Starcross Read online

  Then, as we hurried out on to the wet, shining sand where the small waves were breaking, disaster struck. Jack suddenly went down, almost dragging me with him. I thought that he had slipped, and made to help him up, but he gave a terrible cry, and I realised that he had fallen into the open maw of a sand clam! Weeping, I tried to pull him free, but the fanged lips of the trapdoor were closed tight on his left leg, just below the knee.

  He tried to be brave, poor Jack, but the pain was terrible. He cried out again, and the Crown of Thorns heard him, and came slurping and flolloping towards us, and that awful suction tube swung down to snort me up.

  ‘Oh, Jack!’ I remember crying, as I was dragged backwards.

  He held both my hands and pulled me towards him. The suction from the starfish’s feeding tube increased, and I felt my feet rise up into the air. I was playing the part of the rope in a tug-of-war between Jack and the monster, and a most uncomfortable and undignified role it was!

  ‘Myrtle!’ cried Jack. Poor Jack, he looked quite grey with pain, and the left leg of his trousers was soaked through with gore! ‘Myrtle,’ he shouted. ‘Just a bit closer, if you can …’

  He was drawing me towards him, closer, closer, and I closed my eyes and raised my face to his, in expectation of one last kiss. I confess that I was somewhat disappointed when he let go of my hand and reached out to tug one of the tassels on my bathing costume.

  ‘Jack!’ I said indignantly – and an instant later he released my other hand, too, and I was whirling through mid-air in a most unseemly manner, sucked head-over-heels into the wet mouth of that hideous tube.

  But Jack’s plan, which I had been so slow to understand, had worked. Even as I flew, the inflatable raft concealed within my bustle expanded, so that by the time I reached the starfish I had become too large a morsel for it to swallow. I wedged in the feeding tube like a cork in a bottle, my head inside, my feet out in the open air, kicking frantically and all in vain, since they had nothing to kick against. For what seemed a distressingly long while I stayed there, shaken up and down by the thrashing of the tube and half smothered by the vile fumes from the monster’s stomach. Poor Jack, I thought. He tried so hard to save me, but he has failed, and once I am dead the beast will suck him up too, unless that wretched sand clam eats him first!

  And it seemed so dreadful to me that Jack should be eaten by a starfish and a clam that I had a quite uncharacteristic flash of inspiration. The other tassel! I thought suddenly, and groping about upon my bodice, I found it, and gave it a sharp tug.

  In a spray of smoke and sparks my costume’s distress flare was released from its concealment. The tube which held me captive filled with acrid, choking smoke as the flare went soaring through it into the very belly of the beast, there to explode in the internationally recognised colours of maritime distress.

  The starfish shuddered convulsively, and collapsed. The tube in which I was stuck thudded into the wet sand. Tremors and quiverings still ran through the great corpse, but corpse it was! My action had destroyed it!

  Some months ago, my brother Art contrived to cause a monstrous squid to explode in the upper airs of the planet Jupiter, and he has been boring people rigid with the story of it ever since, oft remarking upon the sense of triumph it gave him, his resemblance to St George and other heroes, etc., etc. Yet I felt no thrill of victory as I contemplated the explosion and demise of the Crown of Thorns. Perhaps it is because I am female, and therefore above such primitive emotions, or perhaps because I was still stuck inside its slimy, stinking feeding tube.

  At last I found the release valve on my life raft, and managed to deflate it. Beslimed and shuddering, I crawled out, and looked up in awe and wonder at the carcass of that great beast which Providence had lent me the strength to defeat. Bits of its stomach lay scattered all across the beach, and small pieces were still falling from the sky, landing with damp, sticky noises on the sand about me. At first I could not see Jack, and I thought that he had been eaten up entirely by the sand clam. Then I realised that he lay just beyond the carcass, hidden from me by that hill of rent blubber and twitching tentacles. He had been trying to use his pocket knife to free himself from the clam, but his efforts had been in vain, and he had collapsed exhausted on the sand, his leg still clamped inside the creature’s jaws, his blood spreading in a river down the sand to stain the waves pink.

