The Digging Leviathan

Prologue

The air was utterly still and carried the salty smell of seawater and the musty smell of an enclosed place. William Ashbless sat on the ground with his back against the outer wall of what had once been a ship’s cabin, quite likely the cabin of a fishing boat, with glass almost all the way round. Most of the panes were broken long since — in fact, it was a miracle that two were still whole — but all the shards of glass had been carefully removed by whoever it was who’d set up housekeeping in the thing years before.

Above him on a little rise burned a vast and smoldering fire, the smoke from which rose straight up into the vaulted darkness above. A rowboat was hauled up onto the shore twenty feet below the strange hovel, and in the bow, dangling from a flimsy bamboo pole, burned an oil lamp that threw puzzling, angular shadows out over a little slice of rock-tumbled island.

Ashbless felt inconceivably weary. He’d been at it a long time, and had met all sorts. But he had vague suspicions that something new was afoot. There was a sort of electricity in the air, a magic. He’d felt it years before on the Rio Jari when Basil Peach had called up the millions of tetras and fetched the moon down from the sky. It was as if a ship were setting sail, drawn by a tide down an obscure and alien river that would open out one day onto a vast antediluvian ocean, alive with mystery. Ashbless meant to be aboard when that ship sailed.

But things weren’t running as smoothly as they might. It was by no means clear who it was held the tickets. Pinion had offered to sponsor him, to support him financially. The idea of it. Ashbless snorted derisively. Pinion was an egomaniac who wanted to own a poet to sing his praises. Of course there was good money in it. But what did he care for money? It wasn’t the money anyway. It was the chance — the growing chance — that it would be Pinion’s ship that first sailed those strange seas.

Moored along a ramshackle dock a hundred yards below him were three Chinese junks, two of them dark and quiet, one of them lit from end to end, a bobbing island of brightness on the dark sea. Ashbless stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, and picked his way down a twisty little path through the rocks. He walked out onto the crumbling pier, stepping along as quietly as he could. Through the cabin window of the lighted junk, Ashbless could see the head of Hilario Frosticos, wagging over his work — something foul, Ashbless assumed, something with which to subdue yet another member of the Peach family.

He peered in at the window, looking around first to see that he was alone. In front of the doctor, pinned to a dissecting board with long, T-shaped pins, was a carp, sliced neatly from gill slit to tail, and laid open to expose its internal organs. Frosticos fiddled with its faintly beating heart, severing thin layers of tissue with a scalpel. The carp stared toward the window through terrified eyes. A little, rotating device bathed the gasping fish with mist, keeping it from drying out and dying. Frosticos nipped out an organ the size of a lima bean and dropped it into a specimen bottle half filled with liquid. He picked it up and held it to the light. For a moment Ashbless was sure he would toss it off like a martini, but he simply corked it and reached for the pull on a cabinet door.

He stopped abruptly, seemed to choke, and staggered a step backward. He coughed and gasped and reached for his throat, the look on his face identical to that of the fish on the dissecting board — the look of something or someone who has opened a door and found death grinning without. Frosticos’ chest heaved as he lurched across the floor of the cabin. His arm thrashed out involuntarily, sweeping a scattering of surgical instruments onto the floor. He grasped his black bag, tore at it, fumbling with the clasps, and spilled the contents onto the tabletop. Jars and vials rolled out among unidentifiable medical debris. Frosticos reached for a green bottle, his fingers clutching, and managed to twist off the cap and gulp down the contents, staggering back against a bookcase, green fluid running down his chin and shirt.

His face was haggard — drawn so tightly that he appeared skeletal, an animated corpse. The skin below his cheekbones quivered slowly in and out, as if it were a tissue-thin layer of flesh drawn across suddenly pulsating gills. Frosticos collapsed into a chair, his head in his hands, and sat just so for minutes, breathing heavily, before he rose, straightened his coat, and very methodically packed his jars and vials back into the bag. He plucked up his tumbled instruments and dumped them into a shallow pan, then switched off the sprayer and unpinned the dead carp, holding it by the tail in his left hand and licking the fingers of his right. Ashbless cringed at the strange behavior, then ducked off into the shadows as Frosticos abruptly turned and started for the window.

Ashbless watched as a white-sleeved arm and hand holding the carp reached out and flipped the fish into the sea alongside the dock. As soon as the arm disappeared, Ashbless slouched along back to the window. He found Frosticos slumped in a chair, his face composed, no longer haggard. The doctor appeared to have fallen asleep, as if the bizarre ordeal had exhausted him to the point of collapse.

The dissected carp had caught on a shard of wood projecting from a tilted piling, and although he knew the fish could tell him little, Ashbless decided to have a look at it. He lay down and bent over the edge of the pier, shimmied farther out, dangled his arm over and stretched as far as he could, almost overbalancing, holding on with his left hand. He just managed to slap its nose, but couldn’t get a grip on the slippery thing. Instead, he knocked it loose, and he watched in the yellow light of the cabin as the big fish sank, tail first.

A shadow grew below it in the water, and just as the carp was on the edge of darkness, the toothed jaws of an immense fish rose out of the depths, closed over it, and it was gone. With exaggerated care, Ashbless pulled himself up onto the pier, glanced in one last time at the sleeping Frosticos, and made his way back along the rocky shore to where his oil lamp still burned on the the end of its bamboo pole. He pushed off, stepped into the boat, and rowed quietly out to sea, the orange light of the island bonfire shrinking behind him in the darkness.

Chapter 10

Jim was standing on the curb watching Ashbless disappear around the corner when he heard Velma Peach scream — a shrill ululation, as if she’d seen something unbelievably ghastly. She bolted out of the door of the maze shed, a look of horror and astonishment on her face. Behind her scurried a pair of mice, oddly clothed, as if setting out for town. His father followed, net in hand, pursuing the mice, Uncle Edward at his heels.

It was a tricky business. One of the mice sailed straight into the bushes; the other scampered across the back lawn, leaping and jumping, giddy with liberty. “The axolotl!” William shouted. “Find the axolotl! Never mind the rest of the mice!”

Velma Peach screamed again and staggered against the front fender of the Hudson, her hand at her throat. A door slammed. Mrs. Pembly stepped down her walk, affecting a casual glance at Jim, stiffening at the sight of the trembling Velma Peach who looked about with loathing, anticipating some new clothed horror.

William raced streetward, having pursued the mouse that had taken to the bushes. He hove in sight of Mrs. Pembly, waving his net before him like a curb feeler, then spun round and headed for the back yard once again, perhaps to avoid their odious and dangerous neighbor, perhaps to search out the axolotl. Mice were a dime a dozen, after all. But a good axolotl. … A shout from Edward set William to flight. Jim dashed along behind. Velma Peach climbed into the Hudson and shut the door.

“There they are!” cried Edward, hoisting himself, like Kilroy, onto the fence and gaping into the Pembly yard. The axolotl, somehow, had crept through, pursued by two mice, one of them wearing the disintegrated topcoat. The lot of them were sniffing their way along, unaware of the Pembly dog, which was lumbering toward them, attracted by Edward’s shouting.

“Christ!” cried William, far more horrified by the potential tragedy than was Edward. He threw his useless net at the dog, cursing as it sailed past him into the wall of the house. “I’ll get them,” said Jim, instantly aware that things had crept along dangerously close to the edge. But William, lost in his fear for the safety of his beasts, for the future of civilization theory, was over the fence before him, grappling with the puzzled dog, clutching at the precious axolotl.

Mrs. Pembly sailed out her back door, carrying, for some unfathomable reason, a pressure cooker, and advanced toward William, menacing him. He, of course, assumed it was his animals she threatened, and he warned her off, plucking up his fallen net and pointing it at her. She was shocked to abrupt and stony silence, however, by the vision of the axolotl, lumpy and weird, padding through the high grass in knee breeches. She dropped her pressure cooker, shrieked, and launched herself toward the back door, smashing past it into her kitchen. Chain locks and dead-bolts rattled into place.

William scooped up the befuddled axolotl, handed it across to Edward, and tried to clamber back over the fence. He was suddenly tired. Achingly so. He couldn’t begin to generate the strength required to climb the fence. He stumbled out through the gate instead, leaving his net behind. Jim felt helpless. He waited for the inevitable sound of the approaching siren, for the appearance of the white van. He flushed with embarrassment and anger — at his father, at Mrs. Pembly, at himself. His father was walking frightfully slowly, like a man without a destination.

William wandered into the back yard, stopped, looked around idly, lay down on the lawn, and wiggled under the house, pulling himself through a crawlspace after yanking off the little wood-framed screen. Edward remonstrated with him vainly, still clutching the amphibian. William’s feet stuck out for a minute from beneath the house like the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East. Then they were gone, dragged in just as the first distant moaning of the siren reached them on the wind.

The soft silt beneath the house was cool. It had lain there undisturbed for almost fifty years. It knew nothing of the turmoil that flapped on great bird wings out on the evening air. It was indifferent to the course of history, to civilization theory, to human suffering. William lay on his side, his ear pressed against the palm of his hand, which was sunk into the powdery dirt. He could hear something rushing in the Earth — right through his hand he could hear it. He thought about the plains Indians pressing an ear to the prairie to listen for the rumbling of buffalo herds, and about himself, forty years past, listening to the hot steel of a railroad track, imagining that he could hear the thunder of a far-off train, catapulting furiously toward unknown and exotic destinations.

Now he seemed to hear a muffled laboring roar far beneath him — the sound of an immense cataract racing through subterranean chambers, or perhaps the rotating mandibles of the digging leviathan, grinding away somewhere far below, miles deep in the crust of the Earth.

William was sleepy. It had been a long day, a day that had seen the inspiration of civilization theory. William had great faith in the philosophy that bits and pieces often added up to something greater than their simple sum. A coat for a mouse, a vest for an axolotl, a pair of trousers for a mole — bit by bit science would creak along toward a brighter day, an end to incivility and brutality. But why was it that the plots he struggled to reveal, the villains he sought to unmask, became more puzzling as fragments of the truth were unveiled? To learn the truth was to make things fall apart. Knowledge wasn’t a cement, a wall of order against chaos; it was an infinitude of little cracks, running out in a thousand directions, threatening to crumble into fragments our firmest convictions. He couldn’t fathom it. It was too deep for him. “If you think you understand it,” he said aloud, “I congratulate you.”

“Understand what?” asked a voice a few inches from his ear. There was a tugging on his pantleg. “Come along then.” William opened one eye and saw nothing but a humped shadow — a shade from some nether region come round to torment him. The air had grown remarkably dark and cold. His right leg was numb. ‘There’s a good lad,” said the shadow, trying to rouse him. William went back to sleep.

He was half conscious of sliding along on his side like a serpent through the dust. The sliding became part of a very wonderful dream that went on and on and on for a lifetime, a dream of murmuring voices, of slamming doors, of utter removal from the distant machinations of the world.

Edward was puzzled. Somehow he’d been wandering along in perfect innocence, minding his own business, doodling with mice, messing with tropical fish, setting up Newtonian meetings in order to smoke a pipe over the idea of journeying to the center of the Earth. And somewhere along the line, he couldn’t say exactly when, he’d stumbled into a morass of confusions. That’s how it went, he supposed. Nothing Was as simple as it seemed. William was right.

And poor William. Hauled away again. It was all very tiresome — past time to put an end to the entire business. It would be a complicated matter, but he’d have William out of there. Everything had suddenly begun to race along. Plots that had been invisible, unhatched probably only days before, were whirling toward frightful solidity. He’d begun to peer over his shoulder, suspicious of perfectly innocent strangers who, perhaps, had smiled at him in passing, or who hadn’t smiled, or who wore a peculiar pair of dark glasses. He’d been walking along Long Beach Boulevard toward Acres of Books two days earlier when he’d passed a woman with a paper carton on her head, a Butterfingers candy bar carton, sufficient to hold a dozen or so bars. A little elastic string kept the ludicrous cap jammed into her tousled hair. So she hadn’t just clapped it on randomly, the thing having caught her fancy as it blew past in the wind. She’d worked at — stabbed little holes in it, snipped off a foot or so of elastic string and wiggled the frayed ends through the holes, knotting them for security. He’d become immediately and inexplicably suspicious. But almost at once he had wondered which of the two of them was madder. He calmed down by assuring himself that a madman doesn’t understand his own madness, doesn’t know he’s gone round the bend. He wakes up one day and there he is — across the borderland, into an adjacent world. He puts a carton on his head and goes downtown as if nothing is wrong.

But for what capering reason, wondered Edward, does he settle on a cardboard carton? Why not a hubcap? Why not an immense shoe? And which — he began to wonder again, piling doubt upon doubt, suspicion upon suspicion — which was madder the lunatic, innocent of design, content to go about town in a cardboard carton, or the man, like himself, who has begun to develop peculiar suspicions, understands their peculiarity, and pursues them anyway? It was too much for him. He admitted it. There was no profit in worrying about madness. It was like fate and would search you out if it chose to. Sanity was a shell which might one day — for a lark, probably — crumble, leaving you picking straws from your hair, wearing candy cartons for hats.

Edward had fired Yamoto on the pretext that he had developed a passion for yardwork. Then he had immediately hired a new gardener, a Dutchman named Teeslink, who hacked the foliage in the front yard into ruin, satisfied with his pruning only when each bush had been reduced to a couple of ribby twigs. Edward lived in fear that Yamoto would show up to clip the Pembly lawn while Teeslink was underway on his own. Or even worse, that William would appear, phenomenally, from down the chimney or through an open manhole, and would recognize Teeslink, too, as a threat, in league with Hilario Frosticos. Damn all threats. Edward was tempted to wash his hands of the entire affair. But he knew he couldn’t.

Professor Latzarel arrived, slamming to such a stop at the curb that his Land Rover shuddered and lurched. He was in a state. There’d been a monumental discovery. The newspapers would be full of it. Mermen, it seemed, had been popping up like wildflowers, like sand fleas.

“Mermen!” cried Edward, forgetting all recent doubts. “How many of them?”

Latzarel calmed down. “Well, it’s not certain. Two at least.”

“Oh,” said Edward.

“But two might just as well be an army. And on opposite sides of the world. Listen to this; I got it from Lassen a half hour ago on the phone. A gilled man washed ashore on Madagascar. He lay on a beach on the west coast for a week before he was found. Sea birds had worked him over, but there wasn’t any doubt. He’s being shipped east to Los Angeles.”

Edward frowned.

“I know. That was my response entirely. Why Los Angeles? It had to have something to do with Oscar Pallcheck. So I set out across town on my way here, and look what I find in the Times.” Latzarel produced a newspaper and flopped it open. There in the bottom corner of the front page was an article captioned “Catalina Merman,” and a short, vaguely ridiculing article concerning yet another supposedly gilled human, far gone in decay, discovered by hikers on Catalina Island. “There’s the connection! I said to myself.” Latzarel tossed the newspaper onto the couch.

“You and I both know where that creature came from,” he continued. “Right out of the pool at Palos Verdes, that’s where. And he floated to Catalina on a current. Either that, or the seabed out there is peppered with tunnels. I half suppose that’s the case.”

The telephone rang. It was Ashbless. Yes, they’d seen the paper. Things were certainly afoot. He’d see them in a half hour. Edward hung up the phone, unaccountably and vaguely disturbed — suspicious of Ashbless for the same reason he’d fired Yamoto. It was William’s doing. Professor Latzarel, however, was enthusiastic. They’d need all the help they could muster, he said.

He pulled out a pocket calendar and began ticking off days. “How long until Jim goes back to school?”

“Almost a week,” said Edward. “The second of January.”

“Good. We’ll pack tonight. Call Squires; we’ll need his boat.”

“Where shall I tell him we’re going?” asked Edward.

“Catalina Island! I have the sneaking suspicion that we’re closing in on something here. That the pieces are falling into place. We’re closer to our goal than you suppose. Things are hotting up, and if you think Pinion isn’t going to be there to step in when we’re slack, you’re sadly mistaken. We’ve got to get the jump on him.”

When Jim wandered in that afternoon, he found the front porch heaped with camping gear and topographic maps, jackets and camera equipment, boxes of food and green steel canisters of drinking water. They spent the night aboard the Gerhardi, rolling on the swell. It was fearfully cold. Professor Latzarel and William Ashbless, hearty as a pair of geese, spent the better part of the evening on deck, talking and smoking in the wind, reminiscing about travels, about expeditions. A man hasn’t been cold, said Latzarel, until he’s been to the Pole. Jim swore he’d never go near the Pole. The deck of the Gerhardi was cold enough for him, and after half an hour there, attempting to maintain some semblance of spirit, he’d given up. It was impossible to imagine being colder. His fingers might as well have been wood, and the stocking cap did nothing to prevent the dull headache that seemed to be driven by the wind. So he spent most of the night in the cabin reading, knowing from experience that he wouldn’t get seasick unless he thought about it. At around midnight he decided to venture topside again.

A gray fog had misted in, thick and drizzly and dead still. Ashbless and Latzarel stood aft talking, but their voices were muted by the fog, and it sounded to Jim as if the voices wafted toward him from another realm, another dimension perhaps — as if he’d eaten one of Fu Manchu’s mushrooms and had receded into some murky closet of reality. He felt that he could push the fog out of his way with his hands, perhaps swim through it. Once his mind went to work, in fact, all sorts of possibilities filtered in, and he was possessed by the uncanny certainty that at any moment the bottle-eyed face of a vast airborne fish would materialize, mottled and dripping, searching for a door back into the sea.

Jim squinted, as if it had become suddenly dark, hoping that by squinting into the gloom he could somehow pierce it. There was, of course, nothing to be seen — nothing separated the Gerhardi from Catalina Island but the silent sea, slack and oily, pressed beneath the blanket of fog. It suddenly, occurred to him that the island might just as easily lie off the port side as off the starboard. He might be staring out toward nothing, toward the open sea. But it was all one. The night around him was a pale gray impenetrable wall.

There was a whisper of wind, and the swirling fog wisped away briefly; a corridor of deep night air opened for one moment of amazing clarity, revealing the ghostly shadow of a strange, pale craft, half submerged, lying in wait out there on the sea. It looked like a white submarine, ancient and finned, a submarine from Atlantis, perhaps, lost in the fog. In an instant it vanished as a swirl of mist rose from the ocean. Jim couldn’t say whether the odd craft had simply slipped into the depths or if the depths had slipped over it, but a moment later, when the fog cleared again briefly, there was no submarine to be seen, nothing but the black, undulating surface of the ocean.

