Willis Pule Escapes the Morgue

Willis Pule Escapes the Morgue marks a change in Pule’s position from a presumed subject of Ignacio Narbondo’s experiments to an active fugitive. Awakening on a slab with no clear account of how he arrived there, he recognizes the morgue around him and fears that he himself has been reanimated. He escapes, kills a man who tries to stop him, and sets out for Wardour Street. His flight turns an uncertain experience of bodily vulnerability into a deliberate return to Narbondo’s orbit, driven by grievance and the promise of Dorothy Keeble.

Awakening and Recognition

Pule comes to suddenly in an unfamiliar, cold place. Dripping water and the stiffness and soreness he feels when he moves are his first indications that something is wrong; he thinks he may be lying on a stone slab or pavement. The environment, rather than anyone’s explanation, supplies the next clue. He sees large drawers like filing cabinets, one open with a foot protruding and a paper tag tied to its toe. He recognizes the room as a morgue.

That recognition does not resolve what has happened to him. Pule reasons that he is dead, then recoils from the contradiction that he is conscious. He wonders whether Narbondo has reanimated him for some purpose, but the scene presents this as Pule’s horrified suspicion, not a confirmed explanation of his condition. The uncertainty matters: the morgue’s ordinary signs of death are now entangled with the possibility that Narbondo’s experiments have crossed into his own body.

Escape from the Morgue

Pule finds a way out by acting before he understands his circumstances. At the doorway to an ill-lit antechamber, he sees a man at a desk, facing away. Rather than approach unarmed, he searches among the nearby items for something he can use and takes a bone saw. When the attendant turns, apparently expecting a returning worker, he encounters Pule instead. The initial attempt to get past him fails; Pule then seizes a crystal paperweight and strikes the attendant. The paperweight breaks, and the man dies.

Pule leaves the attendant behind and reaches the London night. The escape is therefore not a quiet release from confinement: it secures his freedom at the cost of another person’s life. Its abruptness also mirrors Pule’s disorientation. He has only fragments of an explanation, but he is able to convert those fragments into action, first finding a weapon and then forcing a route out of the building.

Narbondo’s Experiments and Pule’s Fear

Pule’s suspicion draws force from the experimental work already associated with Narbondo. In an earlier laboratory scene, Narbondo watches koi feed and attends to a carp that appears sick. He extracts a bean-shaped gland from the fish and preserves it in a vial. When Shiloh arrives, Narbondo dismisses the dead carp as cat food. In a later preparation, Narbondo and Willis Pule place a fresh corpse on a gurney beside a living, sluggish carp. These episodes establish a recurring connection between fish, bodily materials, and attempts to restore the dead.

They do not prove that Narbondo caused Pule’s condition, and Pule himself has no certainty about what has happened. But the morgue makes his fear more than an arbitrary fancy: the body on the slab belongs to a world in which Narbondo has worked directly with corpses and fish as part of an experiment. The contrast between a tagged body, classified as dead, and a conscious man struggling to move gives the escape its central tension. Pule can act, yet he cannot confidently explain the condition from which he is escaping.

The Road to Wardour Street

Once outside, Pule chooses a destination rather than simply fleeing. He heads for Wardour Street, where Narbondo awaits his fate. Pule recalls that Dorothy Keeble had been promised to him as a prize if his journey to Harrogate succeeded. By this point, he believes he has been cheated of the emerald and of the future he had imagined. He treats success as a relative matter and resolves to take what he considers his before the day ends.

The escape thus carries the morgue’s immediate danger into the wider struggle around Narbondo. Pule does not emerge with the emerald, proof of what was done to him, or a settled plan beyond reaching Wardour Street. Instead, the journey gives him a new and urgent objective: to confront the man he holds responsible and pursue the promised reward. The event ends with Pule moving freely through London, but not free of the experiment, the failed mission, or the conflicts that brought him to the morgue.