Part II
The Downed Ships:
Jack Owlesby’s Account

The Hansom Cab Lunatic

I was coming along down Holborn Hill in December, beneath a lowering sky and carrying a tin of biscuits and a pound of Brazilian coffee, when a warehouse exploded behind Perkins inn. Smoke and lumber and a twisted sheet of iron, torn nearly in half from the blast, blew out of the mouth of the alley between Kingsway and Newton Street and scattered the half-dozen pedestrians like autumn leaves.

I was clear of it, thank God, but even so the concussion threw me into the gutter, and I dropped the biscuits and coffee and found myself on the seat of my pants, watching a man stagger away from the explosion, out of the mouth of the alley to collapse bloody on the pavement.

I jumped up and ran for the man on the ground, thinking to help but really not thinking at all, when a second blast ripped through and slammed me against a bakery storefront. Glass shattered where my elbow went through the window, and then the rest of me followed, snapping the mullions and tumbling through in an avalanche of buns.

Directly there was another roar—not an explosion this time, but a roof caving in, and then a billow of black smoke pouring out of the alley and a fire that reminded you of the Gordon Riots. I could walk, if you call it that, and between the two of us, the baker and I, we pulled the bloody man across to where my coffee lay spilled out in the gutter. We needn’t have bothered; he was dead, and we could both see it straight off, but you don’t leave even a dead man to burn, not if you can help it.

I couldn’t see worth anything all at once, because of the reek. It was a paper company gone up—a common enough tragedy, except that there was an element or two that made it markedly less common: Mr. Theophilus Godall was there, for one. Maybe you don’t know what that means yet; maybe you do. And the paper company wasn’t just any paper company; it was next door but one to an empty sort of machine works overseen by the Royal Academy, specifically as a sort of closed-to-the-public museum used to house the contrivances built by the great Lord Kelvin and the other inventive geniuses of the Academy.

***

My name is Jack Owlesby, and I’m a friend of Professor Langdon St. Ives, who is perhaps the greatest, mostly unsung, scientist and explorer in the Western Hemisphere. Mr. Oscar Wilde said something recently along the following lines: “Show me a hero,” he said, “and I will write you a tragedy.” He might have taken St. Ives as a case in point. I’m rather more inclined to enlarge upon the heroism, which is easier, and of which you have a remarkable surplus when you tackle a subject like Langdon St. Ives. You yourself might have read about some few of his exploits; and if you have, then I’ll go as far as to tell you that this business of the exploding paper company won’t turn out in the end to be altogether foreign to you.

As for Theophilus Godall, he owns the Bohemian Cigar Divan in Rupert Street, Soho; but there’s more to the man than that.

***

Luckily there was a sharp wind blowing down Kingsway toward the Thames, which scoured the smoke skyward almost as soon as it flooded out of the alley, so that the street was clear enough in between billows. The blast brought a crowd, and they didn’t stand and gawk, as crowds have got a reputation for. Two men even tried to get up the alley toward the fire, thinking that there might have been people trapped there or insensible, but the baker stopped them—and a good thing, too, as you’ll see—pointing out quick that this being a Sunday the paper company was closed, as was everything else in that direction except Perkins Inn, which was safe enough for the moment. He had been out for a look, the baker had, not a minute before the explosion, and could tell us that aside from the dead man there hadn’t been a soul dawdling in the alley except a tall gentleman of upright carriage in a greatcoat and top hat.

All of us looked as one down that grim black alley, all of us thinking the same thing—that the man in the coat, if he had in fact been dawdling there, was dead as a nailhead. The two men who had a minute earlier been making a rush in that direction were happy enough that they had held up, for the flames licked across at the brick façade opposite the paper company, and a wide section of wall crumbled outward in a roar of collapsing rubble.

The baker, as if coming to, clapped a hand onto the top of his baldhead and sprinted for his own shop—thinking to get some few of his things clear before it went up too. The heat drove him back, though, and I can picture him clearly in my mind today, wringing his hands and scuffing his feet in the spilled coffee next to the dead man, and waiting for his shop to burn.

It didn’t, though; thank heaven. It began to rain, is what it did, with such a crashing of thunder that, with the first bolt, we thought another roof had caved in. The drops fell thick and steady, as if someone were pouring it out of a bucket, and the baker fell to his knees right there in the street and clasped his hands together with the rainwater streaming down his face. I hope he said a word for the dead man behind him—although if he did, it was a brief one, for he stood up just as quick as he had knelt, and pointed across at a man in a greatcoat and hat, walking away in the direction of the river.

He carried a stick, and his profile betrayed an aquiline nose and a noble sort of demeanor—you could see it in his walk—that made him out to be something more than a gentleman: royalty, you’d think, except that his hat and coat had seen some wear, and his trousers were splashed with mud from the street.

The baker shouted. Of course it was the man he’d seen loitering in the alley directly before the blast. And two constables had the man pinned and labeled before he had a chance to run for it. He wouldn’t have run for it anyway, of course, for it was Godall, as you’ve no doubt deduced by now.

I was possessed by the notion that I ought to go to his defense, tell the constables that they’d collared the wrong man. I didn’t, though, having learned a lesson from that earlier unthinking dash of mine into what the newspapers, in their silly way, sometimes call “the devouring elephant,” meaning the fire, and still limping from it, too. They would arrest me along with Godall, is what they would do, as an accomplice. My word is nothing to the constabulary. And I was certain that they wouldn’t keep him two minutes anyway, once they knew who he was.

The rain fell harder, if that were possible, and the flames died away almost as fast as they’d risen, and the fire brigade, when it clanged up, had nothing at all to do but wait. The smoke boiled away, too, on the instant. Just like that. You would have thought there’d be a fresh billow, what with the sudden rain and all, but there wasn’t; it was simply gone, leaving some whitish smoke tumbling up out of the embers of the dwindling fire.

It struck me as funny at the time, the fire and blast so quick and fierce, and then the smoke just dying like that. It’s a consequence of hanging about with men like St. Ives and Godall, I guess, that you jump to conclusions about things; you want everything to be a mystery. No, that’s not quite it: you suspect everything of being a mystery; what you want is a different story, which is to say, no story at all. There was a story in this, though. It took about thirty seconds of thought to conclude that it had been an incendiary bomb and a lot of chemical smoke, which had fairly quickly used itself up. The explosion had to have been manufactured.

My biscuits, it turned out—the tin I’d dropped in the road—had been trampled, and I left for Jermyn Street empty-handed. It’s a good walk in the rain—by that I mean a long one—but it gave me time to think about two things: whether the tragedy that afternoon had anything to do with Lord Kelvin’s machine (the presence of Godall rather argued that it had) and what I would tell Dorothy about it all. Dorothy, if you don’t already know, is my wife, and at the moment she was a wife who wouldn’t be keen on my getting caught up in another of St. Ives’s adventures when the last one hadn’t quite got cold yet. I had the unsettling notion that “caught up” was just the right verb, even if a little on the passive side; this had all the earmarks of that sort of thing.

St. Ives wasn’t in Harrogate, at his laboratory. He was in London paying a visit to my father-in-law—Mr. William Keeble of Jermyn Street, the toy maker and inventor—consulting him on the building of an apparatus that doesn’t concern us here, and is too wild and unlikely for me to mention without throwing a cloud of suspicion and doubt over the whole story. But it was fortuitous, St. Ives’s being in London, because if he hadn’t been I would have had to send a message up to Harrogate, and he would have come quick enough, maybe to find nothing at all and have wasted a trip.

As it was, I ran him down that night in an oyster bar near Leicester Square. The rain had given off, but the clouds hadn’t, and it felt like snow. St. Ives sat reading a Standard that wasn’t long off the presses. News of the explosion, however, didn’t appear on the front page, which was fairly bursting with an extravagant story of another sort altogether. And here my own story digresses for a bit.

I wish I could quote it to you, this second story, but I haven’t got it anymore; so I’ll tell it to you straight out, although I warn you that I can’t do it justice, and that you wouldn’t half believe me if I could. Any good library, though, can afford you a copy of a London newspaper from the day in question, if you’re the sort of Thomas in the popular phrase.

And note that I haven’t tried to sandbag you with the notion that I’d seen this second tragedy as well as the explosion up in Holborn: what I’m telling you now is neither art nor journalism, but a sort of lager and lime mix-up of both, and maybe nearer the truth for that.

***

It was what the Standard referred to as an “imbroglio,” although that, I’m afraid, is a small word, and this was no small matter. A lorry had very nearly overturned on Whitefriars Street. It had been running along south, heavily laden, toward the Embankment, its load covered in canvas, several layers, and lashed down against the wind and possible rain. Some few witnesses claimed that there was a man beneath the canvas, too, peering out at the day, although no one saw him so clearly as to identify him beyond their generally agreeing that he ran to tall and thin, and was hatless and nearly bald.

The lorry, angling round across Tudor Street and onto Carmelite, caught a bit of stone curb with its wheel. There was a shifting of cargo and a horrible shout from the half-hidden man on board, and the wagon, as if it were a great fish on the end of a played-out line, shuddered almost to a stop, the horses stumbling and their shoes throwing sparks on the pavement. A terrible mechanical howling set in, as if an engine had just that minute been started up.

The driver—an enormous man with a beard—cursed and slammed at the reins and whipped the poor beasts nearest him as if to take the hide off their flanks. They tried to drive on, too—desperately, to hear the witnesses tell of it—but the lorry, or rather the cargo, seemed to compel the horses back, and for the space of a long minute it looked as if time had stopped dead, except for the suddenly falling rain and the cursing and the flailing of the driver. Then there was the snap of a stay chain coming loose and the lorry lurched forward, the chain swinging round into the spokes, and there was such a groaning and screeching and banging that it seemed sure the wagon would go to pieces on the road and the horses plummet down Carmelite and into the river.

It wasn’t the lorry, though, that was tearing itself apart. The air suddenly was full of flying debris, shooting out of the buildings along the street: nails and screws pried themselves out of door casings and clapboards; an iron pot flew from an open window as if it had been thrown; door knockers clanked and clattered and hammered in the hands of a dozen anxious ghosts and then tore away from their doorfronts with a screech of overstrained steel. Even the two iron hitching posts in front of the Temple Inn lurched out of the ground in a shower of dirt and stone fragments, and all of it shot away in the direction of that impossible lorry, a sort of horizontal hailstorm of hardware clanging and banging against the mysterious cargo and clamping tight to it as if glued there.

A man on the street, the paper said, was struck down by one of the posts, and wasn’t expected to recover his senses, and two or three others had to be attended to by the surgeon, who removed “shrapnel and all manner of iron debris.” Shopwindows were shattered by stuff inside flying out through them, and the wagon itself, as if possessed, rocked up and down on its hounds like a spring pole.

During the mêlée there sounded an awful screaming and scrabbling from under the canvas, where the unfortunate passenger (fortunate, actually, that he was padded by several folds of heavy canvas) fought to clamber farther around behind the cargo. His cries attested to his partial failure to accomplish this feat, and if the strange business had gone on a moment longer he would have been beaten dead, and half a dozen houses along Tudor and Carmelite dismantled nail by nail and left in a heap.

The howling noise stopped, though, just like that. The horses jerked forward and away, hauling the lorry with its broken stay chain and spokes, and disappearing around onto the Embankment as the rush of iron debris fell straight to the roadway in a shower, clanking along in the wake of the wagon until it all tired out and lay still.

The street lay deathly silent after that, although the whole business took only about a minute and a half. Rain began to pour down (I’ve already described it; it was the same rain that saved the baker’s shop up in Holborn), and the lorry got away clean, no one suspecting that the whole odd mess involved any definable crime until it was discovered later in the afternoon that a building owned by the Royal Academy—a machine works—had been broken into and a complicated piece of machinery stolen and the paper company next door ignited…It was thought at first (by anyone who wasn’t certifiable) that this business of the flying iron might be connected to the theft of the machine.

The peculiar thing, then, was that a spokesman from the Royal Academy—the secretary, Mr. Parsons—denied it flat out and quick enough so that his denials were printed in the Standard by nightfall. There wasn’t any connection, he said. Couldn’t be. And he was extremely doubtful about any nonsense concerning flying door knockers. Science, Mr. Parsons seemed to say, didn’t hold with flying door knockers.

Tell that to the man laid out by the iron post, I remember thinking, but it was St. Ives and Godall who between them made the whole thing plain. I forgot to tell you, in fact, that Godall was at the oyster bar, too—he and Hasbro, St. Ives’s gentleman’s gentleman.

But this is where art leans in and covers the page with her hand—she being leery of making things plain when the story would be better left obscure while the reader draws a breath. “All in good time” has ever been the way of art.

***

And anyway it wasn’t until the first of the ships went down in the Dover Strait that any of us was certain—absolutely certain; or at least Godall was, from the deductive end of things, and St. Ives from the scientific. I wasn’t certain of anything yet.

I was sitting on one of Godall’s sofas, I remember, waiting for the arrival of St. Ives and thinking that I ought to take up a pipe and thinking too that I had enough vices already—indolence being one of them—when a man came in with a parcel. Godall reacted as if the Queen had walked in, and introduced the man to me as Isaac Laquedem, but aside from the odd name and his great age and frailty, there seemed to be nothing notable about him. He was a peddler, actually, and I forgot about him almost at once, their business having nothing to do with me—or with this story except in a peripheral way.

My father-in-law, William Keeble, had been teaching me the trade of toy-making, and I sat there meddling with an India-rubber elephant with enormous ears that I had finished assembling that very morning. Its trunk would rotate when you pushed its belly, and the ears would flap, and out of its mouth would come the magnified noise of ratcheting gears, which sounded, if you had an imagination, like trumpeting—or at least like the trumpeting of a rubber elephant with mechanical nonsense inside. It was funny to look at, though.

I remember wondering what it would have been like if Keeble himself had built it, and thinking that I at least ought to have given it a hat, maybe with a bird in it, and I listened idly to Godall and the old fellow talk about numismatics and about a clockwork match that the man was peddling. Then he left, very cheerfully, entirely forgetting his parcel of matches and going away up Rupert Street toward Brewer.

A minute passed, neither of us noticing the parcel. Then Godall spotted it and shouted damnation, or something, and I was up and out the door with it under my arm and with my elephant in my other hand. I ran up the street, dodging past people until I reached the corner, where I found the old man in a tearoom trying to sell little cheesecloth bags of green tea that could be dropped into a cup of boiling water and then retrieved again—not for the purpose of being reused, mind you, but so that the leaves wouldn’t muck up the brew. The proprietor read tea leaves, though, as well as palms and scone crumbs, and wasn’t at all interested in the invention, although I thought it was fairly clever and said so when I returned his automatic matches. He said that he admired my elephant, too, and I believe he did. We chatted over a cup of tea for ten minutes and then I strolled back down, thinking correctly that St. Ives would have shown up by then.

There at the side of the street, half a block up from the cigar divan, was a hansom cab, rather broken-down and with a curtain of shabby velvet drawn across the window. As I was passing it, the curtain pushed aside and a face popped out. I thought at first it was a woman, but it wasn’t; it was a man with curled hair to his shoulders. His complexion was awful, and he had a sort of greasy look about him and a high effeminate collar cut out of a flowery chintz. It was his eyes, though, that did the trick. They were filled with a mad unfocused passion, as if everything around him—the cab, the buildings along Rupert Street, me—signified something to him. His glance shot back and forth in a cockeyed vigilance, and he said, almost whispering, “What is that?”

He was looking up the street at the time, so I looked up the street too, but saw nothing remarkable. “Beg your pardon,” I said.

“That there.”

He peered down the street now, so I did too.

“There.”

Now it was up into the air, toward a bank of casements on the second floor. There was a man staring out of one, smoking a cigar.

“Him?” I asked.

He gave me such a look that I thought I’d landed upon it at last, but then I saw that I was wrong.

“That. In your hand.”

The elephant. He blinked rapidly, as if he had something in his eye. “I like that,” he said, and he squinted at me as if he knew me. There was something in his face, too, that I almost recognized. But he was clearly mad, and the madness, somehow, had given him a foreign cast, as if he were a citizen from nowhere on earth and had scrambled his features into an almost impenetrable disguise.

I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth, and when he reached for the rubber elephant, I gave it to him, thinking, I’ll admit, that he’d give it back after having a look. Instead he disappeared back into the cab, taking the elephant with him. The curtain closed, and I heard from him no more. I knocked once on the door. “Go away,” he said.

So I did. He wanted the creature more than I wanted it. What did I want to build toys for, anyway, if not for the likes of him? And besides, it pretty clearly needed a hat. That’s the sort of thing I told myself. It was half cowardice, though, my just walking away. I didn’t want to make a scene by going into the cab after him and be found brawling with a madman over a rubber elephant. I argued it out in my head as I stepped into Godall’s shop, ready to relate the incident to my credit, and there, standing just inside the threshold, impossibly, was the lunatic himself.

I must have looked staggered, for Hasbro leaped up in alarm at the sight of my face, and the person in the doorway turned on her heel with a startled look. She wasn’t the fellow in the truck; she was a woman with an appallingly similar countenance and hair, equally greasy, and with a blouse of the same material. This one wore a shawl, though, and was older by a good many years, although her face belied her age. It was almost unlined due to some sort of unnatural puffiness—as if she were a goblin that had come up to Soho wearing a cleverly altered melon for a head. This was the mother, clearly, of the creature in the cab.

She smiled theatrically at me. Then, as if she had just that instant recognized me, her smile froze into a look of snooty reproach, and she ignored me utterly from then on. I had the distinct feeling that I’d been cut, although you’d suppose that being cut by a madwoman doesn’t count for much—any more than having one’s rubber elephant stolen by a madman counts for anything.

“A man like that ought to be brought to justice,” she said to St. Ives, who gestured toward the sofa and raised his eyebrows at me.

“This is Mr. Owlesby,” he said to the woman. “You can speak freely in front of him.”

She paid me no attention at all, as if to say that she would speak freely, or would not, before whomever she chose, and no one would stop her. I sat down.

“Brought to justice,” she said.

“Justice,” said St. Ives, “was brought to him, or he to it, sometime back. He died in Scandinavia. He fell into a lake where he without a doubt was frozen to death even before he drowned. I…I saw him tumble into the lake myself. He didn’t crawl out.”

“He did crawl out.”

“Impossible,” said St. Ives—and it was impossible, too. Except that when it came to the machinations of Dr. Narbondo you were stretching a point using the word impossible, and St. Ives knew it. Doubt flickered in his eyes, along with other emotions, too complex to fathom. I could see that he was animated, though. Since his dealings with the comet and the death of Ignacio Narbondo, St. Ives had been enervated, drifting from one scientific project to another, finishing almost nothing, lying on the divan in his study through the long hours of the afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep. For the space of a few days he had undertaken to restore Alice’s vegetable garden, but the effort had cost him too much, and he had abandoned it to the moles and the weeds. I could turn this last into a metaphor of the great man’s life over the last couple of years, but I won’t. I promised to leave tragedy alone.

