The Adventure of the Ring of Stones E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Langdon St. Ives
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 172

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A strange message summons Langdon St. Ives and his companions to the Half Toad Inn in Smithfield, London, and along with the eccentric but fabulously wealthy Gilbert Frobisher, they set out for an uncharted island in the Caribbean, carrying a map that promises a treasure that beggars description. What they find – a terrible, pagan god from the depths of the ocean – leads them back to London, carrying within the hold of Frobisher's steam yacht a fearsome, tentacled menace that threatens to devastate London.

Leseprobe

THE ADVENTURE OF THE RING OF STONES

Copyright © 2014 by James P. Blaylock.

All rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2016 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

Cover design by Dirk Berger

eISBN: 978-1-625672-39-1

ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

NOVELS

The Elfin Ship

The Disappearing Dwarf

The Digging Leviathan

Homunculus

Land Of Dreams

The Last Coin

The Stone Giant

The Paper Grail

Lord Kelvin’s Machine

The Magic Spectacles

Night Relics

All The Bells On Earth

Winter Tides

The Rainy Season

Knights Of The Cornerstone

Zeuglodon

The Aylesford Skull (forthcoming)

COLLECTIONS

Thirteen Phantasms

In For A Penny

Metamorphosis

The Shadow on the Doorstep

NOVELLAS

The Ebb Tide

The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

WITH TIM POWERS

On Pirates

The Devil in the Details

For Deuzie and KyddThis tale of the sea…

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title

Copyright

Also by James P. Blaylock

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Epilogue

Prologue

The Voyage of the Celebes Prince

In the year 1843, I, James Douglas, signed on to the hired clipper Celebes Prince out of Portsmouth, bound for Hispaniola. I was rated ship’s boy, twelve years old that very week. We were to return with rum, sugar, and bath sponge, as easy as kiss-my-hand if the wind was fair. The Celebes Prince was what is called an opium clipper, and I knew well enough that she was a smuggler, but I was a boy with few scruples in that regard, and the Captain treated me well. The first mate told me the Captain had a boy my age who had died, fell from the maintop and hit his head on a carronade, and that meant something, I suppose. I could use a sextant, and I knew the night sky as well as any man aboard, barring the Captain, who was a right seaman but a dark, bloody-minded man in most regards, with a taste for Port Royal rum that would have done for him if he’d lived long enough.

We soon picked up the variables and logged a hundred-forty sea miles a day, straight down into the northeast trades and in among the Caribbean Islands. We took on rum and sugar and bath sponge in Santo Domingo, filled our water, and weighed again, the Captain having a fear of the yellow jack, which was mortal that season. Two sponge fishermen came along, dark brown men. I was told that they were the last of the Taino Indians, who had mainly died out on Hispaniola. One was deaf from his time spent in deep water, and the other didn’t seem right in the head. What use we had for sponge fishermen I couldn’t say, our hold already being full of that item.

We were bound for home, I thought—a fast run if our luck held—Portsmouth or thereabouts, perhaps a handy cove first where we could offload the rum. The second morning I awoke at eight bells in the dark and went on deck. We were at anchor, rolling on a moderate swell. Just to starboard lay an island, a rocky coast with surf running, although there was a likely bay sheltered by a long reef where a ship’s boat might lie at ease. Even in the darkness I could see a mountain in the center of the island, where smoke was rising—a volcano, I thought, although I had never seen one. There was no beach, just the black mouth of a sea cave and cliffs, very steep, rising away on either side. I could see the water boiling over the reef in the moonlight, no doubt a dry reef when the tide fell. The air was clear, and the stars shone, and without a thought I fetched the instrument and took a reading, curious how far we had sailed in the night, Santo Domingo being 18 degrees north and a little under 70 degrees west. Nearly 200 sea miles was my answer, although it was mere curiosity at the time. The island had a name, but I won’t write it here, nor utter it neither.