Latzarel didn’t like the sound of it when Jim related the incident. Ashbless wrote it off to imagination — the fog and the silence, he said, could get hold of a man’s mind. Fog hallucinations were common on the sea: ghost ships, mermen, impossible sea creatures, faces among the dark floating gardens of kelp — all of them fog figments. Edward, who’d joined them on deck, pulled his peacoat around himself and lit his pipe. It was equally possible, he said, that sea monsters and ghost ships ventured out in the fog by choice, that fog was a cloak of invisibility, or perhaps the atmosphere of their phantom world, leaking into our own, carrying with it no end of night shades and mist creatures.

Jim insisted that he’d seen what he’d seen. Whether it was a phantom he couldn’t say, but there it was. He suddenly thought to himself that if his father were there, he’d find a more rational explanation. Then the thought struck him as peculiar, not because of his father’s inflation of almost every innocuous event, but because that very inflation had come to seem to Jim to be rational. He peered out into the foggy ocean, watching for something, he didn’t know what: the reappearance of the shadowy submarine, or the floating, ghostly, weed-hung skeletons of a crew of dead mariners wandering just below the surface of the gray ocean.

Latzarel said that he’d turn in, and Edward decided to do the same. Jim followed them, suddenly preferring the contrived and unlikely plots of Fu Manchu to the strange things that might — who could say? — be drifting toward them on the tide. And beyond that, he could smell the thick musty aroma of Roycroft Squires’ amazing coffee wafting through the galley vent, the antithesis of phantoms, of obscuring mists. William Ashbless decided to stay on deck, drawn, as he was, to the atmosphere. He’d “keep watch,” he said, yanking on a stocking cap and producing pen and paper from beneath his coat. When Jim drifted toward sleep forty-five minutes later, it was to the sound of the murmuring conversation of Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel. The words submarine and Pinion and mermen floated past his ear, but he fell away into sleep, the objects of the conversation metamorphosing into the murky figures of a dream.

When he awoke, the sun shone. Remnants of fog lay on the horizon, dissipating in the light of day. Catalina Island, rocky and green, thrust up out of the sea amazingly close to them, and Jim wondered whether it had been there all night long, or had risen with the sun. Ashbless had spent the night on deck, wrestling with poetry, and had fallen asleep before dawn, having seen nothing of phantom submarines. He made a point of laughing the whole thing off, perhaps to allay Jim’s suspicions of deviltry. They rowed ashore after breakfast, hauling along cans of water and boxes of food. There was nothing but a handful of surprised goats on shore to greet them. Roycroft Squires waved farewell late in the afternoon and motored noisily toward the distant mainland, promising to return in four days.

So the adventurers found themselves abandoned on the rocky, chaparral-covered west shore of the island, and Jim for one had no idea on earth what it was they expected to find.

Professor Latzarel, however, hadn’t any doubts. He was off in the rowboat an hour after camp had been set up, unreeling his weighted rope into suspiciously deep pools. Uncle Edward, looking like a gaunt seal in a neoprene wetsuit, snorkeled atop the chilly waters, gazing down into the depths through forests of sun-dappled kelp until after a half hour or so he developed such a violent headache that he splashed ashore and fell asleep in his tent, having discovered nothing in the way of bottomless pits.

Latzarel rowed seaward some hundred yards or so into deeper water, plunking out his line, hauling it in, and plunking it out once again, drifting out of sight around a little headland in the current.

Jim climbed the steep hills behind the camp, skirting thick stands of scrub oak and prickly pear and pushing along through knee-high grasses. The perfume of broken sage rose around him on the still, warm air, and once he routed a peccary out of a thicket, the foolish beast snuffling away on its skinny little legs, grunting anxiously. He half expected to crest a hill and see below a farmhouse with a dark-haired woman tending pigs. If he did, he told himself, he’d venture in that direction just for the wonder of it, and see if he could resist her enchantment. But by the time he got to the summit, the sun was dropping toward the sea in the west. Below him stretched a valley, but there was no farmhouse there, only a half-dozen goats tripping away down the rocky hillside, frightened by his approach. He followed the crest of the hill, wrapping around toward the seaward side until he found himself on a precipice overlooking the thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean that separated him from the islands of Japan. Several hundred feet below he could see Professor Latzarel in his rowboat, pulling for home. He stayed in as close to shore as he could in order to keep out of the same current that had swept him round the headland two hours earlier. Jim decided to sit on the precipice and watch the sun go down, wondering if he could hike the mile or two he’d come in the half hour of twilight he’d have left. An approaching wall of fog, however, way off over the ocean, changed his mind abruptly, and he decided to forego the sunset.

He took one last look at Latzarel, who would, if he could maintain the pace, beat him back to camp. The water along the shoreline was remarkably clear and green, the rocks and kelp beds and shallows standing out as clearly as if he gazed at a watercolor painting and the rippling surface of the sea was brush strokes, hazing the absolute clarity of it. There seemed to him to be, almost exactly beneath Latzarel’s tiny craft, a patch of black water that contrasted utterly with the blue-green shallows that surrounded it. At first he thought it was a rock reef or a patch of dense kelp, but it had an odd regularity to it and such a black, nightlike color that he suspected it was a deep hole. He wondered if the professor had sounded it, perhaps on his voyage up the island. Jim picked up a rock and threw it out over the precipice. The rock seemed to fall into the island, dropping in among the brush of the hillside. The cliff face, apparently, looked far steeper than it was. He picked up a second rock and realized, just as he was drawing his arm back to let it go, that it was a curious looking rock altogether — that there seemed to be a picture painted on it. Before the thought could register, however, he’d let go of the stone, and it arced out toward the sea, plunging a hundred yards down the cliffside before disappearing silently into the weeds. More such rocks lay about — any number of them. The cliff seemed to be built of them, as if some fabulous giant stonemason had built it of slices of stone, each one containing the dark imprint of a fossil, a sort of prehistoric fish graveyard.

Jim began jamming them into his pockets, pulling them out and throwing them away almost immediately as he found better ones. He edged his way down a crack in the wall of the cliff, holding onto twisted branches of mesquite, chipping out fossilized seashells, conical homes of conchs and nautili, until finally, at the same instant he realized that the entire end of the island was bathed in orange fire from the enormous sun, half sunk in the sea, he yanked out a flat slab of stone in the middle of which was a perfect fossil trilobite, a creature out of time’s abyss. He emptied the fish out of his pockets and shoved the trilobite in, climbing back up to the summit as if he had a pocketful of eggs, and in the dwindling light set off down the crest. He could just see Professor Latzarel, a dot on the sea, pulling around the headland.

It was dark when Jim crashed into the glow of the campfire; Uncle Edward had been on the verge of setting out to search for him. Dinner had been held up. Edward still had a headache that tormented him. Latzarel hadn’t discovered a thing, and the first tendrils of fog had snaked in off the sea. The branches of the oak trees, in fact, were ghost branches, almost lost in the fog, which had settled in eerily some ten or twelve feet above the ground.

Jim produced his trilobite, smiling at Uncle Edward’s reaction. It seemed to eradicate the remnants of his headache. Professor Latzarel was even more dumbfounded, and when Jim told him of the cliff of fossils that rose above the pool on which Latzarel himself had been rowing not an hour and a half earlier, the startled scientist was for paddling back up the island immediately. He had to take a sounding, he said. But he was convinced, in the end, to wait for morning, especially when he saw William Ashbless dumping lobster tails into a great iron kettle of steaming gumbo. If Jim’s sea pit turned out to be genuine, he said, they’d shift camp around to the seaward side of the island the following afternoon.

The fog wasn’t as thick that night as it had been offshore the previous evening. It drifted past in cottony patches, now obscuring the oaks behind the camp, then melting away into them, leaving, perhaps, a scattering of twisted limbs framed in absolute clarity that faded into gray mist and shadow. A moment later all would be lost in fog, the campfire and its circle of explorers an island in a gray sea.

The effect of the patchy fog was even more disconcerting than had been the thicker, all-obscuring mists, for instead of imagined fog creatures appearing out of a wall of gray, the mists parted to reveal strange and unpredictable night shapes: a granite outcropping thrusting peculiarly forward like a rushing beast turned to stone in mid-flight or a wall of green foliage in two-dimensional illusion as if it were a painted screen draped across an avenue into wonderland.

There wasn’t a great deal of talk. Even William Ashbless was silent. He seemed restive, however, and drank in quick little sips from a silver flask full of Scotch, standing up and looking out to sea during moments of clarity, perhaps expecting something to appear. Everyone agreed that their expedition had only a single end — to find a merman, better alive than dead. It was a wild goose chase if ever there was one, but Latzarel was convinced that for some unfathomable reason the key to the mystery of the Earth’s core was on the edge of revelation. It was a matter of weeks, of days. He hadn’t spent his life searching for that key to be caught unprepared when the time came. Why that time was at hand he couldn’t say, but all signs forecast it. Something was in the air. And in the magic of the misty island night, with the sound of the ocean lapping on the shingles and the faint, low murmur of a distant foghorn somewhere out in the Santa Barbara Channel, Jim felt the same certainty. That he told himself the feeling was a product of night magic didn’t alter it, perhaps because he was certain that the enchantment itself was authentic. He was as certain of it as he had ever been certain of anything.

He suddenly wondered, for no good reason beyond the mystery of it, if the slope of the sea bottom as it dropped off into the depths was the same as the slope of the granite and chaparral hills rising beyond the camp. It was possible that the one was an inverted echo of the other — that the land beneath the sea was a dark counterpoint to the land above it, a mirror image disguised beneath algae and urchins and countless centuries of gathering polyps and barnacles, of decaying vegetation and the distortions of tree roots and scrub and the dusty, decayed and fossilized remains of innumerable generations of extinct beasts. How likely was it that anyone would have noticed?

In the heavy evening fog it was increasingly difficult to convince himself that the four of them weren’t sitting around a sputtering fire of broken kelp fronds on the floor of the sea. He thought suddenly about Giles Peach who, it was certain, would feel utterly at home venturing out through submarine gardens with a mad Captain Nemo, dwelling among octopi and starfish.

He became aware of the smell of seaweed — of brown kelp lying across exposed rocks. The fog on his tongue tasted salty and cold, like the flavor of a raw oyster. And as he sat, still and silent, nearly sleeping, it seemed as if the veil of fog that washed across them was thickening, and that floating upon it, bobbing on invisible currents, were odds and ends of sea life and oceanic flotsam: the papery shells of chambered nautili, painted and glowing like Japanese lanterns; slowly revolving nebulae of tiny purple urchins and dancing periwinkles; glittering grains of silica sand scattered in the current, blinking sidereally in the watery firelight like stars in a misty night sky. A glance at his companions suggested that they too were lost in sea dreams, had wandered into the Land of Nod. He seemed to hear something off toward the ocean — a brief splashing and a short cry, almost a mewling that sounded strangely human and pathetic.

The fog cleared. Jim stood up and picked his way down the dirt path toward the beach, his hands in his pockets, looking sharp for something — whatever it might be. He felt a familiar presence, as if he knew what it was, who it was, perhaps, that he’d find. A brief wash of moonbeams played across exposed tidepools dark and choked with waterweeds, all of it colorless in the pale, reflected light. Nothing stirred. A procession of exposed rocks ran out and disappeared into deep water on his right. On his left the shore swerved around into the headland, most of it invisible in the fog. There was nothing at all to be seen in the water but the shimmering circle of the moon, wavering there for a moment, then swallowed up by the fog. There was a splashing to the right, out beyond the last of the chain of rocks. Something rose unsteadily from the depths and then disappeared again beneath the surface. A bubbling and swirling arose along toward shore, as if the creature, whatever it was, were swimming up through the shallows toward him. Jim’s first impulse was to cry out, to shout for his uncle, to alert everyone to the possible approach of the expected merman, but somehow he feared that his shouting would break the spell, would burst the bubble of enchantment that enclosed the night, and that the fabulous approaching creature would sink away out of sight.

A head rose from the water, dripping, looking up at him, beseeching him somehow. Its mouth worked, and it shook its head slowly, as if it held some vast secret sorrow that it couldn’t begin to reveal. It was Giles Peach.

Jim shouted, and even as he did, he knew that he wasn’t surprised. He’d felt Gill’s presence all along. He’d wandered down to the beach in response to a silent beckoning. At the sound of his shout, Giles was gone — vanished beneath the swell. The fog parted briefly, and lying offshore, bathed in sudden moonlight, was the ghostly submarine, riding at anchor. There was a commotion behind him, the sound of running feet, and his three companions rushed toward him, just as the door in the fog slammed shut, obscuring the ocean entirely.

Latzarel was wet to his waist, sloshing out through the shallows, clambering from rock to rock, searching for mermen. Jim could tell in a moment that he hadn’t believed that it was Giles Peach who had crept up out of the sea. Mermen, Latzarel had insisted, all looked pretty much alike — one was drawn toward their similarities — gills, webbed fingers, that sort of thing. He edged around a monolithic, mussel-covered rock, grasped two handfuls of slimy waterweed in an effort to pull himself up to a higher vantage point, and yanked the weeds loose, slipping with a shout into a pool and disappearing beneath the surface. Edward, pants rolled uselessly to his knees, sloshed out after him, and the two staggered shoreward finally, soaked, having discovered nothing.

“Did you see him under there?” asked Ashbless, taking a nip from his flask. He offered it to Latzarel who waved him off, declining to respond to his question.

“I must communicate with him!” said Latzarel, comparatively dry and sucking down coffee a half hour later. Ashbless laughed and started to say something facetious regarding Latzarel’s plunge into the deep, but the professor cut him short with a look.

“But what’s the submarine doing out there?” asked Edward, poking at the fire with a stick. “What’s it hovering offshore for? How do we know this merman wasn’t off the submarine? Some sort of reconnaissance mission.”

“If they’ve got submarines,” asked Ashbless, “why bother bringing mermen? Seems redundant.” He smiled at Edward.

“I’m sure it was Giles,” Jim put in. “There was more than just my seeing him. I think he called my name.”

Professor Latzarel nodded theatrically. “I suppose it might have been,” he said. “But it’s far more likely a common merman, one of the crowd that’s been putting in an appearance. What sort of wild coincidence would it be if Giles had, somehow, slipped off into the sea — we know his father went in for it there toward the end — and, with a million square miles of ocean to swim in, he turned up here on the same weekend as us? It just won’t wash.”

“Unless he was aboard the submarine,” said Edward. “This is more than just casual mermen. I might have been carried away by the fog, but I distinctly felt that something strange was in the air tonight, something …” He paused and squinted at Latzarel as if hoping that his friend would supply the missing phrase as William had once before. Ashbless beat him to it.

“Something fishy,” he said.

“Well, yes, rather.” Edward packed tobacco into his pipe. “I’m not sure you’ve caught my meaning yet. For a moment there I could have sworn I was underwater myself. It was uncanny.”

“Hmm,” said Latzarel, staring at the fire. “I think I follow you …”

“It’s a matter of fog, gentlemen,” said Ashbless. “I’m telling you that it does things to a man. It’s like darkness — exactly like darkness. We’ve got to be able to see. That’s it in a nutshell. If we can’t see we’ll people the darkness with hobgoblins — dream things. It’s a simple business. We’re always twice as frightened of what might be there as of what is. Now a poet, mind you, has harnessed his imagination. He has to, if he wants it to work for him. Poetry isn’t a matter of letting go, it’s a matter of taking hold of the reins. What we have tonight, gentlemen, is an easily explained scientific phenomenon — a combination of warm air and cold ocean water. Fog. Humidity to such a degree that water precipitates out of the air. Simple business, really, that generates neither ghost ships nor lost friends.” He smiled at Jim in a fatherly way, as if to assure him that the seeming hallucinations were entirely normal, given his age and his not yet having reined in his imagination.

Jim was struck with distrust for him — a distrust that reminded him at once of John Pinion and that generated a sudden rush of suspicion, a certainty almost, that Ashbless was having them on, playing them false. Uncle Edward wasn’t satisfied either. He winked at Jim and shook his head minutely. Professor Latzarel, however, could see sense in the poet’s rationality. He far preferred the condensation of moisture to ghost ships. And the thought of a real submarine, floating off the tip of the island, watching them, complicated an already strange pursuit beyond his ability to deal with it so late on a cold night with his shirt scratchy from the dried salt on his skin and his hair seeming to grow wetter by the moment in the fog. Tomorrow would be time enough to think of ghost ships.

Chapter 11

The night passed without further adventure; and the morning dawned clear. By eight, Edward and Professor Latzarel were skimming round the headland in the rowboat while Jim clambered up into the hills again to explore. Ashbless stayed in camp to sleep, having been up all night pursuing the arts.

Winter rains had soaked the cliffside and tumbled rock and brush down toward the ocean, piling it up like a little vertical delta above the high-tide line. The jagged ends of rocks jutted out into the air, threatening to crumble and slide, cascading no end of Paleozoic cephalopods and fossilized seaweeds into a dusty heap. Edward searched the face of the cliff with binoculars, while Professor Latzarel played out rope tied to a lead ball that sank deeper and deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Edward swept the binoculars along, peering past long shadows thrown by the morning sun that lay out over the sea. What he expected to find, he couldn’t say. Perhaps nothing. It reminded him of a time when he was a lad of thirteen and had gone out searching for stones in the desert — rubies, emeralds, he didn’t know what — and found among a tumble of black and gray rock a clump of quartz crystals as big as his hand.

He began to fancy that he could see, among the shadows of ridges of the hillside, shapes that suggested the bones of prehistoric beasts — the cocked hat of a peering tricerotops, the shark-toothed back of a stegosaurus — but it was likely that he was merely being tricked by shadows cast by a scattering of clouds that drifted across the sun, deepening the patches of dark, suddenly veiling formations that had stood out clearly moments before in the long lines of strata.

