The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (65 page)

“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.