“Look here,” the woman said, handing across what appeared to be a letter. It had been folded up somewhere for years, in someone’s pocket from the look of it, and the cheap paper was yellowed and torn. It was addressed to someone named Kenyon, but the name was new to me and the contents of the letter were nothing of interest. The handwriting was the point as was the signature: Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives handed it across to Godall, who was measuring out tobacco on a balance scale in the most disinterested way imaginable.

She handed over a second letter, this one fresh from last week’s post. It was in an envelope that appeared to have been dropped in the street and trod upon by horses, and part of the letter inside, including the salutation, was an unreadable ruin. The first two paragraphs were written in a plain hand, clearly by a man who cared little for stray blots and smudges. And then, strangely, the final several sentences were inscribed by the man who had written the first missive. It didn’t take an expert to see that. There was a flourish in the T’s, and the uppercase A, of which there were two, was several times the size of any other letter, and was printed rather than enscripted, and then crossed pointlessly at the top, giving it an Oriental air. In a word, the handwriting at the end of this second letter was utterly distinct, and utterly identical to that of the first. The signature, however, was different. “H. Frost,” it read, with a scattering of initials afterward that I don’t recall.

The text of this second letter was interesting. It mentioned certain papers that this H. Frost was anxious to find, and would pay for. He was a professor, apparently, at Edinburgh University, a chemist, and had heard rumors that papers belonging to our madwoman’s father were lost in the vicinity of the North Downs some forty years ago. He seemed to think that the papers were important to medical science, and that her father deserved a certain notoriety that he’d never gotten in his tragic life. It went on so, in flattering and promising tones, and then was signed, as I said, “H. Frost.”

St. Ives handed this second letter to Godall and pursed his lips. I had the uncanny feeling that he hesitated because of his suspicions about the woman, about her reasons for having come round with the letters at all. “The doctor is dead, madam,” was what he said finally.

She shook her head. “Those letters were written with the same hand; anyone can see that.”

“In fact,” said St. Ives, “the more elaborate the handwriting, the easier it is to forge. The reproduction of eccentricities in handwriting is cheap and easy; it’s the subtleties that are difficult. Why someone would want to forge the doctor’s hand, I don’t know. It’s an interesting puzzle, but one that doesn’t concern me. My suggestion is to ignore it utterly. Don’t respond. Do nothing at all.”

“He ought to be brought to justice is what I’m saying.”

“He’s dead,” said St. Ives finally. And then, after a moment of silence, he said, “And if this mystery were worth anything to me at all, then I’d have to know a great deal more about the particulars, wouldn’t I? What papers, for example? Who was your father? Do you have any reason to think that his lost papers are valuable to science or were lost in the North Downs forty years ago?”

Now it was her turn to hesitate. There was a good deal that she wasn’t saying. Bringing people to justice wasn’t her only concern; that much was apparent. She fiddled with her shawl for a moment, pretending to adjust it around her shoulders but actually casting about her mind for a way to reveal what it was she was after without really revealing anything at all. “My father’s name was John Kenyon. He was…misguided when he was young,” she said. “And then he was misused when he was older. He associated with the grandfather of the man you think is dead, and he developed a certain serum, a longevity serum, out of the glands of a fish, I misremember which one. When the elder Narbondo was threatened with transportation for experiments in vivisection, my grandfather went into hiding. He went over to Rome…”

“Moved to the Continent?” asked St. Ives.

“No, he became a papist. He repented of all his dealings in alchemy and vivisection, and would have had me go into a nunnery to save me from the world, except that I wouldn’t have it. His manuscripts disappeared. He claimed to have destroyed them, but I’m certain he didn’t, because once, when I was about fifteen, my mother found what must have been them, in a trunk. They were bound into a notebook, which she took and tried to destroy, but he stopped her. They fought over the thing, she calling him a hypocrite and he out of his mind with not knowing what he intended to do.

“But my father was a weak man, a worm. He saved the notebook right enough and beat my mother and went away to London and was gone a week. He came home drunk, I remember, and penitent, and I married and moved away within the year and didn’t see him again until he was an old man and dying. My mother was dead by then for fifteen years, and he thought it had been himself that killed her—and it no doubt was. He started in to babble about the notebook, again, there on his deathbed. It had been eating at him all those years. What he said, as he lay dying, was that it had been stolen from him by the Royal Academy. A man named Piper, who had a chair at Oxford, wanted the formulae for himself, and had got the notebook away from him with strong drink and the promise of money. But there had never been any money. I ought to find the notebook and destroy it, my father said, so that he might rest in peace.

“Well, the last thing I cared about, I’ll say it right out, was him resting in peace. The less peace he got, the better, and amen. So I didn’t do anything. I had a son, by then, and a drunk for a husband who was as pitiful as my father was and who I hadn’t seen in a fortnight and hoped never to see again. But I was never a lucky one. That part don’t matter, though. What matters is that there are these papers that he mentions, this notebook. And I know that it’s him—the one you claim is dead up in Scandinavia—that wants the papers now. No one else knows about them, you see, except him and a couple of old hypocrites from the Royal Academy, and they wouldn’t need to ask me about them, would they, having stolen the damned things themselves. He’s got his methods, the doctor has, and this letter doesn’t come as any surprise to me, no surprise at all. If you know him half as well as you claim to, gentlemen, then it won’t come as any surprise to you either, no matter how many times you think you saw him die.”

And so ended her speech. It just rushed out of her, as if none of it were calculated, and yet I was fairly certain that every word had been considered and that half the story, as they say, hadn’t been told. She had edited and euphemized the thing until there was nothing left but the surface, with the emotional nonsense put in to cover the detail that was left out.

She had got to St. Ives, too. And Godall, it seemed to me, was weighing out the same bag of tobacco for the tenth time. Both of them were studying the issue hard. If she had come in through the door intending to address their weightiest fear, she could hardly have been more on the money than she was. Something monumental was brewing, and had been since the day of the explosion and the business down by the Embankment. No run-of-the-mill criminal was behind it; that weeks had gone by in the meantime was evidence only that it was brewing slowly, that it wouldn’t be rushed, and was ominous as a result.

“May we keep the letters?” asked St. Ives.

“No,” she replied, snatching both of them off the counter where Godall had laid them. She turned smiling and stepped out onto the sidewalk, climbing into the waiting cab and driving away, just like that, without another word. She had got us, and that was the truth. St. Ives asking for the letters had told her as much.

Her sudden departure left us just a little stunned, and was Godall who brought us back around by saying to St. Ives, “I fancy that there is no Professor Frost at Edinburgh in any capacity at all.”

“Not a chemist, certainly. Not in any of the sciences. That much is a ruse.”

“And it’s his handwriting, too, there at the end.”

“Of course it is.” St. Ives shuddered. Here was an old wound opening up—Alice, Narbondo’s death in Scandinavia, St. Ives once again grappling with weighty moral questions that had proven impossible to settle. All he could make out of it all was guilt—his own. And finally he had contrived, by setting himself adrift, simply to wipe it out of his mind. Now this—Narbondo returning like the ghost at the feast…

“It’s just the tiniest bit shaky, though,” Godall said, “as if he were palsied or weak but was making a great effort to disguise it, so as to make the handwriting of this new letter as like old as possible. I’d warrant that he wasn’t well enough to write the whole thing, but could only manage a couple of sentences; the rest was written for him.”

“A particularly clever forger, perhaps…,” began St. Ives. But Godall pointed out the puzzle:

“Why forge another man’s handwriting but not use his name? That’s the key, isn’t it? There’s no point in such a forgery unless these are deeper waters than they appear to be.”

“Perhaps someone wanted the letter to get round to us, to make us believe Narbondo is alive…”

“Then it’s a puzzling song and dance,” said Godall, “and far more a dangerous one. We’re marked men if she’s right. It’s Narbondo’s way of calling us out. I rather believe, though, that this is his way of serving her a warning, of filling her with fear; he’s come back, he means to say, and he wants that notebook.”

“I believe,” said St. Ives, “that if I were her I’d tell him, if she knows where it is.”

“That’s what frightens me about the woman,” said Godall, sweeping tobacco off the counter. “She seems to see this as an opportunity of some sort, doesn’t she? She means to tackle the monster herself. My suggestion is that we find out the where-abouts of this man Piper. He must be getting on in age, probably retired from Oxford long ago.”

Just then a lad came in through the door with the Standard, and news that the first of the ships had gone down off Dover. It was another piece to the puzzle, anyone could see that, or rather could sense it, even though there was no way to know how it fit.

***

The ship had been empty, its captain, crew, and few paying passengers having put out into wooden boats for the most curious reason. The captain had found a message in the ship’s log—scrawled into it, he thought, by someone on board, either a passenger or someone who had come over the side. It hadn’t been there when they’d left the dock at Gravesend; the captain was certain of it. They had got a false start, having to put in at Sterne Bay, and they lost a night there waiting for the cargo that didn’t arrive.

Someone, of course, had sneaked on board and meddled with the log; there had never been any cargo.

What the message said was that every man on board must get out into the boats when the ship was off Ramsgate on the way to Calais. They must watch for a sailing craft with crimson sails. This boat would give them a sign, and then every last one of them would take to the lifeboat and row for all he was worth until they’d put a quarter mile between themselves and the ship. Either that or they would die—all of them.

It was a simple mystery, really, baffling, but with nothing grotesque about it. Until you thought about it—about what would have happened if the captain hadn’t opened the logbook and those men hadn’t got into the boat. The message was in earnest. The ship sank, pretty literally like a stone, and although the crew was safe, their safety was a matter of dumb luck. Whoever had engineered the disaster thought himself to be Destiny, and had played fast and high with the lives of the people on board. That had been the real message, and you can bank on it.

The captain lost his post as well as his ship. Why hadn’t he turned about and gone back to Dover? Because the note in the log didn’t hint that the ship would be destroyed, did it? It was more than likely a hoax, a prank—one that would kill a couple of hours while they tossed in the lifeboat and then rowed back over to her and took possession again. He had never even expected to see the doubtful sailcraft. And they were already a day late because of the stopover at Sterne Bay. It was all just too damned unlikely to take seriously, except the part about getting into the boat. The captain wouldn’t risk any lives, he said.

But there it was: the ship had gone down. It hadn’t been the least bit unlikely in the end. There were only two things about it that were unlikely, it seemed to us: one was that the crew, every man jack of them, had remained in Dover, and shipped out again at once. The word of the captain was all that the authorities had; and he, apparently, was a Yank, recently come over from San Francisco. The second unlikelihood was that this business with the ship was unrelated to the two London incidents.

The Practicing Detective at Sterne Bay

We had no choice but to set out for the coast by way of Sterne Bay. It wasn’t just the business of the downed ship; it was that St. Ives discovered that Dr. Piper, of the Academy, had retired years past to a cottage down the Thames, at Sterne Bay. Godall stayed behind. His business didn’t allow for that sort of jaunt, and there was no reason to suppose that London would be devoid of mysteries just because this most recent one had developed a few miles to the east.

St. Ives had put in at the Naval Office, too, in order to see if he couldn’t discover something about this Captain Bowker, but the captain was what they call a shadowy figure, an American whose credentials weren’t at all clear, but who had captained small merchant ships down to Calais for a year or so. There was no evidence that he was the sort to be bought off—no recorded trouble. That was the problem; nothing was known about the man, and so you couldn’t help jumping to the conclusion that he was just the sort to be bought off. It seemed to stand to reason.

We rattled out of Victoria Station in the early morning and arrived in time to breakfast at the Crown and Apple in Sterne Bay before setting about our business. Nothing seemed to be particularly pressing. We took over an hour at it, shoving down rashers and eggs, and St. Ives all the while in a rare good humor, chatting with the landlady about this and that—all of it entirely innocent—and then stumbling onto the subject of the ship going down and of Captain Bowker. Of course it was in all the papers, being the mystery that it was, and there was nothing at all to suggest that we had anything but a gossip’s interest in it.

Oh, she knew Captain Bowker right enough. He was a Yank, wasn’t he, and the jolliest and maybe biggest man you’d meet in the bay. He hadn’t an enemy, which is what made the business such a disaster, poor man, losing his ship like that, and now out of a situation. Well, not entirely; he had taken a position at the icehouse, tending the machinery—a good enough job in a fishing town like Sterne Bay. He was generally at it from dawn till bedtime, and sometimes took dinner at the Crown and Apple, since he didn’t have a family. He slept at the icehouse too, now that his ship was gone and he hadn’t got a new one. He was giving up the sea, he said, after the disaster, and was happy only that he hadn’t lost any men. The ship be damned, he liked to say—it was his men that he cared about; that was ever the way of Captain Bowker.

St. Ives said that it was a good way, too, and that it sounded to him as if the world ought to have a dozen more Captain Bowkers in it, but I could see that he was being subtle. His saying that had the effect of making her think we were the right sort, not busybody tourists down from London. That was St. Ives’s method, and there was nothing of the hypocrite in it. He meant every bit of it, but if being friendly served some end too, before we were done, then so much the better.

Now it happened that Hasbro had an aunt living in the town, his jolly old Aunt Edie. She had been a sort of lady-in-waiting to St. Ives’s mother—almost a nanny to him—and now, as unlikely as it sounds, she had taken to the sea, to fish, on a trawler owned by her dead husband’s brother, Uncle Botley. So after breakfast St. Ives and Hasbro went off to pay her a visit, leaving me to myself for an hour. I wanted to sightsee, although to tell you the truth, I felt a little guilty about it because Dorothy wasn’t along. I’ve gotten used to her being there, I guess, over the years, and I’m glad of it. It’s one of the few things that I’ve got right.

It was a damp and foggy morning, getting along toward late—the sort of morning when every sound is muffled, and even though there are people out, there’s a sort of curtain between you and them and you walk along the damp cobbles in a gray study, lost in thought. I strolled down the waterfront, thinking that Sterne Bay was just the sort of place to spend a few leisurely days, maybe bring along a fishing rod. Dorothy would love it. I would propose it to her as soon as we got back. The thought of proposing it to her, of course, was calculated to rid me of some of the guilt that I was feeling, out on holiday, really while Dorothy was stuck up in London, trapped in the old routine.

Then I thought of poor St. Ives, and of Alice, whom he had loved for two short years before that awful night in the Seven Dials. Thank God I wasn’t there. It’s a selfish thing to say, perhaps, but I can’t help that. The man had lived alone before Alice, and has lived alone since. And although he’ll fool most people, he doesn’t fool me—he wasn’t born to the solitary life. He’s been worn thin by it. Every emotional shilling was tied up in Alice. He had put the lot of it in the savings bank until he had the chance to invest it in her, and it had paid off with interest. All that was gone now, and the very idea of a romantic holiday on the water was impossible for him to bear. He’s been disallowed from entertaining notions that other people find utterly pleasant and common…

And just then, as I was strolling along full of idle and sorrowful thoughts, I looked up and there was a three-story inn, like something off a picture postcard.

It was painted white with green gingerbread trim and was hung with ivy vines. From what I could see, a broad veranda ran around three sides of it. On the veranda sat pieces of furniture, and on the willow furniture sat a scattering of people who looked just about as contented as they had any right to look—a couple of them qualifying as “old salts,” and very picturesque. There was a wooden sign over the stairs that read THE HOISTED PINT, which struck me as calculated, but very friendly and with the right general attitude.

I stepped up onto the veranda, nodding a hello in both directions, and into the foyer, thinking to inquire about rates and availability. Spring was on the horizon, and there would be a chance of good weather—although the town was admirably suited to dismal weather too—and there was no reason that I shouldn’t simply cement the business of a holiday straightaway, so as to make Dorothy happy.

She would love the place; any doubts I might have had from the street were vanished. There were wooden floors inlaid with the most amazing marquetry depicting a whale and whaling ship—the sort of work you don’t see anymore—and there were potted plants and a great stone fireplace with a log fire burning and not a piece of coal to be seen. A small woman worked behind the long oak counter, meddling with papers, and we talked for a moment about rooms and rates. Although I didn’t like her very much, or entirely trust her, I set out finally for the door very well satisfied with the inn and with myself both.

That’s when I thought I saw my rubber elephant lying atop a table, half hidden by a potted palm. I was out the door and onto the veranda before I knew what it was that I’d seen—just the bottom of him, his round feet and red-painted jumbo trousers. It was the impossibility of it that made it slow to register, and even by the time it did, by the time I was sure of it, I had taken another step or two, half down the stairs, before turning on my heel and walking back in.

The woman looked up from where she dusted at furniture now with a clutch of feathers. She widened her eyes, wondering, perhaps, if I hadn’t forgotten something, and I smiled back, feeling like a fool, and asking weakly whether I didn’t need some sort of receipt, a confirmation—implying by it, I suppose, that her bookwork there behind the counter wasn’t sufficient. She frowned and said that she supposed she could work something up, although…And I said quite right, of course but that as a surprise to my wife I thought that a little something to put into an envelope on her breakfast plate…That made her happy again. She liked to see that in a man, and said that she was anxious to meet the young lady. When I glanced across the room there wasn’t any elephant, of course, or anything like it.

I don’t doubt that you’re going to ask me why I didn’t just inquire about the woman and her son, who carried a rubber elephant with enormous ears. There would have been a hundred friendly ways to phrase it. Well, I didn’t. I still felt like half a fool for having blundered back in like that and going through the song and dance about the breakfast plate, and I was almost certain by then that I hadn’t seen anything at all, that I had invented it out of the curve of a leaf and the edge of a pot. It was a little farfetched, wasn’t it? Just as it had seemed improbable to the captain of the downed ship that the nonsense in his log ought to be taken seriously.

I had imagined it, and I told myself so as I set out toward the pier again, where, just like that, I nearly ran over old Parsons, the secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences, coming along with a bamboo pole and creel in his hand, got up in a woolen sort of fishing uniform and looking as if even though he mightn’t catch a single fish, at least he had got the outfit right, and that qualified him, as the scriptures put it, to walk with the proud.

I was surprised to see him. He was thoroughly disappointed to see me. It was the company I kept. He assumed straight off that St. Ives was lurking somewhere about, and that meant, of course, that the business of the Royal Academy was being meddled in again. And he was right. His being there said as much. It was an altogether unlikely coincidence. If I had looked at it from the angle of a practicing detective, then I’d have had suspicions about his angling outfit, and I’d have concluded that he was trying too hard to play a part. He was up to something, to be sure.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I gave him a jolly look, and said, “Down on holiday, actually. And you, going fishing?”

Foolish question, I guess, given what he looked like, but that didn’t call for him to get cheeky. “I’m prospecting,” he said, and held up his bamboo pole. “This is an alchemical divining rod, used to locate fishes with coins in their bellies.”

