The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online

Book: The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online
Authors: James P. Blaylock
Tags: Fantasy
their hands, peered inside, sniffed it, handed it round. It was Lord Kelvin himself who asked the decisive, ruinous question. The question for which there was no answer.”
    “Ah,” I said, waiting.
    “Kelvin looked at him over the top of his spectacles in that way he has, and asked, quite simply, and with great finality, ‘how does it know?”
    I stared at St. Ives, blinking once or twice, waiting for his words to convey some meaning to my mind. It had been a long and trying day.
    “The question baffled poor Keeble. He didn’t expect it. But they were adamant. It’s the scientific method or nothing with them, you know, and too often nothing comes of it. Far too often. Do you follow me?”
    I poured myself another glass of sherry and nodded. “The succulents and begonias book—I take it you don’t rue the loss. And yet your telegram seemed to hint that the volume was of a vital nature.”
    “And perhaps it was, in its roundabout way. Tell me, do you read the work of Mr. Poe?”
    “Too morbid for my taste.”
    “He’s a master of the crime story. Pioneered the device of the false clue, the red herring, the specious oddity that throws your man off the track.”
    “Or onto the track, in my case,” I said, cramming a cake into my mouth, a very delicate seeded cake tasting of anise, and I nodded my appreciation at Hasbro as he reentered the room bearing what appeared to be manuscript pages.
    “Quite so. But you see, I knew that these—these pig men, I suppose we can call them, would purloin that telegram and then deliver it themselves. They’re keen on the manuscript, you see. As a ruse de guerre, I deposited the false volume, the mockup, with Dr. Lester, then gave the missive to Bill Kraken and had him dash down to London to deliver it.”
    “Bill Kraken!” I was aghast. Of all the unreliable drunkards! “You can’t mean old Cuttle Kraken’s mad brother?”
    “The same.” The Professor uttered a sort of sigh and drained his glass, helping himself to one of the cakes. He took the manuscript from Hasbro. “Pour yourself a glass of this sherry,” he said, smiling at the man. “We’re a company now.”
    “Yes, sir,” Hasbro said, pouring himself an unconvincing dribble.
    “Unfortunately poor Bill was knocked on the head in a tavern in Limehouse. He’ll recover, thank God, but they weren’t kind to him. They took the message around to your digs themselves, delivered it to you, and then accosted you on the train in order to steal the book after old Lester had entrusted it to you.”
    I was dumbstruck. “And so the book is gone! I still don’t fathom…”
    “ This is the Kraken-Birdlip manuscript,” St. Ives said, winking at me and handing me the loose pages that he’d taken from Hasbro. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was indeed reading Birdlip’s treatise on succulents and begonias. I gave St. Ives the searching stare and awaited a further explanation. I had been practiced upon, and I wasn’t smiling and winking, although he was, apparently tremendously pleased with himself.
    “Another ruse?” I asked him.
    “Indeed. Ruse upon ruse. This, of course, is the treatise on alien botanicals prepared by Cuttle Kraken and Dr. Birdlip after their first venture through the hole. After Cuttle’s death in the explosion, Birdlip spirited it away, consigning it to me before he went into hiding. It constitutes evidence, of course, which ought to have been destroyed in the conflagration in Birdlip’s laboratory. But as you can see, it wasn’t destroyed. How the pig men divined the truth is hard to say, but I became certain that they had.” He laughed now, out of high spirits. “I had almost said ‘deveined’ as if the truth were a shrimp.”
    “And so you fabricated this, this red herring de guerre, this shrimp de mer, just in order to confound them?”
    “Just so.”
    St. Ives was triumphant, proof positive that my little contribution to his scheme was well worth a few gorse spines,

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