The axolotl was a horse of a different color. It was almost too mucky to mess about with, and it had an antipathy toward hats and coats and only a grudging acceptance of a pair of pants that fit like shorts after a broad hiatus was made in the seat to accommodate the amphibian’s tail. William emptied a little cardboard box full of doll clothes onto the desk top, searching for a hat. But all he could find was a little beret of sorts, the type of thing a Frenchman might wear. Better to do without entirely.
The sight of the clothed beasts slowed Edward down considerably when he pushed in through the door, but he was struck with the impossibility of the whole thing and decided to take the long view. He smiled at William. “What ho?”
“Hah!” said William, adjusting a mouse coat. Take a look at this. I’m onto something new. There’s no doubt about it. Our problem all along is that we assumed we were moving backward from the mammalian to the amphibian ages. Devolution. Well it’s not as simple as that. Even the most mundane of the beasts are complex affairs. There’s nothing simple about a mouse. It has certain tendencies that we’ve failed to take into account; and one, the way I see it, is its natural tendency toward civilization — gentility. On a reduced scale, of course. This isn’t all my grand idea, mind you. I’ve been reading Shakespeare. The Elizabethans were aware of the innate ability of animals to sense impending chaos. The Chinese, as I understand it, use pigs and cows to sniff out earthquakes — they’re unaccountably perturbed by anything that threatens their sense of order, their natural inclination toward domesticity and civilized behavior. So what do we do, I asked myself. We hasten the process, that’s what. Civilize the things. And I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts we see some advances. Some cooperation. Help me pull this coat onto the axolotl, will you? I can’t get a grip on him with one hand.”
Edward waylaid the axolotl, pinning him down while William worked at the coat. “What about the water?” Edward asked. “I don’t mean to question your theory — in fact it’s perfectly sound as far as I can see — but won’t all of this finery lose some of its civilizing effect when it’s water-soaked?”
William gave his brother-in-law a look that seemed to imply that Edward was a child when it came to understanding civilization theory. He shook his head. “You overestimate the beasts, Edward. You’ve interpreted the theory too broadly. Science often falls into such a trap — finding a single nugget and anticipating an entire vein. The tendency toward civilization in these beasts doesn’t stretch so far as that. Although I’m certain they’ll respond to the influences of proper dress, I doubt entirely that they’ll understand the difference in correctness of fashion. Do you follow me?”
“Yes,” said Edward, “I believe I do. You’ve certainly thought this through.” He cleared his throat, then noticed that within the cages, the door to which stood ajar, were half a dozen mice in various states of dress, milling around and eyeing each other. One was reducing his topcoat to shreds and making a bed out of it in the corner. Edward had never seen William so serious or so elated. There was nothing wrong with elation, he told himself.
A slamming car door out on the street heralded the arrival of William Ashbless, his white hair awry about his ears. His shin cracked into the bumper of his car as he edged around it on his way toward the driveway, and he shouted at the bumper, kicking it for good measure before hastening toward the garage, waving what appeared to be a photograph.
William glanced up at the banging and shouting, was unimpressed, and went back to manipulating his clothed beasts. Ashbless burst in, jabbering excitedly, then abruptly fell mute when he saw the objects of William’s attention. He was silent for only a few seconds, however, before it dawned on him that there was nothing particularly surprising in William’s behavior. He waved his photograph at Edward.
“Benner,” he said. “You remember young Steerforth Benner. Self-satisfied little snake, but useful. Well, I found out he’s working part-time for the county coroner, mucking out the crematorium or something. So I gave him a call, and look what he came up with.”
He handled Edward a black and white photo of a corpse — the corpse of Oscar Pallcheck, dredged out of the tar pits. Edward was astonished. The photo was unbelievable. He turned it over and glanced at the back side as if expecting to find a disclaimer, then peered closely at the front, holding it in the sunlight that slanted in through the window. It was apparent that something had been done to Oscar’s neck. At first it seemed as if there were the indentations of fingers — as if he’d been strangled very neatly and symmetrically. Edward hauled out a magnifying glass. The marks were open — bloodless slits. And Oscar’s head, as the Times had promised, was hairless and had an odd, triangular shape. His eyes, surprisingly, were open. The expression in them was peculiarly familiar.
“William!” Edward cried, poking his brother-in-law in the small of the back. William looked up, feigning surprise, as if he’d been so lost in his work that he was unaware of the poet’s arrival. “Look closely at this. Do you know him?”
William fingered the photo, blinked, and sat down hard into the swivel chair at the desk. He took his pipe out of his pocket with a shaking hand. “Of course,” he said. “It’s Narbondo’s merman.”
‘It’s Oscar Pallcheck,” said Edward.
“Which Narbondo?” asked Ashbless, puzzled.
“There’s only one that amounts to anything among the scientific arts,” Edward said, pulling down the correct volume of Narbondo’s Gilled Beasts. He flipped to the drawing of the Sargasso Sea merman, and there, staring up out of the page, was an amphibian caricature of the dead Oscar Pallcheck, a sort of toad man in trousers.
No one spoke. Edward laid the photo alongside the drawing. The likeness was astonishing. “Narbondo, is it?” asked Ashbless.
‘That’s right,” Edward responded.
Ashbless pulled down the first volume of the work, opened it to the frontispiece, and studied a detailed woodcut of the face of Dr. Narbondo. “He was a son of a bitch. A megalomaniac. He lived at Windermere for years. Did some foul things to sheep. He hated everyone. Threatened at one time to poison the oceans and kill the entire Earth just to get revenge on the scientists in the Academy.”
“Did he?” said William facetiously. “Relative of yours?”
“He was a distant cousin of Wordsworth. Almost no one knows that though. He couldn’t abide Wordsworth’s friends. All too fey for his tastes. He was an explorer. An adventurer. Disappeared into Borneo on some hair-brained adventure involving orangutans. He had certain serums which he claimed allowed for the breeding of unlike beasts — hippos and serpents, fish and birds — and was harried out of England, finally, as a vivisectionist. He was the basis for Dr. Moreau in Wells’ novel. Supposedly he surfaced in China years later searching for a fabled longevity serum involving fish, but that was close to a hundred years ago.” Ashbless fell suddenly silent, as if he’d said more than he’d wanted to and men caught himself.
William hated it when Ashbless carried on so — as if he had knowledge of certain arcana, known, perhaps, only to the cognoscenti. He’d reveal a tidbit or two, just enough to inflate himself for a moment, then clam up, allowing the silence that followed — the promise of strange things unspoken — to inflate him even more.