William stood up and walked to the dresser, bending to have a closer look at the bottle caps. He was certain he knew where they’d come from, that he understood most of their strange odyssey which had begun in Griffith Park years before. And one, he knew, had been lost two months past during his unfortunate war with the neighbor’s garden hose.
He picked it up and turned it over. There was the cork washer, plucked out of the grass, pushed carefully inside. The cap seemed to him to be warm, almost alive, as if it had been recently clutched in someone’s hand. He closed his fist over it, seeing the bottle cap in his mind as if it were a little circular window that opened onto a sunlit garden, or a tiny green landscape glimpsed distantly through the wrong end of a telescope.
There was a stirring behind him. He turned to find Jim propped on his elbows, regarding him sleepily. William grinned, at a momentary loss for words. He puffed on his pipe to fill the void, but it had gone cold. He pulled it out of his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. “You’ve kept them too?”
Jim nodded, sitting up. “I had another one that I wore on my jacket, but I lost it when it fell off. So now I keep them on the dresser.”
“Wise move,” said his father. “I’ve lost more than I care to think about. Sometimes I wonder, though, if I wouldn’t be better off losing them all.”
Jim shook his head. He was certain they were both wiser keeping them—wiser by far, but he couldn’t say so. He suddenly couldn’t say anything at all.
“You’re right,” said his father, poking at the half dozen caps on the dresser, arranging and rearranging them. “I think I’ll put mine atop my dresser. They’re safer there, like you say.”
“You can have the one back that you lost,” said Jim, suddenly finding words. “I’ve been saving it for you.”
“Have you? I’ve got a better idea. I’ll make you a trade. You keep the Nehi orange and I’ll take this grape Crash. I’ll keep it in my pocket. A sort of good-luck token. Agreed?”
“Sure,” said Jim.
William picked out the chipped purple bottle cap and closed it into his fist until it bit into the palm of his hand. He was abruptly aware of the night breeze, of the smell of cool, wet air that washed through the room. “Time to sleep,” he said, pulling his blanket around him and heading toward the door. “See you in the morning?”
“Right.” Jim watched his father leave, wondering if he too was aware of the crumbling of an old, imaginary wall. He pulled the curtain aside and looked out into the night. Somewhere far off was the sound of traffic, muted by distance. A lonesome cricket chirruped out in the yard, and the man in the moon peeped out from behind an illuminated cloud, keeping a vigilant eye on the sleeping Earth.
BOOK THREE
Journey to the Center of the Earth
We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have heard the mermaids singing, and know that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God’s sake pass it round, and let us have a pipe before we go!
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
“Crabbed Age and Youth”
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 i
n. “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.
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