Read The Elder Ice: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Online
Authors: David Hambling
The Elder Ice: A Harry Stubbs Adventure (11 page)
I was looking for Harcourt’s wand with some thought that I could dispel the thing by a reversal of the actions he had carried out. Instead, I saw the ice axe, and it brought an idea. That was more in my line than magic tricks, if only I could get to it and use it to effect.
The prospect of certain death was a powerful tonic. I bounded, zigzagging across the room, more Nijinsky than Dempsey, and that vicious fizzling sound erupted again. Its aim was improving. In spite of my desperate evasions, the leather thong holding the axe parted inches from my fingers, and I snatched it out of the air.
The genie, or whatever the shadow-thing would be properly termed, was invulnerable to any physical assault. But perhaps it depended somewhat on the green star, the “lamp” that housed and perhaps sustained it. I directed my attention to that. As to whether something that had endured a million years in the Antarctic would be susceptible to human agency, I did not know. But as Sergeant Eagleton would say, “Just hit him as hard as you can, Gunner Stubbs; he’s only human”—though of course in this case, that hardly applied.
I ducked low, moving from side to side. The thing loomed in front of me like a clot of shadows blocking my way. With a cry, I ran right through it, raised the ice axe, and with a powerful double-handed blow brought its point down on the green star. It was a bold move, and perhaps the spirit of Sir Ernest rewarded my boldness. An inch on either side and I should have missed entirely, but the steel point landed squarely on the centre of the star as momentum carried me forward and over it. I rolled and struck the desk, expecting each instant to hear that hiss again, scanning to see where the shadow thing was.
It was gone as abruptly as it had come.
A faint green haze surrounded the ice axe embedded deep in the floorboards. There was no other sign of the green stone, save for a faint star-shaped imprint in the floor where it had been driven in before it burst. The only sound was my heavy breathing as I clambered to my feet.
“Bravo,” said Mrs Crawford in a faint voice. She was lying where she had fallen. Blood had spread around her like a dark rug.
“I'll fetch a doctor.”
“Please—don't leave me.”
I kneeled awkwardly next to her. She reached out, and I took her hand. It was cold.
“I am so sorry. To have put you to so much trouble. Harcourt was much worse than I thought. Madder. Mad enough to try to wake Them. Thank God you averted that.”
“Those things you and he were saying. Were they true?”
“Mostly.” She swallowed. “I'm afraid I deceived you again. False promises of riches... I am glad you survived after all.” She swallowed again with more difficulty. “Please don't cry now. I've done bad things. This is—poetic justice.” She looked up at the ceiling. I thought she was not going to speak again, but she was composing herself for a final statement. The words, when they came, were a whisper. “You did very well, Mr Stubbs. Thank you.”
Then I was left all alone. Alone, kneeling in blood, with the dead around me.
Epilogue
And that is the story of how Harry Stubbs claimed victory in what was, by any measure, the most unusual bout he ever contested. I was not as unscathed as I thought. Arthur Renville pointed out that I had lost half an ear, sliced off as clean as you like, with a furrow I had never even felt ploughed in my temple.
Of course, I called on Arthur to help pick up the pieces. Who else would know what to do? He was angry at first, but the pile of cash on Harcourt’s desk helped smooth matters over. He listened to my story, and by the end he had his feet up on the desk and was smoking one of Harcourt’s cigars. He was satisfied the whole affair was over and things could return to normal. His verdict was that Connell and Harcourt would not be missed, and it seems he was right. I cannot say how much of my story he believed.
As for Mrs Crawford, or whatever her real name was, nobody came looking for her either. The woman I saw in the office was just a role she put on and took off as easily as I remove my bowler hat. But I don’t suppose I’d ever have had any answers from her, even if she had lived.
Things did carry on as normal. The world is still the same. But my understanding of what is normal has changed. Before, I thought I understood everything. But now the world is too much for me, now I have seen how much I never understood at all and never will. Once I thought Shackleton was a hero. Now I see he was a hero and a fool, and a hero again, and six other things besides.
