The coroner's office, who were going to perform a full-scale autopsy on young 
Oliver's body, were also keeping tight-lipped. The medical investigator there was a 
quiet, grey-haired man called Jack Newsom, and he had always expressed a distaste for 
publicity and pyrotechnics. Lawrence Dunn felt the same way, and that meant Oliver's 
death would remain confidential until Sheriff Wilkes wanted to make a full-scale 
announcement.
    It was just as well. It was going to shake New Milford rigid, knowing that their 
drinking water might turn them scaley as lobsters. It was as much as I could do to 
believe it myself, and I'd stood right there and seen young Oliver's body.
    The kettle boiled and I made myself a jug of coffee. When it had brewed I took down a 
bottle of Jack Daniel's from the kitchen cupboard and poured a couple of fingers into the 
bottom of a mug. Then I topped it up with coffee, gave it a stir, and went through into 
the living-room to sit down beside Shelley and watch the log fire burn up. I felt chilled 
and exhausted and just about ready to join Shelley in a long sleep.
    I was almost dozing off when the telephone rang. I yawned, stretched my face, and got 
up to answer it. I said: 'Who is it?' and
    took a Hetty mouthful of coffee and whisky.
    'It's Dan,' said Dan. 'I'm back at the laboratory. I've been running some more tests 
on that water.'
    'Have you had any sleep yet?'
    'Who needs sleep? This is important.'
    I yawned again. 'Okay, it's important. What have you found
    out?'
    Dan said: 'I ran some dating tests on the water and the organisms in it. I got Rheta 
in to help me, and we must have gone through twenty or thirty tests, just to make 
absolutely
    sure.'
    'So? What does that do?'
    'A dating test tells me the age of the organic material in the water, and that gives 
me a pretty clear idea about the depth from which it's risen out of the ground. If, for 
instance, the organic material is seven to eight thousand years old, then it probably 
originates from the deciduous forest layer which you can find about twenty feet under the 
surface. See what I mean?'
    'Sure,' I said. 'The older it is, the deeper down it originates. So how old is the 
stuff in the Bodines' water?'
    Dan paused. 'Would you believe two million years? Or
    thereabouts, anyway.'
    'Two million years? You mean the organic stuff in that water
    is prehistoric?'
    'That's right. We've checked, and there's no mistake. That water must have come up 
from subterranean sources more than a mile and a half under the surface.'
    I finished my coffee and whisky, and coughed. 'That's ridiculous. Their well isn't 
more than a hundred feet deep, if
    that.'
    'The tests are conclusive.'
    'Okay, they're conclusive. But what do they prove? So the Bodines drank some very old 
water. Where does that leave us?'
    Dan said patiently: 'I don't think you're following me. The organisms in that water 
are also two million years old.'
    'I beg your pardon?'
    'The little squiggly creatures. I've tested the fluid that comes out of them, and 
I've tested their own organic fabric. The results are always the same. I'm sending a 
small sample over to the radio-carbon laboratory at White Plains, just to make doubly 
sure, but I don't think there's any room for doubt. They're two million years old.'
    I closed my eyes. It was all getting too much for me. 'Listen, Dan,' I said tiredly, 
'how can anything be two million years old and still be living? Those organisms don't 
even have beards.'
    'All the same, it's true. They're living fossils. Rheta's checking up now, to see if 
we can relate them to any known prehistoric species.'
    I was silent for a long time. Standing there listening to Dan on the telephone, I 
suddenly felt tired and lonesome and mystified by everything that had happened in the 
past twelve hours. I was frightened, too, to tell you the God's-honest truth. I kept 
thinking about Oliver's scales, and the bony carapace in the bathtub, and the shuffling 
hulking figure I had seen disappearing over by the Bodines' fence.
    Dan said: 'I think we're going to have to make some more tests, Mason, and maybe dig 
down into the well itself. That water's coming up from some-place, and for the public's 
protection I need to know where. Maybe you'd like to come out with us later this 
afternoon and give us some help. I've already advised Carter, and he's going to give us 
all the co-operation we need.'
    'What time would you like me to be there?' I asked him.
    'Get some sleep first. I'm going to, just as soon as I've finished up here. Make it 
two-thirty, up at the house.'
    'All right,' I said, and put the phone down. I looked across at Shelley and he 
squeezed his eyes closed, as if he was bored with the whole business.
    'It's no good looking like that,' I said, walking through to the bedroom. 'There's a 
whole gang of two-million-year-old fossils in this town's drinking water, and so far it 
looks like they're giving people fish-scales. Do you want to wind up with fish-scales? 
You, a cat?'
    I undressed, straightened the bed out of the rumpled condition in which I had left it 
the morning before, and climbed between the sheets. I was so exhausted that it couldn't 
have been longer than four or five minutes before I was asleep.
    While I slept, I had the weirdest dream, or dreams. I felt I was standing by the 
seashore, at night, and the moon was shining its shattered light across the surface of 
the ocean. Then, I was swimming, carried up and down on the waves, and I could feel the 
chill of the briney water. The moon appeared and disappeared like a remote and alien 
signal lamp.
    Before long, I was plunging beneath the surface of the ocean itself. I wasn't afraid, 
and for some reason I felt no need to breathe. The water itself seemed to be breathable, 
and I could feel the cold, refreshing flow of brine through my lungs. It was almost 
impossible to see anything, though. The water was very dark, and I could only feel my way 
through the currents and undertows, and through the icy glittering schools of herring and 
bass. But what made this dream swim especially strange was that / knew where I was going, 
with great sureness and certainty. I knew that if I continued to swim in a wide leftward 
curve, that'I would soon reach a jutting headland of submarine rocks, and that once I 
reached those rocks I would only be a mile's hard swimming away from my destination.
    Already ahead of me I could see dim shafts of moonlight playing down through the 
waters. Then the dark shape of the rocks began to appear out of the murk, and I swam 
faster and more urgently. It was dangerous to swim in the sea at night, and I knew it. 
The ocean was alive with slithery predators.
    I had almost made the peak of the rocks when I sensed a vibration through the water.