Latzarel squinted, then jerked back, sure that he’d seen movement in the room. It’s Peach, he thought, holding his breath. His quarry hadn’t flown! He was just vaguely conscious of voices on the street, of a child’s crying. He peered in again, screwing up his face for the sake of penetration. Three inches away, just beyond the cracked window, another face peered back at him, eyes crossed impossibly, tongue lolling out, a blinding light erupting without warning from the thing’s forehead.
Latzarel shouted and tumbled over backward into the bushes, kicking and flailing. Stifled laughter moomphed out from the cellar. The broken window slid open, and William Hastings, unable to contain himself, shoved out through it, gasping with laughter, contorting his face.
“Damn it!” cried Latzarel. “My heart! I could have dropped dead on the spot! I …” Then it occurred to him that Edward and William were both inside and he fell silent, scrambling to his feet.
Someone whistled on the street. There was another shout. “He went through there!” cried a man’s voice.
“Christ!” shouted Latzarel, understanding suddenly the nature of the commotion on the road. “They’re after me!” He shoved his head and arms in through the window. It would be tight. Edward jumped across, and he and William each got hold of an arm, hauling away on Latzarel who wriggled at the window like a snake. William burst into another fit of laughter.
“Hurry, damn it!” shouted Latzarel, infuriated. ‘They’ve got my leg! Let go of me there!” And with that admonition, he shot into the room as if he were spring driven, sprawling onto the floor, taking Edward down with him. William slid the window shut and snapped the catch, waggling his fingers off the end of his nose at the crowd outside, one of whom, in a fit of rage and bravado, smashed in the window with the heel of Latzarel’s shoe, which he held in his hand like a club.
William yowled and sprinted toward the trapdoor at the heels of his two companions. In a moment the room was empty. William began to haul the Oriental rug back into place, giving up when he realized it wouldn’t fool anyone anyway, and slammed the trapdoor shut. Latzarel retrieved his hat, limping along on one shoe, huffing for breath.
“That was close,” he said.
“Too close,” said Edward. “Let’s go. They’ll be through the trap in a minute.”
But he was wrong — it didn’t take as long as that. Almost as soon as he said it, there was a grinding at the manhole cover in the street. They weren’t fooling with trapdoors; they were taking a more obvious route. A shaft of sunlight poured through it — a golden halo around the dark shadow of a head. William, schooled in such pursuits, loped off down the tunnel, shouting at his companions to follow him. They had an edge, after all. The hounds would have to find a flashlight. They’d never set out after such a desperate gang in a dark sewer. But if they did … William thought about it.
There was almost nothing for three-quarters of a mile but the tunnel they were in. They couldn’t lose their pursuers; they’d have to outrun them. As hardy as Latzarel was, three-quarters of a mile would take it out of him — a hundred yards would probably cook his goose, and him with only a single shoe. They couldn’t afford to fight with anyone; that would be spectacularly foolish, the end, certainly, of their bid to beat Pinion to the center of the Earth. They’d read about his triumphs from a jail cell. William could already hear Latzarel laboring for breath behind him. He turned to look.
Someone stood a couple of hundred feet back, bathed in the circle of sunlight, watching them make away. A bold neighbor, no doubt, waiting for the arrival of a flashlight. Or a gun. William pressed on. Every yard increased their chances. If only they could make it as far as the warren of tunnels off Brand.
Latzarel was falling behind, despite Edward’s attempts to hurry him on. There wasn’t a ghost of a chance that he’d make it, not if he had to run all the way. So William pulled up short. Latzarel puffed gratefully to a halt, bending at the waist, grasping his knees, breath whooshing in and out like a bellows. “I’m going back,” said William, “I’ll put them off the scent. Put the fear into them.” Edward shook his head. “Yes, I am. You two go along. If they get me, I’m just an escaped lunatic, tormenting the good doctor.”
Edward began to complain.