But just then, when I was going to say something clever, up came a gentleman in side whiskers and interrupted in order to wring Parsons’s hand. “Dreadfully sorry, old man,” he said to Parsons. “But he was tired, and he’d lived a long life. Very profitable. I’m happy you could come down for the funeral.”

Parsons took him by the arm and led him away down the pier pretty briskly, as if to get him away from me before he said anything more. He had already said enough, though, hadn’t he? This man Piper was dead, and Parsons had come down to see him buried.

It was a full morning, taken all the way around. There was a half hour yet before I was to meet St. Ives and Hasbro back at the Apple. I was feeling very much like a detective by then, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was I had detected, besides this last bit. I decided that wasn’t enough, and went across toward the ramshackle icehouse, a wooden sort of warehouse in a weedy lot not far off the ocean.

I went in at a side door without knocking. The place was cold, not surprisingly, and I could hear the hiss of steam from the compressors. The air was tinged with the smell of ammonia and wet straw. The jolly captain wasn’t hard to find; he confronted me as soon as I came in through the door. He seemed to be the only one around, and he was big, and he talked with an accent, stretching out his vowels as if they were made of putty. I won’t try to copy it, since I’m no good at tricking up accents, but he was full of words like tarnation and fleabit and hound dog and ain’t and talked altogether in a sort of apostrophic “Out West” way that struck me as out of character in a sea captain. I expected something salty and maritime. I made a mental note of it.

That was after I had shaken his hand and introduced my self. “I’m Abner Benbow,” I said, thinking this up on the spot and almost saying “Admiral Benbow,” but stopping myself just in time. “I’m in the ice trade, up in Harrogate. They call me ‘Cool Abner Benbow,’” I said, “but they don’t call me a cold fish.” I inclined my head just a little, thinking that maybe this last touch was taking it too far. But he liked it, saying he had a “monicker” too.

“Call me Bob,” he said, “Country Bob Bowker. Call me anythin’ you please, but don’t call me too late for dinner.” And with that admonition he slammed me on the back with his open hand and nearly knocked me through the wall. He was convulsed with laughter, wheezing and looking apoplectic, as if he had just that moment made up the gag and was listening to himself recite it for the first time. I laughed too, very heartily, I thought, wiping pretended tears from my eyes.

“You’re a Yank,” I said. And that was clever, of course, because it rather implied that I didn’t already know who he was, despite his recent fame.

“That’s a fact. Wyoming man, born and bred. Took to the sea late and come over here two years ago just to see how the rest of the world got on. I was always a curious man. And I was all alone over there, runnin’ ferries out of Frisco over to Sarsleeto, and figured I wouldn’t be no more alone over here.”

No more than any common criminal, I thought, assuming straight off, and maybe unfairly, that there was more to Captain Bowker’s leaving America than he let on. I nodded, though, as if I thought all his nonsense very sage indeed.

“Been here long?” I asked, nonchalant.

He gave me a look. “Didn’t I just say two year?”

“I mean here, at the icehouse.”

“Ah!” he said, suddenly jolly again. “No. Just got on. If you’d of come day before yesterday you wouldn’t have found me. Old man who ran the place up and died, though. Pitched over like he was poisoned, right there where you’re a-standing now, up and pitched over, and there I was an hour later, looking in at the door with my hat in my hands. I knew a little about it, being mechanical and having lived by the sea, so I was a natural. They took me right on. What’s all that to you?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” I said, realizing right off that I shouldn’t have said it twice; there was no room here to sound jumpy. But he had caught me by surprise with the question, and all I could think to say next, rather stupidly, was, “Up and died?” thinking that the phrase was a curious one, as if he had done it on purpose, maybe got up out of a chair to do it.

You can see that I had got muddled up. This wasn’t going well. Somehow I had excited his suspicions by saying the most arbitrary and commonplace things. Captain Bowker was another lunatic, I remember thinking—the sort who, if you passed him on the street and said good-morning, would squint at you and ask what you meant by saying such a thing.

“Dropped right over dead on his face,” said Captain Bowker, looking at me just as seriously as a stone head.

Then he grinned and broke into laughter, slapping me on the back again. “Cigar?” he asked.

I waved it away. “Don’t smoke. You have one. I like the smell of tobacco, actually. Very comfortable.”

He nodded and said, “Drives off the ’monia fumes,” and then he gnawed off the end of a fat cigar, spitting out the debris with about twice the required force.

“So,” I said. “Mind if I look around?”

“Yep,” he said.

I started forward, but he stepped in front of me. “Yep,” he said again, talking past his cigar. “I do mind if you look around.” Then he burst into laughter again so that there was no way on earth that I could tell what he minded and what he didn’t mind.

He plucked the unlit cigar out of his mouth and said, “Maybe tomorrow, Jim. Little too much going on today. Too busy for it. I’m new and all, and can’t be showing in every Dick and Harry.” He managed, somehow, to get me turned around and propelled toward the door. “You understand. You’re a businessman. Tomorrow afternoon, maybe, or the next day. That’s soon enough, ain’t it? You ain’t going nowhere. Come on back around, and you can have the run of the place. Bring a spyglass and a measure stick.”

And with that I was out in the fog again, wondering exactly how things had gone so bad. In the space of ten minutes I’d been Abner and Jim and Dick and Harry, but none of us had seen a thing. At least I hadn’t given myself away, though. Captain Bowker couldn’t have guessed who I really was. I could relate the incident to St. Ives and Hasbro without any shame, There was enough in the captain’s manner to underscore any suspicions that we might already have had of the man, and there was the business of his not wanting me to see the workings of the icehouse, innocent as such workings ought to be.

I lounged along toward the Apple—it wasn’t the weather for hurrying—and had got down past the market, maybe a hundred yards beyond The Hoisted Pint, when I heard the crack of what sounded like a firecracker from somewhere above and behind me. Immediately an old beggar with his shoes wound in rags, standing just in front of me, stiffened up straight, as if he’d been poked in the small of the back, and a wash of red blood spread out across his shirtfront where you could see it through his open coat.

Before I could twitch, he sat down in the weeds and then slumped over backward and stared at the sky, his mouth working as if he were trying to pray, but had forgot the words. He had been shot, of course—in the heart—by someone with a dead-on aim.

A woman screamed. There was the sound of a whistle. And without half knowing what I was about, I had the man’s wrist in my hand and was feeling for a pulse. It was worthless. Where the hell do you find a man’s pulse? I can’t even find my own half the time. I slammed my hand over the hole in his chest and leaned into it, trying to shut off the rush of blood and feeling absolutely futile and stupid until a doctor strode up carrying his black bag. He crouched beside me, squinted at the corpse, and shook his head softly to tell me that I was wasting my time.

Reeling just a little from the smell of already-drying blood, I stood up and stumbled over to sit on a bench, where I hunched forward and pretended for a bit to be searching for a lucky clover until my head cleared. I sat up straight, and there was a constable looming over me with the look in his eye of a man with a few pressing questions to ask. If I was a rotten actor in front of Captain Bowker, I had improved a bit in the score of minutes since, and it was a simple thing to convince the constable that I knew nothing of the dead man.

I avoided one issue, though: I seemed to be collecting dead men all of a sudden. First there was the tragedy up in Holborn, now a man drops dead at my feet, shot through the heart. Most of us go through our lives avoiding that sort of thing. Now I was getting more than my share of it. It was evidence of something, but not the sort of evidence that would do the constable any good, not yet anyway.

It wasn’t quite noon when I got back to the Crown and Apple and cleaned myself up, and when St. Ives and Hasbro found me I was putting away my second pint and not feeling any better at all. This last adventure had taken the sand out of me, and I couldn’t think in a straight enough line to put the pieces of the morning together in such a way that they would signify.

“You’re looking rotten,” said St. Ives with his customary honesty. He ordered a pint of bitter, and so did Hasbro, although St. Ives had lately been under a new regime and had taken to drinking nothing but cider during the day. They were following my lead in order to make it seem perfectly natural that I was swilling beer before lunch. St. Ives winked at Hasbro. “It’s the clean sea air. You’re missing the London fogs. Your lungs can’t stand the change. Send for Dorothy.” He said this last to Hasbro, who pretended to get up, but then sat back down when the two fresh pints hove into view.

They were joking, of course—being jolly after their morning visit. And I was happy for it, not for myself, but for St. Ives. I hated to tell them the truth, but I told them anyway. “There’s been a man shot,” I said.

St. Ives scowled. “The news is up and down the bay by now. We heard a lad shouting it outside the window of Aunt Edie’s cottage. Sterne Bay doesn’t get many shootings.”

“I saw the whole thing. Witnessed it.”

St. Ives looked up from his pint glass and raised his eyebrows.

“He wasn’t a half step in front of me. A tramp from the look of him, just about to touch me for a shilling, I suppose, and then, crack! just like that, and he’s on his back like a bug, dead. Shattered his heart.”

“He was a half step in front of you? That’s hyperbole, of course. What you meant to say is that he was nearby.”

“As close to me as I am to you,” I said, thinking what he was thinking.

St. Ives was silent for a moment, studying things. It had taken me a while to see it too, what with all the complications of the morning. Clearly the bullet hadn’t been meant for the beggar. There’s no profit in shooting a beggar, unless you’re a madman. And I had been running into too many madmen lately. The odds against there being another one lurking about were too high. Picture it: there’s the beggar turning toward me. From back toward The Hoisted Pint, I must have half hidden him. The bullet that struck him had missed me by a fraction.

So who had taken a shot at me from The Hoisted Pint, from a second-story window, maybe? Or from the roof of the icehouse; that would have served equally well. I thought about the disappeared elephant and about the captain and his “Out West” mannerisms. But why on earth…?

I ordered a third pint, swearing to myself to drink it slowly and then go up to take a nap. I’d done my work for the day; I could leave the rest to Hasbro and St. Ives.

“I saw Parsons on the pier,” I said. “And I talked to Captain Bowker. And I think your woman with the letters is skulking around, probably staying at The Hoisted Pint, down toward the pier.” That started it. I told them the whole story, just as it happened—the toy on the table, Parsons in his fishing regalia, the captain jollying me around—and they sat silent throughout, thinking, perhaps, that I’d made a very pretty morning of it while they were off drinking tea and listening to rumors through the window.

“He thought you were an agent,” said St. Ives, referring to Captain Bowker. “Insurance detective. What’s he hiding, though, that he wouldn’t let you look around the icehouse? This log of his, maybe? Not likely. And why would he try to shoot you? That’s not an act calculated to cement the idea of his being innocent. And Parsons here too…” St. Ives fell into a study, then thumped his fist on the table, standing up and motioning to Hasbro, who stood up too, and the both of them went out leaving their glasses two-thirds full on the table. Mine was empty again, and I was tempted to pour theirs into mine in order to secure a more profound nap and to avoid waste. But there was the landlady, grinning toward me and the clock just then striking noon.

She whisked the glasses away with what struck me as a sense of purpose, looking across her spectacles at me. I lurched up the stairs and collapsed into bed, making up for our early rising with a nap that stretched into the late afternoon.

***

I was up and pulling on my shoes when there was a knock on the door. It’s St. Ives, I thought, while I was stepping across to throw it open. It might as easily have been the man with the gun—something that occurred to me when the door was halfway open. And for a moment I was tempted to slam it shut, cursing myself for a fool and thinking at the same time that half opening the door and then slamming it in the visitor’s face would paint a fairly silly picture of me, unless, of course, it was the man with the gun…

It wasn’t. It was a man I had never seen before. He was tall, gaunt, and stooped, almost cadaverous. He wore a hat, but it was apparent that he was bald on top and didn’t much bother to cut the tufts of hair above his ears. He would have made a pretty scarecrow. There were deep furrows around his lips, the result of a lifetime of pursing them, I suppose, which is just what he was doing now, glaring down his hooked nose at me as if he didn’t quite approve of the look on my face.

Afternoon naps always put me in a wretched mood, and the sight of him doubled it. “You’ve apparently got the wrong room,” I said, and started to shut the door. He put his foot in the way.

“I’m an insurance agent,” he said, glancing back down the hallway. “Lloyd’s. There’s a question or two…”

“Of course,” I said. So that was it. Captain Bowker was under investigation. I swung the door open and in he came, looking around the room with a slightly appalled face, as if the place was littered with dead pigs, say, and they were starting to stink. I didn’t like him at all, insurance agent or not.

He started in on me, grilling me, as they say. “You were seen talking to Captain Bowker today.”

I nodded.

“About what?”

“Ice,” I said. “My name is Adam Benbow, from up in Harrogate. I’m a fish importer down on holiday.”

He nodded. He was easier to fool than the captain had been. I was bothered, though, by the vague suspicion that I had gotten my name wrong. I had, of course. This morning it had been Abner. I could hardly correct it, though, not now. And how would he know anyway? What difference did my name make to him?

“We’re investigating the incident of the downed ship. Did you talk to him about that?”

“Which ship?”

“The Landed Catch, sunk off Dover days ago. What do you know about that ship?”

“Not a thing. I read about it in the papers, of course. Who hasn’t?’’

“Are you acquainted with a man named Langdon St. Ives?” he asked abruptly. He half spun around when he said this, as if to take me by surprise.

It worked, too. I sputtered there for a moment, blinking at him. And when I said, “Langdon who?” the attempt was entirely worthless. I was as transparent as window glass.

He acted as if I had admitted everything. “We believe that Mr. St. Ives is also investigating the business of the Landed Catch, and we’re wondering why.”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Who was it again? Saint what?” It was worthless pretending, and I knew it. I had to dummy up, though. I wasn’t about to answer the man’s questions. St. Ives could do that for himself. On the other hand, I suppose it was pointless to insist that I didn’t know St. Ives. The man was onto my game, what with the false names and the Harrogate business.

“What did you see, exactly, at the icehouse?”

“See? Nothing. The man wouldn’t allow me in. He seemed anxious, to tell you the truth. Like he didn’t want me snooping around. He has something to hide there; you can take that much from me.”

“Something to hide, you think?”

“Bank on it.”

The man nodded, suddenly jolly, grinning at me. “I think you’re right,” he said. “He’s hiding something horrible, is what I think. These are dangerous waters. Very rocky and shallow. He’s a subtle man, Captain Bowker is. My advice is to steer clear of him. Leave him to us. He’ll be in Newgate Prison waiting to swing, if only for this morning’s shooting.”

I must have jerked my eyes open when he said this last, for he grinned at the look on my face and nodded, pursing his lips so that his mouth almost disappeared. “You were a lucky man,” he said. “But you’re safe now. We’re onto him, watching him from every angle. You don’t have to hide in your room like this.

‘‘I wasn’t hiding, actually. I…”

“Of course, you weren’t,” he said, turning toward the door. “Quite a welcome you’ve had. Don’t blame you. Look me up. Binker Street.”

He was out the door then, striding away down the hail. I shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed, studying things out. I understood nothing—less than before. I was vaguely happy, though, that someone was watching the captain. Of course it must have been him who had fired the shot—him and his cowboy upbringing and all. Much more likely than my hansom cab lunatic. I could see that now.

There was another knocking on the door. It’s the agent, I thought, back again. But it wasn’t. It was the landlady with a basket of fruit. What a pleasant surprise, I remember thinking, taking the basket from her. “Grape?” I asked, but she shook her head.

“There’s a note in it,” she said, nodding at the basket.

From Dorothy, I thought, suddenly glad that I’d made the reservation at The Hoisted Pint. Absence was making hearts grow fonder. And quickly, too. I’d only left that morning. There was the corner of an envelope, sticking up through the purple grapes and wedged in between a couple of tired-looking apples. The whole lot of fruit lay atop a bed of coconut fiber in a too-heavy and too-deep basket.

It was the muffled ticking that did the trick, though—the ticking of an infernal machine, hidden in the basket of fruit.

My breath caught, and I nearly dropped the basket and leaped out the door. But I couldn’t do that. It would bring down the hotel, probably with me still in it. I hopped across to the window, looking down on what must have been a half-dozen people, including St. Ives and Hasbro, who were right then heading up the steps. I couldn’t just pitch it out onto everybody’s heads.

So I sprinted for the door, yanking it open and leaping out into the hallway. My heart slammed away, flailing like an engine, and without bothering to knock I threw open the door to the room kitty-corner to my own, and surprised an old man who sat in a chair next to a fortuitously open casement, reading a book.

It was Parsons, not wearing his fishing garb anymore.

Aloft in a Balloon

Parsons leaped up, wild with surprise to see me rushing at him like that, carrying my basket. “It’s a bomb!” I shouted. “Step aside!” and I helped him do it, too, with my elbow. He sprawled toward the bed, and I swung the basket straight through the open casement and into the bay in a long, low arc. If there had been boats roundabout, I believe I would have let it go anyway. It wasn’t an act of heroics by that time; it was an act of desperation, of getting the ticking basket out of my hand and as far away from me as possible.

It exploded. Wham! Just like that, a foot above the water, which geysered up around the sailing fragments of basket and fruit. Everything rained down, and then there was the splashing back and forth of little colliding waves. Parsons stood behind me, taking in the whole business, half scowling, half surprised. I took a couple of calming breaths, but they did precious little good. My hand—the one that had held the basket—was shaking treacherously, and I sat down hard in Parsons’s chair.

“Sorry,” I said to him. “Didn’t mean to barge in.”

But he waved it away as if he saw the necessity of it. It was obvious that the device had been destined to go out through the window and into the sea. There had been no two ways about it. I could hardly have tucked it under my coat and forgotten about it. He stared for a moment out the window and then said, “Down on holiday,” in a flat voice, repeating what I’d said to him on the pier that morning and demonstrating that, like everyone else, he had seen through me all along. I cleared my throat, thinking in a muddle, and just then, as if to save me, St. Ives and Hasbro rushed in, out of breath because of having sprinted up the stairs when they’d heard the explosion.

The sight of Parsons standing there struck St. Ives dumb, I believe. The professor knew that Parsons was lurking roundabout, because I’d told him, but here, at the Apple? And what had Parsons to do with the explosion, and what had I to do with Parsons?

There was no use this time in Parsons’s simply muttering, “Good day,” and seeing us all out the door. It was time for talking turkey, as Captain Bowker would have put it. Once again, I was the man with the information. I told them straight off about the insurance agent.

“And he knew my name?” said St. Ives, cocking his head.

“That’s right. He seemed to know…” I stopped and glanced at Parsons, who was listening closely.

St. Ives continued for me. “He made sure who you were, and he found out that you had suspicions about what was going on at the icehouse, and then he left. And a moment later the basket arrived.”

