plunge into the night on this bus. Forever crossing into some new land. You just have to get underway, that’s all. Ride with the elves in search of the man in the moon. With the white hunter through savage Africa. Follow the trail of a grey old wizard through magic lands, far from the reaches of the cold dust wind of the plains. Take this star schooner of a bus through twirling space, bound for Mars. Just climb aboard, cut the moorings, and cast off.

The dwarf there, speaking to the grey lady in undertones. Setting her straight perhaps. He knows where we’re headed and always has, by God. Anyone with pointed ears and that glittering silver hat knows something. He rides busses a lot, that one does. I bet he even knows about those lonely shoes I stumble across, now and again.

“Pardon me sir, but where are we going?”

“Eh?”

“I say, where are we bound?”

The dwarf winks. He nods toward the darkened window and points a long thin finger toward the jeweled heavens that hang so low overhead.

The bus whizzes along silently, dipping down and flying over hills that lie on the plains like grim whales on the bottom of the sea. Monty, looking out from inside a tiny flying fish, sailing amidst the black leviathan. By God! On a bus. You can go anywhere on this sucker. The bus, over a dip in the road, nosing skyward, ascending, angling straight up toward where the dwarf’s finger had pointed, only a moment before. Straight up through the speckled dark as the moon and the stars seem to grow and brighten with a beckoning shimmer.

“That’d be mighty fine. Mighty fine,” says Monty to no one in particular, settling back into the folds of the plush recliner, book lying open on his lap. Through the dim window the bright dots of the stars hover thick in the night sky. So thick and big that you couldn’t shoot a bullet up there without hitting one of them; let alone a bus. The great circle of the red planet swings into view, misty and crisscrossed with inexplicable lines like the intricate translucent swirlings of the agate marble in Monty’s pocket. The fiery eye of a winking enchantress. “By God!” breathes Monty. “Mighty fine.”

A good deal of controversy arose late in the last century over what has been referred to by the more livid newspapers as “The Horror in St. James Park” or “The Ape-Box Affair.” Even these thirty years later, a few people remember that little intrigue, though most would change the subject rather abruptly if you broached it, and many are still unaware of the relation, or rather the lack of relation, between the actual ape-box and the spacecraft that plunked down in the Park’s duck pond.

The memoirs of Professor Langdon St. Ives, however, which passed into my hands after the poor man’s odd disappearance, pretty clearly implicate him in the affair. His own orang-outang, I’ll swear it, and the so-called Hooded Alien are one and the same creature. There is little logical connection, however, between that creature and “the thing in the box” which has since also fallen my way, and is nothing more than a clockwork child’s toy. The ape puppet in that box, I find after a handy bit of detective work, was modeled after the heralded “Moko the Educated Ape” which toured with a Bulgarian Gypsy fair and which later became the central motif of the mysterious Robert Service sonnet, “The Headliner and the Breadliner.” That the ape in the box became linked to St. Ives’s shaven orang-outang is a matter of the wildest coincidence—a coincidence that generated a chain of activities no less strange or incredible. This then is the tale, and though the story is embellished here and there for the sake of dramatic realism, it is entirely factual in the main.

•

Professor St. Ives was a brilliant scientist, and the history books might some day acknowledge his full worth. But for the Chingford Tower fracas, and one or two other rather trivial affairs, he would be heralded by the Academy, instead of considered a sort of interesting lunatic.

His first delvings into the art of space travel were those which generated the St. James Park matter, and they occurred on, or better yet, were culminated in 1892 early in the morning of July 2. St. Ives’ space craft was ball-shaped and large enough for one occupant; and because it was the first of a series of such crafts, that occupant was to be one Newton, a trained orang-outang who had only to push the right series of buttons when spacebound to motivate a magnetic homing device designed to reverse the craft’s direction and set it about a homeward course. The ape’s head was shaven to allow for the snug fitting of a sort of golden conical cap which emitted a meager electrical charge, sufficient only to induce a very mild sleep. It was of great importance that the ape remain docile while in flight, a condition which, as we shall see, was not maintained. The ape was also fitted with a pair of silver, magnetic-soled boots to affix him firmly to the deck of the ship; they would impede his movements in case he became restive, or, as is the problem with space travel, in case the forces of gravity should diminish.

