“Perhaps,” I said. Privately, I entertained some doubt about how human they were under those long coats. To claim that someone is inhuman because of the way he seems to walk, seen from a distance at night, is a stretch. It was difficult to explain this to one who had not been there, though Ross was the most sympathetic of listeners. “And whatever it is, it can kill people inside locked cells or offices,” I said. “Gillespy and Hooper and Beltov.”
“They all died in different ways,” said Ross. “And we don’t know for sure whether they were all murdered. Also, why am I still alive? You seem to think this Dr Nye takes an especial interest in me.”
I had to admit that I had a great many questions and no very substantial answers. Positing an enemy who could attack through solid walls, and whose killings could look like accidents, natural causes, or suicide meant that any death could be a murder. This perhaps is what they mean by the road to madness.
One immediate project was getting that reel of film back before Bellingham could start showing it to more people. That was a challenge in itself.
The chief mission, though, had to be confronting Nye. The Phantom of the Cinema was his doing: he had persuaded or encouraged Beltov to extract the mental images recorded by the Sarcophagus. Perhaps he even had an inkling, or more than an inkling, of what effect those images would have on the man who copied them. It looked like a deliberate attempt to multiply madness.
If I did that, though, Nye might simply laugh at me and say I was imagining things, before sacking me—or having me committed. Or, he might get his minions to follow and murder me, in a locked room if need be.
I would need some kind of weapon or tool to tackle Nye, and Ross was the only card I held. Nye had Ross committed and kept him in the asylum without killing him. That surely meant he had other plans. Ross was in some way special to him.
“What happens when you complete this grand gyre?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ross, “but afterwards, I should have some clue about what I’m supposed to be doing. Some kind of… cosmic direction. I’ll find out what I’ve been put on this earth for. Haven’t you ever wondered what all this is for?”
I suppose we have all asked ourselves that in some form or other, but the question comes more naturally to some than others. My pa always said you had to do your bit, whether it was helping your family, your friends, or your country, and that pulling your weight was what mattered in life. Maybe it was not the sort of philosophy they teach at Oxford, but it had always stood me in good stead. People like Ross, though, they seemed to want something more.
“I suppose the Creator knows what he’s doing,” I said.
“Well, now’s your chance to find out,” he said. “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”
That stopped me in my tracks. I had not thought for a moment that there was a possibility. I had never been up in an aeroplane. I had seen them at Crystal Palace and elsewhere often enough, but rides were expensive, and I always had misgivings about my bulk in such a lightweight craft.
“It’s a two-seater,” he pointed out helpfully. “You might find it an interesting experience, especially as you’ve never been up before. And I need another pair of eyes.”
“What for?” I asked, though I had some idea.
“Bandits,” he said. “Or God knows what. But I can’t help feeling that I’m not going to be allowed to get away with it this easily.”
It struck me that if anything was going to happen, then it was not advisable to be in the plane, and he sensed my doubt.
“It would make a world of difference to have you along,” he said. “You could keep an eye out and cover the rear hemisphere.”
A biplane flew past a few hundred feet overhead, buzzing like an outraged bumblebee, leaving a faint trail of vapour behind. It seemed like a frail thing of paper and wooden struts, held together with wires. And we were facing unknown forces with unknown powers.
“Name your price, Harry. You can have anything you want—even unto half my kingdom.” He looked away then looked back. “It would be an awful shame for me to get this far and not make it just because you weren’t watching my back.”
If Ross was to crash, I would be left stranded, without a clue on how to proceed, and the case would come to a halt.
If I could get over the embarrassment of having helped him to escape, I could start again with my life, which would mean asking Arthur Renville for assistance. Though, of course, if he died, my having helped him would be that much more awkward; his fiancée Miss Bentham would hold me responsible. More seriously, there was the possibility that the enemy who pursued him would be on my tail. Gillespy, who had been on the same mission, had ended up driven mad. I could only guess what had befallen Ryan.
“If you really think I can make a difference,” I said, “you can count on me.”
“I knew I could,” he said. “Don’t worry, I won’t crash. I’m famous for my good luck, in the air and on the ground.”
An hour later, Ross was satisfied that everything was set. He took a last look at his flight plan—a collection of diagrams, lists of speeds and bearings—rolled it up, and stuffed it into an inner pocket. I noticed then that a rolled-up piece of paper, like a scroll, was also a sort of spiral; and so was a film in a canister. Then, Ross grinned at me and scrambled up into the cockpit. “Go on, fire her up,” he said.
I had expected we would take this by stages, assure ourselves that the plane was sound, and have a test flight, but Ross was nervous. He suspected, or his intuition warned him, that our time was limited, and Nye’s agents, human or otherwise, would be closing in on us soon.
I took hold of the wooden propeller in both hands and gave it a good shove round. The engine caught immediately, and the unexpected noise of it was something shocking: it was like standing in the middle of a hundred motorcycles with broken silencers, all at full throttle.
Ross revved the engine a couple of times then gave me the thumbs-up sign. I removed the wheel chocks, dragged them a short distance away as I had been instructed, then climbed gingerly up to the rear cockpit.
