A shadow grew below it in the water, and just as the carp was on the edge of darkness, the toothed jaws of an immense fish rose out of the depths, closed over it, and it was gone. With exaggerated care, Ashbless pulled himself up onto the pier, glanced in one last time at the sleeping Frosticos, and made his way back along the rocky shore to where his oil lamp still burned on the the end of its bamboo pole. He pushed off, stepped into the boat, and rowed quietly out to sea, the orange light of the island bonfire shrinking behind him in the darkness.
Chapter 10
Jim was standing on the curb watching Ashbless disappear around the corner when he heard Velma Peach scream — a shrill ululation, as if she’d seen something unbelievably ghastly. She bolted out of the door of the maze shed, a look of horror and astonishment on her face. Behind her scurried a pair of mice, oddly clothed, as if setting out for town. His father followed, net in hand, pursuing the mice, Uncle Edward at his heels.
It was a tricky business. One of the mice sailed straight into the bushes; the other scampered across the back lawn, leaping and jumping, giddy with liberty. “The axolotl!” William shouted. “Find the axolotl! Never mind the rest of the mice!”
Velma Peach screamed again and staggered against the front fender of the Hudson, her hand at her throat. A door slammed. Mrs. Pembly stepped down her walk, affecting a casual glance at Jim, stiffening at the sight of the trembling Velma Peach who looked about with loathing, anticipating some new clothed horror.
William raced streetward, having pursued the mouse that had taken to the bushes. He hove in sight of Mrs. Pembly, waving his net before him like a curb feeler, then spun round and headed for the back yard once again, perhaps to avoid their odious and dangerous neighbor, perhaps to search out the axolotl. Mice were a dime a dozen, after all. But a good axolotl. … A shout from Edward set William to flight. Jim dashed along behind. Velma Peach climbed into the Hudson and shut the door.
“There they are!” cried Edward, hoisting himself, like Kilroy, onto the fence and gaping into the Pembly yard. The axolotl, somehow, had crept through, pursued by two mice, one of them wearing the disintegrated topcoat. The lot of them were sniffing their way along, unaware of the Pembly dog, which was lumbering toward them, attracted by Edward’s shouting.
“Christ!” cried William, far more horrified by the potential tragedy than was Edward. He threw his useless net at the dog, cursing as it sailed past him into the wall of the house. “I’ll get them,” said Jim, instantly aware that things had crept along dangerously close to the edge. But William, lost in his fear for the safety of his beasts, for the future of civilization theory, was over the fence before him, grappling with the puzzled dog, clutching at the precious axolotl.
Mrs. Pembly sailed out her back door, carrying, for some unfathomable reason, a pressure cooker, and advanced toward William, menacing him. He, of course, assumed it was his animals she threatened, and he warned her off, plucking up his fallen net and pointing it at her. She was shocked to abrupt and stony silence, however, by the vision of the axolotl, lumpy and weird, padding through the high grass in knee breeches. She dropped her pressure cooker, shrieked, and launched herself toward the back door, smashing past it into her kitchen. Chain locks and dead-bolts rattled into place.
William scooped up the befuddled axolotl, handed it across to Edward, and tried to clamber back over the fence. He was suddenly tired. Achingly so. He couldn’t begin to generate the strength required to climb the fence. He stumbled out through the gate instead, leaving his net behind. Jim felt helpless. He waited for the inevitable sound of the approaching siren, for the appearance of the white van. He flushed with embarrassment and anger — at his father, at Mrs. Pembly, at himself. His father was walking frightfully slowly, like a man without a destination.
William wandered into the back yard, stopped, looked around idly, lay down on the lawn, and wiggled under the house, pulling himself through a crawlspace after yanking off the little wood-framed screen. Edward remonstrated with him vainly, still clutching the amphibian. William’s feet stuck out for a minute from beneath the house like the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East. Then they were gone, dragged in just as the first distant moaning of the siren reached them on the wind.
