Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure

by David Hambling

  “I also noted from our records that you read a considerable quantity of fiction,” Hoade added.

  That made it sound as though I was a fantasist, living a world of my own imagination. Skinner joked about my wanting to be John Hannay or Bulldog Drummond or Nayland Smith. He thought their adventures were childish stuff, a view that did him no credit but one many people shared.

  “I have a weakness for works of imaginative fiction,” I said.

  “Don’t apologise for it!” said Hoade, sounding more critical than ever. “Reference is the great, universal engine of the library, the powerhouse of raw knowledge. But literature—what you call imaginative fiction—is the embodiment of our wildest dreams. What is life for if you can’t dream? How can a man discover anything without imagination to draw on?”

  I was saved from having to answer the knotty literary question by the arrival of Skinner himself. He appeared behind Hoade, waving urgently and mouthing, “Come now.” I excused myself and went after Skinner, and when I stepped outside, I found he was in a taxi parked up on the kerb with the door open.

  “We’ve had an invitation to attend another of his Lordship’s garden parties,” said Skinner. “There’s no dress code, so just hop in.”

  En route, I relayed what I had discovered concerning meteorites and baetyls.

  Skinner nodded thoughtfully, smoothing his moustache. “Good work! That ought to narrow the search down at the Horniman. They can’t have too many meteorites in their collection, can they?”

  “I would assume not,” I said though that was a pure guess on my part. The more I learned, the more things I discovered I knew nothing about.

  I was still mulling this over as we turned down the avenue that led to the Firs.

  “Once more into the breach, Harry,” said Skinner.

  Stafford was waiting at the gate with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, the young footman two paces behind him, and he looked wearily resigned. “Pierce got free. Don’t worry; he’s not wild the way he was last time. But he’s… erratic. I thought we were better safe than sorry, so I called you.”

  The shotgun was a plain one with a cherry stock burnished by years of polishing. This was a favourite shooting gun, not just the first one that came to hand. The situation had become almost routine.

  “Very wise, sir,” said Skinner.

  “I got you the rope, the sack, and the gloves,” said the footman, holding up these items to Skinner. His right hand was wrapped in a neat white bandage.

  “Good man,” said Skinner, drawing on a glove and flexing his fingers. “Same drill as last time, then, Mr Stubbs.”

  “He’s over by the fountain,” said Stafford.

  The old gardener was keeping an eye on the madman from a distance. Pierce was wearing the same clothes as before and crouching over a flowerbed. He was thin and wasted, and his corpse-like pallor showed no improvement.

  Close up, he looked far worse. His skin was wrinkled up with the texture of towelling. Normally, a sick man’s skin would tighten over the bones and his features would take on a harsher relief, but Pierce’s face seemed less distinct as though the sharp lines were being worn away like a weathered statue.

  “You just leave that and come indoors a bit now,” the old gardener was saying. “You know it ain’t good for you to be outside in the sun.”

  “I can’t stand it.” Pierce’s voice was horribly changed to a rasping whisper. He was plucking weeds from the flowerbed with short, agitated movements. There were quite a few weeds, more than there had been previously. He looked down at them with dismay. “I want to get back, but it’s all different. We are all different.”

  “Maybe we can help you, lad,” said Skinner.

  Pierce turned round stiffly and looked up at us from a thousand miles away. “I’m the under-gardener. I’m keeping these weeds down, but we don’t understand.”

  Skinner made a small gesture, signalling the rest of us to spread out and surround the boy. We moved slowly and carefully so as not to startle him as if approaching a frightened horse.

  “All we want is for you to get better,” said Skinner soothingly.

  “Me, me, me,” said Pierce. “Who am I? Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re the under-gardener,” said Skinner.

  “I am Legion!” said Pierce with sudden vehemence, slapping his own forehead. “Too many of us. Too many in one head! I just want to work in the garden, but I don’t know who we are any more.”

