Parsons blinked. He looked at the receding madman. He looked at the approaching starship. He looked at the decayed head, toothy and brown, that rolled to a stop at his feet, peering up at him through empty sockets. Its jaws clacked once, as if in a tired attempt to bite his shoes or to utter some final lamentation. Then it lay still. “What on earth…” murmured Parsons.
* * *
St. Ives could once again see Greater London spread out below him, but this time it wasn’t spinning like a top. It lay below like jeweled pinpoints flung along the winding dark ribbon of the Thames. To the west the sky was tinged red with dying sunlight, which quickly deepened to purple then blue-black as his craft dropped toward Hampstead Heath. Behind him lay the uncharted oceans of deep space — oceans traversed by comets and moons and planets and asteroids, the vast and lonely sailing ships that plied the trade lanes among the stars, and among which, for a few brief minutes. St. Ives had maneuvered his little coracle of a star vessel.
But he was destined now for Hampstead Heath. The wonders of the heavens would wait for him, of that there could be little doubt. But the machinations of earthbound villainy would not. His friends at that moment were embroiled in God knew what sorts of dangers and intrigues. St. Ives smiled as he diminished the speed of the craft sliding in toward the fires that dotted the hillsides like beacons above the lights of Hampstead.
The great oval green was thick with people who swirled and parted and fell back. There, he could see, was a knot of people on chairs in a cordoned area — the Royal Academy, without a doubt. And before them — that had to be Parsons. St. Ives angled in toward him, looking in vain for his own companions. But there were horse carts aplenty, and one looked pretty much like another from such lofty heights. The ground sailed up at him. Upturned faces, mouths agape, swam into clarity. St. Ives fingered the levers, toyed with them, eased them this way and that, settling, finally, onto the green, dead center between two roaring fires, with no more jarring than if he’d sailed in on a feather.
He arose, flipped open the hatch, thrust out his head, and was amazed to see, sitting directly in front of the ship, its back turned toward him, the upholstered chair from the house on Wardour Street, still tethered to the ship, the luckless ghoul bound into it by three turns of hempen rope. The thing’s hair stood on end — elevated by the spate of rapid travel through space — and its face was pulpy and bent, as if shoved and pummeled by atmospheric pressures. The ghoul seemed to be staring straightaway toward an open-mouthed Parsons, who held in his right hand, of all things, the severed, diminished head of Joanna Southcote.
St. Ives smiled and nodded at Parsons, who, quite apparently, was going to weep. He’d clearly been affected by the glorious issuance of the craft. St. Ives had underestimated Parsons; that much was certain. What was even more certain was that the members had underestimated St. Ives. Their countenances betrayed them.
“Gentlemen!” cried Langdon St. Ives, having prepared a small speech while cavorting through the upper reaches of the atmosphere. But his speech ended as abruptly as it began, for there arose immediately a furious shouting from the direction of the village of Hampstead, a shouting that climbed the hill like an approaching giant. And there, hovering out of the starry distances, sailed the blimp of Doctor Birdlip, swinging slowly on the breeze, making for Hampstead Heath.
As wonderful as St. Ives’ arrival had been, the approach of the wonderful dirigible diminished it. The Royal Academy pushed past the star vessel in a rush, leaving St. Ives to address the back of the head of the thing in the chair. Duty, thought St. Ives, recalling the point of his journey to the Heath. His friends were somewhere nearby, as were his enemies. Birdlip approached, carrying with him the inheritance of Jack Owlesby — independence for Jack and Dorothy, Sebastian Owlesby’s only respectable legacy. And there would be no end of villains afoot with an eye toward it.
St. Ives was torn. He dare not leave the craft unattended. Who could say what deviltry might be perpetrated against it? Drake, certainly, would attempt to repossess it, Pule to blow it to bits, Shiloh to claim it as a chariot of some peculiar god or another. Still, what could he do? Sit in it? Let the same crowd overrun the blimp, pluck the jewel from their grasp? He bent through the hatch, overbalancing and sliding out onto the riveted shell of the craft, grabbing at a pair of brass protrusions to haul himself free.
