The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

you on the train in order to steal the book after old Lester had entrusted it to you.”

I was dumbstruck. “And so the book is gone! I still don’t fathom…”

“This is the Kraken-Birdlip manuscript,” St. Ives said, winking at me and handing me the loose pages that he’d taken from Hasbro. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was indeed reading Birdlip’s treatise on succulents and begonias. I gave St. Ives the searching stare and awaited a further explanation. I had been practiced upon, and I wasn’t smiling and winking, although he was, apparently tremendously pleased with himself.

“Another ruse?” I asked him.

“Indeed. Ruse upon ruse. This, of course, is the treatise on alien botanicals prepared by Cuttle Kraken and Dr. Birdlip after their first venture through the hole. After Cuttle’s death in the explosion, Birdlip spirited it away, consigning it to me before he went into hiding. It constitutes evidence, of course, which ought to have been destroyed in the conflagration in Birdlip’s laboratory. But as you can see, it wasn’t destroyed. How the pig men divined the truth is hard to say, but I became certain that they had.” He laughed now, out of high spirits. “I had almost said ‘deveined’ as if the truth were a shrimp.”

“And so you fabricated this, this red herring de guerre, this shrimp de mer, just in order to confound them?”

“Just so.”

St. Ives was triumphant, proof positive that my little contribution to his scheme was well worth a few gorse spines, but before I could utter a word there was a tremendous explosion that brought me catapulting out of my chair, dumping a half glass of sherry down the front of my trousers. I saw that Hasbro stood at the open French window, his hair whisking about on the wind and a regular torrent of rain from a renewed storm sluicing into the room. In his hands was a long smoking rifle of monstrous proportions — a death-dealer from the look of it.

“What-ho Hasbro?” St. Ives stood up unflustered, peering out into the night.

“Prowlers, sir.”

“Did you bring any down?”

“Yes, sir. I seem to have dropped one, as the white hunter would say. He’s lying on the lawn, apparently immobilized.”

The Professor had a lantern in hand in a nonce, and we were out the door and into the rain, warily approaching the creature, Hasbro brandishing his weapon, ready to blow the interloper to Kingdom Come. The fallen man, if a man he was, apparently now trod on more hallowed ground than had been available in the environs of Chingford-by-the-Tower.

I’ll admit that I’d had a sip or two that evening, but I was sober enough to see with relative clarity, and, I might add, I’m a man who prides himself in his straightforward veracity. Ask any of the lads at the old Scout’s Rest, and they’ll back me to a man. Jack Owlesby, they’ll say, is solid as the Rock. And it took that sort of solidity, I can assure you: when St. Ives held the lantern over the wound, it ran with green blood — a murky and fibrous green, as if spun into tangled clumps of dirty Irish cobweb. St. Ives was grim, but was not particularly taken aback. He reached down and popped the corpse’s shoe off, and, with a wide gesture, as if introducing a fairly so-so pianist, waved at the thing’s cloven hoof, the ghastliest bit of anatomical peculiarity I’d hitherto had the pleasure to encounter. The beast had the foreleg of a pig, and, indeed, appeared to be the very gentleman, if gentleman I can call him, who had propelled me through the open train window that very afternoon. He was dead as a Yorkshire ham, and already he had begun to stink.

Another thing Jack Owlesby isn’t is a coward. I mean to say, I was pitched from the window of a moving train, an incident that would discourage the stoutest heart, and yet I trudged like a trooper through the night to a rendezvous with a scientist — not mad, strictly speaking, but eccentric, given to flights of fancy — whose intention it was to shoot me into outer space in an utterly unlikely machine. Mere pluck isn’t in it, from my point of view. But when I caught sight of that hoof, attached to the end of a pinkish but rather human-looking leg, I let fly a “Yoicks!” that might have been heard as far away as Stoke Newington, and took off, as my old mother would say, like a dirty shirt toward St. Ives Manor, where I finished off the sherry bottle and opened a second without invitation.

