The Digging Leviathan

Prologue

In the silver light of the midnight moon the mangroves looked animate. Twisted roots arched out into brackish water at the mouth of the Rio Jari, stretching away north in tangled profusion toward Surinam where pipid frogs chirped and paddled in slack water. South, not five miles distant, rolled the black silent expanse of the Amazon, nearly forty miles across. The night was warm, and the moon seemed to cover half the sky, bathing yellow mangrove blossoms in watery beams and playing across the mottled bark of an enormous orchid-hung trunk that lay half submerged in the river.

Basil Peach gripped the ragged end of a broken limb, steadied himself, and flung a weighted net into the river. A paraffin lantern burned on shore, but the dirty yellow glow was lost almost at once in the opalescent moonlight.

William Ashbless wrote poetry and watched Peach fish. Peach hadn’t said anything for three hours. Above, on a bit of sandy bank, slept Professor Russel Latzarel and the lepidopterist, Phillip Mays. It was nearing two in the morning. Ashbless would have been asleep himself, but the moonlight was conducive to poetry, and he had suspicions about Basil Peach.

A week past they’d fished the Peewatin River in French Guiana for cichlids, then had come south on a Coastline ferry bound for Belem and Recife. It was slow going. Basil Peach always had one eye on the jungle; it drew him as a fish is drawn to the shadows of a submarine cave. At Macapa he didn’t leave the ship, but lay in his cabin for three days, sweltering in air so humid that it threatened to melt into vapor.

Professor Latzarel hired a boat at Macapa and, to the astonishment of the fisherman who owned it, floated up and down the bank of the Amazon, sounding deep pools with a five-hundred-foot line hung with a lead weight the size of an orange. A week later at the mouth of the Rio Jari, he ran out of line. The weight plummeted down and down into the dark river, yanking out yards of rope until there wasn’t any more beyond the eight or ten inches tied to the peculiar little fiddlehead of his hired coracle. Professor Latzarel cursed himself for not having another five hundred feet — but it was an ambivalent sort of cursing, since he knew, or at least hoped, that a thousand feet wouldn’t have been enough. The pool, he was certain, was bottomless. In the following days he caught seventy-four tetras, each about as long as his thumb. The fish were an unusual luminescent blue — blue tinged with the springtime colors of salmon and pink and violet. Professor Latzarel was entirely satisfied.

But Basil Peach was restive. His fishing was pointless. His long, hairless face was still fleshy white despite the tropical sun. Day and night he wore a visored cap with a transparent green bill about a foot long, with a high-collared shirt, the flaps of the collar turned up to hide his neck and the two rows of crescent-shaped vestigial gills that rose to a point almost behind his ears. Basil Peach was peculiar, Ashbless had to admit. His father and grandfather had been peculiar, too. They could quite easily have been fish themselves, or pale anthropoid amphibians. Basil was certainly more at home in the mangrove swamps and the jungles of the Amazon Basin than in the streets of Los Angeles five thousand miles away.

Peach cast his net again, pulling on a leader line to bring it around through the current. Ashbless scribbled in his notebook and smoked his pipe. He considered titling his sequence of poems Amazon Moon in honor of his old friend Don Blanding. What he wanted more than anything else was a glass of Scotch and a bottle of beer to chase it with. In the corner of his right eye he could see the bottom arc of the moon, enormous in the sky. It seemed to Ashbless that he was sitting in a bowl formed of mangroves, and that the moon was a lid settling down over him. He could see shadows, perhaps of mountains, on its surface, and along the eastern hemisphere flowed what appeared to be winding swerves of an old dusty riverbed across dry plains, a shadow river that would have dwarfed the Amazon. The whole thing was a leering ivory face, an ancient Japanese netsuke that swallowed the stars. Basil Peach was oblivious to it. He stood among waterweeds cocking his head.

There was a tremendous splashing upriver. Peach dropped his seine, and it lay for a moment slack on the water before coining abruptly to life, wriggling and flopping and sweeping down over the submerged log, finally catching on a limb. Upriver the water was alive with silver fire. A million glints of reflected moonlight shone from the churning surface, spreading out across the dark river. Little arcing glimmers appeared and disappeared as if someone were casting out handfuls of blue diamonds. It was teeming with fish, thousands of blue tetras glowing in the phosphorescent light of the impossible moon.

A moaning filled the air as if the very atmosphere were being stretched by the pull of tides, and countless fish rose in a cloud of iridescence over the jungle, whirling into the moon as it fell back through the heavens. Silver stars blinked on around it, seeming for all the world to be the fish themselves, and the river was silent and dark except for the furtive splashing of the thing in the net.

When Ashbless left off watching the moon and picked up his pen, Basil Peach was twenty yards upriver, sloshing through shallows, bound, perhaps, for the moon himself. Ashbless watched him disappear, waited for an hour, then fell asleep in the sultry night, waking in the morning when the sun peeped up over the mangroves. Peach had not returned.

A splashing in the river reminded Ashbless of the fish in the net. He and Mays pulled it in and rolled it onto the shore grasses. To Latzarel’s wild surprise, it was a marine coelacanth, black and scaly and dying in the sun, some night creature having ripped into its underbelly in the early morning. Latzarel dissected the fish, bottling its organs, convinced, predictably, that it wasn’t a member of the living genus Latimeria. In its stomach he found shell and tentacle fragments of a straight-chambered cephalopod, possibly a late Devonian squid.

Basil Peach never returned. Four months later Latzarel received a postcard mailed from Lake Windermere in central England.

Chapter 1

Hot winds had blown down out of the Santa Ana Canyon for three days, charging the air with static electricity and the smell of the desert. The Hollywood Hills and San Gabriel Mountains were full of fire. It seemed likely that before the first of November the entirety of the Los Angeles basin would be burned to cinder. Plumes of black smoke clouded the horizon, and fine black ash and soot drizzled like dead rain when the winds fell and left off blowing the smoke away to the northwest. The evening hills flickered with patches of orange flame, and the night air was full of sirens screaming away up the boulevard. Serious reporters chattered from the car radio, mouthing suspicions of arson. But to Jim Hastings, who rode along in his Uncle Edward’s Hudson Wasp bound for the ocean, speculations about arson seemed immaterial. He was fairly sure that even if all arsonists suddenly disappeared from the earth, the scrub-covered foothills, feeling the sweep of hot autumn winds, would set themselves ablaze in the tradition of Mr. Krook of the rag and bottle shop.

There was a stupendous low tide, a negative eight feet. The rock reefs along the shores of the Palos Verdes Peninsula were exposed two hundred yards seaward at three o’clock in the afternoon. Onshore breezes that had sprung up in late morning kept the skies above the shoreline clear as rainwater. The sun shone on little wavelets in sharp glints, and from the top of the cliffs Jim Hastings and his best friend Giles Peach could see Catalina Island floating mythically. It seemed as if every bit of chaparral and gnarled oak on the distant island were visible and that the Santa Barbara Channel had, mysteriously, awakened to find itself a part of the Aegean Sea. The two scrambled down a steep dirt trail to the beach, leaving the unloading of the old Hudson to Jim’s uncle, Edward St. Ives. Jim, a romantic, claimed to have heard that wild peccary and cyclops lived in caves in the cliffs and wandered out onto the beaches on deserted winter days. Gill, a pragmatist, said he supposed that was a lie.

The two of them wandered from one long shelf of rock to another, finding successively larger tidepools that contained successively stranger fish. Tiny octopi and violet nudibranchs hovered in the shadows of eel grass and blue-green algae. Little schools of silver opaleye perch darted across the expanse of larger pools, and in one, guarded by two lumpy-looking orange parents, hovered ten thousand baby garibaldi, shining like blue fire when they darted out of the shadows of rocks and into the sunlight.

Uncle Edward caught up with them, carrying the wooden bucket that he called Momus’ glass. The bottom had been carefully sawed out and a round piece of double strength window glass caulked in. When the glass-bottomed bucket was partially submerged in the rippling water of a pool, the land beneath sprang into sharp clarity as if beyond the wall of an aquarium.

Such were the depths of the pools, however, that in some of them there was nothing but shadow below. The reds and blues and greens of the algae faded in the depths, and the pools fell away finally into darkness. It was impossible to say whether a crab scuttling over a bed of sea lettuce was ten feet beneath the surface or twenty, or whether the seeming depth was a trick of refraction and the crab only a foot below them.

Jim broke mussels to bits, smashing them against rocks and dropping pieces of slippery orange flesh into the pool, watching them disappear between the clutching fingers of anemones. Once, just for the slip of an instant, he fancied he saw a great luminous eye peer up at him from a swaying shadow deep below — the eye of a fish who had wandered up out of a deep ocean trench.

Jim had the idea that the pools were somehow prodigiously deep. He had read, in fact, that the entirety of Los Angeles lay on what amounted to a floating bed of rock. A deep enough hole would sooner or later find the ocean. Uncle Edward insisted that at any particular moment, while you sat in your armchair smoking your pipe and reading your book, a submarine might well be cruising a mile beneath you, its running lights startling schools of giant squid. These tidepools, then, might go anywhere they pleased. That was pretty much the way Jim saw it. And Giles was in no hurry to disagree, as he had in the matter of the cyclops. He had a strange affinity for the ocean, for the idea of ancient, Paleozoic seas and the monsters that crept — and might still creep — across dim ocean floors.

Giles had been born, like his father, with a neat set of vestigial gills along either side of his neck. Coincidentally, the index and middle fingers of each of his hands were partially webbed. Doctors had suggested operating on the baby, but Basil Peach had been dead against it, owing, perhaps, to being the obvious progenitor of the deformities. To alter them would be to admit to them, and in those days Basil Peach would admit no such thing. Jim hadn’t thought much about Gill’s deformities, such as they were, until he met Oscar Pallcheck. He had assumed that any number of people had such ornamentation. Oscar, however, had immediately seen the humor in Giles’ nickname. It still made him laugh; he could stretch a joke out over years. Giles, however, was above it, or seemed to be.

So Jim didn’t expect Giles to refute his theory of bottomless pools. He assumed that if Giles had sported a single eye in the center of his forehead, then he would have been more amenable to the idea of cyclops. Giles borrowed the bucket, lay across a dry expanse of rock, and gazed entranced into the pool, watching for the leviathan.

About then there was a shout from Uncle Edward. Jim hurried across from one rock to another, plunging up to his knees in a tidepool on the way to where his uncle was thrusting his hand and arm into the depths. Jim looked sharply in the pool for some treasure, for a wonderful seashell or a pearl or a Spanish coin. But the surface of the water was rippled with wind and rising tide, and churned by the repeated dunkings of Edward’s arm. Abruptly, his uncle gasped in a deep breath, plunged his head and shoulders into the cold water rand came up holding what at first appeared to be a white murex or a pelican’s foot shell. But on closer examination it wasn’t either one. It was the tiny bleached skeleton of a human hand.

The discovery, although strange and magical enough to Jim, seemed to suggest immense mysteries to Uncle Edward, who slogged off across the reefs through the rising tide, muttering about diving bells. The tide was quickly coming in, and all of them were wet to the waist before they clambered up the steep cliffs to the car. No cyclops peered out at them.

On the return trip Giles Peach was still under the sway of the deep pools, for he took only a half-hearted interest in the little hand. It occurred to Jim, as the Hudson rounded a curve in the Coast Highway and the green ocean disappeared to westward, that it was a pity he hadn’t some sort of tens — some facsimile of the glass-bottomed bucket, of Momus’ glass — to shove up against Giles’ head in order to see what was inside. It wouldn’t at all have surprised him if the view were one of gently waving eel grass and sea lettuce and wandering chitons and limpets.

It was about then that Giles Peach was put in the way of the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Edward St. Ives was a collector of books, especially of fantasy and science fiction, the older and tawdrier the better. Plots and cover illustrations that smacked of authenticity didn’t interest him. It was sea monsters; cigar-shaped, crenelated rockets; and unmistakable flying saucers that attracted him. There was something in the appearance of such things that appealed to that part of him that appreciated the old Hudson Wasp. And beyond that, he loved the idea of owning great quantities of things. He wasn’t in the habit of reading the books, since the texts so rarely made good on the promise of the illustrations. Once a month or so, after a particularly satisfactory trip to Acres of Books, he’d drag out the lot of his paperback Burroughs novels, lining up Tarzan books here and Martian books there and Pellucidar books somewhere else. The Roy Krenkel covers were the most amazing, with their startling slashes and dabs of impressionist color and their distant spired cities half in ruin and shadow beneath a purple sky.

“Look at this machine, Jim,” Uncle Edward would say, pointing at the weird, suspended apparatus operated by the Mastermind of Mars. There on the cover was a bluish-purple complex of metallic globes and rotors and suspended silver wires, and the goggle-eyed Mastermind waving an impossible syringe over the supine body of an orange-robed maiden.

“What do you suppose he does with this?” Uncle Edward would ask.

“Does he grow turnips?” Jim would ask.

After which Uncle Edward, pretending to take a really close look at it, would reply, “Why I believe he does. It’s a turnip transformer. That’s exactly what it is.”

So one Saturday when Burroughs was spread across the living room, Giles Peach wandered in and fell away into the covers of those books as he’d fallen into the depths of the tidepools. The illustrations were windows into alternate worlds, and he quickly saw a way to boost himself over the sill and clamber through. He fingered this volume and that, amazed at mastodons and sunlit jungle depths, and he traced with his finger the smoky line of cloud drift beyond the domes of the city of Opar.

“Why, look at this machine,” Uncle Edward cried, winking at Jim and pointing once again to the globular device. “What do you suppose he does with this?”

Jim was too well schooled in the game by then not to ask, “Does he grow turnips?” in a sincere enough tone to snatch Giles back into the living room.

“I doubt that he grows turnips,” said Giles, who had no humor in him. “At least he doesn’t grow them with this machine.” He peered at the cover, inspecting the ridiculous device, determining what manner of thing it was.

“Oh?” said Uncle Edward. “It looks altogether like a turnip transmutator. The sort that the Irish use to turn potatoes into other sorts of root crops.”

Giles gave him a look, a sort of pitying, condescending look, and pointed toward the recumbent maiden. “Do you mean to say they’re going to turn this woman into a turnip?” he asked, coming to the conclusion that the book quite possibly wasn’t the scientific treasure he had supposed it to be. “I’d say it has something to do with a dental drill,” Giles said, pointing toward what appeared to be a syringe. “This doctor is about to drill a hole in her skull and perform some sort of electronic lesion.”

“Giles!” cried Uncle Edward, surprised. “Where did you hear such a thing as that?”

“I read about it,” said Giles calmly, as if reading about lesions performed with dental drills and electricity was a common enough thing among fifteen-year-olds in the city of Eagle Rock. “There was a man,” continued Gill, “who could make rats dance by lesioning part of their brain — some little gland, I think.”

“Was there?” asked Edward, who favored the idea of dancing rats. “You like to read this stuff, do you, Giles?”

“Very much, sir. I’m studying to be a scientist, an inventor.”

“Well good for you, lad. That’s just the thing, science.” Uncle Edward picked up a handful of books and slid them in along the shelves. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Giles inspected the cover of At the Earth’s Core, the flower-hung jungle and the scantily clad pair of women astride blue dinosaurs in a sunlit clearing. He carefully opened the volume and thumbed past four pages until he arrived at the first chapter and read aloud two absolutely fateful sentences. “Then Perry interested me in his invention. He was an old fellow who had devoted the better part of a long life to the perfection of a mechanical, subterranean prospector.” He shut the book, looked hard at the cover again, and wandered out through the front door and down the street without saying another word. Giles didn’t mean to be impolite. He was simply lost in Perry’s invention — in the whole idea of inventions. Years later Edward St. Ives would say, on more than one occasion, to watch out for people who fancy inventions but who can see nothing in the notion of turnip transmogrifiers; they aren’t half frivolous enough and will cause trouble. In fact, the mechanical mole — the digging leviathan — was conceived that afternoon and was born in the following months.

If it had been the only thing Giles Peach had invented and built, the very idea of it would seem preposterous. But of course it wasn’t. Giles and Jim had been engaged for some years in building mechanical devices. On occasions Oscar Pall-check gave them a hand, illustrating, more often than not, the defects in their methods. In Giles’ garage was an oak barrel full of mechanical junk they had managed to collect: old electric motors, ruined clocks, nuts and bolts and bits of copper wire, a sprung umbrella, radio tubes, bottle caps and bicycle parts, a little leather bag full of droplets of solder. The two had pieced together a wonderful gadget around an old fan motor. The machine hadn’t any purpose, really, beyond gadgetry. They intended at first to make a spinning model of the solar system. So they attached straightened bits of wire of varying lengths to support the nine planets, which, when the motor was switched on, spun very quickly around the sun in tight little circles until it threw itself to bits.

Gill then rigged a belt and gear mechanism from wide rubber bands, wooden spools, and pieces of an old mechanical clock, extending the device so that it could contain any number of solar systems, all cranking roundabout at the same time. On the strength of his knowledge of astronomy, he determined that such a plethora of simultaneously whirring planets would be as unscientific as a turnip transmutator, and so set out to find a way to operate little white Christmas tree pin lights strung between the wires. He wanted to make a model of the Andromeda nebula, to suspend it from the rafters of the garage, and to shut off all the lights, close the doors, and watch it whirl there in space. The nebula, however, blew a succession of fuses when he plugged it in, managing to get underway for one mysterious, kaleidoscopic moment before blinking into darkness.

When the nebula failed, scientific pretense failed with it. They removed the stars and replaced them with all manner of things, notably the heads of several rubber apes and a collection of little plastic Japanese gods — gaudily painted objects with overhanging bellies and pendulous ears. They tore the base from a coin bank shaped like a globe and affixed the painted sphere to a long coathanger that thrust out from amid the various gods and ape heads. Finally, along the bent arm of another piece of wire Giles strapped a toothy little stuffed crocodile with a broken-off tail. It was a sorry-looking, bug-infested creature, but when the whirring Earth machine shot into life and the globe went spinning away among the ape heads pursued on its course by the open-mouthed crocodile, it seemed to the two of them to be a grand sight. Gill pointed out that it was archetypal, that the crocodile was leviathan and would someday consume the earth.

The two worked the device for an hour with great success until Oscar Pallcheck happened by and had a good laugh over the machine at the expense of the crocodile. Giles and Jim, of course, were obliged to laugh along and to admit that it would improve the thing greatly to shove one of the ape heads into the crocodile’s mouth so that the ape peered out at the continent of Africa. The experiment degenerated from there, and before he went his peculiar way that evening, Oscar found a baseball bat and whacked the globe as it wobbled past into the wall or Gill’s garage, crashing the side in and putting an end to the whirling earth machine.

That same fan motor, along with two others, became, in the Saturday afternoons following, a mechanical man. The thing’s legs were stacks of roped tin cans that flopped and jerked when the current was switched on. The mechanical man suffered more evolutionary changes than had the whirring earth machine and was declining just about as rapidly until, as a lark, Oscar Pallcheck dropped the creature out of the foliage of a Chinese elm on the parkway and into the path of Uncle Edward’s Hudson Wasp.

Giles became convinced as a result that inventions without purpose were doomed by physical law to degeneration in a manner analogous to the decline of human beings who hadn’t any aim or resolve. He singled out Oscar Pallcheck as a case in point.

What all of that inventing was leading up to, none of them knew. John Pinion, the polar explorer, had an inkling, and he encouraged Giles’ gadgeting, going so far as to buy him occasional tools and parts, and talking seriously about the diameter of the Earth. That turn left Jim behind. He didn’t care much for serious inventions, and didn’t half believe that Gill’s growing mechanical mole would dig at all, much less into the center of the Earth.

