EPILOGUE

St. Ives didn’t rue the loss of the ship for a moment. He’d had his voyage. And the future, he was certain, held the promise of more. Here was Dorothy Keeble, recovered, clutching Jack’s arm, the two of them smiling at the Captain, who held before them an open Keeble box in which lay a tremendous emerald, big as a fist and seeming to burn green and immense in the firelight.

A moaning filled the night. Branches tossed on the trees. The tall grasses blew in undulating waves. The blimp canted sideways, mooring lines snapped, and people scurried like bugs, running to get out of the way. Slowly and majestically the blimp toppled over, tearing itself to bits, escaping gases whooshing through rents in the fabric of the thing. The ribby gondola, hauled onto its side, broke apart like a wooden ship beaten against rocks by high seas. And first one, then twenty, then a hundred onlookers rushed in to salvage a bit of it as a souvenir. Wood snapped. Fabric ripped. Great sheets of deflated blimp were stripped loose, clutched at by uncounted hands and rent to fragments. Within moments the once-rotund blimp was nothing but a flattened bit of wreckage that had disappeared beneath an antlike swarm of Londoners. An hour later, when the crowds, finally, abandoned their pursuit of relics and surged wearily homeward at last, not a fragment, not a scrap of Birdlip’s craft remained on the Heath.

St. Ives and his companions kicked through the grass, gazing at the place where the blimp had lain. Bill Kraken said that the loss of it was shameful. William Keeble wondered at the fate of its engine, carried happily away in pieces by drunken green-grocers and costermongers and beggars who hadn’t the foggiest notion of the magic it had once contained. Jack and Dorothy gazed at each other with an intensity of expression that seemed far removed from any wondering over disappeared blimps, an expression very like the one shared by Captain Powers and Nell Owlesby, who stood hand in hand beside Jack and Dorothy.

Ten paces away sat Parsons, astride the arm of the stuffed chair, the corpse slumped beside him, restful now and refusing to respond to Parsons’ chatter. “Sheep,” the biologist insisted, “aren’t like you and me. They produce vast quantities of methane gas. Very inflammatory, I assure you…”

St. Ives strode across and laid a hand on the poor man’s shoulder. Parsons grinned at him. “Telling this fellow about the gaseous mysteries of grass feeders.”

“Fine,” said St. Ives. “But he seems to have fallen asleep.”

“His eyes, though…” began Parsons, glancing at the aerator box that St. Ives held in the crook of his arm. He shuddered, as if gripped by a sudden chill. “You don’t mean to open that here, do you?”

St. Ives shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “Wouldn’t think of it.”

Parsons seemed relieved. “Tell me,” he said slowly, looking askance at the head of Joanna Southcote, which lay now up to its nonexistent ears in weeds beside the stuffed chair, “does the night seem uncommonly full of dead men and severed heads to you?”

St. Ives nodded, searching for words with which to respond to Parsons’ very earnest question. His search, though, came to an abrupt end with the sudden issuance of Shiloh the New Messiah, his face haggard, his cloak stained and mired, the ghastly Marseilles Pinkle tooting in his grip, its rubber head shooting in and out, throwing sparks like a pinwheel and smelling of burnt rubber and unidentifiable decay. With a mad cry the old man fell forward onto his face and lay still, his torn and soiled robes splayed out around him. Dead, apparently, he hopped once or twice as the Pinkle, trapped beneath him, continued to sputter and whir before rolling free.

St. Ives shook his head. Parsons arose and very slowly stepped across to where the Pinkle spun itself out on the green, the rubber head tooting out a final, blubbery whistle. Parsons shook his head ponderously and wandered away into the dark, weaving toward Hampstead like a rudderless boat.

St. Ives watched him in silence, wondering whether his own reputation as a scientist had in any way been cemented by the night’s odd events, and determining finally that he didn’t really care a rap one way or the other. The evening had taken its toll, certainly, on the good as well as the wicked. His companions trudged along toward the wagon, on the seat of which sat a placid Hasbro. St. Ives was suddenly dead tired. The morrow would see him at Harrogate. There was work ahead; that was sure. “Well,” he said to Godall, “so ends the earnest endeavors of the Trismegistus Club. And with a modicum of success, too.”

“For the moment,” said Godall enigmatically. “We haven’t, possibly, seen the last of our millionaire. But I rather believe him to be a spent force. I’ll call upon him myself in a day or two.”

“What ever became of Willis Pule, do you think?” asked St. Ives. “He was utterly mad there at the last.”

Godall nodded. “Madness, I’m certain, is the wages of villainy. He met an old friend, in fact.”

“What’s that?” asked St. Ives, surprised.

“The hunchback.”

“Narbondo!”

Godall nodded. “In a dogcart full of carp. Pule lay face down among them, comatose.”

“Poor devil,” said St. Ives. “I don’t suppose Narbondo had come to his rescue.”

“Not very bloody likely,” said Godall darkly, and the two men hoisted themselves onto the wagon, sitting with their feet dangling over the back so that they faced the sweep of hill on which, two hours earlier, had sat the long-awaited blimp.

Ahead of them, some distance away, trudged half of London, not a man or woman among them with the least understanding of the mysteries that had supplied the evening’s entertainment. What understanding have any of us, wondered St. Ives. Not a nickel’s worth, not really. Not even Godall, for all the man’s intellectual prowess. Intellect wouldn’t answer here, wouldn’t explain why the cold and measured tread of science had strayed from chartered paths and wandered unsuspecting into the curious moonlight of Hampstead Heath. Poor Parsons. What did he make of the blimp now? Would he awaken at midday having somehow clipped the evening apart and reassembled it into a more tolerable pattern, like a man who whistles his way through a dark and lonely night, then abandons his fears in the light of a noonday sun?

St. Ives gazed with sleepy wonder at the empty, receding green as the wagon bumped around a muddy swerve of road into Hampstead, the village dark now and silent. He tried to summon a picture of the blimp riding at anchor, of Dr. Birdlip visible beyond the slats of the wooden gondola, legs wide set to counter the roll of an airy swell. But the Heath lay empty above, the blimp fragmented, disappeared. And it seemed as if the strange craft had never been more than a ghostly will o’ the wisp, a bit of sleepy enchantment woven out of nothing, that whirled and faded now across the back of his closed eyes until he seemed to be sailing with it above the clouded landscape of a dream.