The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

A closet, if you follow me, is something more like home to him.”

“Perhaps he’s thumping for another pan of pudding,” said St. Ives. “I’m half inclined to give it to him. Reminds me of Mr. Dick — do you recall? — up at Bingley. He built that clever device for trapping roaches and then hadn’t the heart to do them in. Fed a small family of them for a week until the cat ate them and destroyed the device. Do you remember that?”

“Very well, sir.”

“Damned curious cat, if you ask me. But we won’t feed this roach. Not a drop of blood, not a slice of pudding. We’ll give him back to the infinite.”

The next morning, when St. Ives peered in at the window once again, the second ghoul was dead. Shards of the crockery bowl that had contained the pudding protruded from his mouth like teeth.

St. Ives spent the day testing the aerating device and readying his ship, a spherical iron shell crosshatched with lines of rivets, atop what would appear to the untutored eye to be an enormous Chinese rocket, pointed toward the domed roof of the silo in which it sat. A series of pulleys and chains allowed for the drawing-back of the dome and, St. Ives prayed, for the issuance of the craft. Along either side of the vehicle were arched wings, batlike and close to the hull. And from the base of the wings protruded exhaust and motivator tubes. Windows, heavy with glass, encircled the craft beneath the conical locking mechanism of the hatch. The sight of the ship satisfied St. Ives entirely. He climbed the wooden stairway that spiraled up and around to the hatch, rapping the iron skin of the ship, peering in at the little cluster of potted orchids and begonias that would aid Keeble’s box in supplying oxygen. He puffed a lungful of air onto the sensing device that would record prevailing levels of gasses in the cabin. It was a frightful risk, sending the craft into the heavens unmanned. He might quite easily lose it in the sea, or watch horror-struck as it smashed down into the suburbs. But it was preferable, all in all, to being aboard an untested craft that suffered such a fate. The needle on the gas detection gauge swung briefly beneath its crystal.

The Keeble box was anchored firmly, the ridiculous hippos and apes carved into the rosewood top grinning out at St. Ives, absolute Keeble trademarks. He pushed the tester button with his finger and a little spray of green chlorophyll dust shot out, carried on a mixture of helium and oxygen. The gauge once again gave a brief leap, then settled as the oxygen dissipated in the general atmosphere of the cabin. St. Ives nodded.

As he clumped back down the stairs, he noted with satisfaction that there wasn’t a single compelling reason to return to London. No word had come regarding the endeavors of the Trismegistus Club. Certainly they could carry on without him for a week. It was entirely likely that the wayward Kraken had been found, that Kelso Drake had heeded the Captain’s warning and scuttled like a beetle into his dark satanic mills. Godall was a marvel — inscrutable, capable. Captain Powers was a rock. The two alone could defend London against a siege of zombies and millionaires. What were they all fooling about with, anyway? What dreary machinations were worth St. Ives’ abandoning the spacecraft, which would, early next morning, angle out through the heavens above West Yorkshire, above the astonished populace of Wetherby and Leeds, to describe its flaming halo in the thin air of the twilit sky and plummet homeward that same evening, already the stuff of legend, to its berth on the moor beyond Robb’s Head?

London could wait for him. They’d have him soon enough. But for the moment they’d play second fiddle. It was the consequence of the scientific fates, and — he thought to himself while regarding from the open doorway of the silo the finny sweep of the wings and the brass and silver of the polished hull — of the scientific muses. He set out across the lawn. It was three in the afternoon by his pocketwatch. Late enough by any reckoning for a glass of Double Diamond. Two, perhaps.

But he wasn’t halfway to the house when, from the direction on the River Nidd, two shots rang out, echoing against the afternoon stillness. St. Ives began to run, redoubling his pace at the sight of Hasbro, a rifle smoking in his hands, standing among the willows. Hasbro threw the rifle to his shoulder, and settled his cheek against the stock. He jerked just a bit with the recoil, then crouched and peered away east into the foliage along the river.

“What the devil!” cried St. Ives, racing up. He could see nothing among the willows and shrubs.

