“What the fuck!” I burst out, as we scrambled backward.
“Do have the consideration to refrain from that manner of language,” Doyle said coolly, frowning at the chest-high spikes. “But I can appreciate the sentiment. What the devil are they up to here?”
“If we’d stumbled into that, what then?” I asked. “It would’ve ripped into us . . .”
“Yes. We could have deformulated it, in time, after . . . exquisite suffering. This will not do at all . . .”
“Fellas, sorry about this!” said someone, chuckling apologetically as he strolled up from the brush to my left. The man’s voice was light, almost lilting. His accent seemed Southern California to me. He was a smiling, genial-looking man with quizzical brown eyes, a stub of a nose, swept-back blond hair that looked dyed but probably was just imagined that way. He wore a khaki jacket, like something from a safari movie, khaki shorts, hiking boots. He had skinny legs, knobby knees. I’d wondered why people didn’t change their appearance more, here, since they seemed to have some psychic influence over their physicality. Some did, but I later learned that there was a tendency for the shape of the body to return to default—which was the way it was in that person’s prime on Earth. Disfigured and severely handicapped people are repaired in the afterworld. It’s not heaven—but in some ways it comes close.
“Charlie Long,” Doyle said, his tone clipped with reproach, “how is it you imagine anything like this”—he pointed at the spikes—“could ever be permissible here?”
“Wasn’t my idea, Arthur,” Long said cheerfully.
Doyle winced. He didn’t like being called by his first name except by his wife. “And whose idea was it, then? Merchant’s?”
“More likely it’s the work of good old,” Long said, pursing his thin lips with comical disapproval. “The man’s got hostility issues. He overreacts to things!” He shrugged. “ takes the term ‘caretaker’ too seriously.” Long stuck his hand out to me. “Charles Long. Head carpenter around here.”
“Nick Fogg,” I said, shaking his hand. He had a firm grip.
“New here?”
“I guess I am. Starting to feel normal though.”
Doyle grunted. “I felt ‘new’ to this world for decades, in some ways. Long—you might have put up a warning sign about this fence or whatever it is.”
“It’s more like a death trap than a fence,” I said.
Long shook his head dubiously. “Death trap? In the afterworld?”
“People do die here,” I said. “Or close enough.” I watched his face. “Man named Morgan Harris, for example.”
There was no special reaction from Long when I mentioned Harris. He simply nodded. “We have had Morgan around here. Last I knew he went off on one of those walkabouts that people go on . . .” His voice trailed off and his brow knit. “Are you saying he’s dead? You are new! There isn’t any death here, just transformation.”
Doyle cleared his throat. “Ah. Back in the Before that we called Earth, people were murdered from time to time. What became of the victims there, Long? What became of their souls? Some have more of that essence that survives the transformation we call death, and some have less, in consequence of the lives they’ve lived. Still, something essential survives. It comes here, Charlie, to this world . . . somewhere.” He gestured grandly, to include the all the vast unknown topography of the afterworld. “Death on Earth is transformation, too. Why shouldn’t there be the possibility of another kind of death here? And we are convinced that’s what happened to Morgan Harris. Another kind of death—and quite possibly murder. First, he vanished . . .”
“People wander off all the time. They leave the village and never come back.”
“Yes, however—Morgan Harris’s remains turned up.”
Long looked back and forth between us. “Remains!”
I nodded, and kicked the spikes still fencing us off. “I might have mine stuck on this. Getting stabbed through the middle by this contraption wouldn’t hurt us for long, I guess. But it’d be bad enough.”
Long shook his head in wonder at the spikes. “Really is an ugly thing. Glad you didn’t step into it. You can talk to Higgs about his toy here.” He turned, cupped his mouth, and shouted, “Roscoe! Hey, get your feuding ass over here!”
“Yes, coming, dammit!” came a faint voice from around the side of the mansion.
I noticed Doyle staring at Long’s fingers, and his sleeves. I could almost see the wheels of ratiocination turning in Conan Doyle’s head.
I looked up at the mansion. It seemed to cry out for ogling. It was twice the size of the queen’s palace in Britain. Every individual section of it was symmetrical, well built and some connected with other sections rationally. But a great many more seem to have grown out from the building with the randomness of toadstools.
