I found the museum, except for the red-nosed attendant and the pale pink girl in the ticket window, deserted. The accursed automaton, I feared, would be closed for business, and therefore it was with satisfaction that I noticed that the coin slot was open, and that, having dropped in my tribute to genius, chess, and machinery, I heard the squeak of the moving mechanism and the brown, jointed fingers of the figure scraping across the board.
I cannot believe that the Sheik was playing his best game. At the end of a half-hour, when the machinery stopped to notify me that another coin was due, I had a decided advantage in position. Before another fifteen minutes, during which we both played rapidly, had gone, the issue was no longer in doubt and I stopped.
“Ha!” said I, aloud. “You will not wink at me this time. Is there any other game you can play better than you play this?”
The automaton was silent.
I cannot say what impelled me to suggest it, but I drew a piece of paper and a pencil out of my pocket and said, “Can you write?”
The door in the chest of the Sheik flew open then for a moment as if to expose his heart to me. Though I had put no coin into the machine, I saw the levers and gears start to move again, the door of that pulmonary cavity was closed and the brown fingers jerked their way forward.
“Not only can write, but is anxious to do so,” I remarked, as I extended the pencil and laid the paper on the chessboard.
For a second or two I waited, as the hand of the mechanical creature wrote a few words: I remember that during those seconds I heard a clock somewhere striking six. I did not make any attempt to see beforehand what he had chosen to inscribe, for I assumed that it would be some empty answer to my bantering remarks. At last the pencil dropped upon the board and rolled under one of the cross-legged creature’s red Turkish slippers, the whirr of the mechanism stopped abruptly, and I picked up the writing.
Having read the scrawl once I believed myself out of my wits. I could not credit my eyes. I could not gather my reason. I was breathless, transfixed!
I looked up at the face of the Sheik and found that, in place of the malicious wink with which he proclaimed himself a victor in a game of draughts, his glass eyes, with their whites in sharp contrast to his swarthy wax skin, were both wide open and set in a glare of such ferocity and malign hatred that they seemed to flash the fire of life and lighten the gloom of the corner with rays of evil.