The one opportunity that he had to see the mole did nothing to change his mind. Jim and Uncle Edward had stopped at John Pinion’s ranch in the foothills of Eagle Rock at the request of Gill’s mother, to summon her son home. And there had sat the mole — the Digging Leviathan, as Uncle Edward liked to call it — twenty odd feet of riveted steel perched on a trestle built of railroad ties. All in all it was a sort of art deco wonder of crenelations and fins and thick ripply glass, as if it had been designed by a pulp magazine artist years before the dawn of the space age which would iron flat the wrinkles of imagination and wonder.

Jim was transfixed. Edward St. Ives was contemptuous. Pinion was a posturing fool, or so he pointed out as the Hudson roared away down Colorado Boulevard that afternoon, an oblivious Giles slouching quietly in the back seat. Pinion was developing the mole in the spirit of spite, not science. He wasn’t intent so much on getting to the Earth’s core as on getting there ahead of Russel Latzarel and Edward St. Ives. Jim nodded sagely and agreed with his uncle.

Gill continued to work away on bits and pieces of the machine, dabbling continually with it at his cluttered and ill-lit workbench in his own garage. He would disappear for hours at a time, tinkering with bits of mechanical debris, with gears and sprockets, wire and springs, machine screws and chunks of lucite rod. Once, when Gill abandoned him, Jim had an opportunity to take a quick glance at the journal that Gill kept hidden under his bed.

Everything went into the journal. It was wonderfully long. Gill egotistically called it the “Last History” and had been at it for years. It filled boxes. Jim didn’t have a chance to browse through more than six or eight pages, but what he read was unsettling, although it was difficult to say just why. There was something peculiar in it, as if what he was reading was linked somehow to the ebb and flow of time and space, and as if it was more than a casual diary, more than symbols scrawled on a page. Jim could sense straight off something waiting just under the surface, like the indistinct shadows that slide below rolling ocean swells — shadows cast, perhaps, by clouds, or then again by the silent passing of a great dark fish, navigating through the gray and shifting waters. Something was lurking among the words in Gill’s journal, swimming below them and around them but never quite surfacing. And once he started to think about it, it didn’t matter at all what it was — the shadows of cloud drift or of deep water monsters — it couldn’t be entirely ignored or forgotten.

He hadn’t made it through a half dozen pages before the garage door slammed and Gill tramped into the house, plaiting a bundle of thin copper wire. Jim had hastily shoved the journal back under the bed, and pretended to be reading a copy of Savage Pellucidar. He made the mistake some weeks later of mentioning the journal to Oscar Pallcheck, who promptly stole it.

Chapter 2

When William Hastings climbed over the wall into his own back yard, it occurred to him that one of his shoes was gone — probably lost among ivy roots. He teetered across the copings, struggling to hoist himself over, popping loose one of the buttons along the front of his coat and cursing under his breath. Absolute quiet was worth a fortune. Silence and speed, that was what he needed, but his arms didn’t seem to have quite the strength in them that they’d once had. It was a loss of elasticity, probably due to slow poisoning over the last two years.

He peered over his shoulder at the tree-shadowed patch of Stickley Avenue visible beyond the edge of the the empty house behind. There was no sign of pursuit, but he knew they were coming, or at least that Frosticos was. Vigilance was necessary here. It was worth twenty dollars a minute, fifty. Off to the right the Pembly house squatted in a weedy yard. He was sure, just for the instant it took for his button to pop off onto the lawn, that he was being watched from the Pembly window. The old lady, no doubt, observing him. He heaved himself up, thrashed wildly to steady himself, and toppled over onto the lawn and onto his back like a bug.

His heart raced. He lay there breathing. Had he shouted? He wiggled his toes and fingers to see if the spine had gone — snapped like a twig. But it hadn’t. When Edward St. Ives glanced up from his book and looked through the window, there was William, his brother-in-law, creeping across the lawn on his hands and knees. Edward threw the window open. “William,” he cried. “Fancy your being here!”

William waved his hand as if smashing invisible newspapers into a box, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, widening his eyes and shaking his head. A moment later he was in through the back door, an ivy-bedecked figure in a tattered coat, groping for a kitchen chair. Edward smoked his pipe.

“Come home, have you?” asked Edward. “Bit of a holiday?”

“That’s right.” William poked at the curtains across the little window of the back door, convinced, it seemed, that at any moment someone, or perhaps some thing — an enormous copper head or a grinning baby’s face, round as a child’s wading pool — would peer up over the fence, tracking him by way of lost buttons and abandoned shoes. No such things appeared.

Edward had been puffing like an engine on his pipe, and the tobacco glowed red beneath a cloud of whirling smoke. William was declining, he decided. It wasn’t just the flayed coat or the absent shoe. He had a pale, veined look about him and three inches or so too much hair that shot out over his ears in sparse tufts. And there was something else — a squint, the rigid line of his mouth — that hinted at conspiracies and betrayals. He seemed to sense something foreboding in the paint that peeled in little curled flakes off the eaves of the silent Pembly house next door, and in the deepening shadow of a half-leafless elm that stretched twisted limbs over the fence, dropping autumn leaves onto the lawn in the afternoon breeze. William watched, barely breathing, waiting, half understanding the hieroglyphic cawing of a pair of black crows in a distant walnut tree, who — he could see it even at that distance — were watching him, emissaries, perhaps, of Doctor Hilario Frosticos.

The silence of falling evening was full of suggestion, an enormous, descending pane of flattening glass. “What do you hear from Peach?” William asked abruptly, startling Edward who had been eyeing the phone.

“Nothing, actually. Got a card from Windermere a month ago. Two months.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing that signified.”

William let go the curtain and opened a cupboard door, pulling out a bottle of port. “Everything signifies,” he said. “I got a letter last week. Something’s afoot. I’m fairly sure it had been read — steamed open and then glued shut again with library paste. I could taste it.”

Edward nodded. Humoring him would accomplish little.

Silence was safest. Edward decided against calling the sanitarium. He could do that whenever he wished. And William had deteriorated. It couldn’t do him any harm to stay at home for a bit.

When Jim Hastings arrived home from school late that evening, he found his uncle and father slumped in armchairs in the living room. A collection of magazines, Scientific American and the Journal of Amphibian Evolution, lay scattered across the coffee table and onto the floor, and the little skeletal hand from the tidepool sat before his father atop a hardbound copy of Amazon Moon and an old devastated volume of Blake’s collected poetry. William Hastings was lost in speculations.

The following morning there was a fog off the ocean, swirling in across the dewy grass of the yard, dripping from the limbs of the elm. William stood at the window, idly rubbing his forehead and thinking of rivers of fog, of subterranean rivers, of rivers that fell away into the center of the Earth, into inland seas alive with the brief black flash of fins and the undulating bulk of toothed whales. The fog cleared just for an instant and William pressed his face almost into the window. “Edward!” he shouted.

“What is it?” St. Ives hurried into the room, rubbing his hands dry on a tea towel.

“Look at that.”

For a moment there was nothing but mist. Then the fog thinned and William pointed at the lawn beneath the overhanging elm. “What do you make of it?’

“I’d say a dog has found his way into our back yard,” said Edward skeptically. “I must have left the gate unlatched.”

William dashed from the room. The back door slammed, then slammed again, and, with his eyes lit like lamps, he dashed back in again. “The gate’s latched. Damn all gates. This isn’t a case of an open gate. This is what I’ve been telling you about.”

“Ah,” said Edward, afraid that it had come to that.

“The Pemblys, I’m certain of it, are playing their hand here. This abomination has their filthy fingerprints all over it.”

“It appears to me,” Edward said, mistaking his meaning, “that the stuff is globbed in what might be called its original resting place. I’m certain we shouldn’t accuse the Pemblys here. In fact, I’m not at all sure what you’re suggesting.”

‘They’ve thrown their dog over the fence to defecate on our lawn; that’s what I’m suggesting. There’s more to this than you know, Edward. I’ve given it a good deal of thought. I’ve thought of nothing else, if you want to know the truth, and I see patterns here. We will be as vigilant and deceptive as they are.

“Ah,” said Uncle Edward.

“We’ll start by trimming the top of that big hibiscus along the fence there. You see, if it were a foot or so shorter, I could stand here like so, against the line of the drape, and see quite neatly into their living room. They’d take me for a pole lamp. Absolutely innocent. I’m going to catch them at their little plots. Don’t mistake me here.”

For once Edward didn’t know whether to humor or reason with him. He made it a general rule to agree overwhelmingly with zealots, who, he was sure, all suffered varying degrees of lunacy. There was no profit in open discussion. He edged up along the drapes to have a peek himself. “What, exactly,” he asked William, “are they up to? They’re awfully good at it, aren’t they?”

“Good at it?” William snorted with quick laughter. “Not half as good as I am. I’ll teach the lot of them. You surprise me, Edward.”

William, apparently satisfied with his plan for trimming the hibiscus, sat down in a green, vastly overstuffed chair, and sipped his coffee, peering thoughtfully into the unlit grate. He looked up suddenly at his brother-in-law. “Do you mean to say that even with the skeleton hand and Professor Latzarel’s fish you don’t see the shape of things? And Peach’s letters from Windermere? What dark secrets …” He stopped and squinted over his coffee, groping around on the table for his pipe. “Do you recall,” he asked, “that second meeting of the Blake Society? The night when that idiot from the university lectured at us about fish imagery in Romantic literature. What was his name? Something preposterous. An obvious lie. Spanner, was it? Ashbless went mad that night. Remember?”

“Well,” Edward replied, “there was some debate. But he hardly went mad. And the gentleman’s name was Benner, Steerforth Benner. But he wasn’t the one who delivered the lecture. It was Brendan Doyle who spoke. Benner wasn’t any older than Giles and Jim.”

“Doyle was it? Cocky little twit. Expert on Romantic poets! Expert on any number of things I don’t doubt. I half suspect it was him who left that memento under the elm.” William gestured broadly at the back yard.

“He was windy,” Edward said, shrugging. “But he wasn’t all that bad. I rather liked him.”

William gave him a look that seemed to imply that in certain matters, Edward was a child. “Ashbless went for him that night, though. Blew his top. Told him he’d tweak his nose, do you remember? Just because of some historical discrepancy. Ashbless is the peculiar one. Believe anything you like about this Doyle, about the filthy Pemblys for that matter, but watch Ashbless. That’s my advice to you.” And William poked his pipestem in Edward’s direction as a gesture of finality.

“I’ve suspected Ashbless since I met him,” William continued, settling comfortably into his machinations. “Anyone who would purposely assume the name of a dead poet, just to add some sham value to his own scribbling, isn’t to be trusted. Not an inch. I won’t insist he’s not good. He’s certainly the best of the Cahuenga poets. But he’s fishy as a chowder. He reminds me of the King in Huckleberry Finn. I keep expecting him to take his hat off and announce, ‘I am the late dauphin.’”

Edward was heating up and about to set in to defend Ashbless when William leaped up and darted across to his post by the drapes. Beyond the fence, Mrs. Pembly, her hair in curlers and dressed in a half-wit’s idea of an Oriental robe, poked among the weeds of her back yard. A big, scabrous Doberman Pinscher trailed along behind her. “She’s up to something,” said William. “For my money she throws that beast over the wall after dark to defecate on our lawn. There’s villainy afoot here.”

Mrs. Pembly paused for a moment, peering up into the branches of the elm. “I’ve got it!” cried William, waving his left hand meaningfully. “It’s a simple business. Did they think they could fool me?”

Edward could see that things were going awry. “What have you got?” he asked.

“A block and tackle. They hoist that damned beast over the wall with a block and tackle, wait for him to commit his disgusting crimes, then jerk him back again like some sort of filthy marionette.”

Before Edward could respond, William was through the back door. He hauled out a shovel from the tool shed, scooped up the offending debris, and sent it soaring across the top of the fence into the Pembly weeds. Mrs. Pembly flattened herself against the garage wail, clasping the lapels of her nightgown together with both hands when she saw who it was that threatened her. She seemed unable to speak.

“Here are your cudgels!” cried William, flinging the spade to the ground triumphantly, and assuming, of course, that Mrs. Pembly had fully understood the transaction. He dusted his hands theatrically, turned, and strode into the house where Edward scratched his head, waiting for the storm to break. But nothing happened. William was apparently victorious. In the course of the morning he trimmed the obscuring hibiscus and spent a solid two hours arranging the drapes and the living room furniture in such a way that, when he stood at the window, a casual observer would take him for a floor lamp. He even went so far as to make Edward stroll back and forth across the rear yard with an air of affected nonchalance while he stood on one leg like a flamingo and perched a broad, conical, bamboo shade on his head in the fashion of a pole lamp or a coolie. Edward had known it would be bad from the moment he saw William creeping across the yard on all fours, but that it would escalate so quickly and thoroughly was a frightening surprise. What was of immediate necessity was to involve his poor brother in intellectual pursuits, to get his mind off imagined threats. There was Jim to think of. It was hard enough on him that his father had gone round the bend. He should be shielded from obvious lunacy. Somehow he’d have to talk William into removing the bottle caps he had clipped to his shirt with their own cork washers. That sort of thing was painful, to be sure. “There’s a meeting of the Society tomorrow night,” he said to William after the lampshade incident.

“The Blake Society?”

“The Newtonians,” said Edward. “Right here. Some of your old Mends will be here.”

“Squires?”

“Yes indeed. He’s working on modifications for the diving bell — something he calls an absolute gyro. It’s a steadying mechanism, I believe, although I’m not much of an engineer myself. Latzarel is planning a voyage into the pool off Palos Verdes sometime next month.”

“Good old Squires,” William said. “I’ve got some ideas I’d like to try out on him. I’ve been reading Einstein, and have a plot for a first-rate story. Hard science, too. Rock hard. That’s why I think Squires is the man to try it on.” William scratched the end of his nose. “Is the maze room intact?”

“Of course,” said Edward.

“Then I’ll just put in a few hours.” William shoved fresh tobacco into his pipe, lit it, and stood up puffing. “Mice all dead?”

“No,” said Edward. “I’ve got a new lot. All white. Absolutely innocent. And there’s three that just gave birth.”

“Grand!” cried William, elated. “I’m going to put some of the litter in with that big bufo morinus. If we keep him full of horsemeat maybe he’ll leave them alone long enough for them to imprint. We’ll be halfway home then.”

‘The bufo died two months ago. But there’s an axolotl as big as a rabbit out there that will work just as well.”

William nodded, caught up in the spirit of science. ‘That will do nicely,” he said. “Very nicely. External gills too. Very pretty items. How is Giles Peach these days, by the way?”

“Amazing. He’s onto something big, I think. John Pinion has an eye on him.”

But Edward was sorry he’d said it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “Pinion!” William gasped. “Pinion can keep his filthy hands off Giles Peach! Peach is ours!”

“Of course,” said Edward. “Of course. I’ve said as much. Damn Pinion.” And finally William, wearing a leather apron, went out the back door, muttering to himself. He got about halfway to the maze shed, stopped, turned, shoved back in, and shouted something incoherent into the kitchen. All Edward could make out were the words “Pinion” and “travesty,” but he let the matter slide and didn’t ask for clarification.

Chapter 3

The Newtonian Society met every month, more often if an excuse could be found. Two years back it had been called the Blake Society and had met to discuss literary matters. William Hastings, at the time, hadn’t yet turned the corner; he was merely an eccentric professor of Romantic literature at Eagle Rock University who possessed an amazing library and who had, one Sunday afternoon, run out of shelf space in the living room, and so had pressed the refrigerator into use, shoving a copy of Herodotus and The White Oaks of Jalna, for some inexplicable reason, in among jars of salad peppers and pickle relish.

The Newtonian Society was formed after William Hastings’ disappearance into what Oscar Pallcheck cheerfully referred to as “the hatch.” Literature was abandoned for science — specifically for the investigation of Professor Latzarel’s theories. On the Saturday evening following William Hastings’ surprise arrival, then, Giles Peach and his friend Jim hurried down the sidewalk toward Jim’s home, anxious to attend the meeting and especially to hear Latzarel’s opinions on the little tidepool hand.

Professor Latzarel’s vehicle — Jim couldn’t think of a better word for it — ground to a halt at the curb just as the two of them drew up to the house. It was an old Land Rover station wagon, a tremendous square thing that appeared from almost every angle to be built entirely of wood — wood covered in a coat of gray dust like the sarcophagus of an Egyptian pharaoh that had sat in the desert for a dozen centuries until, perhaps by osmosis, the wood itself had begun to metamorphose into dust. A day would come, Jim was certain of it, when the machine, wheezing along one of the interlacing highways of the southwest desert, would complete the transmutation and crumble into a quick heap to be blown across the sands by a wind devil spawned by the sudden cessation of motion. The driver of a pursuing automobile, not quite believing in the existence of the unlikely machine in the first place, would see the distant shiver of its decay through the shimmering desert heat and would call it a mirage, not noticing the receding back of the pith-helmeted Professor Latzarel carrying a butterfly net, disappearing beyond a clump of Joshua trees. Jim would have given anything to own such a car.

Professor Latzarel, in fact, must have been packed for an outing, for there, strapped to the enormous rear bumper, was a quiver of old ghost-town picks and shovels, and one of those canvas water bags that perpetually leak and yet are never empty. Inside were a half dozen topographic maps and what must have been a mile of hemp cordage.

Latzarel himself was a fierce, weedy-looking man who took everything very seriously and who couldn’t be bothered to comb his hair. His coat complemented his car. He rushed past Jim, nodding obliquely, then caught sight of Giles Peach. He stopped and shook Giles’ hand, fabricating something to say. He clearly couldn’t keep his eyes off Giles’ gills, which were almost hidden by a turtleneck sweater. “Have you seen Dr. Pinion?” he asked suddenly, raising one eyebrow. Gill replied that he had, just yesterday.

“Ah,” replied Latzarel, nodding his head. “Did he have anything interesting to say?”

“No, sir. He wanted to know about the digging machine.”

“Ah,” said Latzarel again. “That would be the subterranean prospector? Edward has told me a good bit about it. I’d like to have a look at it myself, if I might.”

Giles didn’t reply. He half nodded, but showed no enthusiasm, a strange thing for Giles, who was normally full of his inventions. Jim could see that Professor Latzarel was disappointed, but that he hesitated to be obviously so. The three of them clumped up the steps and into the house, which by then was full of talk and tobacco smoke and glasses of port. Jim was relieved to see his father talking animatedly to Roycroft Squires. He half feared, as he always did, that just beyond the veil of the present some eccentricity lay waiting. That his father might at any moment slide off the thin edge of sanity, and that his uncle would dash for the telephone and a van would come screaming down the road. Oscar Pallcheck liked to call them the “white coat boys” and laughed at the idea of gigantic butterfly nets and shepherd’s crooks. Jim generally laughed along guiltily. But now that his father was home, he couldn’t see the joke. He couldn’t, in fact, develop any considered opinions about his father at all. His thoughts were limited by a misty wall beyond which his mind wouldn’t venture. He had determined that the same wall existed within the mind of his father, that they were products of the same foggy uncertainty. He wondered how often his father traveled back to the day Jim’s mother died in the autumn hills above Los Angeles.

They had gone picnicking in Griffith Park — Jim, his father and mother. Uncle Edward had elected to stay home and, as he put it, whack about in the garage. It was his mother’s idea that they pack a picnic lunch, hike around in the hills — green from early rains — and then catch the late afternoon program at the planetarium.

