He took in the view with a subdued astonishment, which was abruptly less subdued when he saw a rambling wooden house sitting above the bay on a rocky ledge. It seemed to be built right out of the cliff itself.
“I say, Professor,” Hampson said. “What’s this now?” He pointed toward the forest, from which four vast birds winged their way toward the balloon.
“Very large pelicans,” St. Ives said without thinking. He was looking at his compass, relieved to see that it was once again behaving itself.
“Pelicans, forsooth,” Hampson said. “Is it likely they’ll eat us?”
St Ives gave the creatures a good look now and saw that they were not pelicans at all, but some species of pterosaur, with long sword-like beaks. He didn’t believe in what was called mass hallucination, nor did he believe in living pterosaurs, although these certainly appeared to be alive—more stupefying evidence of…something. “If they’re what I understand them to be,” he said, “they’re dedicated to fish and carrion—theoretically, of course.”
“Then I pray that we do not have the look of theoretical carrion about us,” the Vicar said, “and that the beasts are not inclined to spear our balloon simply for sport. We’ve found ourselves in a tolerably strange place, Professor. I’m not averse to finding our way out again.”
St. Ives nodded, thinking of the unlikely lungfish, dwelling now in one of his greenhouse aquariums. That it had come from this very land was beyond doubt—a land that stood outside of time, in some sense, although his pocket-watch was ticking away as ever. He looked back at the cloudy darkness, at the curtain through which they had passed. It was some distance away now, an unsettling distance that was growing by the moment. On the meadow below a wide brook flowed along into that darkness, washing heaven knew what into the void. There were people moving along the shore of the brook, just visible in the twilight.
“Brace for a landing, Vicar,” he said, drawing the gas-release lever downward to release a fraction of their invisible, precious hydrogen. “Be ready to dump ballast, but just a trifle if need be. I’ll give you the word. Easy does it now.” He closed off the valve, estimating that the balloon was descending at a reasonable rate of speed.
“Look below, Professor, there on the sward!” Hampson cried, his eye to the telescope, which he held in one hand.
St. Ives saw that a man was running down the slope of the meadow, evidently having dashed out from the edge of the forest. He waved his hands over his head, gesturing as if his life depended upon it. He was a stout man with a round, bald head, wearing spectacles and dressed in short trousers and gaiters.
“By heaven!” Hampson shouted. “It’s Roger Kryzanek! No shadow of a doubt. His hair has vanished, and he’s in a fair taking, bellowing like an elephant. And no wonder—he’s been marooned for nigh onto twelve years. His hardships haven’t clawed any of the flesh from his bones, I see.” He laughed out loud, elated to see his old friend alive.
But his laughter ended when there appeared half a dozen savages, racing out of the trees and in hot pursuit of the Polish balloonist. They evidently gained on Kryzanek, who was pouring it on. The ground came up to meet the gondola, and a brisk cross-breeze pushed them along sideways when they touched down, the flat hull of the gondola bouncing and sailing like a stone on water. Kryzanek waited anxiously, looking back wild-eyed at the approaching men, two of whom carried spears. They were short men, hairy and dressed in ragged trousers hacked off at the knees and equally ragged shirts. Kryzanek grabbed the mooring line as it danced past and held onto it while capering along over the sward, coming on hand over hand along the rope. “Hampson! By God, Hampson!” Kryzanek shouted. “Haul me in, man!”
Hampson reached out and grabbed Kryzanek’s forearm, trying hard to heave him aboard—an apparently impossible task—and St. Ives bent to help. It would be a close run thing, even though Kryzanek’s weight put a stop to the gondola’s capers. He levered himself over the side and tumbled in, but there was no rising again without dumping ballast, and now the savages were upon them—six men grappling the basket. They could dump ballast until doomsday and not rise an inch.
The six stood patiently, making no threatening gestures. Almost certainly they were not Paleolithic men, pictures of whom St. Ives had seen in a cave painting on the French coast. These had prodigious jawbones and were as much ape as human—a very ancient race, without a doubt. They were decorated with bits and pieces of cheap, pinchbeck baubles set lavishly with paste jewels. Each wore around his neck a primitively carved human head on a thin strip of leather. The heads was round and wore spectacles, like nursery rhyme illustrations of the man in the moon.
