“I see a shadowy sort of fog, if that’s what you mean, a stray storm cloud, perhaps, or the ghost of a cloud. You’re the scientist, however. What do you make of it? I’m familiar with the notion of water pouring from a smitten stone, but not from a hole in the sky.”
“Science does not account for either phenomenon,” St. Ives said as the two set out downhill, passing among the standing stones. He put his hand into the falling water before tasting it. The water was surprisingly warm and was flavored with vegetation, as if leaves had steeped in it—yet another oddity: certainly not rainwater. He stepped back to avoid soaking his boots.
“Look there,” Hampson said, pointing at the shallow brook that flowed away through the grass. A cylindrical fish, heavily scaled and about ten inches long, was pulling itself along with its pectoral fins, apparently going for a stroll. St. Ives retrieved the slippery creature and put it into his hat.
“Did this fish fall from the sky?” Hampson asked. “One would think such a thing to be patently impossible, Kryzanek’s pelagic crabs and periwinkles notwithstanding.”
“Indeed,” said St. Ives, looking at the patently impossible fish. He had seen fossil examples of such a fish when he was a student at the University of Edinburgh and living examples from Africa and Australia that bore a family resemblance to it. “It appears to be a lungfish,” he said, holding out his hat so that Hampson could get a good look at it. “Do you see the leg-like fins and the bony, independent scales—the way the scales do not overlap the way fish scales should?”
“I do, now that you point it out. And the creature seems to have an amphibious sort of fleshy tail on behind.”
“So he does,” St. Ives said. “He can walk as well as swim, and he hasn’t been seen on earth—not this variety of lungfish anyway—for hard upon three hundred million years. If I’m correct, he’s a living remnant of the Devonian era, although it quite possibly lived on for eons after most of the Devonian creatures had passed out of existence.”
Hampson stared at St. Ives for a long moment, perhaps looking for signs that he meant to be humorous. “You’ve been reading Mr. Darwin, I see. In that argument, I’m firmly on the side of the angels, sir. I have no grudge against the opposition, but they may keep their apes.”
“Mr. Darwin would have wept tears of joy to see this fellow,” St. Ives said. “And you must admit that we’re witnessing a wealth of unlikely natural phenomena here—this inexplicable waterfall as well as an extinct lungfish.” He opened his haversack and laid the lungfish in among the penny buns and chanterelles, where it kicked for a moment and then lay still. He would be perfectly happy there until St. Ives could get him into one of the greenhouse aquariums. “You’re certain that this fall of water was not here three days ago? The sun was low, after all, when you passed through. Perhaps there had simply been no reflection upon it.”
“I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. I would certainly have slogged straight through it. No, sir. Water has evidently recently issued from a hole in the sky, carrying with it an impossible fish. I’m happy to call it a miracle, which are few and far between in these grim latter days. What it portends, I cannot say. God moves in mysterious ways, according to Mr. Cowper’s hymn.”
“I meant to suggest only that the fall of water might cease as abruptly as it began.”
“In that case give you joy, Professor. We have arrived on the day of days, apparently. I’ll leave you to your lungfish and have a look at my lichens.”
Hampson set out toward the standing stones, but immediately kicked something buried in the mud, just a corner of it exposed. He stooped, plucked it loose, and rinsed it in the waterfall—a ceramic beer bottle with a cork in it. Stamped into the stony clay were the words T. Danes, Anchor Brewery, Aylesford.
“What a disappointment,” St. Ives said. “Someone has picnicked upon our far-flung meadow after all.”
“I’m not certain I agree with you there,” Hampson said. “The bottle was buried in a muddy pool that did not exist when I passed this way only three days ago. It hasn’t rained since. Where are the footprints of the phantom picnicker? Why should we not assume that the bottle, too, has fallen from the sky, imbedding itself deeply from the force of its falling?”
“Perhaps it’s the loaves and the fishes come again, although this time it’s bottled beer and inedible lungfish.”
“You mean to be waggish, but that’s tolerably close to blasphemy.”