So many other people are living lives beyond me. Even as I write, Frank Mellors is in his antique shop in Chichester, showing an amethyst brooch to a customer. The men speak no special words, but there is a secret understanding between them. Another man in the shop looking at chinaware notices nothing.
A thousand miles away, Nanook of the North is cutting a hole in the ice to catch fish, a task as ordinary to him as opening a tin of pilchards is to you or me. I used to think such worlds as Nanook’s only existed for as long as we watched them on the cinema screen. Now I realise many other worlds, and others that we have yet to dream of, are going on at the same time as our own, everywhere, even under our noses.
On the roof slates above my head, the tardigrades push their way through the moss. The little monsters pursue their prey and avoid predators as they have these six hundred million years, heedless of mankind’s existence. Billions and billions of them, on all our roofs and in every park and garden, whole empires of tardigrades, and only a few like Dr Evans know they are even there.
Ten thousand miles south, the Ancients' tombs are still undisturbed, thousands of feet beneath the elder ice. The Ancients themselves are not dead but passing a few more millennia in dreamless, blank slumber until the world is right for them again. We human beings scurry about, oblivious to their presence.
We are not the Earth's favoured first-born, the inheritors of the world, as we had always imagined. We are the second-born and here only on the sufferance of our elder brothers. Though to them, we are much less than brothers. We are the tardigrades on the roof, the rats in the walls. We think we own the place, but it is only ours until they wake again. We are pets to them, or else we are vermin. Some time ago, they gave their chosen ones rings, like the collar on a pet dog, so they would not kill them by accident. Because the rest of us are nothing more than pests, a threat to their valuables. And their mousetraps are deadly effective.
It is not easy to see mankind relegated so low, so that even Harcourt only hoped to trail behind the Ancients. Perhaps that was why Armydale shot himself after coming back from the
Endurance
expedition. Perhaps he had seen the size of the world compared to us, and it was too much for him.
As for Harry Stubbs, well, another of his dreams has slipped away like the others. I was never going to be a master butcher like my father. I was never going to face Dempsey in front of a packed house at Madison Square Garden. And now I was never going to be an articled clerk with a respectable job in a solicitor’s office. But if I learned anything from Sir Ernest Shackleton, it was the importance of picking yourself up after each setback. You must change course and start heading for the next dream. It might be only another Fata Morgana, but it keeps you going. And it might be real.
My reports, written with so much care for Mr Rowe, are no more. But I wish to record
my
story. Perhaps we will learn the same secrets as the Ancients, and our science will scale the same heights. Perhaps in a hundred years we too will make glowing lamps you can hold in your hand, lamps that can do all the things Mrs Crawford said. Then a man will be able to summon up a whole library with a gesture, and read it all, and make sense of it all at last. And maybe Harry Stubbs' story will be one of the books in that library.
Editor’s Note: Harry Stubbs’ account is accurate as far as it can be verified, even the unlikely details of Ernest Shackleton’s brother Frank Mellors, a convicted fraudster turned antique dealer.
Needless to say, no evidence of lost civilisations has ever been found in Antarctica. There are however some curious parallels between Stubbs’ descriptions and a fictionalised account of the ill-fated 1931 Pabodie Expedition published by HP Lovecraft as “At The Mountains of Madness.”
Harry Stubbs returns in Broken Meats. A bizarre shooting outside a pub sets in motion a chain of events in which Harry reluctantly agrees to help a visitor from China. Mr Yang is an agent of the feared Si Fan Society and possessed of unusual powers. He is seeking information about Rosyln D’Onston, a former journalist, black magician and suspect in the Jack the Ripper killings, now dead for thirteen years. What is Yang’s mission? And just how dead is D’Onston? The answers lie with a cell of renegade Theosophists and an insane alchemical experiment which transcends science.
Also coming in Summer 2015 from PS Publishing:
The Dulwich Horror and Others
, a collection of seven stories of mystery and horror by David Hambling
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Table of Contents
Round Four: The Consignment Man