The Digging Leviathan

Prologue

William Ashbless sat in a long rowboat, hidden in a forest of willows mat sprouted from the weedy bottom of Lake Windermere, flooded with the runoff of spring rain. The hillsides rising in the distance were unnaturally green — the green of opaque emeralds, broken only by rock ridges that seemed to have ripped up from the earth in antiquity and then, surprised at themselves, begun to settle back in, sinking slowly into the high grass.

There was almost no breeze. The lake was quiet as the surface of a reflecting pool, and in the water that surrounded the jutting willows were the reflections of voluminous clouds, slate gray in the low heavens. The air smelled of impending rain. Sheep on the hillsides, shaggy and furtive, chewed moodily and glanced round about, expecting something. Every few minutes one would break and run, darting away a few yards as if having been tapped on the shoulder by a ghost, then stopping abruptly, seeing mat his companions chewed on undisturbed. Spooked by the pending storm, Ashbless thought. He drew his coat closer around him, pulling its hood up over his long white hair. An enormous fish lazed up out of the shadows of the lake, seemed to watch the cloudy sky for a moment inches below the surface, then sank slowly out of sight. In the stern of the rowboat lay another — a strange, dead fish.

It seemed to have half exploded, as if it had risen from prodigious depths, and it looked like an archaic, toothy torpedo with an arrow-shaped tail and limblike fins. Ashbless supposed it was a ganoid. His knowledge of paleontology wasn’t as broad as it might have been, but it was sufficient to make him speculate on the presence of such a beast in Lake Windermere. Perhaps it was on holiday, like he was.

Ashbless raised his binoculars and scanned the shore some two hundred yards down. Basil Peach walked down a cobbled path to the boathouse with his hands in his pockets. He unlocked the door, entered, and came out almost at once carrying a long-handled net, striding off purposefully toward the shore. Behind him rose Peach Hall, stony and cold. Green and brown moss grew from chinks between enormous hewn stones, and most of the west wall was covered with creeping vines, leafless but in such profusion that they obscured the wall and windows. Beneath the wall ran a broad canal, its banks covered with a forest of horsetail and bracken. Dead in the center of the wall, just above the waterline, was an arched doorway of old, age-blackened oak, the only bit of wall cleared of vines. Ashbless was curious to see if the door would open. He was sure that at dawn, just as he had rowed into the little stand of willows, the door had creaked inward and something had peered out, a dark shadow against a briefly lit background — the shadow of a hunched figure with a broad toadlike head, in an overcoat and leaning on a stick.

Basil Peach poked his net into the weeds, wrestled it around, and hoisted something out — something dead. Ashbless couldn’t see what it was. It had been years since he’d seen Peach disappearing up the Rio Jari, and three times as long since he’d been boating on Lake Windermere. Neither had changed much. Peach, perhaps, was a bit more stooped. And his face was broader, his eyes wider, as if stretched and staring. His skin, Ashbless would have said, appeared vaguely mottled from that distance — doubtless a trick of cloud shadow. Peach peered into his net, then climbed back up to the boathouse, opened the door, shoved in the net, and heaved out its occupant.

Ashbless wondered what weird routine Basil Peach followed from day to day, how like it was to that of his father and grandfather and — who could say? — countless Peaches before them, and how it became less human and more like that of a toad or an eft as the long damp years passed until one day Basil would slip out through that arched door and return to dry land no more, summoned by amphibian pipes, muted and watery, the notes darting among seaweeds like fishes. It would have been an enviable passing, thought Ashbless, if it weren’t such a wet one.

John Pinion, it occurred to him, understood nothing of Basil Peach, and even less of Giles. They were beyond his grasp. Pinion knew little beyond scientific greed; but he was essentially innocent. Giles Peach was a means to an end. Hilario Frosticos, though, what ends did he pursue? His greed wasn’t wholly monetary; it was one of decay and ruination, and, like that of his grandfather Ignacio Narbondo, one of perversion. What about himself? What greed was his? Literary greed? Chasing after posterity? Immortality? The thought amused him. He had ample greed. He’d learned, after all, to follow fashion over the long years. And to what purpose beyond vanity?

Only Edward St. Ives seemed motivated by something else, he and William Hastings. But what exactly it was that drove William was impossible to fathom. Edward seemed to be continually clambering along rainbows, pursuing falling stars, suspecting that some monumental wonder was pending, riding in on the tide, obscured, perhaps, by a sketch of thin cloud drift. He was the most foolish of the lot, but Ashbless had always liked him. He’d far rather throw in with Edward and William, even if he’d have to suffer Latzarel’s asinine jokes, than with Pinion and Frosticos. Pinion was an inflated fool. But Pinion had the mechanical mole, and Edward and William only their sadly laughable diving bell. Basil Peach, however, was another alternative.

Ashbless could easily have gone to sleep. Basil Peach had returned to the manor, and there was nothing stirring, nothing to break the silence but the rare chirping of a passing bird and the bleating of an occasional sheep. He began to hum quietly, watching the slow clouds creep across the sky. He wasn’t sure what it was he was waiting for, only that he had all the time in the world.

He stopped humming when the door in the west wall pushed inward. The cloaked thing with the walking stick stood as before, a lamp burning behind him. Then he propped the stick against the wall, shrugged out of his cloak, and slipped into the green waters of the canal, disappearing beneath the surface. Ashbless rowed toward the mouth of the canal, watching the dark green water. Down in the depths he could see the trailing ends of waterweeds and the tips of rocks that seemed to rise toward him, growing suddenly more distinct in shallow water, then disappearing in a blink of deep green when it fell away again into depths. He squinted his eyes, as if straining to see through the darkness of an unlighted room, but the deep water was impenetrable, or seemed so until, drawing toward him like a slowly deepening shadow at some unguessed depth, appeared a slowly swimming creature as big as a man, angling out of the canal into the broad expanse of the lake, submerging slowly and disappearing utterly into shadow directly beneath the boat.

Ashbless pulled his flask from beneath his coat, unscrewed the stopper, and poured a couple of ounces of amber liquid onto the water. That’s as close as we’ll come now to having a drink together, Squire, he thought to himself, as he tipped the bottle back. He shoved it away, picked up his oars, and rowed in toward the dock where he tied up. He peered into the dirty leaded window of the boathouse on his way toward Peach Hall.

An awful stench filtered through a gap in a broken pane, the stink of rotting flesh, of a close cousin to the dead merman on Catalina Island. He pushed open a rickety door and stepped through, holding his breath. Along the far side were four rowboats, hung on the wall in little suspended stalls. A heap of oars and oarlocks, broken and rusted, lay on the wooden floorboards beneath, a home for mice and spiders. Beside them sat a pile of disintegrating carrion, white beneath a layer of quicklime. Perched rigidly atop the muck in a bloated caricature of alertness was the thing Basil Peach had fished dead out of the rushes an hour earlier a toothy little fish lizard, thought Ashbless, of Jurassic persuasion. He gasped out a lungful of used air and escaped through the door of the boathouse, leaving the heap of unlikely creatures to disintegrate in peace.

Ashbless speculated about them, not so much wondering at their presence — he understood where they had come from — as at Basil Peach’s keeping the shore weeds clear of them. It was entirely conceivable that they floated in only along the shores of Peach Hall, that the deepwater tunnel connecting Winder-more to Pellucidarian oceans lay offshore, perhaps at the mouth of the little weedy canal which was nothing more than a private watery bypath traveled in secret by generations of Peaches. Ashbless would be astonished if the door to the center of the Earth were anyplace else, since it had become increasingly clear that the Peach family, somehow, were the guardians of that door. And it was unlikely that the local appearance of strange creatures out of antiquity would enhance the peculiar reputation of the Squires Peach.

A gravel path led around the manor through an avenue of arched linden trees. A hedgehog wandered aimlessly out of the shadow of a bush, looking inquiringly at Ashbless as if waiting to be put into a pocket and taken along. Ashbless spoke to it civilly, but didn’t oblige it. On ahead was the high wall of a boxwood hedge, and from somewhere beyond it came what sounded like low murmuring voices. Ashbless paused to consult his flask, then plunged into a gap in the hedge, up a little leafy avenue at the perimeter of a rectilinear maze. He turned left and right, then left again, running smack into a dead end. He retraced his steps and tried again. The murmuring got louder — the sound, certainly, of a pair of voices talking through the splash of falling water. He turned a corner, expecting to see more hedge, but with a suddenness that surprised him he found himself in a broad grassy clearing in the center of which was an ancient circular pool. Water bubbled up out of the center of it, splashing merrily around the head and shoulders of — Ashbless was sure of it — the thing from the doorway, the swimmer in the canal: old Cardigan Peach, Basil’s father. In an instant he was gone.

Basil looked up in surprise, squinted in the direction of the approaching poet, and rose to meet him with an outstretched hand but without any trace of a smile on his face.

Chapter 16

The morning after his father’s visit, Jim awoke to the sound of thunder, low, distant rumbles that rolled across miles and miles of rooftops. The wind blew in fits, now slacking off, now Mowing raindrops against the window in a rhythmic patter, stray drops plunking down onto the quilt. Jim turned the pages of Huckleberry Finn, rereading the first chapters — perfect rainy weather reading, it seemed to him. There was no pressing reason to get up. With luck he could idle away two or three hours before boredom got the best of him.

He could almost taste the rainy air, and could hear it gurgling through the gutters, rushing out onto the lawn and pooling up on the grass. It was just the right sort of day to set up aquaria. He’d talk his father and uncle into driving him down to the tropical fish store, or he’d ride down on his bicycle if the rain let off, and spend his money on a pair of buffalo-head cichlids. For the moment, though, there was nothing that appealed to him more than simply staring out the window, glancing from time to time at a particularly evocative paragraph, savoring the sounds of the words and the pictures they called up against a background of raindrops.

He clambered out of bed abruptly and stepped across to his dresser. Atop it lay the half dozen bottle caps. He arranged them in a neat hexagon, then in a circle, then, dissatisfied, scrambled them randomly. That still wasn’t quite right. He shifted them around until they were positioned with just the right quality of randomness — no two colors together, none touching nor yet too far removed from the rest — a sort of little circus of bottle caps. Then he plucked the Nehi orange out of the lot and shoved it into his pants pocket, a good luck piece, his father had said. That suited Jim perfectly. The vacant spot in the midst of the remaining caps would remind him of it, and of his father’s appearance at midnight.

Once out of bed, Jim itched to be out and about. It was just the sort of day that Giles Peach fancied, the sort of day to tinker in the garage, to be embroiled in useless projects. He wondered where his friend was and what strange company he was keeping. Wondering about it led from one thing to another, and, in a shot, he knew what he had to do. Everyone else had been off chasing through sewers, having adventures, and he’d been sitting around the house reading a book. It was time to act. In ten minutes he slid out the front door unseen. He could hear his father shuffling around up the hall, and his uncle talking on the phone, to Professor Latzarel probably.

Jim set off down the street toward Gill’s house. Velma Peach would have gone to work almost an hour ago; on Saturdays she left at seven. He had all day long. He would slip into the back yard and go in through the dining room window. He and Gill had done it a dozen times, usually in the middle of the night. Just to be safe, though, he knocked on the front door, feigning nonchalance, and very nearly screamed aloud when the door swung open to reveal Velma Peach in a housecoat. She had a soupy look about her and she sniffled into a handkerchief. She hadn’t gone to work, but had stayed home sick.

Jim was flustered. He hadn’t thought of an excuse, so busy was he with his plan for crawling in the window. “I came for some books,” he said truthfully, “but I don’t want to bother you, your being sick and all. I can come some other time.”

Velma Peach shoved the door open and nodded him in. “You’ll have to get them. There’s thousands of them in there. Lord knows how he keeps track of them. I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea which are his and which aren’t.”

Jim smiled. “I can tell,” he said, sliding past her down the hall toward Gill’s room, praying that she wouldn’t follow him. But Velma Peach had little interest in books. She went off toward the kitchen, blowing her nose voluminously, chattering about cold capsules. Jim strode across to where Gill’s journals sat tilted together against a glass brick. There were only three of them. There would be another box full somewhere — probably under the bed. And Gill would have taken a volume with him. That much was certain. But he couldn’t go heaving off down the hallway and out the door with an entire carton of three-ring binders. So he shoved the most recent under his jacket, pushing his hands into his pockets and holding onto the spine. He was bulky and pointy-looking when he hastened back out into the hall, but it didn’t matter, his friend’s mother was rattling in the sink. “Did you find them?” she called.

“Yes,” shouted Jim, “thanks.” And he banged out the front door before he was forced to carry on any more conversation. A minute and half later he was in his own living room, heart pounding, opening the heavy volume.

“There’s something screwy here with the dates,” said William, taking a sip of coffee. “That’s apparent at a glance. Most of this would be inconsiderable except for that.”

“They could be faked,” said Edward.

“Of course they are,” Latzarel put in, slathering butter and jam across a piece of toast. “Imagination is what it is. Exaggeration.”

“Look here.” William pointed at something in the journal, which, of course, none of the rest of them could actually see. “Here on the tenth of November. I’ll read it: ‘There were the bones of a child sprouting from the rocks like fan coral, waving in the green water when the waves washed across. It was very lonely and was picked apart by cuttlefish and carried away to build nests of human bones. Only a hand remained, and the fish wouldn’t approach for fear it would clutch at them.’”

Edward sat open-mouthed. “Where’s a calendar?” he said thickly.

William pulled his pocket calendar from his wallet.

“What was the date of the entry?” asked Edward.

“The tenth.”

“That’s a Saturday?”

“No,” said William. “It’s a Wednesday. Saturday’s the thirteenth.”

Edward pushed himself up from his chair and dashed from the room. “I’ve got to check the tide chart,” he shouted, slamming the kitchen door behind him. Outside in the maze shed, the Len’s Baithouse octopus leered out from the chart on the wall, wearing his foolish cap. Edward walked back into the house.

“Let me guess,” said Professor Latzarel, poking a scrap of toast in Edward’s direction. “You found the tidepool hand three days after the supposed date of the notation.”

“I found it wrapped around the skeleton of a fish — a tidepool sculpin from the look of it.” Edward rubbed his forehead. The whole idea of it was preposterous, outlandish. “You don’t suppose, do you …” he began, but Professor Latzarel, a rationalist, cut him off.

“Of course not. None of us supposes that for a moment. He was careless with dates. More likely, it’s a matter of self-grandeur — making up for obvious inadequacies, or so he would think. He manipulated the dates in a little game with himself — probably persuaded himself too. It’s a simple matter. Entirely a simple matter, like his nasal irrigator.”

“His nasal irrigator powered an airborne submarine,” Edward pointed out practically.

William nodded and sipped at his coffee. “I tend to fall in with Edward on this for reasons of my own. But look here, just for the sake of logic. Giles referred to the fish avoiding this thing, this hand, but they very obviously didn’t. Not all of them anyway. The hand got one of them. …”

“Got one!” Latzarel exploded. ‘That’s the screwiest part of the whole business. Prescience is one thing, but that sort of fabulous prediction is foolishness. It’s a matter of imagination, like I said. And damned peculiar imagination at that.”

William shook his head slowly. “Not a bit of it. We’ve come too far down the garden path to be frightened off now by an improbable spider. But this business becomes more and more strange, doesn’t it? We’ll agree for the sake of argument that he didn’t go home that Saturday afternoon and simply scribble in his diary alongside a phony date. He’d know, then, that the hand had managed to grab a fish. For what earthly reason would he pretend not to know? No, sir. I’m certain this was written days earlier. But is it a matter of prescience?”

“It must be,” said Edward, slapping the tabletop.

“Yes,” said William. “You see why too.”

“I don’t see a thing but foolery,” said Latzarel. “But explain it to me anyway.”

“Well suppose it’s not mere prescience,” said William. “It could only mean one thing — that Giles’ forecasts created the thing. That the tidepool hand was a product of his journal.”

Latzarel started to protest, but Edward leaped in before him. “But it can’t be,” he said. “Obviously. If it were, then the hand wouldn’t have caught a fish. The journal mandates against it. But if it were prescience, then we’d allow him the error. We can’t expect him to have had a vision of the entire future of that pool.”

“Of course not,” said William, happy that pieces were falling into place. He skimmed the rest of the entry, paused, and looked up. “Also,” he said, “if Giles were responsible for the existence of the hand, then squids would live in houses made of human bones. We can’t have one without the other.”

“True,” said Edward. “Look at the next page. We’re onto something here.”

On the next page, Thursday of the same week, was a single, short entry, “It caught its first fish, which was torn apart by crabs.” Following that was a name: “Oscar Pillbug.”

“Oscar Pillbug?” said Latzarel. ‘This is exceedingly strange. The lad’s demented.”

“Worse,” said William. “That hashes up the prescience theory.”

“Not necessarily,” said Edward. “It just allows for the possibility of the other. Of Giles the creator. Of squids in ribcages.”

“What in the world is Oscar Pillbug?” Latzarel asked.

“I think he meant Oscar Pallcheck,” said Jim. “He used to make up names like that, but they didn’t do any good. Oscar laughed at them.”

Latzarel nodded, easily satisfied. “Poor, tortured soul,” he said. “But look here. I don’t think this squid and bones business has any scientific basis. Surely by now someone would have documented the phenomenon. The oceans aren’t utterly unexplored, after all.”

“No,” said William. “But for my money, squids had no notion of living in skeletons before last November. That’s got to be the case, you see.”

“Unless Giles is simply prescient,” Edward put in.

“Of course,” said Latzarel, squinting into his coffee cup.

William whistled in surprise, pointing at the journal. There on November 13 was the name “Oscar Tarbaby.”

There was a silence round the table. “Ominous business, isn’t it?” said Edward

“Disturbing,” said William. “How much do you suppose he’s capable of?”

“You’re not suggesting,” said Latzarel, “that there’s some connection between this and the Pallcheck boy’s death in the tarpits?”

William shrugged. “I’m not suggesting anything. The journal suggests a bit, though. Here’s more. ‘The silver wires of anti-gravity devices could be woven into the spokes of bicycle wheels or attached to a car’s exhaust system, having a similar effect in either case on the physical properties of the aether.’ Look how he spells ether here. Where in the world did he come up with that? He must get his data out of Paracelsus.” William paused to dump sugar into his coffee. “‘It could similarly be directed at a human lung, since the effect is one of emanated rays traveling on gaseous molecular structures.’ The boy’s a genius!” cried William. “I’ve got to get this to Fairfax. It alters the sensor utterly.”

“I can see that it must,” said Edward quickly, fearing that William would sidetrack himself into scientific meditations, “but what does it say about directing an anti-gravity mechanism at someone’s lungs?”

“Oh, yes,” said William, peering once again at the page and reading. “‘It’s possible that a simple ray would be suitable to levitate a body if carefully directed, and I could throw Oscar Fat-face into the La Brea Tar Pits which is where he crawled out of anyway. I’m going to fix him first, though. He’ll be a sorry, ugly toad.’”

“That settles it!” cried Edward.

“How?” asked Latzarel.

“All of it! Everything’s true. Every fragment of it. And it might be our salvation as easily as our doom.”

“Of course it might,” William assented, standing up and striding back and forth across the kitchen floor. He opened the refrigerator door and looked inside, poking behind old half heads of lettuce and the remains of loaves of bread until he found a jar of kosher pickles. “Pinion’s a fool. My money on it, He’s got a mechanical mole that might as well be a park bench.” He paused for a moment thinking, and thrust the open pickle jar in the direction of the table. Latzarel waved him away, grimacing at the idea of an early morning pickle. William shoved two fingers into the jar and yanked out another, munching away at the thing heartily, then holding it aloft as a sort of indicator. “If we can find Giles,” he said, “and spirit him out of their reach, then Pinion and Frosticos may as well take a crosstown bus.”

“A tin wagon,” put in Edward.

“A motorized footstool,” said William, smiling at his brother-in-law.

Jim sat through the pickle conversation idly turning the pages of the journal, reading discoveries and inventions: of perpetual motion engines built of ball bearings and spools and empty oatmeal cartons; of anti-matter devices built of mirrors and old vacuum sweepers; of light-speed velocity boosters built of old lampshades, a glass bowl full of pink-tinted water, and a moon garden of charcoal clinkers and bluing. Toward the end of the volume, following a grisly account of the propulsion of Oscar Pallcheck, Jim found a long, hastily written entry. He interrupted his uncle’s musings about Giles’ possible improvement of the diving bell and read: “‘The voyage will be undertaken on March 21, the day of the vernal equinox, and will angle toward the equator at first, slowly righting itself until it achieves essential verticality somewhere under the southwest desert. Eighteen hours will suffice for the journey. The end of it is lost to me in fog. It’s possible that the fog veils Eden like Dr. Pinion says. But I can hear the far off sound of vast explosions and earthquakes, which might as easily be the roaring of the subterranean rivers through the polar openings. Either way, it doesn’t make much difference.’”

“What doesn’t?” asked Latzarel. “I wish he weren’t so damned weird! He sounds like a science fiction writer, for God’s sake.”

“He’s referring to the cataclysm,” said William. “Edward, you remember my dream? The death of Giles Peach in the desert? A rain of dinosaurs? Everything blowing to bits?”

Edward nodded. As much as he hated to admit it, he remembered the account of William’s dream very well. “I’m beginning to fear,” he said at last, poking at broken toast with the end of a fork, “that Giles is responsible for a great deal. Certainly for all the unaccountable phenomena. Maybe even for the merman …”

“Maybe,” said William, interrupting, “for the hollow Earth itself. It’s possible, you know. It could well be a product of Basil and Giles both. If we take a good look at the psychology of this thing. …”

“Oh come on,” cried Latzarel, pushed to the edge. “I haven’t been pursuing figments. I won’t have that. You’re both making a mountain out of a molehill here.”

“I’m afraid,” said William darkly, “that in this business there’s little possibility of exaggeration. “I’m beginning to be convinced that Giles’ meddling is going to crack the earth open like a melon unless we step in. Giles had better not be aboard that digger on the twenty-first.”

“Back to square one,” said Latzarel, referring to the search for Giles Peach. “Where do we look next?”

William shrugged. Edward poured himself a last cup of toffee and looked out of the kitchen window. A battered pickup truck rattled into view on the street, pulling up to the curb and scraping along until it came to a rest in front of the house. In the back was a lawnmower, an edger, and an assortment of brooms, rakes, clippers, gunny sacks, and shovels. It was Yamoto, the gardener, come round to attend to the Pembly lawn. Edward’s heart sank like a brick.

The threatened destruction of the Earth paled, as William, alert to the creaking drop and bang of Yamoto’s tailgate, lost interest in his pickle jar and hurried into the front room.

He crouched in front of the window, partially hidden by the drape, and peered out at the gardener. There could be little doubt as to his purpose, his motive. He didn’t care a rap about mowing lawns. He wore a pair of voluminous white trousers and a white cloth cap, both of which had been standard issue at the sanitarium several years past. William was almost sure of it. Why else would he wear such ridiculous clothes? He pretended to fiddle with his equipment: dumping gas into the mower, removing the spark plug from the edger and rubbing at it with a little piece of emery paper. William wasn’t fooled. He guessed Yamoto’s apprehension, saw the little glances of unease he cast around, feigning interest in hedges, in crabgrass, in sprinklerheads, but all the time watching, waiting, sniffing the air.

