Thirteen Phantasms (31 page)

Suddenly and in an instant, as if propelled from a catapult, he sprang past St. Ives, hurled Priestly aside, and jabbed the tip of his umbrella in under one of the ruby eyes—the left eye, it was; I remember it vividly. He pried furiously on the thing as St. Ives and Hasbro attempted to haul him away. But he had the strength of a madman. The eye popped loose, rolling into the grasses, and Mad Bill shook off his two friends, wild in his ruby lust. He cast down his umbrella and dived for the gem, convinced, I suppose, that St. Ives and Hasbro and, no doubt, Priestly and myself were going to wrestle him for it. What brought him up short and froze the rest of us to the marrow there in that steamy jungle sun was a long, weary, ululating howl—a cry of awful pain, of indefinable grief—that soared out of the jungle around us, carried on the wind, part of the very atmosphere.

Our first thought after that long frozen instant was, of course, of cannibals. Bill snatched up the stone and leapt down the path toward the piroques with the rest of us, once again, at his heels.

Before night fell we had paddled out into the Bali Straits, never having caught a glimpse of those supposed cannibals nor seen the hint of a flying spear. There lay the Dutch freighter the
Peter Van Teeslink
. A week later Bill Kraken
died
of a fever in Singapore, shouting before he went of wild jungle beasts and of creatures that lay waiting for him in the depths of the sea and of a grinning sun that blinded him and set him mad.

We buried him there in Singapore on a sad day. St. Ives was determined to bury the ruby with him—to let him keep the plunder which had, it seemed certain, brought about his ruination. But Priestly wouldn’t consider it. The ruby alone, he said, would pay for the entire journey with some to spare. To bury it with Kraken would be to submit, as it were, to the lusts of a madman. And Kraken, only six months previously, had been as sane as any of us. Keep the ruby, said Priestly. If nothing else it would provide for Kraken’s son, himself almost as mad as his father. Hasbro agreed with Priestly as did, after consideration, St. Ives. The Professor, I believe, had an uncommon and inexplicable (in the light of his scientific training) fear of the jewel. But that’s just conjecture. In the forty-five years I’ve known him he’s demonstrated no fears whatsoever. He’s too full of curiosity. And the ruby, finally, was a curiosity. It was certainly that.

Such were the details of our journey down the Wangi River as I related them that day at the Explorers Club. Everyone present at the table except Tubby Frobisher had, of course, been along on that little adventure, and I rather suspected that Tubby would just as soon I’d kept the story to myself, he being full of his own wanderings in the bush and having no acquaintance whatsoever with eastern Java or Bill Kraken. It was the ruby, in the end, that fetched his attention.

For some moments he’d been hunched forward in his chair, squinting at me, puffing so on his cigar that it burned like a torch. He slumped back as I ended the tale and plucked the cigar from his mouth. He paused for a moment before standing up and stepping slowly across to the window to look for his stranger on the street. But the man had apparently moved along.

There was a crashing downstairs about then—a slamming of doors, high voices, the clattering of failing cutlery. “Close that off!” shouted Frobisher down the stairwell. There was an answering shout, indecipherable, from below. “Shut yer gob!” Frobisher shouted, tapping ashes onto the rug.

One of the club members, Isaacs, I believe, from the Himalayan business, advised Frobisher to shut his. Under other circumstances, I’m sure, Tubby would have flown at the man, but he was too full of our Javanese ruby, and he barely heard the man’s retort. It was quiet again downstairs. “By God,” said Frobisher, “I’d give my pension to have a look at that damned ruby!”

“Impossible,” I said, relighting my pipe which I’d let grow cold during my narrative. “The ruby hasn’t been seen in five years. Not since Giles Connover stole it from the museum. It was the ruby that brought about his end; that’s what I believe—just as surely as it brought about the death of Bill Kraken.”

I expected St. Ives to disagree with me, point out that I was possessed by superstition, that logic didn’t and couldn’t support me. But he kept silent, having once been possessed, I suppose, by the same unfounded fears—fears that had been a product of the weird, moaning cry that had assailed us there in the jungle some twenty years before.