‘There’s no time,” said William, looking back down the tunnel. Another stalwart neighbor was halfway down the rungs. William jogged back the way he’d come, wondering exactly what it was he was going to do. There was a shout from the man on the ground, who, apparently, assumed he was being attacked. The second pursuer shot out of the manhole like a shell out of a mortar, and the first launched himself up the ladder, hollering incoherently. William chuckled.
“I’m the trouble you’ve been looking for!” he shouted, raising both hands above his head for effect. He howled like a demon, blubbering at the end of it and bursting into laughter, swept away once again by his bravado. Let them mess with him! He was partly surprised at himself for carrying on so. Even at thirteen he’d been far more cautious. It was combat that did it, yesterday’s baptism of fire. He’d found his natural calling, his forte. Let the whole filthy streetload of them come wheezing into the pipe. He was the man to meet them! A head thrust in and peered down at him, so William cut a quick caper to demonstrate his spirit and searched his mind hurriedly for an appropriate snatch of verse to shout. The only thing he could come up with was a line from Ashbless: “Heavy on my brow sits the cold dog of the snows.” But that wouldn’t do at all, beyond puzzling the devil out of them. It had always puzzled him, anyway.
He glanced over his shoulder. Edward and Latzarel were disappearing in the distance. They’d make it. William shouted at the head that was shoved into the pipe. Then he switched off his lamp and stomped along as hard as he could in the darkness, knowing that whoever was keeping an eye on him wouldn’t be able to stand the idea of a gibbering madman rushing up out of a dark tunnel at him, appearing suddenly out of the substreet nightland, yammering and murderous. He was right. The head vanished and the lid of the manhole was thrust almost into place, a little crescent of sunlight shining in around it.
William was off and running toward the receding figures of his two companions, half disappointed that it hadn’t come to blows, and wondering at the sequence of events that had led him, in the past thirty-odd hours, to have fallen out with such a diversity of perfectly innocent people. Lord knows what Latzarel had done to enrage the mob so. Told them one of his father’s jokes, probably.
It was dark when the door pushed open over the Los Angeles River and the three men, tired and having accomplished nothing, bent through it and scrunched up through the river-rock and weeds to the hole in the chainlink fence that led out toward Los Feliz. Professor Latzarel walked like an East Indian jug dancer, cursing his way half shoeless back to the car where he slumped into the back seat, nodding off into a fatigued sleep by the time they were halfway home.
William lurched awake in the middle of the night, his eyes driven open, a dry scream choking him. He pushed his covers onto the floor with a wide sweep of his arm, convinced, for one hag-ridden moment, that some great bug, a beetle the size of a plate, was scrambling around his feet, tickling the soft flesh between his toes with probing antennae. He gasped for breath. His heart labored like an engine. There was no bug. Of course there was no bug. Such bugs didn’t exist — not in civilized lands.
He remembered scraps of a dream. He’d been in a bookstore, one of the several that were figments of his dream landscapes, that were always operated by the same scowling proprietor, a gaunt man with dark, unkempt hair and a look of suspicion on lids face — perhaps that William was going to steal a book, or bend the pages back and ruin the spine, or was simply not the sort of client that the shop preferred. Perhaps the man wondered vaguely, a dream-wondering, why it was that he was summoned like a genie into existence night after weary night and expected to operate yet another dusty and amorphous shop into which, as surely as clockwork, would stroll the same tweed-jacketed browser, himself both the product and the inspiration of the dream, who would poke around through the books, dissatisfied with titles and prices until, inexplicably, he’d try on a volume as if it were a pair of pants. That was it, William remembered. His bookstore dreams invariably ended the same way. He’d manage, through some trick of dream physics, to pull a book on like trousers over his shoes. He remembered being satisfied with the fit. The price hadn’t been exorbitant. But there was something peculiar about the book, about the trousers. Something awful. A face, an etching on the frontispiece — a mass of little undulating lines like waving fronds of delicate algae that had crept together into a face, a still and cold face, utterly blank and reptilian. Who was it?