The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

in a waking horror in the cabinet, listening to the thing in the box, staring, half expecting the tread of feet on the stair that would announce the end, the gibbet, the headsman’s axe. There it came. Three in the morning it was. Deadly silent. A tramp, tramp, tramp on the wooden stairs — very heavy — and a shadow across the curtain. A hunched shadow. The door fell open on its hinge, and the hunchback stood against a scattering of lights and a clearing sky with such a look of abomination about him that his collapse onto the tiles failed to eradicate it — just as it failed to eradicate my horror of him.

“I should have killed him. I should have slit his throat. I should have cut out the toad under his fifth rib and put it in a cage. But I didn’t. Fear kept me from it. Fear, perhaps, of my own evil. It seemed to me that his face was my own, that he and I were one, that Ignacio Narbondo had somehow drawn part of me in with him, consumed the only part of me that had ever been worth a farthing, and had left a strengthless, malignant pudding, poured into the chair where I sat until half past ten the next morning.

“And it was thus that Nell found me. I begged her to kill me. I hadn’t the courage to perform the deed. I pleaded. I told her of the costerlad. I swore at the same time that I was done with the pursuit — that the creation of life itself wasn’t worth hell. But I lied. The thing in the box can arrest entropy. He can separate tepid water into ice and steam if he likes. He can animate the carcass of a rat dead in a wall for months and dance it about the room like a marionette. He’s prodigiously old, and the only consequence of his thwarting time is his shrunken state. But he must be kept in a box.

“My fitting Keeble’s clever structure with a screen through which I can communicate with him has led, I fear, to my own decay. I can’t say just how I’m bartering with him — knowledge for freedom. If he could but find his craft and a pilot of sufficient stature to navigate it, he’d be lost among the stars in a moment. But that won’t come to pass. Not until I have what I possess — we, I should say, for the hunchback has recovered, and swears he’ll return to Limehouse tonight if the streets are hidden by a sufficiently thick blanket of murk.

“Shall I go with him? Will he draw me along at his heels like a shadow, a daily more fitting shadow? Or will nightfall bring an end to an unhappy and unnatural existence? I can’t for the life of me imagine waking on the morrow. For the first time in my life the morning is cloaked in black.”

“There’s not much more,” said St. Ives, putting a match to his cold pipe with a shaking hand. He’d read the manuscript earlier, but he couldn’t quite get this last part straight in his mind. Nell, it was certain, was without guilt. Even more than that. She was heroic. That the act of shooting her brother, of spiriting away the damned homunculus and giving it to Birdlip to take perpetually aloft, had led to her exile and remorse was the greatest tragedy. Kraken had been correct. St. Ives dropped the manuscript to the floor. Somehow the act of reading it aloud had emptied him of any desire to look at it again.

The Captain heaved himself to his feet and stumped across to a tobacco jar, yanking off the lid and pulling out two fingersful of curly black tobacco, wadding it into the end of his enormous pipe. “I shipped with a Portagee once,” he said, “who knew of that thing — that bottle imp. He’d owned it straight out for a month and went stark staring mad in a typhoon off Zanzibar. Traded it away to a Lascar on a sloop in the Mozambique Channel.” He shook his head at the enormity of the whole thing and sat back down.

“And the rest of it,” asked Godall keenly. “The other hundred-odd pages — are they as wild as this part?”

“Increasingly so,” said St. Ives. “The decline was swift — almost from the day he bought the thing in the box.”

“In the bottle,” put in Keeble, staring out the window at the street. “There wasn’t any box until I built it.”

St. Ives nodded. “He seemed possessed by the thing — by the idea that he could not only animate the dead, an effect, I gather, that he’d discovered without the aid of the homunculus, but that with it, somehow, he could perpetuate life. Indefinitely. Perhaps that he could create life. And perhaps he could. There’s a reference to a successful experiment in which he spawned mice from a heap of old rags, and another in which he revivified an old man from Chingford, who was dying of general paresis. Sheared forty years from him, according to Owlesby. All of it fearfully alchemical, although, as I say, it’s out of my province.

