IF ZEKE CANTRIP MADE a reply, Eric never heard it. Inside the cabin door, his mouth fell open. He stared at the walls and into corners of the room. He looked up at the rafters—at least he supposed the rafters were somewhere there. With everything hanging down, crowding against everything else, it was hard to tell. In some places, a person would hardly be able to walk upright.
“What is this?” he gasped. “What is all this stuff?”
Across the floor, Mr. Cantrip was lowering himself stiffly onto a homemade barrel chair and didn’t immediately answer. He glanced up a moment later, though, and seeing the expression on Eric’s face, smiled and raised a hand.
“My collection!” he announced, proudly. “Let me introduce you. My small collection of relics. From the beaches, you know. Over time. And a pinch of gear from the old days.”
“A pinch of gear! But you’ve got tons of equipment here. I don’t even know what half of it’s for. I’ve never even heard of it!”
The fishcatcher smiled.
“What is this, for instance?” Eric grasped a prickly looking object.
“Well, in the ancient days it hung from your belt, and when you spotted a crab far out in the current you’d throw it and—”
“And this?” interrupted Eric, holding forth a grisly, hairy clump of something.
“Ah, yes. A lampfish mustache. Fascinating, isn’t it? I came across it one day after a storm when I was—
“And this!”
“Well, I—”
“And this!”
“Yes, one day I happened to—”
“And this!”
Each thing was stranger than the last. There were shiny mirror stones and a pearl the size of a pear. There were glass water masks and deadly darts and javelins. (“Used to be more underwater work done here in the olden times,” the fishcatcher explained.) There were traps of every shape, made out of every material, employing every trick ever known for catching fish and crabs. There were compasses and old maps, ships’ rudders and transoms, spyglasses and shark fins, rope ladders and eel skins. The items dangled from the walls or were draped from the ceiling or piled in corners along with many, many other objects unrecognizable to Eric. Or if recognized, they looked so oddly out of context—a group of stuffed seahawks, for instance, gathering dust on a ship’s wheel—or were such a strange color—everything was bathed in a rather eerie reddish light—that it was easy to confuse the ordinary with the unusual, the real with the imagined, the disgusting with the beautiful, the fragment with the whole.
In the midst of all this, Eric turned and turned, gazed and gazed, touched and drew back, until his eyes fell again on the old man. He was grinning and nodding and offering random comments from his seat:
“It’s a nice collection, yes. That’s a red herring, did you guess? Those false teeth were carved from a whale’s jawbone. I like to remind myself how far we’ve come since the early days. A nice collection, I always say. Will you sit down for a minute? No need to hurry off, now that you’ve come such a way. Your bird’s safe on my ground. We could talk of certain things. We could—”
Eric let out a cry. He had identified the source of the reddish light, and now he moved toward a glass tank half-hidden by a curtain behind the fishcatcher’s seat. Its glow was so powerful that his eyes were dazzled, though only a portion of the tank was in view.
“But what is this?” he exclaimed. “What have you got here? It looks like a…But it couldn’t be. Still, it does look exactly like the glow of a…”
When he hesitated again, Zeke Cantrip reached out to pull away the rest of the curtain and, with brilliant light flooding the room, supplied the word for him:
“A lampfish? Dead on course you are! I thought you might be interested. This lamp’s smaller than most I’ve run into. I think it must’ve lost its grip on the current and been swept away. I found it washed up on Strangle Beach after the last storm. Are you amazed?” he asked eagerly, rubbing his hands together.
Eric was amazed. He was dumbfounded. He could not at first see the creature, because of its bright light. But in a moment, an outline appeared to him. Then the great mustaches showed themselves, swirling gently against the glass sides of the tank. He saw a pair of intelligent green eyes turn to examine him through the water. The huge pink body wallowed, then stilled, rippled, then rested. Every bone was visible, every organ and every vein At its center throbbed the heart, steadily, monstrously, like a great bass drum beaten from within.
“How’d you ever get it here?” Eric managed to ask, after several attempts to activate his voice had failed.
“I’ve got a crew!” The fishcatcher winked at him. “Good workers, tried and true. Been with me for years. You saw them on the roof coming in.”
“On the roof! The only thing on the roof, besides my Gullstone, that is, was a bunch of wild sea gulls!”
“That’s my crew! They know how to take an order. Understand every word. Used to be, when I first moved out here by myself, I had nobody to talk to. So I’d talk to the gulls just to hear my own voice. ‘Congratulations!’ I’d call out, every morning getting up. ‘It’s a fine day for fish.’ Or if the sky looked bad: ‘It’s a black day for fish’ I’d yell. ‘D’ya think the wind’ll change?’
“It got so they began to expect my talking, and they’d hang around and wait for me to start. And then, after a while, I guess they began to see what I was talking about, because I’d mention some little thing, like a trap snarled in weed, and they’d look into the problem with me. So gradually we got to working together, with them being my manpower and my crew. Of course, they don’t exactly say ‘Aye, aye, sir!’ like a real captain gets.”
The fishcatcher went into a brief laughing fit about this remark, while Eric looked worriedly over his shoulder. This was strange talk if ever he’d heard it. He remembered uneasily how the squawks of the gulls ushering him down to Strangle Point had seemed to contain words.
“I think I’ll just go out for a minute and see if my bird is all right…” he tried to say, but the old man’s hearing had taken a drastic turn for the worse. He plowed right over the top of Eric’s words and proceeded to tell a story. It was a loony story, and it was told with such alarming scowls and giggles that Eric began to feel even more nervous. He edged closer to the cabin door.