One of the savages was slightly taller than the others and wore red, ankle-length trousers, much faded and stained, and a pair of wire spectacles without lenses. He had a slightly superior air—the chief, St. Ives thought. The man pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose and inclined his head toward the ground, implying that the three in the gondola should climb out.
“Be damned to you,” Kryzanek said to him between heaving breaths.
“I’ll go over the side,” St. Ives said. “We haven’t a choice in the matter, it seems to me. Hand down the stakes and the mallet. We’ve got to moor her securely.”
The chief stepped back to allow St. Ives passage, taking his arm in a gentlemanly way to steady him. Hampson passed along the sharpened wooden staves, and Kryzanek, shaking his head unhappily, hefted the mallet and looked hard at his so-far peaceful assailants.
“Best not to start a row that we cannot finish,” St. Ives said to him, taking the mallet before Kryzanek crushed anyone’s skull.
“I feared this,” Kryzanek muttered. “He knew.” The words conveyed no sensible meaning to St. Ives’s mind. He set to work knocking in the stakes.
The four pterosaurs had swept around and were disappearing into the west now, where the sun was just breaking through the clouds. With luck, its warmth would heat the gas in the balloon and make it more buoyant—a good thing, certainly, if only they managed to take it up again with Kryzanek aboard. St. Ives nodded at his two companions to climb out, the gondola rising to waist height and riding easy, the mooring apparently secure. Without any more ado, the chief led the way into the trees, three of the unlikely savages ahead and three behind, conversing among themselves in a language that was mostly grunts, whistles, and gibbering.
The broad path led uphill, winding around toward the coastline and very shortly entering the forest, which soon became more jungle than forest, damp and vine-hung and smelling of decomposed vegetation. Enormous trees towered away overhead, and the air was full of birdcalls. Ferns grew out of the crotches of limbs, with blooming orchids and a wealth of smaller ferns rising out of the larger clumps—entire elevated gardens. Small monkeys moved high overhead, as did flights of butterflies with immense wings. St. Ives was thunderstruck by what he saw, but he pulled his mind away when Hampson’s voice broke the spell, introducing Kryzanek to him.
“I’ve read of your exploits, sir,” St. Ives said to him. “I very much hoped to meet you here.”
“And I’ve heard of yours, Professor,” Kryzanek answered.
“How so?” St. Ives asked, for it was a strange statement given that the man had been marooned for the past twelve years. His question was left to hang when an immense lizard appeared in a clearing forty feet away—a creature that might easily swallow a moderate pig—a monitor lizard, perhaps, but ten feet long if it was an inch. The reptile caused some excitement among the savages, one of whom hefted his spear and made as if to pursue it, although the chief whistled him back.
“It scarcely matters,” Kryzanek said. “I shouldn’t have raised the subject.”
St. Ives’s mind still dwelt on the giant reptile, and it was a moment before he made sense of Kryzanek’s statement. There seemed to be no reason to pursue the subject of his own ‘exploits,’ however. For a time after that the three made familiar talk—friends mutually known, life in Maidstone and Aylesford, Kryz
anek’s family hearty and healthy.
“Twenty-six grandchildren in all,” Hampson told him.
“God’s rabbit!” Kryzanek cried. “Twenty-six?”
“You’re a veritable patriarch.”
“I live in horror of being a patriarch. But I can’t say that I don’t miss them—those of them that I know. I’ll no doubt learn to miss those I don’t know, for there’s precious little chance we’ll get off this damned island now. Did you find my message, then? I sent it down the river. I would have sent myself down the river, but you would have found a corpse instead of a bottle.”
“We did find it,” St. Ives said. “The bottle was half-buried in a puddle into which a miraculous stream of water fell from the sky—the very stream that flows across the meadow on which we landed.”
“This fall of water was over Sandwich, then?”
“No, sir,” said Hampson. “A meadow near Thurnham. I’m sorry to say there was no time to deliver your message to your wife Pamela.”
