Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure

by David Hambling

  Miss Horniman had said something similar in her talk, but she did not resent hearing her own argument. Far from it. She flipped pages. Unless she was an extraordinarily fast reader, she could only have been reading a few words from each.

  “A gipsy fortune teller? That’s a rather hackneyed device, if I may say so.” She looked at me over her glasses.

  “People still go to fortune tellers,” I said. “And as a matter of fact, that was why I desired to talk to you—because you are an authority in matters relating to what is popularly called magic.”

  “Ah. Ah.” I had surprised her but not for the reason I expected. “The cards never lie. I still use the Tarot from time to time, and it warned me to expect someone today.” She gave me an appraising look as though I had just walked in. “The cards said I would meet a knight on a quest. That must be you.”

  “I wouldn’t describe myself in those terms—”

  “Excuse me, Miss Horniman,” cut in a man with a notepad and a pen, touching her elbow. “I wonder if you could possibly—”

  “Excuse me, Mr Collier,” Miss Horniman snapped back. “I’ll get to you quite soon enough when I’ve finished talking to Mr Stubbs.”

  Collier backed off with a sickly smile. This was it. We were getting to the do-or-die part of the conversation. I was still improvising furiously, but that often worked better for me than trying to think it all out beforehand. Sometimes you needed to trust your reflexes.

  “This is about the Golden Dawn, isn’t it?” she asked. “And those beastly experiments. The reason I left.”

  “I wasn’t aware of the background to your leaving.”

  “The reason I left,” she said levelly, “was over the idea that there should be marital relations between an elemental spirit and a human woman. My views on the matter were overruled.”

  She spoke quite calmly, not at all with the passion with which she had spoken about theatre, but there was a well of emotion beneath her words. The phrase marital relations was not one that she would use lightly.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “It was more about the museum collection.”

  “Oh.” Miss Horniman was thrown, having been so sure that she knew what I had come about. I had surprised her a second time. While she was wrong footed, I made my move.

  “I wanted to ask about your upbringing—being brought up with those things all around you,” I said. “An Aladdin’s cave of the esoteric. What was it in there that woke you to the larger world?”

  “What a question…” But her expression softened, and she brushed back a hair. “Father did not allow us to have friends, so my brother Emslie and I played among the mummy cases and the African masks. We made up our own friends. The Chaldean idols, and Hyperborean bas-reliefs, and South Seas jujus were our playmates, and we made adventures among them. Osiris and Ganesha were members of the household.”

  “But was there something specific that kindled your interest in… the other world?”

  “To me it was always as normal as a greengrocer’s,” she said, ignoring me. “More ordinary, in fact, because we were surrounded by emissaries from the other world, and we never had to go out shopping. I never saw the inside of a greengrocer’s until I went to art school. That must seem very strange to you.”

  It must have been a strange, lonely existence. Her father, I recollected, had been a strict adherent to some obscure religious sect. That was why she was not allowed to play with other children and was educated privately at home with her brother.

  “It seems like a long time ago. Theatre is a better sort of magic, in the end. McGregor went mad, they say—too much contact with those chthonic beings on the astral plane scrambled his brains.”

  I gathered that the name McGregor meant Liddell Mathers. She did not sound especially sorry for him.

  “But I can see you’re determined to do your research, Mr Stubbs, and determination is no bad thing for a writer. It doesn’t drive everyone mad. Arthur used to spin his yarns off what he learned in the Golden Dawn, and it didn’t harm him.”

  Arthur could only mean Arthur Machen, one of her fellow initiates in the Golden Dawn. He was a noted writer of fantastic stories, which were not perhaps as fantastic as I had thought when I first read them. Machen had laughed at the eccentricities of the Golden Dawn, but he understood their grasp upon the human psyche. He thought that what they saw were just shadows. Others, like Yeats and Mathers and Miss Horniman, believed that there was something casting those shadows.

  “Well, I’m getting used to being represented in fiction,” Miss Horniman went on. “Just make sure you get me down properly, ‘warts and all’ as the Protector had it.”

  “I’ll do my utmost.”

  “Spoken like a man,” she said drily. I had a feeling it was not the first time she had delivered that particular backhanded compliment. “Well, I’m afraid it’s not much of a story… but I shall try to oblige you. I must have been ten years old at the time, so Emslie would have been seven. We were playing a game in among all the lumber—this was before the first museum was built and everything was stored higgledy-piggledy around the house. We loved it that way, but it drove my poor mother to distraction—not that she would ever say anything when yet another cartload of strange boxes arrived from Nepal or Valparaiso, but you could tell she was wondering where we would put it.

  “Emslie wanted to be a Roman soldier, and he needed a helmet. Nothing was right; we had all sorts of hats but not one that would satisfy him. Then he saw this African idol from the Congo—it’s a frightful sort of thing, made of brass decorated with hair, like a sort of egg-shaped human figure—and he wanted it.”

  In the way she recounted the anecdote, Miss Horniman sounded like frustrated storyteller. Her role in theatre had always been as a patron, a theatre manager, and an organiser. She’d had little chance to participate in the creative process, and her own stories had remained pent up inside her. A person working with W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw did not get much of a chance to hold forth.