“There it was, a lampfish floundering on the sand!” Zeke Cantrip was saying, though any sane person in Twickham would tell you it was impossible. Lampfish didn’t flounder on dry land. “I saw it and I knew it was too big for my crew to handle. They mostly are. So I ordered my birds to call in reinforcements, and pretty soon a whole crowd of gulls turned up. Maybe your sea gull was one. Did he go off suddenly on the morning after the last storm?”
“No, he didn’t,” Eric replied tartly. “He was inside Aunt Opal’s cabin with me.”
“Well, that’s too bad. It’s always a big show when we take a lampfish off the beach. Gulls come from everywhere, up and down the coast.”
“You’ve found lampfish before?”
“Sure we have. Many times. After the big storms. Strangle Beach catches them up the way it’s shaped. As I was saying, when the gulls all got here, I told my crew to pass on the order to fetch my big net down to the beach, which they did. Then we tried to shove the fish onto the net. The lamps don’t like that much, have their pride like anyone about being pushed around. So it thrashed pretty bad before we finally got it set. Then the birds took hold of the net and tried to fly, and after a lot of beating and flapping (I wish you could’ve seen it!), the net was lifted off the sand and they flew the lampfish out to deep water.”
“They flew a lampfish through the air?” Eric said.
“We’ve got to, to help them out. The fish get quiet on the way. They can see what’s happening, that we’re not out to murder them like everybody else on this coast. But in the case of this one, it was injured. We all saw it right away. Something was wrong with its balance, and when it went into the water, it couldn’t swim. Kept rolling over backwards.
“So we got the net around it again and flew it up here, where I have this old aquarium left over from the last century. People used to stock up on fish for the Season of Storms, you know. It was an idea that never worked very well, though. You couldn’t keep ’em alive long enough to last even halfway through the season.”
The fishcatcher turned and tapped softly on the aquarium’s glass. Inside, the lampfish rippled and flashed forward. Eric jumped back, but a moment later the creature had withdrawn and begun to nibble a mass of seaweed near one side of the tank.
“I’ve been tending lampfish for a while now. Maybe the word’s gone out,” Mr. Cantrip said, “because they’re always well behaved when they’re up here with me. They know I’m trying to help. And mostly, I can. I’ve learned some tricks over time. What works, what doesn’t. This one’s got to go back in the sea tomorrow, fixed or not. You can’t keep lampfish penned for long, or they get weak and die. We want to save them, but we don’t want to kill them doing it. Now as I was saying about your sea gull—”
“Wait a minute!” Eric interrupted. “How could any of this be true? For one thing, the coast is crawling every day with fishcatchers fishing from their boats and casting off the ledges. If bright pink lampfish are being flown around Strangle Beach in nets by bunches of sea gulls, why has nobody ever seen it?”
The fishcatcher shrugged. “Don’t ask me why people choose to see one thing and not another. I’ve been wondering about it for a long time myself. That’s not the least of it, either. For years I’ve been telling people about the currents and the spouts and the lampfish around Twill. I’ve been talking and talking about how there’s more between them than what appears, how there’s another scheme at work, should anyone care to look. Which nobody does, of course. They’re too busy fishing and watching the weather and going to weeps. Loony, they call me, when I try to pipe up. ‘Talks in circles,’ they say. ‘Keep him away from the dog.’ ”
“That’s true,” said Eric, trying to hold back a grin.
Mr. Cantrip nodded. “I used to be a lampfish hunter, same as everybody in Twill. One of the best, in fact. I don’t hunt them anymore, though. I try to warn them away from people. It’s what my crew and I are up to most of the time these days, as if you hadn’t guessed already.”
“I did a little,” Eric said. “You were always turning up at the worst possible moment, making the most possible noise.”
“Right you are!” crowed the fishcatcher. “Do you know there’s been only one lamp caught so far this year? We’re proud of that. We’re pleased as can be.”
“But why?” asked Eric. “We need the lampfish for hooks. We’ve always used red bone hooks on the coast of Twill.”
“Bone hooks? Fishwash! Twill is stuck in a rut with its bones. These days you can make a hook a hundred other ways. You can order steel ones by the bushel from the trading cities. Lampfish are special creatures.”
The fishcatcher lowered his voice and leaned toward Eric. “They come from below.”
“From where?”
“Up the spout, young fellow. Up the marvelous spout!”
Then, in another wild swing of mood, he grabbed Eric’s arm and nearly crushed it with excitement.
“Have you never been out among the lampfish? Then ship with me tonight! The moon will set early, and the wind will drop. It’s a perfect night to show you the sights. How the big fish rise and speak among themselves. A sort of music it is. Or a pulse or a beat. And the swirl. Oh, the swirl! Who can tell how it is. The closer you come to the spinning edge…the more the surge takes hold of your boat…the quicker the spray flies up in your face…”
Suddenly, Zeke Cantrip could contain himself no longer. He struggled to his feet and began an awkward stride around the room. Around and around he walked, circling clockwise, dodging the clutter at first, later tramping through it as the pace of his rounds increased.
Watching him, Eric knew he was in the grip of something strong, some ever-quickening current that moved him along. Round and round and round he went, muttering and murmuring, shaking his head from side to side. He was in the whirlpool, Eric saw. Inside his mind he was there again as certainly as when his body had been there, hurled inside the giant spout, all those years and years ago. Round and round and round before Eric’s frightened eyes, and then the fishcatcher began to laugh.