The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

thrust out of the front of the box. He could hear the ratchet turnings of the clockworks. He held the box in front of his face so that the light from the gaslamp illuminated the spout. He closed one eye and squinted, following the thread of illumination up the spout and into the interior of the box. There was a click, a whir; Pule jerked back in sudden tenor. Was it a suicide device?

A jet of gas wheezed out, spraying over his face. Spitting and coughing, he cast the box onto the bed. He’d been poisoned. He knew it. The box wheezed again, and a great cloud of green dust blew out of the spout with such force that although he threw himself over backwards onto the floor, the gas enveloped him utterly.

He rolled, smashing into the wall beneath the open window. The tower of books that propped the window cascaded into the street, and the window crashed down, sealing the room. Pule shrieked, a high, frightful, elflike ululation that reinforced his fear that he’d been poisoned. The air had been suddenly dyed a livid green. He would choke on poison gas! He’d been tricked. It had been a plot to eliminate the hunchback, and his betrayal of the monster had brought about his own ruin.

He yanked on the window, batting at the frame. It wouldn’t budge. He looked wildly about him and lunged for the door, catching sight of his coat on a nail driven into the jamb. Lunging for it, he tore the coat free and flung it over the still spouting box, smothering the escaping gasses. He picked up the mirror and the books in a single heap and flung the lot of them through the closed window, shoving his head out into the night air, breathing great gulps of it and watching books and glass shards cascade onto the street four stories below.

His chest heaved; his head cleared; his equilibrium and sense of proportion returned. Of course it wasn’t a poisoned gas device. There would have been no con-ceivable way to have calculated the odd events that had led him to board that train in Harrogate. His enemies weren’t half that clever. This was something else. It was just possible that he’d been a victim of his own zealous actions. What if, he wondered, the box had contained an emerald, and was designed so that uninformed tampering would destroy the gem? Was it emerald dust that filled the room? But why in the devil would a man build such a box, or have it built? Had Owlesby been a lunatic who would rather the emerald be destroyed than profit a thief? Or was there more to it? Had Owlesby been a smuggler?

Of course he had. And here, it seemed certain, was a way by which to utterly destroy and disperse evidence that had fallen into the wrong hands. It was frightfully ingenious if it was so.

Pule bent back into the room. Idle speculation was getting him nowhere. One way or another, the box was worth nothing to him. It might, however, give Narbondo a few trying moments. And Narbondo’s box — Pule would have that. He tucked the coat around the still whirring box and stepped out through the door, passing on the stairs his hurrying landlord who began to address him, then fell silent, staring at him in horror.

“Damn you!” cried Pule, pushing the man out of the way and drawing himself up as if to flail at him. Pule stood heaving with wrath, the man cowering against the banister, his countenance frozen. “What are you staring at, idiot!” shrieked Pule. “You soulless halfwit!” Pule choked. He couldn’t breathe. The man’s face seemed to be inflating like a balloon, the shocked look in his eyes testimony to Pule’s condition. Blood rushed in Pule’s ears. His heart smashed in his chest. His face burned.

With a snarl of released rage he kicked the man in the ribs, possessed by the desire to beat him senseless, to flail at him with the heavy box, to bash him through the tilted railing and watch him fall down the vortex between the spiraling stairs the thirty-odd feet to the distant floor below.

The man’s face loosened. He screamed, and the sound of it propelled Pule down the stairs in great leaping strides, hollering curses over his shoulder. An old man stepped out from a door onto a landing as if to detain Pule. He gasped and fled back inside, slamming the door behind him. A bolt rattled into place. At the ground floor Pule crashed through the street door, surprising two women who were just that moment stepping in. They shrieked in unison, one fainting, one leaping across toward a half-open closet as if to hide.

Pule gritted his teeth. His foes were falling before him. And they’d continue to fall. There’d be no stopping him. On the street he took to his heels, fleeing through the black night, neither running from anything nor toward anything, just running, holding the box beneath his arm, beset, it seemed to him, by no end of devils. He slowed, finally, gasping and sweating, outside a low tavern on Drury Lane. A group of men lounged in the gutter, tossing coins at a target chalked on the street. They paid him little heed. As he walked past, a coin rebounded off his heel.