They found a grassy knoll beneath a clump of nearly leafless oaks and ate sandwiches. Jim’s mother talked about the kitchen curtains and about the attention Uncle Edward had been paying to Velma Peach, Giles’ mother. Jim could remember the conversation almost word for word, even though at the time he was indifferent to kitchen curtains and couldn’t at all see why anyone would develop an interest in Velma Peach, or in anybody’s mother, for that matter. Now, two years later, the faded kitchen curtains were tangled in his memory with his mother’s face, one of them calling up the other without fail.

After lunch he and his father trudged around through the chaparral and up this and that little trail, filling a paper bag with useable refuse. They hadn’t any notion of cleaning the place up, but were looking for treasures — for odds and ends of mechanical debris to add to the bucket in Gill’s garage. Nine-tenths of the collection that afternoon consisted of bottle caps of the sort lined with little cork washers that could be pried out and used for remarkable purposes. It was possible, for instance, to clamp a bottle cap to a shirt by separating the washer from the cap, then reinserting it with a layer of shirt in between. On that Saturday in the park William Hastings went wild for the idea, and by the time both of them had had enough treasure hunting each sported fifteen or twenty bottle cap insignias like campaigners at a political convention in support of soft drinks.

Jim’s mother would roll her eyes in feigned uncertainty, as if both of them might belong in a padded room for getting up to such tricks. She would agree after their continued insistence to wear one herself, at least until they arrived at the planetarium.

So Jim and his father, their collecting at an end, set out merrily down the trail toward where Jim’s mother, having complained of an unidentifiable ache, was resting and reading her book — Balzac, Jim recalled, which she read in French. The two came bursting up, emblazoned with bottle caps, and found her asleep. At least Jim supposed she was asleep. He set out to make a racket — whistling, shouting to his father who wasn’t ten feet behind, and commenting aloud about the outstanding collection in the sack. He rummaged in it and found the skeleton of a bladeless clasp knife, the bone shell of the handle having broken away from one rusty side.

For some reason his father never made the mistake of assuming her to be asleep. Perhaps it was the position in which she lay. The next half hour seemed to Jim a sort of numb stage play in which his father, for ten grim minutes, worked to revive her, then sat beside her for another twenty, staring blankly into the twisted branches of the leafless oak against which Jim stood.

Finally two rangers summoned from the Park Service by passing hikers carried his mother on a stretcher to-a waiting ambulance and away to Metropolitan Hospital where she was pronounced dead. Jim and his father were met there by Uncle Edward. Jim could picture every dreary, white and chromium moment of the two or three hours he spent at the hospital. Two years later they seemed to mean nothing at all to him, to be completely removed from any memories of his mother. He knew little of the workings of the human heart, and it was inexplicable that hers should have stopped like a clock that had wound down. When the three of them drove silently and wearily home that night, Jim and his father were still dotted with bottle caps. His uncle hadn’t enough sense of humor left in him to ask about them. Jim could see, two years later at the meeting of the Newtonians, that his father still wore two of the caps affixed to his shirt — a White Rock cream soda and a Nehi Orange. He wished guiltily and sadly that his father would button his coat.

But William Hastings was for once oblivious to that fateful afternoon in the park — something that had pursued him through the two years since — and was carrying on about a story he intended to write. Roycroft Squires nodded and squinted and messed with his pipe, shoving a big wad of curly black tobacco into the enormous bowl carved into the head of an armadillo, and tamped it down first with his thumb and then with the business end of a sixteen-penny nail.

“As I understand it,” said William, puffing on his own pipe, “relativity is a fairly simple business. But I have an angle on it that will knock you out.”

Squires nodded, ready to be knocked out.

“Now, as an object approaches the speed of light,” said William, hunching forward and poking his pipestem in Squires’ direction, “its mass increases proportionately, which is to say it simply gets bigger and bigger. Swells like a balloon, if you follow. And that’s what restricts one from traveling at light speed — there isn’t enough universe to hold us.”

Squires began to say something, to protest, perhaps, but hadn’t gotten two words out when William, swept away in a deluge of science and art, broke in on him with another revelation. “And as we approach light speed, mind you, we fall into what the physicists call a straight line loop. Everything in the end, you see, is circular — the passing of the seasons, the four ages of man, the transmutation of base metals into gold, the cycle of evolution, time and space. It’s all one; you’ve read Fibinocci’s discussion of the whorl of seeds in a sunflower and the circular spray of stars in revolving nebulae?”

The question was rhetorical. William didn’t wait for an answer. “Parallel lines,” he continued, “meet in space. A straight line leading out into the infinite catches its own tail like a mythological oceanic serpent. The mistake, you see, made by men of science, is to remain blind to certain mysteries, certain connections. They suppose that a forest glade illuminated by sunlight is the same forest glade at midnight, lit by moonbeams. You and I know they’re wrong.”

Squires could see his point. He nodded.

‘The rays of the moon, you see, are alive with reflected emanations that are absent in the light of day. All of this, I’m telling you, is of vast importance. In my story an astronaut launches out in his ship, bound for Alpha Centauri. He settles back, watching the approaching stars through a great circular convex window as if he sees the universe in globe, and the stars, as the poem has it, are herring fish. Or rather as if he himself is in a fishbowl and the stars and planets whirling in space are eyes watching him as he hurtles among them. His craft accelerates toward light speed. He swells, moderately at first, then preposterously. His ship becomes bulbous, voluminous. He’s a grinning moon man, a cloud being, but of course he’s oblivious to it. His ship fills the void. And there ahead, just as the ship closes in on the approaching stars and those behind are on the edge of winking out, of abandoning the race, there ahead of him he sees an unbelievable sight: a glowing ship sailing in through deep space, colossal, wide as half the sky, a carnival of glowing lights, inflated with speed. He draws up behind it, wondering, an odd chill in the recesses of his brain. And through the bowl of glass atop the wonderful ship ahead, he can see the head and shoulders of an inflated giant, a grotesque, puffy-cheeked god, soaring through the avenues of space along the of the Milky Way. And in one blind rush, one last moment of icy clarity, he knows who it is he pursues!”

William slumped back into the green armchair, sweating and pale. Squires was overcome. Professor Latzarel, surprised at seeing William there in the first place, was dumbfounded.

“A masterpiece!” said Ashbless, white-haired and wild and leaning against the mantel, a bottle of beer in his hand.

“I haven’t written it yet,” said William. “But when I can get the damned keys of my typewriter cleaned out, I’m going to start in. What do you think, Roy? Will it hold up? The science is sound; I’m certain of that, and it will be a long necessary collision of art and natural law. You’ve read C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures?”

“No,” Squires put in. “But I’ve just finished Bertrand Russell’s book on relativity theory. I’ll recommend it to you ….”

But he hadn’t a chance to finish before William slammed his hand onto the arm of the chair enthusiastically and leaped up to open a fresh bottle of port. In celebration, he said. He’d try the story on Analog, who would, he insisted, appreciate the scientific accuracy. And off he dashed to the pantry for a corkscrew.

Roycroft Squires looked up at Edward St. Ives, who shrugged. “I’m certain,” said Squires, “that William is years ahead of his time.”

Ashbless said there was little doubt of it, and Squires glanced at Edward again and winked. Ashbless was lost in thought.

“See here,” said Professor Latzarel after clearing his throat monumentally. “All this literary talk is very fine, but the Newtonians are a scientific discussion group, and I for one am anxious for Mr. Ashbless to give us the account of the polar expedition for the benefit of Mr. Spekowsky here from the Times and Dr. Orville Lassen from the Journal of Amphibiana.” Two men, one in glasses and a string tie — Mr. Spekowsky, apparently a reporter — and another in an enormous orange sweater and khaki pants — Dr. Lassen from the University. Both men nodded. Spekowsky, frowning, said, “I believe that the gentleman who has just left knew little about physics. Mass, if I’m not very much mistaken …” William Ashbless interrupted him saying, “No, but he knows about the mysteries. Everything he says is accurate. The world doesn’t care about your watery little definitions.” Spekowsky fell silent. William wandered back in, just then, filling glasses with newly opened port and giving Jim and Giles, who sat respectfully and silently in the corner on a pair of kitchen chairs, a little liqueur glass each, half full of the purple wine.

“I’m given to understand,” said Spekowsky in a voice full of doubt, “that you gentlemen made something of a discovery some years ago which is suddenly newsworthy. I can’t at all follow it.”

Ashbless snorted contemptuously.

Conversation settled. William collapsed into his green chair, still lost in the fever of inspiration, and puffed steadily on his pipe. Ashbless, who was the only one among them beside Latzarel who had been at the pole, swirled the liquid in his glass in a tight little circle, watching it race around the inside. Edward understood that he was summoning his powers of memory and art in order to give string-tied Spekowsky his money’s worth.

Chapter 4

“Peach was there,” Ashbless said as a sort of cryptic preface. “I’m not sure any of you know what that means yet. You will though.” Then his eye wandered past Giles, who had sunk into his corner in a drowsy reverie. It was impossible to say that he’d even heard the poet’s peculiar reference to his father. Ashbless frowned and continued:

‘This was in 1954, mind you. Ten years ago. The Pinion expedition to the South Pole. The frozen cave bear chipped out of a wall of ice six hundred miles below Tierra del Fuego by Pinion’s bearers made something of a sensation. It’s in a refrigerated vault beneath the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles. Any of us can have a look at it. It’s fairly unremarkable except for its original location. Pinion’s bode, Hole in the Ground, and the entire revised hollow Earth theory trade on the discoveries of Admiral Byrd at the Pole and on the cave bear — circumstantial evidence and hearsay. Pinion is remarkably adept at passing off others’ discoveries as his own. He’s one of those self-important people who are always dredging up evidence to demonstrate their own cleverness.”

Ashbless rummaged in his coat pocket and hauled out a yellowed newspaper clipping from the Times. “Road to the Center of the Earth?” the heading read, “Cave Bear at South Pole.” The article reported other peculiarities found by the Pinion/Latzarel party: clumps of leafy twigs, a pale orange tulip suspended in a shard of ice, the tip of a stone spear imbedded in the frozen flesh of a prehistoric bird.

Ashbless cast the clipping onto the tabletop with a gesture of contempt, not stooping to pick it up when it slid across onto the floor. William picked it up and carried it across to Spekowsky who himself dropped the clipping onto the top of a smoking stand, not bothering to look at it.

“What can’t be shoved into a museum vault,” Ashbless continued, “was discovered by myself, Professor Latzarel, and Basil Peach while Pinion and his party were chasing down the rumored sighting by Indians of a live wooly mammoth some fifty miles to the east — a practical joke, I don’t doubt. We camped for the space of four nights on an ice field above a tiny warm water lake, steaming deep in a natural depression in the ice — a hot spring, believe it or not, on the Ellsworth Highland. There was a network of caverns and caves running off through the ice below us, little of which we had time to explore. One branch, however, which we followed, opened after some four hundred feet onto a little rocky bay on the shore of a subterranean lake. It was the only access. The walls of the tunnel were lit somehow, perhaps by sunlight glowing through the transparent ice above. And trapped within the ice, hundreds of feet beneath the surface, were the fossil remains of ancient beasts. We could just make out the ivory curve of what must have been an enormous ribcage — the skeleton of a mastodon — encased in clear ice a half mile away. And above the tunnel, just below the point where it led out onto the shore of the lake, were the wing and head of a perfectly preserved pterodactyl in frozen flight, peering down out of the blue crystal, the other half of him, like the dark side of the moon, lost forever in a swirl of opaque white.

“Pinion never saw a bit of this, mind you. The whole network of tunnels collapsed in an earthquake days before he and his fools returned from their goose chase with some faked up plaster-of-Paris casts of footprints.”

Spekowsky gave Lassen a meaningful look. Ashbless didn’t hesitate.

“Two of our party — Fuegan Indians — vanished one evening as they fished in the waters of that pool. Basil Peach was in the caves at the time and was surprised by a third Indian tearing up the tunnel screaming and gibbering about monsters — a great reptilian head that had lurched up out of the lake and swallowed his companions. Peach himself swore that beneath the ice of the tunnel floor he saw the flippered shadow of some great saurian, some Mesozoic amphibian, humping up toward the surface, then disappearing again into the shadowed depths, as if the ice tunnels ran along above a vast subterranean sea of which the little lake was only the tip. Nothing remained of the Fuegans but a smear of blood and one of their hats made of llama fur that floated on the surface of the water.

‘The following evening, Professor Latzarel and Basil Peach themselves witnessed the surfacing of a vast marine turtle, a beast the size of an automobile. It too slid away into the depths of the Earth.”

“Hocus pocus!” shouted Spekowsky, unable to contain himself any longer. His companion, however, was perched on the edge of his chair, his mouth open. Ashbless shrugged. The door opened and Phillip Mays, the aurelian, hunched in, weighted down with a cardboard carton full of liquor. A clove cigarette sputtered in his mouth.

Jim was relieved to see him. He was always relieved to see him if only because Mays seemed so predictable. The edge of impending doom and insanity which sharpened his dealings with everyone else, even his father — particularly his father — was absent in Mays. And at the same time he was undeniably eccentric, a trait which Jim held in high esteem. Mays was always off on adventures, although he didn’t at all look like the adventurous type, squinty as he was and with an overslept look about him. He was off to the Amazon after a rumored violet moth the size of a small bird one month, then scaling the Himalayas the next, scouring little clumps of high altitude tundra for tiny belemnite butterflies that could mimic in miniature perfection their resting place: a wild lilac, a granite slab on a hillside, a blade of grass, a human face. His house reeked of camphor, and on the wall of his study, pinned with an epee to green plaster, was a butterfly the size of a heron, netted in Colombia by Indians and worshipped before being traded to Mays for a five-dollar gold piece, a cigarette lighter, and a penlight with a miniature painting of the Santa Monica pier in the tip, which you could just make out by aiming the thing into the sun and screwing your eye, so to speak, into a little porthole in the end, then waiting for a moment to sort out palm trees from eyelashes. Mays had a case of the things. He never went into the jungle without a half dozen in his satchel and had given one to Jim at the second meeting of the Newtonians.

“Ah, Phil,” Uncle Edward cried when the door swung open.

“Let me introduce you to Mr. Spekowsky and Dr. Lassen.”

Spekowsky shook his hand with the air of a man suspicious of deviltry while Mays juggled his cardboard box between his free hand and his knee. Dr. Lassen scribbled notes into a little red spiral binder, oblivious to the proffered introduction.

“We’ve been discussing Professor Latzarel’s discoveries at the South Pole,” said Edward. “Perhaps you can acquaint Mr. Spekowsky here with the strange nature of the tropical fish that the two of you brought back.”

Mays said he was happy to. He had with him, in fact, not only photographs of the specimen in question, but an actual pickled fish, revolving slowly in a tiny formaldehyde sea held in a sealed glass jar. ‘The preserved fish, about two inches long, was a gray and pale shadow of the fish in the photograph, Latzarel’s Rio Jari tetra.

“So you’re telling me,” Spekowsky asked after Mays had carried on for a bit, “that specimens of this fish were caught both in the alleged South Pole pool and at the mouth of this South American river?”

‘That’s correct. A coincidence which is, on the face of it, impossible.”

“And this coincidence is supposed to convince me that the Earth is hollow. That wooly mammoths and Neanderthals and such are poking around beneath us at this moment?”

Giles Peach was transfixed, his eyes big as plates.

“We didn’t mention Neanderthal men,” said Professor Latzarel in the interest of scientific accuracy. “But, yes, we do consider this fairly substantial evidence.”

Spekowsky guffawed, but was quite obviously caught up in the game. “Sounds like evidence of continental drift.” He looked once again at the photograph of the fish. It had a splayed tail of iridescent pink that deepened to lavender and pale blue, then back to pink again round its gills. If its fins were clipped off it might quite easily be mistaken for an Easter egg by a far-sighted person.

“Look,” said William Ashbless, suddenly flaring up and running a huge hand through his white hair, “we’re wasting our time here. What do we care for the press? By God, we’ve seen things at the Pole that this — this — journalist can’t imagine. Are we asking the likes of him to authenticate our discoveries with an ill-written article on the last page of the Times? Far be it from me to applaud John Pinion, but by God, Pinion is a man of action. He’ll be there before us, gentlemen, mark me. All of this talk is getting us nothing but headaches!”

Spekowsky, feeling himself slandered, straightened his tie, threw his coat over his shoulder and marched out, laughing dramatically. Edward St. Ives, waving the skeleton hand from the tidepool, carried on vainly about recent discoveries and about their anticipated excursion in the diving bell, but Spekowsky had had enough. The door slammed, the room fell silent, and Jim waited for Professor Latzarel to explode, as he surely would, at William Ashbless.

“Sometimes,” Latzarel said, breaking the short silence, “I wonder whose side you’re on.”

“Russ!” cried Ashbless. “We need this Spekowsky like we need a leaky boat.”

“He was just coming round. We’d have had him. And now, of course, not only is he not for us, he’s against us. I can imagine the article he will write.”

“Speaking of articles,” said Dr. Lassen suddenly, coming up, as it were, out of his reverie. “I have this recent clipping from the Massachusetts Tribune that might interest you.” And he produced a square of cardboard with an L-shaped clipping glued to it. “Giant Squid Found on Massachusetts Shore!” shouted the caption. The article, some two hundred fifty words long, described the monster thus: “The giant squid, not unlike the one battled by Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s classic, was forty-four feet long and had to be carried from the beach on a flatcar.” The creature had been dissected by scientists at Woods Hole, and in its stomach, along with the ancient, rotted figurehead from a long-ruined sailing ship, and a pair of brass pliers encased in verdigris and closed around a tooth, was the half-digested neck and torso of a human being. At least they thought it was a human being. They couldn’t be sure; digestive fluids had ruined it, and there was one strange, unaccountable confusion: the thing in the squid’s stomach appeared to have been gilled — amphibious. The article didn’t call it a merman, but the implication was obvious. The squid and its inhabitant were bound for Boston for further study.

Jim heard his uncle read the story through a growing mist, as if he were falling asleep with his eyes open. Giles Peach sat next to him, not apparently listening, but staring, his mouth half open, out the dark window at the branch of a low bush that thrashed against the glass in the wind. It seemed to Jim suddenly that for the past moments he’d been drifting, or perhaps sinking, into a watery sleep. And off in the periphery of his vision, where he could just see them, as if they were creeping up out of a dream, were waving tendrils of kelp floating lazily in the sunlit depths of a submarine grotto. The light was diminishing and the room falling into shadow. His uncle’s voice, droning on about the enormous squid and its merman, slipped I through obscurity toward silence, as if Jim were on the edge of I sleep, sailing across the threshold of dreams. Giles Peach sat still and silent, the line of gills along his neck undulating softly I and rhythmically. A seaweed curtain closed around Jim, a I green and lacy wonder of kelp snails and starfish and dark dens in rock reefs from which shone the luminous eyes of waiting fish.

He awoke with a sudden shout to find Giles Peach on his way out the door, Dr. Lassen pulling on an unlikely, floor-length overcoat, his father asleep in his chair, and Uncle Edward poking through a cigar box full of iridescent beetles with Squires and Phillip Mays. He could hear Ashbless and Professor Latzarel talking furiously in the kitchen. Jim lay in bed that night with the lingering suspicion that something peculiar had occurred, that he hadn’t merely drifted into a dream. But he fell asleep almost at once, and when he awoke in the morning it was to the earthbound smells of coffee and bacon and to the sound of a lawnmower. His father and uncle were in the kitchen.

“Peculiar business, wasn’t it, them finding the squid?” William asked, shoveling a forkful of eggs into his mouth.

“Absolutely,” Edward responded.