“You design that building, Long?” I asked, nodding toward the mansion.
“Me?” His mouth twisted with a private amusement. “No! But I built it, you might say—I formulated it, with a little help from Higgs. But it was designed by Garrett. By Mr. Merchant. If you can call impulse a design. Garrett Merchant’s feeling is, if we can formulate whatever we want, why not just build whatever you want wherever you feel it? So he points and says, ‘I want this here’ and we add it. And he comes up with something all the time. There’s very little central design. We’ve learned not to argue, long as any addition is not likely to fall over. It’s not like the afterworld doesn’t have gravity, but sometimes he tries to get me to ignore that particular force of nature.” He shrugged. “Of course, I don’t have to do it. I don’t have to have a job here. But . . . it’s fascinating, to me, to see how far we can carry it. And he’s given me a great many Fionas—and my own wing of the house.”
“How does he earn his Fionas?”
Doyle answered that. “He figured out how to treat frip, to make it more concentrated, easy to chew or smoke. He did the work himself, at first. Then Higgs turned up—Higgs worked for Merchant in the Before—and he’s taken over all the grounds work, maintenance, all that.”
I hooked a thumb toward the sculptured shrubbery. “What’s up with the aviation topiary?”
“Merchant asked Higgs to do it. Merchant made his money, on Earth, in aviation. Guy was a big competitor to Boeing. Planes, missiles, the occasional orbiter. I guess the shrubbery there is homage to all that stuff.”
“Aviation! That’s right, I remember. Big spender, party guy, yacht race enthusiast.”
So Merchant was the type of guy who doesn’t give up running his own corporate fiefdom just because a little thing like death comes along . . .
“Sure,” Long said. “Famous guy in his time. Oh, here’s Higgs.”
Roscoe Higgs was a hulking, bald, round-faced man with an etched frown and long simian arms. He wore boots and a blue work shirt and coveralls. “Who’s that one?” he asked, nodding toward me, his eyes narrowed.
“And good afternoon to you too, Higgs,” Doyle said sarcastically. “My associate here is Mr. Fogg. He is a consultant in this investigation. Which has now taken on a dual character. Let us take the second tine of the fork, as it were, first. Did you set up this vicious trap here?” He pointed at the sharp spikes sticking up from the ground.
Higgs flapped a big hand dismissively. “And so what? I warned Moore, he wouldn’t listen, so I figure that’d discourage him. If he got stuck on it, I’d have got him loose if he couldn’t do it himself. But he’d have learned a lesson.”
“So you’ve been feuding with Moore? I appreciate your feelings toward him but we cannot have it taken this far. I’ll have to talk to the village council about this,” Doyle said.
“We’re not in the village here!”
“But you come into the village,” Doyle said. “You use it. If you wish to continue to do that, this must end. How many other traps are there?”
“A few,” Higgs admitted sulkily.
“And you yourself formulated them?”
“Yes.” Higgs shrugged. “And the springs that pop the spikes up,” he added with a touch of pride. “They’re underneath. Pressure plate there. I was an engineer for Garrett, back on Earth.”
Doyle was looking closely at Higgs—especially at the man’s hands and feet—just as he had with Long.
“So the trap was all about scaring Moore off?” I asked.
“He’s just the latest one, spooking around, upsetting things,” Higgs said, his gaze sliding out toward the woods.
“And would Mr. Morgan Harris be another such person?” Doyle asked, mildly.
“Sure, Harris tramped his dirty shoes through the house,” Higgs said indignantly. “Left his plant samples around. Always distracting Mr. Merchant.”
“Ah, there it is,” Long put in. “The jealousy.”
Higgs deepened his perpetual scowl, and glowered at Long. “Don’t start that crap again.”
“Do start it again, Charlie,” Doyle said impishly. “What jealousy is this?”
“Oh, he’s like a jealous pet around Merchant,” Long said. “Merchant’s like his own private billionaire.”
“Merchant has a billion Fionas?” I asked.
“No one has that,” Higgs said, huffily.
“Since everyone has all they materially need here,” Doyle said, “there is no true wealth in the afterworld. Just the appearance of it. Which perhaps frustrates Garrett Merchant.”
“Mr. Merchant is a person of high style,” Higgs said. “Says a man without style is a cipher. Just a blank.”
