Keeble rose to draw the drapes tighter, to dim the room, but Winnifred followed behind, pulling them entirely apart, flooding the room with spring sunlight.
“We’ve enough gloom,” she said simply. “We can study this out as easily in the light of day as we can in darkness.”
“There’s nothing to study out!” cried poor Keeble, gripped by a despair which was deepened by two sleepless nights. “If I hadn’t been so damned pig-headed with the engine, if I’d given it over, she’d be here now, wouldn’t she? And Jack’s head wouldn’t be split like a melon, would it? Drake would have pocketed another fortune — so what? Would I be any the worse off for another man’s fortune?”
“We all would…” began Theophilus Godall, rising out of a deep, tobacco-enshrouded study. But Keeble, it was clear, wasn’t keen on reason, on thrashing it out. He seemed to spiral down into himself and sat poking at the end of a sort of brass grapefruit, each poke precipitating from out of the opposite end the grinning rubber head of a man with enormous ears. Smoke and spark accompanied each issuance.
The device reminded St. Ives, somehow shamefully, of the strange pornographic debris that had fallen out of the drop-front desk at the house on Wardour Street. He found himself wondering how on earth it could — whether this wasn’t evidence of some deformity in his own rusted moral apparatus. He needed sleep. He could blame peculiarities of intellect on the lack of it. Then he remembered. The thing Keeble toyed innocently with was the odd device the old man had scrambled after and which had been snatched away from him by the butler. “What is that business?” he asked idly, pointing at the orb and the idiotic rubber man that shot from it.
“Some piece of rot left last night by that man Drake,” said Winnifred Keeble. “Heaven knows what it signifies. I would have thrown it in his face if I knew then what Jack has told us since. But I didn’t.”
“Kelso Drake?” muttered Godall, standing up. “He left this, did he?”
“He asked if William could build him a hundred of the same, then laughed like a man insane. He’s utterly daft, if you want my opinion. I wouldn’t wonder, though, if there’s not some darker purpose in this that I don’t see.” With that she left the room, up the stairs to the second floor where Jack lay, ministered by his aunt, Nell Owlesby.
Godall bent over St. Ives. “I don’t like the look of this at all.” he said.
“Of the device there?” asked St. Ives.
“Yes. It’s imported, of course, from France.”
“I didn’t know that,” said St. Ives. “What, exactly, is it used for?”
Godall shook his head darkly, as if the Queen’s English hadn’t the sorts of syllables necessary to reveal the grim truth of the matter. “We’ve got to get it away from Keeble. If Captain Powers awakens and sees it… well, he’s too good a man, too simple and uncorrupted to stand for it. He’ll want to beat the stuffing out of someone, and he’ll do it too, shoulder or no shoulder.”
“What in the world…” began St. Ives, looking once again at the curious device, which was covered, he could see, with nodules of some sort and a little porthole door that opened on either side to reveal what looked for all the world to be glass eyes, staring out from within the ball. Keeble stabbed at the end of it and out popped the rubber man, a puff of smoke and sparks erupting from extended, elephantine ears. A whistle of air poofed from rubber lips. The thing’s eyes whirled crazily, and in an instant he was gone, swallowed by the orb. The portholes clamped shut; the sparking stopped; and the thing sat silent and treacherous.
Godall shook his head again grimly. “It’s called a Marseilles Pinkle. You can imagine, I’m sure, what the thing is. Only the excesses of a southern climate could have produced it.”
“Ah,” said St. Ives, wondering at his own unworldliness.
“Keeble, blessedly, hasn’t a notion. It was widely used in the last century, after the abduction of young French and Italian noblewomen into white slavery. It was sent to their homes — an announcement, I fear, that no ransom would suffice to return them. Even the most coldhearted royalty have been known to fly head foremost into lunacy at the receiving of one, and, tragically, to disgrace themselves utterly with the device despite their grief. The gesture is wasted here, of course. It’s merely a sign of Drake’s monumental wantonness and conceit, probably intended in some roundabout and perverse way to parody poor Keeble’s attraction to toys. It’s also, perhaps, a mistake. It tells us something, I believe, of Dorothy’s whereabouts.”
