Pule Kills Billy Deener and Takes the Keeble Box

Pule Kills Billy Deener and Takes the Keeble Box is a reversal within the confrontation on Hampstead Heath: Willis Pule interrupts Billy Deener’s attack on Langdon St. Ives, but quickly becomes a threat to St. Ives himself. The episode ends with Deener dead and Pule escaping with a Keeble box, its precise identity uncertain even to the witness. That brief seizure connects the violence on the Heath to the wider struggle over boxes, experimental knowledge, and the possibility of reanimation.

Background and Stakes

The immediate danger arises as St. Ives scrambles clear of a ship amid shouting on the Heath. He hears shots and sees Deener beneath an oak, holding a pistol; an empty horse and wagon stand tethered nearby. Deener appears to be trying to drive St. Ives from cover, and St. Ives understands that the shots are intended to kill him. The ship offers temporary protection, but the commotion and the exposed ground make the encounter precarious.

The box matters beyond its value as a stolen object. Earlier, St. Ives had encountered a creature confined in a box, and Theophilus Godall had considered what Kelso Drake might want from Ignacio Narbondo: either an army of workers or the means to obtain what Sebastian Owlesby had desired. Godall presented these possibilities as uncertain, not established fact. His speculation nevertheless places the box within a contest over Narbondo’s experiments and the unusual being associated with it. The Keeble box Pule takes therefore carries the danger of transferring control, even though the scene does not establish exactly which box it is or what Pule intends to do with it.

The Attack on Deener

A man suddenly leans out of the tree above Deener and strikes him with what appears to be a cricket bat. St. Ives recognizes the attacker as Pule only as the assault unfolds. Deener collapses, but Pule continues striking him. The intervention changes the immediate balance of danger: Deener can no longer continue his attack on St. Ives, yet the violence does not bring St. Ives to safety.

St. Ives calls out and approaches cautiously, reacting to the apparent excess of the attack and the possibility that Deener is already defeated. Pule throws the bat aside, turns toward him, and picks up Deener’s pistol. He aims it at St. Ives, who stops and retreats rather than risk drawing the gathered Londoners into the line of fire. The reversal is central to the episode: Pule has stopped Deener, but he does not thereby become St. Ives’s ally. St. Ives reads his actions as an effort to gain the opportunity to kill him, although Pule does not fire.

The Keeble Box and Pule’s Escape

Instead of continuing to threaten St. Ives, Pule crosses to the tethered wagon and searches among Deener’s belongings. He pulls out a Keeble box. St. Ives recognizes the kind of object at once, but cannot tell which of the boxes it is. That distinction remains unresolved as Pule makes off with it. St. Ives’s recognition establishes the box as consequential; his uncertainty prevents the episode from settling the larger question of what, precisely, has changed hands.

St. Ives leaves his cover and runs toward Pule, despite the risk of pursuing him. His urgency is sharpened by remembered damage associated with Pule: St. Ives recalls the rocket bursting through the roof of the silo and Pule smashing Kepler’s bust in his study. These memories make the escape more than a theft witnessed from a distance; they suggest why St. Ives fears what Pule might do with the box. But Pule, described as mad, pays no attention to the advancing St. Ives. He runs into the night, sobbing and muttering words that St. Ives cannot understand. The box is gone before St. Ives can stop him.

Consequences and Significance

St. Ives discovers that Deener is dead. Pule’s intervention has therefore ended Deener’s pursuit, but it also leaves the Heath with a death, a stolen box, and an armed fugitive who has just threatened St. Ives. The scene offers no reconciliation or explanation from Pule: the abrupt change from attacking Deener to aiming at St. Ives makes his actions difficult to read as a rescue, even though they first remove the immediate threat.

The event also brings together two strands of the story. The earlier experiments link Narbondo’s work to carp glands and attempts to revive the dead: he feeds worms to koi, extracts a gland from a carp, and later works with a sluggish carp beside a corpse. St. Ives has also encountered reanimated corpses. These details do not establish what Pule plans to do with the box, but they make its removal part of a larger contest over dangerous experimental materials and knowledge, rather than an isolated act of theft. The episode ends with control still unsettled: Pule escapes, St. Ives remains behind, and the reader is left without certainty about which box was taken or where it will go next.