It occurred to him that the cliff face, falling away into the sea to unguessed depths, might well be a sort of vertical road that wound into the earth on the one hand and angled into the stars on the other, along which he could descend into the past, wandering past a fragile layer of Cenozoic debris and into the Mesozoic, an age of winged reptiles and vast cycad jungles that had sprung from 300 million years of fern marshes and misty Paleozoic seas teeming with fish lizards and toothed whales. Deeper into the earth, well along toward the hollow core, would come the age of fishes, of weird, jawless, armored creatures that crept sluggishly along the weedy bottoms of Silurian seas, disappearing into the Cambrian age of algae and trilobites and brachiopods, scurrying pointlessly, like bugs, for a hundred million years that followed a billion years of nothing at all, of black ooze and unicellular plants, traces of which lie buried deep beneath the seas, lost in geologic antiquity.

Edward realized that he was staring at nothing through his binoculars. He focused on a wave-washed grotto at the base of the cliff, hung with rubbery seaweed that would be under three or four feet of water in an hour’s time. It reminded him immediately of the grotto at Lourdes, and he half expected to see the Virgin appear in a halo of sea mist. What he saw instead was a corpse — pale and bent double at the waist, deposited on the rocks by the previous tide. He nudged Latzarel, who was ecstatic over just having played out the last of a thousand feet of line.

“What is it?” asked Latzarel. “This is monumental. We’ll need the bell. We’ve got … “

But Edward shut him up, handed him the glasses, and pointed toward the grotto. Latzarel took a quick look, shouted, and scrambled for the oars. A moment later their little rowboat bobbed in among the rocks, rising and falling on the swell. Edward clung to heavy stalks of seaweed, trying to steady the boat. The air smelled of salt spray and barnacles and of a deep putrescent odor that rose off the pale body. It looked as if ocean water had filtered in between layers of skin, separating them and swelling them out until the thing was puffy and bloated and threatened to bubble apart. Edward half expected it simply to disintegrate in a swirl of rotted bits. He was indifferent to it as a scientific discovery; it was as a signpost that the decayed merman interested him most, an indicator that the dark ocean water heaving beneath them was the mouth of a river to Pellucidar.

Professor Latzarel, however, was set on tugging the corpse into the boat. The thing had webbed fingers and toes, and although the fleshy parts of its head and neck had been nibbled away by fish and crabs, the gill slits were apparent. The body was entirely hairless and was covered with scales the size of a thumbnail that caught the rays of the suddenly appearing sun and shone for a moment as a scattering of tiny pastel rainbows, the beauty of which was utterly at odds with the choking scent of decay.

“Give me a hand with this, will you?” Latzarel puffed, irritated at Edward’s hesitation.

“You won’t budge him,” said Edward, holding an ineffective hand over his face. “He’ll fall apart. You need a snow shovel.”

“Nonsense. He’s entirely firm. Hasn’t been dead a week yet. Jump out and steady the boat against the rock. When the surge lifts it, I’ll lever this fellow in between the thwarts.”

For the sake of science, Edward dropped over the side into a sandy tidepool that was two or three feet deeper than it appeared. Chill seawater swirled up around his chest. He gasped for shallow little breaths and hooted in spite of himself.

Latzarel watched the sea for the hump of an approaching swell. “Quit singing and steady this thing,” he said. “Here we go!” And a moment later Edward’s feet were swept out from under him in a rush of ocean that whirled in around the rocks, lifting the rowboat and tossing it seaward. Edward tumbled beneath the surface, found the bottom, thrust himself upward, and rose with a bang into the underside of the rowboat, his eyes jammed shut. He thrashed and kicked himself into a tangle of kelp tendrils, sputtering out of the water seconds later, hung with brown leaves. The rowboat had swung around and floated seaward ten yards or so. Latzarel crouched with his merman on the rock, wet to the knees, with an irritated look about him that seemed to imply that Edward could have picked a better time to take a dip. “Get the boat, old man,” he said, nodding at their bobbing craft. “One more good surge will wash him off the rocks. We’ll have a devil of a time fishing him out of the water without a net.”

Edward splashed out after the boat, which obliged him by rushing in again, quartering down the face of a swell that broke across an exposed reef. Edward kicked to stay afloat, grappling with the boat, managing finally to grab the punter and wait for the surge to wash back out. He pulled and pushed the boat back in toward the rock, realizing as he did so that he was grievously cold.

“Here she comes!” shouted Latzarel, scrambling for a footing behind the merman.

Edward braced himself against a rock, shoved the boat forward, and held his breath as the ocean rose around him once again. The boat was abruptly jarred out of his hands. He fell forward, swam a stroke, and righted himself, scrambling up onto the big rock beside Latzarel who beamed with success. The merman, twisted into an impossible pretzel, lay in the boat, his head thrown back and eyesockets staring sightlessly at the sun. One of his hands had fallen across Edward’s binoculars, as if he intended to have a look at the cliff face himself.

“Success, my boy,” said Latzarel. “We’ll see what the Times has to say about this!” He turned and surveyed the cliffside. “I believe the best route for you lies west of us there. About fifty yards down. There’s a cut, it appears, in the precipice. There where that oak tree almost touches the water.”

Edward could easily see the oak tree and the rocky canyon that led away above it. But he didn’t, at first, grasp his friend’s meaning. “Route?” he said, pulling off a shoe and pouring out a stream of water.

“Back to camp,” said Latzarel. “All of us won’t fit into the boat. So I’m suggesting that you hike back. It’s far warmer on the island than on the ocean, and we’ll both make it into camp at about the same time.”

Edward started to protest, but Latzarel was likely correct. The thought of rowing slowly back against the current in the company of a long-dead merman settled the issue for him. He held the boat as steady as he could while Latzarel climbed aboard, taking off his cloth jacket and draping it over the grisly face of his new crew member. Latzarel dipped the oars into the sea, edging out around shallow pools. “I’ll see you in an hour!” he shouted, bending to his work. Edward set out to the west, picking his way from rock to rock, disappearing beneath the bows of the oak and plunging into the dry foliage of the steep canyon.

“We can’t keep him anywhere near camp,” Ashbless insisted, looking skeptically at Latzarel’s prize. “Not for the next two days. Lord knows what the sun will do to him by the time Squires arrives. He’s ripe enough now to satisfy me. I say we cram him into a dufflebag and bury him. Then we can dig him up day after tomorrow and carry him home in the bag.”

“How do we cram him into the bag?” asked Edward practically. “He’ll go to bits.”

Latzarel nodded his head. “He damn near lost an arm coming around the point there when I shipped the oars for a moment. I won’t shove him into any bags. What we need is refrigeration. It might be wisest to leave him in ocean water. Just weight him down with rocks and fill the rowboat. Let him sit here.”

“Here!” shouted Ashbless. “I won’t tolerate it. We’ll sail him downwind a hundred yards — into the next cove. But your boatful of water will heat up in a couple of hours with this sun. There’s no way to keep it cold without continually bailing and refilling. You can count me out for that job.”

“And how are we going to use the boat if he’s in it?” asked Edward. “We’ve got to roll him out of there and into something we can haul around.”

“A sleeping bag,” Jim suggested. “There’s enough extra blankets to use, and it hasn’t gotten cold enough at night to worry about anyway. We can unzip the bag, roll him into it, and zip him up.”

“He’ll broil,” Ashbless objected. “I can’t imagine what kind of muck we’d find in the bag when we got it home.”

“No he wouldn’t,” said Latzarel. “Not if we pulled all the down out of the bag first. I think it’s a capital idea. We’ll tie off the mouth of the bag with rope and float the whole thing in a tidepool down the beach.”

“Like a string of trout,” said Ashbless helpfully.

“Exactly.” Latzarel was already on his way toward the tent. Jim’s sleeping bag, the only one that unzipped entirely, was soon empty of feathers. They laid the open bag out flat, picked up the rowboat, and tumbled the corpse onto the bag, casting the boat down immediately onto the sand and fleeing upwind. Professor Latzarel, breathing through a handkerchief soaked in kerosene, worked at zipping the bag shut and tying it off. Then he and Edward dragged it along toward the tiny cove to the east, bumping it across clumps of shore grass and small rocks, Professor Latzarel cursing and wincing, fearing that he was reducing the thing to a gumbo of ill-connected parts. Finally, however, it was safely afloat in its pool. Once in the water it no longer smelled quite so overwhelmingly. Dozens of little tidepool sculpin and opaleye perch darted out of the shadows to investigate, pecking at the blue nylon bag. Latzarel regarded them suspiciously.

“Well keep watch tonight,” he said.

Edward agreed, although he wasn’t sure what they were watching for. He knew only that when it was his turn to watch, he’d do so from a distance. As it turned out, Ashbless volunteered for the job, since he rarely slept at night anyway.

It was clear that night — not much fog at all, only an occasional lost patch that drifted through morosely, wandering into the hills and disappearing. An enormous moon floated in the sky, throwing a broad silver avenue of doubly reflected light across the sea. Professor Latzarel and Uncle Edward were off standing watch in the merman’s cove, keeping an eye on their prize. Ashbless, looking tired and ancient, sat across the fire from Jim, telling fabricated tales of nineteenth century London, full of anecdotes and inside jokes and impossible minutiae concerning the lives of Wordsworth and Byron, whom he insisted on calling Bill and Noel. Jim wasn’t taken in by it. In fact it was a sad business to think of the old poet mugging up arcane pieces of literary gossip to flavor his tall tides. Jim couldn’t imagine what gain there was in carrying on so, or what Ashbless expected to effect by narrating his lies in the first person.

At midnight Ashbless rose, filled his flask from a bottle in his dufflebag, then shoved both the flask and his bottle into the coat. He turned and took a quick peek at Jim who, wrapped in a wool blanket, had nearly nodded off in front of the fire. He rifled his bag, pulling out odds and ends and slipping them into his long coat. Then he dropped two shirts and a pair of trousers onto his sleeping bag along with several books and some loose papers, and rolled the bag up, tying the unwieldy result with nylon cord. He left, finally, to relieve Edward and Professor Latzarel. Jim watched him go, half puzzled and half asleep.

He awoke an hour later, cold and stiff, the fire having burned down to nothing. He decided to stay out in the open, the night being clear, so he rose and went across toward the tent for a second blanket. The foot of Uncle Edward’s sleeping bag shoved out through the net door of the big canvas cabin tent. Professor Latzarel snored on his cot. The sight of Ashbless’ dufflebag, lying limp and deflated on the ground, awakened the suspicions Jim had felt an hour earlier. He looked around to make sure he was unseen, then Upended the bag. There was nothing in it at all.

Jim pulled off his jacket, pulled on a sweater, then put his jacket back on over it. He followed the trail west toward the cove to have a look at Ashbless. He wouldn’t be half surprised, he told himself, to find no one at all on watch. He was mistaken though. Before he’d come within sight of the cove he heard voices, two of which he recognized. He crept along in the shadow of a granite outcropping, peering down toward the cove finally at Ashbless, John Pinion, and Dr. Hilario Frosticos.

His mined sleeping bag with its weird inhabitant still floated in the pool, moored with three separate lines to surrounding rocks. The night was so clearly lit by moonlight that murky waterweeds and submerged rocks were visible beneath the quiet waters of the merman’s tidepool. The two men arguing on the beach cast long night shadows across the sand. Standing out to sea was the tiny, white submarine that had appeared twice out of the fog.

“They don’t know a thing more than they did last month,” said Ashbless contemptuously.

“Of course not,” Pinion stated flatly, as if Ashbless’ statement was dead obvious. “But what if they did? What if they’d discovered some way of making use of these pools, what would you do? Would you throw in with the likes of them?”

Ashbless didn’t answer.

“My offer still stands,” Pinion continued. “I need a memoirist, one with your — how shall I put it? — longevity. That’s the word. Watch this.”

Pinion pulled a flashlight from, under his coat and signaled the submarine, blinking his light off and on four times. Ashbless tipped his flask up and took a long swallow, but choked and dropped it into the sand as the submarine, dripping rivulets of seawater, rose vertically skyward, humming and bathed in lavender and emerald light that emanated from some unseen source, from the moon itself, it seemed. The submarine sailed overhead like a blimp, like Hasbro’s Metropolitan. Jim knew for certain that it had been Giles in the tidepool the previous evening. The flying submarine settled the issue.

Ashbless stood open-mouthed, staring at the craft’s propeller spinning lazily in the moonlight. “Anti-gravity?” he croaked.

“Of course,” said Pinion. “Child’s play. This isn’t the half of it. We’ll be in the interior by the first of April. The digger is almost complete. This Peach lad is a genius. There’s nothing he can’t do — perpetual motion, anti-matter, you name it. Most of it’s quite simple, actually. And what do these shysters have to show for themselves? A corpse in a sack. What will they do with it, ask it for directions to El Dorado?” Pinion snickered. Ashbless stroked his beard. He looked back over his shoulder toward camp — guiltily, it seemed to Jim. The meeting, Jim was certain, had been pre-arranged. Ashbless was ready to go. They would have awakened to find him gone along with the merman.

The submarine descended, a rope ladder dropped and dangled, the end of it dragging on the ground at the poet’s feet. One by one the three men climbed into the ship silhouetted against the moon. The ladder was drawn up, and the submarine drifted seaward once more, bearing away the turncoat Ashbless. It paused immediately over the merman. The thing in the bag flopped once or twice like a gaffed fish. Jim shouted. The three ropes that moored it stretched tight and snapped, and the merman, sleeping bag and all, levitated, spinning slowly end over end, shedding a hailstorm of flailing crabs, and was tossed into the ocean a hundred yards offshore.

Jim roused Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel, but by the time they jogged to the cove, the submarine was only a haze of lights in the distant sky, dropping slowly toward the sea. For a few moments it seemed to be sailing north toward the coast; then it sank beneath the swell and disappeared.

“Frosticos?” asked Uncle Edward beside a relit fire.

“Yes,” said Jim. “It was him. His hair is the same color as his submarine. Ashbless went off to the cove anticipating them. He must have. He had emptied his pack. He’s known about them all along. That’s why he worked so hard at laughing them away.”

“The traitor!” cried Latzarel, enraged far more by the disposal of his merman than by the poet’s going over to the enemy. He lapsed into silence, however, thinking about the notion of a flying submarine. “Can we be sure it was Peach?” he asked suddenly. “Christ! Remember that damned nasal irrigator he was gabbling about that day in the driveway? What was he going to do with it? Harness the tides or something?”

“Build an anti-gravity engine,” said Jim.

“Anti-gravity!” Latzarel shook his head. “What good will anti-gravity do them on a journey to the Earth’s core? They’ll end up on the moon. Correct me if I’m wrong, Edward, but isn’t anti-gravity utterly contrary to every conceivable fragment of relativity theory?”

“Absolutely.”

Latzarel sighed. Edward made Jim tell him the story of Hasbro’s anti-gravity muffler. And Jim, for the sake of thoroughness and in light of the fact that he could hardly be thought mad anymore, described the rainy rooftop ride of Roycroft Squires — a phenomenon which Squires himself was apparently unaware of.

“We’ve been going at this all wrong,” said Edward. “We’ve supposed that Giles’ inventions were a product of scientific method — that they were inventions in a strict, mechanical sense. But they can’t be. We all know that. There is no anti-gravity. Yet tonight we witness a flying submarine and the levitation of a corpse. We’re certain that the proximity of Giles Peach can either cause mass hallucination or, mote startling, can alter the environment. And remember Ashbless’ story about Basil Peach on the Rio Jari. Impossible on the face of it. What I’m trying to say is that something is going on here that’s simply not apparent on the face of it — something far more strange and dangerous than we’ve understood up until now, but which Pinion has manipulated to his own ends. And do you know what the strangest part of all is?”

Latzarel looked at him vacantly and shook his head.

“The strangest part of all is that William knew. All along he knew. But what in God’s name is the purpose of the song and dance business involving William’s escapes and retrievals? What gain is there?”

“Infiltration,” said Latzarel. “That has to be it. Stage William’s escapes. Phony up a lot of suggestive threats. Promote paranoia. Steam open his mail. Hint that he’s being served poisoned food. Hire that Japanese gardener to follow him around, to appear in unlikely places. William develops the fear that he’s central to some vast plot — that his life and sanity are at stake. So he flees, thereby committing a crime of sorts that will more solidly bring about his permanent confinement. And when they recover him, days later, they drain him of all the information he’s gotten out of us, out of fraternizing with the enemy, as it were. He’s their link to us.”

Edward nodded and scowled darkly.

Jim, scared witless by the new machinations, especially since they surfaced at such a strange, late hour of a night full of flying submarines and levitated mermen, saw in Latzarel’s explanation the hope that his father was as sane as the rest of them. He wondered fitfully just how sane that was. In fact, when he considered it, almost no one he knew could qualify as entirely sane if it came to a contest. All of them seemed to be chasing down — or being chased by — some sort of lunatic notion. What, he asked himself, did that suggest? What if all of them had crossed the borderland? To what extent were they manipulated by Giles Peach, and to what extent were they products of Giles Peach? It was a disturbing question. In fact, it seemed impossible that the tenuous threads that bound the world together — the opposing forces of the tides, polar magnetism, the cosmic dance, whatever it was that preserved order — wouldn’t stand the strain of such unrelieved peculiarity. Supposed order would lose its credibility in a rush. Things would fall apart.

“I can see a problem,” said Edward.

“Hah!” snorted Latzarel.

“Listen to this. If you’re right about this business of infiltration. If William, somehow, has been the most perceptive of us all while being the most — how shall I put it? — accessible, then he’s quite likely in trouble. Now that Pinion and Frosticos have Giles’ cooperation, they don’t need us. We’re minor leaguers, messing about with our diving bell. Pinion will have his digging machine operable when we’re still arguing with the museum about dinosaur teeth. Frosticos won’t need any infiltration then, will he? My money says that William won’t reappear. He’s in trouble or I’m an idiot. Giles Peach was the wild card, and he was dealt to Pinion. William’s a discard now.”

Latzarel frowned and poked at the fire with a stick until the end blazed. He swirled it in the air, making little orange figure eights against the night. “We’re in it too deeply, that’s what I say. Our mistake was to put faith in the Marquis of Queensbury, but there’s too much at stake for that now. I say we get Giles back. Kidnap him if we have to. How in the world did Pinion appeal to him? Of all the slimy …”

“He promised to take him to the center of the Earth, apparently,” said Edward, nodding at Jim, who told the story of the overheard conversation.

“Take him to the center of the Earth!” shouted Latzarel. “Giles Peach needs Pinion like he needs a third foot. It sounds to me as if he could ride there on a shoebox.”