  She continued to describe the argument between her and Emslie. “I told him, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t wear that.’

  “And Emslie absolutely bawled at me, ‘I want his helmet!’

  “‘It’s all one piece,’ I said.

  “‘No, it isn’t!’ He was quite purple by that time. ‘The top comes off!’ he said.

  “And when I looked more closely, he was quite right. There was a hairline crack between the top half of the idol’s head and the rest. I tried to get it off, but it wouldn’t budge, so I found some scissors, and I wedged the point in and tried to prise it open with Emslie urging me on.

  “At first, it wouldn’t come at all, and I broke one point off the scissors, and I knew I would be punished for that. And then I thought, well, I’ve nothing to lose now, so I tried with the other point.

  “Somehow, I managed to lever it open just a little tiny way… the room was dark, and I so vividly remember the line of light peeking through from the inside of the idol as though it was full of fire. It wasn’t a light or a sound, but it was something like the buzzing of bees.

  “I was terrified, and I pushed down on the top and shut off the light and ran away. Emslie burst into tears and ran after me, and we hid among the antelope furniture. We stayed hidden for ages until I felt safe again.

  “I never spoke to Emslie about it afterwards, and I don’t know what he saw or heard or whether he even remembered the occasion. A few days later, I asked my father what the idol was. He was always very fond of explaining things in his collection, and he found the letter that had come with it. It had been recovered by a missionary in West Africa… there was a colony of lepers on an island in a river that worshipped it. They said it contained a stone that had fallen from the sky. What the Greeks called a baetyl.”

  “I’ve heard the term,” I said.

  “The lepers were white, and the natives assumed the missionary was one of them, so they put him on this island with them. I can’t remember the re
st of the story, but the missionary escaped, and when he returned, he found that a band of Belgian slavers had come and killed all the lepers and burned down all their huts.”

  “Belgian slavers—why would they kill lepers?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t know how they knew the men were slavers, but that’s what everyone said,” she said, frowning at the point. “They were masked, I remember that, and led by Europeans, anyway. But the slavers didn’t find where the idol was hidden. The missionary brought it back.”

  “Why would a Christian missionary bring back something like that?”

  “Even Christians can’t always ignore the truth when they stumble on it. I think he was torn between wanting to destroy it and wanting to build a shrine to it as the relic of an unknown saint. He couldn’t do either, so he gave it to Father, who was a notorious collector of old gods.”

  “And did you tell Mathers and the others about it?”

  She hesitated a moment. “I didn’t,” she said at last. “Truth to tell, I forgot about it for a long time. After that, I assumed the whole incident had been childish fancy and imagination. It was only after I ascended in the Golden Dawn that I began to understand what it was—and by that time, I had broken with Father and Emslie. I would have cut off my right arm before I’d ask them for anything. No, I’ve never told anyone about it. Except perhaps the odd friend or two over the years.”

  Mabel Brown was an ambitious woman who had wanted to get on in the theatre and had gone to seek her fame in the West End. Perhaps she had become a protégé of Annie Horniman, and perhaps, in the course of worming her way into Miss Horniman’s inner circle, she had learned something that would later be to her advantage when she came across Stafford’s advertisement.

  “It’s a wonderful story,” I said.

  “Theatrically speaking, it’s only half a story, or one act at best. It needs an ending. I’m sure Arthur would write a good ending to it.”

  “I’ll see what I can manage,” I said.

  Chapter Fifteen: The Coal-Hole

  I had never been party to planning a major robbery before. Thanks to Miss Horniman, we knew the exact room and the case where the baetyl lay. The only difficulty was getting our hands on it. My first impulse—to advise Stafford to make a bid for it—quickly ran into the sand and not just because Stafford was unwilling to do anything openly.

  Even if we could have found a surrogate gentleman buyer, there was a more substantial obstacle: it was not in the power of the museum director to simply sell items. Any such actions would need to be ratified by the board of trustees, who only met infrequently and who were in the business of building up and maintaining a collection, not selling things off. Money was not a motive for them, and as Skinner pointed out, even if we offered them a thousand pounds, that would simply reinforce the impression that the idol was worth holding on to.

  “They’d want to take a closer look at it,” said Skinner. “And what happens when they open it up to look inside? ‘Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew’—light the blue touch paper and stand well back when they unbottle that!”

  If they did open the idol, the quantity of lightning it drew would surely be far greater than the small piece that Mabel Brown extracted. I was forced to agree that, like Mabel Brown, we would have to obtain the item by illicit means.

  Breaking into a museum was a rather different proposition to breaking into a house. As I had often noted, with houses, the protection was often of a symbolic nature, and the security measures were informal. A museum was by definition a repository of valuable items, and the protection was correspondingly formidable.

  A house might have locks on the doors and windows, but those fitments themselves were not usually so solid that they couldn’t be opened with a pry bar wielded by a hand skilled in that art. It was more a question of how quickly and quietly the thing might be achieved. And a museum, even a small one like the Horniman, would have iron bars on the windows and doors that would not yield to manual implements. Moreover, it would inevitably employ a night watchman, and these days, museums were likely to have electric alarms which responded when doors or windows were opened, so that even the most inattentive guardian would be aroused from his doze and alerted to the presence of intruders.