Clouds seemed to be gathering again. The street, which hadn’t been dry for an hour, was cast into sudden shadow. Distant thunder, faint and thin, almost like the tittering of laughter, blew along the street on the wind. William could just hear it through the cold window glass pressed against his ear. The sound of Edward and Professor Latzarel talking in the kitchen fell away into the murk, and every brittle clink and clank of Yamoto’s activity among the machines stood out clearly like a leafless tree on a barren winter hilltop.

The gardener yanked on the rope starter, animating the mower, and set off across the lawn, throwing the heavy grass into a steel catcher. He was within an ace of disappearing from view, of vanishing beyond the curve of a hibiscus, when he turned his head sharply, as if having heard something — the scraping of William’s fingernails along the sill, the tapping of his wedding ring against the glass, or the faint rhythmic exhalations of his breathing. Then he was gone.

“I say,” said Edward, materializing suddenly behind William, “there’s no need to bother with him now. He can’t hurt us, can he? Not as long as you stay out of sight. They’ve probably sent him around to smoke you out.”

“Of course they have. There’s not a bit of doubt.” William fell abruptly silent, staring out past the drape, ducking back in alarm when Yamoto sped into view, sailing at the rear of his flying mower as if hurrying to finish before the rain began afresh. William knew it was a ruse. Mowing the lawn wasn’t the issue. It had never been the issue. They were afraid of him, of his power. They locked him up in a prison masquerading as a hospital, hired burly guards to watch him, filled him with drugs to keep him docile, and he walked out under their noses. He slipped into the sewers and vanished, puffo, like a magician’s coin, reappearing where he chose, in the doctor’s very cellar, blinking away again in an instant, befuddling a host of pursuers.

Yamoto was afraid. That explained his peculiar behavior, his agitation. He’d been sent out on a mission against a phantom. William was an adversary whom Frosticos himself had failed to subdue. William would have a bit of fun with him. The worm had turned The proverbial shoe was on the other foot. He reached for the doorknob.

“Really,” said Edward, touching his shoulder, “leave the man alone. He’ll cut their foolish grass and go along. He does it every week. You’ve got no quarrel with him, not today.”

William brushed Edward aside. “They’re going to regret meddling with me. Starting now. This is no time to cower. They can smell it. Sniff it out like wolves, like carrion eaters. They feed on it, fear. A man has to act. Dignity is the word here. Self-respect. Damn him and his filthy machine, the scum-sucking pig. I’m going to make him a disappointed fellow. Mark my words.”

William started to go on, but the look on Edward’s face gave him pause.

“Think of Jim,” said Edward thickly.

“I rarely stop thinking of Jim,” said William. “I’m fairly sure he understands me. And besides, I’m not going to go raging out there; I’m only going to make it warm for him, play on his superstitions.”

A crack of thunder rattled the windows. There was a simultaneous wash of wind-carried rain thrown up under the gabled porch roof as the storm burst out afresh, driving rain and hail along the sidewalk in black showers. Water was running in the gutters almost at once, and Yamoto, his trousers glued to his legs, raced for his track, loading equipment into the back of it and fleeing before the storm, leaving the Pembly lawn half cut.

“There goes the scoundrel!” cried Edward, suddenly elated at the arrival of the propitious storm. The threat had passed, at least for the moment. Edward prayed silently that it would rain for the rest of the day, for a week. There was more at stake here than William’s liberty. Quite likely far more.

William looked saddened at Yamoto’s absconding. He hadn’t had a chance at him. He had half a mind to play his hand anyway — to go out and hash up Mrs. Pembly’s begonias, to do a wild dance in the rain in front of her kitchen window — to strike fear into her. But Edward wouldn’t go for it. He could see that. And her car was gone. She wasn’t home anyway. He’d end up dancing in the rain just to play the fool. But he’d fix her somehow. In the night. She’d rue the day she cast her hat into the ring with the evil gardener.

The whump of a newspaper against the front door burst the bubble of his reverie, and he looked out to see a newspaper boy, hunched over the handlebars of his bicycle, pedaling through the rain in a plastic overcoat.

“That would be the Times,” said Edward. “Lets have a look at Spekowsky’s column. I’m convinced now that Ashbless drove him off on purpose that night at the Newtonians, then sucked up to him later.” He opened the door, plucked up the paper, and handed it to William, hoping to sidetrack him. William, half attending, opened the paper and thumbed around in it. Professor Latzarel wandered in from the kitchen.

“There it is,” said Edward. “Page ten. Russ!” he shouted as William handed him the paper. Edward shook it straight, looking over the page. There was an article on a giant bullfrog — Bufo Morinus — that had been sighted chasing a stray dog, and another on new evidence for a tenth planet, which astronomers suggested might conceivably be flat like a disc, completely invisible when viewed from the side — a product of the fourth dimension. Another story, only a third of a column or so, concerned an uncanny discovery by commercial abalone fishermen of an entire latticework reef of human bones off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It wasn’t known where the bones had come from, but it seemed likely that they’d drifted down on the longshore current into a declivity and had heaped up there into a strange and unlikely graveyard. Some were so utterly covered with polyps and hydras as to be unrecognizable, perhaps prodigiously old. A scattering of Spanish coins was found, leading oceanographers to speculate that among the skeletons lay mariners who’d met their fate on piratical voyages hundreds of years past There was the suspicion that Francis Drake had journeyed farther south than had previously been supposed. But what was baffling was the sheer number of bones — countless millions of them, heaped together in ivory spires in the midst of a forest of kelp. And in among them hovered thousands of squid, as if in a city of their own making.

“Imagine how surprised we would have been,” said William, “if we’d come across that article yesterday. It must be baffling the devil out of a number of people.”

Latzarel snorted in the middle of a swallow of coffee. He gasped violently, choking and sputtering. “It’s a commonplace to us,” he managed to say after his fit had passed. William nodded seriously, missing the irony in his friend’s statement.

“Here’s another,” said Edward, turning the page of the remarkable newspaper. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. ‘Professor John Pinion announced today the completion of his mechanical digging machine, a vehicle constructed for the purpose of exploring the interior of the Earth. The device, which is reported to be the product of several major discoveries in the area of physics and mathematics, will be launched in late March.’ “

“It’s finished then,” said William, frowning. “That’s news indeed.”

“I don’t see why it should be,” said Latzarel. “You don’t for a moment think that Pinion has made any sort of breakthroughs in physics and mathematics? This is all mummery.”

“No,” said Edward. “John Pinion hasn’t done anything at all, beyond financing the building of Giles’ machine. The problem here, if I understand William’s concern, is that if the machine is indeed done, then Giles Peach can be disposed of, at least kept under wraps. His immediate usefulness is past. They could put him on a bus to Arizona and he’d be as safe from us as if he were on the moon. We’d never find him.”

Latzarel was silent. William drummed his fingers on the aim of his chair. Edward squinted at his shoe. When you added it all up, they hadn’t played much of a hand; they’d only expended a great deal of energy, sailing across the channel to Catalina, running up and down sewers. Edward couldn’t help dwelling on the last pages of the journal, on the threatened cataclysm. It was small recompense to know that when the world burst open — probably on April Fool’s Day — and William’s wooly mammoths and Neanderthal men spewed out like popping coin, only the four of them would know why. They alone would have the answer to the last great scientific mystery, but it would avail them nothing.

Jim stood up and waved the journal at the front window, a look of grieved horror on his face. William, assuming at first that Yamoto had returned, was out of his chair and striding toward the door before he realized mat he was wrong — that two police cars were parked at the curb, and a pair of uniformed officers were putting on helmets and unhooking the straps on revolvers and nightsticks.

William fled toward the rear of the house. Jim dashed into his father’s room, stripped the blankets and sheets from the bed, and crammed the lot of it along with his father’s pajamas into the hamper in the bathroom. Professor Latzarel ran into the kitchen and jammed William’s plate, knife, fork, and coffee cup into the trashbag beneath the sink. Edward opened the door wearing a look of mock surprise, and met the two dripping policemen on the porch.

“We have a warrant for the arrest of William Hastings,” said one, pulling a paper from beneath his yellow raincoat.

Edward lurched inwardly even though he had known the blow was coming. He shook his head sadly. “I’ve heard about the altercation,” he said, giving them a chagrined look. “Dr. Frosticos informed me of it yesterday morning. There was a report that he was hiding in the sewers. Have you looked there?”

Neither of the two answered. One, however, stepped past Edward and peered into the living room. Professor Latzarel waved out at him. “We’re authorized to search your house,” said the other officer, a burly man with a nose like a golf ball. “This is the house belonging to the alleged suspect?”

“To Mr. Hastings?” Edward asked. “Yes, it is. I’m his brother-in-law.” He showed the two in. “Cup of coffee?”

“No,” said the one with the nose.

“What is it, exactly, that you were looking for?”

“Didn’t we just say?” said the other, scowling at Edward. “William Hastings.”

“Oh!” Edward said, feigning surprise. “Here?”

Both of them gave him a long tired look, as if to suggest that he’d best think twice about cracking wise.

Edward decided to brass it out. “I had no idea he’d headed this way. None at all.”

“Right,” said the burly one.

“In fact,” said Edward, following the two into the hallway, “I suggested to Dr. Frosticos that Mr. Hastings had fled north — to Humboldt County. He’s done it before. He’s not entirely well, if you catch my meaning, and he has the peculiar notion that northern California is a sort of magical place.”

“Do you have any knowledge of his actual whereabouts?”

“Actual knowledge of his actual whereabouts? No. Not actual knowledge. Just a hunch. He used to take a cabin every spring off Trinity Head. Last time he escaped they found him holed up there.”

“Take this down,” said the burly one to his partner, who hauled a little notebook out of his pocket and scribbled into it.

Professor Latzarel wandered in from the living room. “Can I be of any help?” he said.

“No.”

“I know a good bit about human psychology,” Latzarel said, as if that revelation would change things entirely.

“Me too,” said the one with the bulbous nose. “Piss-cology is what I call it.” He pushed open the door to Edward’s room, freezing at the sight of the mobile of stuffed bats that hung in the center of the room and at the mummified head and shoulders of a human being that sat in a glass case on the dresser. The floor around the bed was a whirlwind of books and papers.

Golf ball nose squinted at Edward, unsure, perhaps, whether he hadn’t ought simply to shoot him at once. “Take this down,” he said to his younger companion, waving generally at the room. Then under his breath he muttered, “Some people live like pigs,” and pushed down the hall past Edward and Latzarel who followed along, both of them wondering exactly how the bats and mummy contributed to Edward’s living like a Pig.

The rest of the house yielded nothing revealing. They tramped in a procession out the back door and into the maze shed, where the axolotl and the baithouse octopus drew more utterances of contempt. Finally, after glancing into the aquarium shed, they shined flashlights under the house, having heard, perhaps, that William had been known to hide there. They left without a word.

Five minutes passed before Edward dared give William the all clear. It was entirely possible that the two would simply circle the block and return, hoping to catch them out. But there was no further sign of them. The street was empty and the rain began to pour. Edward and Professor Latzarel hurried out into the back yard and around the maze shed, tapping three times on the side of a fifty gallon plastic trashcan. The lid tumbled off, followed by a cardboard carton of grass clippings that fit neatly into the can. William came smiling out from beneath it, his hair fall of cut grass.

Chapter 17

The weeks passed. William would have supposed they’d fly by, since time was so short and their efforts to locate Giles so entirely futile. But they didn’t. They crept along like bugs, peering at them day to day, crawling toward the end of March and — William was increasingly certain — an end to all things, to human dreams and illusions.

With the approach of the first day of spring — dismal, upended days that never really dawned but simply murked into a sort of gray drizzle that continued into the evening — came an ice cream truck. Whether it was Pinion’s truck, Edward couldn’t say. Neither he nor Jim had paid enough attention to it to identify it for certain. And anyway, Pinion wasn’t driving it. An Oriental man, not Yamoto, hunched behind the wheel, playing tinny jingles through a speaker perched on the top of the truck. He appeared from the mist, driving slowly but apparently pointlessly along the street. For when Edward, in a sudden fit of suspicion, hailed him through the drizzle waving a dollar bill, the truck rumbled away down the block unheeding. The same thing happened the following afternoon.

The two policemen returned twice, asking about the alleged suspect, but William was too quick for them, going to ground in his trashcan until the baying of the hounds faded. On their second visit they performed a cursory sort of search — a tired search, as if under orders. On the third visit they stood on the porch and threatened Edward with a jail term for harboring a criminal. Edward played the fool.

Mrs. Pembly, blessedly, was off visiting a sister for the first week, and so was unaware of William’s return. And later, when she spied him one afternoon through the window, it was possible that she had no way of knowing that he was a wanted man, that he hadn’t been released from the asylum. Edward made it a point to be obsequiously nice to her, giving her a bagful of avocados once and assuring her in heartfelt tones that William, finally, had come to his senses. Edward himself would guarantee his good behavior. Twice he had to talk William out of going for her when the mysterious and inexplicable globs of dog waste appeared under the elm. It was almost more than William could bear.

Professor Latzarel haunted the bluffs at Palos Verdes, standing on the cliffs like Moses, hoping that the seas would swirl and part to reveal a long straight corridor into the Earth, or that Giles Peach would rise out of the depths like an undernourished Neptune and give him a sign. But there was nothing but seagulls and wind and the sound of breaking waves until the end of the second week of William’s freedom.

Then a postcard arrived — from Giles. It had been mailed in Windermere a week earlier. He’d sent it to his mother who brought it along at once to Edward. Giles had gone off to find his father, and to “think things through.”

“Think things through?” said Professor Latzarel. “Why the devil would anyone go to England just to think things through? It’s a miserable place in March. Nothing but cold and rain. And why couldn’t he have stayed here and thought?”

“He wanted to confront his father, I suppose,” said Edward.

Latzarel shook his head as if he found the whole thing hard to believe. “I hope so. Because once Basil finds out that Frosticos has gotten hi? hands on Giles, he’ll take steps. How much do you think he knows about Reginald’s fate?”

Edward shrugged.

“I rather think,” said William, lighting his pipe, “that there’s more to this than meets the eye.”

“Isn’t there always?” asked Latzarel.

“I mean to say that Giles didn’t come to this decision alone. He was sent to Windermere. Frosticos and Pinion were through with Giles, and they feared that we’d get hold of him. They’re more worried about us than we give them credit for. They’ve shipped him off.”

“But they need him,” Edward complained. “To run the machine. They wouldn’t dare take the chance of letting him roam so far. Not now.”

William shook his head, playing devil’s advocate. “How do you know they need him? That’s speculation. The digger is finished — all signs point that way. Perhaps whatever magic Giles put into it is there to stay.”

Latzarel wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think so. His devices are built of nasal irrigators and bundles of twine. They can’t work. It must be Giles himself that motivates them.”

“Take your blinders off, Russel!” William admonished, poking his pipe in Latzarel’s direction. “Assume nothing about the physical universe or you’ve boxed yourself in. I don’t know a thing about these nasal irrigators you keep referring to, but I’m very willing to believe in the magic of a bundle of twine. Have you really ever studied twine, after all?”

“No,” admitted Latzarel, “but …”

“No buts,” said William conclusively. “The bird has flown. And if we sit around here smug, assuming he’ll return for the launching on the twenty-first, our goose is cooked. Who says they’ll launch on the twenty-first anyway? The newspaper, quoting Pinion. What a combination. And the journal, of course. But how do we know it’s entirely accurate? How do we know Pinion and Frosticos won’t gum the whole thing up and launch early?”

“What exactly are you suggesting?” asked Edward. “What choice have we but to wait for his return?”

“We jolly well go after him. That’s what choice we have. What does it cost, a few hundred dollars? Fat lot of buying you’ll do with your money when the world is breaking up like a dirt clod.”

“The money’s not the issue,” said Latzarel, always willing to spend a few dollars for the sake of existence. “But let’s be practical for a minute. …”

William interrupted him by removing and waving his pocket watch. “You’ve got about sixty thousand left to be practical in. Then you’ll be scaling the stars with cave men.”

“Sixty thousand what?“ asked Latzarel, beginning to lose his temper.

“Minutes, man. We haven’t half enough time to be practical. We hate practicality. Practicality didn’t build Pinion’s leviathan. You’ve said as much yourself. Where’s the old sewer rat Latzarel who outfoxed that mob up on Patchen Street? Old one-shoe Latzarel, popping in at the window?”

Latzarel grumbled and slouched in his chair. Edward shrugged and raised his eyebrows. From the kitchen, Jim said, “You’re not going without me this time.”

“There’s a man for you!” cried William. “Damn the filthy torpedoes! They won’t be looking for us in Windermere. We’ll pop over there and snatch him. Basil will come in on our side. They’ve made a fatal error here, that’s what I think, and we’re going to trip them up. It’s that or we sit around here and mope. What do you say?”

“I say I go along,” Jim repeated. “You’ll need me when it comes to talking Gill into all this. He’ll listen to me.”

“He’s right,” said William. “By God if you two won’t come along, Jim and I will do the deed ourselves. It won’t take a week. We’ve already got the family passport. It’s good for seven years, isn’t it?”

“It’s good for nothing, as far as you’re concerned,” said Edward. “You’ll never get out of the airport. This whole thing might be a ruse to flush you out, you know. A set-up.”

“Pah!” cried William, who wasn’t about to be left behind. “It’s been two weeks now. They don’t stake out airports for two weeks looking for a man who bonked someone with a flashlight. And I’ll be entirely safe outside the country. A free man. It’s just the thing, as far as …”

The phone rang, interrupting William’s argument. It was Velma Peach, overwrought. Confused. She’d just that moment had a phone call from Giles. Edward covered the mouthpiece with his hand and told his friends. This was news indeed. He listened for a moment, his face growing more serious. It hadn’t been a long distance call. At least it hadn’t sounded like one. Giles wanted to come home. Everyone, he said, was in terrible danger. He had wanted so desperately to complete his journey. To pierce the hollow Earth, to return to the land of his ancestors — the Promised Land, he’d called it. But doing so, he feared, would burst it like a soap bubble on the winds of space. What, asked Velma Peach, did it all mean? What was the nonsense about ancestors? Her side of the family had come from Lithuania by boat with their money sewed inside their clothes; Basil’s from the Lake District. What promised land?

Edward made half an effort to explain Giles’ reference, careful to euphemize the entire account, but incapable of concentration. Could the phone call, he kept wondering, have come from Windermere? And if not, then what about the postcard? Had Giles hurried home so soon? And where was he now, kept, apparently, against his will? Edward hung up, puzzled.

They smoked a pipe over it for a moment. Then Professor Latzarel, his doubts vindicated in part by this new turn, said, “You’ve been hoaxed. That’s what the case is. Giles isn’t in Windermere. He’s never been. The postcard was a forgery, either to smoke William out of here or to send us all off on a goose chase — run us around pointlessly. We’d have gotten to London and found new evidence and gone racing off in some other direction. It’s slow and easy that we want here; that’s what I think. Sixty thousand minutes isn’t time enough as it is. You were right there. It doesn’t leave us any to waste, does it?” He looked at William triumphantly.

William nodded. The phone call put a new coat of paint on the horse. “I’ve got an idea,” said William, slapping his knee. “We call Basil. Easy as that. Either Giles is at Windermere or he’s not. Perhaps he’s been and gone already. Perhaps he never intended to go. It would be an easy enough thing for men with Pinion’s and Frosticos’ connections to have a forged postcard mailed. Easy as pie.”

It took an hour to get through to Basil Peach, and William, for the length of their discussion, fancied he heard voices in the background, lost among general noise, scratching along, now fading, now growing in volume until Basil’s voice began to sound almost as distant as it was. Once, in the midst of a discussion of strange local events, the ghostly insinuating voice disappeared utterly for the space of five seconds, then burst in with the words, “a two-penny head!” so loudly that William dropped the phone. It made no sense to him, and struck him as being all the more suggestive as a result — particularly as Basil couldn’t hear a bit of it.

Basil was unaccountably disturbed. There was a feeling, he said, in the air. An electricity. A desperation. Over the past week dead animals had bubbled up out of Lake Windermere, rising to the surface like released balloons and floating ashore in the willows below the hall. Basil spent his days collecting them. There were enough rumors afoot regarding the manor — rumors that hearkened back hundreds of years — without adding to them a boatload of decayed beasts.

“Beasts?” asked William. “From the lake? Do you mean fish?”

“No,” said Basil. “Animals. An odd tailless monkey with webbed feet and paws, and a thing that looked like an armadillo but without the pointed snout. Then, yesterday afternoon, a rush of little creatures — some sort of scaled hedgehog — beached themselves, all drowned.” Basil had a basket of them. He hadn’t any idea what to do with them. Burn them? The stink would attract the attention of everyone within miles. He was throwing quicklime on them until he could bury them. But in the future, years hence, they’d be dug up and would confirm Lord-knew-what sorts of local suspicions. And on top of it all, who should drop in but Ashbless with an utterly cockeyed scheme.

“Ashbless!” cried William. And to his suddenly alert companions he said, “There’s your postcard! What did he want? No, let me guess. He had a proposal for you. He wanted you to take him to the center of the Earth. He didn’t know how, but he was certain you could. Am I right?”

“Yes,” said Peach. “How did you know? Did he approach you too?”

“That’s right. In a nut. But he abandoned ship when he thought he saw us going down. He’s crafty. Not one to play second fiddle. He didn’t compel you then?”

“No, he didn’t. Although he had an awfully good argument.” Basil Peach fell silent, giving the phone up to the scratchy, spirit voices which carried on about ghost finances for a moment before abruptly disappearing, as if they had become suddenly aware of being overheard. Then Basil, haltingly, said, “He offered to deliver Giles ‘out of bondage.’ Those were his words. Do you know what he meant?”

“Yes,” said William.

“Then it’s true. I thought it was a lie.”

William hesitated, searching for direction. “No, it’s not a lie. But it’s likely not as bad as he made it out. He’s …”

“It’s far worse than you suppose. Unutterably worse.”

“Velma talked to him today on the telephone. He’s well. We’re on his trail. We’re going to scuttle their ship. In fact we’ve got certain knowledge of his whereabouts,” William lied. “We’re going to try to keep the authorities out of it.”

“For God’s sake,” said Basil, “don’t involve anyone but yourself. Notoriety would kill him. If he’s at all like I am, he hates himself as much as he hates me, and what he wants more than anything else is to find a hole in the shell of this world and climb through it. And if he can’t find one, he’ll make it. Mark my words. You don’t half understand it.”

“The interior world,” said William, changing the subject abruptly, “does it exist?”

“Oh, it exists,” said Basil cryptically. “But as I say, I have these fears. Giles and I are attuned, if that’s the word I want. I can feel certain emanations. I’m very much afraid that the destruction of the entire planet would satisfy him almost as much as would his escaping it. And that’s what bothers me about these damned beasts in the weeds. They must have felt the same thing.”

“Like pigs and cattle before an earthquake,” said William. ‘They’re fleeing something. I’ve written a treatise on that very subject.”

‘That’s it exactly,” Basil put in, not waiting to hear about the treatise. “Anyway, I couldn’t help old William. I’d have liked to, regardless of the extortion. But I don’t engage in that kind of thing anymore. I’ve settled into certain habits. And I have my father to look after. He’s … declined, I suppose, is the word for it. I’ll follow him down the path just as surely as the sun follows the moon.” Basil fell into a contemplative silence.

“Well,” said William, trying to leave off on a cheerful note, “we’ll keep you posted. We’ll have results in a day or two. You can count on it. End of the week at worst. Keep your chin up.

