The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives by James P. Blaylock

decay, and Narbondo ahead with that ghastly shears. I pushed him along! That’s the truth of it. I railed at him. I hissed. I’d have that gland, is what I’d have, and before the night was gone. I’d hold in my hand my salvation…”

    What a delicate speculation it is, after drinking whole goblets of tea, and letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to sit considering what we shall have for supper—eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet! Sancho in such a situation once fixed upon cow-heel; and his choice, though he could not help it, is not to be disparaged.
    William Hazlitt
    “On Going a Journey”

    I should wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, Hazlitt’s essays would be a capital pocketbook on such a journey; so would a volume of Ashbless poems; and for Tristrarn Shandy I can pledge a fair experience.
    Robert Louis Stevenson
    “Walking Tours” 

Prologue

    London 1870

    Above the St. Georges Channel clouds thick as shorn wool arched like   a bent bow from Cardigan Bay round Strumble head and Milford Haven, and hid the stars from Swansea and Cardiff. Beyond Bristol they grew scanty and scattered and were blown along a heavenly avenue that dropped down the sky toward the shadows of the Cotswold Hills and the rise of the River Thames, then away east toward Oxford and Maidenhead and London. Stars winked and vanished and the new moon slanted thin and silver below them, the billowed crescent sail of a dark ship, swept to windward of stellar islands on deep, sidereal tides.
    And in the wake of the moon floated an oval shadow, tossed by the whims of wind, and canting southeast from Iceland across the North Atlantic, falling gradually toward Greater London.
    Two hours yet before dawn, the wind blew in fits above Chelsea and the sky was clear as bottled water, the clouds well to the west and east over the invisible horizon. Leaves and dust and bits of paper whirled through the darkness, across Battersea Park and the pleasure boats serried along the Chelsea shore, round the tower of St. Luke’s and into darkness. The wind, ignored by most of the sleeping city, was cursed at by a hunchbacked figure who drove a dogcart down the Chelsea Embankment toward Pimlico, a shabby vehicle with a tarpaulin tied across a humped and unnatural load.
    He looked back over his shoulder. The end of the canvas flapped in the wind. It wouldn’t do to have it fly loose, but time was precious. The city was stirring. The carts of ambitious costermongers and greengrocers already clattered along to market, and silent oyster boats sailed out of Chelsea Reach toward Billingsgate.
    The man reined in his horse, clambered down onto the stones, and lashed the canvas tight. A putrid stench blew out from under it. The wind was from the northeast, at his back. Such was the price of science. He put a foot on the running board and then stopped in sudden dread, staring at an open-mouthed and wide-eyed man standing on the embankment ahead with a pushcart full of rags. The hunchback gave him a dark look, most of it lost in the night. But the ragpicker wasn’t peering at him, he was staring skyward where, shadowing the tip of the moon overhead, hovered the dim silhouette of a great dirigible, a ribby gondola swinging beneath. Rhythmic humming filled the air, barely audible but utterly pervasive, as if it echoed off the dome of the night sky.
    The hunchback leaped atop the seat, whipped his startled horse, and burst at a run past the stupefied ragpicker, knocking his barrow to bits against a stone abutment. With the wind and the hum of the blimp’s propellers driving him along, the hunchback scoured round the swerve of Nine Elms Reach and disappeared into Westminster, the blimp drifting lower overhead, swinging in toward the West End.
    ***
    Along Jermyn Street the houses were dark and the alleys empty. The wind banged at loose shutters and