Ashbless pulled his flask from beneath his coat, unscrewed the stopper, and poured a couple of ounces of amber liquid onto the water. That’s as close as we’ll come now to having a drink together, Squire, he thought to himself, as he tipped the bottle back. He shoved it away, picked up his oars, and rowed in toward the dock where he tied up. He peered into the dirty leaded window of the boathouse on his way toward Peach Hall.
An awful stench filtered through a gap in a broken pane, the stink of rotting flesh, of a close cousin to the dead merman on Catalina Island. He pushed open a rickety door and stepped through, holding his breath. Along the far side were four rowboats, hung on the wall in little suspended stalls. A heap of oars and oarlocks, broken and rusted, lay on the wooden floorboards beneath, a home for mice and spiders. Beside them sat a pile of disintegrating carrion, white beneath a layer of quicklime. Perched rigidly atop the muck in a bloated caricature of alertness was the thing Basil Peach had fished dead out of the rushes an hour earlier a toothy little fish lizard, thought Ashbless, of Jurassic persuasion. He gasped out a lungful of used air and escaped through the door of the boathouse, leaving the heap of unlikely creatures to disintegrate in peace.
Ashbless speculated about them, not so much wondering at their presence — he understood where they had come from — as at Basil Peach’s keeping the shore weeds clear of them. It was entirely conceivable that they floated in only along the shores of Peach Hall, that the deepwater tunnel connecting Winder-more to Pellucidarian oceans lay offshore, perhaps at the mouth of the little weedy canal which was nothing more than a private watery bypath traveled in secret by generations of Peaches. Ashbless would be astonished if the door to the center of the Earth were anyplace else, since it had become increasingly clear that the Peach family, somehow, were the guardians of that door. And it was unlikely that the local appearance of strange creatures out of antiquity would enhance the peculiar reputation of the Squires Peach.
A gravel path led around the manor through an avenue of arched linden trees. A hedgehog wandered aimlessly out of the shadow of a bush, looking inquiringly at Ashbless as if waiting to be put into a pocket and taken along. Ashbless spoke to it civilly, but didn’t oblige it. On ahead was the high wall of a boxwood hedge, and from somewhere beyond it came what sounded like low murmuring voices. Ashbless paused to consult his flask, then plunged into a gap in the hedge, up a little leafy avenue at the perimeter of a rectilinear maze. He turned left and right, then left again, running smack into a dead end. He retraced his steps and tried again. The murmuring got louder — the sound, certainly, of a pair of voices talking through the splash of falling water. He turned a corner, expecting to see more hedge, but with a suddenness that surprised him he found himself in a broad grassy clearing in the center of which was an ancient circular pool. Water bubbled up out of the center of it, splashing merrily around the head and shoulders of — Ashbless was sure of it — the thing from the doorway, the swimmer in the canaclass="underline" old Cardigan Peach, Basil’s father. In an instant he was gone.
Basil looked up in surprise, squinted in the direction of the approaching poet, and rose to meet him with an outstretched hand but without any trace of a smile on his face.
Chapter 16
The morning after his father’s visit, Jim awoke to the sound of thunder, low, distant rumbles that rolled across miles and miles of rooftops. The wind blew in fits, now slacking off, now Mowing raindrops against the window in a rhythmic patter, stray drops plunking down onto the quilt. Jim turned the pages of Huckleberry Finn, rereading the first chapters — perfect rainy weather reading, it seemed to him. There was no pressing reason to get up. With luck he could idle away two or three hours before boredom got the best of him.
He could almost taste the rainy air, and could hear it gurgling through the gutters, rushing out onto the lawn and pooling up on the grass. It was just the right sort of day to set up aquaria. He’d talk his father and uncle into driving him down to the tropical fish store, or he’d ride down on his bicycle if the rain let off, and spend his money on a pair of buffalo-head cichlids. For the moment, though, there was nothing that appealed to him more than simply staring out the window, glancing from time to time at a particularly evocative paragraph, savoring the sounds of the words and the pictures they called up against a background of raindrops.
He clambered out of bed abruptly and stepped across to his dresser. Atop it lay the half dozen bottle caps. He arranged them in a neat hexagon, then in a circle, then, dissatisfied, scrambled them randomly. That still wasn’t quite right. He shifted them around until they were positioned with just the right quality of randomness — no two colors together, none touching nor yet too far removed from the rest — a sort of little circus of bottle caps. Then he plucked the Nehi orange out of the lot and shoved it into his pants pocket, a good luck piece, his father had said. That suited Jim perfectly. The vacant spot in the midst of the remaining caps would remind him of it, and of his father’s appearance at midnight.
Once out of bed, Jim itched to be out and about. It was just the sort of day that Giles Peach fancied, the sort of day to tinker in the garage, to be embroiled in useless projects. He wondered where his friend was and what strange company he was keeping. Wondering about it led from one thing to another, and, in a shot, he knew what he had to do. Everyone else had been off chasing through sewers, having adventures, and he’d been sitting around the house reading a book. It was time to act. In ten minutes he slid out the front door unseen. He could hear his father shuffling around up the hall, and his uncle talking on the phone, to Professor Latzarel probably.
Jim set off down the street toward Gill’s house. Velma Peach would have gone to work almost an hour ago; on Saturdays she left at seven. He had all day long. He would slip into the back yard and go in through the dining room window. He and Gill had done it a dozen times, usually in the middle of the night. Just to be safe, though, he knocked on the front door, feigning nonchalance, and very nearly screamed aloud when the door swung open to reveal Velma Peach in a housecoat. She had a soupy look about her and she sniffled into a handkerchief. She hadn’t gone to work, but had stayed home sick.
Jim was flustered. He hadn’t thought of an excuse, so busy was he with his plan for crawling in the window. “I came for some books,” he said truthfully, “but I don’t want to bother you, your being sick and all. I can come some other time.”
Velma Peach shoved the door open and nodded him in. “You’ll have to get them. There’s thousands of them in there. Lord knows how he keeps track of them. I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea which are his and which aren’t.”