We rowed across to the cove four hours later in the launch, at eight bells in the morning watch, four pulling on the oars, including me. I could pull middling well for a boy, and the Captain favored me. Those left aboard the ship were to fire the bow chaser as a warning if there was a sail in sight, for we didn’t want company. The Indians sat in the stern. No one spoke, and there was never a man more intent than the Captain on what he was about, although what it was I didn’t yet know. He carried two pistols on his belt, and it was the pistols and the silence that put my mind to working, and the more it worked, the more it turned on treasure—something on the bottom of the sea, which called for the sponge fishers. Anyone could see that the Captain was half gone in rum, even at that early hour. His flesh stank of it. Mayhaps he hadn’t slept and had finished his bottle waiting for the sun.

We rowed into the cove, protected by the reef, which stood out of the water now, and the sea cave open before us. The roof of the cave was a rough dome fifteen feet above our heads, with sea birds nesting along the walls and a great lot of noise. There was sea wrack and flotsam that had washed into the cave, the dark water below ink-black, how deep I couldn’t say for the darkness in the cave. We put the anchor over the side, and played out fifteen fathoms of cable, which told the tale.

There we sat, not a word said, and everyone in main fear of the Captain, who was in a state. It was still dim in the cave, despite the sun in the east. The Captain took out his pocket-watch now and then to see the time slip past, until he tipped me a wink at last, and said, “Stand by, Mr. Douglas, and you’ll see something,” although he seemed to be talking to himself. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a ray of light shone into the cavern from a window in the east wall, a jagged crack like a half-open mouth, that hadn’t seemed to be there a moment before. The ray of sunlight played upon the water, the sea floor coming visible, the water as clear as air. Straightaway I saw a long, black shark deep down, then two and three, circling. The sponge divers saw them, too, and didn’t much like the look of them, for the two of them were going over the side. “They’re nought but gammon,” the Captain told them, but it was the brace of pistols that he used to persuade Indians overboard, for there was no time to spare, only a short period of sunlight, and then darkness in the cave until the following day, when the sun crossed the window again.

There on the bottom, fifteen fathoms deep, lay what looked to be a giant great pearl that a man would need a barrow to move. It rested within a ring of white rocks that seemed to have been carefully placed, although that scarcely seems possible, and so was protected from the surge that rolled into the cave and might have washed the pearl away otherwise. Sea fans passed over it in the current, and then moved back, so that you could see it again plain. It couldn’t be a pearl, of course, not that size. “Ambergris, Mr. Douglas,” the Captain said, nodding at me as we watched the Indians kicking hard for the bottom, hauling themselves down the anchor cable hand over hand. They let go the cable and swam to the prize, the two of them grappling with the great ball, lifting it from where it was settled. It was later that I was told that ambergris weighed little. Indeed, it floated on the surface unless it was very old and dense, as this was. Up they came, quicker than you would have thought, but followed by one of the black-bodied sharks, three times the men’s length. It seemed to brush the two of them in passing. They let loose of the burden, and so it fell. The two of them broke the surface empty handed, having been under for three full minutes. The Captain cursed them for the loss and glanced at the light shining through the crack, which glowed yellow now as if the sun was peering straight through.

The bosun said that we should have brought a rope and a net, and that we might try again tomorrow morning. It was dead obvious he was right, but rum had dimmed the Captain’s mind, and the ambergris had been a secret of his own keeping. “Be damned to tomorrow,” he said, and sent the Indians down again, although they would have climbed into the boat but for the pistols. Two more times they tried and failed, the sharks showing little interest now. The water was growing dimmer. The fourth attempt very nearly fetched the prize, although it was in that moment, when they were on the bottom, that we heard cannon fire and saw the smoke from the chaser. It was plain that something was dead wrong with the Celebes Prince. The ship was shaking like a dog throwing off water, and she canted to larboard as if driven over by a heavy gust of wind, although there was no wind. There was no explaining it, not from where we sat in the sea cave.