On the other end was nothing but a faint clicking and the sound of a chorus of ghostly murmuring, too far removed to be understood, just a babble of hushed voices jabbering in a void. William hung up.

Professor Latzarel listened to William’s recounting of the story with a look of incredulity on his face. “By God!” he cried, interrupting William. “I’d like to have a look at these animals. They’d substantiate a thing or two. And out of Windermere! Fancy a connection in a lake.”

“Interesting” said Edward, “that the connections are always in proximity to a Peach, if you follow my meaning.”

“Aye,” said William, arching his eyebrows. “Damned interesting. And what about Ashbless playing old Pinion false? Working one side against the other.” He shook his head.

There was a distant jingling of bells: ding-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding, a tired, unseasonable Jingle Bells, just audible through the window and the drizzle of rain. It drew closer. Edward stepped over to the window, and there, half a block down, rattled the mysterious ice cream truck, crawling inexorably along the empty, cold street. Edward pushed out the front door, drew a dollar bill out of his wallet, and waited for the truck.

He waved the bill at the driver, whistling. The track crept abreast of him, jingling maddeningly. For a moment he was certain it would stop. He’d be forced to buy a popsicle or a sidewalk sundae. It would likely turn into another Pince Nez business. He would stumble into the house having sacrificed a fortune on a box of webby ice cream bars.

The driver ignored him, slid past and pursued his way east, turning the corner and shutting off his foolish bells. Edward could hear him accelerating along the road, giving up his attempt — if there had ever been an attempt — at selling ice cream. Who the driver was, Edward couldn’t say. But he was certain that it was Pinion’s truck. He could feel it. He sprinted up to the house, stuck his head in the door, and shouted, “Let’s go!” then ducked back out, climbing into the Wasp and starting it up.

It was then, just as William was grabbing his coat, intent upon escaping for the moment the prison in which he’d been held a captive for weeks, that a black and white police car rounded the corner and approached up the street. William nearly pitched off the front porch, so sudden was his change of mind. Professor Latzarel stumbled past, almost knocking William into the yard, then saw the police car speeding up and simply continued on. The Wasp pulled away just as the police drew up to the curb. William had vanished. Jim sat nonchalantly on the front porch reading a book. Edward half expected the police to pursue him, an occurrence that would give William ample time to make away.

But they didn’t, perhaps for that very reason. Hard as it was to abandon poor William, Edward accelerated to the corner, jogged down and around onto Stickley Street, and sped out toward Colorado, where the ice cream truck was disappearing into a blur of drizzle and traffic, south toward Glendale. Edward followed a hundred yards back, confident that he had so far gone unnoticed. At Verdugo Road the truck pulled abruptly into the parking lot of Powers’ Tobacco and Bookshop, the rear door fell open, and William Ashbless climbed out, rubbing his hands together and hurrying in. Five minutes later he was crawling back into the truck carrying a stack of books. The door slammed shut, and the driver motored away down Colorado, turning up Brand onto Kenneth Road, then up Western to Patchen where it stopped just along enough in front of the house of Dr. Frosticos for Ashbless to clamber out. Edward threw caution into the dustheap and drove along up Patchen, sliding slowly past the shingled bungalow. Ashbless had pushed through the junipers into the back yard.

“Drive on up the road,” Edward ordered, shoving his door open and climbing out. He followed the poet’s trail into the bushes. He hadn’t any idea what he was going to do, but he was convinced that it was his turn to go spying, that it was high time he reciprocated for the daily visits of the ubiquitous ice cream truck.

He peered around the corner into the rear yard, half expecting to see any number of people staring back: Ashbless and Pinion, Frosticos and Yamoto, perhaps the mysterious Han Koi and his knife-wielding henchmen. What he saw was the yawning mouth of the cellar, the door thrown back on its hinge.

Edward crept across and peered in, listening. All was silent. He was certain that the cellar didn’t connect with the rest of the house. If Ashbless had entered the cellar then either he was still there or he’d gone through the trapdoor into the sewer. Edward went down two steps, crouching and squinting, ready to take to his heels. No one confronted him. Two steps farther down, he was able to see into the entire, empty cellar. The Oriental carpet was tossed aside in a heap. He hurried across, draped the carpet over his head so as to cut out as much of the feeble cellar illumination as possible, and released the trap, easing it inward.

Down below it was dark as ink. Edward listened for the ringing of shoes on concrete, but heard nothing, only the drip, drip, drip of water burbling in the distance. The sewer was empty.

Edward thought matters over as he hurried along Patchen toward where Latzarel sat in the parked Hudson. Of course Ashbless mightn’t have gone into the cellar at all. Edward hadn’t seen him do so. He might easily have entered the back door and poured himself a drink. He might be napping right at that moment, or reading a book over a glass of Scotch. But somehow Edward didn’t think so. Something nagged at his mind. Something about the sewer. He couldn’t quite grasp it.

When they got home the house was empty. There was a note from Jim saying that he’d gone out, and advising them, peculiarly, to pull down the window shade in the rear window of the living room twice. Edward did, supposing at, first that it had become broken, like all other spring-rolled shades, in spontaneous degeneration, and would hurtle off the wall in a rush of unrolling paper when he tugged on its ring. But there was nothing at all-wrong with the shade. He stood puzzling over it, reading the note, when Professor Latzarel remarked the odd blinking of a light from the dark window of the abandoned house behind. The light blinked on and off in little spurts, the same blink, blink, blink over and over. “Code,” said Latzarel, pointing it out.

“What does it say?” asked Edward, ignorant of that sort of secret language.

“W.H.,” answered Latzarel.

“He’s in the old Koontz house then,” said Edward, “hiding out.”

The two of them went out through the back door and peered around the side of the garage. William’s trash drum was overturned, and the side was trampled in. The clever box of clippings and leaves, fresh that morning, was dumped beside it. They’d conducted a more thorough search this time. Perhaps, thought Edward, Mrs. Pembly had tipped their hand. Perhaps she’d seen William pop out of the can like a jack-in-the-box after he’d last outwitted the police. One way or another, he’d clearly eluded them again.

An hour after darkness had fallen, a light flashed once in the window and a moment later a hunched shadow rose above the back fence, grappling with ivy, tumbling over into the yard. Edward sprang to the door, opening it as William rushed through, then closing it directly, after a glance at the Pembly house assured him that no one watched through the window.

William poured himself a glass of port without a word, staring through Edward as if he were transparent. In his hand he clutched a spiral notebook and a fresh copy of Analog.

“Your story!” cried Edward, reaching for the magazine.

William blinked at him. “What?” he said. “Yes.” He let go of the thing and it fell to the floor.

Edward was suddenly worried. “Sit down, old man,” he said, pulling out a kitchen chair. “You must be starved.” He rummaged in the cupboard and came up with a can of beef vegetable soup, waving it in William’s direction and arching his eyebrows. “Feeling okay? Jim tells us you went directly over the back wall. Didn’t give the beggars a chance. We discovered the most astonishing thing. Ashbless …”

“I think I’m on to something.”

“Oh,” said Edward, picking up the magazines from the floor, fearing that what William was onto was some new threat, some phantom taking shape in the mists, and that the phantom would turn out in the end to be authentic, just like the rest. “Onto what?”

“A device,” said William, staring again onto the wall. “A device for propelling the bell. I’m sure I could make it work. And I’ve been studying the Times’ article on the leviathan. I was wrong. It isn’t the release of pressure that would blow us to bits, it’s anti-matter.”

“Is that so,” said Edward, relieved. He stirred the orange broth on the stovetop with a wooden spoon and looked at the cover of William’s magazine. “Star Man,” read the appropriate caption, “by William Hastings.” ‘This is monumental,” Edward said, slapping it on his hand. “By golly! I’ve got to call Russel.”

William waved at him, as if to say that the story was nothing, that Latzarel needn’t be bothered. He looked at the steaming bowl of stuff that Edward stirred, widening his eyes in alarm. “None for me, thanks,” he said, staring at the little square bits of orange and green that floated on top. “I’ve got to think this out.”

“Another story?”

“No, a device, like I said. We can get to where we’re bound. I’m certain of it. If only …” He rapped his notebook on the kitchen counter in sudden inspiration. “I slipped out and ate at Pete’s,” he said, speaking to the soup. “See you in the morning.” He picked up his port glass and the half-full bottle and disappeared into the living room. A moment later Edward heard his bedroom door shut. He sniffed at the soup, grimaced, and poured it regretfully down the sink, sitting down at the kitchen table to have a closer look at William’s story. March twenty-first was fast approaching.

Chapter 18

William’s alarm rattled him awake before dawn. He groped out of bed, bounced once into the door frame on his way down the hall, and blinded himself with the bathroom light, cursing in half sleep and wondering why it was he’d set the alarm in the first place. He remembered — it was the device. Science called upon him to rise early. He intended to be at work in the maze shed before the sun rose — not so much in the interests of the work, but to avoid the prying eyes of Mrs. Pembly who, for hours in the morning, poked in the weeds of her yard in a housecoat, pretending not to be spying on him. William would like to have simply throttled her, clubbed her with an iron pipe and gone about his business with impunity.

What galled him was the unlikelihood she had any interest in the structure of the Earth. It was impossible. Every visible bit of her argued against it. William could understand the motivations, the rationale, behind a John Pinion, and even, in some dark part of him, the murderous curiosities of a Hilario Frosticos. But for what senseless reason had Mrs. Pembly thrown in with them? What profit was there? Money? Not at all likely. She seemed to hate him too spectacularly for that. She would have been more disinterested if money was her goal. How could he explain it — the dog debris under the elm? He wasn’t half surprised that it had reappeared. But he’d get to the bottom of it, he told himself as he turned on the tap.

He gave himself a sidewise look in the mirror. He was getting lean. His cheekbones were appearing, and it gave him a dashing air. Rough and ready. He could use some sun, though, and here he was a prisoner in his own home. How trite. He shook up the can of shaving cream, pressed the nozzle, and with a ppphhht of sudsy air, out came nothing at all but some sticky bits of petrified soap. He pitched it into the trash with a wide swing of his arm, overestimating the amount of swinging room the little bathroom allowed him, and cracking his knuckles onto the tile countertop.

He stood still for a moment, blood rushing in his ears, looking around for something to kill, to smash, to beat utterly to bits. He punched the door casing behind him with his elbow, pretending it was the face of someone he loathed; he hadn’t time to put a name on it. But he caught the edge of the casing on the crazy bone behind his elbow, and a shock of numbing pain shot up his arm, leaving it limp. He turned on it fiercely, his mouth working, ready to slam it and kick it.

But almost at once he caught himself. He remembered the fateful struggle with the garden hose, one of those cases in which he’d clearly won the battle but lost the war. Here was a danger signal, a warning. He was convinced that inanimate objects were half sentient. There were certain days, in fact, when they seemed to conspire against him — when chair legs crept out at odd angles to trip him up, when furniture reorganized of its own accord, when pencil leads snapped for the sake of driving him mad, when carpet tacks put themselves in his way, and the height of stairs increased imperceptibly — just enough so that his foot would hook on the nose of the step above and he’d pitch over forward. There was no arguing with it. It had to do with ions, perhaps, with the configuration of rays in the atmosphere.

What was generally unknown was that such objects could be dealt with — had to be dealt with. Like unruly servants, they had to be put promptly in their place, or the order of things would collapse. Chaos would reign.

But slamming the door frame wouldn’t accomplish it. He was upset, awash with anger. He’d cool down, move slowly. He turned on the hot water and worked up enough soap lather to shave with, very slowly and methodically, a step at a time, nodding at his razor, at his face, at the bar of soap to demonstrate his control. Shaving was a success. But there was a slit in the side of the toothpaste tube and blue paste squirted through it in a little ridge, smearing out over his finger. Nothing at all came out of the mouth of the tube. He laid it on the tiles and mashed it with the edge of his hand. Toothpaste shot out like a rubber snake. He picked up his brush, removed a predictable hair which seemed to be tied impossibly into the bristles, scooped up a wad of countertop toothpaste, and, taking his time over it, brushed his teeth one by one. He rinsed the brush, drank half a glass of water, and opened the door of the medicine cabinet into his eyebrow.

For a long moment he couldn’t breathe. His chest was constricted with fury and disbelief. The yawning mouth of the medicine cabinet mimicked his own open mouth, working toward a curse. “God damn!” he shouted, indifferent to the rest of the sleeping house. He slammed the door and chopped at the injured toothpaste tube, grabbing it finally and smashing the thing into a crimped ball. Then he twisted the ends back and forth, heaving and gasping and covering his hands with toothpaste until the tube was torn almost in two, the halves dangling by a little pressed seam at the bottom. He hurled the mined thing into the bathtub.

With a start he noticed that the first gray of daylight shone beneath the bathroom curtain. They’d conspired to rob him of his secrecy. They’d won. There was little satisfaction in having dealt so handily with the toothpaste tube, That was what came of a lack of self-control. The psychologists Were right. He washed the toothpaste from his hands and collected the ruined tube, debating for a moment the merits of pinning it to the wall with a thumbtack. But it would just make Edward roll his eyes. There would be no profit in it. Whatever irrational forces surfaced to animate inanimate things were already retreating. He could sense it. He hurried in to dress, collected a bag frill of food in the kitchen, and slipped out the back door, flinging the twisted remains of the toothpaste tube into the ivy along the rear fence before ducking into the maze shed. He peeked through into the aquarium room, toward the door, standing half open, that led to a little section of yard hidden entirely from view unless one stood within five or six feet of the rear wall. Beyond the door was an old stump, two feet high or so, positioned so that in an instant he could be out the back of the shed, onto the stump, and into the yard of the abandoned house. From there, if he were pursued, it was an easy matter to gain the street and the manhole cover that led to freedom.

He settled to it, taking time to light his pipe and put a pot of coffee on his hotplate. He chewed at yesterday’s glazed doughnut between pipes, letting his coffee grow cold, obsessed with the findings of T. G. Hieronymous, inventor of the Hieronymous machine, laughed into obscurity by the short-sighted. But the stone that the builder refused, thought William, squinting at the page, will be the cornerstone. There was truth in that observation. The machine made sense — and good sense, too — if one forgot preconceptions. Look at the phrenologists, considered a sort of joke by modern psychology and physiology for close to a hundred years, then vindicated in one monumental swoop by the investigations of Jones and Busacca into the life of the so-called “Bay Area Lump Man.” But this was, admittedly, complex. He grappled with it for three hours, trying to link, at least theoretically, the Hieronymous machine to the principle of Dean-drive.

He sketched a diagram of a modified Hieronymous box, a metal disc on top and a circuit inside. The box, Hieronymous had insisted, would work if there were simply the picture of a circuit inside. It was a matter of projection, after all, not of electricity. A person would rub the disc, round and round, sensing from the resistance of the surface the state of his health. But T. G. Hieronymous hadn’t gone far enough. He was a purist, it seemed to William, a scientist of the chart and caliper variety, undeniably accurate but perhaps short on imagination, on a sense of the mystical. A mandala is what the box wanted, a copper mandala, perhaps, something that would approximate the symbolic perpetual motion of an Indian prayer wheel.

If such a device could be built and could be harnessed to a Dean-drive system, turning the rotary motion into forward motion, it could propel their craft — the diving bell. It would pull energy out of the ether. In fact, there was no reason at all to suppose it wouldn’t be capable of separating oxygen out of seawater, serving as a self-propelled oxygenator and converting hydrogen atoms to fuel — a perpetual motion engine with a double function. William could see it in his mind. It was entirely feasible. If only he had Giles Peach to consult! If Edward hadn’t lost Ashbless in the sewer … but he had.

The whole thing would make a compelling short story, miles more substantial than the relativity story, at least in terms of its scientific basis. It was a sure-fire sale. A starship would be propelled by such a device, perhaps mounted externally to take complete advantage of the sun’s rays. An astronaut, ancient and bearded from eons of light speed travel, would lean out to rob the disc, throwing impossible sparks, propelling his ship through uncharted galaxies. There was no reason that the thing couldn’t be fitted with some sort of ratchet tongue and be made to speak, to moan out, over and over, some pressing question into the void. William could picture it. The illustration would be a blend of mysticism and science — the soaring ship, hurtling toward a pin wheel of stars, and the Hieronymous machine whirling on its rotor, itself a miniature replica of the distant nebula. And God Himself — why not? — leaning out of a cloud with a cupped hand to His mouth, shouting out an answer to the proffered question.

William snatched himself back to his sketch. There would be time enough for literature if the Earth held together in the coming weeks. It was the device that was consequential, not art. He looked at the mice, active in the cages before him, and at the bunch who had moved in with the axolotl. Only one wore a shred of clothing. But that was William’s fault, after all. They couldn’t be expected to have understood civility over-night. He’d have to keep after them.

How small, he wondered, could such a machine be built? If one applied Giles’ anti-gravity ideas to the Hieronymous machine, it might be entirely possible to equip, say, a mouse with such a device and obtain interesting results. Such was the nature of science — one thing led to another in an endless chain; links would break only to be forged anew by some intrepid pioneer, stamping in tin shoes toward the rising sun.

The door opened and Jim wandered in.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” asked William, looking at his watch.

“It’s Saturday.”

His father nodded. “Oh, so it is. Where’s Edward, still asleep?”

“No,” Jim replied, “he’s gone off to Gaviota with Professor Latzarel to work on the diving bell.”

“A waste of time. An utter waste of time without Giles. Your friend, I’m afraid, is crucial.”

Jim nodded. There was no denying that. Uncle Edward had been on the verge of remembering something vital ever since he’d chased down the ice cream truck. But nothing had surfaced.

William felt it too, as if the two of them shared some hiddenknowledge having to do with the disappearance of Ashbless into the sewer. William thought about their recent foray to kidnap Giles. He could see the bulky end of Russel Latzarel shoving out through the manhole into daylight and could hear the momentary clamor of surprised children. He could picture the look on Edward’s face as he pushed past the carpet into the cellar with the circular pool, and the rush to climb out again as the mob howled after them — to climb down three iron rings set in concrete directly opposite three others below the second trapdoor. William sat stock still for a moment, not daring to think, waiting to see if the sudden certainty that possessed him would evaporate. But it didn’t. That’s what Edward strove to remember — the second door in the wall of the pipe which they’d forgotten in their haste to escape. That explained the disappearance of Ashbless. Of course it did. And unless William was a complete codfish, it explained much more than that.

The tunnel led downward, spiraling into silent darkness. The light of their miner’s helmets shone out ahead, bathing the walls in a sickly yellow glow. William carried the big flashlight he’d liberated from the sanitarium, and he flipped it on from time to time to better illuminate the murky trail. An iron handrail affixed to the rock wall ran along beside them for several hundred yards, then disappeared, only to reappear farther on, rusted into a web of flaky brown metal.

It was impossible to say how deep they’d gone. In the dark silence it seemed to William that they’d been trudging along for hours. The tunnel opened out abruptly into a grotto, vast enough so that even the powerful flashlight was too feeble to illuminate the opposite side. The path narrowed, dropping off on their left into the abyss until they picked their way along what had become stone stairs, cut out of a steep rock ledge. Below could be heard the unmistakable sound of water — not of a rushing river, an underground current, but the lapping of shallow water on the stones of a beach.

William edged his way along the stairs. In his dreams he’d often found himself in just such a position — grappling to steady himself on a steep incline, starting to slide, suddenly losing all sense of balance, pitching forward and hurtling off into a chasm. Thinking about it made him sweat. Only the presence of Jim coming along behind steadied him. In his dreams he was invariably alone.

There was a foggy, musty odor in the air, the smell of stagnant seawater, of rotting kelp, of the subterranean sea of H. Frank Pince Nez. A sudden splash in the dark recesses below flattened William against the wall. “Turn off the lights,” he hissed to Jim, and without a further word all was suddenly dark. They stood still, barely breathing, and listened for anything at all.

Faintly, William could just make out the muted splash of dipping oars and the creaking of leather-banded oars in their locks. The sound grew less faint. There was the clack of wood against wood, the scrape of wood against rock, and a low curse. The prow of a little rowboat appeared magically from behind a vast, rocky outcropping that had been, until then, indistinguishable from the common darkness.

Arching out over the water was a slender bamboo pole, dangling on the end of which was a lantern that bobbed over the water and cast a light that flickered and rolled on the oily surface. A single person in a hat and coat rowed along. His destination was evident.

William was half surprised to see that it wasn’t as dark as he had supposed. Off in the distance — it was impossible to say how far — was a diffuse glow like the light of countless fireflies, quite possibly the lanterns of the sewer dwellers themselves. He and Jim hurried in dark silence down the last hundred yards of stairs as the rower in the boat disappeared behind another rock wall. The sound of his dipping oars, however, was clearly audible. In a moment the boat would slide out of the darkness, close enough so that the lamplight would illuminate the little crescent of sandy shoreline on which Jim and William found themselves.

William clicked on his flashlight for a tenth of a second, illuminating the sheer wall of dark granite that rose above them and a heap of fallen boulders that tumbled across the edge of the beach and into the water. Just as the first ripple of lantern light betrayed the arrival of the rowboat, both of them crept in behind the rocks and crouched there, watching to see who it was who was shipping the oars, humming to himself.

The boat slid into foil view, its bow scrunching up onto the sand. The lantern danced on its fragile mount, casting wild undulations of light up and down the rock walls, now illuminating the face of the cloaked rower, then throwing him into shadow. He turned half around, vanished, and was washed in full light once more. It was William Ashbless, out rowing on the subterranean sea.

William had half expected it. He was tempted to confront the old poet, to rail at him for his underhandedness, but he had a better idea. There was no place for Ashbless to go but up. He was obviously bound for Frosticos’ cellar. And he’d come from somewhere he frequented. They’d wait until he’d vanished and steal his boat. Ashbless extinguished the lantern, produced a flashlight from beneath his cloak, and climbed wearily away up the stone stairs.

Ten minutes later — long after Ashbless’ light disappeared from view and no sound could be heard but the soft gurgling of the inland sea — Jim and his father were rowing away in the borrowed boat. They dared not light the lamp, but ran along in darkness, Jim in the bow watching for jutting rocks. Once they scraped across a submerged reef with a tearing crunch, and the boat jammed to a stop, listing momentarily until William pushed them off with an oar.

The lake opened into a sea with a thousand rocky fjords leading away in either direction, perhaps the mouths of rivers that ran east and west, under Burbank and Hollywood, under stucco supermarkets where desultory shoppers cursed the wheels of uncooperative carts and hefted lettuces. Rock walls edged out in front of them as if the surface of the sea were a confusion of currents, or a tide were running and they were cutting across it, angling toward open water. Over his shoulder William could see the slowly broadening glow of distant light, and once, when he rowed around the tip of an angling rock hummock, a point of light could be seen somewhere ahead, as if someone were shining a penlight at them a stone’s throw away, or then again as if a bonfire burned on a distant island in the dark sea.

They passed through a succession of barely submerged reefs, bumping and scraping, both of them expecting to be tossed into the black water. Jim clicked on his light, holding his hand half over the lens. He saw the rock just as they hit it, and hadn’t time to shout. It wasn’t much of a jar, not enough to damage the boat, but Jim lurched forward, flung out his arm to catch himself, and dumped the lighted flashlight overboard.