Finally, St. Ives connected a spring-driven mechanism in a silver-colored box which puffed forth successive jets of oxygenated gas produced by the interaction of a concentrated chlorophyll solution with compressed helium—this combination producing the necessary atmosphere in the closed quarters of the ship.

The great scientist, after securing the ape to his chair and winding the chlorophyll box, launched the ship from the rear yard of his residence and laboratory in Harrogate. He watched the thing careen south through the starry early-morning sky. It was at that point, his craft a pinpoint of light on the horizon, that St. Ives was stricken with the awful realization that he had neglected to fill the ape’s food dispenser, a fact which would not have been of consequence except that the ape was to receive half a score of greengage plums as a reward for pushing the several buttons which would affect the gyro and reverse the course of the ship. The creature’s behavior once he ascertained that he had, in effect, been cheated of his greengages was unpredictable. There was nothing to be done, however, but for St. Ives to crawl wearily in to bed and hope for the best.

•

Several weeks previous to the launching of the craft (pardon the digression here; its pertinence will soon become apparent) a Bulgarian Gypsy caravan had set up a bit of a carnival in Chelsea, where they sold the usual salves and potions and such rot, as well as providing entertainments. Now, Wilfred Keeble was a toymaker who lived on Whitehall above the Old Shades and who, though not entirely daft, was eccentric. He was also the unloved brother of Winnifred Keeble, newly monied wife of Lord Placer. To be a bit more precise, he was loved well enough by his sister, but his brother-in-law couldn’t abide him. Lord Placer had little time for the antics of his wife’s lowlife relative, and even less for carnivals or circuses of gypsies. His daughter Olivia, therefore, sneaked away and cajoled her Uncle Wilfred into taking her to the gypsy carnival. Keeble assented, having little use himself for Lord Placer’s august stuffiness, and off they went to the carnival, which proved to be a rather pale affair, aside from the antics of Moko the Educated Ape. Actually, a far as Keeble was concerned, the ape itself was nothing much, being trained merely to sit in a great chair and puff on a cigar while seeming to pore over a copy of the Times which, more often than not, it held upside down or sideways or chewed at or tore up or gibbered over.

Olivia was fascinated by the creature and flew home begging her father for a pet ape, an idea which not only sent a thrill of horror and disgust up Lord Placer’s spine, but which caused him to confound his brother-in-law and everything connected with him for having had such a damnable effect on his daughter. Olivia, her hopes dashed by her father’s ape loathing, confided her grief to Uncle Wilfred who, although he knew that the gift of a real ape would generate conflicts best not thought about, could see no harm in fashioning a toy ape.

He set about in earnest to create such a thing and, in a matter of weeks, came up with one of those clockwork, key-crank jack-in-the-boxes. It was a silver cube painted with vivid circus depictions; when wound tightly, a comical ape got up as a mandarin and with whirling eyes would spring out and shout a snatch of verse. Wilfred Keeble was pretty thoroughly pleased with the thing, but he knew that it would be folly to go visiting his brother-in-law’s house with such a wild and unlikely gift, in the light of Lord Placer’s hatred of such things. There was a boy downstairs, a Jack Owlesby, who liked to earn a shilling here and there, and so Keeble called him up and, wrapping the box in paper and dashing off a quick note, sent Jack out into the early morning air two and six richer for having agreed to deliver the gift. Having sat up all night to finish the thing, Keeble crawled wearily into bed at, it seems, nearly the same hour that Langdon St. Ives did the same after launching his spacecraft.