Like everything else, it was designed for a smaller man, and I did not at all like the way the plane rocked as I clambered into it. We sat on the tarmac for some considerable time while the engines warmed up, and I had a chance to observe the comings and goings around the airport. A twin-engine passenger plane had newly arrived from Le Bourget, and a ladder was being wheeled out to meet it. As I watched, well-dressed men and two women descended, while porters were already swarming around at the back of the plane getting their luggage. The pilot and co-pilot were on the ground already, shaking hands with the departing passengers.
Then the plane lurched, and we were off, turning in a tight circle and taxiing for the runway. A man with two flags like a traffic policeman waved us on, and we motored down to the end of the runway and executed a turn. Then we were waiting again, I suppose while Ross made some final checks. I donned the leather flying helmet and goggles and buttoned up my new flying jacket. I kept getting wafts of exhaust fumes as the side-winds caught them.
It was the delays that made it all so nerve-shredding. Dusk was falling; Ross wanted a night flight under the stars. I badly wanted it over with.
The engine pitch went up, and the plane moved forward, faster and faster, the ground hurtling past more quickly than anything I had seen, so fast that it literally became a blur unless you turned your head to follow it. The roughness of the runway smoothed out, and I saw that there was nothing but grass beneath us—well beneath us. We flew over fences and hedges, Ross pulled the stick back, and we were on our way.
Ross turned his head to shout at me. It took a couple of attempts to understand him. “She’s going well!” he shouted, and gave another thumbs-up in case I had still not heard.
The horizon fell away, an unforgettable sight, and I felt that we truly were ascending into the heavens. It was true exhileration, actual exaltation to a higher state.
The vibration was enough to rattle your
teeth, and even in the back the noise practically blotted out everything else. My nose was full of the smell of aviation fuel, but the view was incomparable, even in the fading light. The ground beneath was dark, but there were lights everywhere, lights in houses, lights along the streets, and even the headlights of cars and vans going down Croydon Road.
I struggled to make out landmarks below. Everything looked so strange seen from above, and I had no luck, until I saw the towers of the Crystal Palace off to the north with the glow of the great glass building between them. Apart from that I could not orient myself.
The air blew past in a continuous hurricane. It was impossible to believe that the air was stationary and that it was us that were moving—it felt so much as if we were flying into the teeth of a storm.
A v-shaped formation of birds caught my eye—a skein of migrating geese. I marvelled that we could look down on them from above. In the distance were the moving lights of another aeroplane, and it was a strange experience to be on the same level.
The ground wheeled away as we turned, and then it actually tilted upwards so the horizon was at a thirty-degree angle. Again, it must have been an illusion: centrifugal force was holding me in place. I was tilted, and the earth remained on the level as it always had been.
A faint mist streamed past. There had not been much sign of cloud from the ground, but we had travelled some distance. The wind made the wire vibrate when we went into a turn.
After my initial apprehension, I was beginning to enjoy the experience of flight. It felt like freedom: escaping from the bonds of earth, breaking away from gravity into a new realm of endless possibilities where anything could happen, and the ordinary laws of earthbound life did not apply. Perhaps every flight feels like that, or perhaps it was this mission we were on. I tried to keep my emotions under control; we were here for a serious purpose. I was on sentry duty.
We went higher and higher, feeling lighter and lighter, until I could laugh for the sheer joy of it. The aircraft still felt as fragile as ever—every buffet of the wind made the wings ripple visibly, twisting like a cardboard toy—but it flew beautifully.
As we turned and the wire thrummed again, I kept looking about, wary of anything that might interfere with us but not knowing what to expect… A Fokker triplane with machine guns blazing, or storm clouds summoned out of blue skies by sorcery, or a flight of giant bats with fangs and claws—nothing could have surprised me.
We flew over a translucent sheet of cloud, and to my disappointment, the light-dotted landscape was erased, disappearing under a while film. Still, that narrowed my field of observation. I looked around and directly overhead, where the crown of the sky was unexpectedly dark. The horizon might be pale blue, but up there it was night with stars showing.
Ross steepened the turn, and I had a good view in the fading light of a cloud built like a towering fortress as we passed by. Either we had come farther than I had thought, which was highly possible at over a hundred miles an hour, or the cloud had suddenly grown up out of nowhere like Jack’s beanstalk. I wished I knew more about clouds and what they meant. Tall clouds meant storms, I knew that.
Ross was pointing at the cloud and shouting, but I could not make out his words, and he gave up the attempt.
We turned again, and there were two more clouds, great slab-faced icebergs hanging in the sky. We flew in between them, and they seemed to be moving together to cut us off, but Ross pulled back the throttle and we sped through the narrowing gap before it closed.
My eye was drawn to an arrangement of red lights, like the lights that outline a steamer, but they were far above us, and I could not make out the colossal shape which they delineated. Ross pointed at them, too, without bothering to shout.
“There!” I shouted and pointed. Something flitted through the cloud above, beside, and slightly ahead of us. In the fading light, I could not be sure what it was.
