The axolotl was a horse of a different color. It was almost too mucky to mess about with, and it had an antipathy toward hats and coats and only a grudging acceptance of a pair of pants that fit like shorts after a broad hiatus was made in the seat to accommodate the amphibian’s tail. William emptied a little cardboard box full of doll clothes onto the desk top, searching for a hat. But all he could find was a little beret of sorts, the type of thing a Frenchman might wear. Better to do without entirely.
The sight of the clothed beasts slowed Edward down considerably when he pushed in through the door, but he was struck with the impossibility of the whole thing and decided to take the long view. He smiled at William. “What ho?”
“Hah!” said William, adjusting a mouse coat. Take a look at this. I’m onto something new. There’s no doubt about it. Our problem all along is that we assumed we were moving backward from the mammalian to the amphibian ages. Devolution. Well it’s not as simple as that. Even the most mundane of the beasts are complex affairs. There’s nothing simple about a mouse. It has certain tendencies that we’ve failed to take into account; and one, the way I see it, is its natural tendency toward civilization—gentility. On a reduced scale, of course. This isn’t all my grand idea, mind you. I’ve been reading Shakespeare. The Elizabethans were aware of the innate ability of animals to sense impending chaos. The Chinese, as I understand it, use pigs and cows to sniff out earthquakes—they’re unaccountably perturbed by anything that threatens their sense of order, their natural inclination toward domesticity and civilized behavior. So what do we do, I asked myself. We hasten the process, that’s what. Civilize the things. And I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts we see some advances. Some cooperation. Help me pull this coat onto the axolotl, will you? I can’t get a grip on him with one hand.”
Edward waylaid the axolotl, pinning him down while William worked at the coat. “What about the water?” Edward asked. “I don’t mean to question your theory—in fact it’s perfectly sound as far as I can see—but won’t all of this finery lose some of its civilizing effect when it’s water-soaked?”
William gave his brother-in-law a look that seemed to imply that Edward was a child when it came to understanding civilization theory. He shook his head. “You overestimate the beasts, Edward. You’ve interpreted the theory too broadly. Science often falls into such a trap—finding a single nugget and anticipating an entire vein. The tendency toward civilization in these beasts doesn’t stretch so far as that. Although I’m certain they’ll respond to the influences of proper dress, I doubt entirely that they’ll understand the difference in correctness of fashion. Do you follow me?”
“Yes,” said Edward, “I believe I do. You’ve certainly thought this through.” He cleared his throat, then noticed that within the cages, the door to which stood ajar, were half a dozen mice in various states of dress, milling around and eyeing each other. One was reducing his topcoat to shreds and making a bed out of it in the corner. Edward had never seen William so serious or so elated. There was nothing wrong with elation, he told himself.
A slamming car door out on the street heralded the arrival of William Ashbless, his white hair awry about his ears. His shin cracked into the bumper of his car as he edged around it on his way toward the driveway, and he shouted at the bumper, kicking it for good measure before hastening toward the garage, waving what appeared to be a photograph.
William glanced up at the banging and shouting, was unimpressed, and went back to manipulating his clothed beasts. Ashbless burst in, jabbering excitedly, then abruptly fell mute when he saw the objects of William’s attention. He was silent for only a few seconds, however, before it dawned on him that there was nothing particularly surprising in William’s behavior. He waved his photograph at Edward.
“Benner,” he said. “You remember young Steerforth Benner. Self-satisfied little snake, but useful. Well, I found out he’s working part-time for the county coroner, mucking out the crematorium or something. So I gave him a call, and look what he came up with.”
He handled Edward a black and white photo of a corpse—the corpse of Oscar Pallcheck, dredged out of the tar pits. Edward was astonished. The photo was unbelievable. He turned it over and glanced at the back side as if expecting to find a disclaimer, then peered closely at the front, holding it in the sunlight that slanted in through the window. It was apparent that something had been done to Oscar’s neck. At first it seemed as if there were the indentations of fingers—as if he’d been strangled very neatly and symmetrically. Edward hauled out a magnifying glass. The marks were open—bloodless slits. And Oscar’s head, as the Times had promised, was hairless and had an odd, triangular shape. His eyes, surprisingly, were open. The expression in them was peculiarly familiar.