I nodded and started to tell the story my way, to put the right edge on it, but St. Ives turned to Parsons and, without giving me half a chance, said, “See here. We’re not playing games anymore. I’m going to tell you, flat out and without my beating about the bush, that we know about Lord Kelvin’s machine being stolen. A baby could piece that business together, what with the debacle down on the Embankment, the flying iron and all. What could that have been but an electromagnet of astonishing strength? There’s no use your being coy about it any longer. I’ve got a sneaking hunch what they’ve done with it, too. Let’s put everything straight. I’ll tell you what I know, and you tell me what you know, and together maybe we’ll see to the bottom of this murky well.”

Parsons held his hands out in a theatrical gesture of helplessness. “I’m down here to catch a fish,” he said. “It’s you who are throwing bombs through the window. You seem to attract those sorts of things—bombs and bullets.”

St. Ives gave Parsons a weary glance. Then he said to me,

“This agent, Jack, what did he look like?”

“Tall and thin, and with a hooknose. He was bald under his hat, and his hair stuck out over his ears like a chimney sweep’s brush.”

Parsons looked as though he’d been electrocuted. He started to say something, hesitated, started up again, and then, pretending that it didn’t much matter to him anyway, said, “Stooped, was he?”

I nodded.

“Tiny mouth, like a bird?”

“That’s right.”

Parsons sagged. It was a gesture of resignation. We waited him out. “That wasn’t any insurance agent.”

The news didn’t surprise anyone. Of course it hadn’t been an insurance agent. St. Ives had seen that at once. The man’s mind is honed like a knife. Insurance agents don’t send bombs around disguised as fruit baskets. We waited for Parsons to tell us who the man was, finally, to quit his tiresome charade, but he stood there chewing it over in his mind, calculating how much he could say.

Parsons is a good man. I’ll say that in the interests of fair play. He and St. Ives have had their differences, but they’ve both of them been after the same ends, just from different directions. Parsons couldn’t abide the notion of people being shot at, even people who tired him as much as I did. So in the end, he told us:

“It was a man named Higgins.”

“Leopold Higgins!” cried St. Ives. “The ichthyologist. Of course.” St. Ives somehow always seemed to know at least half of everything—which is a lot, when you add it up.

Parsons nodded wearily. “Oxford man. Renegade academician. They’re a dangerous breed when they go feral, academics are. Higgins was a chemist, too. Came back from the Orient with insane notions about carp. Insisted that they could be frozen and thawed out, months later, years. You could keep them in a deep freeze, he said. Some sort of glandular excretion, as I understand it, that drained water out of the cells, kept them from bursting when they froze. He was either an expert in cryogenics or a lunatic. It’s your choice. He was clearly off his head, though. I think it was opium that did it. He claimed to dream these things.

“Anyway, it was a glandular business with carp. That was his theory. All of it, mind you, was wrapped up in the notion that it was these secretions that were the secret of the astonishing longevity of a carp. He hadn’t been back from China a year when he disappeared. I saw him, in fact, just two days earlier, in London, at the club. He burst in full of wild enthusiasm, asking after old—after people I’d never heard of, saying that he was on the verge of something monumental. And then he was gone—out the door and never seen again.”

“Until now,” said St. Ives.

“Apparently so.”

St. Ives turned to Hasbro and myself and said, “Our worst fears have come to pass,” and then he bowed to Parsons, thanked him very much, and strode out with us following, down the hallway and straightaway to the train station.

***

We spent the night on the Ostende ferry. I couldn’t sleep, thinking about the Landed Catch sinking like a brick just to the south of the very waters we were plowing, and I was ready at the nod of a head to climb into a lifeboat and row away. The next day found us on a train to Amsterdam, and from there on into Germany and Denmark, across the Skaggerak and into Norway. It was an appalling trip, rushing it like that, catching little bits of hurried sleep, and the only thing to recommend it was that there was at least no one trying to kill me anymore, not as long as I was holed up in that train.

St. Ives was in a funk. A year ago he had made this same weary journey, and had left Narbondo for dead in a freezing tarn near Mount Hjarstaad, which rises out of the Norwegian Sea. Now what was there but evidence that the doctor was alive and up to mischief? It didn’t stand to reason, not until Parsons’s chatter about cryogenics. Two things were bothering St. Ives, wearing him thinner by the day. One was that somehow he had failed once again. Thwarting Narbondo and diverting the earth from the course of that ghastly comet had stood as his single greatest triumph; now it wasn’t a triumph anymore. Now it was largely a failure, in his mind, anyway. Just like that. White had become black. He had lived for months full of contradictions of conscience. Had he brought about the doctor’s death, or had he tried to prevent it? And never mind that—had he tried to prevent it, or had he attempted to fool himself into thinking he had? He couldn’t abide the notion of working to fool himself. That was the avenue to madness. So here, in an instant, all was effaced. The doctor was apparently alive after all and embarked on some sort of murderous rampage. St. Ives hadn’t been thorough enough. What Narbondo wanted was a good long hanging.

And on top of that was the confounding realization that there wasn’t an easier way to learn what we had to learn. St. Ives knew no one in the wilds of Norway. He couldn’t just post a letter asking whether a frozen hunchback had been pulled from a lake and revived. He had to find out for himself. I think he wondered, though, whether he hadn’t ought simply to have sent Hasbro about the business, or me, and stayed behind in Sterne Bay.

We were in Trondheim, still hurtling northward, when the news arrived about the sinking of the other two ships, just below where the first had disappeared. Iron-hulled vessels, they’d gone down lickety-split, exactly the same way. The crew had abandoned the first one, but not the second. Ten men were lost in all. It had been Godall who sent the cable to Norway. He had prevailed upon the prime minister to take action. St. Ives was furious with himself for having done nothing to prevent the debacle.

What could he have done, though? That’s what I asked him. It was useless to think that he could have stopped it. Part of his fury was directed at the government. They had been warned, even before Godall had tackled them. Someone—Higgins, probably—had sent them a monumental ransom note. They had laughed it away, thinking it a hoax, even though it had been scrawled in the same hand as had Captain Bowker’s note, and warned them that more ships would be sunk. The Royal Academy should have urged them to take it seriously, but they had mud on their faces by now, and had hesitated. All of them had been fools,

Shipping now was suspended in the area, from the mouth of the Thames to Folkestone, at an inconceivable expense to the Crown and to private enterprise. Half of London trade had slammed to a halt, according to Godall. It was a city under siege, and no one seemed to know who the enemy was or where he lay…St. Ives was deadly silent, frustrated with our slow travel northward, with the interminable rocky landscape, the fjords, the pine forests.

What could he do but carry on? That’s what I asked him. He could turn around, that’s what. He made up his mind just like that. We were north of Trondheim and just a few hours from our destination, St. Ives would take Hasbro with him. I would go on alone, and see what I could see. He and Hasbro would rush back to Dover where St. Ives would assemble scientific apparatus. He had been a fool, he said, a moron, a nitwit, It was he and he alone who was responsible for the death of those ten men. He could have stopped it if he hadn’t been too muddleheaded to see. That was ever St. Ives’s way, blaming himself for all the deviltry in the world, because he hadn’t been able to stop it. The sheer impossibility of his stopping all of it never occurred to him,

Hasbro gave me a look as they hefted their luggage out onto the platform. St. Ives was deflated, shrunken almost, and there shone in his eyes a distant gleam, as if he were focused on a single wavering point on the horizon—the leering face of Ignacio Narbondo—and he would keep his eyes fixed on that face until he stared the man into oblivion.

Hasbro took me aside for a moment to tell me that he would take care of the professor, that I wasn’t to worry, that we would all win through in the end. All I had to do was learn the truth about Narbondo. St. Ives must be desperately certain of the facts now; he had become as methodical as a clockwork man. But like that same man, he seemed to both of us to be running slowly down. And for one brief moment there on the platform, I half hoped that St. Ives would never find Narbondo, because, horrible as it sounds, it was Narbondo alone that gave purpose to the great man’s life.

Narbondo had had a long and curious criminal history: vivisection, counterfeiting, murder—a dozen close escapes capped by his fleeing from Newgate Prison very nearly on the eve of his intended execution. There was nothing vile that he hadn’t put his hand to. He dabbled in alchemy and amphibian physiology, and there was some evidence that, working with the long-forgotten formulae of Paracelsus, he had developed specifics that would revive the dead. His grandfather, the elder Narbondo, had elaborated the early successes of those revivification experiments in journals that had been lost long ago. And those, of course, were the papers alluded to by the woman in Godall’s shop.

It was a mystery, this business of the lost journals—a far deeper mystery than it would seem on the surface, and one that seemed to have threads connecting it to the dawn of history and to the farthest corners of the earth. And it was a mystery that we wouldn’t solve. We would tackle only the current manifestation of it, this business of Higgins the academician and Captain Bowker and the revived Narbondo and the ships sinking in the Dover Strait. There was enough in that to confound even a man like St. Ives.

It was St. Ives’s plan to resort again to the dirigible. I would proceed to Mount Hjarstaad by train and make what discoveries I could, while waiting for the arrival of the dirigible, which would put out of Dover upon St. Ives’s return to that city. Ferries were still docking there, but only if they had come in from the north: Flanders and Normandy ferries had stopped running altogether. So St. Ives would send the dirigible for me, in an effort to fetch me back to England in time to be of service.

We should have hired the dirigible in the first place, lamented St. Ives, standing on the platform in the cold arctic wind. We should have this, we should have that. I muttered and nodded, never having seen him in such despair. There was no arguing with him there in that rocky landscape, which did its part to freeze one’s hope. I would have to go on with as stout a heart as I could fabricate.

And so away they went south, and I north, and I didn’t learn another thing about their adventures until I met up with them again, days later, back in Sterne Bay, the dirigible rescue having come off without a hitch and skived at least a couple of days off my wanderings about Norway, but having sailed me into Dover too late to join my comrades in their dangerous scientific quest. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. It’s what I found out in Hjarmold, near the mountain, that signifies.

Narbondo had been fished out of his watery grave, all right—by a tall thin man with a baldhead. It had to have been Leopold Higgins, although he had registered at the hostel under the name Wiggins, which was evidence either of a man gone barmy or of a man remarkably sure of himself. I got all this from the stableboy, whose room lay at the back of the stables, and who had seen a good deal of what transpired there. No real effort had been made for secrecy. Higgins and an accomplice—Captain Bowker, from the description of him—had ridden in late one afternoon with Narbondo lying in the back of the wagon, stiff as a day-old fish. They claimed that he had just that morning fallen into the lake, that they had been on a climbing expedition. There was nothing in their story to excite suspicions. Higgins had professed to be a doctor and had stopped them from sending up to Bodø for the local medicine man.

Curiously, he hadn’t taken Narbondo inside the hostel to thaw him out; he had set up camp in the stables instead, insisting that Narbondo’s recovery must be a slow business indeed, and for the first two nights Narbondo slept on his table without so much as a blanket for covering. Higgins fed him nothing but what he said was cod-liver oil, but which he referred to as “elixir.” And once, when Narbondo began to moan and shudder, Higgins said that he was “coming round too soon,” and he hauled Narbondo out into the freezing night and let him stiffen up some.

The stableboy who told me all of this was a bright lad, who had smelled something rotten, as it were, and it wasn’t the fish oil, either. He had a sharp enough eye to recognize frauds like Higgins and Bowker, and he watched them, he said, through a knothole when they thought he was asleep. It was on the fourth night that Narbondo awakened fully, if only for a few seconds. Higgins had set up some sort of apparatus—hoses, bladders, bowls of yellow liquid. Throughout the night he had sprayed the doctor with mists while Captain Bowker snored in the hay. An hour before dawn, Narbondo’s eyes blinked open in the lamplight, and after a moment of looking around himself, puzzled at what he saw, he smiled a sort of half-grin and said the single word, “Good,” and then lapsed again into unconsciousness.

I knew by then what it was I had come for, and I had learned it in about half an hour. St. Ives had been right to turn around; it didn’t take three men to talk to a stableboy. After that I was forced to lounge about the village, eating vile food, wondering what it was that my companions were up to and when my dirigible would arrive, and worrying finally about one last bit of detail: the frozen man, according to my stableboy, had had milky-white hair and pale skin, like a man carved out of snow or dusted with frost; and yet Narbondo had had lanky black hair, just going to gray, when he had catapulted into that tarn.

The phrase “dusted with frost” wasn’t my own; it was the artful creation of my stableboy, who had lived for ten years in York and might have been a writer, I think, if he had put his mind to it. Here he was mucking out stables. It made me wonder about the nature of justice, but only for a moment. Almost at once it brought to mind the letter we had read in Godall’s shop, the one signed H. Frost, of Edinburgh University.

***

Meanwhile, Langdon St. Ives and Hasbro arrived back in Dover without incident—no bombs, no gunfire, no threats to the ship. I believe that our sudden disappearance from Sterne Bay had confounded our enemies. Perhaps they thought that the fruit-basket bomb had frightened us away, although Narbondo—or Frost—knowing St. Ives as well as he did, shouldn’t have made that mistake. Anyway, in Dover, St. Ives arranged for the dirigible to fetch me out of Norway, and then set about hiring a balloon for himself and Hasbro. They didn’t wait for me—they couldn’t—and I’m narrating their exploits as accurately as I can, having got the story secondhand, but straight from the horse’s mouth, of course.

St. Ives set about constructing a bismuth spiral, which, for the reader unfamiliar with the mysteries of magnetism, is a simple snail-shell spiral of bismuth connected to a meter that reads changes of resistance in the spiral to determine intensities of magnetic fields. It’s a child’s toy, comparatively speaking, but foolproof. The very simplicity of St. Ives’s notion infuriated him even further. It was something that ought to have been accomplished a week earlier, in time to save those ten men.

He affixed the spiral to a pole that they could slip down through a small hiatus in the basket of the balloon, so as to suspend the spiral just above the waves, making the whole business of taking a reading absolutely dangerous—almost deadly, as it turned out—because it required their navigating the balloon perilously close to the sea itself. Why didn’t they use a length of rope, instead—play out the line while staying safely aloft? That was my question too; and the answer, in short, is that the science of electricity and magnetism wouldn’t allow for it: the length of wire connecting the bismuth to the meter must be as short as possible for the reading to be accurate—that was how St. Ives understood it, although his understanding was nearly the death of him.

He meant to discover where Lord Kelvin’s machine—the enormously powerful electromagnet stolen from the machine works in Holborn—lay beneath the sea, somewhere in the Dover Strait. He assumed that it rested on a submerged platform or on a shallow sandy shoal. Maybe it was anchored, but then again maybe it was slowly drifting at the whim of deepwater currents. He suspected the existence of a float or buoy of some sort, both to locate it and, perhaps, to effect its switching on and off.

The two of them were aloft within a day. It was doubtful that the ban on local shipping would last out the week; the economy wouldn’t stand it. The government would pay the ransom or get used to the notion of losing ships. The Royal Academy still denied everything, right down to the ground, while at the same time working furiously to solve the mystery themselves.

St. Ives and Hasbro scoured the surface of the sea, from Ramsgate to Dungeness. Hasbro, an accomplished balloonist—the blue-ribbon winner, in fact, of the Trans-European balloon races of 1883—grappled with the problem of buoyancy, of keeping the basket above the licking waves in order not to drown St. Ives’s apparatus. The wind blew down out of the North Sea in gusts, buffeting them southward toward the coast of France, and it took all of Hasbro’s skill to steady their course at all. St. Ives had fashioned a sort of ballasted sea anchor that they dragged along and so avoided being blown across the coast of Normandy before discovering anything.

Even so, it finally began to seem as if their efforts were in vain—the Strait being almost inconceivably vast from the perspective of two men in a balloon. It was sometime late in the afternoon, when they were just on the edge of giving up, that they saw a sloop flying the ensign of the Royal Academy. St. Ives could see Parsons on the deck, and he waved to the man, who, after seeming to ascertain who it was that hailed him, replied with a perfunctory little nod and went immediately belowdecks. There was the chance, of course, that the Academy had already discovered the spot where the device had been sunk. And there was the chance that they were still searching. What would St. Ives do? What could he do?

They swept across her bow and passed her, St. Ives lowering the bismuth spiral one last time to take another reading. It registered some little bit of deviation, the needle swinging around fairly sharply as they drove along south and west, away from Parsons’s sloop.

They were two hundred yards off his port bow when the balloon lurched, throwing both the professor and Hasbro into the basket wall in a tangle of arms and legs. The basket tilted ominously, nearly pouring them into the sea. Hasbro hacked furiously at the rope holding the sea anchor, thinking that it had caught itself in something, while St. Ives held on to his pole and meter, which burst suddenly in his hands. That is to say the meter did—exploded—its needle whirling around and around like a compass gone mad, until it twisted itself into ruin,

St. Ives let go of the apparatus, which shot straight down into the water as the balloon strained at her lines, trying to tug the basket skyward, but having no luck. The basket, torn in the opposite direction by an unseen force, spun and dipped crazily, fighting as if it had been grappled by a phantom ship.

The crew of the sloop, including Parsons, lined the deck, watching the wild balloon and the two men clinging helplessly to her. It must have appeared as if she were being torn asunder by warring spirits—which she was, in a sense, for it was the powerful forces of hot air and magnetism that tugged her asunder. The ruined meter told the tale. St. Ives had found the sunken device right enough; the iron-reinforced base of the balloon basket was caught in its electromagnetic grip.

With a tearing of canvas and snapping of line, the basket lurched downward, almost into the ocean. A ground swell washed across them, and in an instant they were foundering. St. Ives and Hasbro had to swim for it, both of them striking out through the cold water toward the distant sloop, the nails in their bootheels prising themselves out. St. Ives fished out his clasp knife and offered it up to the machine in order that his trousers pocket might be saved. Finally, when they were well away from the snapping line and rollicking bag, they stopped swimming to watch.

For a moment their basket still tossed on the surface of the water. Then it was tugged down into the depths, where it hung suspended just below the surface. The still-moored balloon flattened itself against the sea, humping across the rolling swell, the gasses inside snapping the seams apart with Gatling-gun bursts of popping, the hot air inside whooshing into the atmosphere as if a giant were treading the thing flat.

Within minutes the deflated canvas followed the basket down like a fleeing squid and was gone, and St. Ives and Hasbro trod water, dubious about their obvious success. If it weren’t for the sloop sending a boat out after them, they would have drowned, and no doubt about it. Parsons, seeing that clearly, welcomed them aboard with a hearty lot of guffawing through his beard.

“Quite a display,” he said to St. Ives as the professor slogged toward a forward cabin. “That was as profitable an example of scientific method as I can remember. I trust you took careful notes. There was a look on your face, man—I could see it even at such a distance as that—a look of pure scientific enlightenment. If I were an artist I’d sketch it out for you…” He went on this way, Parsons did, laughing through his beard and twigging St. Ives all the way back to Dover, after leaving the area encircled with red-painted buoys.