“What do you make of the amphibian? He’s damned intriguing if you ask me. Worth pursuing. I’ll write Woods Hole today. Use Dr. Lassen’s name. He won’t mind. Damn that lawnmower!”

The roar of the mower drew up toward the kitchen window, grinding and growling louder until, smiling and nodding at the surprised William, an Oriental man in a snap-brim hat and loose white trousers sailed past, edging away around a rose bush.

“Who the devil is that?” William asked quietly, as if the man might overhear him. “The gardener. Yamoto. He’s been at it for six months now.

Absolutely dependable. Shows up like clockwork, rain or shine.”

William watched him disappear from the kitchen window, then hurried into the living room to see where he’d gone — what route he’d taken through the grass. He returned lost in thought. “I don’t like it,” he said.

Edward tried to change the subject. “I had the strangest feeling last night. Just for a moment. I believe it was when I was reading that business about the squid. It felt as if a wet tentacle slid across my cheek, or a strand of seaweed. It even smelled like it, just for an instant. I was just barely aware of it, you know, like when there’s a fly buzzing for minutes before you notice it. Then the droning sort of filters in and you look around. Try to spot him. But he stops, lands somewhere. There’s no more buzzing, no fly, and you can’t swear, finally, that there ever had been. Do you follow me?”

But William wasn’t ‘following anything but the advancing Yamoto, who had returned and angled in toward the window, grinning hugely and waving once again at William whose face hovered an inch from the glass. The roar of the mower crested and then fell away as Yamoto retreated, following the snaking path of the flowerbed toward the front of the house.

“What are this man’s credentials?” asked William suddenly.

“I haven’t any idea,” Edward replied. “He was recommended. All he does is cut the lawn. Say, I’ve got a fine idea.…”

But whether he had a fine idea or was frantically trying to dream one up to lure William away from the window was immaterial; William ignored him.

“I know this man.”

“I don’t believe so.”

“He was groundskeeper at the Manor. I’m certain of it.”

“Orientals,” said Edward with a placating wave of his hand.

“Don’t humor me!” cried William. “I won’t be humored. There’s trouble here. Frosticos is behind this. Things are becoming clear. Very clear. Who put you up to this?”

Before Edward could sort out an answer, here came Yamoto again, grinning around a night-blooming jasmine, leering in toward the kitchen window, the grinding of his mower seeming to take on a slow cadence like the distant marching step of an approaching but unseen army, or the convolutions of an immense, inexplicable, and possibly unnatural machine churning into the earth beyond a concrete wall in deadly, suggestive rhythms.

William was aghast. He could picture quite clearly an infinite succession of approaching Yamotos, peering in at him. Edging out of sight. Reappearing suddenly from beyond a bush or the trunk of a tree. Now drawing a bit closer, then, without William’s being aware of the exact moment, flickering away, receding again, shrinking to a speck like the fossils of Basil Peach, encased in blue ice.

The drone of the mower grew louder. William was certain that if he waited in the silent kitchen, it would not be Yamoto, finally, who would appear behind the machine. Perhaps not on this pass or on the next, but soon, very soon, the white-haired doctor would come smiling toward him, reaching out a gloved hand. He had only to wait. The white of billowing trousers appeared briefly beneath the limbs of a low tree, as Yamoto swung round toward them. Edward looked helplessly at Jim who stared at a plate of broken fried eggs. Yamoto slanted past. William, vexed into motion, stormed into the living room, out through the front door and onto the porch. Yamoto sailed across the grass, his trousers alive in the breeze, and mowed unhindered onto the lawn of the Pemblys, making a turn around the perimeter and heading back toward where William stood. Shaking. Unable to speak. Edward waved a coffee cup at him, but William was oblivious, collecting himself perhaps, or just the opposite.

“The Pembly lawn too?” he croaked.

“What?”

“He cuts the Pembly lawn too? He works for them?”

“Well, ‘works’ is hardly the word ….” Edward began. But at that moment Mrs. Pembly, a nightmare of pink plastic hair curlers and voluminous robe, wandered out onto the walk to have a word with Yamoto. The gardener nodded and very unfortunately pointed briefly toward William and Edward.

“By God!” shouted William, leaping off the porch. “We’ll see! We’ll filthy well see who it is this Yamoto works for. By God, he doesn’t work for me!” Mrs. Pembly threw one hand to her mouth, turned, hiked up the hem of her robe, and skipped into the house. Yamoto, who no doubt hadn’t heard William over the roar of the mower, made a little half bow, waiting politely.

“Who are you?” shouted William.

Yamoto shook his head, smiling.

“Damn you! Was it Frosticos that sent you? Where is he?” And William spun around, as if suspecting that the ubiquitous Frosticos was behind him, and took a swipe at Mrs. Pembly’s juniper bush. Poor Yamoto, not yet understanding that something had gone wrong, hastened to encourage William. He too took a swipe at the juniper. The horrified face of Mrs. Pembly, ringed by hair curlers, watched from the window. William, in a passion of suspicion, flailed away at the juniper for another moment with the flat of his hand, then turned on the hapless Yamoto. Mrs. Pembly was gone. Edward rushed across toward them, fearful of violence.

William began to kick at the still roaring machine, but effected nothing. Yamoto protested. William pushed him into the juniper, bent down, and grasped the spark plug wire, intending, doubtless, to pull it out. He yowled and stumbled away, waving his hand, and collided with his brother-in-law. William dodged past, mouth working, dashing for the Pembly garden hose that lay coiled like a serpent beneath an acacia. He twisted the crank atop the spigot and hauled away on the hose, spraying Yamoto, squirting Edward in the eye, training a blast against the window where Mrs. Pembly watched in renewed horror, then drowning the mower into blubbering silence. The hose, at that point, went almost dry, a kink having shut off the flow of water. William yanked at it, accomplishing nothing. Not a drop flowed from it. Edward prayed that the uncooperative hose would give William the time it would take him to collapse, but he wasn’t, apparently, in a collapsing mood. His loathing had merely been transferred to the garden hose, which leaped suddenly forward like one of those East Indian snakes, spraying a quick jet of water up and down William’s pant leg and shoe. Howling in surprise and chagrin, William cast the offending hose onto the lawn and ran toward the heap of Yamoto’s tools that lay on the parkway. He dashed back across the yard with a garden shears, and, to the startled amazement of a dozen neighbors, hacked the offending hose into damnation. He cast the shears into the juniper bush, then, very slowly and deliberately, hung a six-foot section of hose across the beaten top of the same bush — perhaps as a warning, just as the governor of Jamaica had left the heads of pirates impaled atop poles on the outskirts of the city of Port Royal.

He looked about him with his teeth set, and began to step across the ruined hose, as if toward home. But the wailing of a siren drowned his intentions, whatever for one brave moment they might have been, and he sat down woodenly in the little rivulet of water that played out of the end of the reduced hose and ran down the driveway into the gutter.

A van arrived in the wake of a police car. Dr. Hilario Frosticos stepped out, gathered William up, and with an arm around his shoulder as if to support him, led him away. Jim clumped down the two stairs from his front porch to the walk, watching the van turn the corner and disappear. On the lawn next to the defeated garden hose lay a thin cork washer, three quarters of an inch across. Jim bent over and picked it up along with a little crenelated bottle cap, the inside of which was flecked with rust.

Chapter 5

The maze shed, as Edward St. Ives had come to call it, was a clapboard lean-to, one of two sheds affixed to the back and side of the garage. The other was filled with musty, humming aquaria. It was in the maze shed that Edward and William had undertaken certain experiments to encourage aquatic habits in mice.

The maze itself was built of redwood painted over with asphaltic varnish. A series of locks allowed for the filling of one section or another while the rest remained dry, and there was a little avenue along which mice could be run from a succession of wire cages into the mouth of the maze. It had grown more grand and intricate over the years, like one of those toy train sets that starts out as a little oval track on a half sheet of plywood and develops itself a bit at a time into a multilevel expanse of railroad, running along through papier maché hillsides and past miniature farms alive with cardboard chickens and tin pigs.

Tilted bookshelves hung along one wall of the shed, stuffed with a ragtag and water-eaten collection of the Journal of Amphibiana and Aquatic Evolution and a forty volume set of the vivisectionist Dr. Ignacio Narbondo’s Illustrated Experiments With Gilled Beasts which William Hastings had found on a high shelf at Bertram Smith’s Acres of Books for twenty dollars. Open on the table was a recent Scientific American discussing the experimental injection of water into the lungs of rats and subsequent failure of the rats to exhale it, the whole crowd of them drowning, finally, out of their own stubbornness. Edward thumbed the pages idly, thinking about his brother-in-law.

There in a heap on an old mission oak desk lay twenty or thirty little plastic replicas of aquatic plants, thin strips of lead wrapped around the base of each to prevent their floating in the water of an aquarium. Cleverly carved pieces of driftwood and a half-dozen shards of petrified wood had been placed along the avenues of the maze in order to trick the mice into supposing that they’d gotten into a particularly pleasant and reasonable stream for a swim. William had gone to great trouble to tie the plastic waterweeds to the end of a piece of driftwood with fishing line before being interrupted in his endeavors the previous weekend. It was vital, he’d insisted, that the subjects suppose themselves to be paddling through an authentic river. The failure of the experiments reported on in Scientific American were due, he was sure of it, to the rats having been unprepared, psychologically speaking, for the devolutionary leap from land mammal to aquatic. They could hardly have been expected to do anything but drown, given the circumstances.

Edward was only about half convinced. He routed a speckled axolotl past a chunk of petrified wood, the lumpy beast paddling happily and displaying a perfect lack of interest in the mouse that swam with frantic little strokes ahead of it. Whether the litter of mice had developed a maternal regard for the amphibian was impossible to say, although Edward conceded that such a bond was unlikely. The mice and axolotl remained unfortunately aloof from each other. And there was the vague possibility, of course, that they would achieve results entirely opposite from those intended — that the axolotl would be tainted by fraternizing with the mice and would insist on sleeping in a bed of shredded newspaper and shavings of aromatic cedar. Edward admitted to himself that the experiment was a failure. In fact, their three years of mouse experiments had yielded nothing but failures.

Edward became aware, as he swept the plastic seaweed into the drawer of the desk, of a distant jingling bell playing a double-time version of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” over and over again. He watched through a dusty casement window as a white panel truck slowed almost to a stop in front of the house, the driver’s face lost in the shadow of the cab, then rumbled off again, jingling into the distance.

Edward didn’t half like the look of it. “Something’s up,” he said aloud, then stopped himself with the thought that he was beginning to sound overmuch like William. He plucked the Jell-o-y axolotl out of the maze and returned him to a big aquarium, then rescued the hapless mouse, dabbed at him with a tea towel, and ran him back up the corridor and into his cage,

A muffled snickering erupted into a snort of nasal laughter behind him, and Edward turned to find the meaty face of Oscar Pallcheck leering in through the open casement. Oscar’s eyes were too small. Pig eyes, it seemed to Edward, that were almost lost in the pudding of his cheeks. He wasn’t particularly fat, but was stupidly beefy and had a strange sort of Midas touch for breaking everything he handled. He couldn’t take his eyes off the half-filled maze.

“Jim out here?” he asked, forcing back a snicker.

“No.”

“What’re you doing to those mice?”

“Nothing,” said Edward. “Experiments.”

“What was that big turd thing with the feathers in his neck? Another experiment?”

“An axolotl,” said Edward. “If you must know, it’s a sort of salamander. A very pleasant creature, actually.”

“Sure it is,” said Oscar. “What did you do to him?”

“Do to him? I didn’t do anything to him. That’s the way God made him. Inside out. I can’t say why. There’s a lot of God’s inventions that I don’t half understand, and that axolotl not the least of them.”

But Edward’s irony was lost on Oscar who was far gone in his snickering, and who turned at the sound of Jim and Gill coming up behind him. The three of them wandered away talking among themselves, Oscar emitting a snorted guffaw and commenting aloud about a “turd thing” that Jim’s crazy uncle was chasing a mouse with. Edward sighed and mopped up, then pulled down the third volume of Narbondo’s Gilled Beasts and sat at the desk, thumbing through until he came to the lengthy section on mermen. He began to read, for the tenth time, the account of a gilled corpse taken in the seventeenth century from the Sargasso Sea, tangled among the rubbery purple stalks and bladders of floating kelp. There was an unlikely drawing of a peculiar toad man on an adjoining plate, no doubt long dead, but with a wistful and tragic look in his eye, as if he wondered how he’d fallen out of Paradise and in among monsters.

“Pay me for it,” Oscar Pallcheck said, waving a notebook full of looseleaf pages at a silent and saddened Giles Peach. Jim waited and didn’t say anything. He wondered, though, whether he’d have to take Gill’s side against Oscar. The thought terrified him. If he kept silent perhaps everything would work out. Oscar would tire of the game and give Giles his journal. Jim plucked a tuft of grass from Gill’s front lawn, affecting nonchalance, watching the man across the street — Mr. Hasbro — crawling around the ground on his hands and knees, peering beneath an old, orange Metropolitan at its ruined muffler. Beside him was a new muffler, a chrome wonder of tubes and rivets and obscure oval boxes.

“Listen to this,” said Oscar to Jim, involving him in the fun.

Giles snatched at the notebook, a wild grab that missed its mark by a foot when Oscar, with a burst of laughter, yanked it back out of reach. “Listen.” He cleared his throat theatrically and, waving his free hand at Giles as if to ward him off, read:” ‘My father has gone away. I think to the center of the Earth. Why didn’t he take me? Has he turned entirely into a fish?’ “ Oscar guffawed. “A fish! Your old man’s a fish gone off to the center of the earth! Kee-rist! Talk about nuts. Wait, wait.” He ducked around behind the curb tree as Gill grabbed again for the journal, tears leaking from his eyes. He swung wildly at Oscar, managing to hit him weakly in the shoulder, and for a few moments the two of them circled the tree, Oscar shouting with laughter and Giles sobbing and lunging, the gills along his neck flaring and collapsing, something Jim watched half fascinated, half in fear, but which Oscar, in his mirth, was blessedly oblivious to.

Mr. Hasbro tugged the new muffler toward his car. From the altered angle the thing appeared to have metamorphosed into something almost magical. It glowed silver in the sunlight which played in rays off a sequence of bright wires stretched between two curved porcelain masts like strings on a harp. The whole thing, impossibly, seemed to be hovering a few inches off the ground.

Jim couldn’t contain himself any longer, fear or no fear.

“Give it to him, Oscar,” he said, trying to sound as if he meant it.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got to read this other part. I told you I’d show the whole thing to you anyway, didn’t I? Is that what your beef is? You’d have stole it first if you had any guts. Your uncle ought to swim Gill through his nut mazes. But listen to this.”

“I don’t want to,” said Jim, pushing himself to his knees and standing up. He hadn’t any idea what he was going to do, but the situation called for action. Giles stood shaking almost imperceptibly, having given up his pursuit and withdrawn. There was the clatter of tools across the street: the banging of a hammer, the crank of a ratchet, and a muffled curse as Mr. Hasbro yanked his hand out from beneath his car and shoved a finger into his mouth. Nothing could be seen of the wonderful device but two glowing pinpoints of light, one an emerald green and the other an indescribable arc of lavender and blue mixed together in a luminescent swirl. The emerald dot seemed to bleed out into the surrounding air, tinting the street and the trees and the sidewalk a pale and watery green, like sunlight leaking through the back of a breaking wave. And for one eerie moment Jim was sure he smelled salt on the air — the ocean and seaweed smell of barnacles and mussels clumped onto sea-washed rocks. But the air was still and silent. No breeze blew. Mr. Hasbro stood back, hands on his hips, gazing at his vehicle with obvious satisfaction. The old rusted muffler, pockmarked with nickel-sized holes, lay on the parkway beneath a camphor tree.

“ ‘I’ve developed anti-gravity today. I’m sure of it,’ “ Oscar I read, to himself now since Jim wasn’t a willing audience and Giles would no longer be baited. “ ‘It’s a simple business, actually. Far simpler than it seems. I came across a copper coil at Sprouse Reitz, and along with a box of a hundred large paper clips and a penlight …’ Kee-rist!” shouted Oscar again to emphasize his disbelief. ‘This is crazy. That’s what it is. Is this a joke or something?” But Giles didn’t respond even though the question was aimed at him. Jim was vaguely surprised to see Oscar so angry. Perhaps it was simply that he was playing to an unappreciative audience.

But he was even more surprised when Mr. Hasbro, wiping away at his hands with a blue rag, slid in behind the wheel of his Metropolitan, started it up, raced the weirdly humming engine for a moment, and sailed away into the sky, the little Metropolitan reflecting the rays of the noonday sun until, just for an instant as it angled away toward the Hollywood Hills, it looked like nothing more than a bulbous orange fish — an immense garibaldi, perhaps — darting toward the shadows of a submarine cave. Then it was just a speck in the blue-green of heaven.

Jim felt suddenly nauseated. He pointed a trembling finger at the disappearing automobile and croaked out the single word, “Look!” Oscar spun around, set off by the appearance of Jim’s face, and was treated to the sight of a rusty muffler on a half-brown lawn.

“You’re nuts,” Oscar proclaimed, spitting through the gap in his front teeth. “You’re as nuts as he is.” He slammed Gill’s journal shut, tossed it contemptuously into the street, and strode off down the sidewalk, shaking his head about twice as hard as was necessary. The notebook landed on edge, fell open, and a half-dozen loose pages blew out, breezing away merrily down the road as if chasing Oscar Pallcheck. Jim ran them down, retrieved the notebook from the street, and handed it to Giles. Giles, however, seemed almost catatonic — obviously unseeing. Jim was powerfully tempted to flip open the journal and read it — to stuff the loose pages into his shirt and go home. But he didn’t. He sat on the lawn with his friend, pretending that they were both being silent by choice, and watched a bank of dark, wildly roiling clouds come surging up over the San Gabriel Mountains.

Lightning flickered in the east — great long forks of it that touched the foothills like the tongues of electrical snakes. A black veil of rain approached in an even sheet, illuminated by the lightning flashes, and a scattering of hailstones clattered on the street even though the sky overhead was clear, as if they’d been cast from the distant storm by a great wind. And just before the rain began to fall, when the sharp and wonderful smell of ozone rose from the street and sidewalk, a man came riding over the housetops on a bicycle, pedaling like a whirligig, as if the very fury of the revolving wheels was keeping him aloft. Jim watched in silence as the flying bicycle and its surprisingly familiar rider drew toward and then past them, sailing above Hasbro’s chimney, beneath swaying telephone wires, and arcing skyward to disappear into the dark wall of rain that swept over them, almost obscuring the street, blotting out the rest of the world. Jim shoved Gill’s journal under his jacket, his mind racing, thinking of Hasbro’s impossible flight, thinking of Roycroft Squires pedaling past in defiance of gravity — in defiance of sanity. And why Roycroft Squires? He thought of the look in his father’s eyes as he had watched Yamoto through the window, of his obvious certainty that “things are becoming clear.” Were they? Or was the opposite true? Or was he infected by his father’s lunacy?

Giles seemed to wake up suddenly, as if he’d been startled out of sleep. The two of them bent toward the house through huge drops of rain. When Jim handed Giles the notebook, he put it away along with a dozen others without saying a word. Jim didn’t dare refer to it, although its contents were whirling in his mind like the pedals of Squire’s bicycle. It must have been a hallucination. Something he’d eaten. He remembered a story he’d read once in which a man had seen a luminous pig after eating three dozen raw oysters. But he hadn’t eaten any oysters.