“Giles, if I’m not mistaken, believes in his own inventions,” said Edward, lighting his pipe. “He understands that Pinion has the resources to finance an elaborate machine. He has faith in the substance of the machine, in his understanding of science. If he knew he was making it all up, there’s no telling what he would do.”

Latzarel blinked in surprise. “How much of it do you suppose he is making up?”

Edward shrugged.

“How do you know he’s making up any of it?” asked Jim.

Edward shrugged again. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t understand the first thing about it. But I still say that William is in as much trouble as he always insisted he was in. And I agree about getting Giles back. We’ve got to do it for the sake of the boy. Pinion and Frosticos are as crooked as corkscrews, and they’ve lured him away from his poor mother. We owe Giles a debt and we owe William another.”

“And Squires is two days away,” said Jim practically, thinking of the debt he owed his father.

In the end there was nothing to do but wait. Hiking the length of the island to radio Squires wouldn’t hasten his arrival by enough to make it worth the effort. So they spent the next day waiting for the time to pass, pretending to search for mermen, while understanding that a raftload of mermen would be insufficient to propel them a quarter mile closer to the center of the Earth. Nor would a grant from the museum or from the oceanographic institute. They could go nowhere in their diving bell. Certain knowledge of the existence of the interior world wasn’t worth a fig. The future lay in Giles Peach. Ashbless had known as much.

Chapter 12

A week later a letter arrived from William, who had been hard at work on scientific pursuits. Accompanying several pages of ornate, theoretical discussion that Edward could make little sense of were a dozen line drawings of mechanical apparatus, all of which had something to do with gravity; which, William insisted, was “all wrong.” How gravity could be all wrong Edward couldn’t fathom, but there was some indication that William’s concern was with gravity at the Earth’s hollow core. Gravity, insisted William, was a matter of waves, spiral waves that closely resembled the whorl of seeds in a sunflower. They had an eddying effect on a body, a whirlpool attraction not unlike the little twister that sucks water down a drain.

Maintaining his faith in the sensibilities of “animalia,” as he put it, he had run up drawings for the construction of a device he referred to as a “squid sensor,” involving the construction of aluminum cylinders for the purpose of maintaining sea beasts — squids and octopods in general — at temperatures low enough to diminish their sensitivity to physical stimuli — including, William insisted, gravity. Edward could make nothing of it. It was unclear in the end whether the squids were the sensing mechanism or whether they themselves were the objects of the sensing. And what was Edward to do with it? Build such a device? The plans were monumental. Great technical skill would be required. And smack in the center of a complex of ovals and rectangles and wavy lines — meant, apparently, either as wires or as gravity waves or, it was just barely conceivable, as both — were printed in mirror writing the words:

“Find the Sewer Dwellers of Los Angeles — Captain H. Frank Pince Nez.” There was no further discussion of it.

Edward was puzzled. Final instructions suggested that, in a pinch, Edward must send the plans on to Cal Tech, to a certain Professor Fairfax whose knowledge of the magic of gravity was unsurpassed, and who would have access, through his association with the oceanarium, to the ungodly number of squid it would take to develop the apparatus.

Edward made a photocopy and mailed the packet that same afternoon. Then he summoned Professor Latzarel, who had no knowledge whatsoever of sewer dwellers. “Do you suppose,” asked Latzarel, “that he’s making a reference to those stupendous crocodiles and blind pigs that supposedly inhabit the sewers?”

“I guess it’s possible,” said Edward doubtfully. “Why would he do such a thing?”

“Perhaps he’s convinced that they have something to do with his device. His squid sensor. They might, you know. His instructions don’t absolutely exclude them.”

“No,” said Edward, “but they don’t include them either. The one’s not the same as the other. And why, if he meant blind pigs, wouldn’t he refer to them absolutely? No, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.”

“Perhaps this Fairfax would know. We could call him. William seems to have great faith in him.”

“I called him straightaway, actually. He’s out of town. In Berlin at a conference on gravity. He’s apparently the authority William claims he is.”

“Out of town,” mused Latzarel. “Just as well, I suppose. The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to believe that we’re looking at this thing all wrong. Listen to this. What if the squid sensing device were just flummery — a complete phony, or something William mugged up out of a scientific journal. Maybe he referred to your man Fairfax to lend it an air of authenticity, to satisfy whoever it is who steams open this week’s mail. Hold the thing up to the mirror, and what do you have? Ten pages of nonsense and one line of sense. I think William has teen cagey here — has lost the message among pages of drivel, knowing you well enough to assume you’d wade through and find it.”

Edward sat lost in thought. Latzarel’s theory made vast sense — twenty times as much sense as did all the squid business. “Sewer dwellers,” he said, puffing at his pipe. “Are there any?’

“Sounds vaguely Indian,” Latzarel said, lost in his own thoughts.

“Indian?”

“This fellow Pince Nez. From the Owen’s Valley I take it.”

“You’re thinking of the Nez Perce,” said Edward. “Different crowd entirely.”

Latzarel nodded. Then he squinted and jumped to his feet. “ It’s a book! This Pince Nez is an author. Must be a pen name. That’s got to be it. William wants us to find a book. Call the library! Talk to Robb at the reference desk. The man’s an oracle. Brilliant. There’s not a question he can’t answer. He’ll have heard of it.” Latzarel sprang for the telephone himself and dialed away in a state. The book, whatever in the world it was about, must be monumental. It had taken William ten pages of squid sensing to disguise it.

Edward watched anxiously as Latzarel questioned Mr. Robb, the reference librarian, nodding and uttering exclamatory monosyllables. It was indeed a book, written by a sea captain from Boston who claimed to have frequented the sewers beneath Los Angeles and had been the first to navigate and chart what he referred to as the subterranean seas. Like Wilhelm Reich and the orgone box, Pince Nez had been hushed up. They were intent on keeping certain secrets, said Robb.

“Who was?” asked Latzarel, widening his eyes at Edward and shaking his head slowly.

The phone abruptly went dead. Latzarel tapped the button and got a dial tone. “We were cut off. Ominous. Very ominous.” He told Edward of their conversation.

“When was this book published?” asked Edward.

“A small private printing in 1947, according to Robb. What do you suppose happened to him?”

“Pince Nez? I don’t know. …”

“Robb, I mean. You don’t suppose …”

Edward looked grim. He shrugged. “1947, you say? Why don’t we have a look at a telephone directory?” He went into the kitchen and hauled one out, flipping it open to the P’s. “Here it is. By golly! H. F. Pince Nez in Long Beach. 815 Fourth Street. That’s Forth and Ximeno,” said Edward. “Right near Egg Heaven. Let’s go.”

But even before he said it, Latzarel was pulling on his coat. The two piled into the Hudson and roared off toward the Santa Ana Freeway, happy to be “chasing down a lead,” as Edward put it, both of them having accepted the notion that William, somehow, had become their general, and that he was directing operations from the confines of the hospital.

Captain H. Frank Pince Nez, it turned out, was “ninety and two year old,” as he put it a half hour later over a glass of whisky in a cramped apartment that was a wonderland of nautical apparatus. “I’m stone deaf,” said Pince Nez, with a peculiar emphasis on the word “stone.” He held a monumental but utterly worthless speaking trumpet to his ear. He was tall and gaunt, barely stooped with age, and was wrinkled like an apple-faced doll. His white hair was closely cropped, giving him a no-nonsense air — the air of a man used to giving commands and seeing them carried out.

“Captain Pince Nez … “ began Latzarel, who intended to broach the subject of sewer travel straightaway.

“What?” shouted the Captain.

“I say, Captain Pince Nez!” cried Latzarel.

“That’s right,” said Pince Nez, eyeing Latzarel strangely. He rose, left the room, and came back in hauling an ancient electric fan on wheels. “Can you fix it?” he shouted.

Latzarel was taken aback. “What’s wrong with it?” he asked in a normal voice. He might as well have remained silent.

“What … is … wrong … with … the … fen!” hollered Edward, pausing between each word and mouthing the syllables widely, hoping facial contortions would aid communication.

“Sings,” said Pince Nez instantly.

Edward looked at Latzarel. “Sings?”

“Sings! Damn … it!” cried Pince Nez. “All … all … bloody hell! When is it?’

“He can’t think of the word,” whispered Latzarel to Edward. “He’s lost some of his nouns. When do you suppose it sings?”

“At night!” Edward shouted.

Pince Nez lit up. He poured Edward an impossible tumbler of whisky. “Sings all the damn night! They do it to me,” he said. “Always have. Rays is what it is, out of the back of it.”

“Throw it out!” shouted Latzarel unsuccessfully.

“Spout?” asked Pince Nez, half convinced that Latzarel was an idiot. He turned to Edward. “Can you fix it?”

“I believe so,” said Edward, hustling out the door and downstairs to the car. He returned in a moment with a screwdriver and a little chromium-plated pachenko ball with Chinese ideographs on it that he kept in his pocket for good luck. He pulled the back off the fan, rummaged around inside for a moment, and pretended to find the pachenko ball. He held it up in front of Captain Pince Nez, who fell back in horror, clapping his hands over his ears. Edward pulled out his handkerchief and rolled the ball up in it, knotting the end, then shoved it into his pocket. He screwed the back of the fan on and dusted his hands.

It was then that he noticed Latzarel twisting up his face at him from the corner of the room. On a little table beneath a litter of pipes and ashes and spent matches was a battered, dark blue volume. The words on the cloth cover had been worn so dim that from where Edward stood it seemed to be blank. He knew from Latzarel’s expression, however, which book it was. Pince Nez plugged the fan in and cocked an ear toward it. He seemed satisfied. He looked up suddenly at Latzarel, startled by the look on his face.

Latzarel grinned. “May I?” he shouted, waving at the table.

Pince Nez assumed that he was motioning at the pipes. His look suggested that he had doubts about the desire to smoke another man’s pipe.

Latzarel couldn’t help himself. He brushed the debris off and plucked up the book, nodding and smiling at the captain. He whistled. “We’ve got to have this,” he murmured.

Edward couldn’t make it out. “Speak up,” he said, “the old man’s deaf as a post.”

“What!” cried Pince Nez, spinning around. “Coast to coast! I can’t swear to it, but damn near!”

“Of course,” said Edward, grinning and nodding.

Latzarel staggered over and collapsed into a chair. “Offer him money,” he said to Edward. “As much as he wants.”

Edward was unconvinced, but he pulled his wallet out anyway. He extracted a twenty and waved it at Pince Nez. The old man shook his head and warded Edward off with the palm of his hand. Then he plucked the bill from between Edward’s fingers and shoved it into his pocket with a dissatisfied look, a look which implied that Edward’s twenty was nothing.

“I can’t have you here hounding me!” he shouted, picking up his ear trumpet.

“Certainly!” cried Latzarel, standing up.

Captain Pince Nez menaced him with the trumpet, giving him a sidewise look.

“Another twenty!” Latzarel hissed, sitting back down. “This is no time to be thrifty.”

Edward waved a second twenty. Pince Nez, momentarily placated, snatched it out of his hand. The telephone rang. The captain ignored it until Edward, unable to stand its ringing, pointed at and raised his eyebrows.

‘It’ll cost you another twenty,” said Pince Nez.

“Give it to him,” said Latzarel, not looking up from his book.

Edward handed over another twenty, his last. The phone abruptly stopped ringing. Captain Pince Nez reached into his pocket and came up with the other two bills. Hugely surprised, he chewed the corner of one as if checking to see if it was authentic. “Damnation,” he said, impressed. “Who are you boys with?”

“With?” asked Edward weakly.

“Are you for him of against him?” Pince Nez looked up sharply.

“Against him,” shouted Edward, wisely assuming that after ninety-two years Captain Pince Nez must be against almost everyone.

“The bastard,” said the captain, shaking his head tiredly. “But I’ve got this money.” He waved the three twenties. “Payola. He’s afraid of me. I know too much.” He grinned slyly, then looked across at Latzarel, who was turning the pages of his book, profound amazement crossing his brow in waves.

“Who is he?” shouted Edward, as casually and nonchalantly as the circumstances would allow.

“What do you know about him?” Pince Nez shouted back, squinting hard at Edward and draining his tumbler. He pinged his finger against a brass cylinder that sat in the corner of the room, an unidentifiable maritime remnant.

Edward shook his head darkly, trying to phrase a question with which to respond to the captain’s question. He couldn’t think of one, so he said, “Who?” hoping it wouldn’t sound suspicious to the old man.

“Ignatz,” said Pince Nez, “de Winter.”

“That’s the one!” Edward shouted, knowing nothing more than he had a moment before. “What do you know about him?” The conversation seemed to Edward to be growing oddly circular.

“Carp don’t die,” said Pince Nez. “I know that much. Yes-sir.”

Edward nodded, baffled. Then, almost without meaning to, he leaned toward Captain Pince Nez and cried, “What do you make of Ashbless?”

Latzarel jerked up from his reading at the sound of the name. Pince Nez sat back in his chair and waved his hand tiredly, as if to say that he was fed up with the likes of Ashbless — that he’d had enough of him. Edward widened his eyes at Latzarel and made a similar tired gesture at Pince Nez to encourage him.

“The old poet?” asked the captain, smiling vaguely as if reminiscing about some event in the distant past.

Latzarel closed his book. Edward blinked back his surprise. Pince Nez shook his head. “I met him and Blanding out in Pedro,” he said, pronouncing the word with a long “e.” “Blanding was good, but Ashbless, he was old. Tired I guess. Crazy as a loon is what I think.”

“Blanding?” asked Latzarel into the captain’s ear trumpet.

“The other poet.” Pince Nez gave Latzarel an appraising look, then raised himself out of his chair in order to have a better look at his pipe table. Edward was afraid that Latzarel would insist that Pince Nez be given more money, but the crisis passed and the captain relaxed. He looked momentarily puzzled, then tapped against the brass cylinder again, slowly shutting his eyes.

Edward, supposing that the old man was falling asleep, shouted, “Hello!” then grinned immediately as Knee Nez lurched awake. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the three crumpled bills, licked his fingers, and counted through them twice.

“How much do you figure I owe you?” he asked Edward, who said immediately, “Forty ought to do it,” but was drowned out halfway through by Latzarel who yelled, “Nothing. Nothing at all! What about Ashbless? The poet?”

“Hired me to sail him to the Berdoo Straits.”

“To San Bernardino?” Edward asked.

“Pretty much.”

“When?” Latzarel gave Edward a look, nodding and pointing to the book, as if implying that within it lay an explanation of the phenomenon of sailing to San Bernardino, which lay, of course, some fifty miles inland from the coast and utterly distant from any sizeable river.

Edward nodded at Pince Nez and shouted, “When?’

“Thirty-six,” said Pince Nez without hesitation. “Two years before the damned earthquake closed off the inland passage. Too damn bad, too.”

Edward nodded in commiseration. “That would have made you sixty-five or sixty-six.” Pince Nez squinted and counted the fingers of one hand laboriously, then left off and shrugged. “How old was Ashbless when you took him out to Berdoo?”

“Hard to say. He might’ve been a hundred. Easy that. Only I didn’t take him to Berdoo. Never got that far. I ferried him up toward Pasadena and some damn creature capsized us. I never seen the like. Ship went down. We both come out into the L. A. River and got drunk as lords off Los Feliz at a spot called Tommy’s Little Oasis. I remember that like yesterday.”

“Creature?” asked Latzarel.

Pince Nez stared at him.

“What creature?’

“Now I don’t know, do I?” said Pince Nez. “There was all sorts down there, wasn’t there?”

“Of course there were,” said Edward. “This was a big one though?”

The captain nodded. The telephone rang again, shooting Edward out of his chair like a comet. Pince Nez made no move to pick it up. Edward, finally, reached across and answered it. There was silence at the other end, perhaps breathing, then a long ululating laugh — the laugh of a complete and far-flung lunatic that sounded weirdly distant, as if the source were far from the phone, as if the caller had dialed the number, set the phone down, ran off down a long hallway and through a couple of closed-off rooms and laughed wildly. A click and a dial tone followed the laugh. The whole thing was a mystery to Edward, and, of course, was none of his business. But it was unsettling even so. In fact, he was suddenly struck with the certainty that it was his business, that the caller had expected him to answer the phone, would have understood the futility of calling to talk to Pince Nez.

“Wrong number,” said Edward, hanging up. Captain Pince Nez was asleep in his chair. Latzarel stood up, tiptoeing toward the door, carrying his precious book. Edward hesitated, fairly certain that Pince Nez had never understood that he was selling the volume. He was half tempted to wake the old man up and explain it through the ear trumpet until he saw, supporting the bottom shelf of a ruined bookcase, a half dozen more worn copies of the book stacked atop one another. More lay in a heap in a cardboard box, shoved half in behind the same bookcase. The top copy was missing a cover and had obviously been used for years as a coaster. Edward looked at the three twenties lying atop the table in front of Pince Nez and shook his head. He didn’t regret the captain’s keeping them; he regretted only that they had been his twenties and not Latzarel’s. His friend gestured at him from the open front door, and Edward hurried down the steps after him, filling him in on the strange phone call.

“Tomfoolery,” said Latzarel, waving his book. “Kids.”

“It didn’t sound like kids.”

“Why would someone call up and laugh? It must be kids.”

“He didn’t laugh. The laughter came from the background somewhere. And it wasn’t that kind of laughter. …”

“Look at this!” Latzarel interrupted as the Hudson angled up Fourth Street toward downtown. “‘The ship docked in the Sea of the Arroyo Seco where two men came aboard, one with a steamer trunk, and one tall and thin and pale with terrible scars on his neck. In the trunk, I was told, was the body of a boy with the head of a fish.’”

“What?” said Edward, half shocked and half unbelieving. “What does that mean, ‘with the head of a fish’? Was it a fish-headed boy or was there simply a fish head in with him? What is this anyway, a novel?”

“A ship’s log,” Latzarel said flatly. “Mostly charts and maps. There’s a navigable subterranean sea, according to this, that stretches from the Pacific to beyond the San Gabriel mountains. I’m not sure about the notations here, but it looks as if most of it is navigable only by submarine.”

Edward jerked around in his seat to stare at Latzarel who nodded slowly at him, puzzled. “And it’s not at all clear that the boy wore the head of the fish. Listen. ‘I ferried the doctor to Venice …”

“What doctor?” Edward asked.

