At first there was no reaction at all from the adults and the children round Newman, who only looked up with placid and indifferent glances at the silly child. Then, as the meaning of Newman’s words began to take hold, and as the manufactured sincerity in Newman’s dramatised cries began to touch that fearful place in every human brain, there came just the sort of concerted reaction that Newman sought. Someone took him seriously. Then someone else and then another and then another until complete panic took hold — mindless, terror-imbued panic. Some people stopped dead in their tracks. Others began to scurry all about without reason. Fathers lifted their little ones into their clamouring arms. Mothers stepped up upon benches, yanking their young children along with them. How easily the Outlanders frighten! thought Newman.
Then things turned quite ugly. There were scrambles and scuffles and veritable collisions as those who wished to go one way met up with those who wished to use the very same path to go the opposite way. A little girl was knocked down, her hand crushed beneath a rubber sole. A woman held her baby high above her head as if a murderous escaped snake might take an especial liking to any infant that wasn’t higher than a tree.
A little boy was flung into a fence, his eyeglasses flying off his face from the force of the impact. Newman noted in passing that the boy’s look was familiar to him. He was, in fact, the amiable and erudite Outlander Gregory. Newman reversed his steps and went to pull his scientific chum to his feet. “Don’t worry, Gregory. The fugitive snake is safe within that building there,” he said, pointing. Gregory squinted. Without his spectacles he could only kick his legs and flap his arms to keep away all the amassing poisonous snakes that he could not see. “This is merely a diversionary tactic that I have been forced by unfortunate circumstances to employ.” He spotted Gregory’s eyeglasses nesting in a tuft of grass, picked them up and put them into one of Gregory’s fluttering hands. “I have to go now, Gregory. Thank you for being so helpful to me and thank you for the tasty chocolate beads.”
Still speechless, Gregory returned his glasses to the bridge of his nose and watched with now corrected vision as Newman sprinted away.
What could easily have been dismissed as a young boy’s mischievous prank was instead taken for a legitimate admonition, and suddenly circumstances required Newman to say not another word to effect the sort of disorder and mayhem that he required. Hysterical, illogical panic now held sway over that morning’s contingent of visitors to Clive and Clare’s Reptilarium, one overwrought imagination feeding the next, the resultant turmoil escalating exponentially. A misinterpretation of a broken serpentine-shaped branch beneath a tree propelled a frightened man’s flailing elbow into the ribcage of a screaming woman, and obligated a fleeing girl to abandon the woman she had been pushing in a wheeled chair, now toppled upon its side, the girl herself soon tripping over the large stumblestone of a man who had been inadvertently knocked to the ground by an even larger man with ramrodding shoulders.
Newman stopped for a moment to admire his handiwork and then to feel quite guilty over it, and then was on his way again. A moment or so later he reached another building, this one much smaller than the one he had left. There was a sign on the door that read: “Infirmary. Employees Only. No admittance.” He ignored the written enjoinder, threw open the door, and ducked inside.
The front room was filled with cabinets and cages and tables upon which sat various pieces of medical equipment and surgical instruments, the look of the room being quite in keeping with its designation as infirmary for cold-blooded captive creatures. There was a young man standing behind a table, fumbling nervously with a hypodermic needle and a tiny glass ampule.
“What are you doing in here?” he cried with only the briefest glance up from his task. “Get out of here!”
“But there’s a deadly snake on the loose out there!” Newman replied in the same terrified voice he had used outside.
“How the hell did it — they told me it was contained inside the North Building.” The man now looked at Newman with fearful, goggling eyes. “You’re telling me you saw it in the open — you mean on the grounds?”
Newman nodded.
“Jesus!” The man set the ampule down and flicked his finger against the hypodermic. “Look, you better stay here,” he said as he dashed out the door.
Newman knew that he could not remain in this place. He knew that even if he were able for the nonce to lock himself inside, someone would eventually come for him and they would find some way to get him. He decided to look for a different door from the one he’d just entered — to go out that other door and then continue his search for some rear egress from the park itself. Surely there was some other way for the park’s employees to come and go that did not require one to pass so close to the main exhibits building, or the “North Building,” as the man had just denominated it. But Newman had to act fast. There were people who knew what he looked like, people who even should they not be aligned with the man who had tried to kidnap him, would want to take him away and punish him for what he had done to this generally tranquil reptile park.
Newman went through the door that communicated with a back room. There were even more cages in this room — much larger cages — and within them were other snakes and other lizards and other prehistoric animals that he had read about in the Ensyke—some of those scholarly descriptions accompanied by illustrations, but most leaving it only to Newman’s boyish imagination what such fantastical creatures should look like.
Just such a creature now arrested his eye and halted his step. It was a most curious fellow given to running upon his hind legs back and forth within his long, narrow enclosure, his yellow-contoured mouth open and wide, the folds of his orange neck expanded into a sort of a ruff.
“Frill-necked Lizard,”said someone within the room.“Chlamydoraurus kingii.”
Newman started. He spun round and found, seated in a shadowy corner of the large room, a little man hunched forward in a chair — a very old man intently observing him through sunken eyes.
“From Australia,” the cadaverous man went on. “He’s quite popular ‘Down Under.’ They even put his picture on one of their coins a few years back. Are you hiding from the Black mamba?”
Newman nodded but with only the slightest semblance of conviction.
“Wise choice. They are most deadly. Now, if you wish to take it into your head that I am hiding from the mamba myself, why, you are welcome to the presumption. For I have been ordered to stay fixed to this very spot.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why have you been asked to stay fixed to that spot?”
“Clive — the junior Clive and not the senior Clive who is presently chopping his way through the Amazon jungle — fears that I will go and tangle myself up with that fugitive elapid. They think I’m daft sometimes, these Pellers. Now I ask you, young man: if I were so precipitant as to go draping myself with poisonous fugitive elapids, would I have survived even half of my ninety-four years? Dear me. Now you are but a boy. Do you know what the word ‘precipitant’ means?”
“It means rash.”
“Capital! Who is your teacher, young man?”
“Mr. Chowser.”
“I knew a teacher many years ago with the name of Tobias Chowser.”
“I have seen his portrait upon the wall of the Chowser School. It was not long ago that I was under the tutelage of his grandson Mr. Alphonse Chowser.”
“God bless my weary soul, boy! Are you the one they’re looking for— the evasive lad from Dingley Dell?”
Newman nodded and drew closer to the old man.“Unless there is some other. Are you Mr. Rugg?”