The tinkle of a bell sounded faintly through the rain, and a white panel truck drew toward the house. Jim and Giles watched through the kitchen window as the bell fell silent and the truck wheezed to a stop.

John Pinion stepped out. He was dressed in the white duck pants and bluejacket of a Good Humor man, and he hoisted a foolishly small and ribby umbrella before setting out up the driveway. Jim supposed he’d be asked to leave, being associated, as he was, with the competition. He didn’t entirely like the looks of John Pinion, not so much because he was squat and pale, but because he was perpetually shaking your hand in a fishy sort of grip, as if he weren’t so much being pleasant or polite as obsequious — worse than that, as if he wanted to touch you, to feel your skin. Jim wasn’t fond of being touched. He determined to “freeze Pinion out” as Oscar would have put it.

Pinion rang the doorbell, looking furtively over his shoulder, then peering in at the window, shading his eyes, staring straight in at Giles and Jim for ten seconds before he made them out. Then he straightened up and smiled with an embarrassed look. Giles opened the door.

“Odd weather, what?” said Pinion, who sometimes affected a sort of comic book English accent and jargon. “Wet out here.” He pumped Gill’s hand, probably the only hand in miles as cold and fishy as his own. Then he went after Jim’s hand, but Jim, who was large for his age and who had learned a few hand-shaking tricks from Uncle Edward, was ready for him.

He got his in first and grasped the finger end of Pinion’s hand, so that Pinion couldn’t get anything more than a thumb on him. He gave it a hearty squeeze to show he meant business, then let it flop floorward. Pinion grinned foolishly. “Have you got a few moments?” he asked Giles in a plonking, final sort of tone, entirely avoiding looking at Jim.

Jim was damned if he’d leave. He was buoyed up by his run-in with Oscar Pallcheck, such as it was. There was no telling how valiant he might have been if it weren’t for the business with Mr. Hasbro. He was half inclined to suppose he’d imagined it. He must have. Oscar hadn’t seen a thing. Nor had Giles, apparently. But if there was one man who might have had something to do with it, Pinion was that man. In fact, Pinion’s timely arrival was packed with suspicion. Jim wasn’t about to leave. Things were afoot.

Pinion, however, was silent as a clam. He smiled at Jim, but it was a malevolent smile now. There was no mistaking it. He wasn’t about to reveal himself, not to the nephew of Edward St. Ives, Russel Latzarel’s associate. Pinion would wait him out.

Jim was struck with sudden inspiration. He mumbled a quick goodbye, ducked out through the rain, angled around the side of the house into the back yard, and slid silently through the back door, a thrill of fear and intrigue sweeping him toward the living room where Pinion’s voice muttered along. Jim collapsed to his hands and knees at the sound of a shout: the word “yes” exclaimed by Pinion as if in response to a question. Jim picked himself up, cursing himself for having reacted as if he’d be invisible on all fours. His blood rushed along in a fever behind his ears. He needed a plan. Sailing in like this wouldn’t do. He was certain that farther along the hallway was a door — a closet door. He edged up toward it, holding his breath, calculating the time that Velma Peach was likely to arrive home from the bakery where she worked on Saturdays until four — several hours away yet. Pinion laughed aloud and made a peculiar swatting sound, as if slapping his fist into his open palm to emphasize a point. What if Velma Peach drove home for lunch? It was almost noon. If Giles caught him crouched in a coat closet, Jim would simply shriek and leap out at him, like Oscar would do, and pretend it was a gag. But if Velma Peach opened the closet door to shove her raincoat in — he didn’t want to think of it. It would be the end of both of them. He eased into the closet, shoving past an immense fur coat — the skin of an ape, apparently, that smelled musty, like the blue fungus that grows on leather shoes that have sat too long in the dampness of a dark closet floor. He pressed his ear to the wall. There was silence. He couldn’t hear a thing above the sound of his own heart. The sudden sound of Pinion’s voice directly beyond the wall nearly pitched him into the hairy coat. He stood still, breathing through his mouth, listening.

“Naked Eskimos. That’s what I said. And the north wind: there’s no doubt at all it gets warmer in the Arctic as one sails north. Latzarel, remember, hasn’t been to the Arctic. He pretends to be an explorer. Pshaw! He’s a boy scout, a tiny tot, a back yard scrabbler. Have you considered this: If rivers don’t flow out of the center of the Earth — and I, for one, know they do — then why are icebergs made of fresh water? And why, for the love of God, does the musk ox migrate north? Where is he going? To spend the winter on an ice field? You tell me!”

Giles apparently didn’t know, or at least he didn’t answer. He mumbled something about gravity, however, concerned as he naturally would be with physics.

“Fascinating business,” Pinion said. “Perfectly fascinating. You see, gravitational pull is immense, relatively speaking, around the curve from the exterior to the interior of the Earth. We’d roughly double our weight when sailing in through the polar openings along one of the rivers. But inside! Inside we’d halve our weight. A one-hundred-fifty-pound man would weigh about seventy-five pounds. He’d have to — centrifugal force would require it. It doesn’t take much to hold a body to the inside of a hollow, rotating ball.

“But this is all stuff. You’ve heard the same from Latzarel. I know you have. I didn’t drive over here today in that storm to chat about common knowledge. There’s information Latzarel hasn’t got. Nor can he get it! He knows nothing of a race of people — very wonderful people — living at the Earth’s core. Has he mentioned them to you? I think not.”

Jim heard the sound of Pinion slapping something again — a tabletop or the arm of his chair. Pinion paused, cleared his throat, and let the last bit of information settle.

“I was contacted by an emissary of these people. An interesting gentleman, to be sure. He had — how shall I say it? — certain physiological qualities that put me in mind of you. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was gilled. A merman, if you will. And, if I’m not entirely amiss, one of your relatives. You and your family, I mean to say, are exiles from the land within the Earth. A paradise of natural beauty and riches. Gemstones for the plucking. Rivers running with gold. Vast subtropical forests ripe with fruit through the unvarying seasons. There’s no winter there, boy! Think of it. Only perpetual spring and summer.

“It’s a land out of mythology — Ultima Thule, Atlantis, Shamballa, Agharta, Pellucidar! All the ancient mysteries explained. And you, my boy, exiled from that land of eternal sun, you and your unfortunate father …. Alas!”

Jim could imagine Pinion shaking his head, perhaps fondling Giles’ shoulder — the lying old hypocrite. Approached by an emissary! Why would an emissary approach John Pinion? Why wouldn’t he approach Giles Peach? Why would he approach anyone at all? To encourage lunatics like Pinion to invade the land beyond the poles? Jim was aghast. Would Giles swallow all this? Of course he would. He was nine-tenths of the way there before Pinion’s arrival. Why shouldn’t he? Uncle Edward had. Professor Latzarel had. And when Jim considered it for a moment, he had too. He didn’t half believe in Pinion’s emissary, but Ashbless had been right at the Newtonian Society meeting. Pinion would outdistance them all. He hadn’t their honesty, their integrity. But he’d very soon have Giles’ machine.

The front door shut with a suddenness that nearly toppled Jim into the ape coat again. It was Velma Peach, home for lunch. He could hear her there, a foot away. Through the crack between the door and the jamb he could see a hand gripping a raincoat. Surely she wouldn’t hang it in the closet. She was only home to eat lunch. He shut his eyes, waiting, considering and discarding speeches. The closet was far too small to hide him.

“What are you doing here?” demanded Mrs. Peach. For one desperate moment Jim was sure she was talking to him. But then the hand and the coat disappeared. Jim could hear her feet scraping away toward the living room. It was John Pinion she confronted.

“My good woman …” he began.

“What do you want here?”

“I’m interested only in your son’s welfare.”

“You’re interested in some slimy business, I’d warrant. If you want to talk to Giles, ask me first. I know who you are. Giles has enough ideas in his head without your shoving in.”

“Giles, perhaps, is the best judge of that,” Pinion replied in an abruptly icy tone. “You’re about to be outvoted by history. Take my word for it, my good …”

But he hadn’t time to finish before Velma Peach began to shout that she would “good woman” him out the door; Jim, in a wild rush, slid out of the closet unseen and fled down the hall, out through the kitchen and into the back yard. The front door slammed, Pinion’s truck rumbled away, and Jim idled casually along toward home, looking over his shoulder twice, fearful of being caught out and thinking wildly about Pinion’s Atlanteans and Mr. Hasbro’s car and of stealing Gill’s journals. How much of the day’s events could he tell Uncle Edward? All of it might be of vast importance. He’d make up some story of overhearing Pinion. And if it seemed a good idea, he’d mention the Metropolitan incident. Uncle Edward had, after all, insisted he’d been lashed with an invisible wet tentacle at The Newtonian meeting. But he couldn’t mention having seen Roycroft Squires on the flying bicycle. They’d shove him into bed and call Dr. Frosticos. The thought sobered him, and once again he thought of his father’s fear of Yamoto, of everything new or unusual. It seemed to him that whatever else might be true, they were certainly rushing headlong toward some strange fate.

Chapter 6

There was nothing but bad weather for a month: rain and clouds and wind out of the northeast, high tides and storm surf on the south coast. Professor Latzarel haunted the coves along the Palos Verdes Peninsula, waiting for a low tide, plumbing the depths of big pools with a thousand-foot line. Word had come from Roycroft Squires. The launching of the diving bell was impossible. Not to be thought of. They’d have to postpone it.

In mid-December the Santa Ana winds began to blow again, the weather hotted up, and the sea calmed. Anticipating a three-day blow, Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel decided to wait another few days to launch the diving bell, until Saturday, perhaps. If the wind lasted longer they’d launch on Sunday.

Early Thursday afternoon, Giles, Jim, and Oscar Pallcheck walked along Colorado Boulevard in the wind. An occasional tumbleweed, loosed from the foothills or from some vacant lot, came rolling across the road, mashing its way under the bumper of a moving car and disintegrating in a scattering of twigs. The air smelled hot and dry, like wind that had blown across a rocky desert floor. If it were three months earlier, the charged air and the blowing dust would have been a distraction, an irritation, but in early December the wind was an Indian summer, blown in late at night from the east, almost a holiday.

Gill and Jim were set on finding Christmas gifts. It was a perfect excuse to rout through the old bookstores and junky curiosity shops that fronted Colorado. Oscar hadn’t, it seemed, any concern for Christmas, or for bookstores or junk no matter how curious. He laughed into obscurity a series of stuffed salamanders that Jim considered buying for Uncle Edward. There were a dozen of the things pinned to a board and labeled. Aside from a couple of missing feet and a ball of wadding shoving through the ruined eye of a spotted newt, the collection was in tiptop shape. Oscar became fascinated with an unidentifiable metal contraption hung with flexible tubing that he insisted was a nasal irrigator. Then he insisted that a cream pitcher — a ceramic duck through whose beak would pour a river of milk — was also a nasal irrigator. Jim’s salamanders became nasal irrigators themselves very quickly, as did the owner of the shop, a pinched little man with two enormous hearing aids and assorted missing teeth, who not only wouldn’t sell the salamanders to Jim at any price, but who chased the three of them back out into the wind, shouting a final curse as Oscar performed what was meant to be a ridiculing dance on the sidewalk in front of the shop.

The incident primed Oscar up fairly thoroughly, and he announced that they’d spend the afternoon “playing for points,” a pastime in which one of them would challenge another to commit an act of daring in return for a specified number of points. It was a game that Oscar invariably won, unshackled as he was by any sense of morality or guilt:

‘He insisted that his performance at the curiosity shop was worth three points for openers, and neither Gill nor Jim complained. Jim netted two for himself by sliding in through the open door of the K-Y Pool Hall and shouting “Rack ‘em up” in an embarrassed voice before ducking back out onto the sidewalk. Oscar offered six points to Giles to simply walk into the Eagle Rock Public Library and flare his nostrils, very calmly and deliberately, for the space of a full minute in front of Mr. Robb, the feared and glowering reference librarian. He and Jim would keep time on the big wall clock over Mr. Robb’s head. Giles refused and wouldn’t be bullied into it. He earned a grudging point, however, by agreeing to buy Oscar a boysenberry milkshake at Pete’s Blue Chip hamburger stand, and it was then, as the three of them angled across the parking lot of a van and storage yard, that Jim became aware of the desultory jingling of a bell somewhere out on the boulevard.

John Pinion’s truck slowly turned the corner and hove to at the curb. Giles was impassive. Jim knew that whatever transpired, he wouldn’t leave Giles alone with Pinion — not this time; not if he could help it. Oscar assumed Pinion to be an authentic ice cream man as he climbed down out of the cab, and saw in Pinion’s pink face a naivete he could play on like a fiddle.

Chewing a monumental wad of gum, Oscar accosted Pinion with something that sounded like, “Watchasay?” Pinion laughed and smiled in a fatherly way, shoving out his ubiquitous hand. Oscar reached for it, then snatched his own away an instant before making contact. “I don’t connect with sewer pipes,” he announced, breaking into immediate laughter and winking at Jim, who hastened to wink back. Giles was silent. Pinion laughed to show he could take a joke. “Call that a shirt?” asked Oscar, nodding his head toward Pinion’s ice cream outfit.

Pinion couldn’t respond. He smiled more broadly and decided to take the offensive — an unfortunate decision, as it turned out. He sucked in his stomach, shoving vital organs and fat up toward his chest — to show fads physique off to better advantage perhaps — and affected an informal tone, entirely unlike his usual mock-English performance, no doubt supposing that Oscar would find him a sort of kindred spirit.

“How old do you think I am?” he asked, winking at Giles and Jim. “Come on now, an honest guess. What do you say, forty?”

He was nearer sixty; anyone could see that. But he astounded Jim by bending forward and launching himself into a spectacular handstand. Odd change and a penknife clattered out of his pockets onto the sidewalk. Jim could see, across the street, a line of half a dozen faces watching Pinion’s antics from within Pete’s Blue Chip.

Pinion stood just so for the space of thirty long seconds before reversing the process and leaping upright. His pink face had gone scarlet, and he puffed like a steam engine. Jim was struck with the uncanny certainty that the lot of them were being inescapably drawn into some criminal lunacy. Pinion plucked his knife from the sidewalk but let the scattered change lie. He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Well what do you say,” he asked Oscar. “Have you ever seen anyone as fit as me? No you haven’t. I’m a polar explorer. The polar explorer. That’s who I am.”

Oscar leered at Jim, determined not to let Pinion out-wink him. He spat the great gob of wrinkled gum into the street and said, “What do you figure, boys, ninety or a hunnerd?” Oscar winked again at Jim to alert him that the situation was under control. With a growing sense of dread, Jim did his best to be in on the gag. He winked back. Pinion seemed to be fueled by the winks.

“Well, a hundred is it?” He began bouncing and jabbing out into the air as if punching phantoms. “Son,” he said impressively, puffing away there for Oscar’s benefit, “I was the champ of Arkansas. I used to fight ‘em all. It didn’t matter who they were.” He jabbed and ducked and feinted his way through the lie. Jim, anyway, was certain it was a lie. He’d never heard anything about Pinion’s being a boxer, even in his youth. He determined that it was simply Pinion’s monumental ego that wouldn’t allow him to be bested in an exchange with Oscar. He was using psychology, no doubt — appealing to Oscar’s obvious sense of brutality.

Oscar, in fine form, bounced once or twice in the style of the Champ of Arkansas, throwing an imaginary windmill punch and eyeballing Gill and Jim. It was just the sort of thing Oscar lived for and that Jim feared. Gill, Jim could see, was fading.

Pinion pressed the issue. “Ever hear of O’Riley the Irish Miller?”

“Sure,” Oscar lied, “who hasn’t?”

“Well it was me who taught him to fight. I was in the gym every day, over in east L.A. O’Riley went on to whip Stud Pritchard at the Olympic. Took him apart. I was in O’Riley’s corner, and it was just like I taught him. For three rounds it was _N a little of this …” and Pinion threw three quick left jabs.

“And a little of this …” Pinion whirled his right around in a tight hook.

“And one of these,” said Oscar, hopping backward ridiculously on one foot and screwing up his face into an appropriate grimace.

“Then late in the third,” said Pinion, undaunted by Oscar’s performance, “Pritchard made what we fighters call the ‘fatal pause.’”

“Sure he did,” said Oscar, mimicking what seemed to him to constitute the fatal pause.

“And I jumped up and yelled, ‘Cut loose, Miller!’ and O’Riley cut loose!”

At the utterance of this revelation, Oscar could contain himself no longer, and he erupted in a wild howl of laughter, the term “cut loose” having certain slang connotations that Pinion didn’t intend. Oscar immediately acted out Stud Pritchard’s horror at Irish O’Riley’s cutting loose, and then went on to act out the cutting loose process itself with such grim majesty that Jim burst into uncontrollable laughter. Pinion wasn’t half so impressed.

He stepped back a pace, stiffened up as rigid as he could manage, and tapped himself on the stomach. “Punch me,” he gasped, squinting at Oscar. “Right there. Hard as nails.” And he thumped his stomach again, ready to weather the punch of O’Riley the swinging Irish Miller.

Oscar huffed himself up and let fly at Pinion’s abdomen, to the horror of both Jim and Gill. Pinion deflated like a sprung balloon. There was a shout from the direction of Pete’s Blue Chip. Pinion doubled over and whistled into the dirt, his lips turning a sudden shade of pale blue and his eyes rolling up into his head.

For the space of three seconds Jim stood transfixed with honor, but when Oscar, screaming with laughter, broke and ran down Hubbard Road, Jim snatched Giles’ arm and dragged him along in Oscar’s wake. Gill watched over his shoulder for some sign that Pinion wasn’t, as both of them feared, dead. When a half dozen cheeseburger-clutching bystanders emptied out of Pete’s into the street, Giles forgot about Pinion and ran along at Jim’s heels, both of them cutting away down the first available alley, losing Oscar in the process and leaping out onto Stickley Street where they forced themselves to slow up and walk along at a disinterested pace until they reached the safe port of Jim’s house. There they found Uncle Edward, Professor Latzarel, and Roycroft Squires messing with an unlikely looking diving bell perched on the back of a flatbed truck. Jim sailed past as if it weren’t there, still half expecting a mob, perhaps waving hayforks and lit torches, to round the corner with a shout. He worked at convincing himself that he and Gill had merely been bystanders and were in no way responsible for the crippling of Pinion. But then he pictured himself laughing aloud and cheering Oscar on an instant before Pinion’s collapse. They’d find him as guilty as Oscar. Giles they wouldn’t touch. Pinion, after all, wouldn’t press charges — not against Gill. He’d be full of fatherly concern — if he was still alive. But he’d chase Jim and Oscar down. There was no doubt about that. Pinion was vicious and obviously jealous of Professor Latzarel and Uncle Edward.

Jim peered out of the front window at the street. Mrs. Pembly skulked along on the sidewalk, pretending to inspect a little bed of begonias. She was obviously watching the house. Jim’s blood raced. Was she in league with Frosticos, with Pinion? She wandered along the sidewalk and peered down the driveway, oblivious to being spied on. It was the diving bell she was watching. Jim turned to Giles who sat silent as a heap of stones in the green chair, looking dismal.

“Well what about that,” said Jim, affecting a smirk. “That took care of old Pinion nut, didn’t it?”

He intended the remark to carry a tone of bravado, but he, was immediately sorry for it when he saw Giles’ reaction. He shook himself out of his heap, slammed a hand onto the arm of the chair, and tried to speak. “P … p … p … poor Pinion!” he stuttered out. Then he said, “Oscar!” with such a startling hiss that Jim spun around, expecting to see Oscar himself standing behind him. Giles shook his head. His mouth trembled. It seemed to Jim that Gill had something terrible to say, something horrific, something that, finally, couldn’t be uttered. Gill stood up abruptly, walked past Jim without a word, and slammed out the back door. The sight of the diving bell arrested him, however, and in seconds his anger appeared to have evaporated, replaced by scientific curiosity. He stood with his hands in his pockets gaping at the machine. Jim wandered out behind him.