  Furthermore, the display cases themselves, especially those housing the more valuable exhibits, might have their own alarms. Some of those were silent so you did not know when you had tripped one. Now that the telephone was universal, a watchman could summon the law instantly without getting up from his comfortable chair. The metropolitan police could dispatch a flying squad in a fast car, and the end result would be a firm hand on your shoulder while you are still engaged in the act of burglary.

  While I had effected entries to many places in the course of recovering debts, a museum was in a different league than anything I had previously essayed. I found the prospect daunting.

  By contrast, Skinner, who had much less experience in that field than I, was not troubled in the least. “It’s a piece of cake, Harry. This isn’t the Bank of England; it’s a ruddy museum.”

  “It’s an act of outright robbery,” I said. “It’s not like we can say that we are recovering the idol on behalf of someone with a better claim to it, and breaking and entering means seven years hard labour. And if you’ve got your knife on you—a deadly weapon, in legal parlance—the tariff will be increased by five years.”

  “‘Tariff,’” he said scornfully. “You talk far too much like a policeman, Harry, and not enough like a proper criminal. And pry bars aren’t the way to do it! I suppose I’ll have to educate you in the ways of theft.”

  Later that day, I returned from an errand to find Skinner working with a school printing set. It was one of those kits provided with an ink pad and letters, cut out of rubber, that fit into a frame. He was moving with utmost care.

  “You won’t get very far by pretending to be something you’re not,” Skinner said with the air of an oracle. “The trick is to pretend to be something you are.”

  As an apprentice in the arts of deception, I accepted that without comment.

  “If you or I—and might I say, particularly you—was to attempt to pass yourself off as a scholarly, upper-class gent, you’d have less chance than a chicken in a coop full of foxes. Those types speak their own language, and they can spot an impostor as easily as we’d spot a lord pretending to be a workman down at the Conquering Hero. But if you pretend to be what you are…”

  He stamped the letters firmly down and lifted them up after a second.

  “What am I?” I asked.

  “You’re a man who goes around retrieving valuable items for other people, of course. And if I was to be casting for a stage performance, I couldn’t ask for a man who more looks the part.”

  Skinner inspected his newly created letterhead with a magnifying glass. He had already spoiled several sheets of vellum, flicking them irritably onto the floor when he discovered imperfections.

  “That’s more like it.” He put the sheet carefully to one side. “The other thing is not to let them know what you really want. That was where we went wrong with Higgs. Conceal your true intentions so they go protecting the wrong things and thinking they’ve thwarted you while you waltz off with what you’re actually after.”

  He stamped the second sheet with equal care.

  “Have you done this sort of thing before?” I asked.

  “The same general principles apply, whatever the specifics.”

  Skinner’s plan involved sending a series of letters to the museum from a fictitious government department. They all used a similar letterhead, so creating a simulacrum of an official document was not too difficult. With typical nerve, he had even borrowed one of my ideas: he suggested that the idol might be dangerously radioactive. He would imply that radioactivity had been discovered in a similar idol in a museum in the Gambia—which, of course, would be impossible to check—and that it would be necessary to remove said item f
or a thorough scientific inspection.

  Skinner used a genuine address belonging to the Ministry of Agriculture so that any letters of response would be shuttled around Whitehall’s endless corridors for weeks before being returned to the sender. By which time we would have achieved our objective.

  “All you and I have to do is impersonate a couple of glorified furniture-removal men with government pensions,” said Skinner. “A copy of the letter as our authorisation, and Bob’s your uncle.”

  “But what if they challenge us?”

  He smiled indulgently. “People like that don’t argue with government officials! Not with us threatening them with putting a safety cordon around the whole museum. No, we’ll give them a nice receipt with an official stamp and a reference number on it—I’ve printed a couple of forms—and they’ll think they got off lightly.”

  I must have looked sceptical, but Skinner was ready with an ace up his sleeve.

  “Because we have this.” He opened his hand to reveal a small brass tube, which he aimed at me like a telescope. He inspected the other end and pretended to adjust it. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I’m seeing dangerously high levels of Z-rays coming out of your body, Mr Stubbs. It’s reading forty-five, and that’s terribly high.”

  “What is that device?”

  “It’s a scientific radiometer,” he said, pleased as a schoolboy with a new magnifying glass. “I borrowed it off the boss. You can’t argue with science.”

  “I can’t, but the museum people might know how to read it.”

  “I hope they do,” he said. “I’ve got one of the test samples that comes with it stuffed inside, so it reads high.”

  “Doesn’t he mind you breaking his radiometer?” As soon as I asked, I knew Stafford would have handed over a hundred radiometers to be crushed if he could get one step closer to the baetyl. Miss De Vere was right about him in at least one way: he would scruple at nothing—whether it was throwing his fortune away, employing a rogue like Skinner, or seeing his staff wasting away—if it would bring his Holy Grail to him.