The Ebb Tide by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

diving chamber. We had no time to waste if we wanted to catch the tide.

Chapter 5
Hesitate and You’re a Drowned Man
    We held a sort of council of war there in the wagon, mapping out our campaign so that we proceeded according to a stratagem rather than a whim. It seemed to us that the ruse with the map must have borne fruit. Surely there would have been some way for Frosticos to prevent our flight in the chamber if he suspected that we possessed the true map. He was sure of himself, apparently, and that was a solidly good thing. And yet if we were wrong in this notion, we dared not return to the Half Toad or to St. Ives Manor at Chingford-by-the-Tower, lest the Doctor’s henchmen lurked about, on the lookout. We wanted simply to be quit of them, now that we had the means to make use of the map, and so we decided to make straightaway to Morecambe Bay in time to catch a particularly low tide. And yet we had some small matters of business in London, having to do with Tubby Frobisher, which I undertook to accomplish while St. Ives and Hasbro rattled away north with all possible speed.
    It was an added bit of good fortune that Tubby could walk abroad without exciting the suspicions of our enemies, and could convey the tragic details of our untimely deaths to the newspapers, where he had a useful acquaintance who wrote for the Times and occasionally for the Graphic . It was reported that our diving chamber, with three suffocated bodies inside, had been washed up onto a rocky strand near Sheerness, where it was found by fishermen. The scientific community mourned: much lamented passing…eccentric genius…intrepid explorer, and so forth. St. Ives, vilified just months earlier over the incident of the burning squid, was lauded by paragons of science, and there was, Tubby informed us, talk of a bronze bust in a plaster niche at the Explorers Club.
    It was all very gratifying, I can tell you. And of course before the news was revealed publicly, Tubby had looked in on Merton and then had scurried like Mercury himself down to Scarborough to alert Mrs. St. Ives and my own dear wife to the nature of the fraud. (Neither of them were quite as taken with our cleverness as they in all fairness should have been, we discovered later, especially when Tubby regaled them with his secondhand accounts of the flaming meteor over the Yorkshire Dales and the floating cattle and dead parson and other salient and half understood details.)
    We knew little of this, of course, except that I had set Tubby into motion. It wasn’t the first time, by the way, that St. Ives had been mourned, and I wondered whether it was a good enough ruse to further confound a man like Hilario Frosticos. But then perhaps he wouldn’t need further confounding, since he already possessed what he understood to be Kraken’s map. We would soon know, for better or ill.
    ***
    St. Ives drove the wagon beneath a full moon, Hasbro and I sitting beside him, along a seldom-used dirt track that winds down from the forest below Lindale and carries on beyond Grange-over-Sands down to Humphrey Head, which was our true destination. We had ridden in secret along this same road a decade ago, engaged in a similar mission. That had turned out badly, as Tubby had pointed out, and taken all the way around we had fared scarcely better this time, at least so far, despite the success of our flight down the Thames and our subsequent hasty journey to the environs of Morecambe Bay.
    The trees grew more stunted when we drew nearer the water, blown by sea winds as they were, and we found ourselves moving along at a slow pace, creaking over sea wrack and shingle covered with blown sand, the wind in our faces. The moon illuminated the road, thank God, or we might have met Kraken’s fate, for there were innumerable creeks flowing out of Hampsfield Fell to the west, most of them half-hidden by dead leaves and low-growing water plants, and the place had a dangerously marshy quality to it that kept me on