I sensed a ruse, and I thought I could see through it. Skinner was probably well ahead of me, but I spoke up anyway. “Five pounds. And that would be including the original contents.”
“I can’t say what’s in it,” snapped Higgs. “Like everything here, sold as seen.”
A tremendous boom and crash from above us shook the whole building. For a moment, I thought the entire structure was going to come crashing down about our heads. The blast sounded like a bomb. Skinner and I involuntarily ducked. There were further sounds of falling glass and debris from the upper level.
“Lightning,” said Mrs Higgs.
“The cash box!” shouted her husband, racing up the stairs twice as fast as he had come down them. He opened the door, and great clouds of smoke billowed out; tongues of flame whipped up behind them. Higgs threw himself into the room beyond, ignoring the fire.
“He shouldn’t have done that,” said Skinner.
I started up the stairs, but before I reached the top, Higgs emerged from the smoke, holding a weighty iron box in his arms. “I’ve got it,” he said, coughing and almost doubling over.
I went to help him with the box, but Higgs’s eyes narrowed, and he snapped at me angrily. “Get away, you! I can carry it myself. I’m perfectly capable.” His words were cut off as he stifled another fit of coughing.
The strong box was a type I had seen before. During the night, it would be securely bolted to the wall or floor, and in the daytime, it functioned as a cash box with a double lock. What made this box unusual was the fresh mark stretching down one side.
It is difficult to describe exactly what happened next.
Things could not really have occurred the way I remember them, but in my memory, everything went blue-white for a moment. It was as though I was standing inside an enormous photographer’s flashbulb. I was completely dumbfounded by the light before the shockwave hit. It felt like being punched in both ears at once. I had the presence of mind to hold on to the handrail and prevent myself from falling backwards.
The reverberation continued while bright, vertical blobs danced before my eyes, and it took a second for me to recognise the shrill sound beneath it as a woman screaming. Then someone took my arm and urged me downstairs.
“Move yourself, Harry!” Skinner was bellowing in my ear. He sounded a long way off. “Jump to it, quick!”
The world was still full of white fog wherever I looked, but I had recovered enough of my senses to follow as Skinner pulled me along and through a doorway into the rain outside.
“Stay here!”
I sensed him recede again, and a second later, there was more shouting. My vision was clearing, and I could make out Skinner as he dragged Mrs Higgs bodily out through the door.
“Take one arm!” Skinner ordered. “Get her across the road.”
As Skinner was struggling with her, I found it more opportune to take both her wrists in my hand and more or less lift her off the ground to go to the other side of the road. We were not halfway there when our three shadows jumped out ahead of us, and there was a concussion from behind as lightning struck a third time. The thunder boomed and rolled around us, and it seemed to bring down so much rain it was like standing under a waterfall.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered Skinner.
By that time, Mrs Higgs was not offering any resistance. I passed her to Skinner and dashed back across the road. There was still a bright shape on the left side of my vision when I blinked, but I could see well enough to get through the door.
Any thoughts that I might save Higgs, and perhaps even win his gratitude, evaporated as soon as I saw him. He had been thrown from the stairs. He had landed on a table piled with clothes, which had collapsed beneath him. The soft landing had not saved him. I could tell from one look that he was quite dead. Lightning was not invariably fatal, but when it passed through the body, as it had in this case, death was instantaneous. Mr Higgs’s burns did not appear extensive, but the bolt had passed from his back through his chest. His heart and lungs must have exploded from the electrical force of it. Higgs’s arms were locked in place as though he was still holding on to the strong box, but they were clasped around empty air.
The box itself lay in the far corner by the pile of dolls. It had been struck three times by lightning but showed little damage except that the area around the lock had a blackened look to it. It was not rusty or melted, but the iron had been eaten away, enlarging the keyhole into a ragged gash, which exhaled a twist of brown smoke. The lightning had sought out the box and wormed inside it, blasting and melting and vaporising the contents. The inside of the box would be a melted puddle of gold and silver.
As I approached, I felt the brush of static electricity through my hair. Whatever was drawing the lightning was still active though not as vigorous as it had been a few minutes earlier. I backed hurriedly away. A thin layer of silver-grey smoke had settled and was disappearing between the floorboards like viscous liquid. Stroke by stroke, the beetle was being disintegrated and finding its way to the ground. I did not know what to make of it.
Several neighbours had appeared under their umbrellas and were confusedly questioning Skinner and the inert Mrs Higgs in spite of the pouring rain. Another bolt of lightning flashed out, and we all saw the windows illuminated with blue-white light as it struck inside. The reverberations of the thunder hammered down upon us. It went on for far longer than normal thunder.
The lightning was the signal for us to all move inside to the next building, which was a furniture-restoration concern. Four or five workers left their places to crowd round as we entered.
“Higgs is a goner,” I told Skinner.
“I know. I saw him. No luck with the box? Didn’t think so. Look, you’d better slope off and let me talk to the law. We’ll RV and debrief back in the office later.”
“Of course—I can trust you.”
“Harry,” he said seriously. “Don’t ever trust me. Just act in your own interest—it’s what I do.”