The lens end sank first, spiraling slowly downward, the air trapped in the cylinder diminishing the speed of its descent. The light remained miraculously ablaze, illuminating the surprisingly clear water, and settled, finally, on a rock ledge well below the surface where it shone for a moment on the broken spars and decayed rigging of a sailing vessel, lying on its side on the reef. A jagged hole was torn in the hull, and great wooden shards jutted across the dark mouth of it like the teeth of a shark. There was the furtive movement of a shoal of fish escaping the light, and from the gap in the ship’s side, peering up with glaucous, protruding eyes, the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish, was the face of a man, hairless, mystified, joined by another fearful visage that peeked out for one strange moment before the flashlight failed and snapped them all into darkness.

William rowed away in silence, dipping along quietly but furiously toward the glow that promised some facsimile of civilization. They kept the lights out, trusting to fate not to send them to the bottom of that strangely populated sea. But apparently the shallow water was behind them. Rounding, a rock wall in almost complete darkness, they could see, dead ahead and not two hundred yards distant, a long, dim island, stretching away into nothing.

William rowed quickly back into the shadows, then sculled forward, just far enough beyond the wall of black granite to have a look ahead. Off a dock at the foot of the island were three vessels: what appeared to be Chinese junks but with four long oars dangling from either side. They rode low in the water and had a tremendously high stern with a wide rudder. On the side of each, visible even in the murky half light of the subterranean cavern, was an ornately painted goldfish, as if the three strange craft were part of a flotilla, a private navy. Two of the boats were dark and abandoned. One, right at the, tip of the dock, had a light aglow in the cabin, an oil lamp showing clearly in the window.

Fires burned on the island, throwing little domes of orange light into the vaulted darkness. Way off in the distance, far beyond the flow of the island fires, shone dozens of pinpoints of winking flame, like the eyes of night creatures in a dense forest or stars glimmering in a half clouded sky.

William wondered at first about the peculiarity of the island, its almost arctic barrenness, but quickly saw that there could be no vegetation on it, that nothing would grow in the lightless world. A scattering of billowy tents rose along a hill on the near shore. Beyond, some quarter mile farther down the rocky beach, stood a shantytown of strange buildings patched together from the wrecks of ships, complete with jutting masts and tangled rigging, and from debris hauled down, quite possibly, from the sewers. The kaleidoscopic hovels, all tilting against one another, seemed to leap and dance in the light of an immense fire burning on a hill above them. There wasn’t a person to be seen, either on the boats or on the island, and it occurred to William as he stared fascinated at the impossible scene, that for the sewer dwellers, distinctions between night and day would be perfunctory, purely practical. Perhaps whoever lived on the island — pirates, opium smugglers — were asleep. They certainly weren’t expecting him to come rowing up in a boat borrowed from William Ashbless.

To the right was nothing but more rock, more beetling cliffs rising into nothingness, the mottled stone just visible in the artificial twilight. If they rowed silently and slowly along the base of those cliffs, keeping out of rocky shallows, to a point beyond the glow of the bonfire that lit the strange shantytown, they could go ashore and slip back down the island unseen, keeping to the shadows, and search for Giles Peach. William hadn’t any doubt they’d find him there. Alt signs pointed that way: the proximity to Frosticos’ cellar, the presence of William Ashbless, the log of Captain Pince Nez that suggested Basil Peach’s familiarity with the subterranean ocean.

But there was more than that. There was something in the atmosphere, the thin mist of strange enchantment, the certainty that they rowed a boat along the edge of a dark and unfathomable mystery. Both of them could taste it on the silent air — the foggy lace veil of something impending, waiting.

Twenty minutes later the boat scrunched up onto a dark beach. They hauled it quickly up behind a hillock of stone. William wished he had his flashlight, not so much to see with as to club people insensible. They had no weapons at all beyond heaps and heaps of rock, two uselessly long oars, and William’s sharp but foolishly tiny penknife. They’d trust to stealth. Stealth and wits, those were the tickets. If Giles were there, as he surely must be, they’d bring him home alive or be taken in the attempt.

William was surprised at himself for not reacting in cowering horror at the idea of falling once again into the clutches of Hilario Frosticos. He smiled grimly at his change of heart, then thought at once of Jim falling into those same clutches. He pushed the thought out of his mind. He wouldn’t give a nickel for the future anyway if Pinion’s machine set out on its voyage with Giles at the helm.

They picked their way from rock to rock across the slowly brightening landscape until, some fifty feet from the edge of the closest of the hovels, they stopped. Nothing stirred. A thin white cloud of drifting smoke, lying in the slack air like a materializing genie, floated from a glassless window, and beyond, within the shadows of the room, the red coal of a lit pipe alternately glowed and dimmed. The idea of stumbling into every tent and hovel inquiring after Giles struck William as even more foolish than futile. If he were Frosticos, he’d keep Giles aboard ship, ready to cast loose at the first sign of trouble; although, fortunately, trouble would have to seem a distant and unlikely thing to them in such surroundings.

The log of Pince Nez, with its talk of opium smuggling, made the frozen languid smoke — still undisturbed, but joined by a second hovering ghost — suspicious. Opium couldn’t so soon have become one of Giles’ vices, though Frosticos could conceivably have begun to persuade him along those lines. More likely, the henchmen of Han Koi inhabited the shantytown, either asleep or practicing their excesses.

They’d take a chance, thought William, and make for the boats. They circled round the back of the fire, untended and burning low. The entire system of caverns had to have an opening on the ocean — perhaps beneath the honeycomb of docks and canneries that made up old Venice and were the destination of the mysterious steamer trunk, for the fire was a heap of driftwood — of the gray trunks of barkless trees; the broken, listing cabin of an old fishing boat; and the remains of weather-wrecked furniture: half an upside down table, an old stuffed chair reduced to a skeleton frame and a spiral of rusted springs. All of it, surely, couldn’t have been hauled through the sewers and pitched down the stone stairs.

The dock, no more than a collage of debris that had escaped the fires, had crumbled until it seemed to stagger and tilt into the water like a collapsing drunkard. Every third or forth board was broken and hanging, or had fallen altogether into the sea, doubtless hauled away by the water dwellers to shore up a submarine hovel. It was in the second of the three junks that they’d noticed the lamp. But in the first, William could see, burned another, low and orange. He pulled out his pocket knife, slipped his thumb lightly across the thin blade, signaled to Jim, and crept forward, ready to spring for a tethered rowboat and cut it loose at the sound of pursuit. He was as desperate as they come — not to be trifled with. Slippery as a squid, as Professor Latzarel would put it. If he was tested, he damn well wouldn’t be found wanting. Once on the water and skimming toward the stairs, he could easily outdistance the junks. He’d be halfway to safety by the time they could summon enough opium-laced thugs to man the oars. And with a bit of wit, it would be easier than that.

The first of the junks floated evenly, tied with slack line fore and aft. Close on, it was oddly and ornately carved, the bulwark wrapping round the stern in a succession of humped, gilt fish, each biting the tail of the one before it an unbroken circle around the low deck. The square sail canted obliquely across slanted bamboo, and was tattooed, again with the figure of a fish, a tri-colored koi, bent at the middle, impossibly lacy dorsal and tail fins floating over and beyond it as if buoyed up by the still waters of an aquarium.

It struck William suddenly that the sail would look startling hanging from the living room wall. Perhaps if all went well, if he were as furtive and quick as the William Hastings who’d slipped from the grasp of the mob in the sewers, he’d cut the tiling loose, roll it along its yardarm and take it along. He’d spring from the manhole on Stickley Street with the sail and Giles both. Edward’s eyes would shoot open.

Here was another window to peer through. There was a certain excitement in peeking in windows, a feeling of immediate and ruinous folly independent of whatever lay on the other side, an urge to shriek through the window and rap on the glass, leaving some shambling, terror-bitten wreck beyond, wondering at the sudden collapse of the universe.

The scene before him, however, didn’t much encourage that sort of thing. An immense aquarium, easily a thousand gallons, stretched across the wall — was the wall — of a cabin that was a wonder of carved rosewood. Lamps burned over the glass-lidded surface, copper shades casting most of the soft yellow light downward, illuminating the weedy depths of the tank in a mottled, shifting dance of shadow and light. Bursting bubbles rose from the sand in a fine rush, disturbing the surface of the aquarium, generated by clear tubing that coiled away into a Mack rubber bladder the size of a small mattress.

An old man, desperately thin and with white silky hair, sat before the aquarium, watching the creatures within as if mesmerized. He was Oriental, Chinese probably, and dressed in a silk robe. A looped earring with a dangling goldfish hung from one ear; the other ear was turned away. An opium pipe, some wooden kitchen matches, a brass coaster, and other odd debris were scattered over the top of a steamer trunk on the floor beside his chair — a steamer trunk banded with two green copper belts, each studded with an emerald fish. And before him, swimming through the bubbling waters as if searching for some lost thing — a jewel dropped from the worn prongs of an old ring or the missing key to a locked house — were a half dozen peculiar fish.

Their eyes were like green glass. And there was something wrong with their expression. It was a combination of sadness and terror that wasn’t a consequence of the peculiarity of nature. With an abrupt mental lurch that constricted his throat, William saw that one of the fish — all of the fish — had what appeared to be fleshy little appendages, fingers, five of them, at the ends of their pectoral fins, and just the faint trace of a nose protruding above their toothed mouths. It wasn’t the foolish trunk nose of a tang or the flat pig nose of a puffer; it was human — clearly so — a vestigial nose and fingers that turned the beasts into something more than fish, into the haunting, impossible offspring of Reginald Peach. The man in the chair was Han Koi.

Chapter 19

William signaled to Jim again, crept along the dock, and severed the two lines that moored the junk. The bow swung round into the slow current as the boat eased away. With any luck, Han Koi and his finny menagerie would be bumping into the rocks on the far side of the cavern before he was aware of being adrift. William and Jim moved off along the dock.

The second junk contained Giles Peach. It was as simple as that. He was apparently unattended — something that William had ambiguous feelings about. Although it would obviously make it easier to spirit him away unseen, it meant, quite clearly, that his remaining aboard the junk was at least partly — largely, perhaps — voluntary. He sat in a wooden chair reading a magazine. A heap of books lay on the floor roundabout. William recognized the covers of Burroughs’ Pellucidar books and the Heritage Press printing of Journey to the Center of the Earth. It was the magazine in Giles’ hand, however, that struck William most forcibly — a copy of the recent Analogy William’s Analog. Giles peered intently at the page from a distance of two or three inches, out of excitement, it seemed, rather than near-sightedness, for every couple of moments he paused to jot notes into the margins and onto a stack of paper napkins.

He hadn’t changed so awfully much. William didn’t know what, exactly, he had expected. He half feared that Giles would have become something like the thing in the steamer trunk, that he’d shared the fate of Reginald Peach, perhaps with a bit of help from Han Koi and Hilario Frosticos. But there hadn’t been that sort of apparent change — just a vague sensation, a watery electrical charge in the air, that suggested a kinship, perhaps literally, between Giles Peach and the melancholy inhabitants of Han Koi’s aquaria.

William tapped on the edge of the cabin window and hissed. Giles lurched upright, stuffing his magazine between the cushion and the arm of his chair, a look of wild fear in his eyes. His head swiveled toward the door, since he assumed, obviously, that someone approached — an ally, William would have assumed. William tapped again. Giles jerked around toward the window, grasped the shade of his reading lamp, and directed the light in William’s direction, his eyes widening in surprise to see both William and Jim peering in at him out of the darkness.

Gill stammered, looking quickly again at the door. Whether he intended to shout, run, or barricade himself in was, for a split second, unclear. But after that second of confusion, he simply sat still, befuddled. William could detect, he was sure of it, faint lines of hope curling the edges of his mouth and eyes.

“Is there anyone else aboard?” William whispered.

Giles shook his head.

William debated the usefulness of cutting loose the third junk, which, from its dark, silent demeanor, appeared to be empty. He decided against it. Haste was the word, now that they’d found Giles. The two of them slipped aboard, treading as lightly as possible, looking back over their shoulder toward where the vast driftwood fire burned on its little rocky hill.

Han Koi’s boat had floated twenty or thirty yards from shore, but seemed to be lying still in the water. William was suddenly struck with regret at having cut it loose. If the junk were docked, there was the bare possibility that he and Jim would remain unseen, even if the old man decided to take a stroll ashore. But now, unless the boat drifted safely away … William and Jim hurried into the cabin.

Jim nodded at Giles, as if not knowing entirely what to say. Giles nodded back and grinned, embarrassed, perhaps, to be found under such peculiar conditions.

“We’ve missed you,” said William. “Getting on well?”

Giles shrugged.

“Your mother is a bit worried.”

Giles shrugged again guiltily.

“Work going along?’

Giles nodded. William crossed to the window on the dock side and closed the shutters. He wasn’t getting anywhere. Time was passing. He caught sight of a copy of The ABC’s of Relativity lying on the floor amid the other books. “Been reading about relativity?” asked William. “What do you think of this?”

“Well,” said Giles. “I remembered Mr. Squires recommending it that night at the Newtonians. So I bought it. But there are certain problems with it.”

“Ah,” said Edward. “Problems?”

“Yes. I’ve built an anti-gravity unit, you know, that works on the principle of sky tides. The idea came to me while I was reading the book. I thought about building it into a bicycle as a present for Mr. Squires whose car was broken down that night, but then things happened, and …” Giles trailed off into silence.

William, listening for threatening sounds, wasn’t about to let the conversation slacken. “You’ve read my own relativity story in Analog?” William motioned toward the chair with his head.

“Yes, sir,” said Giles, brightening. “It was very impressive. Convincing too. I’m sure they’ve only begun to understand physics. Your story will turn things around. That’s why I’ve been working on the digger for Mr. Pinion. I’m certain we can get to the Earth’s core. Think of what we’ll find there …” And once again Giles fell silent, thinking of what he’d find there.

‘That’s rather why we’ve come,” said William. He looked at Jim, and Jim nodded. “I think there’s a problem with your plan to use anti-matter. I understand the need to dispose of dirt and debris, but what in the world are you going to do with the energy? Have you read P. A.M. Dirac?”

“Yes.”

‘Then you know the danger of shuffling matter And antimatter together as if they were playing cards. There’s a theory I favor that postulates an entire anti-matter universe at the far end of our own — all the anti-matter particles that came out of the big bang. There’s a mirror-image Earth there. All of us, battling the same demons. But we’ve got our clothes on inside out. Do you follow me?”

“Yes,” said Giles, “but …”

“But that’s where they must be,” said William. “There can be no other explanation. Anti-stars, anti-planets, anti-hamburgers, anti-Pinions.” William grinned at Giles. “But you can’t just stir it up in a soup along with matter. You suspect that, don’t you? Your father does. We’ve spoken to him. He sees trouble — a cataclysm. Creatures from Pellucidar are beginning to flee. Are you aware of that? And the communist Chinese have reported desperate anxieties in laboratory pigs. They blame it on CIA weather manipulation, but I think it’s something else.”

“I don’t anticipate a problem any longer,” said Giles. “I obviously couldn’t put the anti-matter into a container, since the container itself would be converted. But there’s such a thing as a magnetic bottle …”

“Yes,” said William, “I’ve read about it.”

“So I built one. I found a bag full of magnets from old cars — it was in the same junk store we were in the day of the wind,” he said, looking at Jim. “I built a polarity reversal bottle.” Giles poked around in a desk drawer for a moment, hauling out a line drawing of something that looked like a rectilinear amphora. Equations peppered the drawing along with arrows and spirals and little, hastily drawn graphs.

William inspected it. It might work. There were parts of it that he couldn’t fathom, equations that meant nothing at all to him. He supposed that Squires could make them out. But Squires wasn’t there. He was a half mile above them in his house on Rexroth Road. And if the three of them weren’t headed in that general direction fairly quickly themselves, there would quite likely be trouble. William was determined not to leave without Giles. But if they had to, if staying too long meant giving Jim up to Frosticos or Han Koi, then they’d flee instead. They’d all rest easier, though, knowing that Giles’ magnetic bottle would do the trick.

It would be a dirty shame if Pinion beat them to the center of the Earth, but their pride could take the blow. It was the blow to the Earth that concerned them. And if Giles had that threat ironed out. … There was something in William that didn’t trust the whole idea of the magnetic bottle. It was sound scientifically. He was sure of that. But there was something else. Instinct? That was it. Civilization theory. Pigs couldn’t be argued with. They had a nose for impending doom. And the dream — the death of Giles Peach. What of that? He didn’t require accuracy of dreams, but it had had an unmistakably premonitory ring to it that sounded in the same key of fear that had inhabited the voice of Basil Peach.

“It won’t work,” said William, grasping at straws.

Giles was silent. He sensed it too.

There was a noise from outside, like the scrape of something along the bulwark. Silence followed. Jim looked out through a crack in the slats of the shutters. Nothing moved. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Giles. “Come on.”

Giles sat staring.

“Powers is having a sale. Burroughs’ novels are twenty-five cents each with every fifth one free.”

“Really?” asked William.

‘That’s right. It just started today. I saw the ad in the window of the store.”

“Martian books?” Giles asked, visibly brightening.

“Heaps. He just bought a collection from somewhere, that’s what he said. They were still in boxes. There’s no telling what all he had.”

Giles looked around himself furtively. “Will you sign this?” he asked William, hauling out the Analog.

“Of course.” William beamed at him. “I don’t have a pen, though.” He tapped his pants pockets. “You and I could accomplish a bit, you know.”

Giles turned red, embarrassed at the praise, and handed across a pen.

“What we need for the diving bell is an oxygenator-propulsion combination. I’ve got some ideas, actually, having to do with a Hieronymous machine. Are you familiar with it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Giles.’ ‘I saw a picture of one in an old issue of Astounding, a Psionic Machine-Type 1.I always wanted to build one.”

“Well, here’s your chance. And another thing — absolute gyro. For stabilization. Do you have any ideas there?”

“Easy,” said Giles. “I’ve already built something like that for the digger. We can do it this afternoon, but we’ve got to get to the Sprouse Reitz on Colorado before they close. That’s where I buy most of my parts.” He checked his watch.

“After Powers’,” said William, smiling.

There was another noise, nearer the shutters now. William motioned Jim into a corner, crept across, and slowly opened one shutter. Darkness met him across the dirty glass. He rubbed circuitously on it with the side of his hand, cleaning a little oval and squinting through it, deciphering the gloom. His heart raced strangely, as if in certain knowledge that something lurked out in the hypnotic darkness — something his eyes couldn’t yet perceive.

Then, in a slice of a moment that seemed to William to resemble the staccato, stroboscope unreeling of an ancient motion picture, there materialized before him a white, smiling face, swerving into sudden clarity beyond the window, leering in. A hand rose beside it. Fingers wiggled in satiric greeting like four fleshy little worms, reminding him of the unholy appendages on the strange fish of Han Koi. The face belonged to a satisfied Hilario Frosticos.

William was frozen in terror, gasping for short breaths, utterly unable to summon up any of the courage he’d possessed not fifteen minutes earlier. A scream gagged him, then ripped from his throat, a single shriek, cut off into a gurgle as he staggered back into the cabin, smashing across the books on the floor and past a terrified Giles Peach to collapse in a heap.

Jim, reacting only to the instinctive terror of a sudden face at a dark window, hurled a book at it, catching the grinning, self-satisfied doctor full in the face. There was a curse of rage followed by silence. Giles sat stone-faced. Staring. William didn’t move. It seemed unlikely to Jim that the two of them were waiting for anything. They were simply swallowed up by fear.

Jim pushed at the desk, shoving it across the door, then heaved at a stack of bookcases, sweeping books out of them onto the floor until he could lever the top case onto the desk. The second followed. He shoved books back into them for weight, conscious as he did so of an omnipresent heaviness in the air. He labored for breath, watching the window out of the corner of his eye for the sign of meddling. He felt wet all over. Not clammy from the muggy air of the cavern, but wet, as if he’d just crawled out of the sea or as if the air around him were itself congealing into seawater. The last of the bookcases rested on the desk. Jim picked up a handful of books, dropping half of them, realizing that since he’d been at it, no one had made any effort to get past his barrier, and hearing at the same time the click and snap of a door opening behind him — a panel in the carved rosewood of the wall. Dr. Frosticos bent through it, smiling malignly. In his hand was a syringe.

William gripped the arms of his chair and sat petrified, utterly unable to respond. Giles seemed asleep, although his eyes were wide open, staring at something none of the rest of them could see. Then, strangely, inexplicably, a fish, pecking at debris on the floor, swam past Jim’s foot. The floor itself, when Jim stared at it in surprise, seemed insubstantial and grainy, as if it were decomposed, or rather as if it weren’t wood at all, but grains of dark sand on an ocean bottom. A tendril of kelp dragged across Jim’s face, waving on a current of heavy, wet air that washed past, then fell momentarily slack before surging back past him in a rush of bubbles, sand, bits of seaweed, and grinning, startled fish.

A cacophony of questions and contrary impressions flooded in on him with the sudden wave of seawater. Had they capsized? Sunk? He fought for a breath of air. Dr. Frosticos banged upside down on the ceiling, his syringe floating off to be swallowed up by a balloonlike puffer that swelled immediately into a spiny orb, whirring away with little flurries of its tiny caudal fin to disappear into one of the bookcases.

There was a terrible battering and howling as the ship listed to port. A groaning surrounded them. There was the sharp snap of ropes, and the junk lurched and heaved on the surface of a suddenly wild sea. The door burst outward; the window disintegrated into sand-size particles, and with a sliding rush as the boat was tossed to and fro, the lot of them tumbled against the wall, then halfway to the door, then back again into the wall. Giles Peach floated along peacefully, resisting the strengthening urge with little sculling motions of his arms and webbed hands. Frosticos was the first to slide through the door.

He flopped over onto his side, hands grasping and flailing, and held onto the door frame, seeming to pull the entire junk farther to port, as if it clung to the side of an enormous vertical wave. Bookcases toppled from the desk, washing past him. The floor seemed to open beneath his face, as if the turmoil had broken through the thin crust of the ocean bottom and into the tunnel of some sand-dwelling creature. A claw poked out. Two claws. A weedy crab the size of a clenched fist, blood red and with white eyes on stalks, a creature almost more spider than crab, hoisted itself from the hole, followed by another and another and another. They crawled onto the head and face of the clutching doctor, nipping off little shreds of skin. His mouth opened in a bubbling scream and the first of the crabs darted in. Frosticos jerked like a hooked fish, loosed his hold, and was swept out into the darkness, followed by surging water, wriggling fish and waterweeds. …

Jim was aware sometime later that he was on deck. A tearing wind banged at the painted sail. His father sat with his back against the mast, staring in disbelief. Overhead was a wild dance of thunder and lightning and flooding rain, an incredible monsoon that swept them along through the darkness. A second junk, the drifting boat of Han Koi, tossed on incredible seas, rising on the face of a swell, toppling at the crest, and running down the backside, its mast snapped, its cabin broken in.

A bolt of forked lightning lit the cavern in a wash of phosphorescent yellow, exposing within the torn-away cabin the Oriental’s immense aquarium. It was lined with sudden cracks like a frozen marble dumped into boiling water, and it burst in an explosion of water and glass, its strange finny prisoners washing as one over the side of the junk and into the momentarily illuminated sea. Utter darkness followed. The light on the distant island was snuffed out — either by the torrent of rain or an intervening ledge of black rock, and the junk seemed to fly across the surface of the sea. Sparks flickered along the mast, and as if in answer to a wild clash of thunder, a ball of revolving sparks arced from the tip of the mast and sailed skyward, wriggling and burning like ascending demons.