“He was certain that the spacecraft belonging to the homunculus was in London, and he hoped to find it in order to sell it, as it were, to the damned creature in exchange for power over death and time. Whether his decline into madness and debasement was a result of scientific greed or of slow poisoning due to contact with the homunculus is impossible to say. Even Owlesby, obviously, didn’t know.

“Apparently Owlesby was jealous of owning the thing to the point of refusing to let Narbondo at it. Nell’s absconding with it must have infuriated the hunchback. She snatched the secret of life out of his hands, as it were, and gave it to Birdlip…”

“Who in a matter of weeks might well drop out of the skies on us,” said Godall.

The Captain frowned. St. Ives nodded.

“Well,” said Keeble, topping off his glass from an open bottle of ale, “this is all a very sad business, very sad. If I were asked, I’d say meet the dirigible when it lands — and I’ll bet my ape clock it touches down on Hampstead Heath where it launched — and snatch the box. Between the lot of us such a thing would be nothing. Then we tie it into a bag full of stones and drop it off the center of Westminster Bridge when the river’s in flood. The box isn’t tight, I can attest to that. Regardless of the thing’s powers, it’s got to breathe, hasn’t it? It’s not a fish; it’s a little man. I’ve seen it. We’ll drown it like a cat, if only to keep it out of the clutches of this humpback doctor.” Keeble paused, his chin in his hand. “And for what it did to Sebastian. I’ll kill it for that. But there’s no use, really, hashing over this Limehouse business. It’s water under the bridge is what it is. Nothing more than that. And murky water too. So I’ll just change the subject for a moment here, gentlemen, and call your attention to the date. It’s Jack’s birthday is what it is, and I’ve got a bit of something to give him.”

Jack blushed, disliking, even among friends, being the center of attention. St. Ives grimaced in spite of himself. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been waving Sebastian’s memoirs about so freely. On his son’s birthday, for God’s sake. Well, this was the Trismegistus Club, and the ends they pursued would lead them along grim paths — there was no doubt of that. There was nothing to be accomplished by pretense and timidity. Better to clear the air with the truth straightaway. Far better to do that than to hide things and make them seem even more despicable and terrifying by doing so.

St. Ives wished, though, that he had known it was Jack’s birthday so as to have some trifle wrapped up. But he could remember no one’s birthday — not even his own most of the time. Keeble produced a square parcel about the size and shape of a jack-in-the-box. St. Ives was fairly certain he knew what it was, that he’d witnessed the rising of its clockwork cayman not too many days past.

“A toast to young Mr. Owlesby,” said Godall heartily, raising his glass. The rest of the company followed suit, giving Jack three cheers.

From the shadows of the back room, Kraken raised his own glass — or flask, rather, which was two-thirds empty of gin. It seemed to Kraken to be perpetually in that state. How it could be more often empty than full was an utter mystery. Kraken hadn’t delved particularly widely into the mathematics, and so he was willing to admit that there were forces at work on his gin that he couldn’t yet fathom. He’d be after them though. He’d seek them out. Like beans in a bottle, he said to himself. Facts were nothing more. And mathematics were facts, weren’t they? Numbers on a page were like bugs on a paving stone. They looked a mess, scurrying around. But they were a matter of nature. And nature had her own logic. Some of the bugs were setting about gathering supper — bits and pieces of this and that. Lord knew what they ate, elemental matter, most likely. Others were laying out trails, hauling bits of gravel to build a mound, measuring off distances, scouting out the land, all of them here and there on the pavement — a mess to the man ignorant of science, but an orchestrated bit of music to…to a man like Kraken.

He wondered if someday he couldn’t write a paper on it. It was…what was it? An analogy. That’s what it was. And it must, thought Kraken, explain the business of disappeared gin in a flask. The beauty of science was that it made things so clear, so logical. The cosmos, that was what science was after — the whole filthy cosmos. He smiled to think that he understood it. He’d only just run across the word in Ashbless. He’d seen it a hundred times, of course. Such were words. You were blind to them for years. Then one reached out and slammed you, and bingo, like lit candles in a dark room, it turned out they were everywhere — cosmos, cosmos, cosmos. The order of