There was Goring himself, dear old Uncle Dev, with the familiar white hair and moustache, bushy brows and tame-lion eyes.
Goring waited for his tongue-tied caller to speak. When he did not, he lifted a frail hand from his blanketed lap and beckoned the young man closer.
“I’m Goring. Mr...?”
The visitor stepped eagerly forward to clasp the outstretched hand, somewhat startling Goring, making him feel uncomfortably like St. Peter in the Vatican, fearing for a moment that the fellow might be going to kneel and kiss his toe.
Instead, he moved back as if to give the older man a better look at him and said, with his too-generous smile: “Don’t you recognize me?”
Goring stared, murmured an apology.
“I’m Jack!”
“Jack? Hmm... I’m still afraid...”
“Jack. You know — the Mysterious Stranger!”
Goring’s hand rose to his eyes. “I’m afraid you still have me at a disadvantage, young fellow. An old man’s memory...”
The caller looked more impatient than annoyed. “Gee, I recognized you right away. You’re just like I knew Uncle Dev would be.”
Goring became alert now in a more than socially attentive way. “Wait a minute. You don’t mean you’re — not our Jack.”
As he said this he waved toward a certain shelf of books directly behind the desk. The visitor pounced on them, ran trembling fingers across their brightly jacketed spines.
“Yes! Jack, the Mysterious Stranger. I’m him!”
“Are you indeed? Well, fancy that.” Although truly flabbergasted, a well-trained imagination helped Goring maintain his aplomb.
A blunt-tipped finger plucked one of the volumes from the shelf. “Penelope and the Coral Reef. Wow! That was super. But I don’t see how Penelope could have thought I was one of the had fishermen. I kept trying to warn her about Chang. But she kept running away.”
He raced on in this vein, darting from one book to another, from Penelope and the Deadly Amulet to Penelope and the Enchanted Valley, from Penelope and the Tavisham Ghost to Penelope and the Smugglers’ Revenge, recalling delightedly how in each adventure he had come to Penelope’s rescue.
Goring listened to all this with an emotion so singular he could not have defined it; it was as if one of his characters had magically come to life and burst through the study door to confront him at the very spot where Goring had created him. The emotion was certainly disturbing but not ungratifying. Recognition he’d had, to a degree, but this was in its way the supreme compliment.
The Penelope books, some two dozen of which had been published over the past couple of decades, had grown out of a simple story he’d written to amuse his young niece, based on one of his archaeological expeditions. He would never have tampered with the stories’ formula — his teen-age readers would not have tolerated it — and in each book Penelope would accompany Uncle Dev to some distant spot and be plunged into an exotic, danger-filled adventure. A conventional figure in each of the plots was a shadowy young man named Jack, a Mysterious Stranger who invariably popped up when Penelope was about to be fatally bitten by a cobra, suffocated in a mine cave-in, drowned in a scuttled yacht, or shot in a bandit’s hideout. Any young reader of average intelligence could have told Penelope — Goring had scores of letters to prove it — that ever since The Opal Talisman adventure Jack had been wildly in love with her, yet she remained, book after book, annoyingly oblivious to his affection.
Only now did the visitor become aware that Goring was in a wheelchair.
“Did that bullet wound in The Mandarin’s Hatchet really injure you, sir?”
Goring sighed and was on the point of explaining that nothing more dramatic than degenerative arthritis accounted for his condition when the caprice seized him to humor the lad’s delusion.
Or was the impulse quite that innocent?
It was second nature to Goring to invent fictional plots and already certain elements of a curious scenario may have been shaping themselves in his mind, a mind grown bitter with jealousy and illness.
So he said, “Not really, no. It was that fall in The Temple of the Sun Dragon, remember? When I fell down the thousand and one steps?”
The man who thought he was “Jack” looked sympathetic to the point of tears. Feeling guilty, Goring insisted his visitor tell him more about himself. “I could offer you some refreshments, but I told Mrs. Harkins she could go to bed. And I’m quite helpless, as you see.”
The visitor’s face grew surprisingly hostile. “Is that why Penelope’s going to marry Howard Rashbrooke?”
Goring’s mind, until now only toying with that dangerous scenario, not really believing he could connect those various elements, seized upon the young man’s hostility with furtive delight, as if the key to that shadowy plot had suddenly dropped into his hand.
“Er... no. No, of course not.”
“Because she mustn’t, you know. Rashbrooke’s nothing but a fortune hunter. Can’t you see that?”
The sorrows which had been Goring’s only company ever since Sheila had begun the affair with Harry Lawton, the affair she thought Goring knew nothing about, were momentarily forgotten, the pain no pills could conquer half-forgotten.
“Rashbrooke claims to be in love with Penelope,” he said slyly.
“Penelope can’t love him. She loves me. She always has, ever since I kissed her in The Opal Talisman. She slapped my face, sure. Any decent girl would have done the same thing if a mysterious stranger kissed her. But she never forgot that kiss. No! She can’t marry Rashbrooke. She can’t!”
The young man had jumped to his feet and assumed a pose, legs apart, fists jammed against hips, which Goring recognized as characteristic of Jack. For a moment he felt a bit like Frankenstein and, like Frankenstein, he had passed beyond the point where he might still have abandoned his perilous experiment. It was as if fate had sent him this instrument, this human tool.
Goring implored the visitor to sit down. “You were going to tell me about yourself. How did it begin? I mean, when did you first know?”
“That I was Jack? Gosh, ages ago. When I was still in the orphanage. The other kids, they liked Tom Swift and Nancy Drew, but the minute I read Penelope and the Jade Tiger... well, Jack was me. He looked like me and he was an orphan and he never belonged anywhere. I must have read that book twenty times. And the others... all the others.”
Goring was silent, watching the emotions glide swiftly over his visitor’s young-old face, while outside the window the artillery rumble of thunder drew closer, and rain, like cold-fingered refugees fleeing before the guns, tapped urgently upon the pane. In spite of what he knew he was going to do, Goring was still deeply touched by the young man’s tale, never dreaming that his unambitious labors could have wrought so lastingly vivid an effect upon a childish mind. How dismaying to realize that he had provided another human being with so total an escape into fantasy.
The caller’s voice droned on. “...and when I read The Missing Cipher last month and Penelope actually got engaged to Howard Rashbrooke I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t let it happen. I knew I had to come here and find her and tell her I love her... Where is she, Uncle Dev? Where’s Penelope?”
Goring’s mind was busy with the various aspects of his scenario that must be made coherent and viable.