SIXTEEN
The Return of Bill Kraken

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, cathedral-like 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 gotten into the morgue, and what sort of débâcle 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. 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 Pinkie. 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 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.”

“Right you are there,” interrupted Godall, who poured Kraken a generous dollop of spirit.

“Thankee, sir, I’m sure. So I…Well…The long and short of it is, I ain’t got the box. I had it, to be sure, but I ain’t got it now.”

“Where is it, man!” cried St. Ives.

“Billy Deener with the chimney pot hat’s got it. Leastways he had it. Murderous villain, too, is what I’m telling you. If I’d have been sharp, I’d have left it with a pal o’ mine in Farthing Alley, but I warn’t sharp. I was uncommon dull from that bonk on the conk—I could see straight, you understand, but I couldn’t hardly see clear.

“Well, chimney pot cleared me right out. I seen him before. And pardon me, yer honors, that I didn’t care to see him again. So when he ’costed me with that ’ere pistol of his, why I give him the box and run, assumin’, in my haste, you see, that he’d let me slide and make away with the prize. And so he did. I blushes to tell it, too. But we can fetch it back, and the girl with it, if you’ll give me a chance to say on.”

And with that he inhaled hugely and drained his glass again, trusting to the element of suspense to keep the rest of them listening.

“Fetch it back!” cried the Captain. “How, lad? Oil yourself, for the love of God! Don’t dry out on us now.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” agreed Kraken, tilting the handy bottle. St. Ives poured an ounce for himself, noting that it was past noon. It was close to the truth to say that it was smack in the middle of a long damned day, a day that would grow a good sight longer before it was played out.

Kraken set in again: “Sewers, is what I said to myself. I worked for Drake; you know that. What I did I daren’t say. It don’t make no difference now. After the last year with the poor master, Drake’s little jobs looked uncommon genteel. We used the sewers, is what we did, for the delicate operations—and not a few of them there is too, when you’re in that line o’ business.”

With that Kraken appeared to see for the first time the instrument that lay beside Keeble’s chair, fallen from the toy-maker’s fingers when he’d once again drifted off to sleep. “Holy Mother of God,” uttered Kraken, turning pale. “Where did that infernal contraption appear from?”

“Drake,” said Godall simply, tossing a shawl over the thing.

Kraken shook his head slowly and took a conscientious sip of brandy, cut, now, with water. “If you’ve seen what Lord Bingley done to himself with such an article up on Wardour Street…” Kraken paused in his shaking and shut his eyes, trying, perhaps, to crush out the memory of Lord Bingley’s demise. He didn’t speak for thirty seconds by the clock.

“Lord Bingley?” asked St. Ives, exercising his scientific curiosity.

Godall shook his head at St. Ives and held a finger across pursed lips, as if to say that the Lord Bingley business hadn’t ought to be brought to light—that some few of the antics of humankind, when illuminated, were all the darker for the light cast upon them.

Kraken failed to acknowledge St. Ives’ question anyway, but resumed his story instead. “I cut down the Stilton Lane Sewer and popped in through the trap, clean as a baby, speakin’ figural, of course. You seen what the sewer does to a man’s boots. And didn’t I see some visions.” Kraken paused and looked closely at the sleeping Keeble. “Dorothy Keeble’s safe, I can tell you again, though what makes her so ain’t what a man might choose. She’s got a fever, or such like, and Drake won’t let nobody near her, excepting, of course, the doctor.” With this last utterance Kraken waggled his eyes at the men around him, to let them know, perhaps, which doctor it was who looked on at Dorothy’s bedside.

“The filthy scoundrel!” cried the Captain, heaving to his feet as if he were intending to thrash the hunchback there and then.

Kraken held up his hand. “It ain’t like that, gentlemen. Drake won’t stand for it, for reasons of his own, if you follow me. He aims to clarify her of fever, or so he lets on. I was in a closet, top o’ the second floor landing. Pule come in not a nickel’s worth after I slipped in unseen. Raging after the girl, he was. Had himself wound with sticking plaster, too. Another of his ‘cures’ as he called it that night when him and the hunchback was twisting the business of the master’s papers out of me. Anyway, there was Pule smelling to high heaven of chemical and his hands painted green. I never hope to see such a thing again. Well, they pitched him out—the bum’s rush. He swore he’d kill Narbondo. Then he swore he’d kill Drake. Then he swore he’d kill the whole blessed city. Then they showed him the road. Narbondo left directly, worried, if you ask me, gentlemen, that Pule would make trouble up on Pratlow. But little enough trouble it would be, alongside o’ what’s been done last night. The doctor was in for a peeper, I can tell you.”

