The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

by James P. Blaylock

  “Aye,” said St. Ives. “But a man with something to look forward to is likely to do his work more cheerfully, and not retire early from the field. And in the situation you describe, I’d be the one who’s three guineas to the bad, wouldn’t I?”

  The Tipper lapsed again into silence, and they went on, into the forest once more, leaving the coal dust behind them. Near Heathfield, the fog rose again around their knees, with here and there patches of it ascending into the treetops. “Pray this fog ain’t washed out by the rain,” the Tipper said. “A fog is perfect weather for a lark like this.”

  His prayer was answered, for the fog grew heavier as the minutes slipped away and they neared the point where they’d don the caps. The Tipper slowed, held out a restraining hand, and whispered, “Steady-on!” And then, when all was still, “Listen!”

  There was a distant mutter of voices, not the lunatic voices of a village gone mad, but of reasonable men, several of them. How close they were, it was impossible to say. The fog hid the world from view and obscured sound. The Tipper turned to St. Ives and in a low voice said, “So much as a quack from your lordship, and I’m gone, do you hear me? You’ll not see me again. I’ll go back after the payment that’s waiting for me in Blackboys and tell your friends that everything’s topping. You’ll be on your own.”

  “Agreed,” St. Ives said, and the Tipper muttered something about it’s not making a halfpenny’s difference who agreed with what. They moved forward carefully, keeping hidden, until they could see a road ahead, the fog blowing aside to reveal a small company of red-coated soldiers sitting beneath an open canvas tent.

  “Lobsters,” the Tipper whispered. “Up from Brighton, no doubt.” He nodded toward a dense birch copse some distance farther on, which ran right up against the road. “That’s where we cross into Heathfield proper. Put that cap on. Pull it low over your ears. If you lose the cap, you’ll lose your wits with it, although you won’t know you’ve lost either of them, if you ken my meaning.”

  St. Ives donned the cap, which was indeed cobbled together from a pair of gloves, the fingers rising atop like the comb of a rooster. He tugged it firmly down over his ears, deadening what little sound was left in the quiet morning. He had no real understanding of the science involved in the caps, although he suspected that the answer lay somewhere within the notebooks of Lord Busby. More to the point, he wondered how the Tipper could have discovered the efficacy of the asbestos cloth. He couldn’t have, of course. Even if the gloves were ready to hand, it wouldn’t have come into his mind to sew them into a cap. The Tipper was clearly in the hire of someone who had knowledge of such things. Busby being dead, that someone’s identity was obvious.

  When would the betrayal come? St. Ives wondered, watching the Tipper scuttle on ahead toward the stand of birch. Soon, surely. He felt for the bulge of the pistol tucked inside his waistcoat. Then he reached into his vest pocket and drew out a hastily written letter addressed to Alice. He hadn’t had time to write what he meant—couldn’t find the words to say it. But if it were necessary, and if the fates were willing, he could get the pitiful attempt into Alice’s hands even if he were captured, and she might at least win free and remember him for who he had always meant to be, paving his marriage with good intentions.

  He crumpled the letter into his vest again, where it would be within easy reach, and then hastened forward to where the Tipper stood a few steps back from the edge of the road. The two of them might be hazily visible through the fog when they crossed, although for the moment they were hidden from view. The Tipper mouthed something incomprehensible, but made his meaning clear with a gesture. They crept out into the open, looking carefully north, and for a moment they caught sight of the soldiers again, mere shadows in the murk, before slipping into the forest on the Heathfield side of the road.

  St. Ives experimentally tugged his cap away from his ear, and instantly, as if the space within his mind had been occupied by a ready-built dream, he had the strange notion that he was at a masquerade ball. He had never been a dancer, and he loathed costumes, but now he was elated at the idea of taking a turn about the floor. He saw Alice approaching, although she was a mere wraith, which didn’t strike him as at all odd. She carried a glass of punch, seeming to float toward him atop a shifting bed of leaves. He could see forest shrubbery through her, and an uncanny white mist roiling behind her like smoke. Something was happening to her face. It was melting, like a wax bust in a fire.