“I always reckoned,” said Doyle, looking up at the mansion, “that a man who’s a blank makes a great deal of show to conceal his blankness. Real style comes from something essential.”
“Well, Mr. Garrett has got that.”
“Higgs,” I said, watching his face, “was Moore trying to get between you and Merchant?”
“What? Mr. Merchant’s not my boyfriend, you know. Moore was just intruding. Coming around here and raving. And I think he stole some things for that elevated junk yard of his.”
“Would you kill Moore to protect Garrett Merchant?” I asked.
I thought I was being subtle by making it about Moore instead of Harris for now, but Doyle gave me a quick, hooded glance of irritation. I could tell he thought I was scaring the suspect. And if you scare the suspect, the suspect will clam up. I’ve never been known for real subtlety.
I gave Doyle a look of apology.
“You can’t kill anyone here,” Higgs said.
Doyle tapped the spikes of the trap. “But you’re willing to do something quite radical to people here, with this cruel device of yours.” The cat of unsubtlety being out of the bag already. “Do you know how to deformulate a human body, Higgs?”
“What?” Higgs seemed confused. “Deformulate a body? No.”
“I see. Is Mr. Merchant about? Can we talk to him without being impaled first?”
“Yeah, he’s here,” Higgs said reluctantly.
“Point us to him. Long can take us there,” Doyle said. “You sir, will be occupied. You will be deactivating all such traps around your house, or I’ll see to it that Merchant sends you away. And you will certainly not visit the village again.”
Higgs looked at Long, maybe hoping for support.
Long nodded. “He’s right. You didn’t tell me about these things . . .”
“Was going to.” Higgs seemed suddenly eleven years old.
“I’m not so sure. Take them down, Higgs.”
Doyle looked at the spikes. “Take this one down last. I shall want to have a look at it again, a little later.”
Long went into another room to call up to Merchant, somehow, as Doyle and I looked around the entry hall.
The great, high ceilinged entry hall of the mansion was like something from M. C. Escher. A staircase rose sweepingly to the right, while on the left another staircase was running upside down from the ceiling to the floor. You’d have to walk upside down, defying gravity, to use it.
The sound of our footsteps echoed from the high, ornate ceiling as if in a cathedral. The hexagonal stone tiles were alternately jet and ivory. A sweeping staircase of broad black and white steps rose to an intricately carved balustrade along a balcony, its balusters shaped in angels and imps topped by optical-illusory spirals that seemed to spin when you looked at them indirectly; a chaotically figured chandelier made of innately glowing crystals hung overhead. Iridescent colors traded place in its crystals.
I gaped around in awe. “Holy . . .” I remembered Doyle was sensitive about profanity. “ . . . crap.”
Doyle nodded. “Yes indeed. It is indecorous decoration.”
“Almost awe inspiring. But more like ‘shock and awe.’ Does someone . . . or something . . . actually walk on that upside-down M. C. Escher stairway?”
“I think not. We have most of the same physical laws here. Of course, there may be spirits about we can’t see . . . and who knows what they might be capable of?”
I looked at him. “Wait . . . are there? Spirits here we can’t see, in the afterworld? I mean, I thought we were spirits here?”
“We are embodied spirits. But . . . Diogenes has alluded to our rate of vibration. Some spirits having a higher one may not be visible to us. Ah, Merchant, there you are!”
A man in a black velvet robe was looking down from the second-floor balustrade now. Garrett Merchant had a scrupulously shaped jet-black goatee, long black hair swept back from a high, pale forehead and sharp features. He waved—it wasn’t a friendly wave, just a yes I see you wave—and made his way along to the stairs and down, holding on to the banister. His small dark eyes fixed on us; his already narrow face was pinched further with irritation. “What’s going on, here?” Merchant demanded, his voice squeaky but somehow resonant with authority. “What’s this about a demand for my appearance?” He pointed a partly chewed stick of frip at us. “Are we in a police state now, Doyle?”
“Tish-tosh! You know perfectly well we’re not, Merchant,” Doyle said affably, looking Merchant over the way he’d observed Long and Higgs. “Nor is a police state possible in this world—or not for long. But see here, are you aware of the malicious traps that your man Higgs has erected?”
