Lord Kelvin's Machine

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 any 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 hook nose. 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 bald head. 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 below decks. 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.