“We’re from the Fair Housing Council,” said Edward to the landlord. “This place is a menace — men dying of unknown causes. Dead fish everywhere. Look at this!” And he pointed toward a half-brown juniper in the flagstone planter, beneath which lay the stiff body of a rat, dead for weeks, a rare piece of serendipity. Edward strode down and flicked it out into the open with a stick. The rat was about a half inch thick — nothing but a leathery slab. Edward shook his head sadly. “We’ll see you Wednesday,” he said. “We’re giving you a chance.” With that he motioned to Latzarel and the two disappeared around the corner, leaving the stupefied landlord stammering on the sidewalk. They hurried to the car and drove away, Edward suddenly possessed by the possibility that they were being watched — followed. That whoever had gotten Pince Nez would still be linking about. But the circuitous route they took through Long Beach revealed nothing suspicious, and they arrived home an hour later befuddled by the myriad loose ends of what might be coincidence and what might be portent. “Everything signifies,” William had said long weeks past.
Chapter 13
Still there was no sign of Giles Peach. His mother received a postcard full of vague ambiguities, insisting that he was getting on well, hinting that he’d thought about traveling, perhaps to Windermere to see his father. The card was postmarked in Los Angeles. They could tell nothing from it.
Proceedings to gain William’s release from the sanitarium were frustrating. William Hastings was a dangerous maniac. That was the consensus. He was undergoing therapy. Dr. Hilario Frosticos insisted that the therapy be continued. He had the support of the courts. Edward wondered what the courts would say about Frosticos having been seen with a steamer trunk containing the body of a monster. Nothing, of course. It was preposterous. There wasn’t a single bit of evidence to implicate Frosticos in any illegal machinations. But it was past time to take steps. If they remained idle, they’d be defeated.
Edward received a letter from Dr. Fairfax at Cal Tech, thanking him for the interesting, package. His brother-in-law, said Fairfax, had an “astonishing but strangely misinformed mind.” It could quite conceivably take years to fathom the mathematic and physical arcana discussed in the charts and diagrams, but it was apparent straightaway that the use of squids, of poulpae generally, to sense gravitational abnormalities had been brilliant. It was William’s deductions that were impossible, unless, of course, modern physics was monumentally mistaken.
Edward said to himself as he read the letter that just about anything was likely to be monumentally mistaken. He’d arrived at that as a sort of maxim — that in the astonished eyes of eternity there must seem to be no end to the foolishness of humankind, dressing proudly in cardboard hats and wearing armadillo shoes, storming around day to day, chattering like zoo apes in pursuit of vagaries as consequential as a fiddlestick’s end, then, bang! knocked dead at some senseless moment in mid-flight only to be found clutching a codfish by an indifferent landlord who shakes his head.
It’s best, thought Edward, shaking his own head, not to put on airs.
The night was black beyond the window. It was nearly three in the morning. William Hastings lay in bed waiting, listening to the beating of his heart and to the occasional screaming laughter of a lunatic somewhere off across the grounds, in X-Ward probably, beyond the chain link fence. A light stabbed up through the window, swept across six feet of ceiling, and disappeared — the headlights of a car motoring up the hill and swinging left onto the grounds. The clump, clump, clump of rubber-soled shoes approached on the tiled corridor. The door swung open. William drooped into feigned sleep, fully dressed beneath the bedcovers. The door shut softly and the shoes clumped away, pausing a moment later, then fading down the hallway.
William edged out of bed, tiptoeing along in his rumpled tweed coat toward the door just shut by the attendant. He carried his shoes in his right hand, and with his left he patted the lapel of his coat to check for the twentieth time that he had the folded page he’d ripped from the ship’s log of Captain H. Frank Pince Nez, uncovered in Frosticos’ office. He’d have them yet, the villains. He’d expose their filthy plots. He reached for the handle of the door and slammed his toe into the caster of the bed adjacent to his, where senile old Warner slept uneasily. There was a moan and a snort. “What?” said a startled voice. “Six o’clock.” William froze, half bent at the waist, listening. He could feel blood oozing into his sock from the end of his toe. “Kits, cats, sacks, and knives,” said the old man, lost somewhere in a peculiar dream. “Out of the mouths of babes rode the six hundred!” William considered going back to bed. Old Warner snorted again and clamped his teeth together a dozen times in rapid succession like a pair of spring-driven chattering teeth from a joke store. William opened the door, peeked out into the hall, and slid through, catching one of the two remaining bottle cap medals on the door edge and popping it off. It bounced on the floor with a clatter. William cursed himself, cursed old Warner, cursed his toe, and was possessed by a frightful need to go to the bathroom. He retrieved the cap and the cork washer and shoved them into his pocket along with the two powdery red Nembutal capsules that he had secreted under his tongue several hours earlier.
Twenty feet down the corridor was a utility closet, its door slightly ajar. William was relieved. He’d half expected to find it locked, and wasn’t at all sure he was capable of carrying out his plan in the darkness.
Then a tide of horror washed through him at the thought of the unlocked door. Someone, he told himself frantically, was hidden there. They’d discovered his plan, found the page missing from the book. It had all been arranged from the start — two weeks ago when by sheer luck he’d found Frosticos’ office empty and unlocked. They’d set him up. One unlocked room was simply sloppiness, a mistake, but two were an impossible coincidence. What might be lurking inside that closet? Frosticos himself? Some white-coated devil with a syringe? A coven of doctors and a steel tray of lobotomy instruments? William reached for the door handle, determined to pitch his shoes into the face of whatever it was that lay in wait there. But there was nothing. A beaten mop stood in a galvanized bucket beside a plastic garbage can filled with trash. Three long, four-battery flashlights sat on a shelf behind, along with a can of cleanser and a bottle of Lysol.
William pulled out one of the flashlights, shined it into the dark recesses of a corner, and began to ease the door shut. The clump of shoes coming along a perpendicular corridor brought him up short. He slipped into the closet and almost shut the door, leaving it open just a slit. He lifted the heavy flashlight to shoulder height, determined not to sell himself cheaply. The clumping of shoes stopped. There was a grunting outside the door. William was frozen with fear. Lord knew what sort of thing it was that would confront him. A foot slid in, pulling the door open. Standing in the hallway was a beast with the body of a man and the head of a cardboard box. It bent toward him, unseeing. William raised his flashlight. He recognized the curly red hair of the stooped handyman who was endeavoring to lay the heavy box on the floor of the closet. He wasn’t a bad sort. William regretted that it couldn’t have been one of the others. With his teeth set in a rictus of determination, he smashed the business end of the flashlight into the back of the man’s head, catching him on the neck — too low to accomplish anything but to send his victim sprawling forward onto his box. The box shoved into William’s ankles and William collapsed backward into the shelves. The can of scouring powder clumped onto the back of the groaning handyman, scattering a cloud of white and blue dust.