  He yanked the cap back down, pressing his hands tightly against his ears. Now there was no Alice, no masquerade. The madness had slipped in like an airborne poison as soon as the door had swung open, and then had evaporated when the door had slammed shut. And yet despite the cap there seemed to be some presence lurking at the edge of his mind, some creature just kept at bay, but straining to be loosed from its bonds. As they neared the village the capering presence in his head became more insistent. He began to hear small, murmuring voices that rose and fell like a freshening wind. Quite distinctly he heard the voice of his mother saying something about a piano. He imagined himself sitting happily on the parlor floor of his childhood home, dressed in knee breeches, watching a top careen around in a wobbly spin, its buzzing sound clear in his ears.

  It came into his mind that his cap might be inferior, that it might be compromised somehow. The Tipper seemed to be sober enough. St. Ives compelled himself to put up a mental struggle, recalling algebraic theorems, settling on Euclid’s lemma, picturing prime numbers falling away like dominoes. He added them together as they ran, tallying sums. A bell began to ring, in among the numbers, it seemed to him, but then ceased abruptly, replaced by the sound of a fiddler, the fiddling turning to laughter, the numbers in his mind blowing apart like dandelion fluff. He forced himself to think of Alice, of himself having gone away to Scotland on his fruitless mission while she journeyed south, possibly to her doom.

  The branch of a shrub along the path lashed at his face, sobering him further. He saw a cottage ahead through the thinning trees now, recognizing the blue shutters. On beyond the cottage lay the broad heath from whence the village got its name. The Tipper had taken St. Ives straight to the cottage, despite its remote location: clearly he knew the way well enough. He stood just ahead now, his finger to his lips.

  The fog had deepened, and not an imaginary fog. St. Ives could smell it, the damp of it on the stones of the cottage, the musty leaves. It recalled the holidays of his youth, spent in Lyme Regis. Memories of seaside vistas wavered pictorially now on the fog itself, like images in a magic lantern show. He reached out to take hold of them, thinking that he might literally hold them, and he was saddened when they passed through his fingers as mere mist.

  The Tipper was grinning at him, as if enjoying St. Ives’s mental unmooring. He put his fingers to his lips and whistled, and out of the fog came Alice herself, not at all a wraith, but solid now, walking slowly as if mesmerized. Her eyes were distant, gazing out on heaven-knew-what. The sight of her brought St. Ives instantly to himself. A man walked behind her, holding onto a clutch of fabric at the back of her dress and wearing one of the asbestos caps.

  Then she quite apparently saw St. Ives, for she shook her head as if to dislodge the cobwebs and focused on his face in apparent amazement. This partial return to the waking world seemed to stagger her, and she stumbled forward, nearly falling. The man behind her hauled her to her feet again. St. Ives saw then that he was none other than Sam Burke, the Peddler, dressed in his familiar tweeds.

  The Tipper suddenly loomed in front of St. Ives and, quick as a snake, his empty hand disappeared inside St. Ives’s waistcoat and reappeared with the pistol in it. He stepped back, shrugging. “This’ll do just as well as the three guineas,” he said. From behind the corner of the house a third man stepped into view, his right arm tied into a sling. In his left hand he held a pistol of his own, which he pointed at Alice, no doubt as a message to St. Ives, since Alice seemed to have gone out of her mind again and was indifferent to it.
<
br />   A wave of anger washed the confusion from the Professor’s brain, and he threw himself forward, hitting the surprised Tipper a heavy backhand blow that knocked him down. The pistol flew from his hand, but St. Ives ignored it. Without pause he snatched the Tipper’s cap from the man’s head and shoved it into his own waistband. He clutched the Tipper’s neck with his right hand and lifted him bodily off the ground so that he hung by his own weight, his feet kicking, his mouth opening and closing like the mouth of a fish drawn from deep water. The one-armed man still pointed his pistol at Alice. He stepped forward now, shaking his head at St. Ives, and in that moment St. Ives knew that the man wouldn’t shoot either of them. The pistol was a bluff.

