friends should have suddenly appeared out of the night. He and Hasbro reached them simultaneously, and found, happily, that the Captain’s shoulder had merely been creased by a bullet fired haphazardly by the old evangelist when the two had sought to grab the reins and stop the brougham’s escape.
It was an hour later. The company slumped in chairs in Captain Powers’ shop, before the general furor of the night’s doings drained out of them and it was revealed to St. Ives what the second Keeble box had contained. St. Ives, in turn, related how in the tumult Kraken had fled once again into the City, seemingly deranged by his bout with the ghouls.
“So that,” muttered St. Ives, “is what the man stole.” He shook his head. “Do you suppose he was trapped in the passage with the ghouls ever since? No wonder he was gibbering mad.”
Godall shook his head and related to St. Ives some few of the intrigues of the past three days. “I knew,” said Godall, “that a good number of bodies had been brought to the house. Narbondo must have used the passage as a sort of storehouse. Fancy them all coming round together like that. This is a strange business.”
“Cut and run; that’s my motto,” said the Captain, poking gingerly at his shoulder.
Hasbro shook his head. “The papers will be full of this,” he said. “We’ve stirred up a curious nest of bugs, and not a single gain was made in the process.”
No one in the shop could deny it as they sat tired and hungry and watching the early morning sky pale with the dawn. The entire business had become woefully complicated, and the Pratlow Street failure took some of the pleasure out of St. Ives’ meeting, after fifteen long years, Nell Owlesby.
The arrival of Parsons, pounding on the door hours later, did little to enliven St. Ives’ mood. He cursed himself for having told the man that he could be contacted through Powers’ shop, and it took a half hour of lying before the scientist could be dissuaded from knocking up Keeble himself. Even Parsons’ revelation that the blimp had been sighted over Limerick, looping over the Irish west coast in a long half elipse that would aim it, they were certain, toward London — even that merely added to the general confusion and early morning muddle. Somehow, it seemed to them, the arrival of Birdlip would be the natural culmination of the tangle of plots they’d become involved in, that the appearance of the blimp, a dot in the distant sky, would place a period, an end mark, to their confused and fruitless efforts to slay the various dragons.
It was hours after dawn, the streets long since awake, when there came a new and furious pounding on the door, startling St. Ives, who dozed in a stuffed chair. His companions were awake, making and discarding plans. Hasbro threw the door open, and there stood Winnifred Keeble, disheveled and tired. “Jack’s coming round,” she said, then turned and hurried back across the street, the collected members of the Trismegistus Club hauling on coats and following in her wake.
SIXTEEN
Willis Pule rushed up out of unconsciousness all in a moment, becoming aware suddenly of the sound of dripping water and of an almost numbing, clammy cold. He lay, it seemed to him, on a stone slab, or on pavement, and lying there had apparently made him overwhelmingly stiff and sore, for when he moved, his joints and muscles shrieked at him.
He opened his eyes. Far above him was a vaulted, cathedrallike ceiling of gray stone. Gaslamps hissed, each throwing out a diffused yellow radiance in a circle around it, precious little of the light drifting down toward the floor below. The room at first seemed to be enormous — a huge subterranean chamber hewn, possibly, out of rock. Pule craned his neck, wincing at a throbbing headache. The room wasn’t, he determined, as big as all that. It was built of cut stone. Vast porcelain sinks lined one wall, and beneath them sat rows of glass and wood cabinets, several of their doors standing ajar to reveal boxes of surgical instruments — bone saws and knives and clamps. I’m in a hospital, thought Pule groggily. But what sort of a hospital is it that freezes its patients and requires them to sleep on granite mattresses?
Another wall was nothing but great drawers like oversize file cabinets, one of which was pulled open. A foot thrust out sporting a broad paper tag tied to its big toe with a string. This was no hospital, Pule realized with sudden certainty. He was in a morgue. He was dead. But he couldn’t be dead, could he? He was cold as an oyster boat, something a dead man might be, but wouldn’t be conscious of. It occurred to him with a shock of horror that perhaps he’d died and somehow been reanimated by Dr. Narbondo for some despicable purpose.