“But a tolerably small feat for God, I’d suppose.” St. Ives worried out the cork and tilted the bottle toward his nose to smell it. “No odor of beer at all,” he said. He peered within now, a ray of sunlight shining into the dark interior and revealing what appeared to be a rolled slip of paper. He carefully withdrew it, trying not to tear the damp paper in the process—a sheet taken from a common pocket note-book on which were written several lines, although some of it was obliterated by damp:
‘…through the open door of the portal,’ it read. ‘…China, but swept away…gas-bag quite destroyed, but fortune favored…The great god Fort quite possibly mad…My dear love to Pamela.’ Nothing else was legible, except for the name Kryzanek scrawled at the end of the missive.
St. Ives filled the now-empty beer bottle with falling water, replaced the cork, and laid it into the haversack with the lungfish.
Open
IT WAS AN hour past closing in the library and the rotunda was blessedly empty. Miss Julia Pickerel ran a lightly oiled cloth over the marble plinths that held the tall candelabras, relishing the silence and the beauty of the painted panels on the ceiling and walls and of the high, arched windows that looked out over Bryant Park. The electric candles and globe lights cast a rosy glow over the interior, it being dusk outside. She rarely had a chance to be in the rotunda alone, and it seemed to her now that it was very like being a duchess in a palace, although a duchess would be unlikely to carry a tack-rag.
There was the sound of the creaking wheels, however, and she looked up, annoyed at the disturbance. A short, stout man entered the great hall, pushing a wheeled cart upon which sat two stuffed chairs, one atop the other. He wore spectacles and heavy mustaches and had an amphibious look about him. Miss Pickerel knew immediately who he was, although why he was wheeling furniture through the rotunda was a mystery. She had no desire to speak to the man and was anxious not to be recognized, and so she turned away. She was an acquaintance of his wife Anna, a friend, really, both she and Anna being members of the Parakeet Society. Some weeks back Mr. Fort—Charles Fort by name, an eccentric of low Dutch heritage—had squired Anna to one of the meetings, where he was evidently bored and sat picking his teeth. He spent a great deal of time in the library, although surely he ought to have gone away with the rest of the public when the building closed and the doors were locked.
She heard his cart pass behind her, and after a few moments she looked back, watching him as he rounded the corner at the far end of the hall and disappeared through the high arch that led into the gallery. This struck her as another odd thing, for it was a comparatively small gallery with tapestry-hung walls. There was no exit from the room save returning through the arch. And the room was entirely without furniture. It had no need of chairs.
It went against her instincts to confront the man, who might be a dangerous lunatic. Evidently he had hidden himself in the library in order to avoid being ushered out when the library closed. Certainly he was up to no good. She stepped across into the shadow of a pillar and waited for his return. She heard shuffling and scraping noises, and then, in a voice fit for the deck of a ship rather than a library, Fort intoned the word open, as if it were a command. There was more shuffling, and a wooden bump, and then utter silence.
When she could stand it no longer, she sidled along the wall toward the edge of the arch in order to peer around the corner. The gallery was empty. Mr. Fort had quite disappeared, as had the chairs. The empty cart, however, sat abandoned in the middle of the room. There was no indication that anyone had enter
ed the room at all, except for a small movement of the bottom corner of the great tapestry hanging on the east wall. It was her favorite, very old—a strange, rustic cottage on a cliff over the ocean, with a beam of sunlight shining on its arched front door.
She stepped inside the gallery and walked hesitantly toward the tapestry, which hung still now. She noted the absence of any breeze and considered the possibility that Fort might be hiding behind the tapestry, perhaps intending to leap out at her. She looked for the toes of his shoes in the narrow opening beneath the hem, but she saw nothing, and so she boldly pulled the edge of the tapestry away from the wall and looked behind it. There was no Fort, nothing but an innocent wall. She stared at the wooden wainscot, what she could see of it in the shadows. There was no door in it.
It came to her that there could not be a door; beyond the wall lay the City of New York.
Closer to Heaven
THE FOLLOWING MORNING found St. Ives and the Vicar Hampson on the meadow once again along with sundry friends.