  He turned to the flowerbed and started pulling weeds with great energy, ripping them out of the ground one after the other.

  “We could just let him carry on until he’s exhausted,” said Skinner. “Or would you prefer to bring this to a close?”

  “Get him back inside,” said Stafford.

  “Too many weeds,” said Pierce, working down the row. “Weeds in my head. Legion, legion of weeds. Pluck ‘em out; pluck ‘em all out!”

  At Skinner’s signal, the two of us stepped briskly forward. Pierce leapt up like a frog, away from Skinner and slap-bang into me. He looked surprised as I took his arms and forced them behind him. This time there was no real struggle. I belatedly realised that what I took to be resistance was just the calcified stiffness of his limbs, which only bent in some directions. It took him a while to straighten his legs to stand up, and it was difficult for him to get his arms behind his back. Once we had got over that difficulty, he was secured in short order.

  Pierce continued to mumble throughout, but at the end, he looked up, and the real man shone through like the sun coming from behind a cloud.

  “It’s all my fault,” he told Skinner. “Don’t let them blame Evie for this.”

  “Keep her out of this!” yelled the footman, throwing himself at Pierce. He would have hit the under-gardener if I had not stepped in between and restrained him. Skinner, meanwhile, kept hold of the unresisting Pierce.

  “Let’s just calm down now,” said Stafford to the footman. It was a milder rebuke than I might have expected.

  The footman looked away shamefacedly, and Skinner and the old gardener frogmarched Pierce back to the house at a funeral pace.

  There was something white on the ground; I thought it was slug in the flowerbed. It was a human digit. There was no blood, but the end of it looked soft and crumbly, more like fresh clay than flesh and bone. It was Pierce’s thumb. He did not even seem to have noticed the loss. The whole thing was profoundly disturbing. A few weeks since, Pierce had been a fit, healthy young man; now he was a shambling wreck in mind and body, literally falling apart.

  “Nobody else in the household affected?” I casually asked Stafford, having drawn his attention to the thumb.

  “Nobody,” said Stafford. “And with Pierce… it’s not as bad as it looks.”

  A good officer never needed to explain anything to his subordinates and certainly never needed to apologise. Stafford was not a good officer. Nor was I a good enough actor to pretend I believed him. As I struggled for polite words, he spoke first.

  “It’s not a notifiable illness,” said Stafford. “I give you my word. It’s not infectious at all. It was an accident.” He continued to try to justify himself. “I told you there was another source. A gipsy woman brought me some water.”

  “Water?”

  “Water from the Grail,” said Stafford. “She warned me. And I warned the staff not to touch it on any account. Young Pierce took it into his head to try drinking it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Stafford shook his head. “One of the maids dared him, and the damn fool went ahead and did it to impress her.”

  I had read up a little on the Holy Grail, which was a sort of cup with mystic healing properties. I wondered whether the servants knew something about Stafford’s quest to find it. It was hard to believe they did not have any inkling. But the Grail was not supposed to be harmful—quite the opposite.

  “A little would have been safe,” said Stafford as though following my thoughts. “It was the quantity he
took. ‘The dose makes the poison,’ you know.”

  “Is there a treatment?”

  “It’ll work its way out of his system in a few more days,” Stafford said without any great conviction.

  “We have a lead in the matter of Mabel Brown,” I said just to change the subject. I explained about how the beetle was a baetyl, and therefore a meteorite, somewhere in the Horniman’s collection. Skinner came jauntily up the path before I was finished.

  “Good work,” said Stafford at my conclusion. He had been less surprised than I had expected and had asked fewer questions. It was as though I was simply confirming something and he had known about the baetyl all along.

  “Let me know how you progress. Do you need more money?”

  “Not at present, sir,” said Skinner. “But I’ll be sure to let you know when we do.”

