From London Far

by Michael Innes

  They corkscrewed rapidly upwards – so rapidly that when Meredith glanced below him the floor appeared to rotate. The surface of the earth, he thought, must look like this from an aeroplane gone into a spin. But at least the two bloodhounds were becoming no more than dark canine smudges, and the figures of several men who had now appeared from the shadows were foreshortening themselves with satisfactory speed. Moreover, no more shots had been fired, and although this no doubt merely signified that they were judged more valuable alive (for a time) than dead, it gave the affair for the moment the feel of a no more than slightly nightmarish hide-and-seek.

  Two men were guarding the foot of the staircase, but making no attempt to climb it. The other men were withdrawing hastily, dragging the bloodhounds with them – a manoeuvre the motive of which would have been obscure had not, at this moment, a dozen powerful lights snapped on overhead.

  And now the whole situation was instantaneously clear. The place was indeed a species of bulk store or depository of surprising length and breadth and quite astounding height; this interminable spiral staircase led up through several galleries apparently appropriated to the accommodation of lighter articles; and the men who were hauling off the bloodhounds were making for a large lift or enclosed hoist which also linked the galleries at the other end of the hall. Even as Meredith realized this, men and dogs gained their objective and the lift was shooting upwards on a course parallel to theirs. Meredith and the girl, however, had a substantial start, and as a result they gained the topmost gallery on one side in the identical moment at which the lift gained it on the other. They ran, pounding along an openwork, cast-iron floor such as Meredith associated with scientific penitentiaries designed by Jeremy Bentham. The men debouched and ran, together with the dogs, which appeared, however, to be conceiving a disrelish for the whole affair. The men ran, the dogs slithered and slobbered, Meredith and the girl ran until they abruptly saw that running was useless. There was no longer any possibility of keeping ahead, for the men had branched left and right, and whichever way they went it must be straight into the arms of their pursuers.

  Or so it seemed – until beneath their feet a fantastic prospect opened. Besides the lift and the staircase there was a third route down: a sort of giant slippery-dip which plunged earthwards in a dizzying succession of hairpin bends and was presumably employed for the easy delivery of objects of an altogether unbreakable sort. At this Meredith, whose acquaintance with fun fairs was something less than small, stared for a moment uncomprehendingly. But the girl had leapt to it without a pause, and Meredith followed. He had time only to see their baffled pursuers turn again for the lift, and to recall fleetingly Gallileo’s formula for bodies moving freely on an inclined plane, when there was a shout from somewhere down below and the whole place disappeared in total darkness. Hurtled from side to side as his battered and breathless body involuntarily negotiated the hairpin bends, and plunging with a steady acceleration into a mere black pit beneath, Meredith profoundly felt the truth of the Virgilian assertion that easy is the descent to hell.

  And now would come the bump. Nunc animis opus, Aenea – thought Meredith, his mind jumping some hundred lines of the poem – nunc pectore firmo. In fact, take a deep breath… He landed on what he suspected was partly a pile of old sacking and partly the girl. The girl and he scrambled to their feet and ran – this time merely from the habit of running, since in the pitch darkness which now enfolded them it was impossible to direct their course upon any rational calculation of chances. They ran and Meredith had the impression that the men were running too – there being no novelty in this except in the obscure impression that they were now running away. And upon this impression Meredith would perhaps have halted for better assurance had he not been momentarily unnerved by a new element in the monstrous confusions around him.

