The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

The Idol’s Eye

I won’t say that this was the final adventure of Professor Langdon St. Ives and his man Hasbro — Colonel Hasbro since the war — but it was certainly the strangest and the least likely of the lot. Consider this: I know the Professor to be a man of complete and utter veracity. If he told me that he had determined, on the strength of scientific discovery, that gravity would reverse itself at four o’clock this afternoon, and that we’d find ourselves, as Stevenson put it, scaling the stars, I’d pack my bag and phone my solicitor and, at 3:59, I’d stroll out into the center of Jermyn Street so as not to crack my head on the ceiling when I floated away. And yet even I would have hesitated, looked askance, perhaps covertly checked the level of the bottles in the Professor’s cabinet if he had simply recounted to me the details of the strange occurrence at the Explorers Club on that third Thursday in April. I admit it the story is impossible on the face of it.

But I was there. And, as I say, what transpired was far and away more peculiar and exotic than the activities that, some twenty years earlier, had set the machinery of fate and mystery into creaking and irreversible motion.

It was a wild and rainy Thursday, then, that day at the club. March hadn’t gone out like any lamb; it had roared right along, storming and blowing into April. We — that is to say, the Professor, Colonel Hasbro, Tubby Frobisher, John Priestly (the African explorer and adventurer, not the novelist), and myself, Jack Owlesby — were sitting about after a long dinner at the Explorers Club, opposite the Planetarium. Wind howled outside the casements, and rain angled past in a driving rush, now letting off, now redoubling, whooshing in great sheets of grey mist. It wasn’t the sort of weather to be out in, you can count on that, and none of us, of course, had any business to see to anyway. I was looking forward to pipes and cigars and a glass of this or that, maybe a bit of a snooze in the lounge and then a really first-rate supper — a veal cutlet, perhaps, or a steak and mushroom pie and a bottle of Burgundy. The afternoon and evening, in other words, held astonishing promise.

So we sipped port, poked at the bowls of our pipes, watched the fragrant smoke rise in little lazy wisps and drift off, and muttered in a satisfied way about the weather. Under those conditions, you’ll agree, it couldn’t rain hard enough. I recall even that Frobisher, who, to be fair, had been coarsened by years in the bush, called the lot of us over to the window in order to have a laugh at the expense of some poor shambling madman who hunched in the rain below, holding over his head the ruins of an umbrella that might have been serviceable twenty or thirty years earlier but had seen hard use since, and which, in its fallen state, had come to resemble a ribby-looking inverted bird with about half a dozen pipe-stem legs. As far as I could see, there was no cloth on the thing at all. He had the mannerisms correct, that much I’ll give him. He seemed convinced that the fossil umbrella was doing the work. Frobisher roared and shook and said that the man should be on the stage. Then he said he had half a mind to go down and give the fellow a half crown, except that it was raining and he would get soaked. “That’s well and good in the bush,” he said, “but in the city, in civilization, well…” He shook his head. “When in Rome,” he said. And he forgot about the poor bogger in the road. All of us did, for a bit.

“I’ve seen rain that makes this look like small beer,” Frobisher boasted, shaking his head. “That’s nothing but fizz-water to me. Drizzle. Heavy fog.”

“It reminds me of the time we faced down that mob in Banju Wangi,” said Priestly, nodding at St. Ives, “after you two” — referring to the Professor and Hasbro — ”routed the pig men. What an adventure.”

It’s moderately likely that Priestly, who kept pretty much to himself, had little desire to tell the story of our adventures in Java, incredible though they were, which had transpired some twenty years earlier. You may have read about them, actually, for my own account was published in The Strand some six months after the story of the Chingford Tower fracas and the alien threat. But as I say, Priestly himself didn’t want to, as the Yanks say, spin any stretchers; he just wanted to shut Frobisher up. We’d heard nothing but “the bush” all afternoon. Frobisher had clearly been “out” in it — Australia, Brazil, India, Canton Province. There was bush enough in the world; that much was certain. We’d had enough of Frobisher’s bush, but of course none of us could say so. This was the club, after all, and Tubby, although coarsened a bit, as I say, was one of the lads.

So I leapt in on top of Priestly when I saw Frobisher point his pipe stem at St. Ives. Frobisher’s pipe stem, somehow, always gave rise to fresh accounts of the ubiquitous bush. “Banju Wangi!” I half shouted. “By golly” I admit it was weak, but I needed a moment to think. And I said it loud enough to put Frobisher right off the scent.