***

At the very moment that they were aloft over the Strait, I was aloft in the dirigible, watching the gray seas slip past far below, and captain of nothing for the moment but my own fate. I was bound for Sterne Bay. The business of the icehouse had become clear to me while I lounged in Norway. Days had passed, though, since my confrontation with Captain Bowker, and in that time just about anything could have happened. I might rush back to find them all gone, having no more need of ice. On the other hand, I might easily find a way to do my part.

At the Crown and Apple I discovered that St. Ives and Hasbro hadn’t yet returned from their balloon adventure. Parsons was gone too. I was alone, and that saddened me. Parsons’s company would have been better than nothing. I sat on the edge of the bed contemplating a pint or two and a nap, wanting to escape my duty by going to sleep—drink and sleep being a substitute, albeit a poor one, for company. Sitting there reminded me of that last fateful knock on the door, though—reminded me that while I slept, no end of frightful business might be transpiring. Who could say that the door mightn’t swing open silently and an infernal machine, fuse sputtering, mightn’t roll like a melon into the center of the floor…

A nap was out of the question. But what would I do instead? I would go to the icehouse. There was no percentage in my pretending to be Abner Benbow any longer. Might I disguise myself? A putty nose and a wig might accomplish something. I dismissed the idea. That was the sort of thing they would expect. My only trump card was that they would have no notion of my having returned to Sterne Bay.

Still, I wouldn’t take any unnecessary risks. I was ready for them now. I went out through the second-story door at the back of the inn, and down rickety steps that led out past a weedy bit of garden and through a gate, right to the edge of the bay. A half score of rowboats were serried along a dock of rotting wooden planks that ran out into the water fifty good yards or so before becoming a mere thicket of broken pilings. There was no one about.

The tide was out, leaving a little stretch of shingle running along beside a low stone seawall. I clambered down and picked my way along the shingle, thinking to emerge into the village some distance from the Apple, so that if they were onto me, and someone was watching the inn, I’d confound them.

Some hundred yards down, I slipped back over the seawall and followed a narrow boardwalk between two vine-covered cottages, squeezing out from between them only a little ways down from where my beggar man was shot before he could borrow any money from me. I hiked along pretty briskly toward the icehouse, but the open door of The Hoisted Pint brought me up short.

I had never discovered whether my rubber elephant inhabited a room there, largely because I had been coy, playing the detective, and was overcome by the woman behind the counter, who, I was pretty sure, had taken me for a natural fool. The truth of it is that I’m too easily put off by an embarrassment. This time I wouldn’t be. I angled toward the door, up the steps, and into the foyer. She stood as ever, meddling with receipts, and seemed not to recognize me at all. My hearty, “Hello again,” merely caused her to squint.

She pushed her spectacles down her nose and looked at me over them. “Yes?” she said.

Somehow the notion of her having forgotten me, after all the rigamarole just a few days earlier, put an edge on my tone. I was through being pleasant. I can’t stand cheeky superiority in people, especially in clerks and waiters, who have nothing to recommend them but the fact of their being employed. What was this woman but a high-toned clerk? Perhaps she owned the inn; perhaps she didn’t. There was nothing in any of it that justified her putting on airs.

“See here,” I said, leaning on the counter. “I’m looking for a woman and her son. I believe they’re staying here or at any rate were staying here last week. They look remarkably alike, frighteningly so, if you take my meaning. The son, who might be as old as thirty, carries with him an India-rubber elephant that makes a noise.”

“A noise?” she said, apparently having digested nothing of the rest of my little speech. The notion of an elephant making a noise, of my having gone anatomical on her, had shattered her ability to understand the clearest sort of English, had obliterated reason and logic.

“Never mind the noise,” I said, losing my temper. “Disregard it.” I caught myself, remembering St. Ives’s dealings with the landlady at the Crown and Apple. Tread softly, I reminded myself, and I forced a smile. “That’s right. It’s the woman and her son that I wanted to ask you about. She’s my mother’s cousin, you see. I got a letter in the post, saying that she and her son—that would be, what? my cousin twice removed, little Billy, we used to call him, although that wasn’t his name, not actually—anyway, that she’s here on holiday, and I’m anxious to determine where she’s staying.”

The woman still looked down her nose at me, waiting for me to go on, as if what I had said so far hadn’t made half enough sense, couldn’t have begun to express what it was I wanted.

I winked at her and brassed right along. “I asked myself, ‘Where in all of Sterne Bay is my mother’s favorite cousin likely to stay? Why, in the prettiest inn that the town has to offer. That’s the ticket.’ And straightaway I came here, and I’m standing before you now to discover whether she is indeed lodged at this inn.”

That ought to have made it clear to the woman, and apparently it did, for the next thing she said was, “What is the lady’s name?” in a sort of schoolteacher’s voice, a tone that never fails to freeze my blood—doubly so this time because I hadn’t any earthly idea what the woman’s name was.

“She has several,” I said weakly, my brain stuttering. “In the Spanish tradition. She might be registered under Larson, with an o.”

I waited, drumming my fingers on the oak counter as she perused the register. Why had I picked Larson? I can’t tell you. It was the first name that came to mind, like Abner Benbow.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at me.

“Perhaps…,” I said, gesturing toward the book. She hesitated, but apparently couldn’t think of any good reason to keep it away from me; there was nothing in what I asked to make her suspicious, and she wouldn’t, I suppose, want to insult the favored cousin several times removed of one of her registered guests. So she pushed her glasses back up her nose, sniffed at me, and turned the book around on the counter.

Fat lot of good it would do me. I didn’t know what the woman’s name was. What sort of charade was I playing? The rubber elephant had been my only clue, and that hadn’t fetched any information out of her. If I brought it back into the conversation now, she’d call the constable and I’d find myself strapped to a bed in Colney Hatch. I was entirely at sea, groping for anything at all to keep me afloat.

I gave the list a perfunctory glance, ready to thank her and leave. One of the names nearly flew out at me: Pule, Leona Pule.

Suddenly I knew the identity of the madman in the coach. I knew who the mother was. I seemed to know a thousand things, and from that knowledge sprang two thousand fresh mysteries. It had been Willis Pule that had stolen my elephant. I should have seen it, but it had been years since he had contrived a wormlike desire for my wife Dorothy, my fiancée then. You wouldn’t call it love; not if you knew him. He went mad when he couldn’t possess her, and very nearly murdered any number of people. He was an apprentice of Dr. Narbondo at the time, but they fell out, and Pule was last seen insane, comatose in the back of Narbondo’s wagon, being driven away toward an uncertain fate.

I noted the room number. They hadn’t left. They might be upstairs at the moment. The nonsense in the coach—his taking the elephant—was that a charade? Was that his way of toying with me? Was it Willis Pule that had shot my beggar man? I thanked the woman at the counter and stepped away up the shadowy stairs, half thinking to discover whether from room 312 a man might have a clear rifle shot down toward the green.

I’ll admit it: right then I was foolishly proud of myself for being “on the case,” and was half wondering about the connection between Pule’s grandfather and the elder Narbondo, which mirrored, if I saw things aright, the relationship between Pule and the doctor. How did Higgins fit, though? Had he discovered references to the lost alchemical papers that had ruined Mrs. Pule’s family? Had he thought to revive Narbondo in order to enlist his aid in finding them? And now they were all skulking about in Sterne Bay, perhaps, carrying out their deadly plans for the machine, waiting for the ransom, thawing Narbondo out slowly at the icehouse.

I felt awfully alone at the moment, and wished heartily that St. Ives and Hasbro weren’t off doing whatever they were doing. The stairs creaked. The evening sunlight filtering through the landing windows was insufficient, and the deepening shadows above me seemed to be a waiting ambush as I stepped cautiously out onto the dim third-floor landing.

An empty hallway stretched away in either direction. Room 312 was either up or down; it didn’t matter to me, for it was clear at once that the landing window would suffice if what you wanted to do was shoot a man. The iron hinges of the double casement were rusted. I got onto my hands and knees and peered at the floor in the failing light. It was swept clean, except for right along the floor moldings, where flakes of rust dusted the very corner. The window wasn’t opened very often; but it had been recently. The varnished wood of the sill was etched with a scraped indentation where someone had forced open the jammed casement, the wood beneath the scratch still fresh and clean, barely even dusty.

I slipped the latch and pulled, but the old window, swollen by sea air and the wet spring weather, was jammed shut. I wiggled it open just far enough to wedge my fingers in behind it, and then it was easy enough to work the window open, scraping it again across the sill. I leaned out then, peering through the gloom toward the green where the beggar had died.

The sounds of the village settling into evening struck me as being very pleasant, and the rush of sea wind in my face awakened me from the morbid reverie of dread that I’d slipped into while climbing the darkened stairs. I could even see the lights of the Crown and Apple, and they reminded me of supper and a pint. But then I looked down three long stories to the paving stones of the courtyard below, and with a dreadful shudder I was reminded of danger in all its manifold guises, and I bent back into the safety of the hallway, imagining sudden hands pushing against the small of my back, and me tumbling out and falling headlong.…Being handed a bomb in a basket has that effect on me.

I knew what I had to know. Confrontations would accomplish nothing, especially when I had no idea on earth what it was, exactly, I would discover upon knocking on the door of the Pules’ room. Better to think about it over supper.

I forced the window shut, then stood up and turned around, thinking to steal back down the stairs and away. But I found myself staring into the face of the ghastly Mrs. Pule, the woman in Godall’s shop.

My Adventure at The Hoisted Pint

I gasped out a sort of hoarse yip while she grinned out of that melon face of hers—a hollow grin, empty of any real amusement. She pointed a revolver at me.

Down the hail we went. I would be visiting their room after all, and I’ll admit that I didn’t like the notion a bit. What would St. Ives do? Whirl around and disarm her? Talk her out of whatever grisly notion she had in mind? Prevail upon her better judgment? I didn’t know how to do any of that. St. Ives wouldn’t have gotten himself into this mess in the first place.

She knocked twice on the door of the room, then paused, then knocked once. It swung open, but nobody stood there; whoever had opened the door was hidden behind it, not wanting to be seen. Who would it be? Captain Bowker, perhaps, waiting to lambaste me with a truncheon. I couldn’t have that. Ignoring the revolver, I ducked away to the left into the room and spun around to face whoever it was that would emerge when the door swung shut.

It was the lunatic son—Willis Pule. He peeked out coyly, just his head, and his mother had to snatch the door shut because he didn’t want to let go of it. She reached across and pinched him on the ear, and his coy smile evaporated, replaced by a look of theatrical shock, which disappeared in turn when he got a really good glimpse at the fright that must have been plain on my face. Then, suddenly happy, he affected the wide-eyed and round-mouthed demeanor of the fat man in the comical drawing, the one who has just that moment noted the approach of someone bearing an enormous plate of cream tarts. Pule pulled his right hand from behind his back and waved my elephant at me.

There was a buzzing just then, and the woman strode across to where the outlet of a speaking tube protruded from the wall. She slid open its little hatch-cover, jammed her ear against it, listened, and then, speaking into the tube, she said, “Yes, we’ve got him.” She listened again and said, “No, in the hallway.” And after another moment of listening she snickered out, “Him? Not hardly,” and closed the hatch-cover and shut off the tube.

She had obviously just spoken to the landlady. The place was a rat’s nest. Everything was clear to me as I slumped uninvited into a stuffed chair. All my detective work was laughable; I’d been toyed with all along. Even the elephant under the potted plant—that had been the work of the landlady too. She had snatched it away, of course, when I’d gone out through the door. She was the only one who was close enough to have got to it and away again before I had come back in. And all the rigamarole about my mother’s cousin with the improbable names

She must have taken me for a child after that, watching me stroll away up the stairs to my probable doom. “Him, not hardly…” I grimaced. I thought I knew what that meant, and I couldn’t argue with it. Well, maybe it would serve me some good in the end; maybe I could turn it to advantage. I would play the witless milksop, and then I would strike. I tried to convince myself of that.

Willis Pule tiptoed across to a pine table with a wooden chair alongside it. His tiptoeing was exaggerated, this time like a comic actor being effusively quiet, taking great silent knee-high steps. What was a madman but an actor who didn’t know he was acting, in a play that nobody else had the script for? He sat in the chair, nodding at me and working his mouth slowly, as if he were chewing the end of a cigar. What did it all mean, all his mincing and posing and winking? Nothing. Not a damned thing. All the alterations in the weather of his face were nonsense.

He laid the elephant on the table and removed its red jumbo pants with a sort of infantile glee. Then he patted his coat pocket, slipped out a straight razor, and very swiftly and neatly sawed the elephant’s ears off. A look of intense pity and sadness shifted his eyes and mouth, and then was gone.

I forgot to breathe for a moment, watching him. It wasn’t the ruining of the toy that got to me. I had built the thing, after all, and I’ve found that a man rarely regrets the loss of something he’s built himself; he’s always too aware of the flaws in it, of the fact that it wants a hat, but it’s too late to give it one. It was the beastly cool way that he pared the thing up—that’s what got to me: the way he watched me out of the corner of his eye, and looked up once to wink at me and nod at the neat bit of work he was accomplishing, almost as if to imply that it was merely practice, sawing up the elephant was. And, horribly, he was dressed just like his mother, too, still got up in the same florid chintz.

His mother walked past him, ignoring him utterly. I hoped that she might take the razor away from him. A razor in the hands of an obvious lunatic, after all…But she didn’t care about the razor. She rather approved of it, I think,

“Willis likes to operate on things,” she said matter-of-factly, the word operate effecting a sort of ghastly resonance in my inner ear. I nodded a little, trying to smile, as if pleased to listen to the chatter of a mother so obviously proud of her son. “He cut a bird apart once, and affixed its head to the body of a mouse.”

“Ah,” I said,

She cocked her head and favored me with a horrid grimace of sentimental wistfulness, “It lived for a week. He had to feed it out of a tiny bottle, poor thing. It was a night-and-day job, ministering to that helpless little creature. A night-and-day job. It nearly wore him out. And then when it died I thought his poor heart would break, like an egg. He enshrined it under the floorboards along with the others. Held a service and all.”

I shook my head, wondering at the notion of a heart breaking like an egg. They were both barmy, and no doubt about it. And given Pule’s years in apprenticeship with Narbondo, all this stuff about vivisection very likely wasn’t just talk. I glanced over at the table. Pule had managed to stuff a piece of candle through the holes where the beast’s ears had been. He lit it with a match at both ends, so that the twin flames shot out on either side of its head, melting the wax all over the tabletop and filling the room with the reek of burning rubber.

“Willis!” shrieked the mother, wrinkling up her nose at the stink. In a fit of determination she leaped up and raced toward the sleeping room. She was immediately out again, brandishing a broad wooden paddle, and her son, suddenly contrite, began to howl and beg and cry. Then, abruptly, he gave off his pleading and started to yell, “Fire! Fire!” half giggling, half sobbing, as he slammed away at the burning elephant with his cap, capering around and around the table and chair as his mother angled in to swat him with the paddle.

It was an appalling sight—one I hope never again to witness as long as I live. I was up in a shot, and leaping for the door, getting out while the getting was good. The getting wasn’t any good, though; the door was locked tight, and both the mother and son turned on me together, he plucking up the razor and she waving the paddle.

I apologized profusely. “Terribly sorry,” I said. “Terribly, terribly sorry.” I couldn’t think of anything else. But all the while I looked around the room, searching out a weapon, and there was nothing at all close to hand except a chair cushion. I believe that if I could have got at something with a little weight to it I would have pounded them both into jelly right then and there, and answered for the crime afterward. There wasn’t a court in all of England that would have condemned me, not after taking a look at that mad pair and another look beneath the floorboards of their house in London.

They advanced a step, so I shouted, “I know the truth!” and skipped away against the far wall. It was a nonsensical thing to shout, since I didn’t any more know the truth than I knew the names of my fictitious cousins, but it stopped them cold. Or at least it stopped her. He, on the other hand, had fallen entirely into the role of being a menace, and he stalked back and forth eyeing me like a pirate, and she eyeing him, until, seeing her chance, she walloped him on the posterior with the paddle, grinning savagely, and very nearly throwing him straight razor and all into the chair I’d been sitting in.

He crept back to his table tearfully, like a broken man, whimpering nonsense at her, apologizing. He slumped over the ravaged elephant, hacking off its feet with the razor and then slicing its legs to ribbons, the corners of his mouth turned down in a parody of grief and rage.

“Where are they?” she asked.

What are they; that was the question. I ought to have had the answer, but didn’t. It could be she meant people—St. Ives, maybe, and Hasbro. She thought, perhaps, that they were lurking roundabout, waiting for me. It didn’t sound like that’s what she meant, though. I scrambled through my mind, recalling her conversation at Godall’s shop.

“I can lead you to them.” I was clutching at straws, hoping wasn’t as utterly obvious as it seemed to be.

She nodded. The son peered at me slyly.

“But I want some assurances,” I said.

“An affidavit?” she asked, cackling with sudden laughter. “I’ll give you assurances, Mr. High-and-mighty.”

“And I’ll give you this!” cried the son, leaping up as if spring-driven and waving his straight razor in the air like an Afghani assassin. In a sudden fit he flailed away with it at the remains of the elephant, chopping it like an onion, carving great gashes in the tabletop and banging the razor against the little gear mechanism inside the ruined toy, the several gears wobbling away to fall off the table and onto the floor. Then he cast down the razor, and, snarling and drooling, he plucked up the little jumbo trousers and tore them in half, throwing them to the carpet, alternately trodding on them and spitting at them in a furious spastic dance, and meaning to say, I guess, that the torn pants would be my head if I didn’t look sharp.

His mother turned around and slammed him with the paddle again, shouting “Behavior!” very loud, her face red as a zinnia. He yipped across the room and sank into the chair, sitting on his hands and glowering at me.

“Where?” asked the woman. “And no games.”

“At the Crown and Apple,” I said. “In my room.”

“Your room.” She squinted at me.

“That’s correct. I can lead you there now. Quickly.”

“You won’t lead us anywhere,” she said. “We’ll lead ourselves. You’ll stay here. There’s not another living soul on this floor, Mr. Who-bloody-is-it, and everyone on the floor below has been told there’s a madman spending the night, given to fits. Keep your lip shut, and if we come back with the notebooks, we’ll go easy on you.”

Willis Pule nodded happily. “Mummy says I can cut out your tripes,” he assured me enthusiastically, “and feed them to the bats.”

“The bats,” I said, wondering why in the world he had chosen the definite article, and watching him pocket the razor. So it was the notebooks…Both of them donned webby-looking shawls and toddled out the door like the Bedlam Twins, she covering me all the time with the revolver. The door shut and the key clanked in the lock.

I was up and searching the place for a window, for another key, for a vent of some sort—for anything. The room was on the inside of the hallway, though, and without a window. And although both of them were lunatics, they were far too canny to leave spare keys roundabout. I sat down and thought. The Crown and Apple wasn’t five minutes’ walk. They’d get into my room right enough, search it in another five minutes, and then hurry back to cut my tripes out. Revolver or no revolver, they’d get a surprise when they pushed in through the door. She would make him come through first, of course, to take the blow…I studied out a plan.

