“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, word 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.
Prologue
The air was utterly still and carried the salty smell of seawater and the musty smell of an enclosed place. William Ashbless sat on the ground with his back against the outer wall of what had once been a ship’s cabin, quite likely the cabin of a fishing boat, with glass almost all the way round. Most of the panes were broken long since — in fact, it was a miracle that two were still whole — but all the shards of glass had been carefully removed by whoever it was who’d set up housekeeping in the thing years before.
Above him on a little rise burned a vast and smoldering fire, the smoke from which rose straight up into the vaulted darkness above. A rowboat was hauled up onto the shore twenty feet below the strange hovel, and in the bow, dangling from a flimsy bamboo pole, burned an oil lamp that threw puzzling, angular shadows out over a little slice of rock-tumbled island.
Ashbless felt inconceivably weary. He’d been at it a long time, and had met all sorts. But he had vague suspicions that something new was afoot. There was a sort of electricity in the air, a magic. He’d felt it years before on the Rio Jari when Basil Peach had called up the millions of tetras and fetched the moon down from the sky. It was as if a ship were setting sail, drawn by a tide down an obscure and alien river that would open out one day onto a vast antediluvian ocean, alive with mystery. Ashbless meant to be aboard when that ship sailed.
But things weren’t running as smoothly as they might. It was by no means clear who it was held the tickets. Pinion had offered to sponsor him, to support him financially. The idea of it. Ashbless snorted derisively. Pinion was an egomaniac who wanted to own a poet to sing his praises. Of course there was good money in it. But what did he care for money? It wasn’t the money anyway. It was the chance — the growing chance — that it would be Pinion’s ship that first sailed those strange seas.
Moored along a ramshackle dock a hundred yards below him were three Chinese junks, two of them dark and quiet, one of them lit from end to end, a bobbing island of brightness on the dark sea. Ashbless stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, and picked his way down a twisty little path through the rocks. He walked out onto the crumbling pier, stepping along as quietly as he could. Through the cabin window of the lighted junk, Ashbless could see the head of Hilario Frosticos, wagging over his work — something foul, Ashbless assumed, something with which to subdue yet another member of the Peach family.
He peered in at the window, looking around first to see that he was alone. In front of the doctor, pinned to a dissecting board with long, T-shaped pins, was a carp, sliced neatly from gill slit to tail, and laid open to expose its internal organs. Frosticos fiddled with its faintly beating heart, severing thin layers of tissue with a scalpel. The carp stared toward the window through terrified eyes. A little, rotating device bathed the gasping fish with mist, keeping it from drying out and dying. Frosticos nipped out an organ the size of a lima bean and dropped it into a specimen bottle half filled with liquid. He picked it up and held it to the light. For a moment Ashbless was sure he would toss it off like a martini, but he simply corked it and reached for the pull on a cabinet door.
He stopped abruptly, seemed to choke, and staggered a step backward. He coughed and gasped and reached for his throat, the look on his face identical to that of the fish on the dissecting board — the look of something or someone who has opened a door and found death grinning without. Frosticos’ chest heaved as he lurched across the floor of the cabin. His arm thrashed out involuntarily, sweeping a scattering of surgical instruments onto the floor. He grasped his black bag, tore at it, fumbling with the clasps, and spilled the contents onto the tabletop. Jars and vials rolled out among unidentifiable medical debris. Frosticos reached for a green bottle, his fingers clutching, and managed to twist off the cap and gulp down the contents, staggering back against a bookcase, green fluid running down his chin and shirt.
His face was haggard — drawn so tightly that he appeared skeletal, an animated corpse. The skin below his cheekbones quivered slowly in and out, as if it were a tissue-thin layer of flesh drawn across suddenly pulsating gills. Frosticos collapsed into a chair, his head in his hands, and sat just so for minutes, breathing heavily, before he rose, straightened his coat, and very methodically packed his jars and vials back into the bag. He plucked up his tumbled instruments and dumped them into a shallow pan, then switched off the sprayer and unpinned the dead carp, holding it by the tail in his left hand and licking the fingers of his right. Ashbless cringed at the strange behavior, then ducked off into the shadows as Frosticos abruptly turned and started for the window.
Ashbless watched as a white-sleeved arm and hand holding the carp reached out and flipped the fish into the sea alongside the dock. As soon as the arm disappeared, Ashbless slouched along back to the window. He found Frosticos slumped in a chair, his face composed, no longer haggard. The doctor appeared to have fallen asleep, as if the bizarre ordeal had exhausted him to the point of collapse.
The dissected carp had caught on a shard of wood projecting from a tilted piling, and although he knew the fish could tell him little, Ashbless decided to have a look at it. He lay down and bent over the edge of the pier, shimmied farther out, dangled his arm over and stretched as far as he could, almost overbalancing, holding on with his left hand. He just managed to slap its nose, but couldn’t get a grip on the slippery thing. Instead, he knocked it loose, and he watched in the yellow light of the cabin as the big fish sank, tail first.