Chapter Eight: First Encounters
I have ceased to attend Upper Norwood Library. I would not wish to be recognised there, following the unfortunate incident during the Roslyn D’Onston affair. The library at West Norwood, which is just as convenient, is my new haunt whenever I need to draw on the well of reference works. It is not as grand, but it does have the busts of great writers of the ages looking down from the façade. I like those wise, solemn faces. They’re like ancient kings who have hewn out this grand kingdom from words and invited us all to share in it.
For my part, my respect for books runs deeper now than it ever did, but Skinner does not believe there is anything useful to be gained from libraries. He says he had a bellyful of training manuals and books of regulations in the army, and that was enough reading to last him a lifetime.
After our misadventure with Higgs, Skinner was pleased enough to see me go off to the library for an hour. He could doze undisturbed in his chair in the drowsy afternoon warmth without even the pretence of staying awake.
At first, I was reasonably successful. I looked up what I could find on lightning and how it could be drawn to a particular object. The encyclopaedia, my usual starting point, had little to say beyond lighting rods, but I came across an old book of lightning lore that looked more promising. It described thunderstones—flint or other minerals stones shaped like arrowheads—which had been found at the site of a lightning strike. According to some traditions, these thunderstones had the power to draw lightning as well as being able to repel it, though modern science had nothing to say on the matter.
A thunderstone, or some similarly compact object, might have been contained in the silver flask, which would have blocked its powers. When Higgs had taken it out, the stone had quickly drawn lightning, with the catastrophic results we had witnessed.
Without wishing to, I saw again Higgs’s body, wracked by the lightning stroke. It was quite different from Mabel Brown’s charred skeleton. Whatever had reduced her to that state had been far
more thorough than lightning but surely must have been connected to the thunderstone.
And in any case, how did one get from something shaped like an arrowhead to a beetle? There were electric eels and other electrified fish, but as far as I could discover, nothing like an electric beetle. The Americans talked about “lightning bugs,” another name for fireflies, which were in fact a form of winged beetle, but they were not actually electrified in any way. Perhaps closer were the bombardier beetles that ejected an explosive charge… but this was taking me wide of the point if the “beetle” was not a beetle in the literal sense.
I could not find the right section in the library by wandering around, so I addressed myself to the filing system. This was series of index cards on yard-long drawers that slid out of the wall.
I was on my knees, going through one drawer of cards, when someone said, “May I help you?”
My interlocutor was a senior member of the library staff, a man with half-moon glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. Neither his expression nor his tone was friendly.
I could hear Skinner’s voice somewhere in the back of my head saying I should tell the librarian to sling his hook and leave me in peace. Skinner could never understand why I did not impose more on people, given my natural gifts in that direction. But Skinner’s ways were not mine. I could not so easily ignore the man’s rightful authority.
“Um, I-I’m not sure,” I stammered.
“Do you know what you’re about with the card index?” His tone indicated that I did not, that I was sabotaging his well-ordered system, that in my clumsiness, I would mix up the cards or lose them.
“I’m still finding my way.”
“Perhaps you could tell me what you’re looking for. The Dewey Decimal System is a finely tuned instrument for extracting information. It is not, however, suitable for casual browsing by the uninitiated.” He gave a tight little smile. “Unless you have an unwarranted faith in the probability of pulling needles out of haystacks.”
I put the cards back, very carefully, and stood up. “I’m not really sure where to start. It’s to do with beetles…”
“That would be under ‘science, biology, zoology, other invertebrates,’” he said crisply. “Second aisle on the left—595, I believe.”
“Thank you very much.”
The librarian’s brusque manner was not actual hostility but more like impatience. His was an orderly brain surrounded by the chaos of a disorderly world. He had the whole universe of human knowledge at his fingertips and was forced to spend his talents on enquiries from subscribers who knew only that the book they wanted was a small green one.
“What is a beetle when it is not a beetle?” I asked.
“Are you looking for the answer to a riddle?”
“In a manner of speaking…”
“Jokes and riddles are classed under humour. That would be 810, I believe. Though it might be under ‘children’s.’” Again, that small reflexive smile. He liked knocking back answers like tennis balls—rapidly and with a bit of spin.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.
“I am here to help.”
His tone was far from warm, but he did seem receptive. It was almost like a challenge. On the basis that I had nothing to lose, I recited a bowdlerised account of the hunt for the beetle, shorn of most of the details but playing up my role as a collector of debts. By the time I had finished, the librarian seemed absorbed in the problem.
“Have you a valid library card?”
“I do,” I said, producing it for his inspection like a passport at the border of a new country.
“Very good. Well then, Mr Stubbs,” he said, reading my name from the card, “what you would be looking for would be a homonym, or more likely a homophone, of the word beetle. A homonym being another use of the same word—such as beetle employed as a verb—and a homophone being a word that sounds the same but is spelled differently. The latter seems more likely, with the additional information that it has a Greek root.”
I nodded dumbly and followed him to the dictionary section, where he selected a thick volume as big as a church Bible, opened it skilfully, and ran his finger down the page.