Kraken grinned at that, fancying Narbondo’s reaction when he witnessed the carnage at the Pratlow Street laboratory, Scotland Yard, perhaps, awaiting him on the stairs, the Keeble box long gone, Narbondo discovering that while he frolicked at Drake’s the slats were being generally kicked out of his best-laid plans.

St. Ives struck his fist onto his open palm and leaped to his feet. “It’s through the sewer then!” he cried. “Can you take me there? We may as well get on with it. They’ve had the advantage of us since this business began. We’ll turn it round now.”

“Whoa on,” said Kraken, grinning just a bit. “There’s more.”

St. Ives stared at him. “What more?”

“Your vehicle, guv’nor, it’s in the hall.”

St. Ives was baffled. “My space vehicle is in Harrogate, locked away.”

“The one you been looking about town for, is the one.”

“The alien craft!”

“Aye, that’s the one. Polished like a mirror, it is, lookin’ out at the dome o’ St. Paul’s like the two of them was cousins.”

St. Ives was in a state. Here was news indeed. Was it possible that within the house on Wardour Street lay the cumulative ends of their search? That they could wade in, pistols drawn, and in minutes take back weeks worth of defeat? Well, by God they’d try. St. Ives clapped his hand onto the arm of the couch in a show of determination. “The report from Swansea forecast the blimp at mid-afternoon. How long for it to make London?”

Kraken sneezed voluminously, waking Keeble up again. They put the question to him. “A few hours, I suppose,” he said. “Not longer. This evening, to be sure.”

“Can we assume, then, that the fourth box will be aboard?”

Keeble nodded. They might, of course, be fooled again, but it was odds on that when the ubiquitous Dr. Birdlip appeared in the sky overhead, he’d be carrying with him Jack Owlesby’s inheritance.

“We’ve got to be on hand, of course,” said Godall.

St. Ives nodded. There was no denying that. Jack’s emerald, after all. Unless they snatched it at the first crack, they’d likely lose it. They’d never wrestle it away from the authorities—that much was certain, not without compromising Nell.

“There’s a half-dozen of us,” said Godall. “We’ll break into parties. There’s too much risk otherwise—we’ve too much ground to cover.”

Godall was interrupted by a sound on the stairs. There stood Jack Owlesby, leaning on the banister. “Jack!” cried the Captain, limping over and offering the lad his arm.

“Afternoon,” said Jack, grinning and stepping gamely but slowly down into the room. He took the Captain’s arm for the trip across the rug to the couch, and he sat down gingerly when he got there, grimacing just a bit. Nell Owlesby and Winnifred Keeble followed. “I’m going with you to Drake’s,” said Jack.

There was a general silence in the room. It was a heroic offer, under the circumstances, but of course was out of the question. No one, however, wanted to deny Jack his part.

Captain Powers, having just that moment sat down, lay down his pipe with exaggerated care and stood up once again.

“Now see here,” he said, looking at each one of them in turn. “I sailed a bit in my day—forty years of it, in truth, and commanded who knows how many lads from the Straits o’ Magellan to the China Sea. It seems natural to me then to step lively here. We got too many officers and not enough hands, and that’s been the long and short of her these last weeks, me bein’ guiltier than the rest of you.”

St. Ives’ protest to this last statement was cut short. “Hear me out,” said the Captain, poking his pipe stem in the scientist’s direction. “Don’t buck me, lad. I’m an old man, but I know what I’m about. Time’s drawin’ on. That ‘ere blimp’s got to be circumvented, as they say. And the hunchback doctor—we’ll go for him straightaway. There’s going to be half o’ London out on Hampstead Heath tonight, blow me if there ain’t, and it won’t do to have any more scuffle than we can avoid, if you see my point. We square things away with the doctor now, is what I mean. Tie him up fast and lay him out in that there closet o’ his. We can fetch him out in a week or so if we recalls it. So here’s what I say, mates:

“I’m the blasted Captain here, so I’ll point and you’ll jump, and we’ll all run aground out on the Heath when the sun goes down, for that’s when we’ll need the lot of us and to spare. For now, Professor, you and Keeble here will slide into Drakes’ through the sewer. I’d get hold of a couple pair o’ India rubber boots for the job.”