  St. Ives made a sudden lunge forward, carrying the Tipper with him, clutched to his chest, the Tipper biting and lurching insanely, a low, gibbering nose uttering from his mouth. Pivoting on his right foot and spinning halfway around, St. Ives hurled the Tipper like a sack of potatoes at the man with the pistol, both of them going over in a heap. He reached into his vest and drew out the note that he had written earlier that morning, and then, rushing toward the Peddler and Alice, he yanked the Tipper’s hat from his waistband, shoved the note into it, and with both hands pulled the cap down over Alice’s head and ears, turning sideways in that same moment and bowling into the Peddler, knocking him backward and clubbing at his head with his fists.

  The Peddler grappled him, strong as an ape, reeling back against the wall of the cottage. He heard Alice shout something—no sort of madness, but something sensible—and he shouted back at her, “Run! Run!” at the top of his voice, holding on to the Peddler, pressing his thumb into the man’s throat, compressing his larynx. And then his own cap was snatched off his head, and there was a shout of triumph in his ear. Abruptly he heard fiddling and laughter on the wind, a cacophony of wild noise. There was a gunshot, fearfully close, and he saw Alice running, the one armed man pointing the pistol and firing it over her head and into the trees. St. Ives looked back vaguely at the man he was throttling, confused now, and saw with horror that the man wore the contorted face of his own father.

  St. Ives reeled backward, releasing the man’s neck. Smoke seemed to him to be pouring out of the windows of the cottage now, taking the form of grinning demons as it roiled into the air. The world was a reeling inferno in the moment before he was struck in the back of the head and darkness descended upon him.

  Chapter 6

  Alice’s Story

  Moments after her collapse on the floor of the inn parlor, Alice revived, and of course we helped her to her feet and into a chair. For a time she sat there with her eyes closed, catching her breath and her sensibilities, still clutching the cap. When she opened her eyes again they had a steadier sort of look in them, as if she had returned in spirit as well as body and mind. From inside the cap she drew out a crushed piece of paper, then threw the cap angrily into the corner of the room.

  Tubby made straightaway to our table to fetch a flagon of tea and a cup. She drank the tea down gratefully, and then after another moment’s rest, happily took a glass of port. She thanked the both of us, looking somewhat recovered, but in no wise happy.

  “We’ve been waiting all day for word of St. Ives,” I said to her anxiously.

  “I’ve got all the word there is,” she told us, “and none of it good.”

  §

  The madness that had possessed her for the past three days had diminished when St. Ives put the asbestos cap upon her head, and had evaporated utterly when she was well clear of Heathfield. Of the madness itself, she recalled that some of it was wonderful, some of it horrifying, but the memory of it was already fading from her mind, as if it had been a waking dream, even now only a memory of a memory.

  Some few days previously she and the niece Sydnee had been strolling through the village, where the spring Cuckoo Fair was just then getting underway. The streets were awash with people, with dozens in the costume of St. Richard and with feast booths set up and a great deal of merriment that the weather couldn’t dampen. The legendary cuckoo was on display, looking something like a large pigeon that someone had waxed artistic with. The two of them had stopped to hobnob with the bird, when suddenly, without warning of any sort, although Alice faintly recalls a high-pitched keening in the air, the world, in her words, “tipped sideways.” On the instant the feast day merriment turned to mayhem. She found herself sitting in the road, with the odd certainty that she was the literal embodiment of the Heathfield cuckoo. She remembered chuckling out loud there in the street—not laughing, mind you, but chuckling like a hen on a nest—convinced that her dress was woven of feathers rather than merino wool.