The diving bell itself, borrowed by Professor Latzarel from the Gaviota Oceanographic Laboratory, was round as a ball. It was almost an antique. Hoses led away out of it into great coils, and in a ring around the bell, within the upper one third or so, were a line of portholes riveted shut. There was a hatch at the top, screwed down with what looked like an immense brass valve. The whole thing was etched with corrosion and flaked with blue-green verdigris. It looked to Jim like something out of Jules Verne.

Roycroft Squires fiddled with the air hoses, running down the length of them, inch by inch, looking for leaks, perhaps. He nodded at Jim, paused, and scratched at a little bump on the hose.

“Weak spot?” asked Jim.

“Not really,” said Squires, resuming his inspection. “Just a lump of rubber.” He glanced back up at Jim. “You look pale. Feeling okay?”

Jim wiped sweat off his nose, certain for one impossible moment that Squires had seen through him, had somehow worked out that he and Oscar had just beaten up John Pinion. “I’m fine,” Jim said. “Really. It’s this wind. Makes me feel sticky.”

“It’s positive ions that does it. Make people act crazy. The local Indians used to throw themselves into the sea when the Santa Ana blew.”

“With any luck we’ll do the same,” shouted Latzarel from within the bell. He grinned out at Jim. The inch-thick glass of the porthole blew his face up like a balloon.

“I’ve been thinking of buying a bicycle,” Jim said idly.

Squires took a pull at a half empty bottle of beer. “Mmmm?” he said.

“You know anything about bicycles?”

“Not a bit, actually. I’m not much on bicycles.”

“I could have sworn I saw you ride past not too long ago.” Jim pretended to rub at the brass wall of the diving bell.

“Not on a bicycle you didn’t. I haven’t ridden one in forty years. Treacherous things. The last one I had lost its chain every sixty or eighty feet.”

Jim said he must have been mistaken and let the matter chop. Squires’ assurance hadn’t done anything to solve the riddle.

Giles Peach had scrambled onto the bell and was peering in at Latzarel. “What is the purpose of these hoses?” asked Giles.

“Air and pressure,” said Latzarel. “Red one’s air; black one’s pressure.”

Gill nodded as if he’d known what they were all along, and then he sniffed and scratched his ear, screwing up his face a little with the look of someone at once condescending and a bit amazed at the inadequacy of the devices. “Fairly primitive,” he said — a statement which, under the circumstances, irritated Jim unspeakably.

“It gets the job done,” Latzarel assured him.

Giles squeezed at the air hose. “Wouldn’t an oxygenator be more efficient?” Then without waiting for an answer, he poked his head in to have a look at the controls. “No motivators?”

“None whatsoever.”

“You’re limited, then, by the length of the hoses?”

“That’s correct,” said Latzarel, humming to himself.

“How deep will she go?”

“Two hundred fifty feet, in a pinch. Deep enough to take some soundings. If I’m not mistaken, though, we shouldn’t have to go too deep on this run. The walls of the pool are probably littered with artifacts. I’d stake my reputation on it. John Pinion’s fishing in the wrong hole.” Latzarel laughed, satisfied with the pun.

At the mention of Pinion, Giles looked suddenly saddened. Jim couldn’t fathom it. Pinion was so slimy.

“Speaking of Pinion,” Latzarel continued, “how are you getting along with your device? Your subterranean prospector.”

Giles shrugged.

“Get that perpetual motion engine of yours working yet?” Latzarel winked through the porthole at Jim.

“I believe so,” said Giles. “I needed a part that I couldn’t find. But just this afternoon I saw one in a junk store up on Colorado.” He paused for a moment then said; “Oscar Pall-check thought it was a nasal irrigator.” He’d meant the remark as a comment on Oscar’s stupidity and coarseness, Jim was sure of that, but Gill turned immediately red, embarrassed at his own coarseness in simply having said it.

Professor Latzarel chuckled. “A nasal irrigator, eh? And you need this for your machine?” He laughed out loud.

“Well it wasn’t, really. It was a relay attached to a vapor box, but Oscar …”

“Vapor!” said Latzarel, punching at a brass toggle switch on the control panel. “A vaporizer, you mean. Your friend was right. It was a nasal irrigator.” Then Latzarel straightened up, held the index finger of his right hand in the air, and uttered profoundly, “A nose is a nose, is a nose, is a nose,” and then blew his own so monumentally into a checked handkerchief that the diving bell rang with the blast. Latzarel laughed hugely, beside himself. He shoved up through the hatch and repeated the gag for Edward’s benefit, telling him that if William were there, with his literature background and all, it would break him up.

It didn’t seem to break Gill up much at all. In fact he shook his head sadly and fell silent, staring toward the distant mountains outlined against a blue, late afternoon sky, the dying wind blowing his lank blond hair up out of his face. Five minutes later he had slipped away unseen without uttering another word. Jim had the illogical feeling that Professor Latzarel would do well to be less cavalier with Giles, who didn’t half understand humor. The idea of Oscar’s nasal irrigator being part of a perpetual motion engine was foolish enough, but Gill wasn’t foolish — crazy, perhaps, but not foolish. And there was the matter of Hasbro’s car, a phenomenon that Uncle Edward had written off as a figment. He’d been concerned, there was no doubting that, but his concern had the same worried look about it that surfaced when William Hastings made one of his intermittent visits home.

“Can you beat this?” cried Uncle Edward on Saturday morning, nearly choking on his coffee. Jim looked up from his bock: The Abominations of Fu Manchu. His mother had never allowed turn to read at the table, but Uncle Edward hadn’t any objections. Edward slapped his newspaper with the back of his hand. “John Pinion was accosted and beaten by a gang of toughs not three blocks from here Thursday afternoon! Hospitalized!”

Jim laid his book on the table and swallowed some milk. “Hurt bad?”

“No, more’s the pity,” said Uncle Edward, shaking his head. “Knocked the wind out of him, apparently. A bystander rushed him down to Glendale General but they let him go an hour later. Apparently he didn’t know his assailants.” Uncle Edward paused and raised his coffee cup, his eyes darting back and forth across the column. Jim sighed deeply and picked up Fu Manchu.

“Ha!” cried Edward. “Listen to this! No wonder he didn’t know his assailants! He was dressed as an ice cream vendor. And he had a tricked-up panel truck with a bell and speaker that played ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep.’ That’s who it is! By God!” Edward dropped the paper and lunged at the phone, dialing Professor Latzarel’s number. “Listen,” he said into the phone.

“Don’t talk, listen. Do you recall my mentioning an ice cream truck that hung about on the road? Yes. Well, you won’t believe this. Pinion’s up to some deviltry, and you can lay to it.”

And he read Latzarel the article from one end to the other. Witnesses, apparently, had seen Pinion attempting to lure three boys into his ice cream truck, performing some sort of song and dance for their amusement. But the boys wouldn’t have any of it, and one, a hulking fellow in a tiny red t-shirt, punched Pinion in the abdomen. The three youths fled west on Hubbard Street.

“They suspect Pinion of being a pervert! Can you imagine?” Edward paused, listened, and nodded grimly. “More than meets the eye. That’s just what I was saying to myself. Something’s up.” Then he looked across at Jim who was hiding behind his open book, the cover of which depicted a bearded Fu. Manchu, a pink mushroom, and a plump, alien-looking scorpion all caught up in a sort of wind devil. “I’ll call you back,” said Edward. ‘To heck with it; I’ll see you in an hour at the docks.”

Uncle Edward cleared his throat meaningfully. Jim looked up, knowing what was coming. “Doesn’t Oscar wear a red t-shirt?”

“Yes, mostly.”

“Didn’t he have one on Thursday afternoon?”

“I guess.”

Edward nodded. “Care to tell me about it? This may be important. It has to be. What’s Pinion up to? That’s what I want to know. He wasn’t trying to lure you into his truck, was he?”

“Not me, that’s for sure. I think he was after Giles ….” And with that, Jim related the whole incident — how he’d tried to call Oscar off, and how Pinion had seemed ready to kidnap Gill, and how Oscar, seeing Pinion go for Giles, had punched him one and the lot of them had run for it, knowing things would go hard for them, having assaulted a polar explorer and all. Already waist deep in his story, Jim went on to describe Pinion’s earlier conversation with Gill and the argument with Velma Peach. He stopped short of any mention of the flying bicycle, assuming that the story would throw a cloud of implausibility and doubt over the entire confession — perhaps deepen the suspicions that had been awakened in Uncle Edward by Jim’s recounting of the Hasbro’s Metropolitan incident.

Edward listened intently, but admitted, finally, to being every bit as confused as he had been before. That Pinion was planning some phenomenon there could be no doubt. But why he had such evident interest in Giles, beyond his scientific curiosity at Giles’ abnormalities, was a mystery. He was still pondering and speculating as they drove out the Harbor Freeway an hour later toward San Pedro.

Chapter 7

Except for the rhythmic heaving of the ground swell, the ocean was still. Six-inch wind waves lapped against the shore at low tide, and the faint remnants of the Santa Ana winds — little, willowy offshore breezes — mussed Jim’s hair, from time to time as he munched black licorice on the foredeck of the Gerhardi Roycroft Squires’ old fishing boat. The boat itself was of peculiar shape — vastly wider in the bow than in the stern, and Jim, understanding nothing of boats, could make little of the strange shape, although it appealed to him: It seemed to be a nautical cousin of his uncle’s Hudson Wasp. The cabin had a sort of humped and globular look to it which reminded him of the sweep of a tiny, almost round Airstream trailer. The boat seemed to have been built by someone with a lively imagination, and it was an altogether fitting companion to the diving bell perched in the stern.

In the sunlight glowing off the surface of the sea, the hull of the bell sparkled like an immense jewel — a running together of sapphire and emerald and gold. Rays of reflected light played off the polished glass ports, regularly bathing the lone watcher on the shore in bright sweeps of luminescence as the Gerhardi rose and sank on the swell.

William Ashbless sat on the beach. He shaded his eyes against the glare and tinkered with a little ship-to-shore radio seemingly charged with static. The voice of Professor Latzarel popped in and out: “Testing, testing, testing …” a half a dozen times at odd intervals. Then he counted a bit for good measure, never getting much past four. Latzarel was apparently happy with the results, however, for it occurred to him to tell a joke by way of further testing the apparatus. Ashbless had a contempt for jokes of all types, especially Latzarel’s. “It seems,” said Professor Latzarel launching out in one of the six standard introductory clauses, “there was an ape who ordered a beer in a pub off Pier Street in Long Beach. The ape handed the bartender a ten … “A burst of static flooded out of the radio. Ashbless cranked away at the volume dial, cutting both the static and Latzarel’s voice which was buried in it. Ashbless could just hear what sounded like “tub ubba hill,” but of course couldn’t be. The radio screed loudly, then fell silent. A burst of laughter leapt out. Ashbless cursed. He’d missed the punchline of Latzarel’s stupid damn joke, apparently. But then it became evident that he hadn’t. It had been anticipatory laughter instead.

“So the bartender, see, thinks to himself, ‘What do apes know about money?’” Unable to contain himself, Latzarel giggled into the radio, which abruptly went dead. Ashbless slammed a hand onto the top of his set. There was a static-laden pause of twenty or thirty seconds before Latzaiel’s voice poked in: ‘Testing,” he said. “Are you there?”

“I’m here,” Ashbless croaked into the machine. “What about the filthy ape?”

“Right,” said Latzarel, giggling. “I’ve got to ask Edward something about the punchline.” The radio fell silent.

Ashbless poked at a switch, twisted a dial, and whistled into the receiver, hoping to irritate Latzarel. He watched Roycroft Squires, who stood on the port bow idly smoking his pipe, gazing out to sea. Twenty miles out beyond the swaying Gerhardi rose the shadowy cliffs of Santa Catalina island, shrouded in sea mist. As the boat listed to starboard, Squires, puffing on his pipe, disappeared behind the bulk of the rising cabin while the southern tip of the distant island seemed to rise skyward behind him. Then as the boat rolled down the backside of the swell, Squires puffed himself up from beyond the cabin, little clouds of tobacco smoke rising over his head, and the tip of the island vanishing momentarily, then rising again almost hypnotically some few seconds later as Squires descended once again beyond the cabin. Ashbless was almost lulled to sleep in the warm air, suddenly free of radio noise and silent but for the cry of a wheeling gull. He could easily have convinced himself that the rocking boat, the puffing Squires, and the misty cliffs of the transmarine island were parts of a cyclical, fabulous machine laboring to an unheard rhythm carried on the late morning breeze.

The crackling of the radio shattered the slow cadence and startled Ashbless out of his daydream. It was Latzarel, testing again. Ashbless was tempted to turn it off. “So the bartender …” said Latzarel, “counts out forty cents change …” A chatter of static eradicated two or three seconds. “And the ape pockets the change and looks around, puzzled …” A great burst of it overwhelmed the ape’s puzzlement. There was a scrunch of gravel and the skid of a shoe on the cliffside scree behind him. Ashbless, fingering switches and dials, turned to find the journalist Spekowsky hastening up, clutching an immense box camera that hung around his neck and shoulder. He was puffing with exertion. The static cleared abruptly, and with a wild hoot of laughter Latzarel shouted, ‘To make small talk, the bartender says, ‘We don’t get many apes in here.’”

Spekowsky was momentarily dumbstruck. He shaded his eyes and peered out at the diving bell. Ashbless hoped that the last revelation concluded the joke, but once again he was mistaken. “And the ape says,” came Latzarel’s voice in a gasp of laughing effort cut short by a hiss of almost deafening static,” … at nine dollars and sixty cents a beer, I’m not surprised!” Ashbless shut the machine down and shook his head at the frowning Spekowsky with a gesture of resignation and blamelessness. Spekowsky hauled out a spiral binder and began jotting quick notes.

Jim had seen the approach of Spekowsky minutes earlier — had spotted the journalist rummaging along the tops of the cliffs, searching for the safest path. He was vaguely surprised to see him, given the recent Newtonian meeting, and was doubly surprised to see him apparently chatting agreeably with Ashbless. The phenomenon puzzled Uncle Edward as well when Jim called his attention to it. Spekowsky busied himself on shore, messing with his camera equipment.

In a little under twenty minutes, the tide dropping rapidly, Edward St. Ives and Professor Latzarel clanked shut the hatch, and with a hum and a splash, the diving bell was hoisted over the edge of the deck and slowly swallowed by the blue ocean.

Jim watched its descent. A rush of bubbles partly obscured the dark sphere that was ringed with a halo of light cast by six stationary lamps. The bell dropped to a depth of ten or twelve feet, dangled momentarily, then dropped again another ten. Jim busied himself with Momus’ glass, but after two minutes or so he could see nothing through it but empty water, for the bell dropped away into the shadows of the enormous pool until there was nothing left but dancing bubbles and a dim, distant submarine glow. Edward’s voice crackled out of the radio on deck as well as from Ashbless’ radio on the rocky shore where Spekowsky leaned forward listening, taking notes.

Inside the bell itself, Edward and Professor Latzarel sat on stools, cold and cramped for space. Little defrosters blew dry air at the ports, but Latzarel’s kept fogging over anyway. He wiped at it with a handkerchief, alternately complaining about the fog and expostulating about some oceanic wonder — a great pink octopus sliding into the shadows of a hollow in the rock wall, or a manta ray the size of the hood of a car, careering away in the distance, sailing among waving tendrils of kelp.

“Spit on it,” said Edward.

“What?”

“On the window. Spit on it and rub it around.”

“What do you see?”

“It’ll keep it from fogging up. By God, look at that!” Edward pointed out into the dark ocean and jammed his face against the cold, dewy port. Latzarel rose and bent across to have a look.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing, now. But there was something vast out there a moment ago.”

“How vast?”

“I don’t know.” Edward shook his head. ‘There was a great luminous eye. As big as a grapefruit. Bigger. It stared at us for a moment, then closed.”

“Closed! You mean it was lidded?”

‘That’s right.” Edward dabbed at a little trail of seawater that leaked in through the seal of one of the ports. He could see nothing beyond, only a family of wildly colored nudibranch messing about on a weedy rock.

A sudden clunking jar pitched Latzarel forward. He caught himself on a brace welded onto the wall of the bell beneath the hatch. “We’ve settled.”

Edward turned, peered out a port, and began to manipulate two little hinged arms, intending to push them off the rocks and into the chasm. The bell hopped forward six inches. Latzarel informed Squires of their dilemma. The bell hopped again with a scrape-clank, then listed abruptly, one of its feet having worked its way off the reef. The bell tottered there for a moment. Edward prodded it once more, it listed farther, and lost its grip on the rock shelf and kelp.

“Say!” shouted Latzarel just as the bell edged free. “Stop! Wait!” But it was too late. They were off. He bent over, craning his neck, peering up through the port. Beyond three feet or so of radiance there was a black wall of ocean.

“What was it?” asked Edward.

“You won’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

“A piece of ivory about six feet long. Curved.”

“Whalebone,” said Edward, resuming his seat.

“Wooly mammoth tusk,” replied Latzarel. “I’m certain of it. We’ve got to hoist back up to that ledge and try to grapple it somehow.”

“On the return trip,” said Edward, “we’ll pass it again. We were lodged at almost exactly twenty fathoms, according to the gauge. A mammoth tusk, you say?”

“I’ll bet you a dinner. Better yet, a bottle of Laphroaig.” Latzarel hunkered down in his seat, spitting on his window and rubbing it with his index finger. The bell dropped and dropped. Latzarel felt both damp and elated. There was a sort of pervasive moisture in the bell. His hair hung limply across his forehead, one strand of it dangling over his left eye. And there was a musty, oceanic smell that reminded him of an unventilated room of rusted salt water aquaria. He pushed a button on the radio. “How deep are we?”

“One hundred-seventy-five feet,” came the response. Squires’ voice sounded weirdly distant to him — like it had come a long way down a speaking tube, perhaps through two hundred feet or so of plastic aquarium tubing. The idea of it struck him as wildly funny all of a sudden, and he turned to tell Edward about it, to let him in on the joke.

But Edward wasn’t interested. He was making hand signals at a squid who hovered beyond the glass, signaling back. Latzarel couldn’t see the squid, but he immediately caught the spirit of Edward’s histrionics and gestured widely, banging his left hand against a brass valve. A little stream of blood ran down the hand and into his shirt sleeve. “Can you beat that?” he said aloud. The blood in his sleeve reminded him of something he’d learned forty years earlier from his father. He fished in his pocket and hauled out a quarter. “Look here,” he said to Edward. “Lookee here.”

Edward grinned at him.

Latzarel waggled his hands, blood spraying off across the knee of his trousers. “Notice,” he said, “that my fingers do not leave my hands at any time.” And with an appropriate flourish, he held the quarter between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, snapped his fingers, and cast Edward a satisfied smirk as the quarter shot up his coat sleeve, rolling out almost at once and clattering onto the deck.

Squires was saying something over the radio — mouthing some sort of warning. Latzarel interrupted him, shouting, “A nose by any other name!” then bursting into laughter. Edward went back to signaling the squid. He pointed out the wonderful signifying beast to Latzarel, who all of a sudden developed an inexplicable passion for dancing, such as it was, given the restrictions of the cramped bell.