What the room lacked was weapons. She had even taken the wooden paddle with her. There were a couple of chairs that would do in a pinch, but I wanted something better. I had worked myself into a bloodthirsty sort of state, and I was thinking in terms of clubbing people insensible. Chairs were too spindly and cumbersome for that.

I went to town on the bedstead—a loose-jointed wooden affair that wanted glue. Yanking the headboard loose from the side rails, I listened with satisfaction as the mattress and rails bumped to the floor, loud enough to alert anyone below that visiting lunatic was doing his work. Then I leaned on one of the posts of the headboard itself, smashing the headboard sideways, the posts straining to tear away from the cross-members. Dowels snapped, wood groaned, and after a little bit of playing ram-it-against-the-floorboards the whole thing went to smash, leaving the turned post free in my hands. I hefted it; I would have liked it shorter, but it would do the trick,

The doorknob rattled just then. They were back, and quick, too. Either that or else maybe the landlady, noticing that the lunatic had been doing his job too well, had come round to investigate. I slid across to stand by the door, thinking that I wouldn’t smash the landlady with my club, but would simply push past her instead, and away down the stairs. If it was a man, though…

Whoever it was was having a terrible time with the lock. It seemed like an eternity of metallic clicking before the door swung to. I tensed, the club over my shoulder. A man’s face poked in from the dark hallway, the rest of the head following, I closed my eyes, stepped away from the wall, and pounded him one, slamming the club down against the back of his head, and knowing straight out that it wasn’t Willis Pule at all, but someone perhaps even more deadly: it was Higgins, the academician-gone-to-seed, still gripping a skeleton key in his right hand.

The blow left him half senseless, knocking him onto his face on the floor. He lay writhing. I stepped across, thinking to give him another one, a sort of cricket swing to the cranium, but he was already down and I couldn’t bring myself to do it—something I’m happy about today, but which took all my civilized instincts at the time.

The door lay open before me, and I was out of it quick, bolting for the stairs, throwing the post onto the floor of the hallway, and wondering about Higgins sneaking around like that. He wasn’t expected; that was certain. He had seen them both go out, perhaps, and had crept in, no doubt searching for the very notebooks that they were off ransacking my room for. They weren’t in league, then, but were probably deadly enemies. The Pules would take good care of him if they found him on the floor of their room.

I peered cautiously down the dark and empty stairwell, and then leaped down the stairs three at a time toward the second-floor landing, thinking to charge into the foyer at a run, knocking down anyone between me and the door and maybe shouting something clever at the landlady to regain some lost dignity. I fairly spun around the baluster and onto the bottom flight of stairs, straight into the faces of the two Pules, who puffed along like engines, coming up, she holding the revolver under her shawl and he going along before, both of them with a deadly resolve.

“Here now!” piped the son, clutching my arm in the devil’s own grip.

“Hold him!” she cried. “We’ll make him sing! Up the stairs, Bucko!”

I kicked him on the shin as hard as I could, my momentum lending it some mustard. He howled and slammed backward against the railing, nearly knocking his mother down. He didn’t let go of my arm, though, but pulled me over with him, both of us flailing and rolling and me jerking free and scrabbling back up toward the landing like an anxious crab, expecting to be shot. I was on my feet and jumping up the stairs three at a time toward the third floor, listening to the curses and slaps and yips behind me as Mrs. Pule rallied her son.

There was no shot, despite the way being clear for it and the range close, but I ducked and danced down the third-floor hall anyway, trying to convince myself that she was loathe to fire the gun in public and bring about the collapse of her plans. I should have thought of that an hour ago, when she collared me at the window, but I didn’t, and wasn’t convinced of it now.

I blasted past the room again, its door still open and Higgins on his hands and knees on the floor, ruminating. The sight of him brought the Pules up short as they came racing along behind me, and for the moment they let me go in order to attend to him. I headed straight toward a French window, grappled with the latch, pulled it open, and looked out, not onto three stories of empty air, thank heaven, but onto a little dormer balcony. There was a hooting from the open door of the room, and a grunt, and then an outright shriek, as the Pules visited the sins of Jack Owlesby onto the head of poor Higgins.

I closed the window behind me, although I couldn’t latch it. In a moment they’d be through it and upon me. Without a bit of hesitation I hoisted myself over the railing, swinging myself down and in, landing on my feet on an identical balcony below and immediately crumpling up, my ankles ringing with the impact. I was up again, though, climbing across this railing too, and clutching two handfuls of ivy tendrils with the nitwit idea of clambering down through it to safety like an ape in a rain forest. I scrabbled in the vines with my feet as the ivy tore loose in a rush, and I slid along through it shouting, landing in a viney heap in a flower bed.

The window banged open upstairs, and I was on my feet and running, trailing vines, wincing at the pain in my ankles, but damned if I’d let any of it slow me down. I expected a shot, but none came—just a litany of curses cried into the night and then cut off abruptly when a voice from a window in a nearby house shouted, “Wot the hell!” and the strollers down along the street to the pier began to point. Mrs. Pule, blessedly, wasn’t keen on calling attention to herself just then.

I ran straight toward the gap between the two houses that would lead me to the seawall, not slowing down until I was there, clambering over the now-damp stone and jumping to the shingle below, where I found myself slogging through ankle-deep water, the tide having come up to lap against the wall. I nearly slipped on the slick stones, and forced myself to slow down. There was no sound of pursuit, nothing at all, and the wild sense of abandon that had fueled my acrobatic leap from the top balcony drained away, leaving me cold and shaking, my shoes filled with seawater.

I climbed back over the wall and tramped along to the Crown and Apple, up the backstairs to find the door unlocked. I slipped into my room, dead tired and even more deadly thirsty. In fifteen minutes I strolled into the dining room in dry shoes, feeling tolerably proud of myself, and there sat St. Ives and Hasbro, stabbing at cutlets and with a bottle of Burgundy uncorked on the table. It did my heart good, as they say.

***

“Not with a revolver, she didn’t,” said St. Ives. “You were too far away for anyone to have brought off so close a shot. My guess is that it was a Winchester, and that it was your man Bowker who fired it. Clearly they and the Pules are working at cross-purposes, although both of them chase the same ends—which have little to do, I’m convinced, with drawing ships to their doom. That’s a peripheral business—quick cash to finance more elaborate operations.”

St. Ives emptied the bottle into Hasbro’s glass and waved at the waiter, ordering a second bottle of wine and another pint for me. I’m a beer man generally; red wine rips me up in the night. St. Ives studied his plate for a moment and then said, “It’s very largely a distraction, too, the ship business, and a good one. Godall seems to think that the Crown is on the verge of paying them what they ask, in return for their solemn assurance that they’ll abandon the machine where she lies. Imagine that. Those were Parsons’s words, ‘Their solemn assurance.’ The man’s gone round the bend. Now that we’ve found the machine, though, they’ll wait on the ransom. We’ve accomplished that much. The Academy has the area cordoned off with ships and are going to try to haul it up out of there.”

St. Ives drained his glass, then scowled into the lees, swirling them in the bottom. “If I had half a chance…,” he said, not bothering to finish the sentence. I thought I knew what he meant, though; he had harbored a grim distrust of the machine ever since Lord Kelvin had set out to reverse the polarity of the earth with it. What were they keeping it for, if not to effect some other grand and improbable disaster in the name of science? I half believed St. Ives knew what it was, too—that there was far more to the machine than he was letting on and that only the principal players in the game fully understood. I was a pawn, of course, and resolved to keeping to my station. I’m certain, though, that St. Ives had contemplated on more than one occasion going into that machine works up in Holborn and taking it out of there himself. But he hadn’t, and look what had come of his hesitating. That’s the way he saw it—managing to blame himself from a fresh angle.

I tried to steer the subject away from the business of the machine. “So what do they want?” I asked.

“The notebooks, for the moment. The damnable notebooks. They think that they’re an ace away from immortality. Narbondo very nearly had it ten years ago, back when he was stealing carp out of the aquarium and working with Willis Pule. He was close—close enough so that in Norway Higgins could revive him with the elixir and the apparatus. For my money Narbondo was pumped up with carp elixir when he went into the pond; that’s what kept him alive, kept his entire cellular structure from crystallizing. Higgins’s idea, as I see it, is that he would revive the doctor, and the two of them would search out the notebooks and then hammer out the fine points; together they would bottle the Fountain of Youth. How much they know about the machine I can’t say.

“Higgins had been tracking them—the notebooks—and he wrote to Mrs. Pule, who he suspected might know something of their whereabouts, but his writing to her just set her off. She came around to Godall’s very cleverly, knowing that to reveal to us that the notebooks existed and that Narbondo was alive would put us on the trail. She and the son merely followed us down from London.”

It made sense to me. Leave it to St. Ives to put the pieces in order. “Why,” I asked, “are they so keen on killing me, that’s what I want to know. I’m the lowly worm in the whole business.”

“You were available,” said St. Ives. “And you were persistent, snooping around their hotel like that. These are remarkably bloodthirsty criminals. And the Pules, I’m afraid, are amateurs alongside the doctor. Higgins didn’t have any idea on earth what it was he was reviving, not an inkling.”

St. Ives pushed his plate away and ordered a bit of custard. It was getting along toward ten o’clock, and the evening had wound itself down. The beer was having its way with me, and I yawned and said that I would turn in, and St. Ives nodded thoughtfully and said that he’d just stroll along over to the icehouse in a bit and see what was up. I slumped. I wasn’t built for it, not right then, and yet it was me who had found out about the business up in Norway. I was pretty sure that I understood the icehouse, and it didn’t seem fair that I be left out. “It’s early for that, isn’t it?” I asked.

St. Ives shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“I suggest a nap. Just a couple of hours to rest up. Let’s tackle them in the middle of the night, while they sleep.”

St. Ives considered, looked at his pocket watch, and said, “Fair enough. Stroke of midnight. We’ll be across the hail, just in case anyone comes sneaking around.”

“Knock me up with fifteen minutes to spare,” I said, getting up. And with that I toddled off to my room and fell asleep in my clothes.

***

The night was howling cold and the sky clear and starry. There was a moon, but just enough to hang a coat on. We had slipped out the back and taken my route along the seawall, none of us speaking and with the plan already laid out. Hasbro carried a revolver and was the one among us most capable of using it.

Absolutely no one was about. Lamps flickered here and there along the streets, and a single light glowed in one of the windows of The Hoisted Pint—Willis Pule turning Higgins into an amphibian, probably. The shadowy pier stretched into the moonlit ocean, and the icehouse loomed dark and was empty in the weeds—very ominous, it seemed to me.

We wafered ourselves against the wall and waited, listening, wondering what lay within. After a moment I realized that Hasbro was gone. He had been behind me and now he wasn’t; just like that. I tugged on St. Ives’s coat, and he turned around and winked at me, putting a finger to his lips and then motioning me forward with a wave of his hand.

We crept along, listening to the silence and ducking beneath a bank of dirty windows, hunching a few steps farther to where St. Ives stopped outside a door. He put a finger to his lips and a hand on the latch, easing the latch down gently. There sounded the hint of a click, the door swung open slowly, and we were through, creeping along across the floor of a small room with a broken-down desk in it.

Some little bit of moonlight filtered in through the window—enough to see by now that our eyes had adjusted. Carefully, St. Ives pushed open another heavy door, just a crack, and peered through, standing as if frozen until he could make out what lay before him. He turned his head slowly and gave me a look—just a widening of the eyes—and then pushed the door open some more.

I caught the sound of snoring just then, low and labored like that of a hibernating bear, and when I followed St. Ives into the room, both of us creeping along, I looked for Captain Bowker, and sure enough there he was, asleep on a cot, his head turned to the wall. We slipped past him, through his little chamber and out into the open room beyond.

It was fearfully cold, and no wonder. Great blocks of ice lay stacked in the darkness like silvery coffins beneath the high ceiling. They were half covered with piled straw, and there was more straw littering the floor and a pair of dumpcarts and a barrow and a lot of shadowy odds and ends of tongs and tools and ice saws along the wall—none of it particularly curious, considering where we were.

St. Ives didn’t hesitate. He knew what he was looking for, out and I thought I did too. I was wrong, though. What St. Ives was after lay beyond the ice, through a weighted door that was pulled partly open. We stepped up to it, dropping to our hands and knees to peer beneath it. Beyond, in a square slope-ceilinged room with a double door set in the far wall, was a metal sphere, glowing dully in the moonlight and sitting on four squat legs.

It’s Lord Kelvin’s machine!—I said to myself, but then saw that it wasn’t. It was a diving bell, a submarine explorer, built out of brass and copper and ringed with portholes. Mechanical armatures thrust out, with hinged elbows so that the device looked very jaunty, as if it might at any moment shuffle away on its piggy little legs. We rolled under the door, not wanting to push it open farther for fear of making a noise. And then all of a sudden, as we got up to dust ourselves off, there was noise to spare—the rattling and creaking of a wagon drawing up beyond the doors, out in the night.

A horse snorted and shook its head, and there was the sound of a brake clacking down against a wheel. I dropped to the ground, thinking to scramble under and into the ice room again before whoever it was in the wagon unlocked the outside doors and confronted us there. St. Ives grabbed my coat, though, and shook his head, and in a moment there was a fiddling with a lock and I stood up slowly, ready to acquit myself like a man.

The doors drew back, and between them, pulling them open, stood the remarkable Hasbro. St. Ives didn’t stop to chat. He put his shoulder against one of the doors, pushing it fully open while Hasbro saw to the other one, and then as St. Ives latched on to the harness and backed the horses and dray around and through the doors, Hasbro clambered up onto the bed, yanked loose the wheel brake, and began to unlatch a clutch of chain and line from the post of a jib crane bolted to the bed.

I stood and gaped until I saw what it was we were up to, and then I hitched up my trousers and set to. Lickety-split, passing the line back and forth, looping and yanking, we tied the diving bell in a sort of basket weave. Hasbro hoisted it off the ground with the jib crane, which made the devil’s own creaking and groaning, and St. Ives and I guided it by the feet as it swung around and onto the bed of the dray, clunking down solidly. Hasbro dropped down onto the plank seat, plucked up the ribands, clicked his tongue, and was gone in a whirl of moonlit dust, cantering away into the night.

It was a neat bit of work, although I had no real notion of its purpose. If the machine in the Strait was guarded by Her Majesty’s navy, then our villains had no real use for the diving bell anyway; that part of their adventure, it seemed to me, had already drawn to an unsuccessful close. But who was I to question St. Ives? He was damned glad to get the bell out of there; I could see that in his face.

But we weren’t done yet; I could see that too. Why hadn’t we ridden out of there with Hasbro? Because St. Ives was in a sweat to see what else lay in that icehouse. Narbondo himself was in there somewhere, and St. Ives meant to find him. We bellied straightaway under the weighted door, back into the ice room, St. Ives first and me following, and stood up to peer into the grinning face of the jolly Captain Bowker, who stood two yards distant, staring at us down the sights of his rifle.

Villainy at Midnight

He wouldn’t miss this time. I was determined to play the part of the cooperative man, the man who doesn’t want to be shot. The door slammed up and open behind us, and there stood Higgins, dressed in a lab coat, his head bandaged and him winded and puffing. Tufts of hair poked through the bandage. He smelled awful, like a dead fish in a sack.

“Leopold Higgins, I presume,” said St. Ives, bowing. “I am Langdon St. Ives.”

“I know who you bloody well are,” he said, and then he looked at me for a cold moment, smiled, and said, “How did you like the fruit?”

Clearly he didn’t know it was me who had beaned him at The Hoisted Pint when he was sneaking into the Pules’ room. That was good; he wouldn’t have been making jokes otherwise. Despite the gloom of the icehouse I could see that his face was bruised pretty badly. That must have been the work of the wonderful Pules.

“Catch it?” asked the captain, still training the rifle on us.

“Got away right enough,” said Higgins. “What sort of watch was that you were keeping? Napping is what I call it. Sleeping like a baby while these two…”

The captain swiveled the rifle around and—blam!—fired a round past Higgins’s ear. I leaped straight off my feet, but not nearly so far off them as Higgins did. He threw himself facedown into the straw on the floor, mewling like a wet cat. Captain Bowker chuckled until his eyes watered as Higgins, pale and shaken, struggled back up, fear and fury playing in his eyes.

“Who cares?” said the captain.

Higgins worked his mouth, priming his throat. “But the diving bell…”

“Who cares about the filthy bell? It ain’t worth a nickel to me. You ain’t worth a nickel to me. I’d just as leave kill the three of you and have done with it. You’ll get your diving bell back when the tall one finds out we’ve got his friends.”

This last added an optimistic flavor to the discussion. “The tall one” was clearly Hasbro, who, of course, would happily trade a dozen diving bells for the lives of dear old Jack and the professor. I didn’t at all mind being held for ransom; it was being dead that bothered me.

“Or one of his friends, anyway.” The captain shifted his gaze from one to the other of us, as if coming to a decision. There went the optimism. I was surely the most expendable of the two of us, since I knew the least. Captain Bowker sniffed the air and wrinkled up his face. “Gimme the ‘lixir,” he said to Higgins.

“He needs it,” said Higgins, shaking his head. It was a brave act, considering, for the captain trained the rifle on Higgins again, dead between the eyes now, and started straight in to chuckle. Without an instant’s hesitation, Higgins’s hand went into the pocket of his lab coat and hauled out a corked bottle, which he reached across toward the captain.

The captain grabbed for it, and St. Ives jumped—just when the rifle was midway between Higgins and us. It was the little pleasure in baiting Higgins that tripped the captain up.

“Run, Jack!” shouted St. Ives when he threw himself at the captain. In a storm of arms and legs he was flying forward, into the air, sideways into Captain Bowker’s expansive stomach. The captain smashed over backward, his head banging against the floorboards and the bottle of elixir sailing away toward the stacked ice with Higgins diving after it. I was out both doors and into the night, running again toward the two houses before St. Ives’s admonition had faded in my ears. He had commanded me to run, and I ran, like a spooked sheep. Live to fight another day, I told myself.

And while I ran I waited for the sound of a shot. What would I do if I heard it? Turn around? Turning around wasn’t on my mind. I pounded down the little boardwalk and angled toward the seawall, leaping along like an idiot instead of slowing down to think things out. No one was after me, and I was out of sight of the icehouse, so there was no longer any chance of being shot. It was cold fear that drove me on. And it was regret at having run in the first place, at having left St. Ives alone, that finally slowed me down.