  This was the shrill reverberation of a high-pitched electric bell which had begun to ring somewhere up in the darkness. The urgent sound had scarcely made itself heard when there was a banging of doors and clattering of feet dying away on distant corridors; and almost at the same moment Meredith and the girl stumbled over something at once soft and massive that lay in their path. The something dismally howled and simultaneously another something fell over them limply but weightily from behind. All this was accompanied by a doggy smell and Meredith, seizing upon so illuminating a scrap of sense-data, conjectured that he, the girl, and the bloodhounds had unwittingly involved themselves in a single complicated tangle. Moreover, they had done so on ground which felt oddly insecure; the floor was gently swinging and twisting beneath them; and Meredith, feeling this, threshed out in sudden unreasoning panic. Both beasts were now abjectly whimpering, and Reason would have told Meredith that as Hounds of the Baskervilles they had fallen altogether short. But Reason had for the moment nodded and Meredith’s only instinct was to lay hold on some weapon with which he could belabour the slavering brutes about him. And even as this urgency came upon him his hand in the darkness closed upon what seemed the handle of some such implement as he required. The handle gave – but only some inches, and moving in an arc. At the same moment he was tumbled over again by one of the bloodhounds and the handle slipped from his grasp. And in the same moment, too, there was a deep purr as of some powerful mechanism coming into operation; the floor rose up and punched Meredith hard as he lay on it; a second later his whereabouts was evident; he, the girl, and the abominable if ineffective dogs were hurtling rapidly skywards in the lift.

  Such contrivances, Meredith told himself with some confidence, stop automatically upon reaching a point beyond which they are not designed to proceed. But even as he formulated this conviction his mind misgave him. For what was in no sense an express elevator built to haul one up sixty storeys, the machine, even in the darkness, was perceptibly moving with an altogether untoward acceleration. Was it possible – A bone-grinding, nerve-shattering jolt, followed by a deafening confusion of breaking, tearing, and rending noises, interrupted Meredith’s speculations. The world had turned topsy-turvy; he was spinning through space; he reached out and grabbed something warm, rough, and moist which even in this distracting moment he absurdly knew to be a bloodhound’s slavering and protruding tongue. He was falling perhaps from the top of the building to the bottom, but his chief horror was at a nervous inability to relinquish his grasp on this plainly unavailing lingual support… Then another sense came into play. He was looking at the evening star.

  Hesperus, alone in the sky, is not to be mistaken. Around that remote patin of light, single and serene, Meredith rearranged his impressions. He lay in open air with a London sky above him; his horizon was a low parapet of artificial stone; the girl stood beside him, pulling up her stockings; behind her was the disrupted remains of that sort of penthouse which on the roofs of great buildings houses the upper mechanisms of lifts; and lying at her feet, reposeful as if posing for Sir Edwin Landseer, were two large, sleepy, friendly bloodhounds.

  Meredith sat up. ‘Where’, he said, ‘is my curly-headed dog-boy?’

  The girl let her skirt fall and stared at him. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  Meredith passed a hand across his forehead. ‘Dear me!’ he said. ‘You must please forgive me. I spoke quite at random. It was merely what Fuseli used to say of the young Landseer. Landseer, of course, drew animals admirably when very young.’

  ‘I see.’ The girl looked at Meredith anxiously in the early twilight. ‘I’m afraid you are in a bit of a daze. Something must have hit you on the head.’

  ‘I think not. I fear I have the habit of sometimes saying very inconsequent things. Indeed, it was just such a foolish utterance that gave me the entrée to our friends’ stronghold this evening.’ Meredith frowned. ‘Do you know, I think I must be a little dazed after all? Entrée must be replaceable by some good straightforward English word. But for the life of me I can’t put my tongue to it. By the way, have you ever clutched a dog’s tongue in the dark? It is a remar
kable sensation, really remarkable.’

  ‘I suppose it must be.’ The girl now looked as if her mind on Meredith’s intellectuals was quite made up. ‘And now we’d better be going. Our perch here is still pretty unhealthy, if you ask me.’

  Standing up, Meredith could now see farther about him. Landmarks familiar to him upon his diurnal academic occasions showed new and surprising proportions from this unwonted elevation. They were reassuring, nevertheless. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose we had better move on.’ He crossed tentatively to the low parapet bounding the flat roof upon which they had been precipitated. ‘Do you know, I can just distinguish Smirke’s portico? It looks uncommonly impressive in the evening light. But, so far as I can see, we are on a sort of island block. Escape appears impracticable without descending again into the building. How fortunate that these animals have composed their differences with us. Do you know anything about firearms, ma’am? If our assailants follow us to the roof it will be useful to know whether the capacities of this weapon are exhausted.’

