He could just see the flatbed truck parked ahead, along the main channel. The diving bell was hanging from a chain, swinging across onto the deck of the tugboat. The fools! They’d find nothing but death. His mechanical mole had been a work of genius. He couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong. He drove to Ports O’Call Village and parked in a metered lot. Damn the meter. He was above meters. He walked along the docks, just at the edge of a meandering mob of Japanese tourists. There was the tug. The bell was aboard. The tourists pointed at it, jabbered. Good God, the fool Latzarel was telling them a joke. Pinion was furious. He was tempted to … he didn’t know what.
He knew only that Latzarel and St. Ives weren’t going anywhere. His head ached. Damn the noise! He squinted into the sun at a wheeling gull that cried out overhead to torment him. The pier ran out into the channel and another pier — two others — angled out perpendicularly from the first. Farther along was another identical pier, and beyond that another and another. Pinion’s head reeled with the thought of it. There was a dull ache right behind his eyelids, as if something was shoving against the back of his eyes, pushing them out. He felt as if his head were about to burst.
One of the tourists waved a camera at the bell, chattering at Latzarel to stand beside it. The man slipped, sprawled toward the edge of the pier, and Latzarel and St. Ives and the boy — what was his name? — gawked over the side. Pinion stepped across onto the boat, barely making a sound on his crepe soles. In a moment, just as the salty camera was hauled dripping from the water, Pinion crept in under a heap of canvas and rope. He lay in the darkness, the sounds from without muffled by the canvas. There was a roaring in his ears, as if someone held a great seashell to either one — the hollow windy sound of thousands of miles of open ocean. He clutched at his head, stifling a groan. It must be arthritis, enlivened by ocean air. He could feel it in his joints — a burning and tearing, almost an itch. His skin crawled. Maybe it was the damned canvas. But he couldn’t just throw it off and pop out.
The motor churned into life, the tug surged forward, and in twenty minutes he felt the roll of the groundswell as they motored out toward Angel’s gate. Latzarel was full of joviality. Pinion hated Latzarel. He retched under the canvas as silently as he could, clutching his stomach, which seemed to be tearing itself to pieces. His bones felt as if they’d crack apart. He was hellishly sick, but it wouldn’t stop him.
He was aware, suddenly, of an uncanny illusion. The canvas, it seemed, was translucent, like green seawater, and he peered through it at a sunlit sky as if he were looking out from the depths of a pool. He felt a cool rush of water across him just as a twisting shudder of pain wracked his hands. But nothing had happened. He still lay under the canvas. He reached for the edge of it to pull it back, but his fingers slipped through it as through water. It rippled, sending a swirl of little wavelets across his vision, obscuring the sight of the bowed front of the cabin that was drawn sharply against the sky. The ripples settled. Pinion stared, unbelieving. Just out of the corner of his eye he could see Latzarel bending to some task. St. Ives was nowhere about. Squires was invisible in the wheel-house above. And staring at him, dead at him, through the curved glass of the cabin, was Giles Peach, as if in a trance. A rush of panic slammed through him. Peach could see him. He looked him in the eye. He was watching him there beneath the canvas. Something was desperately wrong.
He doubled up in pain, then straightened with a cry he couldn’t suppress. He gasped for breath, floundering. They’d see him. Surely they’d see him. Suddenly he hoped they would. He’d die otherwise. His skin seemed to ripple like the canvas. It itched wildly. He scratched at his arm and a line of silver scales popped loose. His fingers were strangely immobile, were joined, in fact, by little fleshy bridges of skin. He clawed at his throat, unable to breathe. The flesh on his neck seemed to be disintegrating, pulling apart.
He gasped and thrashed, but his screams were airy nothings. And in a moment he wasn’t even aware of screams — he was aware of nothing at all, not even of the startled cry of Edward St. Ives, who noticed the pitching thing beneath the canvas and pulled it back to reveal a momumental fish with fleshy, finger-tipped fins, gasping helplessly in the ruined uniform of an ice cream man.
“Good Lord!” shouted Latzarel with a suddenness that nearly pitched the stupefied Edward into the metamorphosed John Pinion. But Latzarel hadn’t even seen Pinion, he was pointing at the beach, yanking Edward by the back of the shirt.
Chapter 23
Ashbless again? thought William at the sound of his name. But something told him that it wasn’t. It hadn’t been that kind of whisper. It hadn’t been meant to hail him; it was a ghost whisper, echoing out of the dark corridor, neither ahead nor behind him. He slowed, listening. There it was again. “William. William Hastings.” Then the sound of something — what was it? — a razor lapping against a strop, the scraping of leather soles on the concrete pipe.
How far was he from the shore? Surely not more than half a mile. He began to run. His flashlight had dimmed again to a dirty intermittent glow. William ran on, passing the mouth of a tunnel from which came a shrill scream, a howl that degenerated into shrieking laughter. There was a rush of steps behind him. They stamped along furiously for a moment then gave off into abrupt silence that lasted just long enough to convince William that some fresh horror was about to launch itself at him, then erupted into the clanging of a bell that echoed wildly through the sewers as if through the dark halls of a funhouse.
The clanging was sliced off cleanly, and in the deep, ensuing quiet the whispering began again: “William. William Hastings,” weirdly loud, as if leaking into the sewers through secret transmitters. And impossibly, directly ahead of him, Hilario Frosticos materialized, stepping out of the shadows, clutching his bag.
William almost ran headlong into him. He threw himself to the side, his shoulder skidding against the curve of the pipe, and spun half around, slouching onto his hands. His flashlight smashed against the concrete floor and blazed brighter than ever. But it wouldn’t last. William was sure it wouldn’t last.
He looked into the doctor’s face, searching there for some sign of compassion, of civility. It was utterly blank — a face made of stone. Even its color was wrong — a pale bluish ivory that shone through a layer of powder. The color in his cheeks was rouge. And his hair — it seemed to be sewn on in tufts stitched in neat rows like trees in an orchard. He was ghastly — inhuman.
His eyes — that was the worst part. They were void. Empty and depthless and white as if obscured by semi-transparent cataracts. What did he look like, wondered William, beneath the rouge? How old had he been when he traveled in the company of Pince Nez, thirty-five years earlier? And who, for God’s sake, did he resemble? Why was William certain that he wasn’t who he seemed to be?
Frosticos coughed, lurching just a bit, almost imperceptibly. But William saw it. He clutched his black bag with rigid fingers. He grinned, and the grin broke into a fit of coughing and choking. William made a move, as if to run, but Frosticos stepped in front of him, waving the black bag, taunting him with it. What grim instruments did it contain? What hellish apparatus?
A tear ran out of Frosticos’ left eye, taking a line of powder with it. The flesh below was unnaturally blue — almost iridescent like the blue of a fish. It gave William the horrors. He was frozen there, waiting. He couldn’t think in a straight line. One thought kept bumping up into another, catapulting over it smack into a third, the lot of them piling up in a tangled heap. He watched the doctor’s face. There was something wrong with it. Dead wrong. He seemed to be almost gasping for breath, and he clutched once at his heart, involuntarily, as if swept by a sudden spasm.