He could remember the fight with the old evangelist: the pistol shot, grappling at the top of the stairs, being pushed headlong down them. He had no recollection at all of having landed, only of sailing through the air. But he must have landed, mustn’t he? Landed and worse. He was lying on a slab in the morgue, in among what appeared to be an army of corpses, most of which were laid out in a long line on the floor.
How desperate, he wondered, was his situation? On what grounds could he be arrested? None. He had, it’s true, booted his landlord in the ribs and broken the window in his room. But he had no identifying papers on his person. No one here would confront him with that. He was alive and free — that much was clear. But how in the world had he got into the morgue, and what sort of debacle had occurred to bring about the death of so many people? And why, for God’s sake, did his hands seem to be tinted green?
On a nearby slab lay a man who was turned toward Pule. His mouth hung open and his eyes stared, as if in accusation. Pule stared back at him. It seemed as if he knew the man, as if he’d seen the face before, looking at him in much the same way. Of course he had — not two weeks before in Westminster Cemetery. Pule sat up, began to pass out, and lay back down, breathing heavily, one hand on his cold brow. He tried again, swinging his legs over the edge of the slab, slumping forward with his head between his knees until the rushing and pounding settled.
He squinted at the row of corpses, which waited as if in line to file back into the grave. All of them, every one, had come from Narbondo’s storeroom. There was the woman pulled drowned from the Thames; there was the child run down in the street by a wagon; there was the freshly hanged forger, his neck broken and twisted, stolen from the gibbet by the navvy who had deserted Pule on the night of the recovery of Joanna Southcote. But how on earth? Had the passageway been discovered? That would put an end to Narbondo’s freedom — to his life if they caught him. And what of himself? What of Willis Pule? If Narbondo were jailed, Pule would follow.
The room was empty. Pule slid from his slab and stood erect, swaying, faint. He bent over, resting his head for a moment on the cool slab before turning and shuffling toward the door. If he had to run, his goose was cooked. The line of corpses gaped at him — half of them deprived of the dubious joys of becoming members of the Church of the New Messiah, the other half of going into the unremunerative employ of Kelso Drake. Better, perhaps, to be returned to the ground. It was a far more restful business, anyway, was death.
Pule stopped inside the door, peering through into an ill-lit antechamber beyond, where a lone man sat at a desk, facing away. Pule backed off softly, slipping across to the cabinets and rooting quietly among the debris for a weapon — anything. A bone saw would do. In a moment he was back at the door, which creaked as he pushed it farther open and crept through. The man at the desk turned lazily, expecting, perhaps, a fellow worker back from dinner, but not, certainly, the grimacing corpse that confronted him, green and lurching and waving a bone saw — a corpse fresh from the slab, lately of the London streets, which were rife with rumors of the walking dead. The man arose, a shriek on his lips, and Pule was upon him. He slashed with the saw, the blade snapping almost immediately against the edge of the chair. Pule cast it to the floor, grasping a crystal paperweight from atop a heap of papers, leaping after the bloodied man who was halfway through the door, shrieking down a dark hallway. Pule clubbed at him blindly with the paperweight again and again. The man stumbled and fell. Pule found himself holding half the weight, the thing having cracked neatly in two against the man’s crushed skull.
Pule dropped the chunk of glass onto the floor, stepped across the dead man, and found himself afoot in the London night, heading for Wardour Street where Ignacio Narbondo awaited his fate. He had been promised Dorothy Keeble as a prize if his sojourn to Harrogate were successful. Well, success was a relative business at best. He’d been swindled of the emerald, swindled of his dreams. But before the day was out, he’d have what was his.
William Keeble sat in the corner of the room, his brandy untouched on a table beside him, his head in his hands. He looks done in, thought St. Ives, condemning himself for having been sporting in Harrogate while Dorothy Keeble was being kidnapped in London. The sun was high in the sky, lightening the shadowy room.