  The girl took Bubear’s revolver from his hand and looked at it. ‘Its capacities’, she said gravely, ‘are exhausted, sir.’ She looked about her. ‘But I don’t think anybody will follow us. And it’s just because nobody has followed that I think we had better be off. Call the dogs.’

  Meredith turned uncertainly towards the animals. ‘Call them?’ he said.

  ‘Certainly. You wouldn’t leave them to it, would you? And it looks to me rather hopeful over this way.’ The girl had moved off to the farther side of the roof. ‘Well, I see it’s only a girder. I’d rather hoped for a fire-escape or at least a little iron bridge. Do you think you can manage it? I must say you’ve managed a great deal. And I’m frightfully grateful.’ The girl paused. ‘Sir,’ she added seriously.

  Meredith had followed her and the dogs had come at his heel without urging. ‘Manage it, ma’am?’ He peered at the girl in the dusk with a gleam of humour. Then his voice sharpened. ‘Manage that?’

  The request was certainly formidable. For that was a short steel girder, with a flat top some six inches broad, which ran horizontally out from the building some three feet below the level of the parapet and met a farther building at about the same distance below a parapet of similar type. There were indeed, Meredith saw, several identical girders at intervals of some yards; presumably they were designed to give additional stability to the tall old buildings between which they ran; the relevant fact about them, however was that they spanned a chasm the recesses of which dusk was now rendering unplumbable. ‘You suggest’, said Meredith, ‘that we had better get across one of these?’

  The girl looked at a wrist-watch – a motion which Meredith had observed her make several times in the preceding couple of minutes. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ The girl was sincerely apologetic. ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir. But I think we better had.’

  ‘I beg you not to.’ Meredith frowned at having said a futile thing. ‘If we had a rope perhaps I could help–’

  ‘But we haven’t. And I’ll go first.’ She advanced to the parapet and there for a fraction of a second hesitated.

  Meredith laid a hand on her arm. ‘Wait.’ He swung his legs over. Three feet was a long way down. The girder, in fact, could not be reached while he was in any state of balance unless he turned on his stomach and lowered himself gently while feeling about with his feet. And the disadvantage of this was that he would then be facing the wrong way round – for to walk across the girder backwards would tax an acrobat. There was no help for it. Over on his stomach he must go and the adventure must begin with an awkward about-turn.

  Having seen the necessity of these manoeuvres, Meredith proceeded to carry them out. He must not look down. As soon as he had managed the turn, he must look carefully but with no strained fixity at a point on the opposite parapet immediately above the girder and move steadily towards it… And now he was over and his feet had found their hold. He straightened up, paused, turned. The opposite parapet was before him, perhaps ten feet away. Suddenly it came to him from some intuitive depth that looking straight ahead was not his particular line. For other people – yes. But he would do better after taking a good peer down… The muscles first of his neck and then of his eyes rebelled; he mastered them and peered; he saw the walls of the two buildings running down until they almost converged in the gloom. And as Meredith thoughtfully scanned this a hovering vertigo lifted and he walked briskly across the girder with a steady tread. Nor did the opposite parapet offer any difficulty. He had surmounted it before beginning to think how to do so.

  ‘It’s not bad,’ he called back seriously – and wondered whether he should stand watching the girl or move out of sight. She was on the girder. An appalling conviction of powerlessness seized him. He dropped on his knees and vomited – as quietly as he could. By the time he had recovered from this irresistible natural call the girl was beside him.

  ‘I don’t think I could have done it if you hadn’t shown me it could be done.’ She laughed a little shakily. ‘I suppose you are a member of the Alpine Club?’

