I wondered in that moment, from my elevated per-spective, how I had ever come to doubt the boy. My doubts had all been speculative. His actions had clearly professed his innocence and loyalty. A high regard for one’s powers of logic, I told myself, can smothercate a man.
“Take a look down the way, sir,” Finn said now, pointing out toward the Bay.
I took a look. It was St. Ives and Fred Merton, perhaps a quarter mile down toward Grange-over-Sands, coming along the trail by the shore. Merton carried a rifle. They had seen us right enough, floating there high above the treetops, and they stood for a moment marveling at the sight. As for us, we could see far out into the broad Atlantic, the dark line westward being the shore of Ireland, I believe, and the Isle of Man sitting in the sea in between. I opened the hatch, leaning out into the giddy breeze, and pointed downward, toward where the tall man stood at the edge of the pool in dazed contemplation. He apparently saw the signal himself, deduced that reinforcements had arrived, and set out at a dead run toward his camp, carrying his rifle.
St. Ives and Merton were wary, of course, and came along much more slowly. By the time they reached the camp our assailant had fled in his shay, leaving his accoutrements behind. From our height we could see him scouring along the road in the distance, but there was nothing at all to do about it, which was a dirty shame. Hasbro had been shot twice in the space of a few days by the same man, a man who had no motive aside from mere sport, which says something about human degradation that I’d rather not soil these pages speculating upon. Justice, I’m afraid, sometimes is not met out on Earth, or at least not that we know of. But then I’m reminded of Spanker, burrowing his way to Hell, and I find that there’s little satisfaction in that sort of justice anyway.
We descended from our height after a good deal of shouted communication with St. Ives. The device — an anti-gravity mechanism that reacted quite simply to heat — bodily heat and radiant sunlight in our case — gradually lost its powers when Finn was induced simply to set it down onto the deck of the chamber. Later St. Ives speculated that the naturally high degree of heat in the manure heap on Parson Grimstead’s property had been sufficient to elevate the immediately surrounding cattle. Our descent was every bit as graceful as our ascent, although far more disappointing, for I rather enjoyed the view.
As for Dr. Frosticos, he and his submarine didn’t reappear, and so we had no choice but to keep his diving chamber until he called for it. We took a certain joy in the fact that he had failed in all his endeavors, and that in his last, mad rush in the submarine he had passed out of our lives again, at least for a time.
Uncle Wiggily, an Afterword to “The Ebb Tide”
Uncle Wiggily, By James P. Blaylock
As some few of my readers know (perhaps very few) the first of my stories involving Professor Langdon St. Ives appeared in UNEARTH magazine in 1977. It was titled “The Ape-box Affair,” and along with St. Ives it introduced the young Jack Owlesby, who in fact is a character in the story as well as the “I” who narrates it. (Although it’s often not revealed in the texts, Owlesby narrates all of the St. Ives stories, sometimes writing in the first person, sometimes in the third as the whim strikes him. Owlesby seems to want to be a writer as well as an historian.) It also introduced Dorothy Keeble, Jack’s future wife (named “Olivia” in the “Ape-box Affair” as a courtesy to the young woman: the events of the story are very recent at the time of the narration, and Owlesby would have avoided taking the liberty of using her actual name, although he doesn’t scruple against using the actual names of the other, older characters. One of the avowed purposes of his work is to promote and chronicle the adventures of Langdon St. Ives.) The plot of “The Ape-box Affair” hinges on a confusion of several mechanized boxes built by William Keeble, toy maker extraordinaire. Some of the incidents, characters, and trappings of “The Ape-box Affair” found their way into the first St. Ives novel, Homunculus, published several years later. Some of them did not — the picking and choosing having occurred, I’ll insist, in the interest of what might be called “truth,” which, like Uncle Wiggily’s infamous bar of laundry soap, is a slippery eel at best.
I had published only one real story previous to “The Ape-box Affair,” also in UNEARTH, a very different sort of piece involving an imaginative boy riding aboard a Greyhound bus that might or might not be bound for Mars, which he might or might not have confused with a red agate marble in his pants pocket. In the further interest of truth, such as it is, I’ll insist now that the boy in that story was me, although I didn’t know it at the time that I wrote it; certainly it was my agate marble that he had in his pocket, and his state of imaginative confusion was very like my own in those days.The story was generated by an incident that’s still fresh in my mind, although it occurred more than 35 years ago. A bunch of us — Tim Powers, Bill Bailey (later to marry Tim’s sister Beth) my wife Viki, and I were driving into L.A. in our friend Neil’s Volkswagen bus, bound for Canter’s Delicatessen. The usual wild conversation ensued nonstop, and someone put a question to me. I didn’t respond, my mind being elsewhere, as it so often is. After a silent moment Neil said, “Blaylock thinks he’s riding on a Greyhound bus to Mars.” Everyone laughed, including me, although I was already thinking about the story the comment suggested. In those days I carried several good luck charms in my pocket, including the agate marble that figures into that story. I sometimes still seem to be aboard that Greyhound bus — a long, strange trip….
“Uncle Wiggily went to a store where they sold toy circus balloons, and of the monkey gentleman who kept the store he asked:
‘Have you any flying machines?’
‘What do you mean — flying machines?’ asked the monkey gentleman. ‘Do you mean birds?’
‘Well, birds are flying machines, of course,’ the rabbit gentleman said. ‘But I mean a sort of airship that I could go up in as if I were in a balloon, and fly around in the clouds….’”
When I was growing up my family occasionally played the Uncle Wiggily board game, in which one was pursued through the swamp by the bad Pipsisewah and the terrible Skeezicks. I loved the game, even though it gave me nightmares. Later on I discovered the Uncle Wiggily books, written by Howard R. Garis, and I’m still particularly fond of Uncle Wiggily’s Airship, in which Uncle Wiggily builds his airship by tying balloons to a laundry basket. He fastens an electric fan to it for propulsion and contrives a sort of hockey-stick tiller and “a baby carriage wheel to steer by,” and then embarks on a series of high altitude adventures, often suffering crash landings when the balloons burst. In one adventure he’s saved by the ingenuity of Arabella the chicken girl, who blows flotational soap bubbles through a pipe: “Then she blew forty-’leven bubbles, or maybe more, for all I know. Uncle Wiggily caught them, and fastened them with silk threads and cobwebs, which a kind spider lady spun for him, to the basket of his airship….”
Back in the early 1980s a man in Long Beach fastened helium balloons to a lawn chair and floated high over the city, eating a sack lunch and rising to heights above 10,000 feet, where he was viewed with astonishment by pilots and passengers of commercial airplanes. When he landed, hours later, sunburned and amazed, he was cited by the FAA for having failed to file a flight plan. There were no other relevant laws on the books, apparently, although there are now. We’re living in an era when Uncle Wiggily would be an outlaw, and the monkey gentleman and Arabella the chicken girl accessories to a crime. (Uncle Wiggily, by the way, took a Japanese umbrella up with him to solve the sunburn problem.) We hear often enough that truth is stranger than fiction, which is obviously true if you keep your eyes open. It’s wonderful, however, when reality mimics fiction, and an unemployed car mechanic out in Long Beach goes down to a store where they sell toy circus balloons and becomes Uncle Wiggily for a day.