“William!” Edward cried, poking his brother-in-law in the small of the back. William looked up, feigning surprise, as if he’d been so lost in his work that he was unaware of the poet’s arrival. “Look closely at this. Do you know him?”
William fingered the photo, blinked, and sat down hard into the swivel chair at the desk. He took his pipe out of his pocket with a shaking hand. “Of course,” he said. “It’s Narbondo’s merman.”
‘It’s Oscar Pallcheck,” said Edward.
“Which Narbondo?” asked Ashbless, puzzled.
“There’s only one that amounts to anything among the scientific arts,” Edward said, pulling down the correct volume of Narbondo’s Gilled Beasts. He flipped to the drawing of the Sargasso Sea merman, and there, staring up out of the page, was an amphibian caricature of the dead Oscar Pallcheck, a sort of toad man in trousers.
No one spoke. Edward laid the photo alongside the drawing. The likeness was astonishing. “Narbondo, is it?” asked Ashbless.
‘That’s right,” Edward responded.
Ashbless pulled down the first volume of the work, opened it to the frontispiece, and studied a detailed woodcut of the face of Dr. Narbondo. “He was a son of a bitch. A megalomaniac. He lived at Windermere for years. Did some foul things to sheep. He hated everyone. Threatened at one time to poison the oceans and kill the entire Earth just to get revenge on the scientists in the Academy.”
“Did he?” said William facetiously. “Relative of yours?”
“He was a distant cousin of Wordsworth. Almost no one knows that though. He couldn’t abide Wordsworth’s friends. All too fey for his tastes. He was an explorer. An adventurer. Disappeared into Borneo on some hair-brained adventure involving orangutans. He had certain serums which he claimed allowed for the breeding of unlike beasts—hippos and serpents, fish and birds—and was harried out of England, finally, as a vivisectionist. He was the basis for Dr. Moreau in Wells’ novel. Supposedly he surfaced in China years later searching for a fabled longevity serum involving fish, but that was close to a hundred years ago.” Ashbless fell suddenly silent, as if he’d said more than he’d wanted to and men caught himself.
William hated it when Ashbless carried on so—as if he had knowledge of certain arcana, known, perhaps, only to the cognoscenti. He’d reveal a tidbit or two, just enough to inflate himself for a moment, then clam up, allowing the silence that followed—the promise of strange things unspoken—to inflate him even more.
William watched him squint away at the Narbondo picture, and tried to guess his age. It was impossible to say. In a dimly lit room Ashbless could pass for seventy. His wild, voluminous hair, although snow white, gave him a hearty and slightly youthful and fit look. But in the sunlight, when the cracks of his face weren’t obscured by vague and timid illumination, he looked older, peculiarly older. He could have been ninety. A monumental ninety, to be sure. William was reminded of Tennyson, who, supposedly, carried horses around on his back to demonstrate his might. Aware of the stigma of being a poet, perhaps. And that bothered him about Ashbless too. Poets always struck William as being close cousins to actors, strutting about, immersed in themselves, in their own pretensions to seriousness and insight.
There was more to Ashbl
ess than that, but William couldn’t quite pin it down. He decided to bait him, just for sport. “I’ve been reading some of the poetry of your ancestor,” he said, knowing that any hint at the falsity or assumption of Ashbless’ name would mortify the poet.
Ashbless didn’t respond.
“Very good stuff,” William continued, happy with himself. “It’s not at all difficult to see his influence on your own poetry. Clear as a bell, I’d say. You’ve done some elegant things with his themes.”
“I feel a spiritual affinity to him,” Ashbless murmured, pretending to be more concerned with Narbondo’s Gilled Beasts than with discussions of his poetry.
