Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [29]
“There was a collection of paintings. Flemish, I think,” the gambler continued, puffing. “Milky, watery landscapes without much obvious interest—except that over time they changed.”
“You mean with the light?”
“No!” the gambler exclaimed. “I mean changed. One day a peasant in the picture would be pitching hay, the next day a hay cart would be seen departing—a cart that had not been there before!”
Interesting, Lloyd thought.
“And Rutherford had a huge aquarium that he would swim in himself. He had a kind of vessel built—it looked like a diamond coffin—in which he could stay submerged for long periods of time. He used it to study his electric eels and those jellyfish creatures we call the Portuguese man-of-war.”
Lloyd gave a low whistle. He would have liked some eels himself.
“Yes!” St. Ives shook his head. “You see, I would not have been in his service had I not found something in him to admire—and there was much to hold my interest. The trouble was I found too much to admire and ended up taking too much interest in his wife, an auburn-haired beauty with eyes like sapphires.”
“You fell in love—with his wife?” Lloyd blurted, but when he spoke an image of Miss Viola rose up in his mind. A glimpse he had had of one of her corsets. It had become confused in his mind with his mystic twin.
“And she with me!” St. Ives replied. “My beautiful Celeste. Never will I experience such bliss in this life again!”
A storm of rage passed through the gambler’s eyes.
“Rutherford was cruel to Celeste and ignored her—spent too much time with his compounds and machines. He was also addicted to a narcotic that he manufactured himself. A transparent liquid, tinted a faint blue—like damson plums. He called it Mantike. Every night he would inject some of the foul stuff and slip off into a meditative stupor in his library. But there were other eyes and ears about the place, and when that bastard found out about our sin he drugged me with something—whether it was the Blue Evil I do not know. I woke to find myself secured to a table in one of his infernal laboratories. And I remained awake. No drugs or sedatives after that. There he conducted a little piece of theater involving surgical instruments.”
At these words the gambler’s body seemed to quiver in the warm air, while Lloyd’s thoughts flashed back to his rabbit Phineas. His father was wrong about him never thinking of Phineas. St. Ives spat into the river.
“But then why did he give you this?” Lloyd asked, pointing to the hand.
“Another of his hideous experiments.” St. Ives chuckled. “How the nerve connections work I have no idea. But this is not the metal addition that it may appear. I feel the hand. It is a part of me, or I a part of it. There are other extensions and accessories that I carry, but the hand itself I cannot remove. I will die with it attached to me. Yet it will not die. And that is perhaps why he enabled me so—as an expression of his power and ingenuity. The rest he did to me was not enough. He wanted a constant, visible, and necessary reminder always before me. To make me forever dependent on his technics. Who knows? Perhaps, for all the agony he inflicted, I may have been lucky not to have been turned more fully into one of his gadgets. I might well be a mannequin whole, and not just in hand.”
“I don’t understand,” Lloyd murmured.
“He was far, far ahead of his time, was Mr. Rutherford. His toy caravels were ingenious, but he was capable of many other feats. Oh, yes! He had designed and built a mechanical manservant. A sort of butler named Zadoc. What it was powered by I do not know, he would not reveal it—but it was not steam. A very handsome but ghastly porcelain face. Gave Celeste nightmares. But he was working on much more complex contraptions still.”
“And what … happened … to him?” the boy whispered.
“I set a booby trap in his laboratory,