Ross nodded, and I looked over my shoulder and tried to see it again, but Ross threw the plane into a sudden and violent manoeuvre. I gripped the sides of the cockpit as I was flung about. A dark-winged shape bigger than an eagle hurtled by, shockingly close and followed by a second. If pressed, I would say they were ungainly mechanical birds, but that was merely an impression. They were jerked out of my field of view as the plane banked and rolled. Ross turned his head, and he was laughing with maniacal glee at having outmaneuvered his opponents.
I twisted around, but they had vanished. From Ross’s account of air battles, if they had dived and missed us, they would not catch us again unless he turned to seek combat. Given that we were unarmed, and the slightest contact would break a wire or rip a wing and send us plunging to the ground, I hoped he was heading away as fast as possible.
Whatever had attacked us had failed. I assumed they must have been sent by Nye in a last-ditch attempt to prevent us from getting further. And indeed, they had tried to intercept us at the very boundary of the normal world.
It was no ordinary flight, and as we raced towards a dark cloud, a tunnel, barely wide enough for the plane to pass through, opened in it like a mouth. The curving passage was so narrow that I could see the red-and-green glow from our lights reflected from its surfaces. The material looked too solid and well-defined to be cloud, but there was nothing else it could be.
Ross was vindicated. We had succeeded in processing the gyre just as he had hoped. Mysteries were opening to us, even if I could not understand them.
What happened after that became confused. My actual memory is curiously muted, as though I saw it at one remove. And I have dreamed about that flight so many times that I can no longer rightly distinguish the dreams from the memories. Both are equally strange and unbelievable.
To the best of my recollection, for as veiled and mixed in with the stuff of dreams as it became, we came out of that tunnel, perhaps after several similar passages, into an open space that was dimly lit by a greenish moon, which gave it the appearance of a wooded plain. I could attempt to describe the irregularities which appeared below, and you could try to determine for yourself whether they were natural cloud formations, fabrications of unreliable memory, or something else. Subsequent events make what I saw—or thought I saw—a moot point at best.
I was certain that tall obelisks projected from the cloud surface opposite, and that there were moving figures of men and animals, and lights like yellow torch flames moving with them.
As I looked around to take in the whole vista, I saw the men in white walking down the wing towards me.
Presence of mind had not wholly deserted me, and I shouted for Ross and pointed. He turned as they reached me, and I was hauled up bodily and whirled around.
I landed on my knees, striking my shoulder against something solid that could not have been there. Someone took hold of me—it was Vanstone!—and I shoved him away. There was confused shouting around me, and as Vanstone came at me again, I punched him solidly on the abdomen, then twice more until he fell back.
I reeled from a blow and saw Miller, who looked both elated and frightened. He had finally succeeded in hitting me.
“The needle!” someone shouted.
“Stubbs!” shouted someone else, right in my face. It was Miller, grinning cheerfully and shaking me. “Harry, wake up!”
I pushed him away, trying to make sense of my surroundings. The wind and the roar of the engine were muted and muffled, and another scene was superimposed on my vision. Clouds still rushed past, but at the same time, I was in a room with a solid floor and walls. The cockpit was fading; if I did not get back into the plane at once, it would dissolve altogether. I crawled forward and grabbed the handholds again, but before I could get myself in, strong hands were on me, and I was manhandled by men in white, who blurred and merged with the cloud then became solid and real.
I struck out and tried to free myself before the pain of a cold sting erupted in my arm. Still confused, I felt for it. The flying jacket melted away under my fingers.
Vanstone stood back, no
longer a wraith but a substantial being. There was something long and silver in his hand—not a knife, but a hypodermic syringe. I was backed into a corner, and they were all looking at me.
“Don’t you know us?” asked Donnelly, standing ready with a straitjacket.
I could see Miller and Vanstone quite clearly, along with another man behind them, who was not dressed in attendant’s garb. “Quickly,” he said. “Get him under control.”
The scene blurred, and the walls behind me dissolved. Wind was rushing past, and I grabbed on to the plane, but I was trying to fight them off at the same time with one hand. Finally, the wind had gone, but shadows still flitted past and through me as I slipped away into unconsciousness. Then, the biplane was gone and the only wings I had were those of a dream.
Chapter Seventeen: Inside
Days in the cell were indistinguishable. The only variation was in the food they brought me, and in the fractional progress of the sunlight through the high window. Each day, the ray of light shifted around a little. Apart from these two things, it could have been the same day, over and over. I tried to keep track of time, but I quickly became confused. As a result of being drugged, my dreams intruded or overlapped with my waking life to start with, and I thought I had woken up more times than I had. After a while, the effect wore off, but the date no longer mattered.
My world entirely consisted of the cell. It was nine and half feet square, walled in cream tiles. The tiles themselves were not identical. I had not been there more than a few hours before I spotted where some of them had been replaced. Linoleum covered the floor, which was much worn around the centre by constant pacing and still with some spring to it out in the farther edges and underneath the bed.
The bed was a heavy iron construction of Victorian vintage, firmly bolted to the floor. For a mattress, it had three cushions, known as biscuits, of heavy canvas packed with coir. They were hard, but not as hard as the iron bedframe.
For sanitary purposes, a grate in one corner led into an open pipe. The smell came and went at different times of the day.
Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4) Page 18