William nodded grandly, as if he understood clearly what Ashbless meant, “like spirit writing?” he asked. “Automatic writing? That sort of thing? No wonder you’ve got such a vivid understanding of the Romantic age.”
“I don’t believe in spirit writing. My knowledge of the Romantic age is a product of unbelievably intense study. Do either of you know how long the Peach family has lived in the manor at Windermere?”
He’s showing off, thought William. “I haven’t a clue.
Didn’t Basil Peach’s father buy it after the war when money went to bits there? Some old family was taxed out of it, I don’t doubt.”
“Actually,” said Ashbless, acting genuinely puzzled, as if he were beginning to grasp the tangled threads of a dark and webby secret, “they’ve been there for ten centuries, maybe longer. And if my memory serves me well, Peach and Narbondo—Ignacio Narbondo, that is—were acquaintances. The doctor had a scientific interest in Peach—you follow my meaning here?”
“Oh quite, quite.” William put down his pipe and stood up. “Your knowledge is astonishingly vast.”
“Not half vast enough,” said Ashbless cryptically, shoving the photo into his coat pocket.
William turned to his brother-in-law who had lost himself in the Sargasso Sea account. “By the way, Edward, speaking of Giles Peach, what news on your conversation with Velma?”
Edward livened up instantly. Ashbless picked up the abandoned volume and thumbed through it. “I spoke to her early this morning,” said Edward. “She was leaving for the bakery just as Russel and I were pulling out for Gaviota. I had a good talk with her. Warned her against Frosticos. It seems that Giles was taken with some sort of fit. Respiratory trouble, from the sound of it. That and dehydration. It was nip and tuck, apparently. Basil used to have the same problem. And get this: Frosticos was his doctor twenty years ago. So Velma called Frosticos. She doesn’t like him a bit, she said, but he came to mind right off. That poor woman has had her share of troubles. There’s no denying that.”
William eyed Ashbless, fairly sure that the poet was only pretending interest in his volume—that he was watching Edward out of the corner of his eye.
Edward continued: “She seemed to think that Frosticos first appeared back in the pre-Arctic days, when Basil and Pinion were thick. So I managed to suggest that Pinion and Frosticos were quite likely fast friends. That set her off. She apparently can’t abide Pinion, who she says had been hounding Giles to help him in some crackpot scheme, to develop the digger, actually. She’s afraid Giles has been influenced. Anyway, she called Frosticos this morning and wrote him off. Told him to send his bill, that Giles had recovered. So that’s that.”
The multiple mentions of Frosticos had a dampening effect on William’s enthusiasm. He thought darkly about the suggested Frosticos-Pinion connection, about the dead Oscar Pall-check, about the mysterious Dr. Narbondo, the grinning Yamoto, the pall of dim and threatening mystery that was settling around all of them. Edward continued to speak, but his words were lost on William, who stared at a dusty, torn, and out-of-date tide chart stuck to the wall with thumb tacks, depicting, below the monthly tide tables, an obese and comic octopus who winked out of the chart from beneath a sort of billed captain’s hat that said “Len’s Baithouse” across it in faintly arabesque letters.
Jim stood up abruptly, tossing The Bride of Fu Manchu onto the coffee table and hurrying out the front door. He couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t thought of it earlier. It might hot tell him a thing. But then again … On the surface of it, Oscar’s death was utter nonsense. But somewhere beneath the surface, in some dark and subterranean cavern, lurked the pale thought that the explanation was clear as crystal—simple, in a hugely strange way.
He strode along down toward Mr. Hasbro’s house, toward the little orange Metropolitan docked at the curbside. No one was about. Jim threw himself down onto the grass and peered under the car, half suspecting some sort of phenomenon, perhaps Hasbro himself, to peer back out at him. There was nothing but an entirely ordinary muffler. The words “Ajax Muffler—Whisper Quiet” were stamped into the steel shell of the thing, which had already begun to discolor from heat. There were no silver wires, no lavender and green lights, nothing at all other-worldly or fantastic about it.