“It was necessary that we get aloft without wasting an instant,” St. Ives said. “I was worried, am worried, that the curtain, so to say, will simply vanish, as it must have done after you passed through it over Sandwich.”
“You’re in the right of it there, Professor,” Kryzanek said. “And it will surely close when the current solstice tide has peaked.”
“The solstice tide, do you say? I do not completely understand the term. What has it to do with the closing of the curtain?”
“You are no doubt well-versed on the subject of oceanic tides, Professor, but this is a tide of a different color—a cosmic tide, if you will, a sky tide. It’s not scientific, perhaps—not in the canon, but it’s inarguable.”
“I’m inclined to argue with it,” St. Ives said.
“A waste of breath, I assure you. I wore myself out contemplating it, but I finally accepted it and made myself at home, so that I could come to know this wild place. What I learned, to my dismay, is that the curtain, as you call it, will cease to exist when the tide passes full, marooning us utterly, and it doesn’t care a groat for your doubt. We must be aboard your balloon when the tide is making. With luck we’ll be drawn back through the portal. At the moment, however, we’re prisoners of the great god Fort, whom I do not trust, not for an instant.”
“Fort?” asked Hampson. “Strange name for a god. Do you mean a god in some abstract sense?”
“A living man. He’s a humbug, is Fort—an American, who seems to relish my company, since the natives cannot be made to understand the nature of card games. They believe him to be a god, which he encourages by tricking them out in trash jewelry and supplying them with butterscotch. You’ll meet him soon enough.”
They walked into a well-swept clearing now. Overhead stood a multi-level cottage built in the heavy limbs of a banyan tree. A set of spiral stairs encircled the trunk. The several rooms, which were affixed to heavy aerial roots that had grown into the earth, were roofed with thatch, the uppermost section covered with what must be the gas-bag of Kryzanek’s balloon, tattered and torn, although Kryzanek had made an effort to mend some of the tears. The walls of the cottage were made of sticks and wattle. There were lace curtains in the windows, moving in the very faint breeze that found its way through the trees.
“This is Scrimshaw, gentlemen—my home,” Kryzanek said, gesturing at the edifice as they passed along the road. “Picturesque, ain’t it? I’ve gazed upon the picture far too long, and when I saw your balloon descending at last the notion came to me that I might experience the joy of never ascending my stairway again.”
On the floor of the clearing stood a wooden table with two crudely built benches and, strangely, an upholstered chair with a wooden deal table beside it. A half-eaten mangosteen and a leather-bound book lay upon the table, the book open, spine upward, no doubt to mark the place where Kryzanek had set it down when he’d sighted them. A broad patch of sky was visible through the tree’s limbs.
“Surely you did not bring that chair along in your balloon?” Hampson said. “Nor books, I’d imagine, unless you meant to use them as ballast.”
“Fort hauls these luxuries in through his private passage, Vicar, including what I needed to build this house—hardware, tools, even the window curtains. He’s monumentally solicitous in that regard. He refers to his passageway as ‘the second portal.’”
“Could he not haul you out through this portal?” asked St. Ives. “All of us, for that matter, if it comes to it.”
“I almost dread answering that question,” Kryzanek said. “You’ll be inclined to argue with it, too. In a word, Fort comes from a future time. I’ve seen proof of it, and I have no desire to accompany him into a world even further from home and hearth than this one.”
“From the future?” St. Ives said. “I very much look forward to meeting the man. Indeed I do.”
“I pray it’ll be a brief meeting. We’re burning daylight, to use one of Fort’s own phrases.”
A tapir some four feet in height stared at them from deep shadows now, and a large upright creature moved along a heavy branch some distance beyond—an orang-outang or perhaps a gorilla. St. Ives realized that there must be a wealth of animal life on this…
“Where are we?” he asked Kryzanek. “Do you know? Has this man Fort told you?”