  “Good, good. Look, we really are getting somewhere here, and you’ve been an absolute credit. Just–bear with me. We’ll keep a better eye on Pierce, but stand ready. In the next few days, I may have a rather tricky piece of work for you connected with our second source.”

  He bit his lip as if he might have said too much. Stafford was balanced between enthusiasm and anxiety. He never shared any more information with us than he had to. That had always puzzled me before; we were his loyal confederates and deeply implicated in his schemes, and it would have seemed in his best interests to keep us well informed. Even the army told a soldier what he needed to know to carry out an operation.

  But his worry was the eternal worry of the miser and the hoarder. Stafford was concerned that if we knew too much, we would take the prize for ourselves. He assumed that we must be as enthused as he was over his Grail in spite of all we had seen. He could not bring himself to trust even us.

  “We’re ever at your service, sir,” said Skinner.

  Pleased again, Stafford dismissed us, and we marched back to the gate. We both tried not to stare at the new greenhouse next to the potting shed. A few days earlier, there had just been shoots two inches long. Now the vegetation inside was so thick and lush that it pressed on the glass as though ready to burst out. It could have been an advertisement for a miracle fertiliser except that there was something unwholesome about the growth as if the superabundance was nourished by a sewage outfall.

  The leaves did not seem right. The packed greenery behind the steam-fogged glass looked more like tentacled seaweed than honest land plants. Was it an illusion, or did they wave? Stafford’s Grail water was being put to use, growing, I did not doubt, the golden apples of the sun. I wondered whether they would take their form from our sun or from an alien star.

  Chapter Ten: A Trip to the Museum

  A letter from Sally arrived in the office the next day while I was in conference with Skinner, filling him in on what I had discovered on the beetle question.

  “Mr Stubbs—this is just to let you know Mss De Vere upped sticks and left this morning with no notice. She has not left a proper forwarding address just a post office. Anything I hear I will pass on. Miss Berry was put out. Yrs, Sally.”

  “Perhaps she was summoned away on important business for her Theral Development Society,” I said.

  I had asked Hoade to look it up, and he had informed me that no such organisation existed, or at least not officially. Which did not surprise me greatly.

  “She didn’t have any reason to stay after Mabel Brown combusted,” said Skinner. “That rooming house wasn’t exactly her class of place. Now, about beetles and this Roman emperor…?”

  “Emperor Heliogabulus, otherwise known as Elegabulus, was famed for his eccentric and vicious ways,” I said, reading from my notebook. “Allegedly, he once had enemies smothered to death with rose petals.”

  To my surprise, Skinner burst into song: “I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus… “ Then he stopped and indicated for me to go on.

  “He got his name from a cult he belonged to that worshipped a meteorite, this itself also having the name of Elagabal. When he became Emperor, Heliogabulus had the stone brought to Rome, where it was paraded through the city on a chariot drawn by six horses and installed in a brand-new temple.”

  “Very grand, I’m sure.” Skinner had his knife out; he had previously carved his initials in the tabletop and now proceeded to add curlicues to the letters.

  “In 210 BC,” I said, “when Rome was threatened by Hannibal, the senate pleaded that another baetyl be brought to the city to defend them. King Attalus of Persia duly gave them a stone that was identified with the goddess known as the magna mater, or Great Mother. Who is also variously known as Cybele and Astarte—a goddess still worshipped secretly to this day by some gipsies.”

  I was pleased by this link to Stafford’s gipsy woman, but Skinner was unimpressed. “Oh, yes,” he said offhandedly. “I know Magna Mater, that old baggage. But is this strictly cogent to the matter in hand?”

  He had no very great interest in the wider considerations, whereas I believed that only by a careful accumulation of knowledge could we can make sense of things.

  I skimmed over accounts of other ancient baetyls, all painstakingly gleaned from the books supplied by Hoade. Some sacred meteorites were inert, but others were livelier and exercised a control over their worshippers through dreams and visions. They popped up all over the place in different religions. The fabled Black Stone at Mecca was supposed to be a meteorite. Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven came when his head was pillowed on a rock; he decided the rock was a sacred gift from heaven, assumed by some scholars to indicate a meteorite. Jacob founded a temple there, calling the place Beth-el—which some said was the root of the word baetyl. Other equally learned men said all that was rubbish.