St. Ives looked at Keeble. Did he have the stuff for it? It was clear he had to be given the chance. Keeble seemed to make a visible effort to pull himself together, to haul in loose limbs and slap some color into his face. He picked up his glass, thought better of it, and set it down hard on the table.

“I’m going with them,” said Jack staunchly.

“You’re going with me,” cried the Captain, puffing like an engine on his pipe.

“I’m…” began Jack.

“Enough! You’ll take orders or by heaven you’ll stay home and scrub the slime out o’ Kraken’s boots! You and Nell, as I was saying, will lie low outside o’ Wardour Street with a wagon. We’ll be ready to fly when the Professor and Keeble steps out wi’ the girl. It’s action enough you’ll see then, my lad. Can you fire a pistol?”

Jack nodded silently.

“One thing,” interrupted St. Ives. He considered for a moment, his face brightening, his eyes gleaming. “In the event,” he said, “that I don’t come out—through the door that is—look sharp for me in the sky. I mean to get the starship out of Drake’s just as soon as we’ve got Dorothy safe. Be ready, then, to make for Hampstead without me.”

The Captain shrugged. That was St. Ives’ affair. Certainly there would be no way of going back in after the ship, not after the confrontation that would likely occur that afternoon. “And we’ll leave ye too, mate. Don’t think we won’t. I aim to be on hand when Birdlip heaves to. The em’rald’s been in my hands these long years, if you follow me, whether it’s been in my sea chest or aboard that ‘ere blimp. Yes, sir, starship or no, I’m for Hampstead when I see the black of that girl’s hair.”

St. Ives nodded.

“And you two,” he said, nodding first to Hasbro and then to Kraken. “You swabs will take care of this here doctor, like I said.”

Kraken chortled and rubbed his hands. “That we will,” he said.

Hasbro was more eloquent. “Since his ruffians,” said the starchy gentleman’s gentleman, “tore the manor to bits and shattered the visage of poor Kepler, I’ve wanted nothing more than to have words with the good doctor, strong words, perhaps.”

“Aye,” cried Kraken, leaping up in a rush and whirling away with his fists at phantoms, then sitting down in a rush when he remembered that he wasn’t wearing trousers. “Mighty strong words,” he said squinting.

“That’s the spirit,” said the Captain. “Don’t take no.”

“Not us, sir,” replied Hasbro, nodding obediently. “Am I to understand, then, that Mr. Kraken and myself are to rendezvous with the rest of you on the green at Hampstead?”

The Captain nodded vigorously. “That’s it in a nut. And mind you, it’s the blimp we want. This ain’t no social affair. First one in grabs the box. Don’t be shy. Don’t wait for slackards. Lord knows which of us will get in first.”

“Well it won’t be me,” said Winnifred Keeble, frowning at the Captain. “Apparently I’m to stay home, am I? Well I’m not, and you, sir, can smoke that if you’d like. I’m going in after Dorothy.”

“As you say, ma’am,” replied the Captain humbly. “The more hands the better when foul weather blows up.”

“And I, gentlemen,” said Godall, rising and picking up his stick, “intend to confront our evangelist. He has, if I’m not mistaken, one of the boxes in question. Which might it be again?”

St. Ives looked at Hasbro for help. “That would be the aerator box, sir, if I remember aright, which Pule possessed when he leaped from the train. And there will be two of the boxes at Drake’s, sir, if you’ll allow a gentle reminder—the little man inhabiting the one and the clockwork alligator in the other—both, I believe, of some value to us.”

“Quite,” said St. Ives, itching to be off. “What detains us then?”

The Captain knocked his ashes out into a glass ashtray. He blew through his pipe, shoved it into his coat pocket, and stood up. “Not a blessed thing,” he said.