The soft silt beneath the house was cool. It had lain there undisturbed for almost fifty years. It knew nothing of the turmoil that flapped on great bird wings out on the evening air. It was indifferent to the course of history, to civilization theory, to human suffering. William lay on his side, his ear pressed against the palm of his hand, which was sunk into the powdery dirt. He could hear something rushing in the Earth — right through his hand he could hear it. He thought about the plains Indians pressing an ear to the prairie to listen for the rumbling of buffalo herds, and about himself, forty years past, listening to the hot steel of a railroad track, imagining that he could hear the thunder of a far-off train, catapulting furiously toward unknown and exotic destinations.
Now he seemed to hear a muffled laboring roar far beneath him — the sound of an immense cataract racing through subterranean chambers, or perhaps the rotating mandibles of the digging leviathan, grinding away somewhere far below, miles deep in the crust of the Earth.
William was sleepy. It had been a long day, a day that had seen the inspiration of civilization theory. William had great faith in the philosophy that bits and pieces often added up to something greater than their simple sum. A coat for a mouse, a vest for an axolotl, a pair of trousers for a mole — bit by bit science would creak along toward a brighter day, an end to incivility and brutality. But why was it that the plots he struggled to reveal, the villains he sought to unmask, became more puzzling as fragments of the truth were unveiled? To learn the truth was to make things fall apart. Knowledge wasn’t a cement, a wall of order against chaos; it was an infinitude of little cracks, running out in a thousand directions, threatening to crumble into fragments our firmest convictions. He couldn’t fathom it. It was too deep for him. “If you think you understand it,” he said aloud, “I congratulate you.”
“Understand what?” asked a voice a few inches from his ear. There was a tugging on his pantleg. “Come along then.” William opened one eye and saw nothing but a humped shadow — a shade from some nether region come round to torment him. The air had grown remarkably dark and cold. His right leg was numb. ‘There’s a good lad,” said the shadow, trying to rouse him. William went back to sleep.
He was half conscious of sliding along on his side like a serpent through the dust. The sliding became part of a very wonderful dream that went on and on and on for a lifetime, a dream of murmuring voices, of slamming doors, of utter removal from the distant machinations of the world.
Edward was puzzled. Somehow he’d been wandering along in perfect innocence, minding his own business, doodling with mice, messing with tropical fish, setting up Newtonian meetings in order to smoke a pipe over the idea of journeying to the center of the Earth. And somewhere along the line, he couldn’t say exactly when, he’d stumbled into a morass of confusions. That’s how it went, he supposed. Nothing Was as simple as it seemed. William was right.
And poor William. Hauled away again. It was all very tiresome — past time to put an end to the entire business. It would be a complicated matter, but he’d have William out of there. Everything had suddenly begun to race along. Plots that had been invisible, unhatched probably only days before, were whirling toward frightful solidity. He’d begun to peer over his shoulder, suspicious of perfectly innocent strangers who, perhaps, had smiled at him in passing, or who hadn’t smiled, or who wore a peculiar pair of dark glasses. He’d been walking along Long Beach Boulevard toward Acres of Books two days earlier when he’d passed a woman with a paper carton on her head, a Butterfingers candy bar carton, sufficient to hold a dozen or so bars. A little elastic string kept the ludicrous cap jammed into her tousled hair. So she hadn’t just clapped it on randomly, the thing having caught her fancy as it blew past in the wind. She’d worked at — stabbed little holes in it, snipped off a foot or so of elastic string and wiggled the frayed ends through the holes, knotting them for security. He’d become immediately and inexplicably suspicious. But almost at once he had wondered which of the two of them was madder. He calmed down by assuring himself that a madman doesn’t understand his own madness, doesn’t know he’s gone round the bend. He wakes up one day and there he is — across the borderland, into an adjacent world. He puts a carton on his head and goes downtown as if nothing is wrong.