William Ashbless hadn’t been paying any attention to the radio. His mind was on poetry. He wrestled with a complicated quatrain involving the sea, but the rhyme escaped him. He was vaguely irritated by the scratching of Spekowsky’s pen on paper, which, somehow, was about twice as maddening as was the voice of Russel Latzarel shouting his foolishness about noses. Of all the places to horse around. Whatever faith he’d had in Latzarel’s successfully penetrating the Earth was fast fading. He heard Spekowsky snicker. Over the radio came the words: “Blow ye hurricanoes! Blow-rowr-rowr! Yip and roar!” And there was the noise of someone — Latzarel likely — roaring and yipping. Then came a shout: “Smite flat the rotundity of my girth!” And a howl of laughter. “Singe my white head, all-shaking squid! Cast ye down ye poulpae, if ye will!”

Ashbless fiddled with the knobs. He looked across the hundred yards of ocean at the Gerhardi where Squires, hanging from a winch by his legs, wrenched at the workings of the hoses, both of which were stretched taut, apparently fully played out. Spekowsky had heard enough, or so he thought. A sudden gasp of surprise over the radio, however, surprised them both.

“I tell you I saw it again,” said Edward. A silence followed, echoing up out of the radio. Ashbless strained to hear. “What the devil was it? A cephalopod?” Latzarel laughed abruptly, then said, “Rumble thy bellyful, arquebus!”

“There!” shouted Edward. “There. Beyond that ledge!”

Latzarel began to sing foolishly, but abruptly shut it off. There was silence again. Ashbless could hear what sounded like the drip, drip, drip of water over the radio. Then Latzarel, in a stage whisper, said, “Plesiosaurus.”

‘Too big,” came the reply.

“Magnified by the water and window.”

“Still too big. It’s forty feet long.”

“Elasmosaurus. Erasmus, come from Baobel.” Latzarel snickered.

There was another long silence. “What’s he up to?” asked Edward.

“Studying us. By God! Why don’t we have cameras on this bell? Whoops! There he goes. Straight down.” Latzarel began to giggle, then sneezed voluminously.

A screech of steel followed, as if the diving bell were being dragged across a reef. “Hey!” someone shouted. There was another screech and a muffled, watery clang. “Christ!” Edward cried amid unidentifiable banging. “He’ll foul himself in the hoses! Haul away! Yank us up! Squires!” Then the radio, abruptly, went dead.

Ashbless was on his feet in an instant, hauling at a little wooden dingy that he’d dragged up the beach earlier. Spekowsky shook his head, as if to indicate that he, anyway, wasn’t being taken in by tomfoolery. Ashbless ignored him. He pushed the dingy out into the water, shoving it through a twelve-inch wave that broke across the prow when he was waist deep, and hauled himself into the precariously rocking boat, losing, his hat, fishing it out of the water, and rowing away finally in a mess of flailing oars toward the Gerhardi.

A humming and rumbling came from the listing boat. Cables scattering seawater wound up out of the ocean. Jim stood at the bulwark, watching the depths for some sign of the rising bell, but there was nothing but an eruption of bubbles.

Out of the corner of his eye Jim saw something approaching; it was Ashbless, hauling away on his oars. The little dingy scoured across the surface of the sea, Ashbless glancing now and again over his shoulder to correct his course. He was coming along quickly — so quickly that Jim looked around for something to prod the dingy away with when it came crunching in. Ashbless gave the oars one last heave, shipped them, and turned to find he’d given them one heave too many. He kneeled on the thwart, grappling with an oar in an attempt to yank it back out, dropped it, and thrust his foot out toward the Gerhardi across a rapidly diminishing few feet. Abruptly the ocean below glimmered into luminescence, and in a rush of bubbles and hissing there appeared the dark bulk of the diving bell, alien and cold, itself an opaque bubble ringed with feeble lamps. It rose right through Ashbless’ little dingy and out into the open air, streaming water like some impossible, globular, deep water monster. The cables squeaked through the winch behind Jim, howling with the effort it took to hoist the bell, free now of the ocean, up and onto the deck. It clanked down onto two of its feet and canted over toward the third, which had been bent and twisted back.

Ashbless splashed in the water. His dingy, a great chunk whacked out of the stern, floated an inch beneath the surface; Jim hung the portable ladder over the side and Ashbless clung to it for a moment before cursing his way up. Jim gave him a hasty hand over the side, then scrambled up to help Squires, yanking at the hatch. A moment later, Edward popped out, said something to Squires, and dropped again into the bell. Squires leaned in, got two hands under Latzarel’s armpits, and with Edward shoving from below, managed to haul Latzarel, bleeding from a long gash on his forehead, out onto the deck.

On the following afternoon the bell sat once again on its flatbed truck on the driveway. William Ashbless and Edward St. Ives watched Professor Latzarel tinker with it.

“Nitrogen narcosis,” said Edward after a long silence. “Or maybe oxygen poisoning, or exhaust in the air line.”

“It had to be something like that.” Ashbless ran a broad hand through his lank white hair. “I thought you’d gone haywire at first. All that business about squids. I thought it was one of Russel’s jokes.”

‘This was no joke,” Latzarel assured him, whacking away at the ruined foot of the bell with a lead hammer. “Hand me those pliers. The needlenose.”

Edward left off polishing the salt off the ports and handed the pliers across.

“Look at this!” cried Latzarel after a moment of prodding with the pliers. “Haywire is it? Nitrogen narcosis! Rapture of the bleeding deep! Call Spekowsky! Call the museum!” And amid his shouting he shoved out from under the bell, gripping in his pliers a white triangle that looked to Edward at first to be a chip of plastic.

“What do you make of that?” he asked triumphantly. And he held aloft a faintly curved, almost conical tooth, sheared off at a length of nearly two inches. “It was jammed into a crack behind the foot. I almost missed it. Rapture of the stinking deep!”

“Shark’s tooth?” Ashbless offered skeptically.

Latzarel gave him a dramatically tired and pitying look. “I don’t know anything about King Lear,” he said. “But I’ll take your word for it. I do know about that damned monster. Both of us saw it. It was no hallucination. This came from the mouth of a giant plesiosaur, and you can take my word for it. Damn!” he shouted, slamming his free hand against the hull of the bell.

“I wish to God we could have gone back after that tusk.”

Edward nodded, examining the piece of tooth. “We need a better craft. We’ll never get to where we’re bound in this. You don’t suppose that Giles Peach is onto something with all his talk about oxygenators and pressure regulators?”

“And anti-gravity? And perpetual motion? Giles Peach reads too many science fiction novels.” Latzarel shook his head. “No, I think we’ve got to get this tooth to the right people. We’ll outfit an expedition. A newer diving bell, a bathyscaphe. We’ll need funding, but this ought to do the trick.” He tossed the tooth into the air, flipping it like a coin and letting it drop back into his open palm.

Edward started to say something, but hadn’t gotten anything out when the whump of a newspaper hitting the driveway sounded behind him, and the newspaper itself skidded into his foot. He and Latzarel grabbed for it at the same moment, both of them anticipating a possible article by Spekowsky. Their attention, however, was arrested at the bottom of the front page. Oscar Pallcheck’s body had been hauled out of the La Brea tar pits.

What it was doing there, no one could say. It had sunk in particularly viscous tar, and if it weren’t for the single shoe lying atop the black ooze — a shoe that turned out to have a foot in it — the body would quite likely have remained entombed, sunk to some Mesozoic layer in the well of tar until future excavation uncovered it. It appeared at first as if he’d been the victim of some peculiar disease — his skin, particularly the skin on his head and neck, was scaled; he was almost entirely hairless, and his eyelids were oddly transparent. His incongruous resting place, however, argued foul play, unless he’d thrown himself in — an unlikely thing altogether. An autopsy revealed little. Some sort of investigation was in the offing. It had been discovered that Oscar was one of the three boys accosted by John Pinion in the parking lot of the van and storage yard a few days earlier. Pinion, a renowned polar explorer and anthropologist, had been questioned regarding the tar pit incident and released on his own recognizance.

“Pinion is it!” gasped Edward. “What do you make of it?”

“Nothing,” said Latzarel.

Ashbless snatched the dangling Times out of Edward’s hand and reread the article, squinting shrewdly. “I don’t believe Pinion has the first thing to do with this. He’s entirely innocent. I’ll bet on it. The truth here is a devil of a lot stranger than it appears.”

“It always is,” came a voice from behind them, and William Hastings, haggard and hunted and wearing an inconceivable mustache and Van Dyke beard, bent out of the shadows of the bushes at the corner of the back yard.

Chapter 8

“Did you get my letter?” William asked Edward, not stopping to shake hands first.

“Why no. No, Í didn’t. When did you mail it?”

“A week ago. Those bastards must have opened it.” He slumped against the truck frame and paused for a moment, catching his breath. He nodded to Ashbless and to Latzarel, who was jiggling his dinosaur tooth nervously in his cupped hands, his mind an arcade of spinning gears and flywheels and blinking lights. William’s sudden appearance hadn’t settled any issues.

“Why did they open it?” Edward asked in a tone he hoped would provide an element of rationality while obscuring doubt. It was best to be safe.

William shook his head a bit, as if asking for breathing space. Then very calmly and deliberately he said: “They’re going to destroy the world. Blow it up.”

“Whatever for?” cried Edward, genuinely aghast.

“Because they’re sons of bitches,” said William.

Ashbless handed Edward his newspapers with a barely disguised rolling of his eyes. “Good to see you, old man,” he said to William, nodding. “Keep your pecker up. We won’t let them explode the world. Leastways not until I’ve had a drink. See you all later.” And he touched a finger to his forehead as a parting gesture and strode away down the driveway. His car engine started up and roared off.

“Condescending twit,” muttered William, pulling off his mustache and beard. “I half believe he’s one of them. Hurried away because he didn’t want to be found out.”

William, about then, realized what he was leaning against and caught sight of the diving bell. His face fell. “You’ve gone without me,” he said despondently, as if he had known all along it would come to that.

“The tide,” said Edward weakly. “And it was only a preliminary run. We’ve got evidence that will rock the scientific world.”

Latzarel handed William the tooth and related the elasmosaurus business in detail, coloring it with the wooly mammoth tusk. William squinted and nodded, absently poking the false little pointy beard back onto his chin, then forgetting about it and leaving it dangling sideways while he had a look at the newspaper account of Oscar’s demise. Edward couldn’t keep his eyes off the beard. It was like a crooked picture, and he itched to be at it. “Uh, the beard, William,” he said finally, emboldened by his suspicion that the canted disguise would appear to the casual passerby to be evidence of eccentricity.

“What? Oh, yes,” said William, and he pulled the thing off again, pressing it onto his coat pocket for safekeeping.

“Spekowsky!” shouted Latzarel. “We’ve forgotten Spekowsky.” And he yanked out the science page, finding, almost at once, half a column regarding the voyage of the diving bell. “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” the caption read, and there followed an article describing a “preposterous tidepool excursion by Russel Latzarel” that was launched with an eye toward reaching the Earth’s core in a leaky diving bell on the end of a two hundred foot line. Reports of sea serpents and elephants were later attributed to nitrogen narcosis, the article read, and then apologized for having reported on the incident at all, claiming to have done so only out of scientific curiosity and thoroughness.

Latzarel was livid. Edward wasn’t much surprised. “We’ll see!” shouted the professor. “I’ll just use your phone for a moment!”

“Certainly,” said William, assuming that the statement was addressed to him.

But Latzarel returned five minutes later in a doubly bad humor, red enough to explode, cursing science in general as well as the director of the museum of natural history, who had, it seemed, read Spekowsky’s article. He had no faith whatsoever in dinosaur teeth and was indifferent to lands within the Earth — with “scientific quackery,” as he put it. Latzarel could barely speak.

“He’s with them!” cried William, screwing up one eye and glaring at Latzarel through the other.

“I’m half inclined to agree with you,” Latzarel said. He studied his tooth once more and shoved it into his pocket.

“Tomorrow morning then. We’ll get this craft back up to Gaviota. They might be amenable to financing another expedition.” He shook his head grimly, thinking about scientific quackery. Still worked up, he stormed away toward the Land Rover and whirled off in a dust cloud.

William, with a suddenness that astonished his brother-in-law, dropped to his knees behind the truck and scuttled toward the bushes like a crab, smashing his way in among shrimp plants and begonias and heavenly bamboo, then peering out toward the driveway. “I’m not here,” he hissed at Edward.

“Haven’t been for weeks.”

Edward’s puzzlement was quickly gone, for there on the street, moving along slowly and deliberately, was a familiar white van. Edward’s heart sank. He was determined to protect William — at least for the moment. Had Mrs. Pembly seen him? The false mustache wasn’t worth a farthing. It was a beacon, if anything. Edward would tell Frosticos a thing or two. No he wouldn’t. It would give him away, would gain him nothing.

But the van wasn’t stopping. It pulled up to the curb at the Peach house. Edward climbed onto the truck bed and crouched behind the hull of the bell, looking out over the hatchcover.

“They’re not coming here,” he whispered, although he didn’t, strictly speaking, have to, since Frosticos was stepping out of the van along with a white-suited attendant — an Oriental, Edward noticed — a half block away. For one wild moment Edward was certain the attendant was Yamoto, the ex-gardener. But it couldn’t be. This man was too short by far. He’d let himself get carried away. He’d have to watch that. But what in God’s name was Frosticos doing at the Peach house? That certainly wasn’t a matter of paranoia. There was a scrabbling in the bushes behind him as William worked his way down toward the front yard to get a view of the street.

Something dreadfully strange was afoot. William could sense it. He only half understood Edward’s whispered assurances. In fact, his brother-in-law’s whispering sounded to him like so much static lost in a sea of sudden afternoon emptiness. He scraped between a shrimp plant and the wall of the house, breaking off brittle stalks dangling with salmon-colored, vaguely fishy blooms. A dead, curved branch yanked his falser beard from his coat pocket, snapping up and waggling there with the little triangular goatee perched atop it like a toupee on a stick. William watched it bob momentarily, then edged his way along until he could peer out past a stand of orange and green bamboo.

There was an abrupt change of atmosphere. Clouds, unseen in the heavens overhead, passed across the face of the sun, throwing the street into sudden shadow. The breeze fell. Nothing stirred. He heard nothing at all but the dry crackle of leaves and twigs beneath him and the distant droning of a fly. But he felt as if he could hear a voice in the dead air — as if he were breathing the voice, or rather as if his breathing were part of a vast and rhythmic breathing, the ebbing and flowing of an unimagined tide on a sea that was one great sibilant whispering, the combined stirrings of countless tiny voices murmuring together. He strained to hear them, to fathom it, but it was ink, like the ocean at midnight, a vast and watery dark.

The black asphalt street undulated as if it were a river coming to slow life. Dark swirls rippled in its surface. Something lurked below, just brushing up toward shadowed daylight. What was it? William wasn’t sure, but he knew it was there. Leviathan. Dr. Frosticos’ van sat like a white whale atop the river of asphalt, floating there, staring down toward him, watching. What was it waiting for? What were they all waiting for? The street was a river flowing into the east, and below it waited beasts — unidentifiable beasts, nosing up out of subterranean caverns. It seemed to William that the river ran through him, and there trickled into his mind unbidden the words: “Let those curse it who curse the day, who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan. Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light but have none, nor see the eyelids of the morning.”

He felt the ground heave beneath him, and he clutched at a stalk of bamboo, snapping it off at a joint. In his hand was a tendril of kelp, limp and wet. He dropped it, fighting for breath. All round him were waterweeds, waving in the currents of a submarine garden: delicate fans of blue-green and purple algae, undulating clumps of eel grass, brown kelp fronds among which grazed limpets and chitons. Crabs scuttled past. Violet tube worms and hydra flowered from the walls of the house.

William was suffocating, drowning. He clutched at the base of a sea fan, tearing it away from its holdfast, the lacy organism disintegrating into pink dust that glinted in the watery rays of the sun and drifted in a cloud, dispersing on the current. William thrashed and kicked, smashing his hand against the house, sweeping brittle sea life adrift. Then, as if in a dream, it occurred to him that he could breathe if he wanted to — that unlike a foolish rat who hadn’t sense enough to exhale a lungful of water, he was entirely capable of it. He relaxed, floating, clutching at seaweed, breathing altogether easily. His exhalations rose above him toward some distant surface, slow wobbling bubbles.

The whole thing struck him as strange, especially the bubbles. And almost as soon as he considered them, they began to burst in little crystal explosions, shattering the sea life around him. Moon snails and blennies, anemones and hermit crabs, periwinkles and starfish — all of them popped out of existence in a rush, and William, loosed from his hold, rose through the water toward sunlight. He blinked awake on the couch in the living room. Edward stood over him, smoking a furious pipe.

William, vaguely surprised to find his trousers dry, sat up. He ran his hands through his hair. “What time is it? How long have I been out?”

“It’s four, You’ve been out about a quarter of an hour. Frosticos is gone. I’m certain he didn’t take Giles with him.”

“I’ve had the most amazing dream,” said William. “I believe it was prophetic.” He held up his hand as if anticipating an argument from Edward, who wasn’t much on prophecy or mysticism of any sort. But Edward, apparently, wasn’t in an arguing mood. ‘This digging machine. What does Giles Peach call it?”

“The Digging Leviathan, if I’m not mistaken. It does somewhat resemble a crocodile. But the whole thing’s a lark as far as I can see. Pinion seems to set some store in it, but the whole idea is an impossibility from first to last: perpetual motion, anti-matter, anti-gravity. It’s a fabrication. Utter lunacy. On Pinion’s part that is. Giles can’t be blamed; he’s only a lad. But Pinion’s gone round the bend. Latzarel thinks so too.”

William eyed his brother-in-law. “You look grim,” he said. “What have you seen?”

“Seen?” asked Edward in mock surprise. “Nothing. I hauled you out of the bushes. To be absolutely truthful, you seem to have suffered some sort of collapse. It was touch and go there for a moment. Put the fear right into me.”

“Something put the fear right into you, all right, but it wasn’t any fit of mine. Did you see what I saw?”

“No,” said Edward.

“How do you know? You haven’t any idea what in the devil I saw. I remember more than you suppose. Do you recall your squid tentacle at the Newtonians? Of course you do. You suppose I was too occupied with that false gardener to remember your mentioning it. But that’s not my way. Did you see more tentacles today? Is that it?”

“Of a sort,” said Edward, attempting to tamp his pipe with his finger. He jerked his hand back and shouted with surprise and pain, looking accusingly at his finger. “It seemed to me for a moment, since you press me, that the landscape had become …” His voice trailed off.

“Aquatic,” William said.

‘That’s right. In a nut. I don’t understand it at all.”

“Neither do I.” William fumbled in his pocket for his own tobacco pouch. “I’ll just have a dab of port with this pipe. Join me?”

“Please,” said Edward.

“I’m beginning to see things clearly,” said William when both of them had settled into their chairs and were sipping at their port. Edward grimaced inwardly, as he did whenever William made such pronouncements. This time it was a halfhearted grimace, however, a grimace tempered by his own remembrance of Frosticos’ van, admittedly glimpsed through the distorting arc of one of the porthole windows after Edward had climbed into the diving bell so as to spy more securely on the doctor. It had, for an imponderable second, seemed to him to be a great fish, or the ghost of a great fish, lazing on the surface of a dark sea. He hadn’t been able to shake the vision out of his eyes. And for a long moment he was certain that the diving bell was settling into the blackness of a great oceanic trench, sounding toward unfathomable depths. But the hallucination passed, and there was William, tossing himself through the shrimp plants, hashing up bamboo, flailing against the wall of the house.

“You know I’ve an interest in physics,” said William, breaking into Edward’s reverie.