“The man with the steamer trunk, apparently,” said Latzarel, starting over. “‘I ferried the doctor to Venice where, late in the evening of the 26th he delivered the chest to a Chinese in exchange for three plugs of black opium knotted together with rawhide. The Chinese was referred to as Han Koi, and the doctor, who I knew as de Winter, was addressed as Dr. Frost by the Chinese, who was apparently in grave fear of him.’” Latzarel waved Edward to silence without looking up, and went on. “‘I myself shared his fear, having through the mate heard that the supposed corpse in the trunk had been the victim of one of de Winter’s experiments. A violent thrashing and gasping started within the trunk, which toppled over onto its side and broke open. Within, lying in a pool of green bile, was the live body of a youth with the head of a great fish, suffocating terribly, its eyes jerking to and fro in stark terror. Han Koi shouted and a dozen pig-tailed Chinese, half of them with knives drawn, swarmed out and dragged the trunk away into the depths of an abandoned cannery beneath the docks. I was given a two-inch knob of raw opium as payment and was glad to be quit of de Winter.’ That’s it,” said Latzarel.

“Just like that?” cried Edward. “Nothing more about the thing in the trunk?”

“Not a bit. This is a ship’s log, I’m telling you. That’s the last Pince Nez knew of it, apparently, unless there’s references to it later in the book.”

“There can’t be any doubt about the identity of this de Winter.”

“Not a bit.”

“No wonder William was in such a sweat to hide the message away.” The two rode along for a moment in silence, tooling up the on-ramp onto the Harbor Freeway. “It’s got to be lies,” mused Edward finally.

“It doesn’t look like lies to me,” answered Latzarel. “What conceivable reason would he have for fabrications? There isn’t enough here to develop a good fiction. Half of the volume is appended matter — charts and such. And you’re the one who said that de Winter’s identity is obvious.”

“Who was the fish-boy?” asked Edward abruptly.

“Some poor devil of a lost youth, I don’t wonder. Snatched possibly, like a stray dog.”

Edward nodded, but was unconvinced. “When did Reginald Peach disappear? He was younger than Basil, wasn’t he?”

“By ten years,” said Latzarel. “It was in the late thirties, I think. I remember it was then that Basil was institutionalized for the first time. We both know who his doctor was.”

“This thin man aboard the ferry,” Edward said, “what if that was Basil Peach?”

“Then we’re living in a strange world,” Latzarel said, closing the book and staring out of the window.

“Pince Nez assumed that de Winter was a vivisectionist. He had to. It was the only rational explanation. He wouldn’t have suspected that the thing in the trunk was a product of nature.”

“Maybe,” said Latzarel, “except that he was uncommonly familiar with the inhabitants of the subterranean sea. Lord knows what he understood about the products of nature.”

Edward agreed. And the more he thought about it, the more he agreed. He accelerated into the right lane and coasted down the off-ramp and onto Carson Street, turning right into the traffic of Figueroa and right again onto Sepulveda, pulling back onto the Harbor Freeway, westbound now, back the way they’d come. Latzarel knew immediately the reason for the change of direction. They hadn’t learned half enough from Captain Pince Nez. They couldn’t have. Neither one of them had known what to expect. They had been too easily tired by ear trumpets and senility.

It seemed to take hours to plod along down the Pacific Coast Highway from traffic light to weary traffic light. They rolled across Alameda and over the Dominguez Channel, then made the light at Santa Fe and angled over the Long Beach Freeway, dropping onto the bridge that spanned the Los Angeles River, the thin channel of dark water murky as tea and hinting at strange and unimagined sources. Iron doors led away into the concrete walls of the riverbank and, perhaps, into a dark chasm world lit by the glowing lights of gliding submarines and by the occasional lamps of the sewer dwellers, little stars that glinted on distant islands, goblin fires in the black void, miles below the concrete and asphalt lace of surface streets.

There was an ambulance and a police car in front of the building on Fourth and Ximeno. Edward drove past, turned up Ximeno, and parked on Broadway. Both men leaped out of the car, a thrill of fear catapulting them along the sidewalk. They forced themselves to slow when they reached the corner. It was Captain Pince Nez — dead — being loaded into the back of the ambulance which motored casually away past a half dozen lackluster onlookers. There was nothing particularly exciting in the death of a man ninety-two years old; at least there was nothing exciting in it for anyone but Edward and Professor Latzarel — them and a fat, balding man with a stick and a cigar who turned out to be the landlord. He seemed half irritated that Pince Nez had chosen to die in his apartment building. “Crazy old fool,” the landlord said, whacking his stick against a little flagstone planter that sheltered a crop of weeds.

“Heart attack was it?” asked Edward, affecting a tourist’s concern.

“I suppose so,” said the fat mail, chewing his cigar. “Went straight to hell. You could see it in his face. What a look. I hope to never see what it was he saw. Devil finally came for him, I suppose. It was me who found him. Screamed he did — uncanny damn scream. I broke in, and there he was, face down on the floor. Had a dead fish in his hand. Can you beat that? Some sort of codfish. Was eating it, I guess. Him and his damned Oriental ways.”

Edward was trying to think of an excuse to look through the empty apartment. The dead fish business was troublesome. It would look suspicious, though, if he and Latzarel just nosed in. There was no telling what brought about the old man’s death, although Edward hadn’t any doubt that it wasn’t any simple heart attack. He’d seen something, like the landlord said. Only it wasn’t any spirit sent out from hell; it was a flesh and blood devil.

The landlord, about then, produced a wad of money from the pocket of his soiled khaki work pants. Edward guessed the denomination of the bills as well as the number — twenties, three of them. The landlord counted them with a satisfied look. Edward glanced at Latzarel who shook his head. “Water under the bridge,” he said. “Spilt milk.”

“We’re from the Fair Housing Council,” said Edward to the landlord. “This place is a menace — men dying of unknown causes. Dead fish everywhere. Look at this!” And he pointed toward a half-brown juniper in the flagstone planter, beneath which lay the stiff body of a rat, dead for weeks, a rare piece of serendipity. Edward strode down and flicked it out into the open with a stick. The rat was about a half inch thick — nothing but a leathery slab. Edward shook his head sadly. “We’ll see you Wednesday,” he said. “We’re giving you a chance.” With that he motioned to Latzarel and the two disappeared around the corner, leaving the stupefied landlord stammering on the sidewalk. They hurried to the car and drove away, Edward suddenly possessed by the possibility that they were being watched — followed. That whoever had gotten Pince Nez would still be linking about. But the circuitous route they took through Long Beach revealed nothing suspicious, and they arrived home an hour later befuddled by the myriad loose ends of what might be coincidence and what might be portent. “Everything signifies,” William had said long weeks past.

Chapter 13

Still there was no sign of Giles Peach. His mother received a postcard full of vague ambiguities, insisting that he was getting on well, hinting that he’d thought about traveling, perhaps to Windermere to see his father. The card was postmarked in Los Angeles. They could tell nothing from it.

Proceedings to gain William’s release from the sanitarium were frustrating. William Hastings was a dangerous maniac. That was the consensus. He was undergoing therapy. Dr. Hilario Frosticos insisted that the therapy be continued. He had the support of the courts. Edward wondered what the courts would say about Frosticos having been seen with a steamer trunk containing the body of a monster. Nothing, of course. It was preposterous. There wasn’t a single bit of evidence to implicate Frosticos in any illegal machinations. But it was past time to take steps. If they remained idle, they’d be defeated.

Edward received a letter from Dr. Fairfax at Cal Tech, thanking him for the interesting, package. His brother-in-law, said Fairfax, had an “astonishing but strangely misinformed mind.” It could quite conceivably take years to fathom the mathematic and physical arcana discussed in the charts and diagrams, but it was apparent straightaway that the use of squids, of poulpae generally, to sense gravitational abnormalities had been brilliant. It was William’s deductions that were impossible, unless, of course, modern physics was monumentally mistaken.

Edward said to himself as he read the letter that just about anything was likely to be monumentally mistaken. He’d arrived at that as a sort of maxim — that in the astonished eyes of eternity there must seem to be no end to the foolishness of humankind, dressing proudly in cardboard hats and wearing armadillo shoes, storming around day to day, chattering like zoo apes in pursuit of vagaries as consequential as a fiddlestick’s end, then, bang! knocked dead at some senseless moment in mid-flight only to be found clutching a codfish by an indifferent landlord who shakes his head.

It’s best, thought Edward, shaking his own head, not to put on airs.

The night was black beyond the window. It was nearly three in the morning. William Hastings lay in bed waiting, listening to the beating of his heart and to the occasional screaming laughter of a lunatic somewhere off across the grounds, in X-Ward probably, beyond the chain link fence. A light stabbed up through the window, swept across six feet of ceiling, and disappeared — the headlights of a car motoring up the hill and swinging left onto the grounds. The clump, clump, clump of rubber-soled shoes approached on the tiled corridor. The door swung open. William drooped into feigned sleep, fully dressed beneath the bedcovers. The door shut softly and the shoes clumped away, pausing a moment later, then fading down the hallway.

William edged out of bed, tiptoeing along in his rumpled tweed coat toward the door just shut by the attendant. He carried his shoes in his right hand, and with his left he patted the lapel of his coat to check for the twentieth time that he had the folded page he’d ripped from the ship’s log of Captain H. Frank Pince Nez, uncovered in Frosticos’ office. He’d have them yet, the villains. He’d expose their filthy plots. He reached for the handle of the door and slammed his toe into the caster of the bed adjacent to his, where senile old Warner slept uneasily. There was a moan and a snort. “What?” said a startled voice. “Six o’clock.” William froze, half bent at the waist, listening. He could feel blood oozing into his sock from the end of his toe. “Kits, cats, sacks, and knives,” said the old man, lost somewhere in a peculiar dream. “Out of the mouths of babes rode the six hundred!” William considered going back to bed. Old Warner snorted again and clamped his teeth together a dozen times in rapid succession like a pair of spring-driven chattering teeth from a joke store. William opened the door, peeked out into the hall, and slid through, catching one of the two remaining bottle cap medals on the door edge and popping it off. It bounced on the floor with a clatter. William cursed himself, cursed old Warner, cursed his toe, and was possessed by a frightful need to go to the bathroom. He retrieved the cap and the cork washer and shoved them into his pocket along with the two powdery red Nembutal capsules that he had secreted under his tongue several hours earlier.

Twenty feet down the corridor was a utility closet, its door slightly ajar. William was relieved. He’d half expected to find it locked, and wasn’t at all sure he was capable of carrying out his plan in the darkness.

Then a tide of horror washed through him at the thought of the unlocked door. Someone, he told himself frantically, was hidden there. They’d discovered his plan, found the page missing from the book. It had all been arranged from the start — two weeks ago when by sheer luck he’d found Frosticos’ office empty and unlocked. They’d set him up. One unlocked room was simply sloppiness, a mistake, but two were an impossible coincidence. What might be lurking inside that closet? Frosticos himself? Some white-coated devil with a syringe? A coven of doctors and a steel tray of lobotomy instruments? William reached for the door handle, determined to pitch his shoes into the face of whatever it was that lay in wait there. But there was nothing. A beaten mop stood in a galvanized bucket beside a plastic garbage can filled with trash. Three long, four-battery flashlights sat on a shelf behind, along with a can of cleanser and a bottle of Lysol.

William pulled out one of the flashlights, shined it into the dark recesses of a corner, and began to ease the door shut. The clump of shoes coming along a perpendicular corridor brought him up short. He slipped into the closet and almost shut the door, leaving it open just a slit. He lifted the heavy flashlight to shoulder height, determined not to sell himself cheaply. The clumping of shoes stopped. There was a grunting outside the door. William was frozen with fear. Lord knew what sort of thing it was that would confront him. A foot slid in, pulling the door open. Standing in the hallway was a beast with the body of a man and the head of a cardboard box. It bent toward him, unseeing. William raised his flashlight. He recognized the curly red hair of the stooped handyman who was endeavoring to lay the heavy box on the floor of the closet. He wasn’t a bad sort. William regretted that it couldn’t have been one of the others. With his teeth set in a rictus of determination, he smashed the business end of the flashlight into the back of the man’s head, catching him on the neck — too low to accomplish anything but to send his victim sprawling forward onto his box. The box shoved into William’s ankles and William collapsed backward into the shelves. The can of scouring powder clumped onto the back of the groaning handyman, scattering a cloud of white and blue dust.

William shoved against the wall, scrambling to get his feet set. With a sideways swing he slammed the flashlight squarely into the back and side of the man’s head, knocking him senseless, chin-down into his box. William pulled himself free, crawling across the back of the unconscious handyman. His flashlight was ruined, the broken lens of the thing chinking down onto the tiles. He pitched it into the closet, shoved the cardboard box as far back in as he could, and crammed the limp body into it, grabbing another flashlight off the shelf and shoving the door closed.

Then, thinking a bit, he reopened the door, pulled up the face of the unconscious attendant, and pried open his mouth, dumping in the remains of the two nembutal capsules. One drooled out immediately onto the floor and the other glued itself to the man’s tongue. William cursed. Ten minutes had passed and he wasn’t twenty feet from the door of his room. The escape was going fearsomely slowly. He’d managed to do nothing but bash in the head of some poor, half-wit handyman who in all likelihood was about to revive and begin to shout. William pulled a rag off the shelf, thinking to shove it into the man’s mouth as a gag. He’d tape the mouth shut with masking tape. But that meant he’d have to tie him up too, which would require pulling him into the hallway. What would he do for rope, tape the man’s hands together? The handyman twitched. William raised his flashlight, but the thought of hitting him again was sickening, as if he were lost in some nightmare and had spent an eternity in that hallway, clubbing an innocent man while sweating for fear of discovery. Speed was his only hope.

He shut the door once again and fled, ducking into the pantry and through a door that led into an enormous kitchen. He pulled a laminated cardboard pocket calendar from his coat pocket, slid it in between the striker plate and the latch and swung open the door that led out onto a loading dock and into the night. Beyond a strip of asphalt were a lawn and trees, and beyond that the curved road that led out through a wrought-iron gate to freedom.

Pale beams from a canted crescent moon played down upon the lawn so faintly that the occasional bushes were indistinguishable from the dark grass. The sky was startlingly clear and thick with stars. An enormous Venus, big as a grapefruit, sailed toward the lower tip of the moon, close enough to throw a stone from one to the other. A rabbit darted from the shadow of a bush into the weak moonlight, racing away toward the road, quickly lost again in the night. William followed it, hunching and running, waving his flashlight out to the side, waiting in fear for lights to click on in the dark wards behind him, for the battered handyman to come to and bang his way out of the closet, for the cry to go round that a dangerous inmate was loose on the grounds, hammering people into pudding. But nothing stirred.

A hedge of hibiscus fronted the road. William ran along beside it, bent almost double, safe in the shadows, his tweed coat and trousers blending with the dark wall of shrubbery. He knew exactly where he was going. Farther along, some thirty yards from the black gate, a round iron manhole cover lay exactly in the center of the road, big as a truck tire. If it was too heavy to move, William would go for the gate. He’d scaled it once before and could do it again in a pinch, if the guard was asleep.

If he weren’t, William would have to bash him. He determined, as he jolted along beside the hedge, to send a letter of apology and explanation to the poor handyman at first opportunity. Such things were required of a gentleman.

He paused beside a gap in the boxwood, peered up over the hedge toward the distant guardhouse, and could make out, just above the sill of a little window, the back of the guard’s head. He was reading a book. William crept through the hole, stumbling out onto the road, then dropping to all fours back against the darkness of the hedge. He wrenched at his coat, producing a small black prybar, pilfered from the groundskeeper’s toolbox. He crept out onto the road, scuttling like a crab, and without hesitation slipped the bent end of the prybar into the quarter-sized hole in the iron disc and gave it a pull.

Nothing happened. He might as well have been yanking on the street itself. He pulled out the prybar and slid the straight end in between the cover and the steel perimeter, levering the heavy disc free from its seat and raising it a half inch or more. He slipped his fingers in under it, then wisely slipped them out again. He eased the lid back down, jerking out the prybar just before the lid trapped it.

There was a silence-shattering clank from the lid that seemed to echo beneath the street. William dashed for the cover of the hedge, creeping into the hole and crouching there. He peeped out, to see the gate guard standing outside his little shack, playing his own flashlight along the road. The guard stood so for a full minute, watching, before giving up and going back in to his book. William crept out. He wondered how long he’d been on the loose. Twenty minutes? He was sure that in the east, low on the horizon, the orange-gray glow of dawn paled the stars.

He crept back onto the road, set his feet, shoved his prybar into the hole and heaved. He held his breath. A sharp pain raced across his shoulder and up his neck. The lid raised slowly, almost out of its hole, then dropped back in, settling there maddeningly. William rested, realizing that he was sweating. He’d wait just a moment, then give it another heave-ho. He watched the back of the guard’s head for some sign of movement, then bent to it once again, just as an eternity of lights blinked on behind him. Shouting erupted from the direction of the kitchen. A window slammed open, and an air-driven siren blasted out three staccato spurts. Raucous laughter sounded from X-Ward, and the guard, his flashlight on, crouched out of his shack and doubled around the hedge toward the shouting. William grabbed his prybar and tore at the manhole cover, ripping skin from the palms of his hands against the hexagonal shaft of the steel bar, knowing that he should have taken advantage of the guard’s running off and headed for the gate. But it was too late for that now. More shouts sang out. “There he is!” cried a voice. “Stop!” “Get the net on him!”

“The bastards!” cried William aloud, and with one great sobbing heave, he yanked the cover free and half off the hole, dragging it back a few more inches, grabbing his flashlight and pouring light into the shaft. He dropped in, grasping iron rungs and disappearing into the hole, laughing wildly, shouting foolish obscenities at his pursuers, who stormed up, still yelling idiotically for him to halt. A white-trousered leg dangled in above him. William whacked the foot on the end of it with his flashlight, shouting, “I’m armed!” in such wild and perilous tones that the leg was abruptly withdrawn.