The shouting increased in volume. St. Ives slid head first onto the dewy grass of the heath, then scrambled onto his feet, yanking at his rumpled clothes. A loud crack sounded behind him along with the snap and zing of something ricocheting off the hull of the ship. Another crack rang out, and St. Ives was once again in the grass, scuttling like a lobster around the ship, peering out beneath the lower curve of the thing at a man in the chimney pipe hat — Billy Deener — crouched beneath the spreading limbs of a shadowy oak. A pistol smoked in his hands. Beside him was a horse and wagon, empty, tethered to the tree. Deener took aim with his pistol and stepped forward, as if to stride toward St. Ives in order to flush him out. There could be no doubt that it was murder he intended. And there in the tumult on the Heath he’d get away with it too. They’d find St. Ives stiff as a gaffed fish on the green and half a million Londoners suspect.
St. Ives edged round the far side of the ship. Would it be wise to run, trusting the increasing distance to confound Deener’s aim? He peeked out and a shot banged off the hull of the ship, the bullet singing past his ear. St. Ives contracted like a startled snail. He could, perhaps, clamber into the ship, shut the hatch, and sail away, but the man would he on him like a dog — St. Ives would be found murdered, dangling from the hatch, exterminated in a sorry effort to flee. It was run or nothing. Zigzag — that was the ticket. He’d dash away toward a far stand of trees. He’d keep the ship between them so that Deener would have to fire past it.
St. Ives leaped up and ran for it. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” he shouted, for no purpose other than to alert the night to the ensuing mayhem. He glanced over his shoulder as soon as he was underway, unable to stand the idea of not knowing where the assassin stood.
But there was no assassin — not standing, anyway. A man leaned out of the tree like an ape above Deener, and even as St. Ives watched, he slammed the chimney pipe hat cockeyed with what appeared to be a cricket bat. The hat sailed off end over end as Deener collapsed forward onto his knees. The man dropped from the tree, his own hat tumbling to the ground, and gripping the club with both hands smashed Deener again. Drake’s hireling fell poleaxed onto his face in the weeds.
The man with the bat raised it aloft for another blow. St. Ives set out cautiously toward the ship. This is thick, he thought. There was, after all, such a thing as common decency, even toward a would-be murderer. The cricket bat descended, cracking against Deener’s skull, then again and again, as if the man who wielded it was wild with fury. “Here now!” cried St. Ives, setting off at a run. The man cast the bat haphazardly into the air, turned toward the approaching St. Ives, and bent to pick something up out of the grass. It was the pistol. He leveled it at St. Ives, who lurched to a skipping halt, reversed direction, and weaved away across the green, tempted to run downhill toward the assembled masses below, but fearful that some innocent Londoner might take a bullet intended for him.
St. Ives ducked in once again behind the ship, wondering wildly at the strange course of events that had led Willis Pule to save him from the murderous Billy Deener, for it had been Pule, gibbering mad, who had leaned out of the tree with the cricket bat to pulverize Deener. But why? In order, apparently, to have the pleasure of killing St. Ives himself. But Pule had given up the idea. He strode across to the tethered horse and wagon, rummaged among Deener’s effects, and hauled something out — a Keeble box. Even from a distance there could be no doubting it.
The gun forgotten, St. Ives leaped from his cover and raced toward Pule. Which of the boxes it was that Pule was even then making away with, St. Ives couldn’t say. But visions of the spark-throwing rocket bursting through the silo roof a
nd of Willis Pule smashing about in his study, beating poor Kepler’s bust into pieces, leant St. Ives a sudden disregard for danger. Madness, however, had given the student of alchemy wings, for he paid the advancing St. Ives no heed at all, but raced away into the night, gabbling to himself as he ran, half sobbing, his words utterly indecipherable. Billy Deener, St. Ives discovered, was dead.
