Homunculus (21 page)

“Look there!” cried someone directly behind him. It was a familiar voice - Hasbro’s voice. St. Ives spun round, expecting to see some revelation - perhaps Pule being dragged across the meadow by his heels. What he saw was Hasbro pointing in theatrical horror at the blasted silo, clearly visible now in the thin moonlight. A simultaneous murmur of surprise issued from the crowd.

St. Ives flinched. Had Hasbro gone mad? Had he been bought off by Narbondo? He squinted at his otherwise capable gentleman’s gentleman with a face which he hoped betrayed nothing to the several dozen onlookers, but which would be an open book to Hasbro.

“The spacecraft, sir, appears to have shorn off the silo roof -blew it to bits, if I’m any judge.”

“So it has!” cried McNally.

“The scoundrel!” shouted Brinsing the baker, shaking a fist over his head to illustrate the enormity of the act.

“The filthy dog!” cried St. Ives, echoing the general sentiment and relieved that Hasbro hadn’t, after all, gone mad. They’d eventually have seen the silo, after all. It was far safer to explain it away so simply and logically. The ship had destroyed
his
property too - had narrowly missed the house, had strewed all sorts of debris about the meadow. Poor Mrs. Langley! He glanced down and there was old Binger, returned, standing agog, scratching his head. Hasbro’s suggestion that the craft had simply ripped the lid from the silo as it passed along overhead ran counter to his memory.

“Binger!” shouted St. Ives suddenly, descending the stairs and collaring the old man. “There’s that business of the half pound I owe you. Step along with me now, and I’ll pay up. Mrs. Langley has a pie, too, unless I’m mistaken, and we’ve bottles of ale to wash it down with. Come along, then.” And he stepped across the threshold, dragging Binger with him, Hasbro closing in behind.

“Half a pound, sir?” asked the innocent Binger, thoroughly befuddled.

“That’s right,” said St. Ives. “Step along here now.” He turned to the crowd on the meadow, tipping his hat. “Keep at it, lads,” he cried, shutting the door behind him and precipitating the old man down the hallway toward the kitchen. “We’ll just have a go at that pie now.” He smiled and drew a half pound from his pocket. “It’ll be in the pantry, I should think. Cool as a cellar in here.” The pantry door swung back to reveal two prone corpses on the stone floor - the remains of Narbondo’s ghouls. “No pies here,” rattled St. Ives, slamming the door shut. “Take care of this, will you?” he whispered to Hasbro.

“Certainly, sir. And I’ll just take the wagon along to Lord Kelvin’s afterward, don’t you think? If I can… collect the spacecraft, sir, we could study it at our leisure.”

St. Ives nodded hugely. Hasbro’s talk of “studying” the spacecraft was lost on Binger, though, for the man stared openmouthed at the shut pantry door.

“A five-pound note was it?” asked St. Ives evenly.

“Beg pardon, sir, but…”

“No buts, Mr. Binger,” cried St. Ives. “You’ve rendered us a service, man. And I intend to reward you. Disregard the dead men in the pantry; they’re not what you suppose. Sent along by the undertaker, they were. Victims of a wasting disease. Quite conceivably virulent. Here’s the note, eh? And here, by heaven, is a bottle of ale. Join me? Of course you will!” He hauled Mr. Binger along toward the parlor. “I was just set to have a go at one of these when that damned alien appeared. Tore the roof right off the silo. You saw that, did you?”

“Aye, sir. What was he doing inside it, sir? I’d swear he come out through the roof.”

“Optical illusion, I should think. Difficult scientific matter. These men from the stars aren’t like you and me. Not a bit. Liable to do anything, aren’t they?”

“But wasn’t he down on the river...”

“I don’t at all wonder that he was,” said St. Ives. “He’s been high and low tonight, hasn’t he? Smashing my silo, beating dogs up and down the highroad, tearing into Lord Kelvin’s barn - you witnessed that, didn’t you, Mr. Binger. Quite a sight, I don’t doubt. From the attic window, you say, after it beat the devil out of my silo?”

“Yes, sir,” said Binger, livening up. He balled his hand into a fist and sailed it along from one side of his chair to the other, burying it between the arm and the cushion.

St. Ives sat transfixed. “Just like that, was it? Remarkable narrative powers you have, Mr. Binger. Really remarkable. Quite an explosion when it struck, was there?” St. Ives opened two more bottles of ale. He needed them every bit as much as he needed to pour them down the confused Binger.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Hasbro dragging a body down the hallway toward the rear door - the second ghoul, from the look of the checked trousers. Mr. Binger’s back was to the hall. St. Ives blinked and grimaced at him, hoping that his evident satisfaction with the man’s brief but gesture-ridden tale would encourage him to generate some really colorful, time-consuming detail. The next corpse followed the first out the back door, which slammed after it. And in a moment St. Ives heard the wagon rattle away out of the carriage house. He looked out through the window to see Hasbro driving along toward the river through moonlit dust, the two corpses flung into the wagon behind him.

St. Ives was relieved. It wouldn’t do to bury the creatures on the grounds - not with the night’s complications. They’d be miles down the Nidd by morning. And if they were discovered, their deaths would be laid to the alien, to Willis Pule. Damn Pule, thought St. Ives. Willis Pule! His very name sounded almost like an obscenity. The spacecraft gone! If Hasbro could retrieve it, he’d put in to have the man declared a saint. He pulled out his pocketwatch. It was coming onto ten o’clock. He’d have to pack. There was no telling when Hasbro would return. They’d be on their way into Harrogate by four in the morning.