•

Three people—two indigent gentlemen who seemed sea-captainish in a devastated sort of way, and a shrunken fellow with a yellow cloth cap who was somehow responsible for the chairs scattered about the green—were active in St. James Park that morning; at least those are the only three whose testimony was later officially transcribed. According to the Times report, these chaps, at about 7:00 AM, saw, as one of them stated, “a great fiery thing come sailing along like a bloody flying head,”—an adequate enough description of St. Ives’ ship which, gone amok, came plunging into the south end of the Park’s duck pond.

This visitation of a silver orb from space would, in itself, have been sufficient to send an entire park full of people shouting into the city, but, to the three in the park, it seemed weak tea indeed when an alien-seeming beast sailed out on impact through the sprung hatch, a bald-headed but otherwise hairy creature with a sort of golden dunce cap, woefully small, perched atop his head. Later, one of the panhandlers, a gentleman named Hornby, babbled some rubbish about a pair of flaming stilts, but the other two agreed that the thing wore high-topped silver boots, and, to a man, they remarked of an “infernal machine” which the thing carried daintily between his outstretched hands like a delicate balloon as it fled into Westminster.

There was, of course, an immediate hue and cry, responded to by two constables and a handful of sleepy and disheveled horse guards who raced about skeptically between the witnesses while poor Newton, St. Ives’s orang-outang, fuddled and hungry, disappeared into the city. At least three journalists appeared within half an hour’s time and were soon hotfooting it away quick as you please with the tale of the alien ship, the star beast, and the peculiar and infernal machine.

Newton had begun to grow restless somewhere over Yorkshire, just as the professor had supposed he would. Now all of this is a matter of conjecture, but logic would point with a stiffish finger toward the probability that the electronic cap atop the ape’s head either refused to function or functioned incorrectly, for Newton had commenced his antics within minutes of takeoff. There were reports, in fact, of an erratic glowing sphere zigging through the sky above Long Bennington that same morning, an indication that Newton, irate, was pretty thoroughly giving the controls the once-over. One can only suppose that the beast, anticipating a handful of plums, began stabbing away at the crucial buttons unaffected, as he must have been, by the cap. That it took a bit longer for him to run thoroughly amok indicates the extent of his trust in St. Ives. The professor, in his papers, reports that the control panel itself was finally dashed to bits and the chlorophyll-atmosphere box torn cleanly from the side of the cabin. Such devastation couldn’t have been undertaken before the craft was approaching Greater London; probably it occurred above South Mimms, where the ship was observed by the populace to be losing altitude. This marked the beginning of the plunge into London.

Although the creature had sorted through the controls rather handily, those first plum buttons, luckily for him, activated at least partially St. Ives’s gyro homing device. Had the beast been satisfied and held off on further mayhem, he would quite possibly have found himself settling back down in Harrogate at St. Ives’s laboratory. As it was, the reversing power of the craft was enough finally to promote, if not a gentle landing, at least one which, taking into account the cushion of water involved, was not fatal to poor Newton.

•

Jack Owlesby, meanwhile, ambled along down Whitehall, grasping the box containing Keeble’s ape contraption and anticipating a meeting with Keeble’s niece whom he had admired more than once. He was, apparently, a good enough lad, as we’ll see, and had been, coincidentally enough, mixed in with Langdon St. Ives himself some little time ago in another of St. Ives’s scientific shenanigans. Anyway, because of his sense of duty and the anticipation of actually speaking to Olivia, he popped right along for the space of five minutes before realizing that he could hardly go pounding away on Lord Placer’s door at such an inhuman hour of the morning. He’d best, thought he, sort of angle up around the square and down The Mall to the park to kill a bit of time. A commotion of some nature and a shouting lot of people drew him naturally along and, as would have happened to anyone in a like case, he went craning away across the road, unconscious of a wagon of considerable size which was gathering speed some few feet off his starboard side. A horn blasted, Jack leapt forward with a shout, clutching his parcel, and a brougham, unseen behind the wagon, plowed over him like an express, the driver cursing and flailing his arms.