William cried out a parting curse and ran east down the sewer, planting each foot on either side of the little rivulet of water that lapped along the trough of the concrete pipe. Fifty yards down he cut abruptly right, then right again almost immediately into a pipe of about half the diameter of the first. He was forced to slide along at a crouch, kicking through the water, scraping his back against the hard surface of the pipe with each step. It opened out shortly into a cavernous cylindrical tunnel, and William was racing along, wheezing for heavy lungfuls of air, shining his flashlight ahead of him. He’d lose them easily now, thanks to Captain H. Frank Pince Nez and his sewer charts.

A quick glance over his shoulder betrayed no following light. They’d given up on him, the wimps. William chuckled and slowed up. He was a fairly desperate lad — overpowering a burly handyman, yanking the impossible lid off a manhole that spanned half the street. “I’m the terrible Toad!” he shouted, feeling a giddy affinity to his favorite literary hero. The concrete walls shouted it back at him in triplicate, a deep and sonorous chorus of assent.

William skipped along, splashing water up his pantlegs, singing foolish songs that he made up on the spot, filling in gaps in the meter with “ho-ho, ho-ho,” when words failed him. “Oh the bastards lay all smug in their beds, ho-ho, when William Hastings took flight, and beat the handyman senseless, ho-ho, with a whacking great flashlight!” he sang, swinging his weapon in a broad arc, the light surging wildly up and down the walls of the pipe.

But then, just as the last echoes died out, he became aware of the sound of the clattering of about a million footsteps behind him in the darkness, and the murmuring of pursuing voices. He doubled his pace, heaving for breath, a fire in the base of his lungs. “What a conceited Toad I am,” he gasped, giggling, and he shut off his light, angling away down a big tunnel that sloped wildly as if following the descent of a hill. He slowed, clicking on his light, and saw some fifty feet ahead another iron ladder, leading up to a shaft in the ceiling of the pipe. He shoved the flashlight into his belt, pulled himself up the ladder and through a crawlspace into what was either a natural cavern or a cavern hewn out of stone. His light stabbed out through the darkness, and he followed it, slumping along now toward a distant tunnel that led to yet another corridor, dropping at a slope of twenty or thirty degrees.

He tripped, rolled onto the seat of his trousers, and skidded along in an increasing rush, sliding to a stop finally against a pile of scree, his flashlight undamaged. From his coat pocket, torn in the fall, he yanked the page from the log of Pince Nez, following the trail of purple ink with which he’d marked his route a Week before, and popped immediately into a junction of pipe that led off to the east, foregoing another that angled away north. He paused after a hundred yards or so, far too tired to sing foolish songs, and listened over the shouting of his breath for the sounds of pursuit. There were none. He smiled and patted his map. After five minutes he was up and limping toward Glendale, bound for freedom.

There wasn’t a jury alive that would condemn him. They’d take a single look at Frosticos and another at the paper written in Frosticos’ hand ordering a full frontal lobotomy for the patient William Hastings — the paper he’d found atop Frosticos’ desk and which at the moment rode safely in his inside coat pocket along with his vital map. No one could fault a man for choosing freedom over permanent vegetablehood. He’d have the support of the scientific community. Fairfax would rally round; he’d have the data on the squid sensor by now. And Professor Ryan at Binghamton — she’d have read his proposal for a treatise on civilization theory and have recognized its affinity to her own brilliant work. It would be a court case to end all court cases. The Scopes monkey trials would pale. Frosticos would go down in a rattle of ice. All would be exposed — vivisection, the digging leviathan, the plot to shatter the Earth. William smiled to think of it — vindication and victory. He could taste it. They’d try to stop him but he’d outwit them, the slimy bunch of worms. He laughed aloud and tried to think of mote verses for his song, but what he came up with was mostly ho-ho-ho’s, so he left off in order to save his strength.

He paused, finally, to rest. He rummaged in his pants pocket, pulling out his bottle cap. It was a White Rock cream soda cap. He could picture the winged woman crouching on her rock on the label of the bottle. The cork washer was delicate, torn at one edge, but with the end of his thumb he managed to shove it firmly in behind the cap, pressing the two together. He flicked at the cap once or twice with his fingertip, and it stayed put on his shirt. Hugely satisfied with himself, he set out once again, limping along at an even pace down the concrete tunnel that narrowed in the distance, its concave walls spiraling downward into abrupt darkness.

Roycroft Squires read a collapsed copy of Doom for the sixth time. He was coming up to his favorite chapter, the one in which Lord Ottercove’s car sprouts wings and clears the roofs of Fleet Street houses, “flying Piccadillyward.” There was just enough science in the novel to satisfy him. He took a reflective sip at a cup of coffee, grown half cold from neglect, and jotted a note concerning mortality in the margin, shaking his head in contemplation. There was a knock at the door. Squires frowned. No one with any sense knocked at his door before noon. It was probably Jehovah’s Witnesses, come round to insist that he was all wet regarding Christmas. He’d be firm with them. Perhaps they’d take a dime for their magazine and leave him alone.

But it wasn’t Witnesses at the door, it was the eight-year-old neighbor boy, clutching a twisted paper in his hand. “Please, sir,” he said apologetically, frightened, no doubt, at Squires’ furrowed brow, “this is for you.”

“For me is it?” said Squires, nodding seriously. “What is it?”

“It came up out of the street, sir,” said the boy. “There were no end to them.” He emptied out a pocketful of notes, each one twisted into a little cylinder as if they had been shoved through a hole. Squires was puzzled, but was sure that the notes had something to do with Edward St. Ives and his strange affairs. He gave the boy a fifty-cent piece and sent him off overwhelmed, then spread the notes out over his coffee table. There were eight in all.

Written on each were the words, “Take this message to the home of Roycroft Squires, 210 East Rexroth.” One of them followed the request with the word “please,” another with “immediately,” another with “for the love of God!” as if having been written in states of increasing desperation. On the other side of each was the puzzling sentence, “Be on hand at six p.m. beneath the carob tree. Look sharp. W.H.”

“W.H.?” asked Squires aloud. He puzzled over it for a moment, wondering if he was the intended victim of some childhood prank, if a gang of neighborhood boys was setting him up. W.H.? William Hastings! Of course. Who else? But what did it mean, wondered Squires, that the notes had come out of the street? That didn’t sound entirely likely. He drew the blinds in the big arched window in the front wall of his house, looking out past the carob tree under which he’d been asked to stand. To his amazement a little cylinder of paper appeared through the manhole cover in the center of the street and blew merrily away in the breeze. The boy from next door charged after the wonderful missive.

It was puzzling. William Hastings — for it had to be he — was hiding in the sewer. There was no getting round it. Why he didn’t just shove his way out into daylight was worth speculating on, but Squires couldn’t think of a suitable answer. He took out a pen and paper and wrote, “I’m ready to look sharp at once, but if six o’clock is preferable, knock twice. You can count on me then. R.S.”

He rolled it up like a cigarette, wandered outside, and took a quick look up and down the street. There was no one in sight. Even the neighbor boy had disappeared. He strolled out to the manhole and poked his message through it. It was immediately pulled from his hand. A moment later there were two dull thuds on the cover. Squires shrugged and walked back into his house, Seven hours to go. It was vaguely irritating. He hated waiting. Reading was impossible: The thought of William in the sewer kept insinuating itself between him and the novel. He went into the study and began wrapping books for mailing. He’d sold his entire Manly Wade Wellman collection to a woman in New York for a small fortune. But concentrating even on such a task as that was maddening. He peered out the window, smoking countless pipes, watching the manhole cover which he’d ignored for the past twenty-five years.

The afternoon dragged on, the sun set, and six o’clock crept near, minute by minute. He walked out onto the dark lawn, and at six sharp the iron lid creaked up, pushed outward by a dark bulk that turned out to be the tweed-coated back of William Hastings. Squires hurried into the street, hauled the cover clear, and William, dead tired, his trousers splashed with sewer mud, his hair on end, pulled himself out without a word and hurried toward the house.

Chapter 14

It was late in the evening, almost ten o’clock, when Edward and Professor Latzarel parked the Hudson Wasp at Rusty’s Cantina some six blocks off Western Avenue and walked up the hill toward Patchen Street. A Hudson Wasp, both of them agreed, is not the car to drive when it’s secrecy a man wants. It was damp and cold, the weather having taken a turn toward winter, and there was a breeze that must have been blowing straight onshore across the South Bay beaches. Edward could smell just a hint of sea salt on it. He pulled his corduroy coat tighter and lit his pipe. A slice of moon like a section of a luminous orange hung over low foothills in the east.

The shaded residential streets were deserted and noiseless, and it seemed to Edward that their footfalls must carry for miles — that four blocks up in the shingled house of Dr. Hilario Frosticos, the doctor himself was cocking an ear, sensing their vibrations on the sea wind, listening for the clack, clack, clack of their approach on the sidewalk. The shadows of bushes and sighing, leafless trees stretched away in the lamplight, shifting and waving. Edward started at the sudden blinking on of a light beyond a window, knowing as he did that Latzarel would hiss at him under his breath to stop being so remarkably obvious. The air of a nonchalant stroller was called for.

If questioned by a suspicious policeman they’d say they were in the neighborhood to visit Roycroft Squires on Rexroth. Wiry hadn’t they driven there? They’d had car trouble and had been forced to leave the car at Rusty’s Cantina. Damn those old cars. Nothing but headaches. Edward went over the lie in his mind, watching in fear the headlights of an approaching car, a rattling old junker that passed and disappeared. They crossed Rexroth with two blocks to go. The turret on the front of Squires’ house was visible halfway down the street. Edward could see that there was a light on behind the drawn Venetian blind. He thought about Squires’ refrigerator, a paradise of beer, rows and rows of it, and determined to have a look at the lot of it before the night was through.

They turned right onto Patchen, keeping to the far side of the street, slowing down. Frosticos’ house sat on a double size lot. The front yard was green, even in midwinter, and was cropped so closely and evenly that it might have been a rug. The house itself was a shingled bungalow, sitting dark and silent, almost black beneath a pair of monumental camphor trees. Edward could imagine Yamoto the gardener zooming around them in little circles, flying at the rear of his mower.

There was a light on in the second story and another in the cellar, which appeared from a distance to be the flickering glow of candlelight. Professor Latzarel, punching Edward on the shoulder, dashed across the street, melting into a wall of juniper bushes along the side of the house.

The two men crackled and smashed in the bushes for what seemed an age; then everything was silent again. No new lights popped on. No one shouted. Dogs remained silent. They tiptoed along the edge of the house, crouching through the shadows until they reached the cellar window behind which burned the light. It wasn’t a candle after all; it was a single dim bulb covered by a blown-glass tulip shade. So feeble was the light that Edward could at first see almost nothing. The floor was either packed earth or concrete. An old spindle-sided Morris chair with leather upholstery sat directly beneath the lamp, as if somebody had dragged it there to take advantage of the light. Beyond were shadows.

A faint gurgling noise sounded from the room. Edward squinted, trying to peer through the gloom. He could see the edge of some sort of circular structure, unidentifiable in the darkness. As the moments passed it grew more clearly defined — a raised concrete pool or a circle of cut stone. Trailing over the rock edges were strands of what must have been waterweeds, elodea from the look of it. Edward could just make out something — someone — in the pool. Water splashed and gurgled. A stream of it ran down along the strands of weed and pooled up on the floor, reflecting the dim yellow light. Someone was bathing in a pool full of water plants. The shape of a head was visible. An arm rose to scratch it, a webbed finger doodling with an ear. Edward was aghast, even though he knew he’d found what he sought.

He heaved on the sill, thrusting his knee out toward a utility meter that sat beneath the window between him and Latzarel. He had to edge across and get a better look — just one good glimpse. With his knee anchored securely against a pipe, he pushed himself across toward the edge of the window where Latzarel stood, his face pressed against the glass, watching as the person in the pool slipped beneath the surface. Edward pulled himself up onto the meter box, feeling the pipe give way beneath him almost at once. The iron broke with a wild hiss. Edward toppled forward, banging against the window with his head, shattering the glass.

There was a fearful splashing within. A light blinked on in the house next to them. A door slammed. There was shouting from the house behind. Edward suddenly became aware of three things: a trickle of blood that ran down along his nose from a cut on his forehead, the smell of escaping gas, and the sight of Professor Latzarel, hunched and running across the lawn in the thin moonlight, up Patchen Road. Edward was after him like a shot.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see someone — an alerted neighbor probably — poking around on a front porch. He told himself that Latzarel had been a fool to run, that they could have brassed it out, made up a lie. Frosticos would be the last one to give them away, what with a seemingly kidnapped Giles Peach afloat in his cellar. But it was too late now — there was nothing for it but to follow Latzarel, who was running wonderfully fast for his size, his hair awash above his head in a frenzy of excitement. The two of them rounded the corner, dashed the two blocks to Rexroth without looking back, then cut across a lawn and up Rexroth to Squires’ house. Latzarel rang the bell at the same time he pushed open the door and stumbled through, puffing and red faced, Edward on his heels.

“Shut the door, old man,” Latzarel wheezed, and not waiting even a moment for a response, threw the door shut himself, catching it just before it slammed and easing it home with a trembling hand. “They’ll be after us.”

“Who will?” asked Squires, taking his pipe out of his mouth.

“Your ghastly neighbors.”

“My ghastly neighbors have been chasing you up the road?”

“Yes,” said Edward, catching his breath. “For an easily explained reason.”

“St. Ives!” Latzarel shouted, taking a good look at his friend’s face.

“Were you attacked?” asked Squires, hauling Edward into the kitchen. He soaked a tea towel in water and wiped at the cut on Edward’s forehead.

“No, no,” Latzarel assured him. “We were two streets up. Frosticos lives up on Patchen …” But he was interrupted by a pounding on the door. He grabbed Edward by the shoulder and shoved him toward the library, yanking what he thought was a beer out of the refrigerator as he pushed the library door closed. Edward shouted something in a surprised voice, but Latzarel didn’t wait to hear it. He pulled the cap off his drink, poured half of it down the sink, nodded to Squires, and sat down on a chair in the breakfast nook, affecting the attitude of a man who’d been discussing philosophy for an hour or two. Squires opened the front door and stood back, pushing curly black tobacco into his pipe. A man in a t-shirt stood on the porch, looking in suspiciously.

“Did two men run in here?” he asked, giving Squires an appraising look. “A fat man with wild hair and a tall one in a brown coat? One of them might have been hurt.”

Out of the corner of his eye Squires could see Latzarel working away at his hair with a pocket comb. “No, I can’t say that they did. Were they friends of yours?”

“Not very likely,” he said, peering past Squires into the room.

Latzarel appeared from the kitchen, his hair preposterously parted in the center. His coat was gone and his sleeves were rolled up. He waved his bottle cheerfully at the frowning man who stood in the doorway. “I can’t at all decide what to offer you for this first edition of The Polyglots. It’s been read pretty thoroughly.”

The statement meant nothing to Squires. In fact, it meant nothing to Latzarel. Only the man on the doorstep supposed it had any meaning, and after getting a good look at Latzarel, even he wasn’t sure. “Who’s this?” he asked.

“It’s none of your business,” said Squires evenly. “Who are you, and what the devil do you mean, banging on the door at this hour?”

The man looked surprised at being asked such a question. Latzarel smiled at him and took a first, long pull at his bottle, gasping and gagging in spite of himself when the liquid within gurgled across his tongue. He coughed, pretending to have choked. “Who do you think I am, my dear fellow?” he asked, taking a quick look at the label on his bottle and finding that he’d stumbled by accident onto one of Dr. Brown’s Cel Rey elixirs instead of beer.

“He believes you’re an escaped fat man, apparently,” said Squires, giving the man a look.

“Now, now,” said the man, shaking his head and holding up a hand. “I accused no one. There’s been a break-in up on Patchen, and a couple of men, as I say, ran in this direction. But I can see they’re not here.”

“Well too bad,” Latzarel said. “Just when you thought you had them corraled. They must be desperate men.” Then to Squires he said, “Maybe we’d better bolt the door. There may be a siege.”

The man stood on the porch for another few moments as if trying to find the words necessary to break off the conversation. A shout from the road, however, and a quick succession of footsteps on the sidewalk made him turn and dash away, shouting something over his shoulder about “rough customers.” Squires shut the door behind him and drew the Venetian blinds tighter over the arched window.

Edward peered out of the library. “Is it safe?”

‘Tolerably,” said Latzarel, “but we’d better lie low for a while until the excitement dies down.”

Edward walked through the door, followed, to Latzarel’s immense surprise, by William Hastings. “What in the devil have you done to your hair?” asked William.”

Latzarel mussed the part out of it. “Nothing,” he said. “Where did you pop up from?”

“A manhole,” said William, smiling at the tale he was about to tell them. The four sat down into chairs around the electric fire.

“So,” said William two hours later, pouring down the last half inch of a bottle of beer, “I’ve done some studying. Made some connections. The physical universe, I’m convinced, is a far more puzzling place than we’ve given it credit for. Your information about Giles Peach bears me out. Science has taken a good crack at it, and can’t be faulted. But it wears blinders. It’s got to be made to yank them off. It’s time for a literary man to have at it.” William held his beer bottle up like a telescope and peered into it — a habit he unfailingly acquired after his third beer had disappeared. Edward wondered what it was that William saw in there, but had never thought of any way to ask him without sounding as if he thought the practice peculiar.

“And speaking of literary matters,” William continued, “I’ve landed the relativity story.”

“That would be the swelling man in the rocket?” asked Squires, putting a match to his pipe.

“That’s right. They sent me an appreciative letter — carried on a bit, in fact.”

“Who did?” asked Squires.

“Analog,” said William.

Squires dropped his pipe onto his chair at that revelation, a wad of flaming tobacco rolling out and sliding down between his leg and the chair arm. He leaped up, swatting at it, and managed to knock it onto the rug and then onto the tile hearth. He went into the kitchen and returned with a tray of fresh beer. “Let’s drink to the relativity story” he said, passing the beers around. And William, smiling broadly, assented. In the roseate glow of the beer, things seemed to be going well indeed for him. The muddy splashes on his trousers and the torn sleeve of his coat had already become souvenirs. He’d given the bastards the slip for well and good. But they hadn’t heard the last of William Hastings, not by a long sea mile. He grinned at the thought of coming battles.

“Roy,” he said suddenly, looking up at his friend who was tamping new tobacco into a fresh pipe, “I’ve been reading up on relativity again — light cones to be more specific. What do you know about them?”

