It was dark when Jim crashed into the glow of the campfire; Uncle Edward had been on the verge of setting out to search for him. Dinner had been held up. Edward still had a headache that tormented him. Latzarel hadn’t discovered a thing, and the first tendrils of fog had snaked in off the sea. The branches of the oak trees, in fact, were ghost branches, almost lost in the fog, which had settled in eerily some ten or twelve feet above the ground.
Jim produced his trilobite, smiling at Uncle Edward’s reaction. It seemed to eradicate the remnants of his headache. Professor Latzarel was even more dumbfounded, and when Jim told him of the cliff of fossils that rose above the pool on which Latzarel himself had been rowing not an hour and a half earlier, the startled scientist was for paddling back up the island immediately. He had to take a sounding, he said. But he was convinced, in the end, to wait for morning, especially when he saw William Ashbless dumping lobster tails into a great iron kettle of steaming gumbo. If Jim’s sea pit turned out to be genuine, he said, they’d shift camp around to the seaward side of the island the following afternoon.
The fog wasn’t as thick that night as it had been offshore the previous evening. It drifted past in cottony patches, now obscuring the oaks behind the camp, then melting away into them, leaving, perhaps, a scattering of twisted limbs framed in absolute clarity that faded into gray mist and shadow. A moment later all would be lost in fog, the campfire and its circle of explorers an island in a gray sea.
The effect of the patchy fog was even more disconcerting than had been the thicker, all-obscuring mists, for instead of imagined fog creatures appearing out of a wall of gray, the mists parted to reveal strange and unpredictable night shapes: a granite outcropping thrusting peculiarly forward like a rushing beast turned to stone in mid-flight or a wall of green foliage in two-dimensional illusion as if it were a painted screen draped across an avenue into wonderland.
There wasn’t a great deal of talk. Even William Ashbless was silent. He seemed restive, however, and drank in quick little sips from a silver flask full of Scotch, standing up and looking out to sea during moments of clarity, perhaps expecting something to appear. Everyone agreed that their expedition had only a single end — to find a merman, better alive than dead. It was a wild goose chase if ever there was one, but Latzarel was convinced that for some unfathomable reason the key to the mystery of the Earth’s core was on the edge of revelation. It was a matter of weeks, of days. He hadn’t spent his life searching for that key to be caught unprepared when the time came. Why that time was at hand he couldn’t say, but all signs forecast it. Something was in the air. And in the magic of the misty island night, with the sound of the ocean lapping on the shingles and the faint, low murmur of a distant foghorn somewhere out in the Santa Barbara Channel, Jim felt the same certainty. That he told himself the feeling was a product of night magic didn’t alter it, perhaps because he was certain that the enchantment itself was authentic. He was as certain of it as he had ever been certain of anything.
He suddenly wondered, for no good reason beyond the mystery of it, if the slope of the sea bottom as it dropped off into the depths was the same as the slope of the granite and chaparral hills rising beyond the camp. It was possible that the one was an inverted echo of the other — that the land beneath the sea was a dark counterpoint to the land above it, a mirror image disguised beneath algae and urchins and countless centuries of gathering polyps and barnacles, of decaying vegetation and the distortions of tree roots and scrub and the dusty, decayed and fossilized remains of innumerable generations of extinct beasts. How likely was it that anyone would have noticed?
In the heavy evening fog it was increasingly difficult to convince himself that the four of them weren’t sitting around a sputtering fire of broken kelp fronds on the floor of the sea. He thought suddenly about Giles Peach who, it was certain, would feel utterly at home venturing out through submarine gardens with a mad Captain Nemo, dwelling among octopi and starfish.
He became aware of the smell of seaweed — of brown kelp lying across exposed rocks. The fog on his tongue tasted salty and cold, like the flavor of a raw oyster. And as he sat, still and silent, nearly sleeping, it seemed as if the veil of fog that washed across them was thickening, and that floating upon it, bobbing on invisible currents, were odds and ends of sea life and oceanic flotsam: the papery shells of chambered nautili, painted and glowing like Japanese lanterns; slowly revolving nebulae of tiny purple urchins and dancing periwinkles; glittering grains of silica sand scattered in the current, blinking sidereally in the watery firelight like stars in a misty night sky. A glance at his companions suggested that they too were lost in sea dreams, had wandered into the Land of Nod. He seemed to hear something off toward the ocean — a brief splashing and a short cry, almost a mewling that sounded strangely human and pathetic.
The fog cleared. Jim stood up and picked his way down the dirt path toward the beach, his hands in his pockets, looking sharp for something — whatever it might be. He felt a familiar presence, as if he knew what it was, who it was, perhaps, that he’d find. A brief wash of moonbeams played across exposed tidepools dark and choked with waterweeds, all of it colorless in the pale, reflected light. Nothing stirred. A procession of exposed rocks ran out and disappeared into deep water on his right. On his left the shore swerved around into the headland, most of it invisible in the fog. There was nothing at all to be seen in the water but the shimmering circle of the moon, wavering there for a moment, then swallowed up by the fog. There was a splashing to the right, out beyond the last of the chain of rocks. Something rose unsteadily from the depths and then disappeared again beneath the surface. A bubbling and swirling arose along toward shore, as if the creature, whatever it was, were swimming up through the shallows toward him. Jim’s first impulse was to cry out, to shout for his uncle, to alert everyone to the possible approach of the expected merman, but somehow he feared that his shouting would break the spell, would burst the bubble of enchantment that enclosed the night, and that the fabulous approaching creature would sink away out of sight.
A head rose from the water, dripping, looking up at him, beseeching him somehow. Its mouth worked, and it shook its head slowly, as if it held some vast secret sorrow that it couldn’t begin to reveal. It was Giles Peach.
Jim shouted, and even as he did, he knew that he wasn’t surprised. He’d felt Gill’s presence all along. He’d wandered down to the beach in response to a silent beckoning. At the sound of his shout, Giles was gone — vanished beneath the swell. The fog parted briefly, and lying offshore, bathed in sudden moonlight, was the ghostly submarine, riding at anchor. There was a commotion behind him, the sound of running feet, and his three companions rushed toward him, just as the door in the fog slammed shut, obscuring the ocean entirely.
Latzarel was wet to his waist, sloshing out through the shallows, clambering from rock to rock, searching for mermen. Jim could tell in a moment that he hadn’t believed that it was Giles Peach who had crept up out of the sea. Mermen, Latzarel had insisted, all looked pretty much alike — one was drawn toward their similarities — gills, webbed fingers, that sort of thing. He edged around a monolithic, mussel-covered rock, grasped two handfuls of slimy waterweed in an effort to pull himself up to a higher vantage point, and yanked the weeds loose, slipping with a shout into a pool and disappearing beneath the surface. Edward, pants rolled uselessly to his knees, sloshed out after him, and the two staggered shoreward finally, soaked, having discovered nothing.