“A prowler, sir,” replied Hasbro, ready, it seemed, to let fly another round if given the least opportunity. “I caught him in the study, and he was out the open window before I could have a go at him. My fetching the rifle, I fear, gave him time to make away along the riverbank. He’d been at your papers, sir — strewed them across the floor, emptied drawers in the press. He was still at it when I happened in — and a lucky circumstance that was — so I’m in hopes he hadn’t found what it was he was after.”

St. Ives was loping across the lawn when these last words were uttered, leaving Hasbro to poke among the riverside shrubs for the prowler. He burst in through the open front door, past the disheveled study and into the library. He hauled out his copy of Squires’ Complications and thrust his hand into the broad hiatus left by the stout volume. Behind was the familiar bulk of Owlesby’s manuscript, undiscovered.

He sighed with relief, wondering at the same time who it was had been after it. For it had to be Owlesby’s manuscript the prowler sought. Like it or not, he thought despairingly, London would have him. Mohammed had refused to go the mountain, so here was the mountain, dragging round to Harrogate to kick apart his personal effects. He couldn’t shake the machinations after all. He returned Squires’ to its niche and walked into the study where Hasbro, having lost his man on the riverbank, was just then stepping in through an open French window.

The study, as Hasbro had promised, was ransacked. What had been heaps of paper were no longer heaped, but were scattered across the plank floor. Books lay higgledy-piggledy. Drawers were yanked from chests, their contents flung and kicked. A plaster bust of Kepler lay split in two, clubbed, apparently, with a heavy Waterford decanter, shards of which glistened in the afternoon sunlight that poured through the windows. Half the destruction was clearly a matter of a wild and hasty search for the manuscript; half of it was pure, irrational villainy.

St. Ives rolled Kepler’s broken head with his toe. “Did you get a good look at this man?”

“Tolerably, sir, but he was clothed so strangely that his features were effectively hidden.”

“Disguise was it?”

Hasbro shrugged, then shook his head. “Bandages, it seemed to me, swaddling his head. He peered at me through eyeslits, for all the world like one of the Pharaohs at the museum in Cairo. And he reeked of some chemical — carbon tetrachloride, if I’m not mistaken, and something that very much resembled anchovy paste.”

“Was it, do you suppose, one of our ghouls?”

“I’d hesitate to say so, sir. He was far too energetic — in the act of beating poor Kepler so altogether viciously that I took him at once for a madman. The rifle, I could see straightaway, was the ticket.”

St. Ives nodded. It certainly seemed so, given the mess. Damned foolish way to go about thievery — smashing things up for sport in the middle of the afternoon. St. Ives stiffened, the sudden picture of the man with the chimney pipe hat flickering unbidden into his mind. “Did he wear a hat?”

“No, sir.”

“Fairly short, was he? Lank, oily hair? Yellow shirt, perhaps, and a leather coat with the sleeves out at the elbows?”

Hasbro shook his head. “On the stout side, sir, running to fat. Blondish hair in curls.”

St. Ives was relieved. He didn’t at all want it to have been Keeble’s garret thief. And what on earth would the man have been after? Keeble had the plans to the engine, after all. Blond, curly hair — the description was maddeningly familiar somehow. A face swaddled in chemical- soaked bandages. St. Ives snapped his fingers, then slammed his hand into his open fist. Narbondo’s assistant! What was his name? Pigby…Peebles…Publes. St. Ives routed through his mind. Pule! That was it. Willis Pule. Of course it was he. Narbondo had set him to it. But how in the world, he wondered, did the doctor know that St. Ives possessed the papers? “Let’s have a look along the river, shall we? Lock the house up and tell Mrs. Langley to shriek like a banshee from the kitchen window if she hears so much as a floorboard creak.”

And in moments the two men, each carrying a rifle loaded with birdshot, thrashed among shore grasses and willows, following Pule’s evident footprints northwest along the Nidd until, some mile down, they disappeared into the waters of the river itself their quarry having, apparently, swum for it. A man named Binger ferried the two across in a little rowboat, promising, on the strength of a half crown’s reward, to return to the manor and keep Mrs. Langley company in the kitchen, and to retrieve the two of them from the opposite shore when they’d worked their way back down.

But across the Nidd there were no footprints at all, and their chances of success declined with the settling dusk. Pule, apparently, had sloshed along in the shallows, perhaps doubled back upriver to confuse them. There