“What?” said Edward, startled. “Oh, quite. The fat man in the rocket and all. Did you write the story yet?”

“Yes, in fact I did. I sent it off to Analog. It’s just their meat, I believe. But that’s immaterial. What I’m talking about here isn’t fiction.” William shook his head in quick little jerks to emphasize his point. He peered into the bowl of his pipe, then jabbed the stem in Edward’s direction. “This leviathan. I don’t like it. Not a bit. I’m half convinced it will be the end of everything. Can you imagine the pressures built up within the interior of the Earth?”

Edward widened his eyes appropriately, but admitted to himself that he couldn’t. “Pressures? How about the polar openings?”

“What polar openings? Have you seen them? Has Pinion? For my money the polar openings are suboceanic, like your tidepool. No, sir. There’s pressure enough in there to blow this planet to kingdom come. I’m certain of it.” He tamped for a bit at his pipe, then inspected the sediment on the bottom of his glass. “I had a very strange dream not a week back. A dream, I say. Not like what happened this afternoon. That was no dream. I’m sure of it now. But as I say, a week ago I had an odd one. Giles Peach figured in it, as did his machine — his mechanical mole. It burrowed into the Earth — I haven’t any idea who drove it; it wasn’t Peach — somewhere in the desert. Near Palm Springs, I believe it was. Any number of people on hand. It was like a circus. Banners waving, trumpets blowing — like the grand opening of the Tower of Babel. That’s how it struck me. Giles Peach stood on a sort of platform above the hole, watching his device eat its way into the Earth, straight down toward the hollow core. He had the most amazing suit on. A clatch of dignitaries, mostly fat ones, clustered around him waving ribbons and clamoring to make speeches. But the lot of them fell silent when the mole approached its destination.

“The Earth heaved and there was a distant muffled explosion somewhere far below. Giles Peach peeked over the railing, staring into the open shaft. He dropped a stone the size of an egg into it like a boy might drop a rock into a well to judge its depth. A blast of wind whooshed out, carrying on it the very stone Giles had let fall, and the stone struck him in the forehead ….”

“It did?” asked Edward incredulously. “You dreamed this?”

“Yes,” William uttered, half put out at the interruption. “But that’s the least of it. There followed on the wind, on this vast exhalation of pressure, a rush of extinct beasts — mastodons, stegasauri, triceratops — that rained down onto the desert floor as if they’d come back to the surface to claim a lost land.”

“What happened to Peach?” asked Edward.

“Dead as a mackerel,” said William. “It was the stone that did it. What do you think?”

“I suppose the stone could have killed him,” said Edward, pondering. “If it hit him hard enough, anyway.”

“Not that. What do you think about the dream. I’m certain it’s prophetic.”

Edward blinked at him. “Undeniably. At least it seems so to me. I’m not much on prophecy, of course. But this has that sort of ring to it. There’s no getting round it. Yes.” He fiddled with his port glass, spilling a purple dollop down his shirt front. “Damn it,” he cried, jumping up. The damage was done, however, so he sat back down. “Sounds like the core of a fairly substantial story to me, eh? A hollow Earth story.”!

‘This is no story. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve been convinced that Peach is the key here. Ashbless is convinced too. You mark my words. And then that dream. It haunts me. I’d have written it off, but here comes Frosticos, messing about at the Peach house. What was he up to? We must know.”

“I intend to find out. I’ll drop in on Velma Peach tomorrow morning. If nothing else, I’m going to warn her against Frosticos. He’s up to no good.” Edward was struck immediately by the peculiarity of his last statement, by the certainty that some time in the future, the near future, Frosticos would set out to i round up William. He’d do something about it this time. He wondered idly at William’s several escapes, at Frosticos’ am-I bivalent attitude toward them. It was a confusing business and it grew more curious by the day.

“I’ll just pop into the study and write some of this down,” I said William, standing up. “Perhaps you’re right about the short story. There’s too much in the dream not to use it.”

Edward agreed with him, deciding as he did so that he was ravenously hungry and would waste no time in lighting the barbecue. But he sat in his chair, lost in thought, for a half hour or so before finally getting up to have a go at dinner. He determined to talk to Velma Peach. He had to know what had gone wrong with Giles.

Chapter 9

It was nearly two in the afternoon when Edward and Professor Latzarel returned from Gaviota. William was busy in the maze _ shed, working with renewed vigor — with a freshened sense of the importance of his mission. The problem with science, he hadn’t any doubt, was its lack of imagination. It chased rats back and forth with a pair of calipers — shoved hoses down their mouths and filled their lungs with water. Science hadn’t any patience. Domesticity, that was the answer. The act of domestication is the act of civilizing. If he were to write a thesis he’d call it “Civilization Theory.” It would supplant Darwin. All beasts lean toward civility. Evolutionary development edged in that direction. Man pursued it. Dogs and cats sought it out. Even rats preferred life in the neighborhood to life in the wild. There was a great truth in it — one he intended to reveal. He yanked the sleeve of a little doll’s vest over the tiny arm of a mouse. The beast gave it an approving look, sniffing at it. Trousers would be difficult — impossible, perhaps, without alterations. Custom tailoring was necessary to do the job right. But the vest, for openers at least, would accomplish a great deal. William whistled a tune. He hadn’t been so happy in months. There was nothing like a man’s work.

The axolotl was a horse of a different color. It was almost too mucky to mess about with, and it had an antipathy toward hats and coats and only a grudging acceptance of a pair of pants that fit like shorts after a broad hiatus was made in the seat to accommodate the amphibian’s tail. William emptied a little cardboard box full of doll clothes onto the desk top, searching for a hat. But all he could find was a little beret of sorts, the type of thing a Frenchman might wear. Better to do without entirely.

The sight of the clothed beasts slowed Edward down considerably when he pushed in through the door, but he was struck with the impossibility of the whole thing and decided to take the long view. He smiled at William. “What ho?”

“Hah!” said William, adjusting a mouse coat. Take a look at this. I’m onto something new. There’s no doubt about it. Our problem all along is that we assumed we were moving backward from the mammalian to the amphibian ages. Devolution. Well it’s not as simple as that. Even the most mundane of the beasts are complex affairs. There’s nothing simple about a mouse. It has certain tendencies that we’ve failed to take into account; and one, the way I see it, is its natural tendency toward civilization — gentility. On a reduced scale, of course. This isn’t all my grand idea, mind you. I’ve been reading Shakespeare. The Elizabethans were aware of the innate ability of animals to sense impending chaos. The Chinese, as I understand it, use pigs and cows to sniff out earthquakes — they’re unaccountably perturbed by anything that threatens their sense of order, their natural inclination toward domesticity and civilized behavior. So what do we do, I asked myself. We hasten the process, that’s what. Civilize the things. And I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts we see some advances. Some cooperation. Help me pull this coat onto the axolotl, will you? I can’t get a grip on him with one hand.”

Edward waylaid the axolotl, pinning him down while William worked at the coat. “What about the water?” Edward asked. “I don’t mean to question your theory — in fact it’s perfectly sound as far as I can see — but won’t all of this finery lose some of its civilizing effect when it’s water-soaked?”

William gave his brother-in-law a look that seemed to imply that Edward was a child when it came to understanding civilization theory. He shook his head. “You overestimate the beasts, Edward. You’ve interpreted the theory too broadly. Science often falls into such a trap — finding a single nugget and anticipating an entire vein. The tendency toward civilization in these beasts doesn’t stretch so far as that. Although I’m certain they’ll respond to the influences of proper dress, I doubt entirely that they’ll understand the difference in correctness of fashion. Do you follow me?”

“Yes,” said Edward, “I believe I do. You’ve certainly thought this through.” He cleared his throat, then noticed that within the cages, the door to which stood ajar, were half a dozen mice in various states of dress, milling around and eyeing each other. One was reducing his topcoat to shreds and making a bed out of it in the corner. Edward had never seen William so serious or so elated. There was nothing wrong with elation, he told himself.

A slamming car door out on the street heralded the arrival of William Ashbless, his white hair awry about his ears. His shin cracked into the bumper of his car as he edged around it on his way toward the driveway, and he shouted at the bumper, kicking it for good measure before hastening toward the garage, waving what appeared to be a photograph.

William glanced up at the banging and shouting, was unimpressed, and went back to manipulating his clothed beasts. Ashbless burst in, jabbering excitedly, then abruptly fell mute when he saw the objects of William’s attention. He was silent for only a few seconds, however, before it dawned on him that there was nothing particularly surprising in William’s behavior. He waved his photograph at Edward.

“Benner,” he said. “You remember young Steerforth Benner. Self-satisfied little snake, but useful. Well, I found out he’s working part-time for the county coroner, mucking out the crematorium or something. So I gave him a call, and look what he came up with.”

He handled Edward a black and white photo of a corpse — the corpse of Oscar Pallcheck, dredged out of the tar pits. Edward was astonished. The photo was unbelievable. He turned it over and glanced at the back side as if expecting to find a disclaimer, then peered closely at the front, holding it in the sunlight that slanted in through the window. It was apparent that something had been done to Oscar’s neck. At first it seemed as if there were the indentations of fingers — as if he’d been strangled very neatly and symmetrically. Edward hauled out a magnifying glass. The marks were open — bloodless slits. And Oscar’s head, as the Times had promised, was hairless and had an odd, triangular shape. His eyes, surprisingly, were open. The expression in them was peculiarly familiar.

“William!” Edward cried, poking his brother-in-law in the small of the back. William looked up, feigning surprise, as if he’d been so lost in his work that he was unaware of the poet’s arrival. “Look closely at this. Do you know him?”

William fingered the photo, blinked, and sat down hard into the swivel chair at the desk. He took his pipe out of his pocket with a shaking hand. “Of course,” he said. “It’s Narbondo’s merman.”

‘It’s Oscar Pallcheck,” said Edward.

“Which Narbondo?” asked Ashbless, puzzled.

“There’s only one that amounts to anything among the scientific arts,” Edward said, pulling down the correct volume of Narbondo’s Gilled Beasts. He flipped to the drawing of the Sargasso Sea merman, and there, staring up out of the page, was an amphibian caricature of the dead Oscar Pallcheck, a sort of toad man in trousers.

No one spoke. Edward laid the photo alongside the drawing. The likeness was astonishing. “Narbondo, is it?” asked Ashbless.

‘That’s right,” Edward responded.

Ashbless pulled down the first volume of the work, opened it to the frontispiece, and studied a detailed woodcut of the face of Dr. Narbondo. “He was a son of a bitch. A megalomaniac. He lived at Windermere for years. Did some foul things to sheep. He hated everyone. Threatened at one time to poison the oceans and kill the entire Earth just to get revenge on the scientists in the Academy.”

“Did he?” said William facetiously. “Relative of yours?”

“He was a distant cousin of Wordsworth. Almost no one knows that though. He couldn’t abide Wordsworth’s friends. All too fey for his tastes. He was an explorer. An adventurer. Disappeared into Borneo on some hair-brained adventure involving orangutans. He had certain serums which he claimed allowed for the breeding of unlike beasts — hippos and serpents, fish and birds — and was harried out of England, finally, as a vivisectionist. He was the basis for Dr. Moreau in Wells’ novel. Supposedly he surfaced in China years later searching for a fabled longevity serum involving fish, but that was close to a hundred years ago.” Ashbless fell suddenly silent, as if he’d said more than he’d wanted to and men caught himself.

William hated it when Ashbless carried on so — as if he had knowledge of certain arcana, known, perhaps, only to the cognoscenti. He’d reveal a tidbit or two, just enough to inflate himself for a moment, then clam up, allowing the silence that followed — the promise of strange things unspoken — to inflate him even more.

William watched him squint away at the Narbondo picture, and tried to guess his age. It was impossible to say. In a dimly lit room Ashbless could pass for seventy. His wild, voluminous hair, although snow white, gave him a hearty and slightly youthful and fit look. But in the sunlight, when the cracks of his face weren’t obscured by vague and timid illumination, he looked older, peculiarly older. He could have been ninety. A monumental ninety, to be sure. William was reminded of Tennyson, who, supposedly, carried horses around on his back to demonstrate his might. Aware of the stigma of being a poet, perhaps. And that bothered him about Ashbless too. Poets always struck William as being close cousins to actors, strutting about, immersed in themselves, in their own pretensions to seriousness and insight.

There was more to Ashbless than that, but William couldn’t quite pin it down. He decided to bait him, just for sport. “I’ve been reading some of the poetry of your ancestor,” he said, knowing that any hint at the falsity or assumption of Ashbless’ name would mortify the poet.

Ashbless didn’t respond.

“Very good stuff,” William continued, happy with himself. “It’s not at all difficult to see his influence on your own poetry. Clear as a bell, I’d say. You’ve done some elegant things with his themes.”

“I feel a spiritual affinity to him,” Ashbless murmured, pretending to be more concerned with Narbondo’s Gilled Beasts than with discussions of his poetry.

William nodded grandly, as if he understood clearly what Ashbless meant, “like spirit writing?” he asked. “Automatic writing? That sort of thing? No wonder you’ve got such a vivid understanding of the Romantic age.”

“I don’t believe in spirit writing. My knowledge of the Romantic age is a product of unbelievably intense study. Do either of you know how long the Peach family has lived in the manor at Windermere?”

He’s showing off, thought William. “I haven’t a clue.

Didn’t Basil Peach’s father buy it after the war when money went to bits there? Some old family was taxed out of it, I don’t doubt.”

“Actually,” said Ashbless, acting genuinely puzzled, as if he were beginning to grasp the tangled threads of a dark and webby secret, “they’ve been there for ten centuries, maybe longer. And if my memory serves me well, Peach and Narbondo — Ignacio Narbondo, that is — were acquaintances. The doctor had a scientific interest in Peach — you follow my meaning here?”

“Oh quite, quite.” William put down his pipe and stood up. “Your knowledge is astonishingly vast.”

“Not half vast enough,” said Ashbless cryptically, shoving the photo into his coat pocket.

William turned to his brother-in-law who had lost himself in the Sargasso Sea account. “By the way, Edward, speaking of Giles Peach, what news on your conversation with Velma?”

Edward livened up instantly. Ashbless picked up the abandoned volume and thumbed through it. “I spoke to her early this morning,” said Edward. “She was leaving for the bakery just as Russel and I were pulling out for Gaviota. I had a good talk with her. Warned her against Frosticos. It seems that Giles was taken with some sort of fit. Respiratory trouble, from the sound of it. That and dehydration. It was nip and tuck, apparently. Basil used to have the same problem. And get this: Frosticos was his doctor twenty years ago. So Velma called Frosticos. She doesn’t like him a bit, she said, but he came to mind right off. That poor woman has had her share of troubles. There’s no denying that.”

William eyed Ashbless, fairly sure that the poet was only pretending interest in his volume — that he was watching Edward out of the corner of his eye.

Edward continued: “She seemed to think that Frosticos first appeared back in the pre-Arctic days, when Basil and Pinion were thick. So I managed to suggest that Pinion and Frosticos were quite likely fast friends. That set her off. She apparently can’t abide Pinion, who she says had been hounding Giles to help him in some crackpot scheme, to develop the digger, actually. She’s afraid Giles has been influenced. Anyway, she called Frosticos this morning and wrote him off. Told him to send his bill, that Giles had recovered. So that’s that.”

The multiple mentions of Frosticos had a dampening effect on William’s enthusiasm. He thought darkly about the suggested Frosticos-Pinion connection, about the dead Oscar Pall-check, about the mysterious Dr. Narbondo, the grinning Yamoto, the pall of dim and threatening mystery that was settling around all of them. Edward continued to speak, but his words were lost on William, who stared at a dusty, torn, and out-of-date tide chart stuck to the wall with thumb tacks, depicting, below the monthly tide tables, an obese and comic octopus who winked out of the chart from beneath a sort of billed captain’s hat that said “Len’s Baithouse” across it in faintly arabesque letters.

Jim stood up abruptly, tossing The Bride of Fu Manchu onto the coffee table and hurrying out the front door. He couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t thought of it earlier. It might hot tell him a thing. But then again … On the surface of it, Oscar’s death was utter nonsense. But somewhere beneath the surface, in some dark and subterranean cavern, lurked the pale thought that the explanation was clear as crystal — simple, in a hugely strange way.

He strode along down toward Mr. Hasbro’s house, toward the little orange Metropolitan docked at the curbside. No one was about. Jim threw himself down onto the grass and peered under the car, half suspecting some sort of phenomenon, perhaps Hasbro himself, to peer back out at him. There was nothing but an entirely ordinary muffler. The words “Ajax Muffler — Whisper Quiet” were stamped into the steel shell of the thing, which had already begun to discolor from heat. There were no silver wires, no lavender and green lights, nothing at all other-worldly or fantastic about it.

Jim stood up, thinking. Velma Peach’s car was parked in the driveway across the street. He walked toward it, mulling over the idea of confronting Gill about Oscar’s death, of simply insisting that he had certain knowledge of Gill’s complicity, and then watch, like Nayland Smith, the subtle changes of expression on Gill’s face that would give him away — the brief picture that was worth, in the Oriental cliches of Fu Manchu, a thousand words.

Velma Peach dashed out of the house right then and interrupted his musings. She had a worried and wild look about her, and clutched in her hand a scrap of lined notebook paper.

“Have you seen Giles?” she asked Jim frantically.

“Not today. Yesterday morning I did.”

“He was here when I left at eight. I mean since then. Today.”

“Not me,” Jim said. “What’s wrong?”

“Where’s your uncle?” she asked, then hurried away up the street without waiting for an answer.

She rushed into the maze shed waving her shred of paper. Giles had disappeared — was kidnapped possibly. But there was a note in his handwriting. He’d gone away. His mother wasn’t to worry. He had important things to do. Vital things. He was a burden, and he was sorry. It was time for him to act. A new age was upon them. And on it went, rambling for a paragraph about the vague and unlikely grandeur that he’d gone off to seek, possibly to effect.

“He’ll be back,” said Edward.

“Give him till nightfall,” said Ashbless, laughing weakly.

But William noticed that Ashbless looked peculiar, as if something had been revealed, something he was trying desperately to hide but was about to burst with.

“Well,” said the poet. “I’m in the way here. I’ll just skip along. Don’t worry, my dear,” he said to Velma Peach, patting her hand placatingly and smiling as if he’d said something sensible and heartfelt. Then he brushed past Jim on his way to his car. He stopped, however, turned, and motioned to Jim to have a look at a photograph that he had in his pocket. Edward and William comforted Velma Peach.

“Steel yourself, lad,” said Ashbless, draping an arm around Jim’s shoulder and angling across the lawn toward the curb. “Have you seen a picture like this before?”

The whole incident struck Jim as peculiar, perhaps worse, and he feared for a moment that the old poet had hauled out some sort of disgusting photo, that he was performing a familiarity. But it wasn’t that sort of photo at all. It was a photo of Oscar Pallcheck, dead, on his way, it appeared, toward becoming a fish.

Jim hesitated. It was a startling thing. “Yes,” he said, unsure exactly what Ashbless was driving at. “In one of the books in the shed — the old set by Dr. Narbondo.” He looked at Ash-bless, trying to read his face, but it was almost impassive, merely satisfied.

“Is there a chance,” asked the poet, “that Giles Peach had a look at those books? I understand the fascination such things must engender in boys. Do you suppose he might have seen the drawing?”

“I know he did,” said Jim truthfully. “He looked at it dozens of times. He even wrote out the story, word for word, in his journal.”

Ashbless nodded, pocketed his photo, squeezed Jim’s arm, and hurried away toward his car.