“Dead air, sir, at around three thousand feet,” Hampson’s brother-in-law Bates said. “Roundabout the height of your waterfall, I’d say. The dead air space is fifteen fathoms in height, give or take.” He knelt before a windlass, its line tied to a small trial balloon that he had sent up to measure the speed of the wind. Bates was a large-framed man, his sleeves rolled against the warmth of the morning sun. His coat and hat lay on the meadow. The day was a twin of yesterday. “The anemometer says that the wind above it blows at two knots, and that below somewhat less.”
“And it was something the same with Kryzanek—this space of dead air?”
“Just so, Professor. We sent up the trial balloon in just this way.”
St. Ives nodded. To Hampson he said, “Do you find that this eccentricity reduces your desire to go aloft, Vicar? We could make a tethered ascent next weekend if the weather holds.”
“Not at all, Professor. The world allows few adventures for a man of my age and station. And Roger Kryzanek was a friend of mine. These eccentricities, as you phrase it, have something to do with his disappearance, it seems to me. The coincidence is too great otherwise. If anything, my desire to go aloft has heightened.” Hampson smiled up at the balloon that floated overhead—a cheerful red color, with the basket gondola dangling below. On the gas-bag itself was painted a black and gold carp, an authentic rendition of a fish that Alice had caught from a pond on their property. It had been painted just a week past by Theodosia Loftus, a talented gipsy girl who had become a particular friend of Alice’s.
Hauling the balloon and its equipage into the time-forgotten dell had taken the better part of the night and the help of six men aside from St. Ives and Hampson. It had been rare good luck that a crew could be assembled on short notice. Dick Bates was fortunately free, as were his twin sons, both of them big men—several inches taller than St. Ives’s six-feet, two-inches and weighing in the neighborhood of eighteen stone. Bill Kraken, from nearby Hereafter Farm, was tall and lanky but surprisingly strong and with infinite stamina. He and the brothers Bates had carried the silk-and-rubber gas-bag, rolled up and bound into a sausage. The fifth man was Hasbro, St. Ives’s friend and factotum. He and St. Ives had toted the gondola, disassembled and lashed to a stout pole with many fathoms of line.
Young Finn Conrad, who occupied a cottage on the St. Ives estate, carried powdered sodium hydroxide and aluminium in a pack on his back. Bates functioned as chemist with Finn as his assistant. The two had been brewing hydrogen gas under the full moon since two in the morning, and the balloon was very nearly inflated. St. Ives could see that Finn deeply regretted not going along on the ascent, and Hasbro equally so. The balloon would hold more weight than that of St. Ives and the Vicar, but a heavier load would require more gas and more time spent on the ground and would make maneuvering slightly more difficult.
St. Ives had made light of the danger when he outlined his intentions to Alice last night. He would ascend, he said, only to have a look at the curious, cloud-like anomaly that seemed to be the source of the falling water. A breeze could push them off course, spoiling any effort to get reasonably close to their goal, in which case they would say quits and descend. There was no breeze to speak of this morning, however; it was a perfect day for a leisurely ascent. The gondola was stocked with a wickerwork hamper carrying St. Ives’s quadruple-tube achromatic telescope and the usual stakes, line, and heavy mallet to facilitate an emergency mooring.
When everything was in train, St. Ives and Hampson climbed aboard the gondola, took the measure of things, and cast off. “Ten o’clock almost exactly,” St. Ives said to Hampson. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”
The balloon rose vertically above the meadow, scarcely shifting on the breeze. The aerial spring, showing no signs of diminishing, thumped against the gas-bag, cascading down the envelope in sheets of water, some of it coming inboard and draining through the bottom of the basket. St. Ives and the Vicar stood clear of it along with the baggage.
The ascent was slow, but as long as they were rising at all, St. Ives had no desire to hasten it, since there was no recovering ballast once it was spilled. Very soon, however, the ground appeared to be a long way off, the dwarfed crew looking upward at them, shading their eyes against the morning sunlight. A small breeze shifted the balloon out of the fall of water, the grateful sun warming them, and St. Ives saw the coast in the distance—the city of Deal with the Goodwin Sands beyond and the ships at anchor in the Downs, the view startlingly clear through the telescope.