“Ah.” Merchant paused on the bottom step, stuck the frip in the corner of his mouth like a cheroot, and put his hands in the pockets of his robe—more of a long smoking jacket, really. To my amazement, it actually had his monogram on its breast pocket.
“Who is it, Garrett?” came a purring feminine voice. I looked up to see a pretty young woman leaning on the railing. She had a heart shaped face and wore a gold fringed robe--and nothing else. I took notice of her long, prettily turned ivory legs, and her—
Doyle jabbed an elbow into my ribs and I looked away from her.
“It’s . . . Doyle and . . .” Merchant looked at me. “Who would you be?”
“Fogg. Nick Fogg, sir.” I figured he’d like the sir.
“Fogg. Fine. Whatever. “
Okay, he was unmoved by the sir.
Merchant looked at Doyle. “I don’t know anything about any malicious traps, Doyle. Sounds like some stupid local rumor. A myth.”
He didn’t seem very convincing.
Doyle seemed skeptical. “Truly? Well your man Higgs has nearly skewered us. I’ll let Long explain. But we cannot have a vicious device so close to Garden Rest. You can put up a fence—but not a trap. The thing is designed to stab people.”
“Oh yes?” Merchant raised his sharply defined jet-black eyebrows. They looked almost painted on. “And do you have any other imperial orders for me, Doyle? I had thousands of laws and regulations and rules skewering me back on Earth. I don’t want them here. I’ve retired here and I want to be left in peace!”
Retired? In the afterlife?
“Did you give Roscoe Higgs permission to put the trap in?” Doyle persisted.
“I didn’t tell him to install a trap! Just . . . something to discourage people. A little. Nothing that’d stab anyone!” Merchant waved a hand as if to brush it all away. “That’s his own fool idea! I’ll have a look. That’s all I can promise.” He went on, peppering the air with words and pointing the frip at us again. “Has it occurred to you that if you had not trespassed there would be no issue? If you want to do something constable-like, how about taking on that Bull Moore idiot? He still thinks we’re on a planet and he simply won’t get a grip! And there’s that wretch Bolliver, snooping about!”
“Yes,” said Long, coming into the entry hall. “Bolliver is the other one who’s got under Higgs’s skin. But hey, I don’t like Bolliver either.”
“You people have bothered Mr. Merchant enough!” Higgs said, following Long in.
Merchant turned away, started for the stairs. I looked up to the balcony again but the girl had gone. Not much doubt about what we’d interrupted Merchant doing.
And what was sex like, in the afterworld? I was feeling increasingly curious.
“Merchant,” Doyle said softly. His voice, though soft, somehow demanded a response.
Merchant paused, turned frowning to him. “Well?”
“You went on some expeditions with Morgan Harris, I believe?”
“So?”
“You know that he’s . . . that his body has been destroyed?”
He grunted. “By what?”
“We think it was a he or a she, not a what,” I said. “Sir.”
“So ask the old Lamplighter to have a talk with Harris’s soul about it,” Merchant said. “I haven’t seen Morgan Harris for weeks . . . Wait a damned minute! Is this some sort of investigation about Harris? You have that ‘just a few more routine questions’ look. Ridiculous! Come out with it, Doyle, what do you really want?”
“When was the last time you saw Morgan Harris?” Doyle asked, ignoring both of Merchant’s questions.
“Last time I saw Harris? Who keeps track of time, around here? I don’t know, weeks ago. We went on a botanical hike, of sorts. He told me he might have found something like tobacco. I thought about farming the stuff.”
“See anyone around him who showed him any hostility?” Doyle asked, tugging on one of his mustaches.
“No, no. Didn’t see anyone. Except that Bolliver. Saw him once. Don’t remember when it was. We avoided Moore’s territory, or what he supposes is his territory. I like to go out and work off some excess energy in a hike, and besides the tobacco I thought he could help me with . . . well, I was thinking of getting a tree, a really big tree, to grow right here in the house, make a solarium.”
Long sighed, almost inaudibly.
“How do you decide territory around here?” I asked. I thought a guy like Merchant might have issues with property. I was curious to see how he’d react to the question.
“We simply claim property, Fogg,” Merchant snapped. “Long as it’s unclaimed already and no one objects. That’s the last foolish question I’m going to answer.”
