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

heartily, apologized for having called me a lump of coal, compelled me to admit to the truth of the insult, and then apologized again for having nothing but dry bones and clinkers to feed us. If he had known for certain that we were coming, he said, he would have slaughtered the fatted calf.
    Barlow hauled me away at that point to see to my arm, which needed a proper cleaning and bandaging. He gave me one of his own shirts, my own being a bloody ruin, and he took my coat away with him to see whether Mrs. Barlow could put it right. Mrs. Barlow was at that moment apparently looking after Alice’s needs. We were being looked after on all sides. I had the distinct notion that the earth was growing steadier on its axis after having been tilted this way and that for the past weeks.
    I found my companions in the dining hall where they were just then sitting down to gnaw on the bones and clinkers, which turned out to be bangers and mash running with butter and gravy, cold pheasant, cheese and bread, and bottles of good burgundy. Barlow had already taken the corks out of three of the bottles, and the glasses stood full. You can imagine that we fell upon the food and drink like savages, Alice included, pausing only to answer Uncle Gilbert’s myriad questions. He cocked his head at what we had to say, nodding seriously, cursing the man who had hit me on the head, astonished at the machinations of Ignacio Narbondo, who, he insisted, needed a good horsewhipping before he was bunged up in an empty keg with a rabid stoat and set adrift. He knew the Tipper, he said, from his hunting forays around Blackboys. Gibbet bait, he was. Vermin. A worm. Gutter filth. “We’ll settle him,” he told me, nodding heartily and tipping me a wink. “We’ll hand him his head in a bucket.” He seemed to be as worried for the Professor’s health as we were, as if the two of them were old friends.
    His use of the word “we” made me uneasy. I mentioned to him that we would be out of his way before dawn, which meant getting precious little sleep….
    “Of course I’ll come along,” he said. “You’ll need another stout hand when you beard these rogues.” He stood up from his chair and crossed to the wall, where he took down a saber, cutting at the air with it and skipping toward a great, mullioned, oak chest full of crystal objects as if to hack it to pieces. I thought of Tubby beheading the stuffed boar in the Explorers Club. I was fond of Uncle Gilbert, as I said, but he was distinctly excitable. My refusing him outright, however, wouldn’t have been gentlemanly, so I rather hoped that Tubby would come up with something to put him off the scent.
    “You knew the Earl of Hamsters, didn’t you Uncle?” Tubby asked as Barlow poured more wine into our glasses.
    “Lord Busby, do you mean? I did indeed know him. We were at Cambridge together, you know, before we were sent down over a misunderstanding involving the fairer sex, ha ha. Pardon me,” he said to Alice, “not half so fair as you, my dear. Anyway, I regretted it immensely, of course, but I mend quickly, and I was never any kind of scholar. I’m afraid it went ill for poor Busby, who was a frightfully sensitive man. Every small insult struck the man like a blow. The press made game of him, with the Earl of Hamsters comments, although he did have capacious cheeks. He had a trick of packing them full of walnut halves and then eating them one by one when we were in chapel. He saw nothing humorous in it, do you see. He simply didn’t have to share them with the rest of us that way, or crack the nuts during sermon. Poor Busby had a run of ill luck after the scandal, and became a variety of scientific hermit. I felt badly when I read that he’d been murdered. What has he to do with our mission?”
    I told him what I knew—about the Prussians, about Busby’s experimental rays that were said to be impervious to the horizon and therefore monumentally dangerous, about the man’s palpable