“Banju Wangi,” I said to Priestly. “Remember that pack of cannibals? Inky lot of blokes, what?” Priestly nodded, but didn’t offer to carry on. He was satisfied with simply recalling the rain. And there had been a spectacular rain in those Javanese days, if you can call it a rain. Which you can’t, really, no more than you would call a waterfall a faucet or the sun a gaslamp. A monsoon was what it was.

Roundabout twenty years back, then, it fell out that Priestly and I and poor Bill Kraken had, on the strength of Dr. Birdlip’s manuscript, taken ship to Java where we met, not unexpectedly, Professor St. Ives and Hasbro, themselves returning from a spate of very dangerous and mysterious space travel. The alien threat, as I said before, had been crushed, and the five of us had found ourselves deep in cannibal-infested jungles, beating our way through toward the Bali Straits in order to cross over to Penginuman where there lay, we fervently prayed, a Dutch freighter bound for home. The rain was sluicing down. It was mid-January, smack in the middle of the northwest monsoons, and we were slogging through jungles, trailed by orangutans and asps, hacking at creepers, and slowly metamorphosing into biped sponges.

On the banks of the Wangi River we stumbled upon a tribe of tiny Peewatin natives and traded them boxes of kitchen matches for a pair of long piroques. Bill Kraken gave his pocket watch to the local shaman in return for an odd bamboo umbrella with a shrunken head dangling from the handle by a brass chain. Kraken was, of course, round the bend in those days, but his purchase of the curious umbrella wasn’t an act of madness. He stayed far drier than the rest of us in the days that followed.

We set off, finally, down the Wangi beneath grey skies and a canopy of unbelievable green. The river was swollen with rain and littered with tangles of fallen tree trunks and vegetation that crumbled continually from either shore. Canoeing in a monsoon struck me as a trifle outré as the Frenchman would say, but St. Ives and Priestly agreed that the very wildness of the river would serve to discourage the vast and lumbering crocodiles which, during a more placid season, splashed through the shallows in frightful abundance. And the rain itself, pouring from the sky without pause, had a month before driven most of the cannibal tribes into higher elevations.

So we paddled and bailed and bailed and paddled, St. Ives managing, through a singular and mysterious invention of his own, to keep his pipe alight in the downpour, and I anticipating, monsoon or no, the prick of a dart on the back of my neck or the sight of a toothy, arch-eyed crocodile, intent upon dinner.

Our third night on the river, very near the coast, we found what amounted to a little sandy inlet scooped into the riverside. The bank above it had been worn away, and a cavern, overhung with vines and shaded by towering acacias and a pair of incredible teaks, opened up for some few yards. By the end of the week it would be underwater, but at present it was high and dry, and we required shelter only for the night. We pushed the piroques up onto the sand, tied them to tree trunks, and hunched into the little cavern, lighting a welcome and jolly fire.

That night was full of the cries of wild beasts, the screams of panthers and the shrill peep of winging bats. More than once great clacking-jawed crocodiles crept up out of the river and gave us the glad eye before slipping away again. Pygmy hippopotami stumbled up, to the vast surprise of the Professor, and watched us for a bit, blinking and yawning and making off again up the bank and into the undergrowth. St. Ives insisted that such beasts were indigenous only to the continent of Africa, and his observation encouraged Priestly to tell a very strange and sad tale — the story of Doctor Ignacio Narbondo. This Doctor Narbondo, it seems, practiced in London in the eighteenth century. He claimed to have developed any number of strange serums, including one which, ostensibly, would allow the breeding of unlike beasts: pigs with fishes and birds with hedgehogs. He was harried out of England as a vivisectionist, although he swore to his own innocence and to the efficacy of his serum. Three years later, after suffering the same fate in Venice, he set sail from Mombasa with a herd of pygmy hippos, determined to haul them across the Indian Ocean to the Malay Archipelago and breed them with the great hairy orangutans that flourished in the Borneo rain forests.

He was possessed, said Priestly, with the idea of one day docking at Marseilles or London and striding ashore flanked by an army of the unlikely offspring of two of the most ludicrous beasts imaginable, throwing the same fear into the civilized world that Hannibal must have produced when, with ten score of elephants, he popped in from beyond the Alps. Narbondo, however, was never seen again. He docked in Surabaja, disappeared into the jungles with his beasts, and, as they say of Captain England in Mauritius, went native. Whether Narbondo became, in the years that followed, the fabled Wildman of Borneo is speculation. Some say he did, some say he died of typhus in Bombay. His hippopotami, however, riddled with Narbondo’s serum, multiplied-within a small area of Eastern Java.