  The awfulness of our predicament almost overwhelmed me. ‘Help! Help!’ I shrieked, turning to shout across the empty beach, until my cries echoed plaintively among the bluffs and crags inland. But I knew that even if they echoed all the way to Earth it could do me no good, for in the remote era we were trapped in there would be no one there to hear me. How piteously alone I felt! And how I feared that I should soon be still more alone, for I did not see how Jack could long survive!

  And then, miraculously (as I thought), my cries received an answer! Unexpectedly, impossibly, a voice called out, ‘Miss Mumby?’

  I looked about me and saw, emerging from the drifting smoke which still poured across the beach from the carcass of the dead starfish, a wicker bath chair.

  Chapter Ten

  Myrtle’s Account Continues: Strange Meetings upon an Ancient Shore, Miss Beauregard’s Motives Made Plain and Mrs Grinder Revealed as a Woman of Many Parts.

  For a moment, as you may imagine, I stood quite bewildered and astray, for the last people I had expected to encounter upon this interminable beach were the gentle Miss Beauregard and her lumpen companion. Yet there they were, Miss Beauregard waving graciously as Mrs Grinder propelled the invalid-carriage towards me o’er the shining sands. Its axles squeaked, and its wheels cut three deep grooves in the sand, which slowly filled with water and faded away once it had passed.

  ‘Oh, Miss Beauregard!’ I cried out as they drew near. ‘Pray do not come any closer! There is a great deal of gore here; it is no sight for a lady and may cause you to swoon …’ (I felt more than a little inclined to swoon myself whenever I looked down at the red wash of Jack’s life-blood spilling down the strand into the surf. But I was determined to show no weakness in front of Miss Beauregard, who, for all her good breeding, was still a foreigner. I took deep breaths and told myself that I should show this daughter of France how brave a British girl might be, and somehow I was able to remain upright.)

  ‘Ah!’ cried Miss Beauregard, when she drew near enough to see Jack’s predicament for herself. ‘A sand clam! And it is eating the Honourable Ignatius Flint!’ And with a graceful motion she sprang from her chair, pulled out a small silver revolver which had been concealed in her bosom, and fired six shots into the creature’s maw. It spewed forth a quite horrible amount of stinking purple foam and its jaws went slack, allowing Jack to drag himself free.

  ‘Why, Miss Beauregard!’ I cried, staring at her through the thinning veil of pistol smoke. ‘You can walk! I had no idea that sea air would effect so rapid an improvement in your condition!’

  Miss Beauregard did not reply, but, stooping, tore a length of cotton calico from her underskirts, and used it to make a sort of bandage, which she tied tightly about Jack’s leg. Glancing up at me as she worked, she snapped, ‘Water! This wound should be washed in case the creature’s fangs were envenomed.’

  I hesitated a moment, thinking that it was really Mrs Grinder’s place, as a servant, to fetch water. But Mrs Grinder stood stolidly behind the wicker chair, squinting out at us from the depths of her black bonnet, but making no attempt to help. I looked at Jack, who, though pale with pain and shock, was yet managing to smile gratefully at the fair Delphine as she tended his wounds. I am not sure why, but her attentiveness irritated me. Despite all that had come between us, I felt that it should be I who nursed Jack. So I undid the ties of my waterproof bathing bonnet and strode pointedly to the sea’s edge, where I filled it with clean water and returned to help Delphine bathe Jack’s poor, mauled limb.

  Despite the blood, he had not been so badly savaged as I had feared, and soon declared that he could stand. But Delp
hine would not hear of it. ‘You must take the chair,’ she said. ‘I do not need it.’

  ‘You walk well enough, I see,’ said Jack, grunting with the pain as we helped him to sit down in the chair. ‘Handy with that pistol, too. I had a feeling there was more to you than met the eye.’

  ‘As there is to you, Ignatius Flint,’ said Delphine, emphasising that name in a way that showed she knew it to be false. ‘I believe you to be none other than Jack Havock, an agent of the British Secret Service. What are you doing here?’

  ‘We might ask you the same thing,’ said Jack. ‘And don’t tell me you were simply out for a walk when the hotel vanished. You ain’t just some pretty invalid, are you? And you didn’t come to Starcross for the sea bathing. Who are you really?’