“Yes, he has,” Kryzanek said, speaking to the back of St. Ives’s head. “We’re aboard a piece of our own earth that was blown into the sky in some ancient cataclysm—a floating island, if you will. It remains hidden behind what you referred to as the curtain, which is quite simply a mantle of invisibility, as the Welsh might say. This island floats unseen above the earth, stopping now and then when the tides are right. Currently we’re over the North Downs, as you know. When the tide is in flood, Fort has the natives shovel odd heaps of debris into the stream, which carries the debris into the sky of our world—periwinkles and frogs and china plates, which fall to earth, astounding the citizenry.”
“Why would a man do such a thing?” Hampson asked. “There can be no profit in it.”
“Fort cares nothing for profit. He means to be jocose, I’m afraid.”
“Jocose?” St. Ives asked. “I’m not certain I see the joke.”
“Fort would tell you that the joke was on you, sir. He performs these strange feats largely to confound science, which wears blinders, if you will, denying everything that they cannot understand. Fort gives scientists things to deny and gives the local citizenry a thrill of astonishment.”
At that point they rounded a bend in the road, seeing before them the cliff-side house that St. Ives had discerned from the air. Thick vines, heavy with purple blooms, snaked up the rough volcanic rock walls that formed the base of the wooden house. Mullioned windows looked out over the cove. The glassy but strangely ominous sea stretched away to the horizon, small islands visible in the distance. An enormous, toothy creature, perhaps a seagoing crocodile, peered up out of a bed of kelp for a moment and then sank beneath, and farther out to sea the black neck and head of what appeared to be a plesiosaur cut along through the oily swell.
What I wouldn’t give for three hours time among the tidal pools with a net and a collecting bag, St. Ives thought. Such a chance would surely never come again. He would positively amaze the Royal Society. He would amaze the world! Perhaps the spring tide that Kryzanek feared wasn’t absolutely imminent after all….
An irritating voice in his mind warned him against foolhardy thoughts, and as they ascended a set of stone stairs, he wondered if in some sense it was Alice’s voice—that in their years together she had become a sort of guardian angel. He should ask Hampson for his opinion on the subject.
They arrived at a verandah that sheltered a great, arched entry door, a door that swung inward now, although nobody stood in the doorway. The chief of the savages pounded the butt of his spear thrice on the planks, perhaps announcing their arrival to the god Fort, and then the six moved off and sat upon the verandah floor, immediately starting up a
jabbering conversation.
“I’ll lead you in,” Kryzanek said, as they walked into the dim interior. “I warn you that Fort is some variety of devil—very persuasive. I mentioned that he comes and goes through what he refers to as a portal, where the date is some twenty years ahead of our own.”
“You believe this to be true because you’ve accompanied him there,” asked St. Ives, “or because he told you it was true?”
“I believe all of it to be true, Professor, although I haven’t been to the future, so to say. I take his word for that. He has some curious proofs, however.”
“What sort of proofs?”
“You’ll discover them soon enough. The man is…unavoidable. He is obsessed with simple questions of time—questions simple to ask, I mean to say, but impossible to answer. He is concerned with the idea that alterations in the past will alter the future.”
“I believe that they would,” St. Ives said.
“Then you’d best think twice about lingering in this house. My own desire to flee motivated my great effort to be away in your balloon there on the meadow. The effort failed, but it proved nothing. You, sir, are his great experiment. He means to have his way with you because of who you are.”
“This is all very cryptic,” Hampson said.
“I’ll make one thing about it clear, then. I mean to be away in the balloon with time to spare, and there is very little of that commodity left to us.” With that he ushered St. Ives and Hampson toward the back of the house.
The Tell-tale Carp
THEY FOUND CHARLES Fort in his lamp-lit study, sitting in an upholstered chair identical to the chair in the clearing before Kryzanek’s tree house. There were three other such chairs in the room. He was short but stoutly built, his hair cropped. His eyes, looking out through spectacles, held an amused look. “Gentlemen,” he said, standing up and putting out his hand, “it’s my great pleasure to see you at last. I’ve awaited your coming.” He shook hands with St. Ives and Hampson, although Kryzanek declined the gesture. “Please, sit down,” Fort said. “Drink a glass of this capital brandy.” He fetched a decanter and a stack of tumblers from the bottom shelf of a table beside his chair.
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 35