The explanation of the existence of the hippos seemed to whet St. Ives’s curiosity. He questioned Priestly for an hour, in fact, about this mysterious Doctor Narbondo, but Priestly had merely read about the mad doctor in Ashbless’s Account of London Madmen (a grossly unfair appellation, at least in regard to Doctor Narbondo) and he could remember little else.

St. Ives, Hasbro, and I, of course, already knew of the existence of this Narbondo, and of his secret identity, for he was not, as Frosbinder alleged, Ignacio Narbondo, who lies frozen in a Scandanacian Tarn. He was (and still is) Ignacio Narbondo’s long lost twin brother Ivan, who had stolen his brother’s name and traded on his reputation before the name and reputation fell into disrepute. His flight from England had less to do with vivisection than with the sworn enmity of the enraged Ignacio, an enmity that is now long cooled, if you’ll allow me a moment of levity.

Half a dozen times that night I awakened to the sounds of something crashing in the forest above, and twice, blinking awake, I saw wide, hairy faces, upside down, eyes aglow, peering at us from overhead — jungle beasts, hanging from the vine-covered ledge above to watch us as we slept. Visions of the supposed Narbondo’s hippo-apes flitted through my dreams, and when daylight wandered through the following morning, I was convinced that many of the past night’s visitations had not been made merely by the creatures of dreams, but had actually been the offspring, so to speak, of the misanthropic Doctor Narbondo.

We had a brief respite from the rain that morning, and, determined to make the most of it, we loaded our gear aboard the piroques and prepared to clamber in. The sun broke through the clouds about then, and golden rays slanted through the forest ceiling, stippling the jungle floor and setting off an opera of bird cries and monkey whistling. We stood and stared at the steamy radiance of the forest, beautiful beyond accounting, then turned toward the canoes. A shout from Hasbro, however, brought us up short. He’d seen something, that much was certain, in the jungle beyond the riverside cavern.

“What ho, man?” said St. Ives, anxious to be off yet overwhelmed with scientific curiosity.

“A temple of sorts, sir,” said Hasbro, pointing away into the forest. “I believe I see some sort of stone monolith or altar, sir. Perhaps a shrine to some heathen god.”

And sure enough, bathed now in sunlight was a little clearing in the trees. In it, scattered in a circle, were half a dozen stone rectangles, one almost as large as an automobile, all crumbling and half-covered with creepers and moss.

Bill Kraken, still suffering from the poulp madness that had so befuddled him in the past months, gave out a little cry and dashed past Hasbro up the bank and into the forest. The rest of us followed at a run, fearing that Bill would come to harm. If we had known what lay ahead, we would have been a bit quicker about it even yet.

What we found in the clearing was that circle of stone monoliths, crumbling, as I’ve said, with age. Dozens of bright green asps rested in the sunshine atop the stones, watching us through lazy eyes. Four wild pigs, rooting for insects, crashed off into the vegetation, setting off the flight of a score of apes which had, hitherto, been hidden away overhead in the treetops. In the midst of the circle of stones sat a peculiar and indescribably eerie statue, carved, it seemed, entirely of ivory. It was old, though clearly not so old as the monoliths surrounding it, and it was minutely carven; its mouth looked as if it were ready to speak, and its jaw was square and determined and revealed just a hint of sadness. On closer inspection it clearly wasn’t ivory that it had been carved from, for the stone, whatever it was, was veined with thin blue lines.

It was uncanny. Professor St. Ives speculated at first that it was some sort of rare Malaysian marble. And very fine marble at that — marble that Michelangelo would have blathered over. More astonishing than the marble, though, were its eyes — two great rubies, faceted so minutely that they threw the rays of the tropical sun in a thousand directions. And it was those ruby eyes that not only cut short our examination of the ruined ring of altars and the peculiar idol, but which were the end of poor old Bill Kraken, a fine scientist in his own right before falling into the hands of the aliens after Birdlip’s demise.

It was the flash of sunlight from those rubies that had instigated Kraken’s charge up the slope and into the clearing. While the rest of us had gathered about commenting on the strange veined stone, Bill had stood gaping, clutching his umbrella, hypnotized by the ruby lights which, as the forest foliage swayed in the breezes overhead, now shading the jungle floor, now opening and allowing sunlight to flood in upon us, played over his face like the glints of light thrown from one of those spinning mirrored globes that dangle from the ceiling of a ballroom.

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 super-stition, 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 pro-duct 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.

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.

The idol stared at the Professor, its mouth working, moaning, trying to speak, to cry out. “Nnnn…” it groaned. “Nnnar, Nnarbondo!” it finally shouted, screwing up its face awfully, positively creaking under the strain.