  She recalls Sydnee wandering off, snatching at the air as if trying to catch a will-o’-the-wisp, and in the days that followed Alice never once saw her niece again, or didn’t know her if she did. Those days might as well have been moments or years, her sense of the passing of time having abdicated. She somehow found her way home to the cottage, where she conversed with hobgoblins and wraiths, although the hobgoblins might simply have been the Tipper and his cronies.

  She fell silent for a time after telling us this, and then in a smaller voice said, “I left him there. I simply fled. It was what he wished—what he commanded. And yet it was cowardice on my part. There was a fallen pistol that I might have reached, had I acted instead of standing there stupefied. There was also that horrible man aiming his own pistol at me. He was injured, though. His arm was in a sling. I might have prevailed over him.” She stared into the purple depths of the port. “I fled through the woods, right into the midst of the soldiers at the blockade. I had removed the cap by then, and at first they assumed I was insane, and perhaps I still was, a bit. I told them that a man had been assaulted, because I didn’t know what else to call it, but they were in no haste to venture into Heathfield. I bid them good day and quite coolly walked away into the woods and came here, every step of the way thinking I should turn back, regretting that I had left St. Ives in such peril.”

  “By God they would have shot you, too, Alice, if you had,” Tubby told her sensibly. “You must see that. Your value to them was to draw St. Ives into Heathfield. Once you had, you were worth nothing. Jack and I would have been sitting here playing Whist while the two of you disappeared out of existence. But here you are, alive and well, precisely because you weren’t rash. Now we three can put our considerable shoulders to the wheel.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “They allowed me to go. They want something, and they believe that I might provide it for them. They wouldn’t have hindered me.”

  “Perhaps,” Tubby said. “But in any event you were better out of it. And they wouldn’t have had to kill you. They’d simply have had to remove your cap. You couldn’t have prevailed against them. The three of us might, however.”

  I half listened to Tubby’s assurances, but I had been shocked to stony silence by Alice’s pronouncements. St. Ives taken? It was almost too much for me to grasp, even though I had feared that very thing. There were indeed three of us, but clearly there was only the one cap, and no time to find the elusive “wheel” that we were to put our shoulders to. I couldn’t abide waiting. I strode to the corner full of bloody-minded thoughts and plucked up the cap, looking out the window toward the edge of the forest, which was dark now. There was no question of the identity of the man with his arm in a sling, nor any question of his being a cold-blooded devil. Alice had described the third man: clearly the Peddler, but at that moment I didn’t much care if he was Beelzebub in a dogcart.

  Tubby saw what I was up to with the cap straightaway. “Don’t be unwise, Jack,” he said, taking me by the arm. “Alice has just escaped from that mire of human scum. There’s no sense in your wading back in.”

  “There’s but the one cap,” I told him, as if that justified my going alone or at all.

  “And there’s no telling how many of the villains are at work. St. Ives sees things far more clearly than either of us. Now that the prey
has fallen into the trap, they’ll almost certainly return to Beachy Head. The battle of Heathfield was lost, although thank God Alice was not. Your visiting the scene of the battle can’t come to anything useful. At best it’s a mere delay. We’ll do what St. Ives asked and take the battle to them, by heaven. It wasn’t but half an hour ago that you were telling me the same thing. Listen to yourself if you won’t listen to me, but listen to yourself sober, for God’s sake, and not drunk on anger.”

  There was of course a great deal of sense in what he said, although I still couldn’t see more than a red glimmer of it. But then Alice prevailed upon me to read the message on the folded piece of foolscap that she had found in the cap—apparently the first of the two messages that St. Ives had written out that morning, for the nib of the pen was still sharp.

  “Dearest Alice…” it began, and what followed was the plea of a man whose hopes were defeated. His first concern, you see, was to put things right between the two of them. But Alice’s tears as we silently read the note made it clear that she had no idea that things had gone wrong, no earthly notion of the Professor’s misery, the ebbing of his hope, as if he believed that love was as shifting and transitory as the tides. What strange things we convince ourselves of when the shadows descend upon us!