William hunched to his feet, clinging to the mast to keep from pitching off the rolling deck. His hair streamed out behind him as he blinked into the wind, watching the ravaged waves toss and leap, now piling into steep walls, now blown flat, long streamers of lacy silver spray taking sudden flight and wisping away, tearing themselves into misty particles and disappearing. The sea itself seemed radiant with light, as if the driftwood fires of the island burned deep beneath the waves, illuminating submarine grottoes where the skeletons of sunken ships shone like the silhouettes of ancient ruined cathedrals.

Jim was suddenly aware that his father was shouting at him over the wind. He could make nothing of it at first, then realized he was asking about Giles. “Where’s Giles?” he shouted, gesturing with his free hand. Jim shook his head. In the cabin? Perhaps so. His lamp, weirdly, was still lit. It swung back and forth on its chain, sputtering. Jim crawled toward the door, but saw that it had slammed shut. The window, though, was unshuttered. He pulled himself along the deck, wedging his left foot against the bulwark and pressing himself up, pulling on the sill, peeking in as the junk lurched and flew on its course. Giles sat within, placid as a stone in his chair, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs in the wavering light of the swinging lantern.

The junk jerked to a stop with a suddenness that threw Jim into the cabin wall. There was a monumental scrunching and scraping of gravel as it beached itself not fifteen feet from the foot of the stone stairs. St. Elmo’s fire flickered along the mast one last time, charging the suddenly still air with the smell of burnt gunpowder, then winking out. The seas fell off, leaving the water oily smooth, and the only noise was the screak, screak, screak of the brass lantern chain as inertia pulled it to a slow stop.

Chapter 20

William rested in the darkness of the abandoned Koontz house, munching morosely on a bag of Fritos and sipping a tasteless beer. Four hours ago he’d envisioned himself heaving up out of the sewer with a grim smile on his face — the conquering hero, young Peach in tow, the painted sail of the junk folded under his arm as a memento of the last decisive battle, won beneath the streets of Glendale. The threat to the Earth would be extinguished — snuffed out by William Hastings, the man hounded and bedeviled by the lying forces of evil. But the victory didn’t amount to much. His sail lay in a heap in the living room at home, the top edge charred by St. Elmo’s fire. It was a gaudy effect, but wasted on him now. All his conceit, his bravado, his best intentions had gone to smash in an instant. He couldn’t have saved himself from annihilation. Damn himself; he couldn’t have saved his son, who at least had the wits and the courage to slam Frosticos in the nose with a book.

It was true that William had talked Giles into altering his allegiance. His story had done that. Giles had said as much. He’d been amazed to find that William shared his knowledge of the arcana of physics. It had been his story, in a sense, that had saved the world from bursting like a balloon. He’d have to write Analog and congratulate them for their far-sightedness.

William shook his head sadly. In the end, Giles had done all the saving, had led them up that interminable staircase and out into freedom, William all the time anticipating the following tread of Hilario Frosticos, of his face materializing in the blackness ahead. William wondered what it was Frosticos had seen during the melee, what it was Frosticos understood to have happened. Had he felt himself being eaten alive by crabs? William shuddered. It wouldn’t make him a happy Frosticos if he had. Perhaps he had drowned. But William knew he hadn’t. It would be too convenient. Things were never that simple.

And he had an uneasy feeling along his spine — something that stirred that black marble of guilt and doubt and fear within him — that was as instinctive and undeniable as the certainty that possessed the Chinese pigs, that prompted them into fearful restlessness and sent them snuffling around their cages in search of an exit which, if found, would lead in a wild, terrified rush off the edge of a cliff of self-destruction.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and there was the face writhing like a mass of ghostly worms, whirling into sharp clarity. He yanked his eyes open almost at once. There’d be little sleep tonight. He’d take the chance of sneaking home after midnight — better to take the chance of being caught among friends than to spend the night in an empty house.

He dozed off and dreamed that he was rubbing a circle of clarity into the dirty glass of a window. There was something beyond, something in the night — white and deadly, grinning humorlessly in at him. He shuddered awake, lurching to his knees, swearing to himself that he’d been an idiot, a monkey-witted pickle-head to have given poor Latzarel such a fright in Frosticos’ basement. He had no idea. It was karma; that’s what it was. The circle would remain unbroken, as the song put it. Japanese carpenters left a visible error in their cabinetry to humble themselves, to scuttle conceit. But the joints and workings of William’s life were riddled with unintended error, with outright bungling, and it hadn’t done a bit to pare away conceit. Conceit had swum in laughing, nodding and shouting and making an ass of him. It made him something worse, but he couldn’t think of a word for it. Jim hadn’t blamed him, and that was the worst of it, in a way. The better people were, the harder it was to measure up, the more important it was not to go to bits. He hadn’t wanted to fold up like a paper doll. That wasn’t at all what he had in mind. He’d spend the night in the abandoned house, sleep or no sleep. He had his book, his pipe, half a bottle of brandy — what was it Laurence Sterne had said on the subject? — “and we know not what it is to fear death.” William had always admired that line. He wished he could have written it. But pipe and brandy aside, there were other things to fear besides death. For this night, though, the brandy would have to be the first defense. He hoped and feared at once that he’d have another chance to prove himself. For the moment, he’d start in on the dark house. He shut his eyes and watched the webby lines spin and twirl.

Reporters were skeptical on the television two days later. The whole idea was ludicrous, straight out of a science fiction novel — and not a novel with pretensions either, but a dimestore thriller, a pulp, with ray guns and dinosaurs on the moon. There was a shot of The Digging Leviathan, the mechanical mole, tethered behind John Pinion’s ranch house. It was elevated on a sort of trestle affair, with its nose facing downward, aimed into the Earth. It was self-propelling, Pinion explained to an inquisitive reporter. The last few feet would be the most touchy. Once its nose pushed through into the hollow core of the Earth, its propulsion would cease. They could only hope that its momentum would carry them forward far enough to get the hatch open.

Pinion looked nervous and kept smoothing down his hair. It struck Edward suddenly that he wasn’t really an evil sort, not at all. He was simply a man possessed. He was a zealot, and so was near-sighted and given to extremes. Edward almost pitied him. He was certain that Pinion’s reputation was about to be flung down and danced on. What the mole would do without Giles Peach at the helm was impossible to predict. It might simply sit there and refuse to work. Its engines might well be nonsense — conglomerations of the same sorts of dimestore trash and castaway debris that Giles and William had been puttering with in the maze shed.

What was peculiar was the fanfare. Spekowsky was some-how at least partly responsible; that much was clear. He poked around the machine along with another reporter, asking poor Pinion impossible questions about anti-gravity, questions that Pinion was utterly unable to field. He waved them aside as inconsequential. Wait, he said, until the launching. He was prepared to stake his reputation, his life. This wasn’t some sort of steam shovel. They were undertaking a journey of some eight hundred miles. Perhaps more. Following in the footsteps of Admiral Byrd, in the tradition of Christopher Columbus, who set out in spite of the flat Earth.

Edward hurried out to the maze shed where William and Giles tinkered with their Dean-drive mechanism. They’d attached it to the axolotl, still dressed in water-soaked trousers. When Edward bent in through the door William was just setting it off. There was the spinning of a tiny crank, the sigh of a stream of fine bubbles bursting on the surface of the water-filled maze. The axolotl shot forward, careering down the little avenue and smashing into the wall in a befuddled heap long before it occurred to him to begin to negotiate the turn. William fished him out and plucked the mechanism off his neck. He looked up at Edward and nodded at his device. Giles tinkered with a piece of sheet copper at the workbench.

“We’ve about got it,” said William. “The oxygenator threw us for a bit, but Giles has come up with a device with a chlorophyll and helium back-up system. It’s a little bulky, and if we have to use it we’ll talk like elves, but it should work. He’s piecing it together now.”

Edward looked across at the unit on the bench. Giles was dumping green powder into a funnel which emptied into a copper box. A canister of helium was linked to the box by a coiled tube. God knew why. Edward felt like a child. Physics and chemistry were not his provinces. All he could think of was that the tin funnel might have been Tom Terrific’s hat. He’d always had an inexplicable fondness for cartoons.

“They’re about to launch,” he said.

William put the axolotl back into its aquarium and dried his hands. Giles cared nothing for the launching of the leviathan. It was the diving bell that possessed him now. The digger would have to look after itself.

Edward followed his brother-in-law into the house. “I don’t believe Ashbless is on hand,” he said, clumping up the back steps.

“Hah!” cried William. “Of course he’s not. He’s no fool. I’m certain he thought he had Giles pegged that afternoon when Velma Peach came round to tell us he’d disappeared. Ashbless! He’s full of hunches. But he hasn’t half enough science in him for accuracy. He’s just moving by instinct. Giles tells me it was Ashbless that brought him the Analog. You mark my words. If the launching fails, we’ll hear from the poet. And soon, too.”

William turned up the sound on the set. John Pinion was crawling into the hatch, waving foolishly at the live action cameras. Then, not even acknowledging the existence of the cameras or reporters, Hilario Frosticos appeared out of the hangar, strode across the lawn, and clambered in, slamming the hatchcover after him. Reporters backed away and the machine hummed into life, shuddering there on its supports. The rotating teeth in its nose worked back and forth, and a monumental humming arose as it slid down into the Earth in a whirlwind of dust.

“It’s going, by God!” cried Edward.

William crouched in front of the television, unbelieving. The machine sank into the soft earth, sliding in a foot, then six feet, then its entire length, disappearing from view, pushing a mound of dirt out after it into an immense mole hill. Reporters, chattering in surprise that equaled Edward’s, rushed to the hole waving cameras. The leviathan sank deeper, threatening to disappear entirely from sight.

There was an awful tearing sound, such a breaking and banging and crashing that for one wild moment William was convinced the cataclysm was upon them. Then all was abruptly still. Reporters and cameramen rushed everywhere. William and Edward crouched before the television, inches away. Jim stood behind them. Professor Latzarel slammed in through the door without so much as a knock, gibbering about listening to the news on the radio, but he was waved to silence.

The Digging Leviathan had gone amok, slanting off its course and through the concrete wall of a sewer. Its indestructible mandibles were ruined — a mass of twisted metal, growling and whirring and spinning in random spurts, round and round like the crank of an old car. Somehow, within moments, a camera crew with blazing lamps had found its way into the sewer. The whole voyage was a debacle, a ruin. The leviathan was wedged into the concrete pipe. John Pinion climbed out of the hatch, his hand over his face. He appeared to be weeping. Frosticos followed, disappearing in the tumult.

Two helmeted policemen accosted Pinion, who shook them off with a curse. Beyond, half in the shadows, stood William Ashbless, watching. Sunshine streamed in suddenly from the hole above as a shower of dirt cascaded in, widening the opening. Firemen grappling with an enormous hose peered through, but there was no threat of fire. Pinion waved his fist at them, frightened, apparently, that they’d hose down his machine. He was shouting something, contorting his face. A reporter waved a microphone at him and tried to pick up the words. It was Spekowsky.

“How-do you feel after this tragedy?” asked Spekowsky nearly shoving the mike into Pinion’s mouth.

“What!” shouted Pinion, turning on him. “Get that filthy device out of my face! Get back, I tell you!” And he took a swipe at the reporter, who ducked neatly back, thrusting out his microphone once again.

“What went wrong, Mr. Pinion?” he shouted. Then he shook his head sadly at the camera, as if commiserating with Pinion over the fate of his enterprise.

“You … bastard!” cried the stupefied Pinion, springing at him. The two policemen subdued him, escorting him stooped and sobbing down the sewer. He broke away after about ten feet, turning to survey his wrecked machine, gesturing at it, mouthing something, perhaps asking it why it had betrayed him. Then he seemed to perk up and look around, as if for the first time noting the absence of his copilot, Hilario Frosticos. He said something to the police, who shrugged, gesturing down the sewer toward where a cylinder of light shone in through an open manhole.

A hole had been torn in the side of the digger, and the engine was a wreck of odd parts, exposed to the prying eyes of the camera. Spekowsky spoke into the microphone, motioning toward the digger, reminding the audience of Pinion’s claims to have invented unimaginable engines — anti-matter, perpetual motion.

“Hello, what’s this?” he said, obviously enjoying himself at the expense of Pinion and his device. “Who could imagine that such an engine could propel a machine through the Earth?” Then he stopped and grinned, as if suddenly remembering that the engine hadn’t propelled the machine anyplace but into a sewer. He poked at a flat, coiled spring, obviously a remnant of an old, cheap clock. It was attached by a complication of paper clips to a basketball bladder, and a length of copper wire from which dangled an obvious price tag. Spekowsky turned the tag over and a camera zoomed in. “Sprouse Reitz,” the tag read, “29¢.”

“Huh?” said Spekowsky just as the cameras retreated. William Ashbless, his long white hair around his shoulders, was edging in to have a look just as the segment winked out into a commercial for toilet cleaners depicting a man in a rowboat adrift on a toilet bowl sea.

“Poor John Pinion,” said William, feeling that Pinion had been betrayed, and that his betrayal was largely William’s fault — all William’s fault, for that matter. Two days earlier Pinion was leagues ahead of them — on his way to becoming the greatest explorer since Brendan the Navigator. And now here he was, a weeping ruin, a laughingstock. Reporters who’d been drinking beer all afternoon downtown were dancing on his dreams, yammering, dissecting his craft for the off chance they’d find material for new jokes. William could see the headline: “Mechanical Mole Clogs Sewer!” Pinion had shot his bolt after William had unfeathered it. Poor devil.

William grinned at the thought. Too bad about Pinion, as slimy as he was. But Frosticos, that was a different story. How had he been allowed to slip away unnoticed? Why hadn’t he been harried by reporters — asked to explain the workings of the marvelous vehicle? And Ashbless hadn’t even been aboard. What, he wondered, did the old man have up his sleeve? William was fairly sure they’d hear from him shortly. Well, Ashbless could whistle into the wind.

The lightweights. They bit off more than they could chew when they messed with William Hastings. He’d slid in again and whipped the rug out from under them. And now they were cooked geese. Even if they could hoist the leviathan out of the sewer, without Giles it wasn’t worth scrap. He wondered suddenly what Giles was up to. Here he was wasting time. Giles had been right not to watch the news. It was nothing but a circus. Pinion was a clown, capering and grimacing.

Giles worked silently and quickly, like a surgeon. No movements were wasted or arbitrary. The heap of debris on the counter was slowly diminishing, and a large Hieronymous Machine attached to a modified Dean-drive mechanism was taking rapid shape. They’d be in the water in a matter of days.

“Well, it was a failure,” said William to the back of Giles’ head.

Giles nodded, poking with a screwdriver at a recess in the box.

“I can’t quite figure why it went haywire. Either that or I can’t figure why it worked at all. One or the other.”

“It still had some bugs in it,” said Giles indifferently. “And he wouldn’t have known how to pilot it.”

“Needs a special pilot does it?”

“Yes, sort of. You have to have a feel for the mechanism. It’s simple, actually, if you understand it. It’s a question of emanations, of rays. You’ve read the Martian books?’

“Certainly,” said William. “Quite a bit in there about rays, as I recall.”

“Yes, there was. We don’t know half as much about them as they do on Barsoom, of course, but I was reading an article about the Russians. They’re quite advanced. All this talk about nuclear war is just nonsense — that’s what the word from the inside is. They’ve got a madness ray that’s impervious to the horizon. They’ll just aim it right through the Earth at Los Angeles, and — pow! — we’ll be drooling in the street.” Giles stopped abruptly, surprised at himself for having carried on so. He looked furtively at William, embarrassed, perhaps, at having spoken so flippantly about lunacy.

William smiled at him. The boy was a genius, and an eccentric. There was no denying it. He rummaged in the mouse cage and hauled out Alexis and Mary, two of his favorite mice. He suspended a pair of identical doll dresses in front of them, enticing the coy pair. They seemed to respond with interest, having fallen wider the spell of civilization. William helped them into the finery, then shunted them up the avenue into a dry section of maze where they went sniffing along inquisitively, looking for a treat. They were the mainstay of his experiments — the bedrock. The axolotl seemed to be drawn to their obvious gentility. William had high hopes that they’d be similarly affected by the amphibian and would undertake at the very least some of its attraction to water.

But if he could — if Giles could — perfect the mechanism in miniature, he could leap across ten million years of creeping evolution in one fell swoop. The mice could be amphibianized through technology. There was an interesting irony there, thought William, if you looked at it from the right direction.

A car door slammed out front. William was off like a rocket, through the aquarium shed, onto his stump, and over the fence. He closed the rear door of the Koontz house behind him and locked it. There was no one in the street. The manhole cover sat unwatched in the quiet street. There was no telling who had driven up. If they’d come a half hour earlier, they’d have caught him out, watching Pinion’s decline on the television. He hadn’t even heard the arrival of Latzarel’s car, noisy as it was. Such was fate. It was dealing him the high cards. He squinted through the window at the back door of his house. The door flung open and the two policemen burst out, heading straight for the trashcan. The fools. They must be supremely tired of chasing phantoms. Frosticos had made phone calls. He was mortified by defeat.

The two officers seemed to be yelling at Edward. The one with the amazing nose was waving his hands. Edward shrugged convincingly. Latzarel was acting heated, slamming his hand into his fist to emphasize a point. They wandered into the maze shed. William could only imagine their astonishment and loathing. What would they make of Mary and Alexis, sporting in the maze? What unholy explanation could Edward offer to explain the decorated mice? Civilization theory wouldn’t answer. They’d be deaf to it — obviously so; they weren’t a product of it.

The younger of the two came reeling out. The other followed, shaking his finger at Edward. William could hear the shouting through the closed window. “Deviant!” he seemed to be shouting, although it might have been “Deviate!” which was even better, since it implied sexual perversion. William giggled. Then he noticed the head of Mrs. Pembly peering over the fence. She’d set them on him. That had to be the case. He’d been lax, parading into the house in broad daylight to watch the news. He clenched his fist and started for the door, but stopped halfway there. They were two days away from launching. Edward and Latzarel were going up to Gaviota tomorrow to fetch the bell. He was almost home free. He’d wait. He had patience. But by God, if he could see his way clear, he’d make her pay dearly. He couldn’t afford it now, though. He was bound to be on the bell. It was a journey he’d anticipated for years, long before the first faint glimmers of it had begun to take material shape. He’d wait her out. That was what. Then, like good Caius, he’d “strike, and quickly too.”

All was quiet, it seemed, at home. But Mrs. Pembly still watched through her window, and the police were sure to be lurking in the neighborhood. He’d lie low, to borrow a phrase from Edward, and slip out after dark for a hamburger and fries at Pete’s Blue Chip.

Almost as soon as the sun disappeared and night fell, there was the sound of the secret knock on the rear door. William unlatched it, and Edward slipped in, full of news and desperation. Things were hot. The police, he was sure, were onto them. Reports of William’s presence had surfaced too often to be false leads. That they hadn’t been to the neighbors on Stickley Street yet and discovered the Koontz house was dumb luck. Tomorrow they might well wise up.

He and Latzarel were leaving in the early morning for Gaviota. Jim was off to school. Giles had taken the machine home for the day to put the finishing touches on it. Edward hated to see him go. Pinion wasn’t, to be sure, entirely out of the picture. There was no telling what sorts of desperate capers he’d get up to. And Frosticos — he was clearly still interested in Giles regardless of the fate of the digger. But Velma Peach was staying home. She was a stalwart woman, said Edward. If things had been different — if she and Basil had separated … well …

William commiserated with him and invited him to go along for a hamburger. This was no time for hamburgers, said Edward. What if William was forced underground? They had to launch in two days. The oceanarium only half understood what they intended to do with the bell. The sooner they were away in it the better. And Giles insisted the mechanism would be ready. He was adamant. If they hesitated they’d lose him. He’d set out in a flowerpot. And he’d get there, too, while they joined Pinion in the failed-man’s club.

William agreed. He couldn’t agree more. The sooner the better. If he had to go into hiding, they’d know it. He’d simply be gone. The only thing to do was for them to stick to their plans. If all else went awry, he’d meet them at San Pedro. Or if not there, at Palos Verdes. If he couldn’t get to Palos Verdes, then he’d fallen into the clutches of some nemesis — the police, Hilario Frosticos — and wouldn’t be making the trip anyway. But that, he said, was unlikely. He had a copy of Pince Nez. There was a drainage outfall with sewer connections right there in the cove. Neap tide was at three in the afternoon. What could be simpler?

Edward shook his head. It didn’t seem at all simple to him. There were too many variables. But whatever else happened, William was to lie low. Incognito. He wasn’t to stir when the sun was up.

William was satisfied. He’d be a bat, he said. A vampire — melted by the sun. But for now, he was off to Pete’s Blue Chip for a double cheeseburger, fries, and a boysenberry shake.

Edward shook his head darkly and watched. He wasn’t sure what it was he feared most, William’s fears or his bonhomie, which chose the strangest times to surface.

A wind blew up in the night, thrashing through the date palms that lined Stickley Avenue. The big dry fronds rustled back and forth, and William, sleeping fitfully on the floor, teetered on the edge of wakefulness, surfacing every half hour or so to curse the wind. He swore each time that if he weren’t asleep in ten minutes he’d switch the lamp on and read, dangerous as it was, but somehow he dozed off immediately into a sort of half sleep, never actually looking at the luminous dial of his pocket watch.

Around two in the morning, predictably, he began to regret the onions on his cheeseburger. There was half a warm beer left in a bottle against the wall, but somehow instead of drowning the burning in the bottom of his throat, it seemed to encourage it. He had a bottle of Rolaids — 500 of them — in the medicine chest at home, and at two-thirty, unable to remember the passing of the last hour but ready to swear he hadn’t slept through it, he lay on his back calculating how much he’d pay for two of the chalky, miraculous tablets.

The wind blew harder. A door banged shut somewhere, over and over again, and there was a continual swishing of troubled vegetation out in the night. Every once in a while, entirely randomly, he could hear the scrape-swish of a branch against a window screen. He started each time, yanked up out of thin sleep, certain as his heart labored and he lay holding his breath that someone was fiddling at the screen, that there’d be a sudden face at the window. He could see the face in his mind. As he drifted into a twilit sleep, the face, somehow, became one with the wind, as if fingers of wind tugged at the screens out in the dark night and a pale cold face, just the smoky, swirling shroud of a face, stared in, watching him. A crashing in the yard broke into the dream, dissolving the face.

William hovered on the edge of sleep. A palm frond, he told himself, had dropped onto the sidewalk. Dream images swirled in his head. He watched himself stand up and move off — going out, he supposed, to visit a bookstore. Noises in the night distracted him. There was a universe of activity on the wind. Bits of debris flew past, lit by the moon: a bowler hat, a slowly revolving bicycle wheel, an open umbrella, a lawn chair that bounced along end over end, leaping the fence and swirling suddenly skyward toward the moon. The elm tree, still leafless, danced and thrashed against the blue-black sky. There seemed to something in it, ropes tangled in a steel device, a winch. Beyond the fence, in the Pembly yard, Mrs. Pembly stood staring, her housecoat flapping gaudily. She seemed to be looking right through him.

Dr. Frosticos labored behind her, aided by Yamoto the gardener. Yamoto’s white trousers snapped and flapped in the wind as if at any moment he would simply set sail, careening away in the wake of the bowler hat and the lawn chair. They strapped Mrs. Pembly’s dog into a leather sling and hoisted the protesting beast skyward. The dog wore a tweed jacket and a bowler hat. They were mocking William. Clearly. They knew he was watching, that he wouldn’t dare confront them in the dead of a windy night.