  “There’s no consistency,” I said, “in the description of the meteorites themselves in terms of colour, size, or shape. Also, they have a tendency to disappear over time and be replaced with copies.”

  “And that’s all your book learning can tell us, then?”

  “I’ve made all the running here,” I said, not having mentioned Hoade’s role. “You needn’t look down your nose at me, not when you haven’t done anything.”

  “Not so, my Titanic friend,” said Skinner, with an irritating air of self-congratulation. He drew out a folder with some loose papers. “I will give you your baetyls, but you must give me necrocomica.” He spoke the last word with relish. “That being a term coined by none other than our old friend Paracelsus for exactly what you’re talking about: mystic meteorites. Some say Paracelsus wrote a book about them, the Liber Necrocomicon. I never turned up a copy, but I spent a good deal of time chasing round second-hand—pardon me, antiquarian—bookshops, on behalf of a certain gentleman I could name.” He looked up from the papers. “If you ever want to feel like a proper Charlie, try going round asking for a book that never existed and having every know-it-all book peddler put you right.”

  “But if he never wrote it…?”

  “I can still tell you a meteorite came down outside the city of Ensisheim in 1492,” said Skinner, reading from his notes. “Which Kaiser Maximilian claimed was a miracle from God. He ordered the stone to be hung up in chains from the church ceiling, which it duly was and where it remains to this day.”

  “And that might be what we’re looking for?”

  “Not a bit of it. Paracelsus examined that one in 1528, and he didn’t reckon there was much to it. Said it was made of earthly material and not a miraculous heavenly substance like dear old Kaiser Max claimed. Some meteorites are just ordinary stones, and some of them, according to Paracelsus, are not. It never occurred to me that it might be connected with this beetle until you made the association.”

  “Some meteorites draw lightning,” I said thoughtfully. “They fly through the heavens, where our patron can see them with his telescope, and they spit out shooting stars like a ship dropping boats to land on an island. And when they land, they become gods or at least baetyls.”

  Skinner shrugged. It was all one to him. “And a
ll we need to do is find where the Horniman Museum keeps their collection of baetyls or necrocomica or mystic meteorites. We look for the one that Mabel Brown chipped a bit off of, and we make them an offer for it. Easy as pie.”

  Skinner did not seem troubled by other aspect of the case, such as Pierce the gardener being the victim of some accident. I forbore to ask whether he would be buying the baetyl on behalf of our patron or Dr Estelle De Vere. Instead, by mutual consent, we donned our hats and set out to catch the bus for Lordship Lane to visit a place I had not been to since my schooldays before the war.

  The Horniman Museum was a local landmark, an expansive edifice in light-grey stone with something of the temple and something of the castle about it. It had a square clock tower like a church with a circular top to it, and the rest of it was like a series of Greek temples with pillars—or railways stations if you looked at it in that way. The man who built it was the founder of Horniman Tea, who grew very rich from being the first to sell tea in small packets, rather than in larger parcels that the grocer would have to draw from like sugar or flour.

  Horniman collected items from around the world while doing business, and the collection outgrew his house. Being wealthy, he had a museum built for it, and like every local schoolboy, I found it a place of wonder and mystery. There was a stuffed walrus the size of an elephant at the entrance, sitting on an artificial iceberg, like the guardian of the gates to another world, with tusks like ivory scimitars. The walrus was a great, bloated beast, intimidating, looking at visitors all glass eyed. Guides loved to tell children how the beast killed Eskimos, rearing up and dragging their kayaks under the icy water and eating them when it mistook them for seals. I remember one boy fainted when he heard that. It wasn’t me, I should add.