Doctor Narbondo! It seemed impossible, lunatic. But there it was. He lurched forward, pawing the air, stumbling toward the ruby, the idol’s eye. One pale hand fell on the edge of the table. The glasses danced briefly. Priestly’s port tumbled over, pouring out over the polished wood in a red pool. The rain and the wind howled outside, making the fire in the great hearth dance up the chimney. Firelight shone through the ruby, casting red embers of reflected light onto Narbondo’s face, bathing the cut-crystal decanter, three-quarters full of amber liquid, in a rosy, beckoning glow.

Narbondo’s hand crept toward the jewel, but his eye was on that decanter. He paused, fumbled at the jewel, dropped it, his fingers clutching, a sad, mewing sound coming from his throat. Then, with the relieved look of a man who’d finally crested some steep and difficult hill, as if he’d scaled a monumental precipice and been rewarded with a vision of El Dorado, of Shangri-la, of paradise itself, he grasped the decanter of Laphroaig and, shaking, a wide smile struggling into existence on his face, lifted it toward his mouth, thumbing the stopper off onto the tabletop.

Hasbro responded with instinctive horror to Narbondo’s obvious intent. He plucked up Priestly’s unused glass, said, “Allow me, sir,” and rescued the decanter, pouring out a good inch and proffering the glass to the gaping Narbondo. I fully expected that Hasbro would sail across and join Frobisher’s heaped form unconscious on the floor. But that wasn’t the case. Narbondo hesitated, recollecting, bits and pieces of European culture and civilized instinct filtering up from unfathomable depths. He nodded to Hasbro, took the proffered glass, and, swirling the whisky around in a tight, quick circle, passed it once under his nose and tossed it off.

A long and heartfelt sigh escaped him. He stood there just so, his head back, his mouth working slowly, savoring the peaty, smoky essence that lingered along his tongue. And Hasbro, himself imbued with the instincts of the archetypal gentleman’s gentleman, poured another generous dollop into the glass, replaced the stopper, and set the decanter in the center of the table. Then he uprighted Frobisher’s fallen chair and motioned toward it. Narbondo nodded again heavily, and, looking from one to the other of us, slumped into the chair with the air of a man who’d come a long, long way home.

Thus ends the story of, as I threatened in the early pages, perhaps the strangest of all the adventures that befell Langdon St. Ives, his man Hasbro, and myself. We ate that cutlet for supper, just as I’d planned, and we drained that decanter of whisky before the evening was through. St. Ives, his scientific fires blazing, told of his study over the years of the history of the mysterious Doctor Narbondo, of his slow realization that the curiously veined marble of the idol in the forest hadn’t been marble at all, had, indeed, been the petrified body of Narbondo himself, preserved by jungle shaman and witch doctors using Narbondo’s own serums. His eyes, being mere jellies, were removed and replaced with jewels, the optical qualities of the oddly wrought gems allowing him some vague semblance of strange vision. And there he had stood for close upon two hundred years, tended by priests from the tribes of Peewatin natives until that fateful day when Bill Kraken had gouged out his eye. Narbondo’s weird reanimation and slow journey west over the long years would, in itself, be a tale long in the telling, as would that of St. Ives’s quest for the lost ruby, a search that led him, finally, to a curiosity shop near the Tate Gallery where he purchased the gem for two pound six, the owner sure that it was simply a piece of cleverly cut glass.

At first I thought it was wild coincidence that Narbondo should arrive at the Explorers Club on the very day that St. Ives appeared with the ruby. But now I’m sure that there was no coincidence involved. Narbondo was bound to find his eye, and if St. Ives hadn’t retrieved it from the curiosity shop, then Narbondo would have.

The doctor, I can tell you, is safe and sound and has done us all a service by renewing Langdon St. Ives’s interests in the medical arts. Together, take my word for it, they work at perfecting the curious serums. Where they work will, I’m afraid, have to remain utterly secret. You can understand that. Curiosity seekers, doubting Thomases, and modern-day Ponce de Leons would flock forth gaping and demanding if his whereabouts were generally known.

And so it was that Doctor Narbondo returned. He had no army of supporters, no mutant beasts from the Borneo jungles, no hippos and apes with which to send a thrill of terror across the continent, no last laugh. Cold reality, I fear, can’t measure up to the curious turnings of a madman’s dreams. But if it was a grand and startling homecoming he wanted when he set sail for distant jungle shores two hundred years ago, he did quite moderately well for himself, I think you’ll agree.