The dog dangled in its sling, back and forth, its legs hanging foolishly. Its hat blew off. Frosticos cursed as Yamoto jumped for it and missed, the hat sailing away into the darkness just as a toppled lawn chair shook in the teeth of the wind and rose into the air, blowing away with the hat. The dog swung in a little circle over the wall. They lowered him in jolts onto William’s lawn, grinning and whispering encouragement. Mrs. Pembly stood with her arms crossed, still staring, deadly serious.

In a moment the dog was airborne once more, its filthy goal accomplished. William was speechless with horror and loathing. It was his tweed jacket the dog wore. He was sure of it. They’d stolen it, the bastards — sneaked in under the cover of the wind and slipped out with it. They could have slit his throat, drugged him, beaten him, but they didn’t. They were toying with him. He was furious. They’d pay. The lot of them would pay.

The dog disappeared behind the wall. Yamoto clambered up onto the fence and pulled himself onto a branch, wrenching at the device in the tree. That was for Edward’s benefit. There’d be no evidence of machinations in the morning, no explaining the horror in the yard.

Yamoto dropped back onto the fence, grinning. He crouched, peered toward William who stood frozen with terror, and ran along the copings toward the old Koontz house, toward William’s sanctuary, his white, billowing trousers lit by moonlight. He was far older than William remembered. William had seen his face before, and recently too. He had a little droopy beard and wore earrings beneath the brim of his bowler hat — dangling goldfish with the face of Giles Peach. Yamoto’s face was empty of expression. Dead. And he seemed to run on and on along the fencetop, sure as a cat, scampering closer and closer.

William gasped with terror. Choked with it. Tried to move, but could do nothing but watch Yamoto running toward him through the wind, his white robes whipping and snapping like loose sails on a mast. He saw suddenly that a steamer trunk lay propped against the wall, its lid slamming shut and falling open, bang, bang, bang, until the entire chest rose above the ground, hovering and dancing for a moment before sailing off, shrinking in the distance. Yamoto ran inexorably along and was suddenly lifted by the wind and flung head over heels, his bowler hat spinning away and he following after, an untethered kite, glowing and dwindling in the agitated moonlight. The roof of the Pembly house blew loose and spun off. The elm cracked and bent and tore out bodily, pinwheeling away. Clouds raced in the sky, and through the rents torn by the wind, William could see shooting stars, showers of them, blown through space, the wild gale sweeping the heavens clean and piling stars and planets, bowler hats and lawn chairs against some rusted and teetering chainlink fence in the void.

Chapter 21

Sunlight shone through the curtainless window, straight into William’s eyes. It was eight o’clock. It had been a hellish night. The wind still blew, but somehow daylight masked the sound of the rustling palm fronds. William remembered having nightmares. It was impossible, though, to say when he’d fallen asleep, and whether he had seen anything at all out the back window. It was all peculiarly real to him.

He was damned if he was going to spend the day in the empty house. He’d have been wise to sneak home before dawn, but he’d just have to risk it now. He’d never been quite so desperate for a cup of coffee. Edward would sweat at the idea of him exposing himself so, but c’est la vie, as the Frenchman said. He’d lock himself in and not answer the door or telephone. He could always nip back over the fence in a crisis.

He stood for a moment at the back door, watching the Pembly house. Nothing stirred. He opened the door and darted out, hunched and running toward the fence. He stopped, peeked over, saw nothing once again, and then clambered up onto a pile of brick and over the wall into the door of the aquarium shed. From the maze shed he looked out again. There was no use taking chances. He started out, then checked himself, stopping and staring at the grass under the elm where a clump of dog waste gathered a multitude of early morning flies.

William’s heart smashed away in his chest, half in anger, half in fear. There was no sign of a winch in the treetop. Of course there wasn’t. They’d taken it out. If he looked over the wall, there it would be, rusting in the weeds, the picture of innocence. He came to himself suddenly and hurried into the house.

The morning dragged along. He tried to read, but couldn’t. So he tried to write, but it was a waste of time. He came up with nothing but nonsense, nothing but first paragraphs full of mystery and promise that led to the wastepaper basket. He roamed the house, poking into closets, flipping on lights and flipping them off again. He spent more and more time watching through the window, speculating on the activities of his neighbor. He arranged the drapes. The hibiscus hadn’t grown so much as to obscure his view, but until almost noon, there was nothing at all to see. Mrs. Pembly remained invisible, ignoring her weeds. Once she came outside with something for the dog, an enormous knucklebone, from the look of it, or, thought William giggling at his post by the drapes, the boiled head of her husband. She disappeared straightaway into the house. William didn’t like it a bit. It was unnatural. Something was in the air.

At around noon William dozed in the green chair. He awoke with a jerk, but couldn’t remember what it was that had roused him — a noise of some sort, vaguely threatening. He listened, cocking an ear toward the street. There was a creak and a bang, the sound of a tailgate being lowered. William stood up and crept to the front window, and there was Yamoto, in his trousers, messing with a bamboo rake and a grass catcher, scrabbling in the little bed of begonias that separated part of the Pembly lawn from William’s own.

William was furious. He could see in his mind a crouched and running Yamoto, wearing a bowler hat, his white clothes fluttering, the remnants of a nightmare. He shuddered and paced back and forth. A tiny Edward St. Ives sat on his shoulder, admonishing him, belaboring his conscience and his better judgment. William brushed him off onto the floor. “I know what they’re up to,” he said aloud. He stopped in front of the window. Yamoto was weeding with a triangular hoe, dangerously close to William’s side of the begonias. If he touched the orange tuberous …!

A man can’t be pushed that far, thought William.

“Discretion is the better part of valor,” said a tiny, irritating voice.

“Discretion! Don’t talk to me about discretion. And I hate cliché. Look at that! He’s jarred my angel wing! Those green stalks can’t take that kind of abuse. The butcher!”

William raged around the room. The tiny Edward vanished. And just as well for him. This was an affair of honor. The white glove had been cast long ago, and it was time for William to pluck it up and slap Yamoto silly with it. The old lady too. Their villainy had reached new heights the past night.

But William was shrewd. He thought of his lesson with the toothpaste tube. Slow and easy, that was his way now. Yamoto would be at it for an hour at least. There was time for preparation. He routed out an old backpack and hauled it into the kitchen, shoving in a package of saltines. A can of peaches followed along with a can opener. He found part of a bag of Oreo cookies in the cupboard and put that in, then added a half dozen little cardboard cartons of raisins, an apple, and a piece of salami.

He dug out a one-quart canteen and filled it with water, found a flashlight — not quite the bone crusher he was used to, but heavy enough in his hand to lend him a certain contempt for the casual villain — and finally the third of the army-navy store miner’s helmets. It belonged to Russel Latzarel, but he would understand. He wouldn’t need it aboard the diving bell anyway. William set the stuffed backpack, the canteen, and the miner’s helmet by the back door. Then, considering, he fetched the copy of Pince Nez, a compass, and one of the little penlights he’d gotten from Phillip Mays. He stuffed the lot of it into his pack, slipped out through the maze shed, and dumped them over the fence into the back yard of the vacant Koontz house. He might, after all, be moving quickly.

The preparations gave him a sense of urgency. Ready for anything, that’s how they’d find him. He’d tackle Yamoto now. He could hear the roar of his mower. It would be best not to simply charge out and confront the wily gardener. That had been his mistake the last time, when he’d been defeated by a garden hose. There must be a way to vindicate himself now, not only in his own eyes, but in the eyes of the law. It could easily come to that. It was odds-on that it would. And if it did, some link between Yamoto and Frosticos would go a long way toward justifying his own actions, his escapes from the sanitarium. Paranoia, after all, ceases to be paranoia in the light of revealed evidence. Edward would agree with him there.

William slipped out onto the front porch, flattening himself against the wall of the house that enclosed the end of the porch. He peeked around the corner of it. Yamoto chased his mower across the lawn. He jerked around in a tight little turn and headed back. William ducked away, waiting. As soon as Yamoto reversed direction again, William was off, scampering across the lawn toward the pickup truck. He was safely hidden by the fender when Yamoto reversed again, and in the next instant he was clambering into the cab, as quietly as he could, throwing himself fiat on his back atop the seat.

He breathed hoarsely, out of fear rather than exertion, and ran his hand along under the seat. There were nothing but springs. He had no idea what he hoped to discover. A walkie-talkie? A gun? A medical bag? His hand closed on a book. He hauled it out It was written in Oriental characters. William couldn’t tell which end was which. He tossed it to the floor in disgust. ‘Then why can’t he talk like a man,” he muttered, quoting Huckleberry Finn, and popped open the glove box. An avalanche of debris cascaded out onto the floor. He shoved his hand in and swept out the rest: cigarettes, hard candy, street-maps, napkins, little plastic containers of mustard and ketchup, a fountain pen, another book, nuts and bolts. Nothing, though, that really sewed the case up. Nothing damning, as the lawyer would say. Nothing but a little wooden box, carved, it seemed, out of rosewood — in the figure of a goldfish, bent in the middle like the yin half of a yin and yang. William popped the top off. There were pills inside, Bayer aspirin, from the look of them. William touched his tongue to one. It was bitter.

Of course they would look like aspirin. In an organization of the magnitude of Han Koi’s it would be a simple enough business to press morphine and heroin into false aspirin tablets. And the goldfish — a dead giveaway. It would mean nothing, of course, to the casual observer. But to William, to someone with knowledge of the arcana, the machinations of the world by the clever Han Koi. … William shoved it into his pocket.

He raised himself onto his elbows and looked back over his shoulder at the house. Yamoto cut on, oblivious. William laughed. Damn it! he thought to himself. If only he’d brought a potato to jam into Yamoto’s exhaust pipe. He’d wait in the bushes, watching. Yamoto would try to start the truck. Nothing would happen. He’d crawl down out of the cab, scratching his head, and open the hood. The engine would tell him nothing. It would leer at him. Puzzled, he’d creep around, peering under the truck, wiggling things, chattering. Mrs. Pembly would come out with her arms folded and commiserate. Both, of course, would harbor suspicions, fears. They’d look around in vain. Was William Hastings about? Had he been coming and going like a ghost in the night? Had it been he who had destroyed the plan to penetrate the Earth?

Mrs. Pembly would shake her head. Yamoto would crouch on his hands and knees at the rear of the truck, staring in horror at the business end of a potato stuffed up his exhaust pipe, thwarting the flow of necessary vapors, stopping utterly the workings of the engine. He’d poke at it. Mrs. Pembly would marvel, perplexed, asking him why on Earth? Then both would stop. There’d be a rustling in the bushes behind them. William Hastings would step out, smiling, wearing a suit and tie. He’d bow, inquire after the health of the dog. Suggest modifications in the sling and harness affair in the tree. They’d be dumbstruck, Yamoto holding the potato like a fool, Mrs. Pembly falling back at the sight of him. “Aspirin?” he’d ask, holding out the incriminating box. Yamoto would pale.

William giggled, thinking about it. If he hurried, he might still have time to pull it off. He stared at the fabric stretched across the ceiling of the cab. There seemed to be a million little holes in it, all in uniform lines. It was just possible, though, that they weren’t holes, that they were little dots painted on.

“Aspirin?” asked William aloud, canting his head and widening his eyes.

An unimaginable scream jammed him against the seat — a short, violent scream like the scream of a man in mortal terror. William sprang up, slamming his head into the ceiling. Yamoto, his mouth working, stared in at him through the open window, gibbering, looking as if he’d seen his own corpse in a bush.

“Hah!” shouted William after his initial surprise. He waved the rosewood goldfish at him. “So this is your game? Heroin, morphine? What is it? What do you know of Han Koi?”

Yamoto stumbled backward, waving his open palms before him in a sort of ritualistic dance. William reached for the dashboard to steady himself, found Yamoto’s book, and pitched it out the window. He could think of nothing else to do with it. The same was true for the debris on the floor. William picked up a handful and tossed it out onto the lawn, furious. They’d see who it was they’d run afoul of. He pushed open the door and shoveled the rest into the gutter. Mrs. Pembly was on the porch. If she had any sense, she’d stay there.

Yamoto ran toward his tools. So it was that way. He’d been spooked by William’s knowledge of the pills in the box. This wasn’t ten-cent bets on baseball games anymore. Yamoto was desperate. William climbed out of the cab and into the bed of the truck. He tripped over a bamboo rake. The bastard. He cursed at it, stomping the little bent fingers of the thing. He picked it and sailed it into the bushes like a spear. Yamoto waved his hoe menacingly. William laughed aloud, dumping a gunnysack full of grass clippings out onto the road and rolling a power edger out after it down the lowered tailgate, the red and yellow machine clanging to the street on its side and lying there dead. William shouted at it. Then he shouted at Yamoto, who, he could see, was keeping his distance. He leaped off the truck onto the parkway, stumbled, and clambered to his feet again before Yamoto had a chance to be on him with the hoe.

He advanced toward the porch. Yamoto was a gibbering wreck. It was Mrs. Pembly who now most desperately required comeuppance. “Do you think,” shouted William, waving his arm, “that I know nothing of your little game with the dog?”

Mrs. Pembly shot into the house like a rocket, slamming the door. She reappeared at the window. William made a hash of one of her begonias while Yamoto protested loudly and incoherently. William stomped another. “Keep your filthy dog off my lawn!” he shouted. The speeches he’d rehearsed in past weeks were taking flight in the face of his rage. He yanked a third begonia out by the roots, tore it to bits, and flung it at Yamoto, then stomped another into scrap.

He was tiring out. There was no profit in flattening begonias. It wouldn’t accomplish a thing. He was suddenly at a loss. Things hadn’t gone at all well. Edward had been right all along and there was no denying it. But he had the rosewood box. That’s what frightened Yamoto so. You could see it in his eyes — a desperation. He needed that box. William hopped across into his own yard. “I’ll be back!” he cried, although it sounded weak to him. Not the note of severity the situation required. He nipped into the maze shed and over the fence, grabbing his backpack and canteen and slamming the miner’s helmet onto his head. Five minutes later he was climbing down iron rungs into the sewer, unpursued.

By the time Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel drove up in the flatbed with the diving bell perched weirdly on its bronze feet, the police had come and gone twice. They’d questioned Jim. He’d been at school and knew nothing. There was evidence, they insisted, that William Hastings had broken into the empty house behind, that he’d been living there for days. Jim hadn’t heard anything about it. His father, he had been sure, was in northern California, living among the redwoods. The police weren’t interested. They’d found hamburger wrappers in the Koontz house, and a counter boy at Pete’s Blue Chip had recognized a photo of William Hastings. They’d done some neat detective work, to be sure.

But William Hastings was gone — into the sewers, likely. He thought of himself, they said, as some sort of Swamp Fox, a Robin Hood, suffering under the delusion that he fought a cloudy and nebulous world threat.

An article in the Times the following morning referred to the incident in humorous tones, capitalizing on William’s adventures and on his associations with Russel Latzarel, the diving bell pilot, who also sought the center of the Earth. John Pinion’s recent fiasco was mentioned. They’d received a letter from Hastings, written very coherently and elegantly on blank endpapers torn from an old book. The strange missive, detailing a plot to explode the world, had been rolled into a little cylinder and shoved up through a manhole cover directly in front of the Times office. Subsequent searches of the sewer by police yielded nothing. Hastings had wisped away like smoke.

There were accusations in the letter against a prominent local psychiatrist, talk of great subterranean lakes sailed by opium smugglers in Chinese junks. Mermen lived in the dark waters in homes made of ancient sunken sloops and galleons, all of which, in some imponderable way, were linked to the submarine boneyard recently discovered by abalone fishermen, to the sighting of an elasmosaurus by Professor Russel Latzarel in an oceanic trench off Palos Verdes, and to a mysterious flying submarine seen from the tip of Catalina Island. The Times was cheering for Hastings. He was, after all, harmless. What had he done beyond ruining a half dozen begonias in a neighbor’s flowerbed? And as for slugging a man with a heavy flashlight — Hastings had included with the letter a photocopied order for a pull-frontal lobotomy to be accomplished in the very sanitarium he’d fled from weeks past. His doctor, lately and coincidentally implicated in the John Pinion sewer imbroglio, was being sought for questioning.

Edward’s first thought was to lament the letter. But as he read the article through a second time, his attitude slowly changed. William, it was clear, had gone a long way toward turning himself into something of a local hero. It had been a shrewd step. Admittedly he’d never be taken seriously again, but then even without the letter he was on the edge of that particular fate.

And who was to say that it wasn’t publicity Frosticos feared most? Han Koi certainly couldn’t afford it. Perhaps Yamoto was in league with the doctor. Edward had coolly agreed to paying for repairs to his equipment and to the restoring of Mrs. Pembly’s begonias. There was nothing to be gained in expanding the feud. Far better to deflate it. But the Pemblys were putting the house up for sale and moving away. They’d had enough of William’s shenanigans. And Edward was no better. As far as she could see they were all peas in a pod.

In the end Edward determined to take William at his word, for bettor or for worse. His brother-in-law had, after all, become in some ways the most strangely coherent of the lot of them. And when all was said and done, if he’d been pressed, Edward couldn’t have begun to explain where those randomly appearing dog droppings were coming from. If it turned out that Giles Peach had equipped a neighborhood dog with anti-gravity, it would hardly have surprised him.

So William had a copy of the timetable in his wallet. Giles insisted that the schedule was crucial. They’d cast off at the nadir of the low tide, an impressive negative six feet. Squires could just get the tug into position if there wasn’t a swell running. And all reports predicted calm and tranquil seas. Why they needed a low tide, Edward couldn’t at all understand. Giles said it had to do with the effect of pressures on the Hieronymous machine and the Dean-drive system. If they’d wanted to go the other direction — to fly — they’d need a high tide. It was a matter of particle physics and of ray propulsion. Edward took his word for it. They’d launch tomorrow at three o’clock sharp. William would either be there or he wouldn’t. It was simple as that. The time had come.

Edward awoke that night, wondering what it was, exactly, that he’d heard. It had been a banging, a gunshot, perhaps, or a car’s backfiring. That and the jangling of an abruptly stifled bell. He sat in bed, the sleep draining from his brain, then tiptoed down the hallway. The noise, he was sure, had come from outside, so there was no real need to carry the unsheathed saber that he clutched in his hand, but like William’s flashlight, it gave him a feeling of invulnerability.

A white truck was parked at the curb. A shadowy face peered out of the cab, watching the house. It was John Pinion. Latzarel had been afraid that Pinion would snap — that his unsought trip down the sewer pipe would break him. They’d all, said Latzarel, have to look sharp. Edward flipped on the porch light. The truck rumbled to life, died, was rekindled, and jerked away down the road. Edward turned the light off and went back to bed, wondering what in the world it was that Pinion was up to. If he was looking to sabotage the diving bell, he was sadly out of luck. It was locked in Roycroft Squires’ garage. Professor Latzarel and Giles Peach guarded it, and Edward suspected that if Giles intended the bell to be safe, then the bell would be safe.

The phone rang at eight o’clock in the morning. Edward was lying in bed, thinking about the voyage. He felt as if he were moving, perhaps to a foreign country, a country in which he wouldn’t be able to communicate, where they drove cars on the wrong side of the road or upside down. He was struck with the immense foolhardiness of their scheme. They were entrusting their lives to Giles Peach. There was no denying his powers, but at the same time there was no denying his eccentricity, his peculiar impenetrable surface calm. It seemed to Edward to be a big mistake to take Jim along. They could endanger their own lives if they chose, but not Jim’s. He’d spoken to William about it and William had spoken to Jim. The result of all the speaking was that Jim was going. Giles, after all, got to go. Giles was going with or without them. Well, thought Edward, lying on his back, life was full of risk. For the first two hundred feet they’d be tethered to the Gerhardi. If Giles’ devices were in order, they’d cut loose and descend. If they weren’t, Squires would hoist them out. But this last seemed impossible to Edward. He couldn’t envision life beyond that afternoon, not life on the surface anyway. His entire existence had been funneled into the journey.

It was William Ashbless on the telephone. He was jovial — regretted that be hadn’t seen Edward since Catalina. He’d been morose on the trip, not his usual self. It was a matter of artistic temperament. He’d hiked off into the hills and meditated on pine nuts and berries for a few days.

“We saw you take off in the submarine,” said Edward flatly, stretching the truth a bit. “And we’ve spoken to Basil Peach about your trying to extort favors out of him for the safe return of his son. You’ve sold all of us out one way or another. Go back to bed.”

“I sold no one!” Ashbless called into the phone before Edward had a chance to hang up. “Who was it smuggled the copy of Analog into Giles? Who was it put the idea into his head of throwing in with William and you? Who was it revealed the treachery against Reginald Peach? I’m a poet, an artist, and always have been. I understood that William saw more clearly than the rest of them added up, and that’s what I told young Peach. If William hadn’t gone in after him, I would have. Why do you think I wasn’t aboard the leviathan?”

“Because,” said Edward tiredly, “you knew it wouldn’t go anywhere without Giles. You’ve known about Giles’ powers longer than the rest of us. I’d bet on that. You’ve just been waiting to see which of us would get hold of them in the end. Well, we have, and there’s no room for passengers.”

“Wait!” shouted Ashbless into the phone as Edward hung up. There was no time to wait. It took a little under an hour to get the last bits of gear together and lock the house up. Once, at around 9:30, Edward was certain he heard the jangling of bells on an ice cream truck, but he could see nothing on the street. Jim was sure, shortly thereafter, that he’d seen a head peering over the back wall. He thought at first that it was his father, but a search minutes later revealed nothing.

By eleven the four of them were piloting the flatbed truck along the Pasadena Freeway. Roycroft Squires followed along behind in his little Austin Healey, which neither flew nor drove at light speed, thanks to his cheerfully refusing Giles’ offer to customize it. He’d been tempted, but in the end he couldn’t think of anywhere he had to go that quickly.

Edward watched the side mirrors for the sign of a pursuing truck. As far as he could tell there was none. He kept his suspicions from Giles, not knowing exactly how Giles would react to the mention of John Pinion. Most of all, Edward wanted to avoid Giles’ turning the Pasadena Freeway into a tidepool. The less oddball activity they involved themselves in, the better, especially when they were a bare four hours away from the launch. And besides, there was no sign of John Pinion. It had quite likely, thought Edward, been his imagination.

But almost as soon as he’d convinced himself, they crossed under Pasadena Avenue and Edward glimpsed a white panel truck just pulling onto the freeway behind them. In a moment it was out of sight in traffic. Edward didn’t know whether to speed up and lose it, or to slow down and identify it. So he did neither, but simply drove on apace, catching sight of it again as they crossed Lomita Boulevard into Wilmington.

Latzarel, he was fairly sure, had become aware of his apprehension, for he watched the mirror incessantly, and once, just before the Harbor Freeway ended at the Vincent Thomas Bridge to Terminal Island, Latzarel gave him a questioning look, raising his eyebrows. Edward shrugged. Giles sat impassive, lost in himself. Jim read a copy of Savage Pellucidar, toning up for the journey. When they hauled the bell up to the dock alongside Squires’ tug, there was no sign of a white truck.