“Astonishing business!” cried St. Ives heartily, interrupting the old man’s by now oft-told story. “Come round and see us again, my good fellow. That’s right. Here’s a bottle for the road. Give Mrs. Binger our best. And what of young Binger? Working at the mill is he? Capital, capital.” With that Mr. Binger found himself on the front porch, a bottle of ale in each hand, trying to answer all of the professor’s questions at once, but finding himself in conversation, all of a sudden, with an oak slab door. He set off down the drive, richer by five pounds, two bottles of ale, and a story that would last him years.

St. Ives tumbled halfway up out of sleep three hours later at the sound of the wagon rolling along the drive. He pulled himself up in bed and peered out into the night. The wagon drove past, the dark bulk of the spacecraft atop the bed. Into the carriage house it went. A door slammed. St. Ives dropped away again and awakened before dawn the next morning to the sound of Hasbro hauling suitcases out the front door.

The two of them drove along toward Harrogate and the London express a half hour later, the sun just peering up over the trees in the east. What strange activities lay before them St. Ives could only guess at, but the set of his mouth and the squint of his eye promised that he was ready for them, that he’d breakfast on them. His error had been that he’d thought himself apart from the villainies of the London underworld. But he saw things more clearly now, much more clearly.

ELEVEN

BACK TO LONDON

W
illis Pule shivered in the undergrowth that choked the empty streambed of a little tributary to the River Nidd. The willow and bracken was thick enough to keep out searching eyes - he’d lie low there until the train was a moment from pulling away toward London. The station was a five-minute dash to the south. He’d been a genius to buy his return ticket the day before. His goose would be cooked otherwise. They were scouring the countryside for him. But why, for the love of God? Surely not because of the affair at St. Ives’ manor. That would hardly have loosed such a lunatic mob. Perhaps it had something to do with the explosions that had followed his retreat. But for heaven’s sake,
he
had had nothing to do with that. Damn these country clowns, he thought to himself, peering above the foliage roundabout him. If he could manage it, he’d exterminate the lot of them. Some sort of infectious disease, perhaps - animated rats that fed on blood and were hopping with plague fleas.

He patted his nose gingerly, arranging the sagging bandages. He’d have torn them off, thrown them into a ditch, but the chemicals they’d been soaked in had lent his face an amber-blue tint that was startling and inexplicable. The bandages were less so. And more than that, they seemed to be having a positive effect. The skin on his face felt drawn and tight, and he’d long ago overcome his compulsion to retch at the smell of the anchovy paste. He tugged at the knots in the end of the bandages, loosened them, and pulled the whole works taut, tying it off once again.

He checked his pocketwatch. It was time to go. He’d simply have to brass it out - there was nothing else to be done, He could hardly sit in the bushes forever, and he’d be caught for sure if he set out down the road. He’d have liked to steal a cart - garrote the owner and make away with the man’s goods, but he was in a deep enough mire as it was. The cost of further mayhem might perhaps be greater than the profit.

He peered again over the bushes. Surely the mob had tired itself out long since. No one, apparently, was about, save a thin man in knee breeches who cleaned cod at a trough behind a fish shop. Pule stepped through a gap in the shrubbery and strode away purposefully, not at all, he fancied, like a man fearful of pursuit. The cod man slashed away at his fish, oblivious to him. Pule rounded the corner of the fish shop, saw that the street before him was empty, and bolted for the train station, one hand pressed to his head to keep the bandages from flying apart.

A block from the station he slowed to a walk. He had enough time. It was dangerous to call attention to himself so. There was the open platform, the train chuffing on the track. Some few people climbed aboard. A tired-looking man in a mustache sold scones and coffee through the windows. Pule would kill for a scone -literally, he thought to himself. He was in a regrettable mood, and hunger put an edge on it.

There were the steel steps into the second-class car, ten feet ahead of him. No one shouted. No one menaced him. He snatched a newspaper from a boy idling on the platform, sprang into the car, found an empty compartment, and hid behind the newspaper. He’d stay there, he decided, until they were at least halfway to London.

The train edged forward in a hiss of escaping steam, then lurched to a stop. Footsteps rang on the platform. Pule peeked past the edge of his newspaper, horrified to see Langdon St. Ives and his manservant climbing into the train car. Damn! He raised the newspaper. If the door to his compartment opened he’d go out through the window. What else could he do? He hadn’t any weapons. Next time he wouldn’t be caught weaponless. And there
would
be a next time.

Narbondo would rail at him for having failed to find the papers. It had taken hours to wring Kraken clean of information. Liquor had done it far more neatly than had torture - although Pule rather preferred the latter; since they had no idea whether Kraken had anything to offer them anyway, torture seemed pretty much an end in itself. He’d been a determined old sod, though, and a sorry one, but he’d divulged it all in the end, weeping into his cups. Pule smiled behind his newspaper. He wondered idly whether St. Ives had taken a compartment on his car or had gone along to the next. What did it matter?

Pule was overcome by a sudden idea. He could slip off the train, return to St. Ives’ estate, and in the master’s absence, ransack it. Torch the place, if it came to it. He’d been hasty - was on the edge of missing his chance. He arose, casting down his paper, when the train lurched forward again, dumping him backward onto the seat. It seemed certain that the train was at last underway. Pule thrust open the compartment door and shoved out his head, only to see some few yards before him the back of St. Ives’ servant, who stood in the aisle, speaking to his employer through an open door. Pule slid back in as the train lurched once again to a stop. Was he fated to stay on the damned train? To be robbed of a second chance? He shrugged. What did it matter, after all? It was Narbondo who would profit from his returning to the manor. It was always Narbondo who profited.