were endless boats swirling past and here and there one anchored along shore. He might easily have clambered into one and rowed away downriver to Kirk Hammerton. And who was to say he had no accomplices? Narbondo himself might have been waiting beyond the hill in a wagon. Narbondo! The thought of him sobered St. Ives, who had been caught up in the idea of pursuing Pule, of running him down and delivering the scoundrel to the magistrate.
He’d taken a bit for granted, leaving his cook alone in the manor and merely sending an old man along to her when none of them had any idea what sort of foe it was they hunted. He’d been rash. Pule, after all, hadn’t gotten away with a thing. The threat of future danger certainly outweighed the necessity of pursuit.
Stars had flickered on in the evening sky. The lights of Harrogate shown in the west. St. Ives shouldered his rifle, and the two men set out apace for the manor, St. Ives breaking into a jog at the idea of poor Mrs. Langley confronting the hunchbacked doctor or a band of his blood-eating zombies. He and Hasbro were scouring along the last quarter-mile of riverside when the sky beyond the willows changed without warning from deep twilight purple to bright yellow, and a thunderous explosion rocked the meadows.
The man in the chimney pipe hat sat in the branches of a willow, squinting in wondering assessment at the fleeing figure whose head was a mess of loose rags. Through an open window stepped a tall, balding man in a dark suit, a rifle over his shoulder. Billy Deener hadn’t any liking for guns if they were in someone else’s hands and here was one in the hands of a man who quite apparently knew what he was about. He threw the weapon to his shoulder and emptied both barrels at the retreating figure, who stumbled, rolled back to his feet, and ran all the faster, weaving back and forth through knee-high grass, white filaments of loosening bandages trailing behind him as if he were an unraveling mummy.
Deener wondered who this interloper was — a common thief? Not at all likely, not with a head wrapped in rags. Countryside thieves wouldn’t go abroad dressed so. It was easier by far simply to wear a mask. Whoever the man was, he hadn’t been carrying the box, more’s the pity. It would have been an easy thing to strangle him with his own loose bandages.
Deener climbed out of his willow and sprinted toward the silo recently vacated by St. Ives. In a moment he was in at the door, out of sight of the two on the riverbank. Luck was with him. They’d be caught up in the pursuit of the bandaged man. It was a perfect diversion. He couldn’t have planned a better one.
Before him sat the rocket, the space vehicle perched atop it, almost lost in the shadows of the windowless upper reaches of the silo. Deener climbed the stairway toward the domed ceiling. A rare smile flickered along the set line of his lips. Here was something worth meddling with. Worth smashing up. Worth destroying. He’d have the box for Drake and some fun besides, at the expense of the tweed-coated phony with the idiot false mustache. He was tired of the man and his showy friends. He’d fix the filthy lot of them if he could, starting now. He fiddled with the hatch, twisting at the cone with both hands until, with a sigh of escaping air, it clicked counter clockwise half a turn and the circular hatch popped open like the lid of a jack-in-the-box, narrowly missing his outthrust chin. All was dark inside. He fumbled in his coat pocket for a match, struck it against his shoe, and thrust it into the interior. The light illuminated the cabin briefly, and when it flickered out, Deener lowered himself in, struck a second match, and lit a pair of little gaslamps, one on either side of the cabin.
The interior of the craft was a gothic wonder of potted plants and machinery. Deener scratched his head at it, not knowing where to begin. Best to start at the start, he thought wisely. That had always been his way. It was the box he was after first, or at least it was the box that Drake was after. And there it was, affixed to the wall next to his left ear.
He patted his pantleg, feeling beneath the fabric the flat surface of a prybar and the round bulk of a ballpeen hammer. In a moment he had them out and tapped the prybar under the edge of the box with the hammer. A grinning hippo watched him from the front of the box. He raised the hammer in a sudden rage; he’d beat the thing from the wall. Smash the offending hippo. Reduce the thing beside it to splinters. What the hell was it anyway? A sea monster? An octopod? He’d beat it to bits. He’d…but Drake. What would Drake do to him? He lowered the hammer and breathed heavily for a moment, staring at the loathsome box. Then once again he shoved his bar in under it, gave it a heave, and caught the box as it fell to the floor. He shook it, but nothing rattled inside. He searched for a latch, but there was none. All six sides of the box were identical, aside from the carvings and a cigar-shaped brass pipe issuing from the mouth of a winking basilisk seated on a divan, a tiny book open on a table beside him. A brass crank thrust out from the ear of the basilisk.