Chapter 22

Living in the sewers wasn’t all it might he. William’s fascination with himself as a phantom Robin Hood evaporated as it became clear that, at least for the moment, no one was chasing him. No one, for all he knew, cared a bit about him. It was unlikely that they’d launched a manhunt as a result of his treading on Mrs. Pembly’s begonias. And it was fearsomely dark in the sewers. The light afforded by occasional street drains didn’t illuminate the underground tunnels for more than a few murky feet. With his headlamp and flashlight off, he was enclosed by such utter darkness that he felt as if he were walled up — in a coffin, perhaps, or had met the fate of an Edgar Allan Poe villain, bricked into a cellar. The idea of spending the night and most of the next day in the darkness, listening to the scuffling of rats, imagining the slow dragging swish of an impossible serpent, began to weigh on him.

He followed the map of Pince Nez, trudging up Colorado and into the foothills toward uncharted streets that he knew to be under construction. Not two miles from home he discovered a manhole cover in an undeveloped cul de sac — nothing around but weedy vacant lots stickered with little surveying stakes. He pushed up out of the manhole, caught a bus on Colorado to downtown Los Angeles, and spent the declining afternoon at Olvera Street eating enchiladas and writing a letter to the Times on pages ripped from the log of Pince Nez.

But he was jumpy. Every policeman was a threat. Idle looks of passersby were filled with manufactured suspicion. He found himself refusing a table near a window and insisting on one against a wall by a rear exit, remembering advice from a gangster movie he’d seen involving a hoodlum gunned down through a restaurant window from a passing car. He spent half an hour searching for a manhole in the area, and found one finally across from Union Station, too far away from his beer and enchiladas to do him any good in a crisis. In the end, however, there was no crisis, and he slipped into the sewer around four-thirty, making his way to the Times building to deliver his letter — his apologia — to the fingers of fate.

He certainly couldn’t simply barge in and declare himself to be William Hastings, so he shoved the rolled letter through a manhole cover and fled, surfacing again late in the evening to buy flashlight batteries and a sleeping bag, toying with the idea of spending the night in the woods — such as they were — that covered one of the little unused triangular acres at the confusion of interchanges involving the Santa Ana, Santa Monica, Pomona, and Long Beach freeways.

But the plan fell through when he was hailed by a slow-moving squad car on Spring Street and was forced to go to ground once again in the sewers, not knowing whether he’d been recognized or whether the police had simply been suspicious of his miner’s helmet and sleeping bag.

A half hour later he was in a cab driving south down La Brea. He had to get closer to the coast. He hadn’t enough money in his wallet for a trip all the way to the peninsula, so he watched the meter fly, the cab motoring through Inglewood, Lennox, and Hawthorne — closer and closer to freedom.

Then he caught the driver’s eye in the rear view mirror. It was furtive, suspicious. “I’ll just get off at Rosecrans,” said William, gathering his gear.

“I thought you said Palos Verdes,” the driver put in, irritated.

“No,” said William. “I’ve changed my mind. This is fine.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said the driver.

Something was wrong, and dangerously so. The driver was an agent of someone — Frosticos, the police. They’d gotten to him. He was leading William into their clutches. The traffic signal at Rosecrans was green, fifty yards away. The cab accelerated. The light switched to yellow. The driver sped along, then slowed as he approached the next intersection.

“Palos Verdes it is, then,” said William. “I was just a bit nervous about money. The tip and all.”

“Don’t worry,” said the driver again. “We’re in business to make friends, not money.”

William started for his wallet, considered for half a second, then leaped from the cab, leaving the door gaping on its hinge, just as the driver pulled into the intersection.

“Hey!” shouted the driver, lurching, slamming on the brakes. Horns honked. The driver jumped out, his car stalled in the intersection. Traffic was a mess in an instant. William ran off down an alley and into a residential neighborhood, banging along with all his supplies. The cab driver hadn’t made any money on him. William laughed aloud and slowed down. He’d write a note to the company, thanking them for their friendship.

It was clearly time to disappear into the sewers. No one, apparently, could be trusted. He’d sleep for an hour or two, then travel the rest of the distance on foot. He found it impossible, though, to sleep. There was water almost everywhere, at least a little trickle — sometimes a river of it — running down the center of the pipe. Some of the tunnels were wide enough for him to stroll along comfortably above the flood, but if he tried sleeping on the curved wall of pipe, he’d have rolled down into the water as soon as he dozed off. Either that or the level of water would rise in the night and float him away. He found a dry pipe, finally, and unrolled the bag, crawling in and lying there in the darkness. He was ten or twelve miles from Palos Verdes, a distance he could cover fairly easily, even after spending three hours asleep.

He read Pince Nez in the lamplight, studying the charts, tracing the straightest route to the storm outfall south of Lu-nada Bay. Every once in a while a car rumbled past overhead, but they were fewer and fewer as the night wore on. He began to imagine that he was in a tent formed of thin, yellow light, that the darkness was a canopy around him. With the light on he could see nothing at all outside its little sphere of radiance. Several times he directed his flashlight beam into the surrounding night, illuminating nothing at all but the empty gray concrete swerve of pipe. He was surè, once, that he saw the dark bulk of some fleeing animal, just vanishing from the sudden splash of light, but when he shone the flashlight round about, searching, it had disappeared utterly. It began to seem to him as if creatures must be crouched just out of the lamplight, studying him.

No light, he decided, would be preferable to inadequate light, so he snapped off the flash, insisting to himself that he’d steep and then push on. It was nearly three in the morning. He lay fully clothed in the sleeping bag, forcing his eyes shut. Water gurgled somewhere close by. His foot began to itch. He shifted, scratching his leg, and became tangled in the bag. His shoes, somehow, insisted on gluing themselves to the cotton lining so that when he crossed or uncrossed his legs the entire bag folded over him, strapping his legs together like the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy. He turned over onto his side, and seemed to teeter there on his hipbone, grinding it against the suddenly thin bit of polyester fluff that separated him from bare concrete.

He had to lie still. He must focus on something. That was the key. He realized that he had been playing a tune incessantly in his head, perhaps for hours. “Ding-dong, the witch is dead; witch-o, witch-o, witch-o, witch; ding-dong the wicka-dold-witch is dead,” over and over again. He didn’t have the foggiest notion what the rest of the words were or whether the song had another verse. But there it was, maddeningly, appearing and reappearing, playing and replaying. He’d try counting backwards; that sometimes worked.

But in the middle of his counting he heard a noise — he was certain of it — away down the sewer. He’d heard the echo of something, of hasty footfalls or of the scrabbling of animals. And it wasn’t the first time he’d heard it. He had fancied, in fact, the faint sounds of pursuit shortly after he’d eluded the cab driver on Rosecrans. But the sounds vanished almost as soon as he paid them any heed.

He shined the flashlight into the darkness, but in the thirty feet of its influence there was nothing. He clicked it off, lay there breathing shallowly, and listened. There it was again — a faint scraping, the pad of quiet feet. It was impossible to say whether it was behind him or before him. He flipped the light on once more, hoping to surprise whoever — whatever — it was that approached. He wondered if lamplight would ward off wild beasts the way firelight was supposed to. He couldn’t at all see why it should. It would simply make him visible. They knew by now exactly where he was, perhaps that he lay completely immobile in a sleeping bag. He was a sitting duck.

He slipped the bag down toward his waist, sitting up and putting on his miner’s helmet. He had to shake it to get it to work at all. Latzarel had fiddled the thing half to death, probably. He waited and listened. Something was impending. He could feel it along his spine. He shared the ability with Chinese laboratory pigs. The sewer was dead silent and absolutely dark. He slipped the bag over the tips of his shoes, hauling himself into a crouch. He groped around for Pince Nez and shoved it into his backpack, which he slung over his shoulder. He squinted fiercely, dying to pierce the gloom. There it was again — the scraping and padding, just a few short steps that came to an abrupt halt. Then silence. It was in front of him. Lord knew what it was: a blind sewer pig? A boa constrictor as big around as a cow? He gripped his flashlight in his right hand, holding his breath, reaching with his left hand for the switch on the helmet.

He could hear breathing, unnaturally loud. It might have been a foot from his face, an inch. He flipped the switch on the helmet. A quick flash of light burst out, cut off in an instant with an audible click. It illuminated the black tunnel of the sewer in one frozen moment and was gone. Disappearing with it, back into darkness, was the pale standing figure of the white-suited Hilario Frosticos, clutching a black bag of instruments, smiling impassively, a smile devoid of all meaning.

There wasn’t a sound following the night-shattering click of the useless helmet. No footsteps rushed toward William. There was only utter darkness and silence. William was empty. His chest seemed suddenly hollow. His legs disappeared. He felt himself tottering forward onto his knees, caving in. He fought against it, expecting at any moment to be seized. And it was that moment, when he would first feel the probing, clutching fingers that he feared the most. He was possessed with the urge to crawl into his sleeping bag and yank it over his head, holding it shut from within. But he didn’t. He couldn’t move in any direction, since in the absolute, haunted darkness, all directions were equally threatening. He stood and quaked, his knees bent. Nothing stirred.

Had it been an illusion? Had he been asleep? Dreamed it? Leaped to his feet in fright? He held his flashlight in his right hand — a puny weapon, risible. He couldn’t bear to wait in the darkness. He suddenly couldn’t bear the darkness at all. But if he switched on the light and saw again what he thought he’d seen a moment before. … He clutched the backpack in his left hand, and slowly raised his right arm. He could imagine the sudden clutching of his wrist and the doctor’s cold laugh. Or worse, fingers without warning on his throat.

He flipped the switch, A cone of light played out, revealing nothing. A dark veil of night lay beyond. A car bumped along the road overhead, an absolutely friendly and substantial sound that lent momentary substance to the otherwise empty night-land. William had no idea how far from a manhole cover he was, but he intended to find out. Damn the cumbersome sleeping bag. He’d leave it. It was four in the morning anyway. He’d head straightaway for Palos Verdes.

Suddenly he was struck with the cold fear that Frosticos had somehow gotten round behind him — that he was at that moment slipping up, smiling. William dropped the pack, whirled around, and with a single sweep of his arm, flung his useless helmet straight as an arrow down the center of the pipe at head level. If anyone had been there … but no one was. The helmet bounced, skittered along, then spun to a dizzy stop just out of sight in the darkness. William was after it with his pack and flashlight, loping along. To hell with looking over his shoulder. If Frosticos were ten paces behind, William didn’t want to know. Either they’d catch him or they wouldn’t.

He stormed up onto a manhole almost at once and passed it in his haste. He didn’t go back. There’d be another. But when the next appeared, he sailed past it too, not because he saw it too late, but because he was making awfully good time. Fear had lent him impossible stamina. If he paused to climb out they’d be on him. If they were there. If they weren’t, he’d find himself traveling unknown streets at four in the morning. He’d be taken in minutes. And if he were to hide from passing cars, to dart in and out of bushes, to slow up and pretend to simply be taking an early morning constitutional, he’d never get to Palos Verdes.

They’d leave without him. His life would be through. There would be nothing for it, he realized, but to turn himself in, and that would mean, like as not, a return to the sanitarium and to some inconceivable fate. He’d get to Palos Verdes if he had to run all the way. By God, he’d the in the attempt. Just how he’d the he didn’t know, but they’d find him a rough customer. That much was certain.

He dug into his backpack as he jogged along, yanking out his compass. He was heading south beneath Hawthorne Boulevard, straight as an arrow toward the coast highway. Abruptly the sound of pursuing shoes, of someone running along in his wake, joined the clatter of his own shoes on the concrete. He was sure of it. Stopping would reveal the truth, unless, of course, the pursuer were to stop too. There’d be time enough for stopping later, though. In a few minutes he’d be compelled to stop. But at least then he might be a mile closer to his goal, whatever that was worth. And when he did it wouldn’t be to give up. He determined to launch an attack of his own.

He’d run until he was played out. Then, with the last dregs of energy, he’d spin around and run full on into the face of his surprised attacker. He’d smash his head with the flashlight — break his teeth in. He pulled the backpack over his arms so as to free his left hand. Then he dug his penknife out of his pocket and opened the blade as he ran along. If Frosticos had blood in his veins, William would see the color of it shortly.

He gasped for breath, digging deeply into his lungs each time. In another minute or two he’d simply collapse. His flashlight had burned down to a muddy yellow which brightened momentarily when he shook it. In the dark, heaving for breath, he’d be a useless wreck. It was time. William stopped and tried to spin round, but it was a weary, plodding spin, and he realized right away that he hadn’t the strength left to lunge at anyone. He collapsed over forward, staggered a few feet, and shined the weakened light down the tunnel, his knife open and ready. Darkness stared back at him. He waited, enveloped in dread, but nothing appeared out of the black.

Finally he turned and staggered on. He’d run again, he decided, as soon as he caught his breath. But ten minutes later he was still walking wearily, wishing he’d been able to sleep for the two hours he’d lain awake in his bag. His flashlight wouldn’t last another ten minutes. He shook it and banged it to keep it alive, knowing that at any moment he’d have to stop and shove in the batteries he’d bought earlier on Spring Street. And that would mean a minute of absolute darkness, maybe more. What were the odds that he’d get the batteries in right end forward? What if he dropped one and had to go groping after it? But he had no choice. The light, finally, died, and wouldn’t be thumped back to life.

He pulled off his backpack and groped for the batteries, tearing at the plastic that encased them, cursing himself for not having opened them hours earlier so as to be ready. He stopped and listened, imagining he could hear the faint scrape of footsteps back up the corridor. He fumbled with the batteries, feeling for the little knobs on the end. The spring and bulb tumbled out of the cap onto the concrete, rolling, no doubt, toward the water that ran six inches deep down the pipe. William scrambled for them, reaching and groping in the darkness, gripped by a growing dread and a tense anticipation of the pressure of a hand on his back. He found them, juggled them along with the new batteries in his left hand, and swung the flashlight cylinder in a broad arc with his right, the batteries within sailing out and thudding away down the pipe. He dropped in the fresh batteries, listening for footfalls, but hearing nothing. He twisted on the cap, flicked on the switch, and spun around, flooding the tunnel with light. No one was there. It must have been his imagination. He shouldered his pack and walked on, still clutching his knife and remembering suddenly, five minutes too late, the penlight in his pack. He’d panicked. Lost his mind. He would have to get a grip on himself and think things through.

Every hundred feet or so he passed the mouth of perpendicular tunnels, keeping well away from each even if it meant slogging through water. He shined his light into each methodically, simply for the sake of knowing there was nothing there. And then, when William passed his light across the dark circle of another adjoining pipe, there stood, well up into it, the doctor. He was clearly not a product of William’s imagination. William didn’t have to pinch himself. He hadn’t any time to. He was off like a shot, any plans for a sudden assault on Frosticos, for getting a grip on himself, abandoned.

William was nothing but a toy — a mouse in a maze. They were running him for sport. But knowing that did him no good at all. He’d keep running. It was impossible, though, that they’d let him get to his goal. They’d simply wear him out. How had Frosticos gotten ahead of him? Slipped past in the darkness while he fiddled with the batteries? It was unthinkable. But there he’d been.

William couldn’t run forever. It was a matter of hours before the diving bell would drop into the sunlit sea. So there was no possibility that, as if in a nightmare, he would simply run endlessly through darkness haunted by a reappearing Frosticos. The idea of it was unnatural — impossible. Sooner or later it would come to a confrontation. Frosticos wanted to destroy him. It was simple as that. But he was greedy, and that would be his downfall. Frosticos thought of himself as a sort of artist — that was his problem in a nut — and he wanted sorely to turn this present effort into an epic, the stinking, self-satisfied monster. Let him take a long look in a mirror. He’d find he had the face of an ape.

William lurched along, his breath tearing in his lungs, unable to convince himself to slow down. There was no use shining the light behind him; it wouldn’t tell him anything. Frosticos might be anywhere. He was ubiquitous. He wasn’t fooling anyone. It was a simple matter — once he’d discovered William’s destination from the cab driver — to simply clamber in and out of the sewer, appearing for a moment, then disappearing, taking a car a mile up Hawthorne and waiting for William to pass, then popping off and doing it again. But there would be a time, perhaps when daylight made bouncing in and out of sewers impractical, that he’d act, when William’s fate would be played out in the darkness, and even his screams would go unnoticed or unremarked by the dawning world above.

He staggered to a slow walk, forcing himself along, his flashlight on but pointed groundward. He wheezed and coughed, stopping finally to pull his canteen from his pack and take a long chink. He rummaged around and found the apple. He wondered, suddenly, what would happen if he simply didn’t go on — if he sat down and had lunch, read Pince Nez, let a couple of hours slide by. What would Frosticos do? By now he was more than likely some ways farther along, perhaps a hundred yards, perhaps a mile. Maybe he’d stopped at Winchell’s for a cup of coffee and a doughnut, laughing to himself at the thought of William, terrified, quaking in the sewers below. What if William simply didn’t accommodate him?

Somehow, William couldn’t imagine Frosticos simply quitting — going home to bed. Surely Frosticos couldn’t take the chance of William slipping away down a sidestreet, jogging over a block or two, and continuing on. Someone, it occurred suddenly to William, must be shadowing him and had been all along. Then furtive steps in the darkness could easily belong to anyone. To whom? Yamoto? William set his teeth. Of course.

He shined the flashlight down the sewer as if it were a revolver drawn to mow down a gunslinger. Nothing was there — only the same silent darkness. The half-expected white trousers were nowhere to be seen. But how far did his light shine, forty feet? Maybe not even that. He threw his apple core against the far wall of the pipe and got to his feet. He was unspeakably weary, mainly because he’d stopped to rest. He’d lost momentum.

Fifty yards farther along, he spun round again with his light, and again there was no one. Ahead was the mouth of a small pipe leading off to the right. He was suddenly certain that Frosticos was in it — lying in it perhaps. Or that he’d come racing down it toward William on all fours, like a dog, his eyes wide and wild, his teeth sharpened, moving unnaturally fast. William could see it. He knew it was coming. Ten feet away now.

Did he hear footsteps again, shuffling up behind him? Frosticos, perhaps, eyeless, a bleached skull grinning and chattering, sitting atop the white collar. He couldn’t make himself turn. He was two steps away from the tunnel, edging across toward the far side of the pipe. The sight of Frosticos rushing toward him as if up the barrel of a telescope, growing as he rushed, frothing and barking, played against the back of his eyelids like old, scratchy, jumpy film. It would freeze him solid when it came — turn him into a lump of salt like Lot’s unfortunate wife.

Then he was past it. He strode on, his eyes clutched shut, still anticipating the sudden scramble that would announce the end, the sudden touch of a moist hand round his neck. But there was nothing. No one had been in the tunnel. He’d been tormenting himself with imagined fears. He turned and lit the corridor behind to prove it to himself, and saw, he was sure of it, a white patch of moving cloth, just out of flashlight range, disappearing as if someone had stopped suddenly and retreated. It was Yamoto. It had to be. Frosticos was waiting ahead.

William began to run, stopped abruptly, swung around, and once again caught sight of the vanishing white patch like the wisping away of a ghost. If it was Yamoto, William would deal with him. It was one thing for the man to torment him by day in his own home, masquerading as a gardener, clipping the shrubs and peering in at the windows. It was another to follow him into the sewers — quite likely with murderous intent. But William would deal with him. He’d done it before. He grinned at the thought of Yamoto’s screaming terror when he’d surprised William in the cab of his truck. And his gibbering complaint when William pulped the begonias — what had that been but fear? William would show him fear.

There ahead was another pipe leading away. It was time to act, decidedly time. In a moment there would be one less villain afoot in the sewers. He’d use the flashlight on him. He had the spare penlight, after all, and there was every chance that once he was rid of Yamoto, he could give Frosticos the slip. He could as easily jog down to Crenshaw, all the way out to the coast highway. With no one to alert Frosticos, his game would become impossibly complicated.

William switched off his light, plunging the sewer into darkness. He ran his hand along the wall until it slipped into the open pipe, and in an instant he clambered into it, his heart clanging, not allowing himself to think of the waiting Frosticos. There was no sound at all. He strained to hear the quiet pad of approaching feet. It was impossible that Yamoto could have seen him — unlikely that he could have guessed his intent. William crouched at the edge of the pipe and peered out into the larger tunnel. He could see nothing. He was struck with the sudden certainty that a heavy blade, an ax perhaps, would whistle down out of the darkness and sever his head where it poked out. He pulled farther into the pipe.

Who could say what sort of weapon Yamoto carried? A meat cleaver? He’d seen too many movies His elbow struck something solid. He froze in a crouch. It hadn’t been flesh. It felt more like wood — debris, perhaps, wedged into the pipe. He jabbed at it, making out the edge of some rectilinear object with his elbow. There was no sound beyond.

He couldn’t wait in the pipe, that much was certain. Surprise was everything. If Yamoto had stopped to wait him out, William might as well be on his way. Yamoto, after all, might easily have seen the tunnel ahead, might have understood William’s turning off the flashlight. He’d have to take a different tack, perhaps continue on in the darkness, feeling the wall like a blind man until another opportunity presented itself.

Still there was no sound of footsteps. He clicked on his light, poked his head out, and illuminated the empty tunnel. Then he turned and shined the light behind him, at whatever it was that blocked the smaller pipe.

It was a steamer chest, open, standing on end. William screamed in spite of himself, spilling out of the mouth of the pipe and into the stream of water. He was up at once, bathing the chest in light. In it, strapped upright with leather belts, were the remains of something — some fleshy horror. A corpse that might once have been human, but might just as easily have been a beast. It slumped there in its bonds, a ruin of scars and transplanted limbs, its mouth lolling open, nothing but a toothless slit in its face, its nose a black hollow, its eyesockets empty. The thing had no ears, and its arms, strapped across its chest, ended in webbed fingers. William backed away down the pipe, staring at the steamer trunk. It was meant as an advertisement — that much was obvious. He began to run, jogging at first, then racing along, pounding south toward the ocean and the diving bell that would transport him to another world. He didn’t think. There was no use thinking. He couldn’t reason through it. They’d gotten to him again. Who had it been in the trunk? What poor, harmless thing was it that had been reduced to such a state? Certainly not Reginald Peach. The idea of it made him sick. But it couldn’t be. He was too valuable to sacrifice for such a lark. This had been a failure, put to good use despite the failing.

William slowed finally, unable to maintain the pace, and sure once again of the sound of distant footfalls: Yamoto. A voice sounded behind him. William couldn’t make it out above the sound of his own labored breathing and footsteps. He stopped, listening. He had no idea where he was. His pocket watch showed that it was after eleven. He’d been making good time. Perhaps he was nearing his goal and had crossed under the coast highway into Rolling Hills. There was the voice again, calling his name. The footfalls grew louder. It had come down to the final confrontation. He braced himself for it, for the first chill glimpse of whatever it was — Frosticos, Yamoto, Lord-knew-what — that would materialize from the dark, distant tunnel. There it came.

It was Elijah, hairy and wild and ancient. William jerked upright, aiming his light, unbelieving. It wasn’t Elijah; it was William Ashbless, limping. In his right hand was a leather sap. The bastard! It had been Ashbless all along, terrifying him. And here he was, setting out to cosh William into jelly. We’ll see, thought William, setting his feet and glancing over his shoulder in case another attacker approached from up the tunnel. He was dead tired, and his eyes felt as if they were loaded with sand, but he was damned if he couldn’t fight off an ancient poet with a sap.

“Come along!” he shouted, waving the flashlight in his right hand and his penknife in his left.

“Whoa!” hissed Ashbless, putting finger to his lip and shaking his head. “Pipe down, for God’s sake, or we’re both done.”

