The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs by James P. Blaylock Page A

“Well, as the poet said, red-hot pokers doth make falsettos of us all.”
    “He’ll do for me, don’t you see!”
    “ Who will, Billy?”
    “ The bleeding Doctor . You don’t know him. I can see that. If you knew him you wouldn’t be using me so. You’d ken what I’m up against.”
    “I ken it well,” Uncle Gilbert said. “I can see it with my own eyes. You’re tied into a chair and I’m about to burn your deadlights out. What’s not to ken? But you’ve already peached on the Doctor, don’t you see, Billy? He’ll know you’ve been a-talking with us. There’s precious little the Doctor doesn’t know. If I were you I’d say what I know and skedaddle. They’re always looking for hands on the docks in Eastbourne. A two-year cruise might answer. Difficult for a blind man to find a berth, though….”
    “By God that’s just what I’ll do,” the keeper cried. “I don’t half like this work, and I don’t half like the Doctor. Ask me a question and I’ll tell you fair, but I didn’t kill no Captain Sawney.”
    “Where’s the Doctor’s lamp, then? Quick.”
    “They took it away. Middle of last night it was. Experiment was finished, they said. They cleared out, the lot of them. Then the Tipper, he showed up two hours ago and said he was done up, said he would take a bit of a nap, and I let him have his way. No harm in a nap.”
    “Where are they, then? Where’d they clear out to ? No nonsense now. Tell us and you walk away whole.”
    The keeper sat thinking for a moment, as if making up his mind, and then he began to speak.



Chapter 12
     
    The Window 
    on the World

     
    We waited, standing there on the face of the cliff, not talking, but listening. Certainly the Tipper had slipped into the cavern and vanished. He had fled the lighthouse to avoid running afoul of Tubby, and it was unlikely that he thought to lure us into the darkness to waylay us, because he didn’t know we were there. I looked at my watch, surprised to see that the morning had nearly flown. It was half ten o’clock—another thirty minutes until the rendezvous at the light. “Whither?” I asked.
    “We’ll give him another minute or two and then follow him into the cliffs,” Alice said. “He’ll lead us to something. It’s our good luck that he ran off into the woods in Blackboys.”
    I hope so , I thought. “What about the others—Tubby and Uncle Gilbert?”
    “They’re grown men,” she said. “They’ll get along well enough.”
    Gulls wheeled around us, and small seabirds flew out of crannies in the chalk and flew back in again. Birds of prey rode effortlessly on the drafts rising from below. Uncle Gilbert could have named them all, no doubt. The sea wind blew ever more freshly, straight through one’s clothing. To the west the Seven Sisters stretched away, and below us the swell washed in. On the horizon a low brown haze might have been the coast of France.
    We slipped into the darkness of the cavern and waited again, allowing our eyes to grow accustomed to the twilight. We were in a high room—a sort of chalk rotunda with a window letting in sunlight high above, which illuminated a domed ceiling. As the moments passed I became aware of a general movement roundabout me, the cavern apparently alive with crawling and flying things. Moths of great size flitted through the air, and chitonous insects scurried away across the floor, which was littered with what were apparently bones, perhaps fossilized bones, and a rubble of flints and sea shells. Water dripped here and there from above, running in dark rivulets downhill along a dim passage, apparently along the edge of the cliff itself. Some forty or fifty feet farther another wash of sunlight shone through yet another window in the wall.
    Alice set out across the cavern toward the passage, with me following as quietly as I could, although the rubble on the floor rattled and scraped as we trod on it. The second window stood at head-height, appearing to be a