Deener shrugged in momentary resignation, shoved through the hatch, and lay the box on the landing outside, then lowered himself back in. Drooping spikes of orchid flowers caught his eye. Flowers offended him almost as much as the hippo foolery of the box. He slashed at a stem, severing it. Then he hacked at another. They were astonishingly brittle. He swept his arm back and slashed at the little forest of stems. Blossoms flew. He stamped at them, danced on them, pummeling the broad leaves of begonias until they sailed like scattered paper in an autumn wind.
The reflection of his face in a porthole window caught his eye, and he lashed out at it, smashing the curved end of the bar against the heavy glass, which thudded with the blow but refused to shatter. That wouldn’t do. He smashed at it again and then again, cursing it, wheezing for breath. He threw down the bar and plucked up the hammer. Indestructible, was it? He’d see about that. He grabbed an iron rung on the curved wall of the ship and edged in around a cushioned seat. He couldn’t seem to get the right angle. Glancing blows wouldn’t do. The damned seat was square in the way. He beat at the chair, the hammerhead ripping into the soft leather. He kicked at it, shrieking, whipping around as if to surprise the window and delivering against it one final blow. The handle of the hammer split as a spider web of cracks sprang into the heavy glass, breaking the reflection of his sweating face into fragments. He threw down the rest of the handle and pulled himself through the hatch, losing his hat in the process. It bounced once on the landing, rolled onto the stairs, and sailed into the diminishing light of the silo, tumbling groundward end over end.
In a rage, he threw his prybar after it, then stooped, grabbed the box, and raised it over his head as if to smash it down too, to reduce it to rubble on the cobbled floor forty feet below. He stood just so, heaving with exertion, animal noises issuing past his teeth, and then slowly lowered the box, visions of Kelso Drake winking into focus across the tangled confusion of his mind. He turned and leaped wildly down the stairs, three at a time, his breath escaping in mewling grunts with each jolt.
He jerked to a stop at the base of the stairs, crouching before a bank of levers on the smooth side of the rocket. He dropped the box and grasped first one and then another of the levers, wrenching them this way and that. One snapped off in his hand and he slammed it against the others, then cast it with such force against the clapboard wall of the silo that it impaled itself, vibrating audibly.
He reached for another lever, but stopped dead. A humming noise, growing louder by the moment, filled the silo. A low rush followed, building toward a roar. Billy Deener leaped back at a quick surge of heat from the base of the rocket. He grinned with sudden anticipation, and in a stooping run, grabbed the box from the stones with one hand, his fallen hat with the other, and was out the door, pounding across the green toward a distant copse that lay like a shadow against the evening sky.
A blast behind threw him onto his face in the grass, and the darkness suddenly evaporated. He crouched, turned his shaded eyes toward the silo, and watched in amazement the domed roof burst outward in a spray of shingles and shards of wood, the debris spinning slowly in the air roundabout the shattered roof. Through the airborne debris rose the rocket, a pinwheel of sparks showering down like bursting fireworks. It seemed hardly to make headway, but angled jerkily, its nose threatening to dip groundward.
Deener was struck with the sudden thought that the entire thing was going nowhere, that it might teeter over and plummet onto the green, onto his head, in fact. He rose slowly to all fours, ready to throw himself flat, then dashed once more for the trees, watching the struggling rocket over his shoulder.
The thing stopped abruptly and hung for a moment in the air. It shuddered, like a dog shaking water from its coat, and the dark little sphere at the top popped off in another wash of sparks, soaring like a champagne cork northward, over the tops of the willows along the River Nidd, whistling as it flew like a rubberized, inflated bat slowly losing air through a tiny hole. The whistling diminished, momentary silence fell, then the remains of the rocket smashed full length onto the meadow, flickering with sparkling little fires before snuffing out into darkness. Deener watched with evident satisfaction from the edge of the wood. He clapped his hat onto his head, tossed his box skyward, caught it, and strode away through the trees toward the village of Kirk Hammerton.
