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

from above. A roaring fire, I’ve heard, fends off even the most fearsome night denizens, and by God I kept the fire hot. And in the long night I learned several bits of information that served merely to increase the general rumminess. First, I caught on that these cloven-hoofed pig men were not at all human, a fact I had rather suspected, and that they were intent upon putting the damper on our mission into space. It seems that these aliens, these Citronites (Birdlip and the elder Kraken had, apparently, dubbed their planet Citrona after finding vast tangerine orchards in evidence) had been slipping in through what Birdlip and St. Ives have dubbed “black holes”—a single black hole, actually.
    In fact I don’t have an earthly idea, but I picture the mouth of a train tunnel, seen from a distance and cut through solid rock. But these holes, these tunnels if you will, are apparently cut through solid space—something that meant worlds to a man like St. Ives, but meant nothing to a man like me. They were garden gates, if you will, from…elsewhere, and they led, as it was explained to me, from one place to another. A chap might be capering along through the void when a bloody great hole opens up next door, and, if the chap isn’t ready for it, sucks him in like water through a pump hose. The puzzler, at least to me, is that a hole can appear in the void. The Professor cleared that up effortlessly. It seems as if this hole isn’t a hole, not really, not in the sense of its having dimension, or at least measurable dimension. It’s like the thingummy that is all things to all men, apparently, the hole that is both the alpha and the omega, the window that is at once a hiatus and a hindrance. Kraken and Birdlip, suffice it to say, navigated the avenues of this aperture, popping down into the jungle groves of Citrona where they meddled with their botanicals for a week or so before whizzing back through. The real rat’s nest, however, is this: they were pursued on their return by these pig-faced men, an indeterminate number of them, who blew Birdlip’s laboratory to dust, murdering Cuttle Kraken. Their misuse of Cuttle’s brother drove the poor man to drink and madness.
    I awoke on the chair by the fireplace, stiff as a post, and was greeted immediately by the steadfast Hasbro who bore in a pot of mocha java. I sugared it twice, once for taste and once to recapitulate with the depleted blood sugars, and after the coffee and an ablation was ready for all the pig men in Essex. The pig men, however, didn’t show, and neither did Langdon St. Ives who, I found, was off on some mysterious errand.
    When I went out at last onto the veranda, the sun was halfway up the morning sky chivvying for position with a single cloud that hightailed it toward the horizon in the wake of its passel of erstwhile companions. It was one of those clean autumn mornings that makes a chap throw back both arms and suck in a lung full of air, then let it out in a hearty wheeze, and that was entirely my ambition when I was interrupted by Hasbro, who stepped out into the open air and said, “The Professor desires our company in the tower, sir.”
    We crossed the meadow, finding St. Ives within the confines of the stone tower, a circular vaulted room with a polished stone floor and high windows radiating sunlight. A veritable scourge of sucking noises proceeded from a great conical device raised on an iron platform in the center of the floor, and it didn’t take more than a moment to deduce the fact that this device, a gothic assemblage of metal and glass, was the Professor’s spacecraft. I had been expecting a saucer, perhaps ringed with porthole windows and with a whirring combine beneath. This ship, however, had the appearance of a ruddy great bullet that had been decorated in the style of Chartes Cathedral.
    St. Ives puttered about, tugging on one thing and another and grappling with levers and switches. Hasbro took up a position outside the tower