The two officers seemed to be yelling at Edward. The one with the amazing nose was waving his hands. Edward shrugged convincingly. Latzarel was acting heated, slamming his hand into his fist to emphasize a point. They wandered into the maze shed. William could only imagine their astonishment and loathing. What would they make of Mary and Alexis, sporting in the maze? What unholy explanation could Edward offer to explain the decorated mice? Civilization theory wouldn’t answer. They’d be deaf to it — obviously so; they weren’t a product of it.
The younger of the two came reeling out. The other followed, shaking his finger at Edward. William could hear the shouting through the closed window. “Deviant!” he seemed to be shouting, although it might have been “Deviate!” which was even better, since it implied sexual perversion. William giggled. Then he noticed the head of Mrs. Pembly peering over the fence. She’d set them on him. That had to be the case. He’d been lax, parading into the house in broad daylight to watch the news. He clenched his fist and started for the door, but stopped halfway there. They were two days away from launching. Edward and Latzarel were going up to Gaviota tomorrow to fetch the bell. He was almost home free. He’d wait. He had patience. But by God, if he could see his way clear, he’d make her pay dearly. He couldn’t afford it now, though. He was bound to be on the bell. It was a journey he’d anticipated for years, long before the first faint glimmers of it had begun to take material shape. He’d wait her out. That was what. Then, like good Caius, he’d “strike, and quickly too.”
All was quiet, it seemed, at home. But Mrs. Pembly still watched through her window, and the police were sure to be lurking in the neighborhood. He’d lie low, to borrow a phrase from Edward, and slip out after dark for a hamburger and fries at Pete’s Blue Chip.
Almost as soon as the sun disappeared and night fell, there was the sound of the secret knock on the rear door. William unlatched it, and Edward slipped in, full of news and desperation. Things were hot. The police, he was sure, were onto them. Reports of William’s presence had surfaced too often to be false leads. That they hadn’t been to the neighbors on Stickley Street yet and discovered the Koontz house was dumb luck. Tomorrow they might well wise up.
He and Latzarel were leaving in the early morning for Gaviota. Jim was off to school. Giles had taken the machine home for the day to put the finishing touches on it. Edward hated to see him go. Pinion wasn’t, to be sure, entirely out of the picture. There was no telling what sorts of desperate capers he’d get up to. And Frosticos — he was clearly still interested in Giles regardless of the fate of the digger. But Velma Peach was staying home. She was a stalwart woman, said Edward. If things had been different — if she and Basil had separated … well …
William commiserated with him and invited him to go along for a hamburger. This was no time for hamburgers, said Edward. What if William was forced underground? They had to launch in two days. The oceanarium only half understood what they intended to do with the bell. The sooner they were away in it the better. And Giles insisted the mechanism would be ready. He was adamant. If they hesitated they’d lose him. He’d set out in a flowerpot. And he’d get there, too, while they joined Pinion in the failed-man’s club.
William agreed. He couldn’t agree more. The sooner the better. If he had to go into hiding, they’d know it. He’d simply be gone. The only thing to do was for them to stick to their plans. If all else went awry, he’d meet them at San Pedro. Or if not there, at Palos Verdes. If he couldn’t get to Palos Verdes, then he’d fallen into the clutches of some nemesis — the police, Hilario Frosticos — and wouldn’t be making the trip anyway. But that, he said, was unlikely. He had a copy of Pince Nez. There was a drainage outfall with sewer connections right there in the cove. Neap tide was at three in the afternoon. What could be simpler?
Edward shook his head. It didn’t seem at all simple to him. There were too many variables. But whatever else happened, William was to lie low. Incognito. He wasn’t to stir when the sun was up.
William was satisfied. He’d be a bat, he said. A vampire — melted by the sun. But for now, he was off to Pete’s Blue Chip for a double cheeseburger, fries, and a boysenberry shake.
Edward shook his head darkly and watched. He wasn’t sure what it was he feared most, William’s fears or his bonhomie, which chose the strangest times to surface.
A wind blew up in the night, thrashing through the date palms that lined Stickley Avenue. The big dry fronds rustled back and forth, and William, sleeping fitfully on the floor, teetered on the edge of wakefulness, surfacing every half hour or so to curse the wind. He swore each time that if he weren’t asleep in ten minutes he’d switch the lamp on and read, dangerous as it was, but somehow he dozed off immediately into a sort of half sleep, never actually looking at the luminous dial of his pocket watch.
Around two in the morning, predictably, he began to regret the onions on his cheeseburger. There was half a warm beer left in a bottle against the wall, but somehow instead of drowning the burning in the bottom of his throat, it seemed to encourage it. He had a bottle of Rolaids — 500 of them — in the medicine chest at home, and at two-thirty, unable to remember the passing of the last hour but ready to swear he hadn’t slept through it, he lay on his back calculating how much he’d pay for two of the chalky, miraculous tablets.
The wind blew harder. A door banged shut somewhere, over and over again, and there was a continual swishing of troubled vegetation out in the night. Every once in a while, entirely randomly, he could hear the scrape-swish of a branch against a window screen. He started each time, yanked up out of thin sleep, certain as his heart labored and he lay holding his breath that someone was fiddling at the screen, that there’d be a sudden face at the window. He could see the face in his mind. As he drifted into a twilit sleep, the face, somehow, became one with the wind, as if fingers of wind tugged at the screens out in the dark night and a pale cold face, just the smoky, swirling shroud of a face, stared in, watching him. A crashing in the yard broke into the dream, dissolving the face.
William hovered on the edge of sleep. A palm frond, he told himself, had dropped onto the sidewalk. Dream images swirled in his head. He watched himself stand up and move off — going out, he supposed, to visit a bookstore. Noises in the night distracted him. There was a universe of activity on the wind. Bits of debris flew past, lit by the moon: a bowler hat, a slowly revolving bicycle wheel, an open umbrella, a lawn chair that bounced along end over end, leaping the fence and swirling suddenly skyward toward the moon. The elm tree, still leafless, danced and thrashed against the blue-black sky. There seemed to something in it, ropes tangled in a steel device, a winch. Beyond the fence, in the Pembly yard, Mrs. Pembly stood staring, her housecoat flapping gaudily. She seemed to be looking right through him.
Dr. Frosticos labored behind her, aided by Yamoto the gardener. Yamoto’s white trousers snapped and flapped in the wind as if at any moment he would simply set sail, careening away in the wake of the bowler hat and the lawn chair. They strapped Mrs. Pembly’s dog into a leather sling and hoisted the protesting beast skyward. The dog wore a tweed jacket and a bowler hat. They were mocking William. Clearly. They knew he was watching, that he wouldn’t dare confront them in the dead of a windy night.