William gripped the arms of his chair and sat petrified, utterly unable to respond. Giles seemed asleep, although his eyes were wide open, staring at something none of the rest of them could see. Then, strangely, inexplicably, a fish, pecking at debris on the floor, swam past Jim’s foot. The floor itself, when Jim stared at it in surprise, seemed insubstantial and grainy, as if it were decomposed, or rather as if it weren’t wood at all, but grains of dark sand on an ocean bottom. A tendril of kelp dragged across Jim’s face, waving on a current of heavy, wet air that washed past, then fell momentarily slack before surging back past him in a rush of bubbles, sand, bits of seaweed, and grinning, startled fish.
A cacophony of questions and contrary impressions flooded in on him with the sudden wave of seawater. Had they capsized? Sunk? He fought for a breath of air. Dr. Frosticos banged upside down on the ceiling, his syringe floating off to be swallowed up by a balloonlike puffer that swelled immediately into a spiny orb, whirring away with little flurries of its tiny caudal fin to disappear into one of the bookcases.
There was a terrible battering and howling as the ship listed to port. A groaning surrounded them. There was the sharp snap of ropes, and the junk lurched and heaved on the surface of a suddenly wild sea. The door burst outward; the window disintegrated into sand-size particles, and with a sliding rush as the boat was tossed to and fro, the lot of them tumbled against the wall, then halfway to the door, then back again into the wall. Giles Peach floated along peacefully, resisting the strengthening urge with little sculling motions of his arms and webbed hands. Frosticos was the first to slide through the door.
He flopped over onto his side, hands grasping and flailing, and held onto the door frame, seeming to pull the entire junk farther to port, as if it clung to the side of an enormous vertical wave. Bookcases toppled from the desk, washing past him. The floor seemed to open beneath his face, as if the turmoil had broken through the thin crust of the ocean bottom and into the tunnel of some sand-dwelling creature. A claw poked out. Two claws. A weedy crab the size of a clenched fist, blood red and with white eyes on stalks, a creature almost more spider than crab, hoisted itself from the hole, followed by another and another and another. They crawled onto the head and face of the clutching doctor, nipping off little shreds of skin. His mouth opened in a bubbling scream and the first of the crabs darted in. Frosticos jerked like a hooked fish, loosed his hold, and was swept out into the darkness, followed by surging water, wriggling fish and waterweeds. …
Jim was aware sometime later that he was on deck. A tearing wind banged at the painted sail. His father sat with his back against the mast, staring in disbelief. Overhead was a wild dance of thunder and lightning and flooding rain, an incredible monsoon that swept them along through the darkness. A second junk, the drifting boat of Han Koi, tossed on incredible seas, rising on the face of a swell, toppling at the crest, and running down the backside, its mast snapped, its cabin broken in.
A bolt of forked lightning lit the cavern in a wash of phosphorescent yellow, exposing within the torn-away cabin the Oriental’s immense aquarium. It was lined with sudden cracks like a frozen marble dumped into boiling water, and it burst in an explosion of water and glass, its strange finny prisoners washing as one over the side of the junk and into the momentarily illuminated sea. Utter darkness followed. The light on the distant island was snuffed out — either by the torrent of rain or an intervening ledge of black rock, and the junk seemed to fly across the surface of the sea. Sparks flickered along the mast, and as if in answer to a wild clash of thunder, a ball of revolving sparks arced from the tip of the mast and sailed skyward, wriggling and burning like ascending demons.
William hunched to his feet, clinging to the mast to keep from pitching off the rolling deck. His hair streamed out behind him as he blinked into the wind, watching the ravaged waves toss and leap, now piling into steep walls, now blown flat, long streamers of lacy silver spray taking sudden flight and wisping away, tearing themselves into misty particles and disappearing. The sea itself seemed radiant with light, as if the driftwood fires of the island burned deep beneath the waves, illuminating submarine grottoes where the skeletons of sunken ships shone like the silhouettes of ancient ruined cathedrals.
Jim was suddenly aware that his father was shouting at him over the wind. He could make nothing of it at first, then realized he was asking about Giles. “Where’s Giles?” he shouted, gesturing with his free hand. Jim shook his head. In the cabin? Perhaps so. His lamp, weirdly, was still lit. It swung back and forth on its chain, sputtering. Jim crawled toward the door, but saw that it had slammed shut. The window, though, was unshuttered. He pulled himself along the deck, wedging his left foot against the bulwark and pressing himself up, pulling on the sill, peeking in as the junk lurched and flew on its course. Giles sat within, placid as a stone in his chair, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs in the wavering light of the swinging lantern.
The junk jerked to a stop with a suddenness that threw Jim into the cabin wall. There was a monumental scrunching and scraping of gravel as it beached itself not fifteen feet from the foot of the stone stairs. St. Elmo’s fire flickered along the mast one last time, charging the suddenly still air with the smell of burnt gunpowder, then winking out. The seas fell off, leaving the water oily smooth, and the only noise was the screak, screak, screak of the brass lantern chain as inertia pulled it to a slow stop.
Chapter 20
William rested in the darkness of the abandoned Koontz house, munching morosely on a bag of Fritos and sipping a tasteless beer. Four hours ago he’d envisioned himself heaving up out of the sewer with a grim smile on his face — the conquering hero, young Peach in tow, the painted sail of the junk folded under his arm as a memento of the last decisive battle, won beneath the streets of Glendale. The threat to the Earth would be extinguished — snuffed out by William Hastings, the man hounded and bedeviled by the lying forces of evil. But the victory didn’t amount to much. His sail lay in a heap in the living room at home, the top edge charred by St. Elmo’s fire. It was a gaudy effect, but wasted on him now. All his conceit, his bravado, his best intentions had gone to smash in an instant. He couldn’t have saved himself from annihilation. Damn himself; he couldn’t have saved his son, who at least had the wits and the courage to slam Frosticos in the nose with a book.
It was true that William had talked Giles into altering his allegiance. His story had done that. Giles had said as much. He’d been amazed to find that William shared his knowledge of the arcana of physics. It had been his story, in a sense, that had saved the world from bursting like a balloon. He’d have to write Analog and congratulate them for their far-sightedness.
William shook his head sadly. In the end, Giles had done all the saving, had led them up that interminable staircase and out into freedom, William all the time anticipating the following tread of Hilario Frosticos, of his face materializing in the blackness ahead. William wondered what it was Frosticos had seen during the melee, what it was Frosticos understood to have happened. Had he felt himself being eaten alive by crabs? William shuddered. It wouldn’t make him a happy Frosticos if he had. Perhaps he had drowned. But William knew he hadn’t. It would be too convenient. Things were never that simple.
And he had an uneasy feeling along his spine — something that stirred that black marble of guilt and doubt and fear within him — that was as instinctive and undeniable as the certainty that possessed the Chinese pigs, that prompted them into fearful restlessness and sent them snuffling around their cages in search of an exit which, if found, would lead in a wild, terrified rush off the edge of a cliff of self-destruction.