The Captain stared at the ship, shaking his head sharp, like his mind was adrift and he was trying to call it back. Up came the Indians from the bottom, the great pearl wedged between them, hauling themselves one-handed along the anchor cable, the boat dipping with the strain of it. The bow chaser fired again. The Indians neared the surface, bubbles rising from their nostrils. I saw what the two of them didn’t see—the black shadow rising behind them. One of the two—the deaf man, I believe, was jerked downward. Blood clouded the water, and the ball of ambergris fell away into it once again. I saw the man’s face in the last moment, the horror on it plain, his severed leg crosswise in the shark’s mouth, the fish’s brethren rising from the depths, either of them big enough to knock the launch cockeyed if they had a mind to.

The second Indian’s head broke the water. He was empty handed, his eyes full of fear, and him gripping the anchor cable like salvation itself. The Captain held his sheath knife in his hand, and without a word he cut the cable, and the Indian fell back as the launch moved away with the surge. “Leave him!” the Captain shouted, cuffing the bosun on the side of the head when he leant over to clutch the man’s hand. The Indian swam two strokes toward us, his death written on his face. On the instant his body flew half out of the water as one of the sharks took him, the huge mouth and teeth cutting him in half at the waist, a bloody spray spattering the boat, which nearly capsized, the wave thrown up by the shark’s lunge washing us farther toward the cave mouth. The cave was fast falling into darkness now, and we bent to the oars, watching the sharks as they fed. I saw the man’s torso jerk again and again as it was butchered, and then the sun rose another notch, and the light went out of the sea cave, and we were in the cove again and very soon in the open ocean, leaving one horror for another, or so it seemed to me.

The Celebes Prince leapt upon the sea now, like the bodies of the Indians had done. The mainmast went by the boards, and the sails and rigging fell across the deck, as if she had been shattered by the first blast of a hurricane. And yet we could see nothing of any enemy. The ship was caught in the grasp of some great spirit, which was destroying it as violently as the sharks had destroyed the two sponge divers. The bosun tied onto the seizing and hauled himself up the mainchains, the Captain at his heels and the rest of the men following. There was a vast creaking and rending of timbers from the ship, and the sound of screams and shouting. I stood alone on the pitching deck of the launch, full of stony fear, the memory of those butchered divers still before my mind’s eye.

During the pull back to the ship, I had seen that to the north lay cloud drift over what must be an island, and it came to me now to leave the ship to its fate, which I could not alter in any event. As soon as it entered my mind to do so, I slipped the knot and sat on the thwart, taking the oars in my hands, in a moderate hurry now that I knew what I was about. Before I was thirty yards from the ship, however, there sounded a vast cracking, the Celebes Prince listed to starboard, and as God is my witness, the bower anchor itself pierced the side of the ship near the waterline. I mean to say that it smashed straight through the hull, like an arrow through straw. I set out rowing with a will, and when I was perhaps a half mile away, thinking to reach the island, I saw the ship cant sideways again, stay there, and start to settle. In three minutes she was drawn under.

I knew in my heart that I must go back in order to pick up survivors, but I could not. I knew also that the island with the sea cave was cursed, and the sea around it haunted. I made landfall on the island before night and drew the launch up a stream out of the jungle, setting it upside down for a snug roof, and there I lived for a time before a ship put in for water and I was saved. I made up a lie, left the launch behind, since it didn’t fit with the lie, and found myself in Santo Domingo, living there for three months before taking ship for Portsmouth once again, a year and two months after setting out. By then the sea cave and the destruction of the Celebes Prince had come to be very much like a figment to me, and at night I dreamt of sea fans waving over that ball of ambergris, and the sharks circling, and the water red with blood.

I set this account down in my own hand and gave it of my own free will to my friend Reginald Sawney when I set out for home. Whether any but me came away from the wreck of the Celebes Prince I never learned. I take my oath that what I write here is true.

—James Douglas

Chapter 1

Ambush at the Half Toad

A week following the Snow Hill Massacre, which  had rocked Smithfield and all of London, I found myself once again at William Billson’s Half Toad Inn, Lambert Court, along with the brilliant Professor Langdon St. Ives and his man Hasbro, who had traveled with St. Ives these many years and was more friend than factotum. We were waiting on Tubby Frobisher and his eccentric and fabulously rich Uncle Gilbert, the two of them a worrisome quarter of an hour overdue. Tubby was coming down from Chingford, and Gilbert up from his mansion in Dicker, the old man anxious to communicate with us face-to-face. It was he who had summoned us. The mails weren’t to be trusted, Gilbert had told us, and we were to destroy the missive that called us to the Half Toad.