Squires hesitated for a moment, wondering, perhaps, at the futility of the conversation that was almost certainly forthcoming. “The term light cone,” he said evenly, “has to do with the charting of the three dimensions of space and the single dimension of time on a cubical graph, the vertical axis being a person’s position in time, the horizontal being his movement in space. …”

“But as I understand it,” interrupted William, hunching forward in his chair in mounting excitement, “the cone itself is a product of a sphere of light expanding roundabout it like a vast, evenly inflating balloon. I mean to say that all of us are at the center of an infinitely expanding series of photon circles, rushing at light speed through the stars — ripples on the otherwise placid lake of the universe. Auras, if you will. Halos, if you look at it from another angle — an angle most of us have ignored. Up until now, that is. It’s profitable to turn to mythology once again.” He peered at Squires, squinting through one eye. Squires nodded broadly.

“Man, then, if I understand light cones aright, is the omphalos of an expanding photon halo — an almost infinite succession of such halos which, when charted, form a cyclone of emanations, whirling into the stars.”

“I can’t argue with that,” said Squires, giving Latzarel a look. Latzarel said quickly that he couldn’t argue with it either.

“Our lives, gentlemen, are summed up in spatial and temporal terms by the light cones on the highway — symbols of man’s trials, of his voyage through space and time.”

“By the which?” asked Latzarel. “You’ve thrown me there with that last bit about the highway.”

“Those red cones. The clown caps with lamps inside that they use to cordon off lanes on a highway. Inverted light cones is what they are, figuratively speaking. Concrete representations of our earthbound existence, of our literally being bound to the earth in the infinite eyes of those fleeing halos of light.” William paused and thought about it for a moment. He picked up a pen and a scrap of paper and jotted quick notes, lost for the moment in his musings. He paused, grinned, scribbled a bit more, and sat back, wholly pleased with himself. “Can you find fault with it?” he asked, looking up.

“Not with anything I can put my finger on,” said Squires, shaking his head. “It has all the earmarks of your work.”

“Thank you,” said William, understanding that last to be a compliment. He worked his hands together like a spider on a mirror, squinting shrewdly, then left off his puzzling and took a congratulatory swig of beer. “Let a literary man loose on science,” he said triumphantly, “and you’ll go somewhere.”

“There’s truth to that,” Squires assented. “I sense the ripplings of a short story here.”

William nodded. “It’s almost written itself, hasn’t it? Muck up a character or two to flesh it out with, and …” William made a squiggly flourish with his hand to illustrate what would come of mucking up a character or two.

After a short pause, Edward said, “So what do we do about Peach?”

“You’re certain it’s him?” asked William.

“I saw him face-on when he turned toward the window. It was him — the spitting image of his father, too.”

“Then get a warrant,” said William. “There’s probable cause to believe Giles was kidnapped. Either that or he’s ran away. And if he’s ran away and Frosticos is harboring him, then a crime’s been committed just the same.”

“How do we persuade the D.A. to write out a warrant, tell him we were out doing a bit of peeping torn work in the neighborhood and happened to see Giles splashing in a pool in the basement of Frosticos’ house?” Edward shook his head. “And how do we account for the smashed window? Looks like an attempted burglary or something.”

“We don’t mention any of it,” said William. “We work up a letter. Type it. Forge Giles’ signature. One that swears he’s being kepi there against his will — that the doctor is practicing vivisection, is going to cut him up. What do you think they’ll find when they go down into the cellar? Nothing but evidence to confirm their suspicions. And so what if Giles contradicts the lot of it? All signs will point to his being manipulated. And him only fifteen to boot. It’s foolproof. Velma Peach will back us up all the way.”

Latzarel nodded slowly. “It might work,” he said to Edward.

“Tomorrow it might work,” Edward said tiredly. “Right now it’s almost two in the morning. Let’s go.”

Twenty minutes later, after walking back to Rusty’s Cantina, Edward, William, and Professor Latzarel drove north on Western Avenue, slumped silently in their seats. William was the first to speak. “Actually,” he said, rubbing his hand through his hair, “it probably won’t work at all. For my money they’ve already flown. Dirty shame you had to smash out the window.”

Edward nodded. There was truth to that. If be hadn’t slipped and broken the window, Frosticos would be none the wiser. They could have waited until the moment was ripe and gone in after Giles — hauled him out of there. They’d have had the support of Velma Peach. But by now Frosticos would be on his guard. William was right. They’d probably already flown.

“Well,” said Latzarel, thumping his hand down onto the seat of the car, “I’m for wading in. The authorities can’t be depended upon here. They’ll poke around, ask questions. And what will they hear? That Giles Peach is a merman? That we’re bound for the Earth’s core? That Frosticos and Pinion were sighted off Catalina Island in a flying submarine? It’s all preposterous. Nuts. They’ll laugh us down. No one with a bit of sense would find that credible, unless, of course, they’d had the right son of scientific training. No, gentlemen, what I’m suggesting here is that we go into the breach.”

“In what way?” asked Edward, skeptical of going into the breach and of wading in. Latzarel was always making him wade in.

“We go in after him. We haven’t any idea whether they’ve routed Giles out of there or not. Why should they have? They’re not afraid of us. They don’t even know that it was you and I who were messing around the house tonight. And where would they take Giles? To Pinion’s? That’s too obvious. There’d be no profit in it. I say we use the charts of Pince Nez. Take a tip from the French Resistance. Wage our escapade from the sewers.”

“Pince Nez!” cried William, sitting up. “You’ve found the book then?”

“We found the captain,” Edward said darkly. “Frosticos got to him right after we did. Or so we think.” Edward repeated their conversation with Pince Nez, supplying as much of the dialogue as he could, hoping that with his unique insight William could make some sense out of the captain’s cryptic comments, about Ignatz de Winter and the immortality of carp.

But William just shook his head. “You got the book though?”

Edward nodded. “Yes. It cost me sixty bucks and cost Pince Nez his life.”

“So we’ve got to use it!” Latzarel said. “We’ve got to go in after him. We’ll snatch him out of there, slip into the nearest manhole and have him home in half an hour.”

There was silence in the car. Edward hesitated at the desperation of it. Breaking Frosticos’ window seemed reckless enough; Latzarel’s own logic argued against such rash action. What would they tell the authorities when they were caught, when the bullets were flying, when they were asked why they’d found it necessary to break into the home of a doctor of such high repute? Edward couldn’t generate any enthusiasm.

In the light of his own recent victory, however, William was a different case. “We’ll move quickly,” he said, warming to Latzarel’s plan. “Tomorrow. Even if they’ve got plans to fish him out of there, they won’t move so fast as that. They’ll assume I’ll head home and smash up your plans. You’ll have your hands full with me. And anyway, they won’t half believe we’re a desperate enough bunch to mount such an attack as that. That was their mistake in the sanitarium. They thought I was weak. Demented. Milquetoast. They supposed they’d broken my spirit. The scum. But I was too many for them. A man has to strike, by God, and damn the consequences!”

William leaned forward, caught up in the spirit of the thing. “Now I might not amount to such a lot myself, but I gave them the slip, didn’t I? I walked into Frosticos’ office barefoot and rifled the desk, fingered his books, and slipped out scot free. And if that wasn’t enough, I slid out under their noses and disappeared beneath the street, and led them all on a chase through the sewers. Think what we can do together! All of us. Who are they with their foolish plots? One old sod who chases after boys in an ice cream truck and a white devil megalomaniac intent on blowing us all to kingdom come. If we can’t take them apart, then we’re a sad case. And that’s my opinion.

“And mine too!” cried Latzarel. “We move on this tomorrow. What do you say, Edward?”

Edward, caught up in the current of enthusiasm, nodded assent. This was no time to be the weak link.

The next morning about nine o’clock, Edward called the sanitarium. Yes, the doctor was in. He’d be happy to speak to Mr. St. Ives. Had Edward heard from William by any chance? No, he hadn’t. William, Edward sensed, had flown. Perhaps to San Francisco. Maybe farther north — to Humboldt County where he’d lived for a short time when he was first married. He’d talked about returning. Something about the green of the countryside. Like emeralds, he always said, like the walls of Oz. It was nostalgia, to be sure. But if Edward were looking for William, he’d send to Eureka for him.

Dr. Frosticos wasn’t much interested in what Edward would do. His brother-in-law, said the doctor, was a danger to himself and to everyone else. He’d severely beaten an innocent man and broken the toe of another. The authorities had been notified.

“It would be best,” said Edward, “to un-notify the authorities.”

“That can’t be done,” said Frosticos flatly.

“It’s quite possible, then, that the authorities ought to be more thoroughly notified. They might be vastly interested in a certain steamer trunk and a Chinese man by the name of Han Koi.” Edward paused to let his words take effect. There was silence on the other end. “They also might have some interest in the death of Captain H. Frank Pince Nez. We know a good bit about that. A good bit.”

There was more silence on the other end. Edward became instantaneously suspicious. He strained to hear something but could detect nothing but faint breathing. Then, suddenly, shattering the airy silence was a mad and capering laugh, weirdly distant, howling through the ominous breathing. All was silent again.

“If you have any idea who I am,” said Frosticos slowly, “you’ll be on your way north yourself.”

Edward attempted a feeble laugh — a ha, ha, ha that amounted to nothing at all. Less than nothing. He began to suggest that Frosticos leave town himself, but was cut off.

“The boy in the steamer trunk was an unfortunate bungling. An assistant of mine, no longer with me, wasn’t as handy with a scalpel as he might have been. Giles won’t be as unfortunate as was his uncle. He’s just as promising. Reginald wasn’t a complete failure, however; he’s alive today, in fact, living in an aquarium. People who have seen him are certain he’s a fake. The impossibility of him confounds them. They can’t imagine anything quite so — how shall I put it — grotesque. Han Koi has an interest in breeding him with giant tri-colored carp. The offspring would be remarkable, don’t you agree?”

Edward couldn’t speak. Reason had flown. He wanted to shout something, to infuriate Frosticos, to confound him, to set him off, but nothing came.

“My advice to you,” said Frosticos evenly, “is to not allow Mr. Hastings to be taken alive.” And with that he hung up.

“Did you get to him?” asked William.

“Not entirely.” Edward picked up a half-filled coffee cup and dumped it onto the kitchen counter, rattling the empty cup down onto the pool that flooded along into the sink in a little rush.

“He has that effect,” said William, sitting down tiredly. “What did he say about the Humboldt County nonsense?”

“Saw through it right off. There wasn’t a bit of hesitation. For all I know he understood that you were standing at my elbow.”

“Did he mention last night’s broken window?”

“No,” said Edward, “he didn’t.”

“Hah!” William struck his open palm with his fist. “We’ve got him there. The Reginald Peach case is too old now to do him any damage. But Giles is different. He’s worried, all right. We’ll move today. He’s at the sanitarium now; let’s strike.”

“What?” said Edward. “Now?”

“Of course now. Jim’s in school, so he won’t be fighting to come along. We can pick up Russel and be in the sewers in half an hour. We’ll stop at the army surplus on Brand and pick up three of those miner’s helmets with head lamps.”

“I don’t know,” said Edward, shaking his head. “I think you’d better lie low for a couple of days until some of this blows over.”

William gave him an incredulous look. “Lie low? To what end? They’ll be here with a van before the afternoon’s out. Where do you expect me to do this lying low? In a hotel somewhere? A man can’t lie any lower than in a sewer. That’s my motto. I’m going in after Giles. Are you coming with me, or not?”

“I’m coming,” said Edward resignedly. “Phone Latzarel Tell him we’ll pick him up in ten minutes. He won’t have to be persuaded.”

“That’s the ticket,” cried William ecstatically. “We’ll rip their lungs out. Dig up Pince Nez. I’ll lay out a route.”

And with that they were off and running, grinding away toward Professor Latzarel’s house in Pasadena, sitting desperate and stony-faced in the Wasp, both of them feeling conspicuous — William proudly so and Edward utterly certain that his eyes would betray his criminal intent. No one, however, threatened to stop them. No accusatory fingers were pointed. Nobody at the army surplus store intimated that the three miner’s helmets were intended to light the sewers for the purpose of carrying off an illegal venture, for smashing into a man’s house and kidnapping a merman out of the clutches of a mad doctor. And when, shortly before noon, the three of them slid down the concrete slope of the Los Angeles River near Los Feliz, opened a great circular metal door painted like the face of a grinning cat, and slipped into a descending tunnel, no one saw them except a half dozen carloads of freeway travelers, bound for Bakersfield and Saugus and San Fernando, who took the helmeted trio for county workmen.

Chapter 15

“Why in the devil did we start out so far from our damned destination, that’s what I want to know. Economy of movement, that’s always been my way, and here we are God knows where. We’d have saved money parking at Rusty’s again.” Latzarel pushed at his miner’s helmet, which had slid down over his eyes. There was a fearful stench in the sewers, but fortunately the corridor they traveled was broad enough so dial they could keep up out of the muck.

“If I’m not mistaken,” said William, striding along purposefully ahead of them, “this tunnel runs smack up to the foothills, straight as a die. There must be a hundred exits. And down toward Brand there’s a passage or two that I can’t make out from the map. Little notched lines like an intermittent stream on a topographic map, leading in a curious direction. Very puzzling. I thought we’d have a look at it.”

“We haven’t the time to have a look at anything,” said Latzarel angrily. “It’s time to strike, not sightsee.” He started to say more, but the light in his helmet went out, tossing him into darkness. William and Edward were at the perimeter of two moving pools of light ahead. “Wait!” hissed Latzarel, pulling off his helmet. He messed with the two wires up under the crown. The thing blinked on and then went dead. It revealed, briefly, a perpendicular corridor that angled off dark and enormous into the earth. And dragging along it, slowly, in a long triple S of luminous green and pink, was an immense serpent, bound for deeper levels. No one stirred. The creature disappeared into shadow as if it were passing through a veil.

Latzarel’s lamp blinked on again of its own accord just as the beast’s tail flicked into obscurity.

“By God,” said William, letting out a whoosh of suspended breath. “I’ve half a mind to follow it. I’ll bet it’s making for the realm of Pince of Nez and the subterranean sea.”

“Some other time,” said Edward, who’d never seen much in snakes. He pushed ahead and hastened on, leaving his two companions to follow.

“Here we are in front of Squires’ house,” said William some time later, pointing up at a black circle of iron through which shone two little cylinders of sunshine. “I spent a good long time here, writing notes. When the level of water rose late in the afternoon, I made a paper sailboat and sent it off northeast. Sometime, if we pull through all of this, I’m going to make an enormous origami clipper ship and pilot it into the setting sun. I have this feeling — a certainty — that when it finally sinks I’ll find myself somewhere …” William paused, not knowing, apparently, exactly where he’d find himself.

“Where?” asked Edward.

“Wet,” said Latzarel, who wasn’t concerned with the mystery of paper boats. “In a state of watery decline. That’s what my father would have said. ‘Where were you born?’ they’d ask him. ‘In the state of nakedness,’ he’d say. Hah! I’ll never forget that. It still cracks me up.” William shined his headlamp at Latzarel, chagrined at his friend’s spirited reminiscence that had so quickly scuttled his origami boat.

“Somewhere in the midst of a cottage garden,” William said to Edward. “Only beneath the sea — all blue and aquamarine. The sort of thing that comes to mind when you read The Water Babies, and with maybe an octopus and a seahorse playing a cello and a flute with bubbles just pouring out and my paper boat listed over on its side, propped against a reef of pink coral.”

Edward nodded. “I believe I know the place.”

“Listen,” said Latzarel, who’d been fiddling with his helmet and was still caught up in his father’s wit. “He had another one. Pulled it off every day almost. ‘Have some mo-lasses,’ he’d say, into the air, you know, not at anyone in particular. Then, in a different voice, he’d say, ‘Mo-lasses, I ain’t had no lasses yet!’ and laugh and laugh and laugh.” Latzarel smiled, remembering it. “Of course we never actually ate molasses. I didn’t even know what it was. But he’d point at something — a salt shaker, a milk glass; it didn’t much matter what. It was hysterical.” He chuckled to himself and shook his head. His lamp abruptly went out again. “Damn!” he said in a low voice. It blinked on and off as he toyed with it.

“It’s about time,” said Edward, whose interest in the entire kidnap affair was rapidly playing out. “We’re as rested as we’ll ever be. Let’s move on up to Patchen and see this thing through.”

William hauled out the charts of Pince Nez and pointed toward the thin blue line that represented their path. They trudged along, each of them calculating the distance in his head, until, five minutes later, they stopped once again beneath the street to reconnoiter.

“How do I look?” asked Latzarel, dusting at the insignia on his khaki shirt. “Southern California Gas Company,” it read. He pulled off his helmet and handed it to Edward. “I’ll scout this out and either give you the all clear or the danger signal. Be ready to act. Timing here is everything.”

“I’m still a little leery,” said Edward, “about the gas company costume. It’s a fine thing to wear when you’re pretending to be messing with a broken gas line, but what’s a gas company man doing popping up out of the sewers?”

“Nobody cares,” said Latzarel, waving his hand to illustrate no one’s caring. “It’s the uniform that does it. That and the key ring on the belt. Give me a clipboard and I could conquer the world.”

Edward shrugged, still skeptical. They listened for a moment for cars approaching up Patchen, but heard nothing but children, involved, perhaps, in a game of ball in the street. They heaved the lid off the manhole, and Latzarel climbed out into the day, flooding the tunnel with eye-searing sunlight. The lid clanked down, leaving them in blackness, pierced by the suddenly ineffective lamps,

The two of them stood without speaking, waiting for the signal from Latzarel. Slowly the darkness paled again. William crouched abruptly, aiming his headlamp down the tunnel. He pointed toward the ceiling. “Look there.”

Edward looked but saw nothing.

“There. About ten yards down.” William set out in that direction. Edward followed, still not certain about their destination. But there, not quite in the ceiling of the vaultlike pipe, was a trapdoor. Another was set dead opposite in the wall.

William pulled himself up the iron rungs and wrenched at an iron latch. The trap dropped inward, nearly knocking him loose. The bottom of an Oriental carpet sagged into the hole, and William ducked, reacting to its suddenly pushing in at him. He poked at the carpet tentatively, then, throwing caution out the window, pulled himself up, pushing up the edge and peering beneath it. He dropped it again almost at once. ‘This is it” he whispered over his shoulder.