He marched back up the stairs, and Doyle watched him go. Doyle seemed to consider calling Merchant back again, but instead he nodded politely to Long, and turned to Higgs, who was just coming in the front door. “You’ll take down those traps, Higgs? All of them?”
Higgs looked sullenly at him and then looked away. “Yes, yes, already deformulated some of them. I’ll . . . work up something harmless. Maybe just an alarm or something.”
“Very good. Please make it soon. Is it safe for us to return the way we came?’
“Safe, sure it’s safe. It’s still standing but it’s deactivated. Might leave it as a warning. But without the springs.”
“Good day to you both, then, gentlemen.” Doyle strode out, and I followed, hurrying to catch up as usual.
Doyle paused at the spike trap outside, hunkering to examine it near the ground. There was afterworld soil clinging to its base. Soil around Garden Rest is somehow different from Earthly earth, less involved with burrowing creatures, and yet subtly alive. Most of the soil I’ve seen is black and some variant of red-gold color. The soil here looked like that—but with silver flecks.
“Roscoe Higgs had this same dirt under his fingernails,” Doyle said. “Same color combination.”
“You could see his nails that closely? You have a microscope with you I don’t see, Doyle?”
I thought he might be annoyed with my smart-ass question but Doyle smiled as he stood up. “Visual acuity comes from use, especially in the afterworld. It appears this trap was put in recently—or he’d have cleaned himself up since. The rest of his appearance shows a reasonable tidiness.”
I remembered how Doyle and Brummigen had inserted their hands into the dirt to formulate from the ground up. “None of that particular soil on Long?”
“No. Nor on his shoes, so far as I could see.”
“Then the trap was all Roscoe Higgs—it was his doing. Unless Merchant ordered him to do it.”
“Merchant says he didn’t. Not as such. I believe him.”
I looked toward the windows of the mansion, maybe hoping to see the girl looking out. No such luck. “I don’t know. Merchant seems capable of violence. Or ordering it. There were rumors, before he died, that Merchant had a guy killed. Story had it that Merchant had financed vote tampering in Florida . . . and someone was going to blow the whistle on it. Guy died in a small-plane crash. One of those.”
“I do not deal in rumors,” Doyle said. He turned away from the house, and we trudged toward the woods.
“Anyway,” I said, when we reached the trail, “Roscoe Higgs looks good for killing Morgan Harris. He complained of Harris getting in the way around here. He seems fanatic about that. And he nearly skewered the two of us. He seems pretty homicidal to me.”
“Yes. Ostensibly he ‘looks good for it’ as you American detectives say. It could be Higgs. But you know, when Long called him, he said ‘get your feuding arse over here.’ That was rather a lot of information to load into a summons, don’t you think? It was as if he was taking the trouble to divert our attention to Higgs.”
“You think Long’s covering something up?”
“I didn’t say that. But it’s possible. He could be protecting Merchant.”
“You think there could be a woman involved in the Harris killing? You know, cherche la femme? Do people even fight over women here?”
“Of course they do, though mostly with words. People do the usual childish things here. At least, they do for a while. But you weren’t listening closely, with respect to Morgan Harris. I never knew Harris to show an interest in women. If anything, his orientation was, ah—he played for the other cricket team.”
“You mean the Seasiders? Oh!” Slow on the uptake, Fogg. “You mean he’s gay?”
“Well he seemed a cheerful enough chap. But I hardly see . . .”
“You really haven’t heard that term? Gay? I mean, with respect to . . .”
“Just pulling your leg old boy. Yes, that one I have heard. I know you figure an old duffer like me wouldn’t know it. And indeed I don’t like the term. Ruins the old usage. So—Morgan Harris was gay. Many are, here. I’ve learned to accept it.”
“You don’t have any prejudices, Doyle? Not racism, anything? I mean—back in your time, in the Before, most people were biased . . .”
“After a time here, as happens with most people under the influence of this world, I gave prejudices up. Largely.” He cleared his throat. “I suppose class prejudice is a little more persistent.”
I’d been thinking that Doyle and Chauncey didn’t seem without class prejudice. You could take the Englishman out of England, but . . .
