Read Online The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs by James P. Blaylock - Free Book Online

hurried across, holding out what appeared to be a stiffish envelope. Alice took it from him.
    “A man give this to me directly you went down to the Tipper’s,” the boy said. “He was an ugly article, with a head like the moon.”
    “Dressed in brown tweed?” I asked him.
    “That’s the one.”
    “The Peddler!” I said to Tubby as Alice slipped a largish photograph out of the envelope, tilting it toward the gas lamp to see it clearly. Something came over her face then, and it seemed to me that she went as pale as she had been when she had walked into the inn an hour ago. She steadied herself and handed me the photograph, which reeked of chemicals. It was of Langdon St. Ives, lying in a wooden coffin. At first I thought he was dead, and I simply couldn’t breathe, but he was not. He was evidently mad, his eyes opened unnaturally wide, as if he were staring at some descending horror. His forearms were raised, his hands half closed so that they appeared to be claws. At the bottom of the photograph, in a scrawl of grease pen, were the words, “Belle Tout Light. Eleven in the morning. Bring the stone.”
    The meaning was clear. They hadn’t sent the message with Alice when they allowed her to flee from Heathfield, because they intended to underscore the demand with the photograph, which was a hellish obscenity. They had made a tolerably quick business of it—anticipated our movements, too, as we stumbled about imagining ourselves to be acting, when in fact we had inevitably been acted upon.
    I tipped the photograph into the flame of the gas lamp until it blazed, burning down to my fingers before I dropped it to the cobbles of the courtyard and ground it beneath my heel. My recently elevated mood had vanished. I regretted letting the Tipper get the better of me. I regretted Tubby’s having prevented me from going into Heathfield alone. I regretted not having been at the Inn when the Peddler delivered the photograph. The night was suddenly a hailstorm of regrets. I told myself that I might yet see the whole crowd of villains hanging from gibbets, but it was cold comfort.
    Alice very calmly asked John Gunther if he would do us one final service. She even managed to smile at the boy, who was staring at my bloody coat sleeve now, apprehension in his eyes. After our departure, Alice told him, he was to fetch the constable and say that he had been out taking the air when he’d seen someone coming out through the Tipper’s door, which was broken from its hinges, and making away downhill. She put another coin into the boy’s hand, and he nodded reassuringly. The three of us turned to the coach, as impatient as the coachman to be on our way. Our business in Blackboys was at an end. The authorities would find the leftover swag before anyone else thought to loot the place. When sanity returned to Heathfield, as it perhaps already had, the Tipper’s victims might at least recover what they’d lost.
    The three of us climbed into the empty coach, which swayed as if on heavy seas as Tubby hoisted himself aboard. The driver hied-up the horses and away we went down the road toward Dicker, rattling and creaking along. The moon was high in the sky now, and the forest trees along the roadside shone with a silver aura, the wind just brisk enough to move the branches.



Chapter 8
     
    On the Side 
    of the Angels

     
    St. Ives abruptly came to himself, waking up fully sensible, but with no idea where he had been a moment earlier. Now he lay in the back of a moving wagon that smelled of hay, and in fact he rested comfortably enough on that substance, looking up in the faint light at what was apparently tightly stretched canvas. His hands and feet were bound, although the rope that connected his ankles had some play in it, enough so that he could hobble if he had any place to hobble to. He could recall the scuffle at Heathfield, and Alice’s flight, but precious little else since then, aside from a suspicious memory of having met the