Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 by Lord Kelvin's Machine Page B

you the truth,
and when he reached for the rubber elephant, I gave it to him, thinking, I'll
admit, that he'd give it back after having a look. Instead he disappeared back
into the cab, taking the elephant with him. The curtain closed, and I heard
from him no more. I knocked once on the door. ''Go away," he said.
                   So I did. He wanted the creature more than I
wanted it. What did I want to build toys for, anyway, if not for the likes of
him? And besides, it pretty clearly needed a hat. That's the sort of thing I
told myself. It was half cowardice, though, my just walking away. I didn't want
to make a scene by going into the cab after him and be found brawling with a
madman over a rubber elephant. I argued it out in my head as I stepped into
Godall's shop, ready to relate the incident to my credit, and there, standing
just inside the threshold, impossibly, was the lunatic himself.
                   I must have looked staggered, for Hasbro
leaped up in alarm at the sight of my face, and the person in the doorway
turned on her heel with a startled look. She wasn't the fellow in the truck;
she was a woman with an appallingly similar countenance and hair, equally
greasy, and with a blouse of the same material. This one wore a shawl, though,
and was older by a good many years, although her face belied her age. It was almost
unlined due to some sort of unnatural puffiness—as if she were a goblin that
had come up to Soho wearing a cleverly altered melon for a
head. This was the mother, clearly, of the creature in the cab.
                   She smiled theatrically at me. Then, as if she
had just that instant recognized me, her smile froze into a look of snooty
reproach, and she ignored me utterly from then on. I had the distinct feeling
that I'd been cut, although you'd suppose that being cut by a madwoman doesn't
count for much—any more than having one's rubber elephant stolen by a madman
counts for anything.
                   "A man like that ought to be brought to
justice," she said to St. Ives, who gestured toward the sofa and raised
his eyebrows at me.
                   "This is Mr. Owlesby," he said to
the woman. "You can speak freely in front of him."
                   She paid me no attention at all, as if to say
that she would speak freely, or would not, before whomever she chose, and no
one would stop her. I sat down.
                   "Brought to justice," she said.
                   "Justice," said St. Ives, "was brought to him, or he to it, sometime back.
He died in Scandinavia . He fell into a lake where he without a
doubt was frozen to death even before he drowned. I ... I saw him tumble into
the lake myself. He didn't crawl out."
                   "He did crawl out."
                   "Impossible," said St. Ives—and it
was impossible, too. Except that when it came to the machinations of Dr.
Narbondo you were stretching a point using the word impossible, and St. Ives
knew it. Doubt flickered in his eyes, along with other emotions, too complex to
fathom. I could see that he was animated, though. Since his dealings with the
comet and the death of Ignacio Narbondo, St. Ives had been enervated, drifting
from one scientific project to another, finishing almost nothing, lying on the
divan in his study through the long hours of the afternoon, drifting in and out
of sleep. For the space of a few days he had undertaken to restore Alice 's vegetable garden, but the effort had cost
him too much, and he had abandoned it to the moles and the weeds. I could turn
this last into a metaphor of the great man's life over the last couple of
years, but I won't. I promised to leave tragedy alone.
                   "Look here," the woman said, handing
across what appeared to be a letter. It had been folded up somewhere for years,
in someone's pocket from the look of it, and the cheap paper was yellowed and
torn. It