He paused to gaze broodingly into a deep pool. A sinuous brightness slithered near the bottom of the pool, like a living belt of diamonds. It vanished into a hole. “But on this plane one is constantly reminded not to cling to the ways of the Before . . .”
“This plane. You mean planet?”
“I do not.”
“Merchant said something about how Moore believed this is a planet. But—isn’t it?”
“Why—no! Did you think this was a planet you were walking about on?”
I turned to him, inwardly jolted. “How can it not be a planet? I didn’t think it was an ‘alien planet’ with extraterrestrials, but . . . I mean . . . it’s not heaven. I thought of it as the Planet of the Afterlife. And—it’s a world. Everyone calls it a world! It has a sun that rises and sets.”
“But you have seen no stars in the afterworld. Where do you think that might be—a planet without stars?”
“Um . . . I don’t know. I just thought . . . it seemed so much like a planet. It has wind and rain and a sea . . . and creatures.”
“It’s something like one. But it’s not a sphere, like a planet, although it can include a sphere. I’m told it’s more like a Möbius strip but an unthinkably wide one; an ineffably long one. Back on Earth, well, Copernicus and friends were right. The Earth orbits the sun, not vice versa. Here, the sun actually rises and passes over us, as in the old Greek myths. Almost like Apollo passing in his chariot.”
“You’re pulling my leg again, Doyle.”
“Not a bit of it! This is not a planet. Drop a t from the word planet! This is a plane, Fogg. A continuum! I’m told it’s located between the fourth and fifth dimensions. Yet it is a world—a world with its own natural laws.”
“Now wait, the sun . . . if we’re not orbiting it, where does the sun come from?”
“If you were to go far enough toward the west or east, you would see the sun rise, or sink, from a land you could not enter. The sun is emitted by that land. It is, in fact, a land itself! It is a large sphere, not so very far away, and only twice the size of our old moon. And it is an eventual destination for spirits.”
I was still trying to grasp all this. “It comes from underground?”
“The sun is an expression of what, in some places, is called the Ground of Being. It never loses its form, or shape, but it seems to melt into the land—and exude from it . . .”
I shook my head. “Doubt I can ever understand that.”
“Stranger yet, there are beings living there . . .” He looked up at the sun, which was beginning to dip between the trees. “And the beings there, who live upon the sun, are aware of the beings here . . .”
“You get all this from Diogenes?”
“Some of it. There are certain books. You’ll see them tomorrow.”
We walked onward. It was always Doyle who took the lead in going anywhere. I didn’t seem to mind—which would not have been the case on Earth. It was as if he was the one guy I’d be waiting to trail after. The very first one . . . though if I’d been born at the right time, I’d have followed Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys around on tour.
“So—Morgan Harris was gay. But . . . what if someone thought he was after a girl? Maybe Merchant, say . . .”
Doyle snorted. “You merely wish for an excuse to interview that woman up on the mezzanine in the mansion.”
“What? That girl? Me?”
“Do try to put on at least a semblance of gentlemanly behavior, Fogg.”
I changed the subject. “Anyway, there are predators here. Someone preyed on Morgan Harris.”
“Yes. Other kinds of human predation do penetrate to this level. I haven’t yet learned the why—if there’s a why. No doubt you met a couple of our local thugs.”
“Those kids in the town square? Amateurs.”
“Amateur quite describes them, yes.”
“But Higgs seems pretty neurotic. Not as nutty as Moore but pretty wack. Capable of violence. If people bring their mental illnesses here you’d think you’d see serious lunatics hanging around. Schizophrenics and so on. Maybe people prone to violence in their craziness.”
“Mental illness due to neurological damage or poor cerebral wiring doesn’t survive the transition to this world. But . . .” He frowned, the great wordsmith seeming for a moment at a loss for words. “Neurosis can be a result of a mix of factors—and one of them is choice. Some neurotic behavior is itself an addiction. A man like Bull Moore is addicted to his suspicious state of mind. And there is something here like psychological momentum—carried over from the Before. Our psychology rides along with us here. You and I—we all have to free ourselves of this psychological momentum. It can take a very long time and some of us are deeply beset by it. I’m still working on my own personal obsessions—and I have been here three fourths of a century. Not everything is planned out for us here, you see—and the fact that not everything is planned out . . . is planned out!”
