The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

the trees. St. Ives looked back vaguely at the man he was throttling, confused now, and saw with horror that the man wore the contorted face of his own father.
    St. Ives reeled backward, releasing the man’s neck. Smoke seemed to him to be pouring out of the windows of the cottage now, taking the form of grinning demons as it roiled into the air. The world was a reeling inferno in the moment before he was struck in the back of the head and darkness descended upon him.



Chapter 6
     
    Alice’s Story

     
    Moments after her collapse on the floor of the inn parlor, Alice revived, and of course we helped her to her feet and into a chair. For a time she sat there with her eyes closed, catching her breath and her sensibilities, still clutching the cap. When she opened her eyes again they had a steadier sort of look in them, as if she had returned in spirit as well as body and mind. From inside the cap she drew out a crushed piece of paper, then threw the cap angrily into the corner of the room.
    Tubby made straightaway to our table to fetch a flagon of tea and a cup. She drank the tea down gratefully, and then after another moment’s rest, happily took a glass of port. She thanked the both of us, looking somewhat recovered, but in no wise happy.
    “We’ve been waiting all day for word of St. Ives,” I said to her anxiously.
    “I’ve got all the word there is,” she told us, “and none of it good.”
    §
    The madness that had possessed her for the past three days had diminished when St. Ives put the asbestos cap upon her head, and had evaporated utterly when she was well clear of Heathfield. Of the madness itself, she recalled that some of it was wonderful, some of it horrifying, but the memory of it was already fading from her mind, as if it had been a waking dream, even now only a memory of a memory.
     
    Some few days previously she and the niece Sydnee had been strolling through the village, where the spring Cuckoo Fair was just then getting underway. The streets were awash with people, with dozens in the costume of St. Richard and with feast booths set up and a great deal of merriment that the weather couldn’t dampen. The legendary cuckoo was on display, looking something like a large pigeon that someone had waxed artistic with. The two of them had stopped to hobnob with the bird, when suddenly, without warning of any sort, although Alice faintly recalls a high-pitched keening in the air, the world, in her words, “tipped sideways.” On the instant the feast day merriment turned to mayhem. She found herself sitting in the road, with the odd certainty that she was the literal embodiment of the Heathfield cuckoo. She remembered chuckling out loud there in the street—not laughing, mind you, but chuckling like a hen on a nest—convinced that her dress was woven of feathers rather than merino wool.
    She recalls Sydnee wandering off, snatching at the air as if trying to catch a will-o’-the-wisp, and in the days that followed Alice never once saw her niece again, or didn’t know her if she did. Those days might as well have been moments or years, her sense of the passing of time having abdicated. She somehow found her way home to the cottage, where she conversed with hobgoblins and wraiths, although the hobgoblins might simply have been the Tipper and his cronies.
    She fell silent for a time after telling us this, and then in a smaller voice said, “I left him there. I simply fled. It was what he wished—what he commanded. And yet it was cowardice on my part. There was a fallen pistol that I might have reached, had I acted instead of standing there stupefied. There was also that horrible man aiming his own pistol at me. He was injured, though. His arm was in a sling. I might have prevailed over him.” She stared into the purple depths of the port. “I fled through the woods, right into the midst of the soldiers at the blockade. I had removed the cap by then, and at first they assumed I was insane, and perhaps