“It would have to be a noun,” he said. “There is a homonym, in fact, from the Middle English. A beetle is a type of mallet with a large wooden head used to drive wedges. What do you think?”
“I had better write this down,” I said, getting out my notebook.
“By extension, beetle is also a type of hammering machine used to flatten cloth. Also, a shelf or ledge.” He looked up. “That seems much less likely. On the homonym side, it might refer to the seed of the betel palm, known as a betel nut, which is popularly chewed in parts of India, Ceylon, and China. It is used to stave off the effects of hunger and dyes the chewer’s mouth red.”
“That’s also possible.”
“Do you do cross-word puzzles?” he asked. “I’m rather addicted to them myself.”
Skinner sometimes did the cross-word while I was doing paperwork or writing up my notes, and he called out for assistance with some of the clues. Between the two of us, we could fill in most of a puzzle. I suspected my new benefactor filled them in rather more rapidly on his own.
“I’m a beginner,” I said.
“You can generally tell when the answer is right for a cryptic clue, and this is the same sort of thing. Frankly, I’m not convinced that the answer is either a medieval mallet or an Asian nut. Neither of those quite fits, and certainly not with the supposed Greek etymology.”
“What’s the answer, then?”
He spent another minute checking through the dictionary, perusing other possible spellings such as “beatel” and “beital.” At length, he closed the book. But he did it with the determined air of one who will not be beaten.
“It seems,” he said, “that we are going to need a bigger dictionary.”
“Is there a bigger one than that?”
“Of course. The complete OED is twenty volumes. They have one at Dulwich. That’s twenty volumes. I’ll send a query over there for you now.”
“I couldn’t really—”
“But I could. And I shall. Please drop round here tomorrow morning, and I think we will have the answer for you, Mr Stubbs.”
“I’m very much obliged to you, Mr…?”
“Hoade,” he said. “Assistant Head Librarian Hoade.”
I was still thinking about my encounter with Mr Hoade that evening when I repaired to the gym. A man who could reach down into the archives and pluck out knowledge of the ages as easily as picking out a couple of pork chops was a useful ally. I was already beginning to compile a list of things that I might ask him, but I put all those thoughts away as soon as I reached the changing room. I would need all my mental focus. I had been invited that evening specially to spar with a promising young boxer from Sydenham, a heavyweight called Sammy Gold. He was reaching the point where nobody else there was able to handle him. His trainer felt he was ready to move up a size.
Sparring was an essential stage in learning how to box. There was a world of difference between punching a bag and fighting, and sparring provided an intermediate step between the two. In sparring, you wore protective headgear, and punches were limited to body shots only, but it still had the most important elements of a real bout and sifted the fighters from the flops.
All the regulars at the gym, along with a whole gang of visitors, were gathered to watch. I nodded to Skinner, who was always at his ease in a sporting environment though perhaps disappointed that he could not bet on the outcome.
This was Sammy’s first trial at a higher level, and everyone wanted to see if he was the stuff champions were made of. He looked nervous as a racehorse and kept adjusting his mouthguard and brushing his hair back with his gloved hands. He looked at me as if trying to see my weaknesses by X-ray, while I made my own estimates of his reach and agility.
Gold was better than I thought—fast, disciplined, and strong. He was better, in f
act, than anyone I had fought for a while, and that put me right on my mettle. It was only sparring, but I had no intention of losing to a beginner, not even one as skilled and determined as Gold.
In terms of strength and reach, we were pretty well matched, and he could take a punch. The crowd was quiet to begin with, but as soon as they saw it was a real match, they warmed up. The gym rang with shouts of encouragement and advice, and two-thirds of them were cheering on the newcomer. If he could beat me, it would be an upset of epic proportions, and he was strong enough to do it.
When it came to tactics, though, Gold was a slow learner. He did not vary his moves through the whole fight, while I was constantly adjusting and trying new ways to work round him. His footwork was routine, and by the third round, he was dangerously predictable. If an opponent kept dodging the same way, sooner or later he would dodge into my left fist.
I came to respect Gold, though. At the start, he was neither intimidated nor overconfident, and when I began to get the upper hand, he did not fade but kept coming back with good, solid punches and well-drilled combinations. My armour, composed of slabs of muscle, was in good condition, or those blows might have ruptured some internal organs. Or at any rate, that was what it felt like. The boy could punch.
It was a warm evening, and we were both sheathed in sweat well before the end. Unlike many youngsters, Gold did not run out of steam but kept going full bore. If I had relaxed my concentration for an instant, I would have paid dearly for it. But I did not relax my concentration; Harry Stubbs was still a match for any beginner.
The bout carried on at a furious pace through every round, right through to the final bell. It was no easy match, but the referee duly declared me the winner and held up my gloved hand. I made Gold raise his too, and that got a cheer. He was not my equal yet, but he had years ahead of him to learn. Certainly, he was better than I had been at his age, and who could say how far he would go?
“That’s your baptism of fire,” I said.
“You weren’t pulling your punches, were you?” He did not quite sound as though he believed it.
Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 7