  Delphine laughed lightly, as if she and Jack were guests at some society function, and he had made a polite joke. ‘It is supposed to be a secret,’ she said, ‘but since we are so very far from our own time, and you and Miss Mumby are so entirely at my mercy, I suppose I can tell you. I am an agent of the French Government.’

  Naturally, dear reader, I was dismayed at this intelligence. The French are a most excitable race, forever having Revolutions and chopping one another’s heads off. When not busy doing that they spend their time looking covetously skyward, quite green with envy because Britain has a splendid empire stretching all through the vaults of space, and they do not. To learn that we were keeping company with one of their spies was shocking news indeed!

  More shocking still was Jack’s reaction, for not only did he not appear horrified, he laughed, and continued to grin at Miss Beauregard in a most foolish and familiar manner. It occurred to me to wonder whether her considerable personal charms had got the better of his judgement, and I suddenly felt vexed that I was not dressed in a pretty gown of fashionable cut as Delphine was, but in a grimy bathing dress smeared with sand and starfish saliva, and a pair of bathing slippers which squelched comically with every step.

  Suddenly I felt very weary of this adventure, and I am afraid my usual good humour quite deserted me. I lagged behind the others as Mrs Grinder pushed Jack on along the beach, towards a place where the cliffs rose steep and dour, haunted by small, see-through flying creatures with fat airsacs and nasty dangling tentacles, which I believe are known as Martian Ghost-Jellies. Delphine strolled beside him, talking. I hung my head, and watched the long wheel marks unspooling from the chair’s three tyres, and Mrs Grinder’s deep footprints emerging from beneath her dragging skirts. I could not help noticing from the marks she made that Mrs Grinder seemed to have at least six feet, and I wondered if I should draw this odd fact to Jack’s attention.

  But Jack was busy listening to Delphine as she explained to him something of her history. I shall set down what she told him here, so that you may see what a nasty, vexing, deceitful, foreign young person she really was.

  ‘My grandfather,’ said Delphine, ‘was Mr William Melville of Charlestown, Virginia. An American and an alchemist. Despite being a friend of freedom, and utterly opposed to Britain’s empire, he underwent all the years of training that the Royal College of Alchemists insists upon. He lied about his own beliefs in order that he might pass the tests and checks and pitfalls which the College sets in order to keep the chemical wedding a secret known only to British gentlemen. For ten years he studied under the damp and dismal skies of England! But when he had learned every part of the process he fled home to Virginia, and there, with a few fellow patriots, he constructed the United States’ first aether-ship: the Liberty.13

  ‘My grandfather hoped that he might capture a British warship or two, and set up a free American settlement upon one of the outer worlds, from where he might disseminate the knowledge of the chemical wedding to all men. He dreamed of founding a Rebel Alliance which would strike at your empire from a hidden base …’

  ‘It didn’t come true, though, did it?’ said Jack Havock. ‘The British were better than your grandad. Better alchemists, better aethernauts and better fighters. Their Admiral Nelson beat him hands down.’

  Delphine’s eyes flashed fiercely, and she said, ‘Liberty’s wreck was never found.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t,’ Jack goaded her. ‘She was blown to bits.’

  Delphine laughed. ‘That is what the British thought. That is what my grandfather wanted them to think. His ship was badly damaged, but somehow he managed to limp away into the reefs between the asteroids, where none dared follow him.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘That’s just wishful thinking, Miss. You’ve no way of proving it.’

  Delphine shot him a haughty look and went on with her tale. ‘After my grandfather vanished,’ she said, ‘his wife and her young daughter, my mother, were forced to flee to France, and seek the protection of the Revolutionary Government there. My mother married a Frenchman, and settled down to live respectably near Paris. We had plenty to live on, for the Government of France awarded us a pension in honour of Grandpapa’s great deeds. They would gladly love an aether-ship of their own, and they thought that Grandpapa’s Liberty would suit them very well. They sent many secret agents out among the asteroids over the years, looking for the Liberty’s last resting place. But they found nothing at all.