Later, St. Ives and Hasbro slid back in, having deposited the corpus delecti with the local vivisectionist. I was storming the gates of fear with another scupper of Spanish sherry, but I was sober as a judge, much to my dismay. The whole rum puncheon ran contrary to what one might call my better judgment — a dead man, after all, or some facsimile of one — but the Professor had a different way of seeing things. Langdon St. Ives has always seen things in his own light, although the wavelength is off the visible spectrum, a sublunar light, if you follow me, but, admittedly, the light of rare genius. He assured me that if we all kept a judicious eye peeled for scalawags, we’d last out the night in good health. Consider for a moment how cheered I was by this observation.

And it was a vigil that we kept: Hasbro with his elephant rifle scouring the grounds; Professor St. Ives at the lookout, first at one window, then at the next; and I holding sway before the fireplace, guarding the chimney flue and the sherry bottle lest the hoofed men try to slip in from above. A roaring fire, I’ve heard, fends off even the most fearsome night denizens, and by God I kept the fire hot. And in the long night I learned several bits of information that served merely to increase the general rumminess. First, I caught on that these cloven-hoofed pig men were not at all human, a fact I had rather suspected, and that they were intent upon putting the damper on our mission into space. It seems that these aliens, these Citronites (Birdlip and the elder Kraken had, apparently, dubbed their planet Citrona after finding vast tangerine orchards in evidence) had been slipping in through what Birdlip and St. Ives have dubbed “black holes” — a single black hole, actually.

In fact I don’t have an earthly idea, but I picture the mouth of a train tunnel, seen from a distance and cut through solid rock. But these holes, these tunnels if you will, are apparently cut through solid space — something that meant worlds to a man like St. Ives, but meant nothing to a man like me. They were garden gates, if you will, from…elsewhere, and they led, as it was explained to me, from one place to another. A chap might be capering along through the void when a bloody great hole opens up next door, and, if the chap isn’t ready for it, sucks him in like water through a pump hose. The puzzler, at least to me, is that a hole can appear in the void. The Professor cleared that up effortlessly. It seems as if this hole isn’t a hole, not really, not in the sense of its having dimension, or at least measurable dimension. It’s like the thingummy that is all things to all men, apparently, the hole that is both the alpha and the omega, the window that is at once a hiatus and a hindrance. Kraken and Birdlip, suffice it to say, navigated the avenues of this aperture, popping down into the jungle groves of Citrona where they meddled with their botanicals for a week or so before whizzing back through. The real rat’s nest, however, is this: they were pursued on their return by these pig-faced men, an indeterminate number of them, who blew Birdlip’s laboratory to dust, murdering Cuttle Kraken. Their misuse of Cuttle’s brother drove the poor man to drink and madness.

I awoke on the chair by the fireplace, stiff as a post, and was greeted immediately by the steadfast Hasbro who bore in a pot of mocha java. I sugared it twice, once for taste and once to recapitulate with the depleted blood sugars, and after the coffee and an ablation was ready for all the pig men in Essex. The pig men, however, didn’t show, and neither did Langdon St. Ives who, I found, was off on some mysterious errand.

When I went out at last onto the veranda, the sun was halfway up the morning sky chivvying for position with a single cloud that hightailed it toward the horizon in the wake of its passel of erstwhile companions. It was one of those clean autumn mornings that makes a chap throw back both arms and suck in a lung full of air, then let it out in a hearty wheeze, and that was entirely my ambition when I was interrupted by Hasbro, who stepped out into the open air and said, “The Professor desires our company in the tower, sir.”

We crossed the meadow, finding St. Ives within the confines of the stone tower, a circular vaulted room with a polished stone floor and high windows radiating sunlight. A veritable scourge of sucking noises proceeded from a great conical device raised on an iron platform in the center of the floor, and it didn’t take more than a moment to deduce the fact that this device, a gothic assemblage of metal and glass, was the Professor’s spacecraft. I had been expecting a saucer, perhaps ringed with porthole windows and with a whirring combine beneath. This ship, however, had the appearance of a ruddy great bullet that had been decorated in the style of Chartes Cathedral.

St. Ives puttered about, tugging on one thing and another and grappling with levers and switches. Hasbro took up a position outside the tower door, armed with his weapon. Unbeknownst to me, the hour of our departure was approaching, and the Professor and Hasbro knew that the pig men had to act if they were going to squelch things for good and all. St. Ives fully expected a cutting out expedition, and we were all of us on our guard. I was put to work, I can tell you, and I sweated like a banshee all afternoon over a complexity of whatnots and doodads.