Jim stood up, thinking. Velma Peach’s car was parked in the driveway across the street. He walked toward it, mulling over the idea of confronting Gill about Oscar’s death, of simply insisting that he had certain knowledge of Gill’s complicity, and then watch, like Nayland Smith, the subtle changes of expression on Gill’s face that would give him away—the brief picture that was worth, in the Oriental cliches of Fu Manchu, a thousand words.
Velma Peach dashed out of the house right then and interrupted his musings. She had a worried and wild look about her, and clutched in her hand a scrap of lined notebook paper.
“Have you seen Giles?” she asked Jim frantically.
“Not today. Yesterday morning I did.”
“He was here when I left at eight. I mean since then. Today.”
“Not me,” Jim said. “What’s wrong?”
“Where’s your uncle?” she asked, then hurried away up the street without waiting for an answer.
She rushed into the maze shed waving her shred of paper. Giles had disappeared—was kidnapped possibly. But there was a note in his handwriting. He’d gone away. His mother wasn’t to worry. He had important things to do. Vital things. He was a burden, and he was sorry. It was time for him to act. A new age was upon them. And on it went, rambling for a paragraph about the vague and unlikely grandeur that he’d gone off to seek, possibly to effect.
“He’ll be back,” said Edward.
“Give him till nightfall,” said Ashbless, laughing weakly.
But William noticed that Ashbless looked peculiar, as if something had been revealed, something he was trying desperately to hide but was about to burst with.
“Well,” said the poet. “I’m in the way here. I’ll just skip along. Don’t worry, my dear,” he said to Velma Peach, patting her hand placatingly and smiling as if he’d said something sensible and heartfelt. Then he brushed past Jim on his way to his car. He stopped, however, turned, and motioned to Jim to have a look at a photograph that he had in his pocket. Edward and William comforted Velma Peach.
“Steel yourself, lad,” said Ashbless, draping an arm around Jim’s shoulder and angling across the lawn toward the curb. “Have you seen a picture like this before?”
The whole incident struck Jim as peculiar, perhaps worse, and he feared for a moment that the old poet had hauled out some sort of disgusting photo, that he was performing a familiarity. But it wasn’t that sort of photo at all. It was a photo of Oscar Pallcheck, dead, on his way, it appeared, toward becoming a fish.
Jim hesitated. It was a startling thing. “Yes,” he said, unsure exactly what Ashbless was driving at. “In one of the books in the shed—the old set by Dr. Narbondo.” He looked at Ash-bless, trying to read his face, but it was almost impassive, merely satisfied.
“Is there a chance,” asked the poet, “that Giles Peach had a look at those books? I understand the fascination such things must engender in boys. Do you suppose he might have seen the drawing?”
“I know he did,” said Jim truthfully. “He looked at it dozens of times. He even wrote out the story, w
ord for word, in his journal.”
Ashbless nodded, pocketed his photo, squeezed Jim’s arm, and hurried away toward his car.
BOOK TWO
Civilization Theory
Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the hankering after umbrellas in the civilized and educated mind … the memory of a vanished respectability called for some outward manifestation, and the result was—an umbrella. A pious castaway might have rigged up a belfry and solaced his Sunday mornings with the mimicry of church-bells; but Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilized mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
“The Philosophy of Umbrellas”
Prologue
The air was utterly still and carried the salty smell of seawater and the musty smell of an enclosed place. William Ashbless sat on the ground with his back against the outer wall of what had once been a ship’s cabin, quite likely the cabin of a fishing boat, with glass almost all the way round. Most of the panes were broken long since—in fact, it was a miracle that two were still whole—but all the shards of glass had been carefully removed by whoever it was who’d set up housekeeping in the thing years before.
Above him on a little rise burned a vast and smoldering fire, the smoke from which rose straight up into the vaulted darkness above. A rowboat was hauled up onto the shore twenty feet below the strange hovel, and in the bow, dangling from a flimsy bamboo pole, burned an oil lamp that threw puzzling, angular shadows out over a little slice of rock-tumbled island.
The Digging Leviathan Page 10
