Pule Tries to Open the Keeble Box and Release Green Mist

In “Pule Tries to Open the Keeble Box and Release Green Mist,” Willis Pule confronts an object whose purpose he cannot read and whose mechanism answers curiosity with danger. He hopes to learn what the box contains, but turning its crank releases green dust rather than revealing a lid or contents. The episode makes the Keeble box an active force in the story: its design frustrates unauthorized access, threatens its handler, and leaves the meaning of its contents unresolved.

The Box and Pule’s Uncertainty

Pule has recovered the Keeble box from a man on a train, but repeated shaking gives him no clue to its contents. He sees no lid and considers whether the device is deliberately made to defeat someone who does not know how to open it. Its spout and crank suggest a potentially dangerous mechanism; the painted animals, by contrast, make that impression harder to trust. The competing clues do not solve the puzzle. They leave Pule weighing the possibility of a trap against the possibility that the box is merely difficult to operate.

His uncertainty is also practical. He wonders whether the device might explode, yet he has no evidence that it contains explosives. Rather than identify a safe method of opening it, he turns the unknown mechanism itself into a test. The scene’s tension comes from that gap between appearance and knowledge: the box presents a handle he can use, but not an explanation of what using it will do.

The Decision to Wind the Crank

Pule decides that action might help him escape his immediate predicament. He picks up the box and begins winding the crank slowly. He reasons that if it opens, he will discover what is inside; if it does not, he can treat it as a possible bomb and carry it to Ignacio Narbondo’s laboratory. There, he plans to leave it in exchange for Bill Kraken’s box. Even the plan’s fallback is hazardous: Pule acknowledges that the object might explode before he reaches the laboratory, while also regarding damage to Ignacio Narbondo’s equipment and work as an acceptable outcome.

As he winds faster, the mechanism tightens. Pule listens at the projecting spout and peers into it, trying to follow the light inside. The ratchet sounds confirm that the crank is operating internal clockwork, but not what that clockwork is meant to accomplish. A click and a whir provoke a sudden retreat. The box has not disclosed its contents; it has only made its hidden operation more apparent and more alarming.

The Release of Green Dust

The box emits a jet of gas across Pule’s face, then sends out a much larger cloud of green dust. He throws himself away from it, but the dust fills the room. The sequence transforms his earlier speculation about an explosive device into an immediate fear of poisoning. Pule interprets the release as a deliberate attempt to eliminate him, and connects that imagined plot to his betrayal of the person he calls the monster. In the moment, the box’s unknown purpose becomes inseparable from the danger he believes he has brought upon himself.

His escape is improvised from objects already in the room. When the window will not open, Pule tears down his coat and throws it over the still-operating box, smothering the escaping material. He then gathers the mirror and books and throws them through the closed window. With an opening at last, he leans out into the night air and breathes deeply. Books and broken glass fall to the street four stories below. The effort gives him distance from the cloud, but does not open the box or establish what its contents are.

Reconsideration and the Box’s Wider Context

After leaving the room, Pule’s fear subsides enough for him to reconsider his conclusion. He recognizes that a coordinated attempt by his enemies to poison him would not explain the unlikely chain of events that brought him onto the train at Harrogate. He now thinks that he may have misjudged the device through his own eagerness to act. One possibility is that the box contains an emerald and that uninformed tampering is meant to destroy it. He considers whether Jack Owlesby would have preferred the gem’s destruction to a thief’s profit, or whether Owlesby might have been smuggling it. These remain questions, not answers: the green dust does not confirm either the contents or the designer’s intention.

The episode sits within a larger pattern in which unfamiliar mechanisms and biological materials shape the course of events. Elsewhere, Ignacio Narbondo extracts a gland from a carp and preserves it in a vial; Theophilus Godall later suspects that Narbondo can revive corpses and speculates that Kelso Drake may want either workers or access to the desired creature in the box. At Narbondo’s laboratory, a carp is brought beside a fresh corpse during a resurrection attempt. These details establish a context of secret experiments and uncertain exchanges, but they do not identify the green dust or prove that the box is connected to the experiments. Pule’s encounter instead sharpens the central uncertainty: the Keeble box is valuable enough to pursue, dangerous enough to defeat a crude opening attempt, and still opaque when he abandons the room.

Pule does not keep the box in hope of understanding it. Having concluded that it is worth nothing to him in its present state, he wraps his coat around the still-whirring mechanism and leaves, intending to obtain Narbondo’s box instead. His landlord, hurrying onto the stairs, begins to address him and then falls silent at the sight of him. The departure ends the immediate emergency without resolving the device’s secret. The box remains active, and Pule’s attempt to control it has produced an escape rather than an answer.