She slid one of the pair of candy bars out of the wrapper and ate it. A crab sidled out from under the rocks and looked at her. She tossed it a hunk of coconut and chocolate and called him Mr. Crab.
Andrew grinned at her. The crab scuttled out of sight, carrying the treat. Rose folded up the fishing knife and dropped it into the tackle box. There was only a half hour to go before they were due at the Potholder. She reeled in her line and began to dismantle her pole. “We’d better get,” she said.
Andrew nodded. “One more cast.” He was using an old spinning reel with fourteen-pound line and a one-ounce pyramid sinker. “Watch this,” he said, and he baited the bottom hook with a hunk of Mounds bar and cast it way out into the water in a long, low arc. He waited for the telltale thunk when it settled on the bottom. Rose, cheerfully skeptical, watched Andrew take the slack out of the line.
Then, almost at once, as if the universe were playing along, the line jerked, then jerked again, and Andrew set the drag down just a bit, winked at Rose, and leaning back against the heavily bent pole, began to reel in his fish.
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Also by James P. Blaylock
The Elfin Series
The Elfin Ship
The Disappearing Dwarf
The Stone Giant
Langdon St Ives
Homunculus*
Lord Kelvin’s Machine*
Other Novels
The Digging Leviathan
Land Of Dreams
The Last Coin
The Paper Grail
The Magic Spectacles
Night Relics
All The Bells On Earth
Winter Tides
The Rainy Season
Knights Of The Cornerstone
Collections
Thirteen Phantasms
In For A Penny
Metamorphosis
* not available as SF Gateway eBooks
Dedication
For Viki
And this time.
For my friend Lew Shiner.
Pen Pal and Surfing Buddy
And for the lovely Edie
and her mint brownies, raccoon houses, and coffee—
From the four of us
James P. Blaylock (1950 - )
James Paul Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California, in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded – along with Powers and Jeter – as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and a Philip K. Dick Award, he is currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts, where Tim Powers is Writer in Residence.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © James P. Blaylock 1988
All rights reserved.
The right of James Blaylock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11760 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
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