I was walking when I got to the water, breathing like an engine. Fog was blowing past in billows, and the moon was lost beyond it. In moments I couldn’t see at all, except for the seawall, which I followed along up toward the Apple, moving slowly now and listening to the dripping of water off eaves and to what sounded like the slow dip of oars out on the bay. Suddenly it was the heavy silence that terrified me, an empty counterpoint, maybe, to the now-faded sound of gunfire and the moment of shouting chaos that had followed it.

Where was I bound? Back to the Apple to hide? To lie up until I learned that my friends were dead and the villains gone away? Or to confront the Pules, maybe, who were awaiting me in my room, honing their instruments? It was time for thinking all of a sudden, not for running. St. Ives had got me out of the icehouse. I couldn’t believe that his heroics were meant simply to save my miserable life—they were, without a doubt, but I couldn’t admit to it—and so what I needed was a plan, any plan, to justify my being out of danger.

I just then noticed that a lantern glowed out to sea, corning along through the fog, maybe twenty yards offshore; you couldn’t really tell. The light bobbed like a will-o’-the-wisp, hanging from a pole affixed to the bow of a rowboat sculling through the mist. I stopped to finish catching my breath and to wait out my hammering heart, and I watched the foggy lantern float toward me. A sudden gust of salty wind blew the mists to tatters, and the dark ocean and its rowboat appeared on the instant, the boat driving toward shore when the man at the oars out got a clear view of the seawall. The hull scrunched up onto the shingle, the stern slewing around and the oarsman clambering into shallow water. It was Hasbro. His pant legs were rolled and his shoes tied around his neck.

He looped the painter through a rusted iron ring in the wall and shook my hand as if he hadn’t seen me in a month. Without a second’s hesitation I told him about St. Ives held prisoner in the icehouse, about how I was just then formulating a plan to go back after him, working out the fine points so that I didn’t just wade in and muck things up. Captain Bowker was a dangerous man, I said. Like old explosives, any little quiver might detonate him.

“Very good, Mr. Owlesby,” Hasbro said in that stony butler’s voice of his. Wild coincidence didn’t perturb him. Nothing perturbed him. He listened and nodded as he sat there on the wet seawall and put on his shoes. His lean face was stoic, and he might just as well have been studying the racing form or laying out a shirt and trousers for his master to wear in the morning. Suddenly there appeared in my mind a picture of a strangely complicated and efficient clockwork mechanism—meant to be his brain, I suppose—and my spirits rose a sizable fraction. As dangerous as Captain Bowker was, I told myself, here was a man more dangerous yet. I had seen evidence of it countless times, but I had forgot it nearly as often because of the damned cool air that Hasbro has about him, the quiet efficiency.

Here he was, after all, out on the ocean rowing a boat. A half hour ago he was tearing away in a wagon, hauling a diving bell to heaven knows what destination. That was it—the difference between us. He was a man with destinations; it was that which confounded me. I rarely had one, unless it was some trivial momentary destination—the pub, say. Did Dorothy know that about me? Was it clear to the world as it was to me? Why on earth did she humor me day to day? Maybe because I reminded her of her father. But this was no time for getting morose and enumerating regrets. Where had Hasbro been? He didn’t tell me; it was later that I found out.

At the moment, though, both of us slipped along through the fog, and suddenly I was a conspirator again. A destination had been provided for me. I wished that Dorothy could see me, bound on this dangerous mission, slouching through the shadowy fog to save St. Ives from the most desperate criminals imaginable. I tripped over a curb and sprawled on my face in the grass of the square, but was up immediately, giving the treacherous curb a hard look and glancing around like a fool to see if anyone had been a witness to my ignominious tumble. Hasbro disappeared ahead, oblivious to it—or so he would make it seem in order not to embarrass me.

But there, away toward the boardwalk and the pier, across the lawn…It was too damnably foggy now to tell, but some one had been there, watching. Heart flailing again, I leaped along to catch up with Hasbro. “We’re followed,” I hissed after him.

He nodded, and whispered into my ear. “Too much fog to say who it is. Maybe the mother and son.”

I didn’t think so. Whoever it was was shorter than Willis Pule. Narbondo, maybe. He was somewhere about. It wasn’t certain that he was on ice; that was mere conjecture. Narbondo skulking in the fog—the idea of it gave me the willies. But we were in view of the icehouse again, and the sight of it replaced the willies with a more substantial fear. The glow of lamplight filtered through a dirty window, and Hasbro and I edged along toward it, just as St. Ives and I had done an hour earlier.

I kept one eye over my shoulder, squinting into the mists, my senses sharp. I wouldn’t be taken unawares; that was certain. What we saw through the window, though, took my mind off the night, and along with Hasbro I gaped at the three men within—none of whom was St. Ives.

What we were looking at wasn’t a proper room, but was a little niche cut off from the ice room with a canvas drape. It was well lit, and we had a first-rate view of the entire interior, what with the utter darkness outside. The floor was clean of litter, and the whole of the room had a swabbed-out look to it, like a jury-rigged hospital room. On a wheeled table in the middle of it, lying atop a cushion and wearing what appeared to be a rubber all-together suit, was Dr. Narbondo himself, pale as a corpse with snow-white hair that had been cropped short. Frost was a more appropriate name, certainly. Narbondo had met his fate in that tarn; what had risen from it was something else entirely.

He lay there on his cushion, with fist-sized chunks of ice packed around him, like a jolly great fish on a buffet table. Captain Bowker sat in a chair, looking grizzled, tired, and enormous. His rifle stood tilted against the back corner of the room, always at hand. Higgins hovered over the supine body of the doctor. He meddled with chemical apparatus—a pan of yellow cataplasm or something, and a rubber bladder attached by a coiled tube to a misting nozzle. On a table along the wall sat the bottle of elixir that Higgins had apparently saved from its flying doom an hour past.

He showered the doctor with the mist, pulling open either eyelid and spraying the stuff directly in. The interior of the room was yellow with it, like a London fog. Narbondo trembled, as if from a spine-wrenching chill, and shouted something—I couldn’t make out what—and then half sat up, lurching onto his elbows and staring round about him with wide, wild eyes. In seconds the passion had winked out of them, replaced by a placid know-it-all look, and he took up the bottle of elixir, uncorked it with a trembling hand, and drank off half the contents. He glanced at our window, and I nearly tumbled over backward, but he couldn’t have seen us out there in the darkness and the fog.

What to do; that was the problem. Where was St. Ives? Dead? Trussed up somewhere within? More than likely. There were too many issues at stake for them to waste such a hostage as that. I nudged Hasbro with my elbow and nodded off down the dark clapboard wall of the icehouse, as if I were suggesting we head down that way—which I was. I saw no reason not to get St. Ives out of there. Hasbro was intent on the window, though, and he shook his head.

It was the doctor that he watched, Dr. Frost, or Narbondo, whichever you please. He had sat up now and was turning his head very slowly, as if his joints wanted oil; you could almost hear the creak. A startled expression, one of dread and confusion, passed across his face in waves. He was obviously troubled by something, and was making a determined effort to win through it. He slid off onto the floor and stood reeling, turning around with his back to us and with his hands on the table. I saw him pluck up a piece of ice and hold it to his chest, an artistic gesture, it seemed to me, even at the time.

Higgins hovered around like a mother hen. He put a hand on the doctor’s arm, but Narbondo shook it off, nearly falling over and then grabbing the table again to steady himself. He turned slowly, letting go, and then, one step at a time, tramped toward the canvas curtain like a man built of stone, taking three short steps before pitching straight over onto his face and lying there on the floor, unmoving. Captain Bowker stood up tiredly, as a man might who didn’t care a rap for fallen doctors, and he trudged over to where Higgins leaped around in a fit, shouting orders but doing nothing except getting in the way. The captain pushed him against the wall and said, “Back off!” Then he picked the doctor up and laid him back onto his bed while Higgins hovered about, gathering up the ice chunks knocked onto the floor.

“It’s not working!” Higgins moaned, rubbing his forehead. “I’ve got to have the notebooks. I’m so close!”

“Looks like a bust to me,” said the captain. “I’m for making them pay out for the machine. I’m for Paris, is what I’m saying. Your friend here can rot. Say, gimme some more of that ‘lixir now. He won’t be needing no more tonight.”

It was then, while the captain’s back was turned and Higgins was furiously snatching up the bottle of elixir to keep it away from him, that the canvas curtain lifted and into the little room slipped Willis Pule and his ghastly mother, she holding her revolver and he grinning round about him like a giddy child and carrying a black and ominous surgeon’s bag.

Captain Bowker was quick; I’ll give him that. He must have seen them out of the corner of his eye, for he half turned, slamming Willis on the ear with his elbow and knocking him silly, if such a thing were possible. Then he lunged for his rifle; and it’s here that he moved too slowly. He would have got to it right enough if he hadn’t taken the time to hit Willis first. But he had taken the time, and now Mrs. Pule lunged forward with a look of insane glee on her face, shoving the muzzle of the revolver into the captain’s fleshy midsection so that the barrel entirely disappeared and the explosion was muffled when she fired. He managed to knock her away too, even as the bullet kicked him over backward in a sort of lumbering spin. He clutched at his vitals, his mouth working, and he knocked his rifle down as he caved in and sank almost like a ballerina to the floor, where he lay in a heap.

It was the most cold-blooded thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few cold-blooded things in my day. Mrs. Pule turned her gun on Higgins, who couldn’t stand it, apparently, and leaped at the canvas curtain. But Pule, who still sat on the floor, snaked out his arm and clutched Higgins’s leg, and Higgins went over headforemost as if he had been shot. Pule climbed up onto his back and sat there astride him, giggling hysterically and shouting “Horsey! Horsey!” and poking Higgins in the small of the back with his finger, trying to tickle him, as impossible as that sounds, and then cuffing him on the back of the head with his open hand. “Take that! Take that! Take that!” he shrieked, as if the words were hiccups and he couldn’t stop them.

Mrs. Pule saw her chance, and leaned in to slap Willis a good one, shouting, “Behavior!” again, except that this time the word had no effect on her son, and she was forced to box his ears, and so it went for what must have been twenty seconds or so: Willis slapping the back of Higgins’s jerking head and yanking his ears and pulling his hair, and Mrs. Pule cuffing Willis on the noggin, and both of the Pules shouting so that neither of them could make themselves heard. Finally the woman grabbed a handful of her son’s hair and gave it a yank, jerking him over backward with a howl, and Higgins flew to his knees and scrambled for the canvas, his bandages falling loose around his shoulders and fresh blood seeping through them.

They had him by the feet, though, just as quick as you please, and hauled him back in. They jerked him upright and slammed him into the late Captain Bowker’s chair, trussing him up with the captain’s own gaiters.

It was then that I saw someone right at the edge of my vision, down at the far end of the icehouse. I was certain of it. Someone was prowling around and had come out into the open, I suppose, at the sound of the gunfire and the scuffle, and then had seen us still standing by the window, doing nothing, and had darted away again, assuming, maybe, that there wasn’t any immediate alarm.

By the time I nudged Hasbro there was no one there, and there was precious little reason to go snooping off in that direction, especially since whoever it was, it wasn’t one of our villains; they were all present and accounted for. It’s someone waiting, I thought at the time—waiting to see how things fell out before making his move, waiting for the dirty work to be done for him.

And all the while Dr. Narbondo lay there on ice, seemingly frozen. Willis seemed to see him for the first time. He crept across to peer into the doctor’s face, then blanched with horror at what he saw there. Even in that deep and impossible sleep, Narbondo terrified poor Willis. And then, as if on cue, the doctor flinched in his cold slumber and mumbled something, and Pule fell back horrified. He cringed against the far wall, crossing his arms against his chest and drawing one leg up in a sort of flamingo gesture, doing as much as he could do to roll up into a ball and still stay on his feet—so that he could run, maybe, if it came to that.

***

His mother hunched across, goo-gooing at him, and rubbed his poor forehead, fluttering her eyelids and talking the most loathsome sort of baby talk to comfort him while still holding on to the revolver and stepping over the captain’s splayed legs, straight into the blood that had pooled up on the floor. She nearly slipped, and she caught on to her son’s jacket for support, giving off the baby talk in order to curse, and then wiping the bottom of her shoe very deliberately on the captain’s shirt. Maybe Hasbro couldn’t see this last bit from where he stood, but I could, and I can tell you it gave me the horrors, and doubly so when she went straightaway for her son again, calling him a poor lost thing and a wee birdy and all manner of pet names. I couldn’t get my eyes off that horrifying bloody shoe-smear on the captain’s already gruesome shirtfront. I was sick all of a sudden, and turned away to glance at Hasbro’s face. He had taken the whole business in. His stoic visage was evaporated, replaced by a look of pure puzzlement and repulsion; he was human, after all.

“Let’s find the professor,” I whispered to him. I had no desire to watch what would surely follow; they wouldn’t leave the doctor alive, and his death wouldn’t be pretty. These two were living horrors—but even then, bloodthirsty and hypocritical as it sounds, somehow I didn’t begrudge them their chance to even the score with Narbondo; I just didn’t want to see them do it.

We stepped along through the weeds, around to the door that opened onto what had been Captain Bowker’s sleeping quarters. The door was secured now, the hasp fitted with a bolt that had been slipped through it—enough merely to stop anyone’s getting out. We got in, though, quick as you please, and there was St. Ives, tied up hands and feet and gagged, lying atop the bed. We got the gag out and him untied, and we indicated by gestures and whispers what sort of monkey business was going on in the room beyond. He was up and moving toward the door to the ice room, determined to stop it. It didn’t matter who it was that was threatened. St. Ives wouldn’t brook it; even Narbondo would have his day before the magistrate.

He tugged open the door, and you can guess who stood there—Mrs. Pule, grinning like a gibbon ape and holding the gun. I whirled around to the outside door, which still stood open, ready to leap out into the night, and thinking, of course, that one of us ought to get out in order to find the constable, to summon aid. Could I help it if it was always me who was destined for such missions? But there stood Willis, right outside, looking haggard and wearing the mask of tragedy—and training the captain’s rifle on me with ominously shaking hands. I stopped where I stood and waited while Mrs. Pule took Hasbro’s revolver away from him. So much for that.

They marched us back through the ice room, the floor of which was wet and mucky with meltwater and sopping hay, and smelled like an ammoniated swamp. I was desperately cold all of a sudden, and thought about how unpleasant it was to have to face death when you were shaking with cold and dead tired and it was past three in the morning. The night had been one long round of wild escapes, followed by my striding back into various lion’s dens and tipping my hat. There was no chance of another go at it now, though, with one of them in front and one behind.

St. Ives started right in, as soon as he saw Narbondo lying there on the table. He felt for a pulse, nodded, and raised one of the doctor’s eyelids. Next he examined the bladder apparatus and sniffed the elixir, and then, as if it was the most natural and unpretentious thing in the world, he slipped the bottle of elixir into his coat pocket.

“Out with it!” hissed the woman, tipping the revolver against my head. My eyes shot open in order to better watch St. Ives remove the bottle.

“Wake him up,” she said, removing the revolver from my temple and gesturing toward the sleeping doctor.

St. Ives shook his head. “I’d love to,” he said. “But I don’t know how. It would be the happiest day of my life if I could animate him in order that he be brought to justice.”

She laughed out loud. “Them’s my words,” she said, referring to that day in Godall’s shop. “Justice! We’ll bring him justice, won’t we, Willis?”

Willis nodded, wild with happiness now—partly, I thought, because of St. Ives’s insisting that the doctor couldn’t be awakened. Pule didn’t want him awake. He picked up his bag of instruments and set it on the table. When he opened it, I could smell burnt rubber, and sure enough, he pulled out the hacked and charred fragments of the toy elephant and the little collection of gears, put back together now. “This is what I did to his elephant,” he said, nodding at me, but looking at Higgins.

“Elephant?” Higgins said, casting me a terrified and wondering glance. This obscure reference to the elephant must have struck him as significant in some unfathomable way, largely because what Pule held in his hand no longer had anything to do with elephants. It was simply a limp bit of flayed rubber and paint.

I shrugged at Higgins and started to speak to the poor man, but Willis cut me off, shouting, “Shut up!” in a lunatic falsetto and blinking very fast and hard. He wasn’t interested in hearing from me. He was caught up in his own twisted story, and he happily set about laying out an array of operating instruments—scalpels and clamps and something that looked a little like a bolt cutters and a little like a pruning shears and was meant, I guess, for clipping bone.

He made a bow in our direction, and, gesturing at Narbondo, he said, as if he were addressing a half score of students in a surgery, “I intend to affix this man’s head to the fat man’s body, and then to wake him up and make him look at himself in a mirror and see how ugly he is. Then I’m going to install this mechanism”—and here he plucked up the reassembled gears from the elephant—“in his heart, so that I can control him with a lever. And this man,” Pule said, pointing at poor terrified and befuddled Higgins, “I’m going to cut apart and put together backward, so that he has to reach behind himself to button his shirt, and then I’m going to sell him to Mr. Happy’s Circus.”

Pule was madder than I thought him. What on earth did he mean by nonsense like “put him together backward”? It was clear that he could actually accomplish none of this. What real evidence was there that he had any skills in vivisection at all? None, and never had been—only his association with Narbondo, which proved nothing, of course, except that he was capable of committing vile acts. He was simply going to hack three men up—two of them alive at the moment—for the same utterly insane reasons that he had hacked up my elephant or that he chopped apart birds and hid them under the floorboards of his house. And he would do it all with relish—I was certain of it.

Poor Higgins was even more certain, it seemed, for just as soon as Pule mentioned this business about selling him to Mr. Happy’s Circus, he began to utter a sort of low keening noise, a strange and mournful weeping. His eyes rolled back up into his head just as he slumped forward, tugging at the gaiters that held him to the chair, his voice rising another octave.

Mrs. Pule handed Willis the revolver, and he shifted the rifle to his left hand, not wanting to put it down. She picked up the dish of yellow chemical and advised Higgins to pipe down. But he couldn’t, and so she splashed the stuff into Higgins’s face, at which Higgins lurched upright, spitting and coughing, and she slapped him one, catching him mostly on the nose because of his twitching around. “Did you hear him?” she hissed.

“What! What! What!” cried Higgins, out of his mind now.

“You can save yourself,” she said. “Or else…” She hunched over and whispered the rest of the sentence in his ear.

“Merciful Jesus! I’m what?” he shouted. “You’re going to what? Mr. Happy!” His voice cracked. He began to gibber and moan.

They had gone too far. She had wanted to bargain with him, but she had made the mistake of driving him mad first, and now he was beyond bargaining. So she hit him again, twice—slap, slap—and he sat up straight and listened harder.

“The notebooks,” she said. “Where are they?”

St. Ives cleared his throat, and very cheerfully, as if he were talking to a neighbor over the garden wall, he said, “I don’t believe that the man knows…”

“Shut up!” she cried, turning on the three of us.

“Shut up!” cried her son, rapidly opening and closing his eyes and training the revolver on me, of all people; I hadn’t said anything. I shrugged, very willing to shut up.