We were well used to Gilbert’s fancies and had done as he’d asked, ascertaining from the summons that he had in mind a sea voyage of some four weeks duration, the destination a well-kept secret: somewhere in the Atlantic, given the brevity of the voyage, but whether to the high northern latitudes or to the tropics we knew not. His privately-owned, ocean-going steam yacht was moored at the West India Docks. Our curiosity piqued, we had come along to the Half Toad, dunnage in hand, St. Ives evidently relieved to be active once again after a long period of hibernation.

Nearly a year had transpired since the terrible business of the Aylesford Skull, during which time St. Ives had gone to ground in Kent, playing the role of the gentleman farmer. He had seen to the building of an oast house on his and Alice’s considerable property during that mild fall and winter, and in the spring to the planting of a cherry orchard. The breezes of early summer, however, generated a certain nervous energy in the man, the old wanderlust rising in him like a tide. He had been denying nature, of course—something that Alice understood all too well—and it was she who insisted that he agree to Gilbert’s voyage. Meanwhile, she and the children and my own betrothed Dorothy toddled off to Scarborough for their annual summer visit to Alice’s aged grandmother, leaving the running of their acreage in Kent in the hands of the admirable Mrs. Langley, old Binger, the groundskeeper, and young Finn Conrad.

Foot traffic in Smithfield was uncommonly sparse this evening, and there were few customers, the bloody murders having cast a shadow over the neighborhood that hadn’t lifted yet. But it was all the better for our clandestine meeting with Tubby and Gilbert. Billson, who had the physical properties of a blacksmith and the mind of a natural philosopher, was cooking with a keen eye and a generous hand, turning a multi-armed spit that skewered two dozen of Henrietta Billson’s fat sausages, the drippings basting three plump pheasants on another spit directly below, the fire sizzling happily. Billson had just served out delicate mounds of lobscouse as a kickshaw, molded in tiny pie dishes and swirling beneath a cloud of steam redolent of nutmeg, juniper berries, and corned beef. Billson subscribes to the odd habit of serving lobscouse with a brown onion sauce, by the way, which I heartily recommend, the entire business, lobscouse and sauce both, thickened with pounded ship’s biscuit that had borne the government stamp—an inverted arrow—before Billson pulverized it with a belaying pin.

Billson had been a sailor, you see, in the years before he married Henrietta and purchased the Half Toad. Indeed, he had brought an immense, carved, wooden toad home with him from the West Indies—a fanciful ship’s figurehead, the ship itself having been blown to flinders, turning the toad into a missile that had very nearly done for Billson when it splashed down like a meteor not three feet from his head. But the toad had meant his salvation, for he had clung to it through the long night, the rest of the crew dead, the ship sunk. The heroic amphibian now looks out from its perch above the door on Fingal Street, its broad mouth set in a mysterious smile that brings to the well-tempered mind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and never more evidently than after one has consumed two quarts of Billson’s best ale, Old Man Newt.

I had just put a share of it away, the three of us having decided to whet our appetites and whistles while we waited for Tubby and Gilbert. I was admiring in a happy reverie the old oak wainscot, the etchings by Hogarth that adorned the wall, and the pheasants on the spit, my mind idle but well satisfied. Lars Hopeful, the halfwit tapboy, had renewed our jug of ale, and the window behind us stood open, letting in a grateful evening breeze. The bell of St. Bartholomew the Great began to toll just as Mrs. Billson was putting a bread pudding into the oven, which would come out again, hot and with buttered rum set aflame, when we had need of it later in the evening. I recall having turned to the window at the sound of the bell, looking for the crenellated tower of St. Bartholomew over the rooftops, when there came the sound of a wild curse, a pistol shot, and running feet.