“Hey, mate!” shouted an exasperated, accusing voice.

Pule turned on him. The man blanched, croaked out a halfmouthed curse, and fled into the open door of the tavern. His companions, themselves looking up, shouted, rose in a body, and followed the first man, the door of the tavern sailing shut with such force that rust from the hinges sprayed out into the lamplit road. The sound of scraping tables and benches could be heard from within, clunking against the door.

Pule turned slowly and resumed his journey, pondering darkly the revenge he’d have on them all — the well-placed anarchist bomb blowing to shreds the likes of such idlers along with the leering carp dealers of the world. He set a course for Pratlow Street.

FIFTEEN Turmoil on Pratlow Street

Shiloh the New Messiah leaned against the wall in a straight-backed oak chair, all of the joints of which were loose, the glue having dried to dust years before. He sat in silent meditation — hadn’t moved for half an hour. The curtain had been pulled back from the little shrine across the room, and in it, sitting beside the miniature portrait of Joanna Southcote, was the head of the lady herself in its aquarium.

The crosses we bear…thought Shiloh. He shook his head over it. The afternoon’s meeting in Kensington Gardens had been a disaster. It wouldn’t stand thinking about. It would have to be righted; there was no getting round it. One owed as much to one’s mother.

A brief chattering ensued from the glass box — three or four tentative clacks, then silence. The spark hadn’t entirely departed the head. There were elements of it left, apparently, that awakened at odd intervals like bubbles on the side of a glass, released suddenly for no apparent reason to sail surfaceward and burst. It would be the greatest miracle of all, he thought to himself, if during one of her sojourns into consciousness she would speak — give him a sign of some sort. Utter a telling phrase. Refer, perhaps, to the drawing nigh of the dirigible. But there was nothing, alas, save the random click-clacking of dry molars.

In an hour the moon would be down. Darkness would serve him well. The hunchback, he knew, was engaged at the house on Wardour Street, and would be until morning or until his filthy habits burst his pea-sized heart.

There was a chance, of course, that Narbondo had removed the box from his cabinet — an action that would make its recovery infinitely more complicated. But even so, there were the bones of his mother to consider — bones that he’d foolishly abandoned to the hunchback and his base experimentation. Shiloh remembered the confused hands and shuddered. He’d take the bones and the shroud out in a Gladstone bag. The shroud could be enshrined in its own glass case, not unlike the shroud of Turin. Enthusiasts were eager for the sort of circumstantial evidence inherent in such relics.

There had been the case of the woman on the Normandy coast who possessed a felt cap into which was indelibly stained the image of the Bambino of Aracoeli. A shrine had been built for it in the little village of Combray, and fully ten thousand people a year paraded through to view it — or, for two francs, to touch it. A drunken sailor from Toulouse had snatched it from its perch and clapped it onto his head, which promptly burst into flame, reducing the sailor and the cap simultaneously to ash. Not surprisingly, the urn of mixed ashes drew half again as many pilgrims yearly at double the price. The evangelist, laughing to himself, contemplated the fact that thus even the most vile sinners are put to work for the church. They rot in hell, of course, despite their works.

He arose, closed the curtain, and found the street. Outside, pasty and silent, stood an obedient convert, who in a moment trotted away up Buckeridge Street to summon the brougham. Shiloh was impatient. Eternity lay before him, just a few short days away, and he was itching to get at it. And he was itching, at the same time, to hasten Narbondo’s decline into the pit. He grinned to think of the cursing and gnashing of teeth that would ensue on the morrow when the hunchback dragged himself home, worn and degraded, wondering at his own sanity, perhaps injured from some ill-advised acrobatics, to find that he’d been relieved of the bones and the box in a single evening, that his smug posing hadn’t been worth a penny toot. The brougham swung round the distant corner,