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

fear when I met him, like a mouse expecting the imminent arrival of a snake. At that time he had been holed up in the top floor of a hotel on the hillside looking down on Scarborough Bay. It was a den of prostitutes and panel thieves, but he was attracted to the hidden passages. Everything in his laboratory was set up on an ingenious scaffolding of stout wooden crates, and could be packed up and spirited away on the instant.
    I had witnessed the workings of the sapphire ray on that occasion—a propulsion ray generated by a device that Busby referred to as a ‘transmuting lamp.’ Light bounced around inside a cylinder containing the sapphire until it was released as a narrow stream of blue light—‘disciplined radiation,’ as Busby would have it, although the phrase conveyed little meaning to my mind. The ray had sent a glass paperweight hurtling from where it sat on a table in front of the lamp, out through the open window and down into the sea. It plunged into the depths without so much as a visible splash, and was (for all I know) driven into the sea floor. The crystal structure of the sapphire was destroyed in the process, broken down, Busby told us, by ‘imperfect hydrothermal synthesis,’ although why the phrase has lingered in my mind I can’t tell you. Mother nature’s stones, to put it simply, were of inferior quality. It had been a costly little experiment (the expense apparently borne by the Prussians) and one that quite surprised the Professor. I didn’t have the scientific wit to be surprised by it.
    We agreed to meet again the following day. St. Ives, I believe, wanted to confront him on this issue of the Prussians, to talk sense, as they say, but Busby, perhaps anticipating some such thing, was gone from the hotel, lock, stock, and barrel when we returned. I was entirely ignorant of Busby’s having entrusted St. Ives with the fortified emerald, and quite rightly. It was a monstrous thing in every sense of the word, a thing best kept secret. A short time later St. Ives and I found Busby dead in the upper deck of a folly tower in North Kent.
    Uncle Gilbert shook his head in both sadness and astonishment. But he was as keen as a schoolboy to know about the emerald, and his eyes grew wide when Hasbro drew it out of a drawstring bag and set it on the table. It was a vast thing, and I say that as a man who himself came into the possession of an enormous emerald some few years back, which I’ve set into a broach as a wedding gift for Dorothy Keeble, my intended. Busby’s manufactured emerald dwarfed my own. It fit neatly into the palm of Hasbro’s hand, but only just. It was oddly flattened and faceted, evidently not cut for beauty’s sake. There was something about it that was almost malignant, like a poisonous toad, or the proverbial ill wind that blows no good. Alice, I noticed, didn’t care to look at it. Hasbro slipped it back into its bag.
    “What can you tell us of the lighthouse, Uncle?” Tubby asked, gnawing on a pheasant bone.
    “That it’s a damned treacherous light,” he said. “Hard to see. It’s on the bluff, invisible when you’re coming down from Eastbourne ’till you sail halfway around Beachy Head. In a sea mist, you don’t know where you are. Captain Sawney was the keeper until recently. Drunk as a lord most of the time and asleep the rest, but he kept the lights topped off with oil and his wicks trimmed. You’d think he’d have fallen downstairs hauling oil up to the light or cleaning the blasted glass, but he didn’t, the poor sod. He walked off the cliff one night in a mist. They went out to look because the light went dark for want of oil and found the Captain on the rocks below with his head bashed in, the crabs eating him. There’s nothing on the beach below the headland but a ledge of shattered chalk. It comes down, you know, great masses of it some years.”
    “Uncle Gilbert knew Cap’n Sawney on account of the birding,” Tubby said. “Beachy Head is a famous