“Have a look through the glass, Vicar,” St. Ives said, “but keep it inboard, if you would.”
Hampson took the telescope and peered through it, apparently speechless for a time and taking in the view at all points of the compass—the literal compass that St. Ives pulled from his pocket. “There lies Canterbury Cathedral!” Hampson said. “And there in the distance, Professor—could it be that I’m looking into Essex?”
“Almost certainly you are,” St. Ives told him.
“My brother Tom lives in Cambridge Town with his wife and daughters. I wonder if they can make us out, high aloft as we are.” He waved heartily in that direction and laughed. “I’m positively giddy,” he said. “There’s Bimbury Manor, lying very neatly indeed among the trees, and Aylesford village, if I’m not mistaken. Can you make out your house and land?”
“I should think so,” St. Ives said, taking the telescope from him. He quickly found the River Medway, and it was a simple thing to pick out his large meadow with its hops kiln, the barn and house, and the hops orchards roundabout, green and growing in the summer sun. And then he saw their resident Indian elephant, Dr. Johnson, being led out of the barn by Alice and the children. Old Mr. Binger the gardener was with them, as was Hodge the cat, although mouse-sized. St. Ives found that he was holding his breath, strangely moved by the sight of his tiny family going about family business without him, and at such a peculiar perspective. He was no great distance away, and yet it seemed as if he was on a different plane of existence entirely, and of course he was, he reminded himself, having left the Earth behind.
He willed Alice to look upward, but a shadowy grey twilight swallowed the balloon now and his family vanished. The balloon began to spin slowly—Bates’s vortex, St. Ives thought, not much liking the idea. What could cause such a thing was a mystery—some sort of aerial Coriolis effect, no doubt—an effect that had swallowed Kryzanek and his balloon wholesale. They had entered the predictable dead air space now, and there was no breeze at all. Through the murk he could see what looked like a high wall of dark cloud ahead of him.
He consulted his compass and was surprised to see that the needle was spinning erratically, changing its mind and reversing half a spin, and then switching direction again, utterly confused. He fetched out his pocket-watch—fifteen minutes past ten o’clock. The cylinder of water began to thump atop the balloon again as they passed beneath, disturbing the quiet and swirling down the sides, falling straight tow
ard the ground. The thumping abruptly ceased and the water washed straight through the side of the basket in a horizontal stream. Then the natural silence returned and the stream of water was gone. They had apparently passed through its apex and had risen above it.
Both men bent out over the void and saw through the grey dimness that the fall of water stood directly below them. St. Ives could make out the very place where it arched out of the darker shadow that they were fast approaching, the wavering wall of undulating twilight that grew blacker by the moment, very like a theatre curtain disturbed by actors passing behind it.
The balloon tilted now and dragged the gondola sideways into blind darkness, both men holding on tightly as the deck canted over. St. Ives thought of his final, infinitely lucky view of Alice, Eddie, and Cleo and his heart lurched. He considered the chance that he was leaving them behind for good and all, and attempted to put the thought out of his mind. He heard Hampson intoning a prayer—more useful than mere regret—but despite his efforts St. Ives could think only of his family, of having sold his rich bounty of happiness for a handful of idle curiosity.
The Island
THE DARKNESS LASTED a long moment, followed once again by the narrow region of grey shadow. Then they came out into clear air again, although the sky was heavily overcast. The ground was visible below—very close below. It was not their world, however, neither the North Downs nor any landscape that St. Ives recognized. There were sheer cliffs in the near distance—black volcanic rock covered in verdant foliage—and a forest of giant trees stretching away from the base of the cliffs. A rocky coastline lay perhaps a mile away, although the air, which felt positively tropical to St. Ives, was so clear that it was difficult to gauge distance. He could see the spouts of whales rise from the calm sea beyond a horseshoe shaped bay.
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 34