St. Ives was a different kettle of fish. “I mean to say, madam,” he said, calmly and deliberately, “that Professor Higgins is utterly ignorant of the whereabouts of the notebooks. It was he who posted that letter to you, after he had revived the doctor. And since then he hasn’t found them, although he’s made a very pretty effort. Your torturing him now won’t accomplish a thing, unless, as I suspect, you’re torturing him for sport.”

“You filthy…,” she said, leaving it unfinished, and in a wild rage she snatched the revolver away from her son and pointed it at the professor. “You scum-sucking pig! You know nothing. I’ll start with you, Mr. Hooknose, and then Willis will make a scarecrow of you.”

She croaked out a laugh just as I lunged at her; don’t ask me why I did it—making up for lost opportunities, maybe. I threw myself onto the revolver and grabbed it by the barrel, hitting her just as hard as I could on the jaw, which was plenty hard enough to knock her over backward.

Willis grappled with the rifle, but hadn’t gotten it halfway up before Hasbro clipped him neatly on the side of the head, and he sank to his knees and slumped forward.

It was over, just like that. I’d had to hit a woman to accomplish it, but by heaven I would hit her once more, harder, if I had it to do again.

“Go for the constable, Jack,” cried St. Ives, taking the revolver from me. “Bring him round, quick. I won’t leave Narbondo’s side, not until he’s in a cell, sleeping or awake, I don’t care.”

I turned and started out, but didn’t take more than a step, for the canvas pulled back, and there stood the constable himself, the one that had questioned me on the green, and Parsons stood with him, along with two sleepy-looking men who had obviously been routed out as deputies. For it had been Parsons who was lurking about, waiting for his chance. When it had got rough, and he had realized what a spot we had got ourselves into, he had himself run for the constable, and here they were, come round to save us now that we didn’t want saving.

“I’ll just take those weapons,” said the constable, very officiously.

“Certainly,” said St. Ives, handing over the revolver as if it were a snake.

Then there was a lot of talk about Narbondo, on the table, him and a fetching of more ice, and a cataloging of the bits and pieces of scientific apparatus, and finally St. Ives couldn’t stand it any longer and he asked Parsons, “The notebooks. You’ve got them, haven’t you?”

Parsons shrugged.

“It was Piper, wasn’t it? The oculist. He had got them from the old man, and had them all along. And when he died you came down and fetched them.”

“Accurate to the last detail,” said Parsons, smiling to think that at last he’d put one across St. Ives, that at last he had been in ahead of us. “What you don’t know, my good fellow, is that I’ve destroyed them. They were a horror, a misapplication of scientific method, an abomination. I burned them in Dr. Piper’s incinerator without bothering to read more than a snatch of them.”

“Then it’s my view,” said St. Ives, “that Narbondo is dead, or as good as dead. How long he can last in this suspended state, I don’t know, but it’s clear that Higgins couldn’t entirely revive him. Neither can I, and without the notebooks, thank God, neither can you.”

Parsons shrugged again. “Keep him on ice,” he said to the constable. “The Academy will want him. He’ll make an interesting study.”

The use of the word study had a Willis Pule ring to it that I didn’t like, and I was reminded of what it was about Parsons that set the men of the Academy apart from a man like St. Ives. I was almost sorry that Narbondo at last had fallen into their hands.

St. Ives, however, didn’t seem in the least sorry. “I suggest we retire to the Crown and Apple, then,” he said. “I have a few bottles of ale in my room. I suggest that we sample it—toast Professor Parsons’s success.”

“Here, here,” said Parsons, a little vainly, I thought, as we trooped out into the night, leaving the icehouse behind. In fact, though, a couple of bottles of ale and a few hours of sleep would settle me right out. Our adventure was over, and tomorrow, I supposed, it was back to London on the express. I patted my coat pocket, where I still had the proof of my reserving a room for me and Dorothy at The Hoisted Pint. You’d think that I would have had my fill of the place, but in fact I was determined to stay there as I’d planned, under happier circumstances, especially since whoever it was that we would find tending to the guests, it wouldn’t be the woman who had hoodwinked me. The constable had already sent someone around to collect her.

***

So there we were, sitting in St. Ives’s room, and him passing around opened bottles of ale, until he got to Parsons and said, “You’re strictly a water man, aren’t you?”

“You’ve got an admirable memory, sir. Water is the staff of life, the staff of life.”

“And I’ve got a bottle of well water right here,” said St. Ives, uncorking just such an object. Parsons was delighted. He took the glass that St. Ives gave him and swirled the water around in it, as if it were Scotch or Burgundy or some other drinkable substance. Then he threw it down heartily and smacked his lips like a connoisseur, immediately wrinkling up his face.

“Bitter,” he said. “Must be French. Lucky I’m thirsty after tonight’s little tussle.” He held out his glass.

“Mineral water,” said St. Ives, filling it up.

I was tempted to say something about “tonight’s little tussle” myself, but I put a lid on it. Hasbro had fallen asleep in his chair.

Parsons winked at the professor. He was as full of himself as I’ve ever seen him. “About revivifying Narbondo,” he said. “I’ve got a notion involving Lord Kelvin’s machine. You’ve read of Sir Joseph John Thomson’s work at the Cavendish Laboratory.”

St. Ives’s face betrayed what he was thinking, as if he had known that it would come to this, and here it was at last. “Yes,” he said, “I have. Very interesting, but I don’t quite see how it applies.”

This made Parsons happy. To hear St. Ives admit such a thing was worth a lifetime of waiting and plotting. He had the face of a man holding four aces and looking at a table mounded with coin. “Electrons,” he said, as if such a word explained everything.

“Go on,” said the professor.

“Well, it’s rather simple, isn’t it? They spin sphere-wise around their atom. An intense electromagnetic field yanks them into a sort of oval, rather like the shifting of tides on the earth, and in animate creatures causes immediate and unrestrained cellular activity. What if Narbondo were subjected to such a force—a tremendous dose of electromagnetism? It might—how shall I put it?—‘start him up,’ let’s say, like turning over an Otto’s four-stroke engine.”

“It might,” said St. Ives darkly. “It might do a good deal more. I’ll get directly to the point here; this isn’t a matter for dalliance. The Academy undertook to start that damnable machine once, and to be straight with you, I had my man sabotage it. Do you remember?”

Of course Parsons remembered. It had been the incident of Lord Kelvin’s machine that had caused the deepening of the chasm between the two men. Parsons looked almost sneery for a moment and said, “He loaded the contrivance with field mice, if I remember aright. Very effective, if a little bit—what?—primitive, maybe.”

“Well,” continued St. Ives, going right on, “some few of those field mice lived to tell the tale, as my friend Jack might put it. I carried on a study of them for almost two years in the fields round about the manor, until I was certain, finally, that the last of those poor creatures was dead, and what I discovered was a remarkably horrendous syndrome of mutations and cancers. It’s my theory quite simply that this ‘unrestrained cellular activity,’ as you put it, is more likely ungovernable cellular growth. Your engine analogy may or may not apply. It doesn’t matter. You simply cannot start the machine for any purpose, especially for something as frivolous as this. Leave Narbondo’s fate in the hands of the Almighty, for heaven’s sake.”

“Frivolous!” shouted Parsons. “I don’t give a rap for Narbondo’s fate. Imagine, though, what this will mean. Here’s poor Higgins, who has devoted a lifetime to the study of cryogenics. Here’s Narbondo and a lifetime’s study of chemistry. He was a monster, certainly, but so what? You must be a pitifully shortsighted scientist if you can’t see the effect the sum total of their work will have on the future of the human race. And it’s Lord Kelvin’s machine that will usher in that future. To put it simply, my ship is putting in and I mean to board her.” Parsons struck the arm of his chair with his fist to punctuate his speech. Then his eyes half closed and his head nodded forward. He shook himself awake and mumbled something about being suddenly sleepy, and then his head fell against his chest and straightaway he began to snore through his beard, having said, apparently, all he had to say.

The sight of him sleeping so profoundly put me in mind of my own bed, and I was just yawning and starting to say that I would turn in too, when St. Ives leaped to his feet, dropped an already-prepared letter into Parsons’s lap and cried out, “It’s time!” Then he roused Hasbro, who himself leaped up and headed straight for the door.

“Coming or not, Jacky?” asked the professor.

“Why, coming, I suppose. Where? Now?”

“To the Dover Strait. You can sleep on board.”

With that he rushed into Parsons’s room, coming back out with a bundle of the man’s clothes, and I found myself following them through the night—out the backdoor of the inn, down along the seawall, and clambering into the tethered rowboat. Hasbro unshipped the oars and we were away, through the patchy fog, dipping along until the shadowy hull of a small steam trawler rose out of the mists ahead of us. We thunked into the side of her and clambered aboard, then winched up the rowboat after us. Up came the anchor, and I found myself saying hello to Hasbro’s stalwart Aunt Edie and to the grizzled Uncle Botley, pilot of the trawler. Roped onto a little barge behind us rested the diving bell that we had stolen earlier that very night from the icehouse.

St. Ives had drugged poor Parsons. The water bottle had been doctored, and Parsons, in the joy of his victory, had swallowed enough of it to make him sleep for half a day. We would get into the Strait before him, towing the bell, and when we did…

Parsons Bids Us Adieu

We found the waters around the submerged machine alive with a half-dozen ships, all of them at anchor a good distance away. They had attached a buoy directly to it, to track it so as to avoid either losing it or coming too near it. We showed no hesitation at all, but steamed right up to the line. That was where I played my part, and played it tolerably well, I think.

Up onto the deck I came, wearing an enormous white beard and wig and dressed in Parsons’s clothes, which St. Ives had stolen from his room at the Apple. St. Ives stayed hidden; his face would excite suspicion in any of a number of people. He coached me, though, from inside a cabin, and together we bluffed our way through that line of ships with a lot of what sounded to me like convincing talk about having learned how to “disarm” the machine and having brought along a diving bell for the purpose.

Anyway, certain that I was Parsons, they let us through right enough, and we navigated as close to the buoy as we dared, then set out in the rowboat, towing the barge with the bell standing straddle-legged atop the deck, the jib crane attached to the barge now with brass carriage bolts, its chain pulled off and replaced entirely with heavy line. We would have to be quick, though. Uncle Botley had removed as much iron from the rowboat and barge as he could manage, but there was still the chance that if we didn’t look sharp, the machine would start to tug out nails and would scuttle us.

Hasbro and I manned the oars—work that I was admirably suited to from my days of punting on the Thames. They must have been surprised, though, to see old Parsons hauling away like that, given that he was upward of eighty-five years old. The idea of it amused me, and I pulled all the harder, watching over my shoulder as we drew slowly nearer to the buoy.

St. Ives was in the bell itself, making ready. His was the dangerous work. He was going down without air, because a compressor would have been pulled to pieces. But it was a shallow dive, and it wouldn’t take him long. That was his claim, anyway. “Give me eight minutes by the pocket watch,” he had told us, “and then pull me out of there. I can go down again if need be. And,” he said darkly, “if the rowboat starts to go to pieces, or if there’s trouble down below, cut the line and get away as quick as you can.”

Hasbro insisted at once on going with him, as did I, neither one of us keen on getting away. But that wasn’t St. Ives’s method and never had been. He was still in a funk because of the time he thought we had wasted and because of the two ships that had gone down needlessly. And there was the fact of his—as he saw it—having allowed the machine to exist all these years, sitting placidly in that machine works, only to be stolen and misused. He was the responsible party, and he would brook no nonsense to the contrary. There was a certain psychological profit, then, in his going down and facing the danger alone; his face seemed to imply that if something went wrong and we had to leave him, well, so be it; it was no more than he deserved.

Then there was the business of Alice, wasn’t there? It hovered over the man’s head like a rain cloud, and I believe that I can say, without taking anything away from his natural courage, that St. Ives didn’t care two figs whether he lived or died.

And although in truth I had no idea how much air one working man would breathe at a depth of eight fathoms, I accepted his assurances that two men would breathe twice as much and increase the dangers accordingly. The controls were meant for a single man, too, and St. Ives had been studying and manipulating them all the way out from Sterne Bay. Hasbro and I would have been nothing but dangerous baggage, trying to demonstrate our loyalty by our willingness to die along with him, if it came to that. He didn’t need any such demonstrations.

Down he went, into the dark ocean. One of the handlike armatures of the bell held on to a bundle of explosives wrapped in sheet rubber and sealed with asphaltum varnish. There was a timing device affixed to it. St. Ives had never meant to “disarm” the machine at all. He had meant all along to blow it to kingdom come, and he had stolen Higgins’s bell for just that purpose.

The Strait was blessedly placid—just a trace of wind and a slightly rolling ground swell. Line played slowly out through the oaken blocks, and we watched the bell hover deeper, down toward the vast black shadow below. I hadn’t expected quite what I saw—a sort of acreage of shadow down there, but then I realized that what I saw wasn’t merely the machine, but was a heap of derelict iron ships clustered together, the whole heap lying, I supposed, on a sandy shoal.

And that was why St. Ives hadn’t done the obvious—merely wrapped a hunk of iron into that package of explosives and tossed it over the side. It might easily have affixed itself to the hull of a downed ship and blown it up, leaving the machine alone. What the professor had to do was drop onto the machine itself, or grapple his way to it by the use of the bell’s armatures, and plant the explosives just so; otherwise they were wasted. Eight minutes didn’t seem like such a long time after all.

But then the line went suddenly slack and began to coil onto the top of the water. St. Ives had hooked on to something—the machine, a ship. All of us studied our pocket watches.

You’d think that the minutes would have flown by, but they didn’t; they crept. The breeze blew, clouds slipped across the sky, the loose circle of ships rolled on the calm waters, no one aboard them suspecting who I really was in my beard and wig. Hasbro counted the minutes aloud, and Uncle Botley stood at the winch. At the count of eight the three of us put our backs into it. The line went quivering-taut, spraying droplets. The blocks groaned and creaked. The bell very slowly swam into view, and in a rush of ocean water it burst out into the air, St. Ives visible within, the explosive package gone. He had either succeeded or failed utterly; it didn’t matter which, not at the moment.

Thunk went the bell onto the deck, and while Uncle Botley lashed it down, Hasbro and I bent to the oars and had that barge fairly skimming, if I do say so myself. There’s nothing like a spot of work when you know what the devil you’re doing and, of course, when there’s an explosion pending.

A cheer went up from the ships waiting in a circle around us, and I took my hat off and waved it in the air, my wig nearly blowing away in the sea wind. I clapped the hat back down and gave up the histrionics, hauling us through the chop, bang up against the hull of our trawler. We clambered aboard, taking the barge in tow and setting out at once.

We didn’t leave St. Ives in the bell, of course. He climbed out at the last possible minute, taking the risk now of being seen. “Let’s go,” he said simply, and into the cabin he went as I took up the speaking trumpet and started to shout at the nearest ship, on which a half-dozen men stood at attention along the rail, and a captain or some such thing awaited orders. In my best Parsons voice, helpfully disguised by the speaking tube, I gave him all the orders he needed—that we had set into motion the disarming of the machine, but that its excess electromagnetic energies would reach capacity just before she shut down. Move away, is what I told him, for safety’s sake, or risk going to the bottom!

That drew their attention. I think they would have run for it even if my beard had been plucked off right then by a sea gull. Flags were run up; whistles blew; men scrambled across the decks of the several ships, which began to make away another quarter of a mile, just as I told them, where they would await orders. We kept right on going—steaming back toward Sterne Bay. That must have confounded them, our racing off like that. For my money, though, it didn’t confound them half as much as did the explosion that followed our departure. We were well away by then, on the horizon, but we saw the plume of water, and then heard the distant whump of the concussion.

***

So Lord Kelvin’s machine was nothing but sinking fragments, an instant neighborhood for the denizens of the sea. Dr. Narbondo would continue his cold sleep until whatever it was that animated him had played itself out. Parsons, poor man, wouldn’t be at the helm of whatever grand ship he had imagined himself piloting into the harbor of scientific fame. His schemes were a ruin—blown to pieces. Even his victory over St. Ives had been a short-lived one—toasted to with drugged water.

St. Ives wasn’t happy with that part. He felt guilty about Parsons, and he felt even worse that Narbondo would sleep through what ought to have been his public trial and execution. Ah well, I was happy enough. I wasn’t fond of Parsons in the first place, and had rather enjoyed parading around in the beard and wig. I wish there had been some way to let him know about that, just to make him mad, but I guess there wasn’t. He would hear most of it, likely enough, but he probably wouldn’t guess it had been me, and that was too bad.

We landed in Sterne Bay, our business done. And we parted company with Hasbro’s aunt and with Uncle Botley. At the Crown and Apple we found a note under St. Ives’s door—the same note, in fact, that St. Ives had left on Parsons’s lap. The old man had scrawled on it the words, “I’m on the afternoon train to London; you might have the kindness to see me off.” Just that. You would have expected more—some little bit of anger or regret—given what St. Ives had revealed to him. But there was no anger, just the words of a sad man asking for company.

We hurried down to the station to do his bidding. It was the least we could do. His just giving in like that made the business doubly sorrowful, and although I was tempted for a moment to wear them, I left the beard and wig at the Apple.

The train was chuffing there on the track, the passengers already boarded. We ran along the platform. St. Ives was certain that there was some good reason for Parsons’s having summoned him, and that it was his duty, our duty, after exploding Parsons’s dreams, to see what it was that the old man wanted, what last tearful throwing-in-the-towel statement he would utter. Let him complain to our faces, I thought, taking the long view. He had been riding high just yesterday, astride his charger, but now, as they say, the mighty had fallen. The race was not always to the swift. Parsons could have his say; I wouldn’t begrudge him.

But where was he? The cars were moving along. We trotted beside them, keeping up, out toward the empty tracks ahead, the train chugging forward and away. Then, as the last car but one rolled past, a window slid down, and there was Parsons’s face grinning out at us like a winking devil. “Haw! Haw! Haw!” he shouted, apparently having run mad, the poor bastard.

Then he dangled out the window a bound notebook, tattered and old-looking. Streaked across it in faded ink was the name “John Kenyon,” written in fancy-looking heavy script—the name, of course, of Mrs. Pule’s derelict father. Despite what was utterly obvious, and thinking to put on a show of being interested in the old man’s apparent glee, I was witless enough to yell, “What is it?” as we watched the train pick up speed and move away from us toward London.

And he had the satisfaction of leaning out even farther in order to make a rude gesture at us, shouting in a sort of satisfied whinny, “What the hell do you think it is, idiot?” Then the damned old fool drew the notebook in and slammed the window shut, clipping off the sound of his own howling laughter.

The train bore Parsons away to London, along with—if the half-frozen doctor had only been aware of his victory, of this renewed promise of resurrection—the gloating still-animate body of Ignacio Narbondo.