“They didn’t want it, actually,” said St. Ives. “They were offered the thing free, and they turned it down.”
“The fools,” Frobisher said. “They didn’t go for all that hocus-pocus about a curse, I don’t suppose. Not the bloody museum.”
St. Ives shrugged. “There’s no denying that it cost them a tremendous amount of trouble — robbery and murder and the like. And it’s possible that they thought the man who offered it to them was a prankster. No one, of course, with any sense would give the thing away. I rather believe that they never considered the offer serious.”
“I’d bet they were afraid of it,” said Priestly, who had come to fear the jewel himself in the years since our return. “I wish now that we’d buried the bloody thing with Kraken. Do you remember that ghastly cry in the jungle? That wasn’t made by any cannibals.”
Hasbro raised an eyebrow. “Who do you suggest cried out, sir?” he asked in his cultivated butler’s tone — a tone that alerted you to the sad fact that you were about to say something worthless and foolish.
Priestly gazed into his port and shrugged.
“I like to believe,” said St. Ives, always the philosopher, “that the jungle itself cried out. That we had stolen a bit of her very heart, broken off a piece of her soul. I was possessed with the same certainty that we’d committed a terrible crime that possesses me when I see a fine old building razed or a great tree cut down — a tree, perhaps, that had seen the passing of two score generations of kings and, being a part of those ages, has been imbued with their history, with their glory. Do you follow me?”
Hasbro nodded. I could see he took the long view, Priestly appeared to be lost in the depths of his port, but I knew that he felt pretty much the same way; he just couldn’t have stated it so prettily. Leave it to the Professor to get to the nub.
“Trash!” said Frobisher. “Gouge ’em both out, that’s what I would have done. Imagine a pair of such rubies. A matched pair!” He shook his head. “Yes, sir,” he finished, “I’d give my pension just to get a glimpse of one. Just a glimpse.”
St. Ives, smiling just a bit, wistfully perhaps, reached into the inside pocket of his coat, pulled out his tobacco pouch and unfolded it, plucking out a ball of tissue twice the size of a walnut. Inside it was the idol’s eye — the very one.
Frobisher leapt with a shout to his feet, his chair slamming over backward on the carpet. Isaacs, dozing in a chair by the fire, awoke with a start and shouted at Frobisher to leave off. But Tubby, taken so by surprise at St. Ives’s coolness and by the size of the faceted gem that lay before him, red as thin blood and glowing in the firelight, failed to hear Isaacs’s complaint. He stood and gaped at the ruby, his pension secure.
“How…” I began, at least as surprised as Frobisher. Priestly acted as if the thing were a snake; his pipe clacked in his teeth.
There was a wild shout from downstairs. Running footsteps echoed up toward us. A whump and crash followed as if something had been hurled into the wall. Then, weirdly, a blast of air sailed up the stairwell and blew past us, as if a door had been left open and the winds were finding their way in.
But the peculiar thing, the thing that made all of us, in that one instant, abandon the jewel and turn, waiting, watching the shadow that rose slowly along the wall of the stairwell, was the nature of that wind, the smell of that wind.
It wasn’t the wet, cold breeze blowing down Baker Street. It wasn’t a London breeze at all. It was a wind that blew down a jungle river — a warm and humid wind saturated with the smell of orchid blooms and rotting vegetation, that seemed to suggest the slow splash of crocodiles sliding off a muddy bank and the rippling silent passage of a tiger glimpsed through distant trees. The shadow rose on the stairs, frightfully slowly, as if whatever cast it had legs of stone and was creeping inexorably along — clump, clump, clump — toward some fated destination. And within the footsteps, surrounding them, part of them, were the far-off cries of wild birds and the chattering of treetop monkeys and the shrill cry of a panther, all of it borne on that wind and on that ascending shadow for one long, teeming, silent moment
And what we saw first when the walker on the stairs clumped into view was the bent tip of an umbrella — the sprung umbrella hoisted by Frobisher’s stroller. Ruined as the umbrella was, I could see that the shaft was a length of deteriorated bamboo, crushed and black with age and travel. And there, at the base, dangling by a green brass chain below the grip that was clutched in a wide, pale hand, was what had once been a tiny, preserved head, nothing but a skull now, yellow and broken and with one leathery strip of dried flesh still clinging in the depression below the eye socket.
We all shouted. Priestly smashed back into his chair. St. Ives bent forward in eager anticipation. We knew, wild and impossible as it seemed, what it was that approached us up the stairs on that rainy April day. It wore, as the waiter had promised, a pair of glasses with smoked lenses, and was otherwise clad in cast-off misshapen clothing that had once been worn, quite clearly, by people in widely different parts of the world: Arab bloused trousers, a Mandalay pontoon shirt, wooden shoes, a Leibnitz cap. His marbled jaw was set with fierce determination and his mouth opened and shut rhythmically like the mouth of a conger eel, his breath whooshing in and out. He reached up with his free hand and tore the smoked glasses away, pitching them in one sweeping motion against the wall where they shattered, spraying poor, dumbfounded Isaacs with glass shards.
In his right eye shone a tremendous faceted ruby, identical to the one that lay before St. Ives. Light blazed from it as if it were alive. His left eye was a hollow, dark socket, smooth and black and empty as night. He stood at the top of the stairs, chest heaving, creaking with exertion. He looked, so to speak, from one to the other of us, fixing his stare on the ruby glowing atop the table. His arm twitched. He let go of Bill Kraken’s umbrella, and the thing dropped like a shot to the floor, the jawbone and half a dozen yellow teeth breaking loose and spinning off across the oak planks. His entire demeanor seemed to lighten, as if he were drinking in the sight of the ruby like an elixir, and he took two shuffling steps toward it, swinging his arm ponderously out in front of him, pointing with a trembling finger toward the prize on the table. There could be no doubt what he was after, no doubt at all.
And for me, I was all for letting him have it. Under the circumstances it seemed odd to deny him. St. Ives was of a like mind. He went so far as to nod at the gem, as if inviting the idol (we can’t mince words here, that’s what he was) to scoop it up. Frobisher, however, was inclined to disagree. And I can’t blame him, really. He hadn’t been in Java with us twenty years past, hadn’t seen the idol in the ring of stones, couldn’t know that the sad umbrella lying on the floor had belonged to Bill Kraken and had been abandoned, as if in trade, for the priceless, ruinous gem among the asps and orchids of that jungle glade.
He stepped forward then, foolishly, and said something equally foolish about horsewhipping on the steps of the club and about his having been in the bush. A great, marbled arm swept out, whumping the air out of foolish old Frobisher and knocking him spinning over a library table as if he had been made of papier-mâché. Frobisher lay there senseless.
St. Ives at that point played his trump card: “Doctor Narbondo!” he said, and then waited, anticipating, watching the idol as it paused, contemplating, stricken by a rush of ancient, thin memory. Priestly hunched forward, mouth agape, tugging at his great white beard. I heard him whisper, “Narbondo!” as if in echo to St. Ives’s revelation.