We came to the edge of the swamp, and I could see Garden Rest less than a quarter mile away. Here the outer pools were tinged with sunset. The sun was sinking beyond the hills . . . literally sinking, according to Conan Doyle.
I felt a sudden desire to get a drink to go back to the Ossuary and think things through. I glanced at Doyle. “We come to any definite conclusions about Morgan Harris?”
“I have not. Have you?”
“Nope. I suspect Roscoe Higgs. This murderer seemed to want Harris’s remains found. That may be a clue in itself . . . I mean, suppose he did it for Merchant? Maybe he wanted Merchant to know he got rid of someone.”
“I suppose it might be he wanted the remains found. I thought so at first. But a simpler answer, Occam’s choice as it were, is that the murderer could’ve been interrupted just as he completed the process of . . . deformulating the victim’s body.”
We walked on a ways, with my mind wandering ahead of us. What else was in the afterworld? How far did it extend? Was there a map somewhere?
Doyle suddenly stopped and said, “Look here . . .”
He bent and plucked something from the dirt at the side of the path. My gaze had passed right over it—and missed it. Doyle could only have seen a tiny corner of it: a notebook, crusted on the outside with the soil of the afterworld. He shook it till it was a little cleaner, then pried its stuck pages open. I looked over his shoulder, and we saw a pressed flower, between two pages, with inked, slightly runny notes beside it, and a freehand drawing of the flower’s petals. “It would appear to be a botanical monograph. Taxonomy, don’t you know.” Doyle read some of the notes aloud. Pappus is bristly, lengths asymmetrical . . . phyllaries distinctive to afterworld patterns, midvein raised and pulsing with a life not as subtle as Earthly chlorophyllic processes . . . Photosynthesis takes on a new dimension here . . .”
“Botany,” I said. “Did it belong to Morgan Harris?”
“Quite probably,” Doyle said, nodding, prying open the beginning of the notebook. “And in fact . . . yes, here we are.”
The first page of the notebook was largely illegible with dampness, but on the inside of the front cover was scribbled:
M. Harris, afterworld plant taxonomy, Vol III.
He looked the notebook over. “I will take it home and examine it under a magnifying glass. Perhaps . . .” He cleaned it off a bit more, and thrust it in a coat pocket. “This jacket will certainly need laundering.” After a moment, squinting at the ground, he added, “Curious that the notebook should be dropped here. A man like Morgan, with a passion for his science, would not have been so careless with his notes. I suspect it was dropped in haste—possibly he was running. Come—let us backtrack a trifle.”
Half a dozen paces back, Doyle squatted down, pointing at the stones lining the pathway’s edges. “You see? The stones are pushed apart . . . just here, and here. As if two persons were struggling, opposed, each pushing back against the other. And here—the imprint of a heel, pressed into the ground. Indications of a scuffle!”
We found nothing else, and the light was continuing to weaken. We turned and started once more toward the village. “Doyle—when he dropped the notebook, you think he was running from whoever he’d struggled with?”
“It could be, Fogg. It could well be. He may have seen something our murderer did not want him to see. Which led to the scuffle and Morgan running away. Losing his notebook in the process.”
“Running away—but not getting away.”
A few minutes of silence passed as we continued toward Garden Rest, then he said, “Perhaps, if Touie is feeling well enough, you might come to have some breakfast at our little cottage tomorrow, Fogg. There’s something she’s learned to cook that’s rather good. Of course, you don’t need to eat anything here, conventionally, but—it’s rather satisfying, come the morning, to have a bit of a tuck. And we have a rather good tea.” He stopped to gaze off over the shallow pools between the village and the swamp woods.
A rather good tea? I remembered Brummigen mentioning I would be paid somehow for assisting Doyle. But I’d never discussed it with Doyle and couldn’t imagine asking him for even the local equivalent of money.
But perhaps, indirectly . . .
“I do need to find a way to make a living, if that’s the word I want, around here, Doyle. I’ll do anything I can to help you, but maybe you could suggest a—”
“Look!” he interrupted. “What is that, over there?”
He pointed off across the pools of water, near the village. Something was outlined by the slant of light, in the water. Maybe something we hadn’t been able to see on the way here, because of the light.
Was it a black wiry shape—like an exoskeleton of wire?