“It certainly has had a curious history,” said St. Ives with just the trace of a smile on his face. “A very curious history.”

“Has it?” said Frobisher, stabbing his cigar out into the ashtray. “You didn’t manage to sell it, then?”

“Oh, we sold it,” St. Ives said. “Almost at once. Within the week of our return, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Four days, sir, to be precise,” put in Hasbro, who had an irritating habit of exactitude, one that had been polished and tightened over his eighty-odd years. “We docked on a Tuesday, sir, and sold the ruby to a jeweler in Knightsbridge on the following Saturday afternoon.”

“Quite,” said St. Ives, nodding toward him.

A waiter wandered past about then with a tea towel over his arm. Simultaneously there was another crash downstairs, a chair being upset it sounded like, and an accompanying shout. “What the devil is that row?” demanded Frobisher of the waiter. “This is a club, man, not a bowling green!”

“Quite right, sir,” the waiter said. “We’ve had a bit of a time with an unwanted guest. Insists on coming in to have a look around. He’s very persistent.”

“Throw the blighter into the rubbish can,” said Frobisher. “And bring us a decanter of whisky, if you will. Laphroaig. And some fresh glasses.”

“Ice?” the waiter asked.

Frobisher gave him a wilting look and chewed on his cigar. “Just the filthy whisky. And tell that navvy downstairs that Tubby Frobisher will horsewhip him on the club steps at three o’clock if he’s still about.” Frobisher checked his watch. “That’s about six and a half minutes from now.”

“I’ll tell him, sir, just as you say. But the man is deaf as a stone, as far as I can make out, and he wears smoked glasses, so he’s quite possibly blind too. Threats haven’t done much to dissuade him.”

“Haven’t they, by God!” shouted Frobisher. “Dissuade him, is it! I’ll dissuade the man. I’ll dissuade him from here to Chelsea. But let’s have that whisky first. Did I say we needed glasses too?”

“Yes, sir,” said the waiter. And off he went toward the bar.

“So this ruby,” Frobisher said, settling back in his seat and plucking another cigar from inside his coat. “How much did it fetch?”

“A little above twenty-five thousand pounds,” said St. Ives, nodding to Hasbro for affirmation.

“Twenty-five thousand six hundred fifty, sir,” the colonel said.

Frobisher let out a low whistle.

“And it brought almost twice that at an auction at Sotheby’s two weeks after,” I put in. “Since then it’s been bought and sold a dozen times, I imagine. The truth is, no one wants to keep it. It was owned, in time, by Isador Persano, and we all know what came of that, and later by Lady Braithewaite-Long, whose husband, of course, was involved in that series of ghastly murders near Waterloo Station.”

“Don’t overlook Preston Waters, the jeweler,” said Priestly with an apparent shudder—a recollection, no doubt, of the grisly horror that had befallen the very Knightsbridge jeweler who had given us the twenty-five thousand pounds.

“The thing’s cursed, if you ask me,” I said, clearing debris from the table to make room for our newly arrived decanter of Scots whisky. Frobisher, sighing heartily, poured a neat bit into four glasses.

“None for me, thanks,” Priestly said when Frobisher approached the fifth glass with the upturned decanter. “I’ll just nip at this port for a bit. Whisky eats me up. Tears my throat bones to shreds. I’d be on milk and bread for a week.”

Frobisher nodded, pleased, no doubt, to consume Priestly’s share himself. He tilted his glass back and sucked a bit in, rolling it about In his mouth, relishing it. “That’s the stuff, what?” he said, relaxing. “If there were one thing that would drag me back in out of the bush, it wouldn’t be gold or women, I can tell you. No, sir. Not gold or women.”

I assumed that it was whisky, finally, that would drag Tubby Frobisher out of the bush, though he never got around to saying so. I got in ahead of him. “Where do you suppose that ruby lies today, Professor?” I asked, having a taste of the Scotch myself. “Did the museum ever get it back?”

“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.