James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

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 Power’s 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 take the box, thank you. Then out Kraken had gone, into the depths of the passage where there was no end of dead men, dirt from the grave in their hair, and the lot of them stirring there in the candlelight and rising up and starting for him until he’d just about gone mad, and…

“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 spark of life within him had begun to fade, but in time he was conscious and listening to St. Ives. Yes, he said, the emerald box and the homunculus box were identical, beyond the eccentricities of carving and painting that went with that sort of handiwork. Might Nell Owlesby, in her agitated state, have crossed them up? Of course she might. Nell was summoned. She admitted that such an error was possible. Birdlip, she said, might indeed have the emerald. She paused, frowning. “I beg of you,” she said, looking particularly at Captain Powers, “not to think me mad for asking this. But could the little man speak?”

“Absolutely,” said St. Ives immediately. “According to your brother’s manuscript, it was rarely silent — kept up a night and day harangue, an utterly tiresome performance, in any of a number of languages, not all of them of earthly origin.”

Nell nodded. “I never read his papers,” she said simply, assuming that her reasoning would be apparent. “I only ask because I suffered in Jamaica the certainty that the emerald spoke to me — the fear, that is, that I was going mad. I was feverish. I’d hidden the box in a table beside my bed. And in the night I awoke in a sweat, tossing, certain that a voice had issued from the box in the darkness, and had uttered the name of the false prophet that we’re daily more familiar with. I sought this man out, revealed that I’d heard his name in a dream, and, I fear, confessed all, going so far as to tell him that the homunculus — a creature he took an unwarranted interest in — was with Doctor Birdlip. I’ve told no one of this but Captain Powers. It was part of those shameful and dreadful early years. And I’m afraid, dear,” she said, addressing the Captain particularly, “that I omitted any reference to the box having spoken. It seemed those long months later to be a product of fever.”

Kraken had sat stony-faced through Nell’s speech, but he could sit still no longer. “If it please your honor,” he said to St. Ives, “I’ve heard the blasted thing speak too. I’m damned if I haven’t. Last Thursday night, it was. Lord knows what it said, buried in the floor there while you gentlemen carried on in the next room. Yes, sir, I’ve heard it talk, and I didn’t have the horrors neither.”

“I rather believe, gentlemen,” said St. Ives, “that this plays a new light over the page. We’re in a less dangerous fix than we thought, barring, of course, the problem of Dorothy. The box, then, what did you do with it?”

“Well, sir,” said Kraken, peering into the bottom of a snifter gone empty. “I made straight off for Wardour Street when I left the George and Pigmy, aiming to do my part. I could see, there at Narbondo’s, that you lads didn’t have what they call the upper hand.”