Before the conversation had gone forward another inch, there came a terrible knocking at the door, which, when thrown back by a surprised Theophilus Godall, revealed Bill Kraken tottering on the stoop. “Kraken!” cried St. Ives from his chair, but the man had no opportunity to reply — he pitched forward like a dead man onto the carpet.
St. Ives and Godall sprang to his assistance, and even Captain Powers, who was startled out of sleep by St. Ives’ shout, bent in to help. It seemed entirely possible that Kraken’s sudden appearance betokened his return to right-mindedness.
“Give him air, mates,” said the Captain, loosening the dirty kerchief round Kraken’s neck. Then, with Godall supporting Kraken’s head, Captain Powers poured a thin stream of brandy into his mouth, which St. Ives contrived to open by pinching Kraken’s cheeks. “Damn me,” said the Captain in a low voice, and wrinkling his nose. “He’s covered with sewer muck, isn’t he? Get them shoes off him and pitch ’em out the door.”
The effects of the brandy were such, though, that Kraken awoke of his own accord as St. Ives wrestled with his shoes. Braced by a mouthful of the elixir, he managed to wave St. Ives away and remove the shoes himself. The result was a small improvement in his general odor, and he was obliged to remove one by one the rest of his outer garments and to suffer the Captain’s pouring a bucket of water over his head as he sat in a galvanized tub. Wrapped finally in shawls, he was recovered enough to be fit company. His clothes were sent out to be burnt.
“And so,” he was saying to the collected party — including Winnifred Keeble, who had come downstairs for news of her daughter — “I come around at last. It was them ghouls what set it off, is what I think — a state o’ shock is what it’s called. If you ain’t in one, then such a sight puts you there. If you’re already sufferin’ some sort of brain fever, then the particular sight of all them dead men has the opposite effect. A cure is what it is then.
“I studied it out myself when I come out of the George and Pigmy up in Soho. I’d been shouting, they tell me, about dead men slouched in the walls, when I was hit from behind by a pint mug that fell off the shelf. It was like I woke up — like I been out o’ my mind since bein’ beat on the head a week past, kind of in a mist, you know. Liquor didn’t help — sober was worse. And then I went and fetched away the Captain’s box — don’t ask me why. I don’t know. I been through hell, gentlemen, but I’ve come back now. That crack on the noggin in the Pigmy, comin’ on top o’ the corpses, was like a bracer. ‘Let me out,’ says I. ‘Show me the road!’ And off I went, straight as a die, and didn’t stop neither, till I drew up at Wardour Street — you know the house, sir.”
And with that he nodded at St. Ives, who did, indeed, know the house. They tried to waken Keeble, who snored in his chair, oblivious to Kraken’s timely return. He slept so profoundly, however, that their efforts were in vain. Kraken was in a state — much more the old Kraken, thought St. Ives, than the tired, morose Kraken who had drifted in and out of the front room in Captain Powers’ shop Thursday last. St. Ives listened in astonishment to Kraken’s strange tale — how when crouched in the passage off Narbondo’s laboratory he had overheard Pule and Shiloh exchanging words, Pule offering to give up his Keeble box if the old evangelist would see him right in the business of Dorothy Keeble — would use his influence to get Pule an audience with her, so to speak, at Drake’s house on Wardour Street. The old man had raged about sin and damnation. Shots had been fired and Shiloh had said that he’d just
“And wait just a minute,” cried St. Ives, furrowing his brow. “These corpses were just lying about until you came in?”
“That’s it, guv’nor. Dead as herrings, then all of them jumped to it like they heard the last trumpet. Damn me if they didn’t.”
“And this business of the dancing skeleton,” asked St. Ives of Godall, “and the piano playing and the chicken bones or whatever sort of bird it was…”
“How’d yer know about that?” asked Kraken, amazed.
St. Ives nodded at Godall by way of explanation, as if to indicate that there was little or nothing that the man didn’t know. “Where was this box when all of that business was transpiring?”
“On the piano,” put in Kraken. “I tried for it, too, but the humpback nearly killed me with a spade.”
“By Christ!” whispered St. Ives, striking the table before him with his fist. “What if… what if… Wake up Keeble! Straightaway.”
Waking the toymaker took a full minute, either because he was so enormously fatigued or because the very