William lowered the penknife as Ashbless shoved the sap into his coat pocket and strode up toward him looking furtively behind as if fearful of being followed. “I took care of the Oriental,” he said, taking William by the shoulder and hurrying him along.

“Yamoto?” asked William.

“I didn’t ask his name,” Ashbless replied. “I just flattened him. They’ve been onto you since last night. Trying to take a cab to Palos Verdes was foolish. Damn foolish. Everyone knows — Frosticos, the police. I read the article this morning in the Times, then straight off ran into Frosticos and three others in the passage off La Brea. They were onto you then.”

“So they printed the letter!” cried William ecstatically.

“Shhh!” whispered Ashbless, looking around. ‘They paraphrased it, but the spirit of the thing was there. It’s been on the news all morning. What I’m telling you is that they don’t mean to let you out of this tunnel alive.”

“You came down here to tell me that?” asked William, suddenly suspicious again.

“No,” said Ashbless.

William waited for an explanation, ready to bolt. He studied it out. He could twist away to the right, flailing at Ashbless with the light. If he connected and the flashlight was wrecked, he’d run off down the dark tunnel with his penlight. Better yet, he’d take Ashbless’ light. He must have one on him.

“I’ve freed Reginald Peach,” said Ashbless.

“What?”

“Peach. You wouldn’t believe his misery. He escaped twice, but they hunted him down. They won’t find him again, though. He’s agreed to take me to the Earth’s core. Maybe we’ll run into each other there.”

“Reginald Peach,” said William, unbelieving.

“He’s quite an inventor in his own right. And he has certain powers. I think you understand me. Do me a favor if you get topside again. Tell Basil for me that I made an effort to free Giles and that I succeeded with Reginald. I’m afraid he’s misunderstood my motivations.”

“So have I, apparently,” said William, more than half convinced. ‘Thanks for taking care of Yamoto.”

Ashbless waved it off. It was nothing. The least he could do. There was the sound of rushing water ahead, of a subterranean river flowing through a deep channel.

“Where are we?” asked William.

“Nearly under the Palos Verdes Hills. This is as far as I go.” He produced a broad flashlight from under his coat and shined it ahead into the darkness. Vague shapes were outlined in the gray. William could feel cool, fresh moisture off the water. Ahead was an arched bridge, spanning the channel, and tied to it was a long, low craft, almost a gondola, straining to be away in the current. Above the waterline the sides were painted with crocodile men and bird-beaked children and strange Egyptian hieroglyphs, obviously, thought William, produced for some colorful carnival ride.

Sitting in the stern was the strangest apparition William had encountered: a half-naked man with pearly semi-translucent scales and webbed fingers, his head encased in an unbelievable spiral seashell with a porthole window in the front. Bulbous eyes stared out through the glass. The enormous shell, oddly, was filled with water — a helmet aquarium that encased the head of Reginald Peach. Two coiled tubes dangled into the water behind the boat.

William was stupefied. He could think of nothing to say. He’d never, in fact, been introduced to Reginald, hadn’t even seen him. It was true that he had a passing familiarity with some few of his offspring, but it would hardly be decorous of him to mention it.

“William Hastings,” said Ashbless, gesturing, “Reginald Peach.”

Peach dipped his head almost imperceptibly, and to William’s surprise, said “Glad-to-meet-you,” in a bubbly voice that was quite clearly radiated through some sort of machine — an artificial voice box. William said he was happy to meet Reginald too. And in truth he was. The man was fascinating. Imagine the stories he could tell — the filings he’d seen. William had half a mind to induce Ashbless to let him go along.

“Bound for the Earth’s core, eh?” said William, making small talk.

Peach ignored him, directing his gaze at Ashbless. ‘This boat won’t do,” he bubbled pettishly, “and something’s got into my waterline — clogged it up. Wait. There. It’s clear now. Oh, damn!”

A fish the size of a minnow appeared suddenly in his helmet, looking out through the faceplate, baffled. Peach tracked it with one eye. William had always wondered how the dry world looked from the inside of an aquarium. He wished he had the opportunity to ask Reginald — he could sense the core of a short story in it, the thrill of a budding symbol. But again, decorum intervened.

“Nothing ever works right,” complained Peach. “Everything is a mess. And this boat — I don’t trust this boat. It’s too small and there aren’t any cushions on the seats. Someone’s painted it all up, too. I feel like a fool sitting in it.”

Let him complain, thought William, taking the long view. Who has a right to bitch if not Reginald Peach?

Ashbless wasn’t as understanding. “This boat is perfect,” he said. “I’ve sailed farther in worse, on rivers I can’t even mention. And with stranger company too.” He gave William a look, raising his eyes as if to say he was bearing up.

More Ashbless bragging, thought William, who had half a mind to stick up for poor Reginald. But who was to say what Ashbless had and hadn’t done? Here he was, after all, delivering both of them out of the clutches of Frosticos.

Peach piped up before William had a chance to say anything. “Let’s go,” he said. “You’ve rescued this man, apparently. I don’t know why. Here he is, safe as a baby. Quit fooling away my time. Goodbye,” he said to William, tacking it onto the end of his final sentence almost without pause. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!” He wiggled back and forth, nearly capsizing the boat, then made as if to stand on the spindly little thwart.

“Hey!” cried Ashbless, clambering in and untying the painter. He widened his eyes again at William. “It’s going to be a long trip. He won’t talk about anything but medical problems — a list a mile long. He had nothing to read for eighteen years but a waterproof copy of Merck’s Manual. He’s got a whole catalogue of complaints by now, let me tell you.”

“Get this fish out of my helmet,” Peach whined. Ashbless pushed off.

The weird boat with its equally weird crew angled away in the current and in moments was borne into darkness. William Ashbless stood in the stern like some ancient weed-haired sea god, sailing into a river of mystery. William wondered, suddenly, whore the river flowed. Obviously not into the Domin-guez Channel. He hoped Reginald Peach knew what he was doing, that both of them would find the land they searched for. Ashbless, after all, had turned out all right. They’d maligned him unjustly. William saluted with two fingers down the dark chasm where they’d disappeared, then trod across the bridge toward the peninsula and freedom. He hadn’t gone a quarter mile when he heard his name called once again, very softly.

John Pinion’s ice cream shirt and pants woe a wreck. He’d torn and soiled them in the sewers, trying to salvage something from the leviathan. But the sons of bitches hadn’t let him have any of it. They took the perpetual motion engine, worth a fortune. And the magnetic bottle, full of anti-gravity — they’d put it into a paper sack. It was insufferable. Insufferable. He didn’t know what he would do. His life was a wreck. He’d wanted nothing but knowledge, nothing for himself. Gain was foreign to him. But he’d been hounded, used. Allies had become traitors. He’d been accused of being a pervert, a charlatan, a glory seeker, a lunatic. He’d show them, somehow.

He could just see the flatbed truck parked ahead, along the main channel. The diving bell was hanging from a chain, swinging across onto the deck of the tugboat. The fools! They’d find nothing but death. His mechanical mole had been a work of genius. He couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong. He drove to Ports O’Call Village and parked in a metered lot. Damn the meter. He was above meters. He walked along the docks, just at the edge of a meandering mob of Japanese tourists. There was the tug. The bell was aboard. The tourists pointed at it, jabbered. Good God, the fool Latzarel was telling them a joke. Pinion was furious. He was tempted to … he didn’t know what.

He knew only that Latzarel and St. Ives weren’t going anywhere. His head ached. Damn the noise! He squinted into the sun at a wheeling gull that cried out overhead to torment him. The pier ran out into the channel and another pier — two others — angled out perpendicularly from the first. Farther along was another identical pier, and beyond that another and another. Pinion’s head reeled with the thought of it. There was a dull ache right behind his eyelids, as if something was shoving against the back of his eyes, pushing them out. He felt as if his head were about to burst.

One of the tourists waved a camera at the bell, chattering at Latzarel to stand beside it. The man slipped, sprawled toward the edge of the pier, and Latzarel and St. Ives and the boy — what was his name? — gawked over the side. Pinion stepped across onto the boat, barely making a sound on his crepe soles. In a moment, just as the salty camera was hauled dripping from the water, Pinion crept in under a heap of canvas and rope. He lay in the darkness, the sounds from without muffled by the canvas. There was a roaring in his ears, as if someone held a great seashell to either one — the hollow windy sound of thousands of miles of open ocean. He clutched at his head, stifling a groan. It must be arthritis, enlivened by ocean air. He could feel it in his joints — a burning and tearing, almost an itch. His skin crawled. Maybe it was the damned canvas. But he couldn’t just throw it off and pop out.

The motor churned into life, the tug surged forward, and in twenty minutes he felt the roll of the groundswell as they motored out toward Angel’s gate. Latzarel was full of joviality. Pinion hated Latzarel. He retched under the canvas as silently as he could, clutching his stomach, which seemed to be tearing itself to pieces. His bones felt as if they’d crack apart. He was hellishly sick, but it wouldn’t stop him.

He was aware, suddenly, of an uncanny illusion. The canvas, it seemed, was translucent, like green seawater, and he peered through it at a sunlit sky as if he were looking out from the depths of a pool. He felt a cool rush of water across him just as a twisting shudder of pain wracked his hands. But nothing had happened. He still lay under the canvas. He reached for the edge of it to pull it back, but his fingers slipped through it as through water. It rippled, sending a swirl of little wavelets across his vision, obscuring the sight of the bowed front of the cabin that was drawn sharply against the sky. The ripples settled. Pinion stared, unbelieving. Just out of the corner of his eye he could see Latzarel bending to some task. St. Ives was nowhere about. Squires was invisible in the wheel-house above. And staring at him, dead at him, through the curved glass of the cabin, was Giles Peach, as if in a trance. A rush of panic slammed through him. Peach could see him. He looked him in the eye. He was watching him there beneath the canvas. Something was desperately wrong.

He doubled up in pain, then straightened with a cry he couldn’t suppress. He gasped for breath, floundering. They’d see him. Surely they’d see him. Suddenly he hoped they would. He’d die otherwise. His skin seemed to ripple like the canvas. It itched wildly. He scratched at his arm and a line of silver scales popped loose. His fingers were strangely immobile, were joined, in fact, by little fleshy bridges of skin. He clawed at his throat, unable to breathe. The flesh on his neck seemed to be disintegrating, pulling apart.

He gasped and thrashed, but his screams were airy nothings. And in a moment he wasn’t even aware of screams — he was aware of nothing at all, not even of the startled cry of Edward St. Ives, who noticed the pitching thing beneath the canvas and pulled it back to reveal a momumental fish with fleshy, finger-tipped fins, gasping helplessly in the ruined uniform of an ice cream man.

“Good Lord!” shouted Latzarel with a suddenness that nearly pitched the stupefied Edward into the metamorphosed John Pinion. But Latzarel hadn’t even seen Pinion, he was pointing at the beach, yanking Edward by the back of the shirt.

Chapter 23

Ashbless again? thought William at the sound of his name. But something told him that it wasn’t. It hadn’t been that kind of whisper. It hadn’t been meant to hail him; it was a ghost whisper, echoing out of the dark corridor, neither ahead nor behind him. He slowed, listening. There it was again. “William. William Hastings.” Then the sound of something — what was it? — a razor lapping against a strop, the scraping of leather soles on the concrete pipe.

How far was he from the shore? Surely not more than half a mile. He began to run. His flashlight had dimmed again to a dirty intermittent glow. William ran on, passing the mouth of a tunnel from which came a shrill scream, a howl that degenerated into shrieking laughter. There was a rush of steps behind him. They stamped along furiously for a moment then gave off into abrupt silence that lasted just long enough to convince William that some fresh horror was about to launch itself at him, then erupted into the clanging of a bell that echoed wildly through the sewers as if through the dark halls of a funhouse.

The clanging was sliced off cleanly, and in the deep, ensuing quiet the whispering began again: “William. William Hastings,” weirdly loud, as if leaking into the sewers through secret transmitters. And impossibly, directly ahead of him, Hilario Frosticos materialized, stepping out of the shadows, clutching his bag.

William almost ran headlong into him. He threw himself to the side, his shoulder skidding against the curve of the pipe, and spun half around, slouching onto his hands. His flashlight smashed against the concrete floor and blazed brighter than ever. But it wouldn’t last. William was sure it wouldn’t last.

He looked into the doctor’s face, searching there for some sign of compassion, of civility. It was utterly blank — a face made of stone. Even its color was wrong — a pale bluish ivory that shone through a layer of powder. The color in his cheeks was rouge. And his hair — it seemed to be sewn on in tufts stitched in neat rows like trees in an orchard. He was ghastly — inhuman.

His eyes — that was the worst part. They were void. Empty and depthless and white as if obscured by semi-transparent cataracts. What did he look like, wondered William, beneath the rouge? How old had he been when he traveled in the company of Pince Nez, thirty-five years earlier? And who, for God’s sake, did he resemble? Why was William certain that he wasn’t who he seemed to be?

Frosticos coughed, lurching just a bit, almost imperceptibly. But William saw it. He clutched his black bag with rigid fingers. He grinned, and the grin broke into a fit of coughing and choking. William made a move, as if to run, but Frosticos stepped in front of him, waving the black bag, taunting him with it. What grim instruments did it contain? What hellish apparatus?

A tear ran out of Frosticos’ left eye, taking a line of powder with it. The flesh below was unnaturally blue — almost iridescent like the blue of a fish. It gave William the horrors. He was frozen there, waiting. He couldn’t think in a straight line. One thought kept bumping up into another, catapulting over it smack into a third, the lot of them piling up in a tangled heap. He watched the doctor’s face. There was something wrong with it. Dead wrong. He seemed to be almost gasping for breath, and he clutched once at his heart, involuntarily, as if swept by a sudden spasm.

“Where’s the poet?” croaked Frosticos, still grinning in a frozen rictus.

“Gone,” said William coolly.

“Peach?”

“Gone with him.” William was certain by then that Ashbless was miles down the river, deep into a land closed to Hilario Frosticos, no matter what vile powers he possessed. Frosticos knew it too. He’d lost Reginald Peach. A look of absolute fury twisted his face, followed by a wretching spasm of pain.

“You’ll like your new home. …” Frosticos began, but was doubled up by a wracking cough. When he looked up again he was haggard, twisted. He looked as if he had aged fifty years beneath the fleshy powder. William could have run. Frosticos’ power over him was broken. William knew it. He could have slammed Frosticos over the head, beaten him silly. But he didn’t Something was peculiarly, violently, wrong. And William sensed that for Frosticos it was going from bad to worse. He had a look in his eye — a hunted look — the look of a man who’s just discovered he’s made a frightful error. William would wait him out. He gripped the shaft of the flashlight tightly, ready to spring. But he’d watch for a moment first.

Frosticos’ hand shook as he fumbled with the latch on the black bag. For one grim instant William suspected that his worst fears were coming to pass. He raised the flashlight as if to crash it into the doctor’s forehead. Frosticos fell back a step, waving his hand, digging at the bag, glancing back and forth at William and the bag, sweating in a sudden flood of pasty makeup and rouge.

Something vital was in the bag, and it hadn’t anything to do with William. Heroin? Morphine? Of course. The false aspirin tablets. Frosticos had miscalculated. He’d chased William through the sewers until he’d gotten sick. But it was happening too quickly, taking him utterly by surprise. He must be incredibly dependent on it, thought William, eyeing the bag.

Frosticos tore it open and reached inside. William kicked it out of his hands, sending it end over end into slimy black water. Vials and bottles cascaded out, smashing, rolling, spilling serums and pills.

Frosticos howled — a deep, tortured howl of fear and pain. He turned on William, his teeth gnashing together, his eyes wild.

“Come on then!” William cried, waving his flashlight, a sudden surge of courage washing through him.

Frosticos turned and ran at the vials, grasping, gagging, clutching at an uncorked bottle of green liquid that had emptied half its contents into the water. William was after him in a trice. Frosticos lunged. William clubbed him with the flashlight, slipping in a pool. His legs splayed out. He grabbed Frosticos’ coat, pulling the doctor down with him. Frosticos shrieked, kicked, bit at the air. William rolled away and leaped up. He kicked the bottle down the sewer as if it were a football.

Glass and liquid flew when it glanced off the wall of the pipe. Frosticos screamed down on William, utterly insane, his mouth gibbering nonsense. William danced on the vials, smashing and breaking them, and clubbed Frosticos in the side of the head with the flashlight.

The lens smashed and the cap flew off followed by a shooting stream of batteries. Frosticos vanished in the darkness. William steeled himself for another gibbering onslaught. Frosticos would have the strength of a madman. But it was too late to run. He had run far enough.

Frosticos was silent, breathing heavily. He gasped. Something thudded into the concrete, three times in succession, as if Frosticos were jackknifing in the grip of a seizure, banging his head. William yanked off his torn pack, rummaging blindly for the penlight. He found it, switched it on, and shined the light into Frosticos’ face.

He gasped and fell back, treading on the pack. Frosticos seemed to be a mass of worms. His skin was crawling, metamorphosing. He jerked and breathed in hoarse, shallow, ratcheting coughs like an ancient, tired man dying on a sickbed, Then, with one last back-bending jerk, he flopped and lay still. His face slowly settled, quivering, broadening. Dark hair sprouted impossibly from between the pale sprouts. White eyebrows blackened. His eyes slowly focused on William’s face, puzzled at first, then clutched by a surge of sudden hatred. But they were no longer the eyes of Hilario Frosticos. Lying on the floor of the sewer, his still, dead face wearing a last look of rage and baffled surprise, was Ignacio Narbondo, vivisectionist, amphibian physiologist. William gasped, unbelieving.

The face began to shrink, changing once again. Skin shredded off. Hair grew out amazingly. There was a quick smell of death and dry decay in the air — a sarcophagus smell, mingled with the weird aquarium smell of fish. The hair fell out in clumps onto the floor of the sewer, and for one last moment, just for an instant that hung suspended between flesh and dust, William could swear that Frosticos resembled nothing more than a gigantic, ancient carp. But what was left staring up at him in the feeble glow of the penlight was the ivory-boned skeleton of a man, its head pushed forward onto its chest by the swerve of concrete pipe.

William stared at it, his mouth open in disbelief. Surely this was the least expected of the lot of it. But it fit — it fit like a glove. “Carp don’t die,” that’s what Pince Nez had said to Edward. A madness, Edward had assumed. But it signified in some dark way. They had all known it signified; they just hadn’t known how.

Shining the penlight on the still bones, William backed up, a step at a time, picking up his backpack from the sewer floor. He half expected the skeleton to hoist itself up like a marionette and rush at him as if William were Sinbad the sailor. A scattering of teeth clattered from the skull like dice, bouncing and rolling. William was off like a shot, racing for sunlight. This was no Arabian Nights. This was stark, sober reality. Frosticos was dead. The diving bell sailed at three o’clock. He’d come too far along peculiar paths to miss that voyage.

His knee, he discovered, had been bounced on the concrete when he’d fallen. And his back felt as if someone had been at it with a hammer. He pulled his pocket watch out; it was frozen at half past two. The water ran deeper in the pipe. He was forced to slop through it. He hadn’t run for five minutes before he was heaving and gasping again. He’d had it — more than had it. The thing was impossible. The bell, no doubt, had sailed. He’d stumble out onto an empty beach and be led away as a murderer. They’d find the skeleton in the sewer and accuse him of atrocities.

He dragged along, carrying his backpack in his good hand. There ahead, suddenly, was an arced slip of sunlight that looked for all the world like a crescent moon shining in a starless sky. The crescent grew to a half moon, a gibbous, a full moon, and he was out, jumping three feet down into the weedy sand.

Offshore sat the Gerhardi, riding at anchor. The bell was perched on deck. Latzarel was aboard. And there was Edward, posturing at a heap of canvas. Latzarel had him by the coat, pointing onshore, first at William, then above. He hollered something. Edward stood up. There was Jim at the bulwark, dropping the rowboat. A shout rang out above him on the bluffs. William looked up as he limped across the beach, pulling his backpack onto his shoulders, waving tiredly at Latzarel.

Two policemen were sliding toward him down the sandy trail. They hailed him, called him Mr. Hastings. They’d call him something else when Frosticos’ skeleton washed onto the beach in the next rain.

William waved at them pleasantly and loped straight into the water, striking out in a sodden, tired crawl toward the Gerhardi, which appeared and disappeared beyond the swell. He knew they wouldn’t swim for him — he’d become too much the public figure, no longer the head-smashing, begonia-tearing desperado. They’d shout foolish codes over the radio and the harbor patrol would put out of San Pedro. But unless they could dig up another member of the Peach family to pilot them, they’d have a hard time with the pursuit. William bobbed on a swell, treading water. There was Jim in the rowboat ten yards off, five yards. William struggled to haul himself into it, but couldn’t. It was impossible. Jim struck out for the Gerhardi with William in tow. Pince Nez, so miraculously preserved in the sewers, would be a waterlogged wreck. But it had served its purpose. Edward, of course, might despair at the drowning of his sixty-dollar book.

A moment later and William was clambering up the side, boosted from below. He collapsed forward onto the deck, the spinning sun in his eyes. “Let him lie,” said Edward — a harsh thing, it seemed to William. He rolled over and watched the rest of them hurry across to the far side of the deck to grapple with something heaped there. William blinked. It was a great fish. For a moment he was certain it was Reginald Peach, but of course it wasn’t. He rose, slumped, and crawled across on his hands and knees. It was John Pinion.

Edward and Professor Latzarel grabbed the canvas beneath the fish, heaved, and flopped Pinion overboard. William watched him sink, spiraling slowly downward into the deep pool wearing his foolish, shredded ice cream clothing. Pinion twitched and then thrashed almost double as if shaking himself out. He thrashed again, shuddered down the length of him, gave a great kick with his fused legs, and was gone, undulating away into the green depths.

“Let’s go,” shouted Giles, looking out the hatch of the diving bell, indifferent, it seemed, to Pinion’s fate. No one argued. There’d be five of them aboard — a tight fit, surely, but the bell was built for six. They shook Squires’ hand and helped William in, cutting short his shouted reminder to Squires to look after the mice and axolotl. Even before the hatch slid shut, the bell was hoisted above the deck and swinging out over the water. Giles checked the instruments and fiddled with the humming Hieronymous machine. Lights blinked on in a spray of amethyst and emerald and ruby.

William dragged off his backpack and rummaged inside. There was one thing he had to know. He pulled the top from the rosewood box and held the box in front of Giles. “I got this out of Yamoto,” he said, nodding at it. “I’m fairly sure they’re not aspirin. Some sort of opiate, I think — heroin maybe — manufactured by Han Koi, but I need to be sure.”

Giles glanced at the pills as if they were utterly uninteresting, just another irritation. “Of course they are,” he said after a moment. “You’re absolutely correct.” And with that the bell plunged into the water, a storm of green bubbles rising beyond the portholes. The Dean-drive mechanism whirred into life, and a pellet of salt, extracted from the first bit of converted seawater, tumbled out of the Hieronymous machine into a galvanized bucket.

William cheered, thinking suddenly of his origami boat. Giles grinned sheepishly at Jim. Edward and Professor Latzarel shook hands. Five silent minutes later, with an air of absolute confidence, Giles Peach yanked the pair of levers that loosed them utterly from the Gerhardi, and from the dust and muck and turmoil of the surface world. They dropped into the abyss, gaining momentum, tree at last, following the dark wake of John Pinion, all of them bound at last on a strange and watery journey toward the center of the hollow Earth.