  ‘Then, a few months ago, they had word of Mr Titfer’s new venture, and of the way that his hotel seemed able to fling itself into the past. They told me of it, and suddenly I understood. My grandfather’s ship lies on Starcross, but hidden where no prying British eye would ever see it! He must have taken advantage of this asteroid’s curious time-holes to sail the Liberty back into the depths of pre-history, and there some calamity befell him, or else I am sure he would have reappeared to light Liberty’s flame among the Heavens …

  ‘Well, I spoke of my theory to my friends in the Government, and they furnished me with Mrs Grinder, and with my fare to the asteroid belt. As soon as I arrived at Starcross I began searching for a way into the past. That invalid chair which serves as my disguise also contains a number of concealed instruments with which I was able to cut a way through Mr Titfer’s electrical fence, and Mrs Grinder has a powerful sense of smell, which I hope will lead us to the place where the Liberty lies moored. We were searching for it when we saw your distress flare, and heard Miss Mumby’s pathetic cries. Naturally we hastened to investigate.’

  ‘Very good of you,’ said Jack. ‘But hold hard; what about the goings-on at Starcross? Was it you who kidnapped Mrs Mumby and young Art? And poisoned Ferny? And turned Sir Richard and Ulla into trees?’

  Delphine frowned. ‘Certainly not. Something strange is happening in that hotel, but it is not my doing.’

  Throughout this latter part of the conversation I had been repeatedly distracted by Mrs Grinder, who had taken to sniffing loudly every few seconds. Suddenly she stopped, and pointed to a dark cleft in the cliffs which rose behind the beach. ‘There!’ she said, in a gruff and oddly accented voice. ‘The smell is strong there!’

  ‘We have found it!’ cried Delphine. ‘The hiding place of the Liberty!’ And she started to run over the dunes of dry, piled sand while Mrs Grinder shoved Jack’s chair along behind her, and I struggled in my squelching shoes to keep pace with them all.

  I caught them up at the mouth of the canyon, where the warm sunshine gave way to dim, chill shadow. All I could see in there were a few of those drifting ghost-jellies, but Delphine and Mrs Grinder stood staring into the gloom, and even Jack had pushed himself upright so that he might stand staring with them. I stumbled up to the abandoned invalid chair and leaned upon its handle to catch my breath, wondering what held them so transfixed. And then I looked past them, and I saw it too.

  On the canyon’s floor sat an aether-ship, even older and filthier than Jack’s Sophronia, and from her flagpole hung a faded, ripped and shot-torn banner, striped red and white, with a blue square in one corner containing a ring of stars.

  On the canyon’s floor sat an aether-ship, even older andfilthier than Jack’s Sophronia.

  ‘The
Liberty!’ cried Delphine excitably. ‘We shall fly her out of here and find our way back to the Nineteenth Century, and there she shall become the flagship of a new armada that will blast Britain’s navies from the heavens!’

  As she spoke these wicked words, I noticed a silvery gleam among the tumbled blankets of the empty chair. In her haste, Delphine had cast aside her revolver! Spurred on by patriotism and a desire to show Jack that I was every bit as plucky and resourceful as this young French person, I snatched it up and aimed it at her, hoping that she would not notice how much my hands were trembling.

  ‘Hands up, Miss Beauregard!’ I cried. ‘You shall do no such thing! You will return with Jack and I to the year 1851, and there we shall hand you over to the proper authorities!’

  I had hoped that Delphine would recognise the justice of my proposal, and would simply raise her hands and say something such as, ‘I’ll come quietly.’ Instead, she shrugged, and shook her head as if to say, ‘What is this Mumby girl doing now?’ Then she glanced at Mrs Grinder, and raised one perfect eyebrow in what I gather was a secret signal, for Mrs Grinder suddenly surprised me very greatly by exploding.

  I suppose she did not actually explode. She did not fly into pieces like the starfish and scatter parts of her insides about, for which I suppose one should be grateful. But the effect was rather similar.

  Her all-enveloping gown bulged and stretched and tore asunder in a cloud of ripped black bombazine, while from beneath it emerged a number of very small goblin-like beings, who must have been standing all piled up upon each other’s shoulders like a band of circus acrobats. And every one of them clutched a tiny carbine, and every one was clad in the navy-blue caps and coats and scarlet trousers of the French Army!