then at Jack, “was out of his wits. What he accomplished - what he committed - can’t be justified, but it can be explained. And in the most roundabout way can be excused - forgiven at least if you keep in mind the poison that had trickled into his soul. His discussion of the night in Limehouse is accurate - to a degree. But he dissembled throughout. That much is clear. He admits it in the pages that follow. And as I say, what he admits is all the more horrifying, but it explains a great deal. Poor Nell!”
The Captain seemed to stiffen even more at the sound of the name, and he clanked his heavy glass onto the wooden arm of his Morris chair, brown ale sloshing out onto the oak. St. Ives noted that Kraken had disappeared during the course of the narrative. Poor man, thought St. Ives, searching for his place in the journals. Even after fifteen years, the story of his master’s decline is too fresh for him. But the story had to be told. There was nothing for it but to go on, now that he’d launched out:
“I’m possessed by the most evil aching of the head - such that my eyes seem to press down to the size of screwholes, so that I see as through a telescope turned wrong end to. Laudanum alone relieves it, but fills me with dreams even more evil than the pain in my forebrain. I’m certain that the pain is my due - that it is a taste of hell, and nothing less. The dreams are full of that Limehouse night, of the toothy grin of that damned pumpkin, swinging swinging swinging in the fog. And I can feel myself decay, feel my tissues drying and rotting like a beetle-eaten fungus on a stump, and my blood pounds across the top of my skull. I can see my own eyes, wide as half crowns and black with death and decay, and Narbondo ahead with that ghastly shears. I pushed him along! That’s the truth of it. I railed at him, I hissed. I’d have that gland, is what I’d have, and before the night was gone. I’d hold in my hand my salvation.
“And when he failed, when he ran down East India Dock Road in that stooped half hop, terrified, it was I who set them on him. It was I who cried out to stop him. He little knows it. He’d outdistanced me. He was certain it was the police who shouted. And when they were beating him, by God I wasn’t slack. I was a ruin of failure and loathing and rot as I stamped on his hands and helped those drunken toughs drag him into the river where it splashed and roiled and slammed itself to fury below the Old Stairs, and I hoped by God to see him dead and picked by fishes.
“But there I was unlucky. Like the ghost at the feast, he came unlooked for in the night as I sat in a waking horror in the cabinet, listening to the thing in the box, staring, half expecting the tread of feet on the stair that would announce the end, the gibbet, the headsman’s axe. There it came. Three in the morning it was. Deadly silent. A tramp, tramp, tramp on the wooden stairs - very heavy - and a shadow across the curtain. A hunched shadow. The door fell open on its hinge, and the hunchback stood against a scattering of lights and a clearing sky with such a look of abomination about him that his collapse onto the tiles failed to eradicate it - just as it failed to eradicate my horror of him.
“I should have killed him. I should have slit his throat. I should have cut out the toad under his fifth rib and put it in a cage. But I didn’t. Fear kept me from it. Fear, perhaps, of my own evil. It seemed to me that his face was my own, that he and I were one, that Ignacio Narbondo had somehow drawn part of me in with him, consumed the only part of me that had ever been worth a farthing, and had left a strengthless, malignant pudding, poured into the chair where I sat until half past ten the next morning.
“And it was thus that Nell found me. I begged her to kill me. I hadn’t the courage to perform the deed. I pleaded. I told her of the costerlad. I swore at the same time that I was done with the pursuit - that the creation
The Captain seemed to stiffen even more at the sound of the name, and he clanked his heavy glass onto the wooden arm of his Morris chair, brown ale sloshing out onto the oak. St. Ives noted that Kraken had disappeared during the course of the narrative. Poor man, thought St. Ives, searching for his place in the journals. Even after fifteen years, the story of his master’s decline is too fresh for him. But the story had to be told. There was nothing for it but to go on, now that he’d launched out:
“I’m possessed by the most evil aching of the head - such that my eyes seem to press down to the size of screwholes, so that I see as through a telescope turned wrong end to. Laudanum alone relieves it, but fills me with dreams even more evil than the pain in my forebrain. I’m certain that the pain is my due - that it is a taste of hell, and nothing less. The dreams are full of that Limehouse night, of the toothy grin of that damned pumpkin, swinging swinging swinging in the fog. And I can feel myself decay, feel my tissues drying and rotting like a beetle-eaten fungus on a stump, and my blood pounds across the top of my skull. I can see my own eyes, wide as half crowns and black with death and decay, and Narbondo ahead with that ghastly shears. I pushed him along! That’s the truth of it. I railed at him, I hissed. I’d have that gland, is what I’d have, and before the night was gone. I’d hold in my hand my salvation.
“And when he failed, when he ran down East India Dock Road in that stooped half hop, terrified, it was I who set them on him. It was I who cried out to stop him. He little knows it. He’d outdistanced me. He was certain it was the police who shouted. And when they were beating him, by God I wasn’t slack. I was a ruin of failure and loathing and rot as I stamped on his hands and helped those drunken toughs drag him into the river where it splashed and roiled and slammed itself to fury below the Old Stairs, and I hoped by God to see him dead and picked by fishes.
“But there I was unlucky. Like the ghost at the feast, he came unlooked for in the night as I sat in a waking horror in the cabinet, listening to the thing in the box, staring, half expecting the tread of feet on the stair that would announce the end, the gibbet, the headsman’s axe. There it came. Three in the morning it was. Deadly silent. A tramp, tramp, tramp on the wooden stairs - very heavy - and a shadow across the curtain. A hunched shadow. The door fell open on its hinge, and the hunchback stood against a scattering of lights and a clearing sky with such a look of abomination about him that his collapse onto the tiles failed to eradicate it - just as it failed to eradicate my horror of him.
“I should have killed him. I should have slit his throat. I should have cut out the toad under his fifth rib and put it in a cage. But I didn’t. Fear kept me from it. Fear, perhaps, of my own evil. It seemed to me that his face was my own, that he and I were one, that Ignacio Narbondo had somehow drawn part of me in with him, consumed the only part of me that had ever been worth a farthing, and had left a strengthless, malignant pudding, poured into the chair where I sat until half past ten the next morning.
“And it was thus that Nell found me. I begged her to kill me. I hadn’t the courage to perform the deed. I pleaded. I told her of the costerlad. I swore at the same time that I was done with the pursuit - that the creation
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