“A waste of time. An utter waste of time without Giles. Your friend, I’m afraid, is crucial.”
Jim nodded. There was no denying that. Uncle Edward had been on the verge of remembering something vital ever since he’d chased down the ice cream truck. But nothing had surfaced.
William felt it too, as if the two of them shared some hiddenknowledge having to do with the disappearance of Ashbless into the sewer. William thought about their recent foray to kidnap Giles. He could see the bulky end of Russel Latzarel shoving out through the manhole into daylight and could hear the momentary clamor of surprised children. He could picture the look on Edward’s face as he pushed past the carpet into the cellar with the circular pool, and the rush to climb out again as the mob howled after them — to climb down three iron rings set in concrete directly opposite three others below the second trapdoor. William sat stock still for a moment, not daring to think, waiting to see if the sudden certainty that possessed him would evaporate. But it didn’t. That’s what Edward strove to remember — the second door in the wall of the pipe which they’d forgotten in their haste to escape. That explained the disappearance of Ashbless. Of course it did. And unless William was a complete codfish, it explained much more than that.
The tunnel led downward, spiraling into silent darkness. The light of their miner’s helmets shone out ahead, bathing the walls in a sickly yellow glow. William carried the big flashlight he’d liberated from the sanitarium, and he flipped it on from time to time to better illuminate the murky trail. An iron handrail affixed to the rock wall ran along beside them for several hundred yards, then disappeared, only to reappear farther on, rusted into a web of flaky brown metal.
It was impossible to say how deep they’d gone. In the dark silence it seemed to William that they’d been trudging along for hours. The tunnel opened out abruptly into a grotto, vast enough so that even the powerful flashlight was too feeble to illuminate the opposite side. The path narrowed, dropping off on their left into the abyss until they picked their way along what had become stone stairs, cut out of a steep rock ledge. Below could be heard the unmistakable sound of water — not of a rushing river, an underground current, but the lapping of shallow water on the stones of a beach.
William edged his way along the stairs. In his dreams he’d often found himself in just such a position — grappling to steady himself on a steep incline, starting to slide, suddenly losing all sense of balance, pitching forward and hurtling off into a chasm. Thinking about it made him sweat. Only the presence of Jim coming along behind steadied him. In his dreams he was invariably alone.
There was a foggy, musty odor in the air, the smell of stagnant seawater, of rotting kelp, of the subterranean sea of H. Frank Pince Nez. A sudden splash in the dark recesses below flattened William against the wall. “Turn off the lights,” he hissed to Jim, and without a further word all was suddenly dark. They stood still, barely breathing, and listened for anything at all.
Faintly, William could just make out the muted splash of dipping oars and the creaking of leather-banded oars in their locks. The sound grew less faint. There was the clack of wood against wood, the scrape of wood against rock, and a low curse. The prow of a little rowboat appeared magically from behind a vast, rocky outcropping that had been, until then, indistinguishable from the common darkness.
Arching out over the water was a slender bamboo pole, dangling on the end of which was a lantern that bobbed over the water and cast a light that flickered and rolled on the oily surface. A single person in a hat and coat rowed along. His destination was evident.
William was half surprised to see that it wasn’t as dark as he had supposed. Off in the distance — it was impossible to say how far — was a diffuse glow like the light of countless fireflies, quite possibly the lanterns of the sewer dwellers themselves. He and Jim hurried in dark silence down the last hundred yards of stairs as the rower in the boat disappeared behind another rock wall. The sound of his dipping oars, however, was clearly audible. In a moment the boat would slide out of the darkness, close enough so that the lamplight would illuminate the little crescent of sandy shoreline on which Jim and William found themselves.
William clicked on his flashlight for a tenth of a second, illuminating the sheer wall of dark granite that rose above them and a heap of fallen boulders that tumbled across the edge of the beach and into the water. Just as the first ripple of lantern light betrayed the arrival of the rowboat, both of them crept in behind the rocks and crouched there, watching to see who it was who was shipping the oars, humming to himself.
The boat slid into foil view, its bow scrunching up onto the sand. The lantern danced on its fragile mount, casting wild undulations of light up and down the rock walls, now illuminating the face of the cloaked rower, then throwing him into shadow. He turned half around, vanished, and was washed in full light once more. It was William Ashbless, out rowing on the subterranean sea.
William had half expected it. He was tempted to confront the old poet, to rail at him for his underhandedness, but he had a better idea. There was no place for Ashbless to go but up. He was obviously bound for Frosticos’ cellar. And he’d come from somewhere he frequented. They’d wait until he’d vanished and steal his boat. Ashbless extinguished the lantern, produced a flashlight from beneath his cloak, and climbed wearily away up the stone stairs.
Ten minutes later — long after Ashbless’ light disappeared from view and no sound could be heard but the soft gurgling of the inland sea — Jim and his father were rowing away in the borrowed boat. They dared not light the lamp, but ran along in darkness, Jim in the bow watching for jutting rocks. Once they scraped across a submerged reef with a tearing crunch, and the boat jammed to a stop, listing momentarily until William pushed them off with an oar.
The lake opened into a sea with a thousand rocky fjords leading away in either direction, perhaps the mouths of rivers that ran east and west, under Burbank and Hollywood, under stucco supermarkets where desultory shoppers cursed the wheels of uncooperative carts and hefted lettuces. Rock walls edged out in front of them as if the surface of the sea were a confusion of currents, or a tide were running and they were cutting across it, angling toward open water. Over his shoulder William could see the slowly broadening glow of distant light, and once, when he rowed around the tip of an angling rock hummock, a point of light could be seen somewhere ahead, as if someone were shining a penlight at them a stone’s throw away, or then again as if a bonfire burned on a distant island in the dark sea.
They passed through a succession of barely submerged reefs, bumping and scraping, both of them expecting to be tossed into the black water. Jim clicked on his light, holding his hand half over the lens. He saw the rock just as they hit it, and hadn’t time to shout. It wasn’t much of a jar, not enough to damage the boat, but Jim lurched forward, flung out his arm to catch himself, and dumped the lighted flashlight overboard.
The lens end sank first, spiraling slowly downward, the air trapped in the cylinder diminishing the speed of its descent. The light remained miraculously ablaze, illuminating the surprisingly clear water, and settled, finally, on a rock ledge well below the surface where it shone for a moment on the broken spars and decayed rigging of a sailing vessel, lying on its side on the reef. A jagged hole was torn in the hull, and great wooden shards jutted across the dark mouth of it like the teeth of a shark. There was the furtive movement of a shoal of fish escaping the light, and from the gap in the ship’s side, peering up with glaucous, protruding eyes, the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish, was the face of a man, hairless, mystified, joined by another fearful visage that peeked out for one strange moment before the flashlight failed and snapped them all into darkness.