He made a bow in our direction, and, gesturing at Narbondo, he said, as if he were addressing a half score of students in a surgery, “I intend to affix this man’s head to the fat man’s body, and then to wake him up and make him look at himself in a mirror and see how ugly he is. Then I’m going to install this mechanism” — and here he plucked up the reassembled gears from the elephant — “in his heart, so that I can control him with a lever. And this man,” Pule said, pointing at poor terrified and befuddled Higgins, “I’m going to cut apart and put together backward, so that he has to reach behind himself to button his shirt, and then I’m going to sell him to Mr. Happy’s Circus.”
Pule was madder than I thought him. What on earth did he mean by nonsense like “put him together backward”? It was clear that he could actually accomplish none of this. What real evidence was there that he had any skills in vivisection at all? None, and never had been — only his association with Narbondo, which proved nothing, of course, except that he was capable of committing vile acts. He was simply going to hack three men up — two of them alive at the moment — for the same utterly insane reasons that he had hacked up my elephant or that he chopped apart birds and hid them under the floorboards of his house. And he would do it all with relish — I was certain of it.
Poor Higgins was even more certain, it seemed, for just as soon as Pule mentioned this business about selling him to Mr. Happy’s Circus, he began to utter a sort of low keening noise, a strange and mournful weeping. His eyes rolled back up into his head just as he slumped forward, tugging at the gaiters that held him to the chair, his voice rising another octave.
Mrs. Pule handed Willis the revolver, and he shifted the rifle to his left hand, not wanting to put it down. She picked up the dish of yellow chemical and advised Higgins to pipe down. But he couldn’t, and so she splashed the stuff into Higgins’s face, at which Higgins lurched upright, spitting and coughing, and she slapped him one, catching him mostly on the nose because of his twitching around. “Did you hear him?” she hissed.
“What! What! What!” cried Higgins, out of his mind now.
“You can save yourself,” she said. “Or else…” She hunched over and whispered the rest of the sentence in his ear.
“Merciful Jesus! I’m what?” he shouted. “You’re going to what? Mr. Happy!” His voice cracked. He began to gibber and moan.
They had gone too far. She had wanted to bargain with him, but she had made the mistake of driving him mad first, and now he was beyond bargaining. So she hit him again, twice — slap, slap — and he sat up straight and listened harder.
“The notebooks,” she said. “Where are they?”
St. Ives cleared his throat, and very cheerfully, as if he were talking to a neighbor over the garden wall, he said, “I don’t believe that the man knows…”
“Shut up!” she cried, turning on the three of us.
“Shut up!” cried her son, rapidly opening and closing his eyes and training the revolver on me, of all people; I hadn’t said anything. I shrugged, very willing to shut up.
St. Ives was a different kettle of fish. “I mean to say, madam,” he said, calmly and deliberately, “that Professor Higgins is utterly ignorant of the whereabouts of the notebooks. It was he who posted that letter to you, after he had revived the doctor. And since then he hasn’t found them, although he’s made a very pretty effort. Your torturing him now won’t accomplish a thing, unless, as I suspect, you’re torturing him for sport.”
“You filthy…,” she said, leaving it unfinished, and in a wild rage she snatched the revolver away from her son and pointed it at the professor. “You scum-sucking pig! You know nothing. I’ll start with you, Mr. Hooknose, and then Willis will make a scarecrow of you.”
She croaked out a laugh just as I lunged at her; don’t ask me why I did it — making up for lost opportunities, maybe. I threw myself onto the revolver and grabbed it by the barrel, hitting her just as hard as I could on the jaw, which was plenty hard enough to knock her over backward.
Willis grappled with the rifle, but hadn’t gotten it halfway up before Hasbro clipped him neatly on the side of the head, and he sank to his knees and slumped forward.
It was over, just like that. I’d had to hit a woman to accomplish it, but by heaven I would hit her once more, harder, if I had it to do again.
“Go for the constable, Jack,” cried St. Ives, taking the revolver from me. “Bring him round, quick. I won’t leave Narbondo’s side, not until he’s in a cell, sleeping or awake, I don’t care.”
I turned and started out, but didn’t take more than a step, for the canvas pulled back, and there stood the constable himself, the one that had questioned me on the green, and Parsons stood with him, along with two sleepy-looking men who had obviously been routed out as deputies. For it had been Parsons who was lurking about, waiting for his chance. When it had got rough, and he had realized what a spot we had got ourselves into, he had himself run for the constable, and here they were, come round to save us now that we didn’t want saving.
“I’ll just take those weapons,” said the constable, very officiously.
“Certainly,” said St. Ives, handing over the revolver as if it were a snake.
Then there was a lot of talk about Narbondo, on the table, him and a fetching of more ice, and a cataloging of the bits and pieces of scientific apparatus, and finally St. Ives couldn’t stand it any longer and he asked Parsons, “The notebooks. You’ve got them, haven’t you?”
Parsons shrugged.
“It was Piper, wasn’t it? The oculist. He had got them from the old man, and had them all along. And when he died you came down and fetched them.”
“Accurate to the last detail,” said Parsons, smiling to think that at last he’d put one across St. Ives, that at last he had been in ahead of us. “What you don’t know, my good fellow, is that I’ve destroyed them. They were a horror, a misapplication of scientific method, an abomination. I burned them in Dr. Piper’s incinerator without bothering to read more than a snatch of them.”
“Then it’s my view,” said St. Ives, “that Narbondo is dead, or as good as dead. How long he can last in this suspended state, I don’t know, but it’s clear that Higgins couldn’t entirely revive him. Neither can I, and without the notebooks, thank God, neither can you.”
Parsons shrugged again. “Keep him on ice,” he said to the constable. “The Academy will want him. He’ll make an interesting study.”
The use of the word study had a Willis Pule ring to it that I didn’t like, and I was reminded of what it was about Parsons that set the men of the Academy apart from a man like St. Ives. I was almost sorry that Narbondo at last had fallen into their hands.
St. Ives, however, didn’t seem in the least sorry. “I suggest we retire to the Crown and Apple, then,” he said. “I have a few bottles of ale in my room. I suggest that we sample it — toast Professor Parsons’s success.”
“Here, here,” said Parsons, a little vainly, I thought, as we trooped out into the night, leaving the icehouse behind. In fact, though, a couple of bottles of ale and a few hours of sleep would settle me right out. Our adventure was over, and tomorrow, I supposed, it was back to London on the express. I patted my coat pocket, where I still had the proof of my reserving a room for me and Dorothy at The Hoisted Pint. You’d think that I would have had my fill of the place, but in fact I was determined to stay there as I’d planned, under happier circumstances, especially since whoever it was that we would find tending to the guests, it wouldn’t be the woman who had hoodwinked me. The constable had already sent someone around to collect her.