The blimp swayed in the night sky on winds which seemed to be blowing into the stars. The moon rode at anchor, heaving on a heavenly groundswell, encircled by a radiant halo of stellar light, as if the stars themselves were ship’s lamps that illuminated the invisible avenue down which rode Birdlip’s craft, its gondola creaking to and fro in practiced rhythms. St. Ives wondered how many people were mesmerized there on the green; how many were perched in the treetops, peered skyward through unshuttered windows, or stood craning their necks along the dark and muddy roads that led up out of smoky London. Hundreds of thousands? And all of them still — not even the peep of a slanting bat or the chirp of a cricket in the nearby wood broke the silence. There was simply the shrub-scented night, heavy, quiet, expectant, and the slow creak, creak, creak of the swaying gondola, lit now by the sliver of moon. There at the helm stood the skeletal Birdlip, the indomitable pilot, his coat a tatter of webby lace, wisping ‘round the ivory swerve of his ribcage. The moon showed straight through the coat like lamplight through muslin — seemed magnified, if that were possible, as if the coat were a wonderful bit of glass spun of silk and silver that drew through it the accumulated light of the heavens.
St. Ives couldn’t move. What did it mean, this humming dirigible that had, after years of circuitous wanderings in the atmosphere, decided to wend its way homeward at last? What did it signify? Birdlip knew. He’d pursued something — a demon, a will o’ the wisp, the reflection of a phantom moon that beckoned on the night wind and receded toward unimagined horizons. Had Birdlip caught it? Had it eluded him? And what, in the name of all that was holy, would poor Parsons make of it? He’d shortly be faced with yet another fleshless visage. What, wondered St. Ives, did it all mean?
The blimp hovered fifty feet above the heath, seeming actually to rise now, following the natural curve of the hill, intent upon landing not just anywhere, but at some predetermined spot, an utterly necessary spot, as if it were indeed piloted yet by the straddle-legged doctor. His French cocked hat was settled low over his forehead, shading his empty eye sockets, the jellied orbs within having long since been burned by a remorseless sun and picked away by seabirds. What strange eyesight did Birdlip retain? How clearly did he see?
TWENTY
Birdlip
Bill Kraken, sitting astride the limb of an oak some five feet above the heads of the crowd below, wondered much the same thing. In none of Kraken’s investigations into science was there anything as grand, as majestic, as the homeward bound Birdlip and his astonishing craft. Something, Kraken was certain, was pending. He could feel it in the air — a static charge that shivered through the masses who stood mute with anticipation.
The descending blimp swung low overhead. People leaned out of the uppermost branches of trees, endeavoring to touch it. It seemed to Kraken as if the sky was nothing but blimp. He glanced back over his shoulder, looking proudly at Langdon St. Ives who stood before his own incredible ship. The night, indeed, was full of marvels. And he, Bill Kraken, squid merchant, pea pod man, had a hand in them. The man beside him in the branches, an unshaven pinch-faced man in a stocking cap, hadn’t. Kraken smiled at him good-naturedly. It wasn’t his fault, after all, that he didn’t hobnob with geniuses. The man gave him a dark look, disliking the familiarity. Someone above trod on the top of Kraken’s head in an effort to boost himself even higher. Below him on the green, stumbling from shadow to shadow as if working his way surreptitiously toward where the blimp seemed destined to land, lurched a man who appeared to be sick or drunk. Kraken squinted at him, disbelieving. It was Willis Pule.
Kraken dangled one leg down along the trunk, feeling for the crotch of two great limbs that forked up some six feet from the ground. Things, apparently, were hotting up. Pule disappeared into the shadows, then reappeared again beyond a heaped bonfire, the dancing orange light of which seemed to intensify the darkness behind it.
Not twenty paces behind Pule, possessed by a determination that belied his age, Shiloh the New Messiah limped along, accompanied by a straggling covey of converts strung along like quail, half intent on catching up to the disappeared Pule, half intent on Birdlip’s craft. The blimp hung now over the green, suspended by the magic, perhaps, of its Keeble engine. The evangelist was lit for a moment by the same firelight which had illuminated Pule and which now betrayed on the old man a face twisted slantwise in a rictus of loathing, the messiah pursuing the worm, the devil who had made away with the head of his mother, and who now carried one of the fabulous boxes, quite conceivably the same box stolen hours ago by the imposter in the wagon.
And there, sliding along down the edge of the crowd, came Theophilus Godall, carrying with him, Kraken was horrified to see, a round, metallic object that could be nothing other than the Marseilles Pinkle, glinting in the firelight. He was clearly unseen either by Pule or the old man. But Bill Kraken saw him, and so did St. Ives. The tune had begun to he called, and it was time for Kraken to dance to it. He slid to the ground and set out, running straight on into Kelso Drake, an inch and a half of cigar protruding from Drake’s mouth like a blackened tongue.
