An empty hallway stretched away in either direction. Room 312 was either up or down; it didn’t matter to me, for it was clear at once that the landing window would suffice if what you wanted to do was shoot a man. The iron hinges of the double casement were rusted. I got onto my hands and knees and peered at the floor in the failing light. It was swept clean, except for right along the floor moldings, where flakes of rust dusted the very corner. The window wasn’t opened very often; but it had been recently. The varnished wood of the sill was etched with a scraped indentation where someone had forced open the jammed casement, the wood beneath the scratch still fresh and clean, barely even dusty.
I slipped the latch and pulled, but the old window, swollen by sea air and the wet spring weather, was jammed shut. I wiggled it open just far enough to wedge my fingers in behind it, and then it was easy enough to work the window open, scraping it again across the sill. I leaned out then, peering through the gloom toward the green where the beggar had died.
The sounds of the village settling into evening struck me as being very pleasant, and the rush of sea wind in my face awakened me from the morbid reverie of dread that I’d slipped into while climbing the darkened stairs. I could even see the lights of the Crown and Apple, and they reminded me of supper and a pint. But then I looked down three long stories to the paving stones of the courtyard below, and with a dreadful shudder I was reminded of danger in all its manifold guises, and I bent back into the safety of the hallway, imagining sudden hands pushing against the small of my back, and me tumbling out and falling headlong.…Being handed a bomb in a basket has that effect on me.
I knew what I had to know. Confrontations would accomplish nothing, especially when I had no idea on earth what it was, exactly, I would discover upon knocking on the door of the Pules’ room. Better to think about it over supper.
I forced the window shut, then stood up and turned around, thinking to steal back down the stairs and away. But I found myself staring into the face of the ghastly Mrs. Pule, the woman in Godall’s shop.
I gasped out a sort of hoarse yip while she grinned out of that melon face of hers — a hollow grin, empty of any real amusement. She pointed a revolver at me.
Down the hail we went. I would be visiting their room after all, and I’ll admit that I didn’t like the notion a bit. What would St. Ives do? Whirl around and disarm her? Talk her out of whatever grisly notion she had in mind? Prevail upon her better judgment? I didn’t know how to do any of that. St. Ives wouldn’t have gotten himself into this mess in the first place.
She knocked twice on the door of the room, then paused, then knocked once. It swung open, but nobody stood there; whoever had opened the door was hidden behind it, not wanting to be seen. Who would it be? Captain Bowker, perhaps, waiting to lambaste me with a truncheon. I couldn’t have that. Ignoring the revolver, I ducked away to the left into the room and spun around to face whoever it was that would emerge when the door swung shut.
It was the lunatic son — Willis Pule. He peeked out coyly, just his head, and his mother had to snatch the door shut because he didn’t want to let go of it. She reached across and pinched him on the ear, and his coy smile evaporated, replaced by a look of theatrical shock, which disappeared in turn when he got a really good glimpse at the fright that must have been plain on my face. Then, suddenly happy, he affected the wide-eyed and round-mouthed demeanor of the fat man in the comical drawing, the one who has just that moment noted the approach of someone bearing an enormous plate of cream tarts. Pule pulled his right hand from behind his back and waved my elephant at me.
There was a buzzing just then, and the woman strode across to where the outlet of a speaking tube protruded from the wall. She slid open its little hatch-cover, jammed her ear against it, listened, and then, speaking into the tube, she said, “Yes, we’ve got him.” She listened again and said, “No, in the hallway.” And after another moment of listening she snickered out, “Him? Not hardly,” and closed the hatch-cover and shut off the tube.
She had obviously just spoken to the landlady. The place was a rat’s nest. Everything was clear to me as I slumped uninvited into a stuffed chair. All my detective work was laughable; I’d been toyed with all along. Even the elephant under the potted plant — that had been the work of the landlady too. She had snatched it away, of course, when I’d gone out through the door. She was the only one who was close enough to have got to it and away again before I had come back in. And all the rigamarole about my mother’s cousin with the improbable names
She must have taken me for a child after that, watching me stroll away up the stairs to my probable doom. “Him, not hardly…” I grimaced. I thought I knew what that meant, and I couldn’t argue with it. Well, maybe it would serve me some good in the end; maybe I could turn it to advantage. I would play the witless milksop, and then I would strike. I tried to convince myself of that.
Willis Pule tiptoed across to a pine table with a wooden chair alongside it. His tiptoeing was exaggerated, this time like a comic actor being effusively quiet, taking great silent knee-high steps. What was a madman but an actor who didn’t know he was acting, in a play that nobody else had the script for? He sat in the chair, nodding at me and working his mouth slowly, as if he were chewing the end of a cigar. What did it all mean, all his mincing and posing and winking? Nothing. Not a damned thing. All the alterations in the weather of his face were nonsense.
He laid the elephant on the table and removed its red jumbo pants with a sort of infantile glee. Then he patted his coat pocket, slipped out a straight razor, and very swiftly and neatly sawed the elephant’s ears off. A look of intense pity and sadness shifted his eyes and mouth, and then was gone.
I forgot to breathe for a moment, watching him. It wasn’t the ruining of the toy that got to me. I had built the thing, after all, and I’ve found that a man rarely regrets the loss of something he’s built himself; he’s always too aware of the flaws in it, of the fact that it wants a hat, but it’s too late to give it one. It was the beastly cool way that he pared the thing up — that’s what got to me: the way he watched me out of the corner of his eye, and looked up once to wink at me and nod at the neat bit of work he was accomplishing, almost as if to imply that it was merely practice, sawing up the elephant was. And, horribly, he was dressed just like his mother, too, still got up in the same florid chintz.
His mother walked past him, ignoring him utterly. I hoped that she might take the razor away from him. A razor in the hands of an obvious lunatic, after all…But she didn’t care about the razor. She rather approved of it, I think,
“Willis likes to operate on things,” she said matter-of-factly, the word operate effecting a sort of ghastly resonance in my inner ear. I nodded a little, trying to smile, as if pleased to listen to the chatter of a mother so obviously proud of her son. “He cut a bird apart once, and affixed its head to the body of a mouse.”
“Ah,” I said,
She cocked her head and favored me with a horrid grimace of sentimental wistfulness, “It lived for a week. He had to feed it out of a tiny bottle, poor thing. It was a night-and-day job, ministering to that helpless little creature. A night-and-day job. It nearly wore him out. And then when it died I thought his poor heart would break, like an egg. He enshrined it under the floorboards along with the others. Held a service and all.”