  ‘The Alpine Club?’ Meredith shook his head seriously. ‘The Athenaeum is the only club I belong to nowadays. Some of my colleagues have a fondness for mountaineering. But I have always known I had no head for it. Dear me! What of the dogs? They baulked at the spiral staircase. I fear that the girder–’

  But the dogs – weirdly enough – had taken the girder. Somehow they had got down to it and were crossing sedately now. The girl watched them, fascinated. ‘Ineffective brutes,’ she said indulgently. ‘More like goats than bloodhounds.’ She glanced once more at her watch. ‘These roofs carry on right to the end of the street. And we’ve got to make the other end at the double.’

  They made it – the bloodhounds lolloping grotesquely beside them across the grimy London leads. Only when they were as far from Mr Bubear’s repository as they could get did the girl stop and begin looking for some trapdoor or staircase that would lead them downwards. Nothing of the sort immediately appeared. She halted. ‘I think’, she said seriously, ‘that we’d better take cover. You never know how these things will go.’

  Meredith paused to see the girl drop securely behind a sufficiently massive chimney stack. Then he dropped down himself. But as he did so his glance travelled back the way they had come. Only an upper corner of the scene of his recent adventures was now visible. And even as he looked it disappeared, as if irresistibly sucked outwards and down. A cloud of smoke, a mass of flying debris and dust had taken its place, and in the instant of this appearance the shattering sound of the explosion followed. And with a quaint device, thought Meredith at his most random, the banquet vanishes… The reverberations died away into subsidiary rumbling scarcely registered by the outraged ear. The air was dust and fume. And suddenly Meredith cried out. ‘The Titian!’ he exclaimed in agony. ‘The Titian and the Giotto–’

  ‘I don’t think we need worry.’ The girl’s face, now a battlefield of sweat and grime, was close to his. ‘The birds are flown – in quite a little fleet of pantechnicons. And you may be sure that they’ve taken all that’s really first class with them.’

  ‘You really think so?’ Meredith peered at her hopefully. All of a sudden he looked about him and his face expressed horrified despair. ‘But the Juvenal! The Juvenal, ma’am–’

  The girl smiled. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I brought it along with me.’ And from the torn opening of her frock she produced what was to Meredith a miraculously familiar leather wallet. ‘It wasn’t difficult to guess it was important. But I’m terribly sorry I had to jettison the dispatch-case you had it in. It was just when we ran–’

  ‘My dear young lady–’ began Meredith. Words failed him. ‘My dear,’ he said, and kissed her rapturously on a sooty nose.

  V

  They came down to earth prosaically enough through an unfastened trapdoor and a staircase leading past sundry dingy off
ices. The demolition of which Mr Bubear’s organization had engineered the appearance was sufficiently commonplace; a couple of blocks away nobody was at all disturbed. That Meredith and the girl ought to have gone at once and given an account of themselves was undoubted. But an unspoken agreement – perhaps to the simple effect that for the moment they had had enough – took them in the opposite direction. Their clothes were tattered and covered with dust; their faces were begrimed. This in itself excited little remark. But the fact that they were respectfully followed by a brace of bloodhounds did occasionally attract the curious eye, and Meredith, who saw no practicable means of casting off these now faithful companions, felt that it would be pleasant to find a taxi. That a bus conductor could be persuaded to harbour the creatures was unlikely, and the vision of them on an escalator and in a crowded tube was something wilder still… ‘I wonder’, said Meredith, speaking for the first time since they had gained the street, ‘if by any chance we could find a cab?’

  ‘Most improbable, I should say.’ The girl replied briskly, but her voice was tired. ‘I wonder what the creatures are called? Perhaps we might call them Giotto and Titian. Unless you would prefer Landseer and Fuseli.’

  Meredith looked at the girl in alarm – for, having quite forgotten his own bemused reference to those eminent academicians, he found her remark as suggestive of mental derangement as she had a little time before found his. ‘Are you sure’, he said, ‘that you feel fit to walk? We could report–’

  ‘Quite fit.’

  ‘Then perhaps I may escort you home?’

  ‘Escort?’ The girl looked at him quaintly and burst into pleasant laughter. ‘I’m so sorry – but somehow it sounded odd after all our caperings. And I haven’t got a home in London, I’m afraid.’