If he’d had time to think, Kraken would have sailed back into his tree, scaled the slippery trunk like an ape. But he had no such time. He launched himself at the millionaire. “Here’s for Ashbless!” he cried, an obtuse reference to the bullet Billy Deener had drilled into his treasured volume. And he struck Drake squarely on the chin, snatching the Keeble box from his hands as Drake fell sputtering, stupefied with surprise, his hat sailing off to reveal a bandaged head.
Kraken turned and ran, holding the box before him as if it were a pitcher of water he daren’t spill. Drake pounded along behind, filling the suddenly tumultuous night with curses, drowned out when a hundred thousand voices arose in a sudden monumental cheer. The blimp, its time come round at last, shot forward and settled in onto the green, not twenty-five feet from St. Ives’ space vehicle. The bulk of the crowd surged up the hill behind it. The ghoul in the stuffed chair sat placid as a man at tea in front of it. The Royal Academy, directed by the indomitable Parsons, clustered around it, eager to have a look at the skeletal sailor, home at last from the sea.
Kraken angled away into the rushing crowd. There was the Captain, stumping along, and William Keeble at the heels of his stalwart wife, all of them charging toward the blimp, toward the fourth and final box that rode within. “Cap’n!” shouted Kraken, capering along behind them, carried in a rush by the swarming masses, A sea of heads cut off his view. Someone trod on his toe. He stumbled. A dozen people smashed past him. He was pushed from his knees onto his face, nearly trampled, lying atop the Keeble box.
“Filthy piece of dirt!” hissed a voice in his ear, and as he hunched forward in an effort to stand, he was borne down again by the weight of Kelso Drake, his cigar gone, his jaws working as if he were full of speeches too vile to utter.
Kraken plowed his elbow into Drake’s nose. A hand closed over his face, tugging his head back. He clamped his scattered teeth onto a finger and chewed away until the teeth closed against bone. A shriek erupted in his ear, and the hand was jerked away, nearly tearing the precious tooth away with it.
Kraken stumbled forward, half rose, and was elbowed sideways into a host of people, slowing now in the press. He was on his feet, though. Indeed, it would be difficult to fall, closed in as he was by the throng. Over his shoulder he could see Kelso Drake, cursing at the people around him — people who were in no mood to be cursed. A fist shot out and clipped Drake in the ear. He lurched aside. Kraken grinned. Drake was obviously possessed by the thought that millionaires ought not to be treated so. He railed at the man who he suppos
ed had hit him — the wrong man, as it turned out, a man who had the general shape of a hogshead and the facial consistency of a bag of stones.
“Here now!” shouted the man, not wasting words, and he slammed Drake on the nose to the general encouragement of the crowd. Kraken pushed toward the erupting mêlée, shouting happily to see the color of Drake’s blood. The industrialist flailed like a windmill, utterly ineffectively, so far gone was he in his anger and loathing.
Kraken hoped to get in a blow or two of his own, but his hopes were dashed when, with sudden inspiration, he shouted: “That’s the man who murdered the child!” at the top of his lungs, pointing past the circle of Drake’s tormenters into the millionaire’s face. A cry of disgust and abandonment arose, and before Kraken could have a go at him, Drake disappeared beneath a monsoon of whirling fists. “Get him!” cried Kraken, but the suggestion, he quickly saw, was unnecessary. He pushed along toward the blimp, hugging his box.
Ahead of him, two dozen or so men scrambled to string ropes around the craft, cordoning it off against the possible rush of the masses. But the London populace, apparently, harbored suspicions, fears, and perhaps reverence, for they hovered round the perimeter of an oblong patch of ground on which sat the blimp, the corpse in the chair, and the starship. Parsons directed the roping efforts, arguing all the while with both the Captain and St. Ives. Captain Powers grew more heated by the moment, shouting that Parsons had no “jurisdiction.” Parsons attempted to ignore him, but cast meaningful glances at St. Ives, as if to encourage the scientist to calm his bellowing friend.
The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (the adventures of langdon st. ives) Page 34