“What?” asked Edward.

But William was already shoving farther up under the rug, yanking the thing aside finally and hoisting himself through the trap. Edward followed, finding himself in a basement room, musty and wet and smelling of damp vegetation. A circular pool built of cast concrete took up most of the dim room. A spindle-sided Morris chair sat beyond, beneath a tulip shade hung from a copper sconce.

When Professor Latzarel poked his head out he fully expected to see a surprised motorist bearing down, threatening to squash him. But the afternoon street was deserted except for three children who were busy knocking a ball back and forth with sticks as if it were a hockey puck. All three dashed toward him shouting, astounded at the marvel of his appearing, as it were, from out of the street. In a rush Latzarel hauled the lid across the hole, fearful that they’d get a glimpse of William and Edward below. They couldn’t afford publicity.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he said to them, at a loss, really, for conversation. Children had always been a mystery to him; they seemed incapable of speech. He pointed at his insignia to authenticate himself. He regretted almost at once that he hadn’t undertaken a more threatening demeanor, that he hadn’t attempted to put them off, but it was too late. One of them, a boy it seemed, whacked at the manhole cover with his stick, to show it he meant business, possibly.

Latzarel, in a sudden sweat, waved him off, fearing that his friends would understand the whacking to be some sort of signal. “No sticks now,” he said, feeling immediately foolish and hoping that children of such a tender age would simply react to his intent and not give much thought to the words.

“Why not?” asked the boy, angling in at it again with his stick upraised. The other two — a startlingly thin boy with almost no hair and wearing a shirt that read, inexplicably, “Meet me in Pizza Italy,” and a moony-eyed girl of two or three — went for the lid themselves, seeing that Latzarel’s emergence had become a sort of game. Latzarel took a swipe on the shin before waving his hands and stomping and chasing them off. They regrouped near the curb.

He smiled cautiously, fearful that his smile would be taken for enthusiasm, and wondered suddenly if the man in the t-shirt who had chased them to Squires’ house might be lurking somewhere, still caught up in the past night’s doings.

Surely the man was at work. But what if he wasn’t? How good a look had he gotten at Latzarel there in Squires’ dim living room?

The boy in the Pizza Italy shirt took a tentative swipe at the ball, sending it rolling toward Latzarel — quite likely as an excuse to rush at the manhole cover again. Latzarel scooped it up and tossed it back. “Very delicate equipment down there,” he said, advancing on the three, hoping that they could imagine equipment as delicate as that. The older of the two boys stepped in front of the little girl who promptly began to cry. The boy menaced Latzarel with his stick. “You old fatso,” he sneered.

The girl peeked out from behind, echoing the boy’s witticism. “You owd fatty,” she said.

Latzarel was getting nowhere fast, but the more time that passed, the more likely it was that any banging on the manhole cover would be taken as a sign. He held out three dimes on his flat palm, grinning — stupidly he thought — in their direction. It wouldn’t do to have an altercation. Better to let them beat the devil out of the lid. But they weren’t interested in his three dimes. They’d heard about that sort of thing. The boy with the enigmatic shirt howled, then broke and ran for it, disappearing into the door of a house some ways down the street.

“Christ,” said Latzarel aloud. He’d be taken for another Pinion, masquerading his advances to children with a false uniform. He tossed the dimes onto an adjacent lawn, turned, and hurried toward Frosticos’ house, straightening his uniform. The children, seeing him retreat, went for the coins, and were fighting like mad things over them when Latzarel disappeared into the bushes.

As far as he could tell, there was no one home. All blinds woe drawn, upstairs and down. The house was utterly silent. Ahead of him was the broken window and the meter box, the gas pipe newly repaired. He bent over in front of the window and pretended to inspect it, looking first back over his shoulder toward the street where some sort of commotion was progressing. “Damn all children,” he said to himself, and peered in through the window. Inside it was even darker than it had been the night before, now that the lamp was switched off. There wasn’t enough sunlight filtering through the dirty window to do anything but gray a little patch of floor.

Latzarel squinted, then jerked back, sure that he’d seen movement in the room. It’s Peach, he thought, holding his breath. His quarry hadn’t flown! He was just vaguely conscious of voices on the street, of a child’s crying. He peered in again, screwing up his face for the sake of penetration. Three inches away, just beyond the cracked window, another face peered back at him, eyes crossed impossibly, tongue lolling out, a blinding light erupting without warning from the thing’s forehead.

Latzarel shouted and tumbled over backward into the bushes, kicking and flailing. Stifled laughter moomphed out from the cellar. The broken window slid open, and William Hastings, unable to contain himself, shoved out through it, gasping with laughter, contorting his face.

“Damn it!” cried Latzarel. “My heart! I could have dropped dead on the spot! I …” Then it occurred to him that Edward and William were both inside and he fell silent, scrambling to his feet.

Someone whistled on the street. There was another shout. “He went through there!” cried a man’s voice.

“Christ!” shouted Latzarel, understanding suddenly the nature of the commotion on the road. “They’re after me!” He shoved his head and arms in through the window. It would be tight. Edward jumped across, and he and William each got hold of an arm, hauling away on Latzarel who wriggled at the window like a snake. William burst into another fit of laughter.

“Hurry, damn it!” shouted Latzarel, infuriated. ‘They’ve got my leg! Let go of me there!” And with that admonition, he shot into the room as if he were spring driven, sprawling onto the floor, taking Edward down with him. William slid the window shut and snapped the catch, waggling his fingers off the end of his nose at the crowd outside, one of whom, in a fit of rage and bravado, smashed in the window with the heel of Latzarel’s shoe, which he held in his hand like a club.

William yowled and sprinted toward the trapdoor at the heels of his two companions. In a moment the room was empty. William began to haul the Oriental rug back into place, giving up when he realized it wouldn’t fool anyone anyway, and slammed the trapdoor shut. Latzarel retrieved his hat, limping along on one shoe, huffing for breath.

“That was close,” he said.

“Too close,” said Edward. “Let’s go. They’ll be through the trap in a minute.”

But he was wrong — it didn’t take as long as that. Almost as soon as he said it, there was a grinding at the manhole cover in the street. They weren’t fooling with trapdoors; they were taking a more obvious route. A shaft of sunlight poured through it — a golden halo around the dark shadow of a head. William, schooled in such pursuits, loped off down the tunnel, shouting at his companions to follow him. They had an edge, after all. The hounds would have to find a flashlight. They’d never set out after such a desperate gang in a dark sewer. But if they did … William thought about it.

There was almost nothing for three-quarters of a mile but the tunnel they were in. They couldn’t lose their pursuers; they’d have to outrun them. As hardy as Latzarel was, three-quarters of a mile would take it out of him — a hundred yards would probably cook his goose, and him with only a single shoe. They couldn’t afford to fight with anyone; that would be spectacularly foolish, the end, certainly, of their bid to beat Pinion to the center of the Earth. They’d read about his triumphs from a jail cell. William could already hear Latzarel laboring for breath behind him. He turned to look.

Someone stood a couple of hundred feet back, bathed in the circle of sunlight, watching them make away. A bold neighbor, no doubt, waiting for the arrival of a flashlight. Or a gun. William pressed on. Every yard increased their chances. If only they could make it as far as the warren of tunnels off Brand.

Latzarel was falling behind, despite Edward’s attempts to hurry him on. There wasn’t a ghost of a chance that he’d make it, not if he had to run all the way. So William pulled up short. Latzarel puffed gratefully to a halt, bending at the waist, grasping his knees, breath whooshing in and out like a bellows. “I’m going back,” said William, “I’ll put them off the scent. Put the fear into them.” Edward shook his head. “Yes, I am. You two go along. If they get me, I’m just an escaped lunatic, tormenting the good doctor.”

Edward began to complain.

‘There’s no time,” said William, looking back down the tunnel. Another stalwart neighbor was halfway down the rungs. William jogged back the way he’d come, wondering exactly what it was he was going to do. There was a shout from the man on the ground, who, apparently, assumed he was being attacked. The second pursuer shot out of the manhole like a shell out of a mortar, and the first launched himself up the ladder, hollering incoherently. William chuckled.

“I’m the trouble you’ve been looking for!” he shouted, raising both hands above his head for effect. He howled like a demon, blubbering at the end of it and bursting into laughter, swept away once again by his bravado. Let them mess with him! He was partly surprised at himself for carrying on so. Even at thirteen he’d been far more cautious. It was combat that did it, yesterday’s baptism of fire. He’d found his natural calling, his forte. Let the whole filthy streetload of them come wheezing into the pipe. He was the man to meet them! A head thrust in and peered down at him, so William cut a quick caper to demonstrate his spirit and searched his mind hurriedly for an appropriate snatch of verse to shout. The only thing he could come up with was a line from Ashbless: “Heavy on my brow sits the cold dog of the snows.” But that wouldn’t do at all, beyond puzzling the devil out of them. It had always puzzled him, anyway.

He glanced over his shoulder. Edward and Latzarel were disappearing in the distance. They’d make it. William shouted at the head that was shoved into the pipe. Then he switched off his lamp and stomped along as hard as he could in the darkness, knowing that whoever was keeping an eye on him wouldn’t be able to stand the idea of a gibbering madman rushing up out of a dark tunnel at him, appearing suddenly out of the substreet nightland, yammering and murderous. He was right. The head vanished and the lid of the manhole was thrust almost into place, a little crescent of sunlight shining in around it.

William was off and running toward the receding figures of his two companions, half disappointed that it hadn’t come to blows, and wondering at the sequence of events that had led him, in the past thirty-odd hours, to have fallen out with such a diversity of perfectly innocent people. Lord knows what Latzarel had done to enrage the mob so. Told them one of his father’s jokes, probably.

It was dark when the door pushed open over the Los Angeles River and the three men, tired and having accomplished nothing, bent through it and scrunched up through the river-rock and weeds to the hole in the chainlink fence that led out toward Los Feliz. Professor Latzarel walked like an East Indian jug dancer, cursing his way half shoeless back to the car where he slumped into the back seat, nodding off into a fatigued sleep by the time they were halfway home.

William lurched awake in the middle of the night, his eyes driven open, a dry scream choking him. He pushed his covers onto the floor with a wide sweep of his arm, convinced, for one hag-ridden moment, that some great bug, a beetle the size of a plate, was scrambling around his feet, tickling the soft flesh between his toes with probing antennae. He gasped for breath. His heart labored like an engine. There was no bug. Of course there was no bug. Such bugs didn’t exist — not in civilized lands.

He remembered scraps of a dream. He’d been in a bookstore, one of the several that were figments of his dream landscapes, that were always operated by the same scowling proprietor, a gaunt man with dark, unkempt hair and a look of suspicion on lids face — perhaps that William was going to steal a book, or bend the pages back and ruin the spine, or was simply not the sort of client that the shop preferred. Perhaps the man wondered vaguely, a dream-wondering, why it was that he was summoned like a genie into existence night after weary night and expected to operate yet another dusty and amorphous shop into which, as surely as clockwork, would stroll the same tweed-jacketed browser, himself both the product and the inspiration of the dream, who would poke around through the books, dissatisfied with titles and prices until, inexplicably, he’d try on a volume as if it were a pair of pants. That was it, William remembered. His bookstore dreams invariably ended the same way. He’d manage, through some trick of dream physics, to pull a book on like trousers over his shoes. He remembered being satisfied with the fit. The price hadn’t been exorbitant. But there was something peculiar about the book, about the trousers. Something awful. A face, an etching on the frontispiece — a mass of little undulating lines like waving fronds of delicate algae that had crept together into a face, a still and cold face, utterly blank and reptilian. Who was it?

William sat on the side of his bed, his eyes half closed. He didn’t dare shut them entirely, for fear that something would appear, that there lurked deep within him a black marble of chaos and darkness, waiting for an ancient door to open onto a shadow path along which it would roll up into his throat. But he had to know whose face it was. The bits and pieces of decaying dream flitted across the stage before his eyes. Dark lines danced and fluttered and froze for an instant, first into the leggy shape of a beetle, then into the face of Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, which hung there like the negative afterimage of a lighted window on the back of his eyelids, like the floating, manufactured head of the great and terrible Oz. The face paled, shifting, the black lines metamorphosing into the grays of a winter ocean and then into the white of fish skin or tainted snow, and just for a moment, before it winked out utterly, there floated before him the visage of Hilario Frosticos, impassive, almost asleep, but with the faint trace of a leer weighting the corners of his mouth.

William shuddered. He ran his hand through his hair. It was unimaginably cold. He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and lit a pipe with trembling fingers. His bare feet looked as if they were made of pale, wet clay, and his calves seemed to be almost fleshless. It was impossible that they’d support his weight.

He stood up to test them, feeling rubbery. His toes were enormous, and for a moment seemed to have too many joints. He counted to make sure, shaking his head at the little useless tufts of hair that sprouted atop than. Toes were ugly things — like ears and noses. One couldn’t afford to pay any attention to them or they’d call into question the entirety of human self-importance and dignity.

The thought occurred to him suddenly that he’d write a short story. It would be about a poet who was given over to fits of inspiration. Like certain drags, though, such fits would have unfortunate side effects. They’d swell his sense of self worth shamelessly. He’d become a conceited buffoon. And somehow, midway through a particularly inflating verse, he’d catch sight of himself in a mirror or a shaded window or the polished metal swerve of a sauce pan, and with a wild, puncturing shock, realize that he had the face of an ape.

William routed out a stack of lined paper and a pen, waiting for the first droplets of what would become a flood of words. The late hour had lent a seriousness of purpose to the endeavor. He’d rarely been so inspired — seen things so clearly. Nothing, however, happened. He started a paragraph, then lined it out. It was foolish. He began another, paused, relit his pipe, then abruptly stood up and looked into the little framed mirror that hung over the dresser. Relieved, he put the pen and paper on the nightstand, promising himself he’d have another go at it in the sober light of morning. He pulled his blanket around him, shoved his pipe into his mouth, and trudged down the dark hallway. He could hear Edward turning fitfully in his room as he passed it. He opened the half-closed door of Jim’s bedroom and sidled in, clutching the blanket closed at his neck.

His son lay asleep, his mouth slightly open on the pillow. William envied him his dreams, which, from the look on his face, had little to do with horrors. William had long harbored suspicions that children were somehow more closely attuned to the vagaries and marvels of creation than were their elders, that age was like some airy bleach fading and paling those sensations that in childhood matter most, but that in later years we’re indifferent to, or have simply forgotten.

The smell of the thin night air leaking beneath the window was cool and sweet, carrying on it just the slightest odor of fog on concrete, of musty, late winter vegetation. William breathed deeply, trying to surprise it before it evaporated, to catch it and savor it. But almost as soon as he did, the smell disappeared, and empty, mundane air filled the room. Jim, William knew, was still washed in the swirl of the fragrant night air, which he didn’t have to hurry after as if it were the last train leaving an empty station. William had read only the past week that mere were not nearly so many visible stars in the heavens as one might think, that they were easily countable, a mere sprinkling, a handful tossed out into a far-flung corner of the void in a prodigiously distant age. He wondered how old the astronomer was who’d said such a thing. The number of stars in the heavens quite likely diminished with an observer’s increasing age.

His pipe was smoldering out. He’d been ignoring it. He sucked sharply on the stem until the tobacco in the bowl glowed like a little beacon in the dark room. Gray smoke curled toward the ceiling. The night breeze ruffled the curtains, blowing them in for a moment, then falling off, the curtains collapsing abruptly. Jim stirred and rolled over onto his back before settling once again into his pillow.

On the low oak dresser, dark brown with age, was a clutter of stuff, some of it commonplace — loose change, a penknife, a rumpled handkerchief, a torn theater ticket — and some of it almost magical — a rainbow colored aquatic moon garden in a corked jar; a little cluster of pastel fishbowl castles; a carved wooden pirate that propped an illustrated copy of Treasure Island; a Japanese lantern with paper walls, across each of which was painted a single delicate shoot of apple blossom; and a handful of bottle caps arranged in a neat circle.

William stood up and walked to the dresser, bending to have a closer look at the bottle caps. He was certain he knew where they’d come from, that he understood most of their strange odyssey which had begun in Griffith Park years before. And one, he knew, had been lost two months past during his unfortunate war with the neighbor’s garden hose.

He picked it up and turned it over. There was the cork washer, plucked out of the grass, pushed carefully inside. The cap seemed to him to be warm, almost alive, as if it had been recently clutched in someone’s hand. He closed his fist over it, seeing the bottle cap in his mind as if it were a little circular window that opened onto a sunlit garden, or a tiny green landscape glimpsed distantly through the wrong end of a telescope.

There was a stirring behind him. He turned to find Jim propped on his elbows, regarding him sleepily. William grinned, at a momentary loss for words. He puffed on his pipe to fill the void, but it had gone cold. He pulled it out of his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. “You’ve kept them too?”

Jim nodded, sitting up. “I had another one that I wore on my jacket, but I lost it when it fell off. So now I keep them on the dresser.”

“Wise move,” said his father. “I’ve lost more than I care to think about. Sometimes I wonder, though, if I wouldn’t be better off losing them all.”

Jim shook his head. He was certain they were both wiser keeping them — wiser by far, but he couldn’t say so. He suddenly couldn’t say anything at all.

“You’re right,” said his father, poking at the half dozen caps on the dresser, arranging and rearranging them. “I think I’ll put mine atop my dresser. They’re safer there, like you say.”

“You can have the one back that you lost,” said Jim, suddenly finding words. “I’ve been saving it for you.”

“Have you? I’ve got a better idea. I’ll make you a trade. You keep the Nehi orange and I’ll take this grape Crash. I’ll keep it in my pocket. A sort of good-luck token. Agreed?”

“Sure,” said Jim.

William picked out the chipped purple bottle cap and closed it into his fist until it bit into the palm of his hand. He was abruptly aware of the night breeze, of the smell of cool, wet air that washed through the room. “Time to sleep,” he said, pulling his blanket around him and heading toward the door. “See you in the morning?”

“Right.” Jim watched his father leave, wondering if he too was aware of the crumbling of an old, imaginary wall. He pulled the curtain aside and looked out into the night. Somewhere far off was the sound of traffic, muted by distance. A lonesome cricket chirruped out in the yard, and the man in the moon peeped out from behind an illuminated cloud, keeping a vigilant eye on the sleeping Earth.