clearly?'
    'They weren't clear,' he said. 'They must have been talking with their blankets over 
their mouths. They weren't clear. They were kind of growling. I didn't like it.'
    'Do you know where they were-where I can go to find them?' I asked.
    Paul said feebly: 'No police. They won't come out if you bring the police.'
    'I promise no police.'
    'All right. They'll be waiting for you when it's dark. They're in back of the old 
barn on the Pascoe place, maybe three minutes' walk straight into the woods. They told me 
to say that. In back of the old barn on the Pascoe place. But only when it's dark.'
    Rheta felt Paul's pulse. She said: 'He's very weak. I hope that ambulance doesn't 
take too long. He could use some oxygen.' I stood up and went to the window. Very faintly 
in the distance, I could hear the whoop-whoop scribble-scribble sound of the ambulance 
siren and I knew that they wouldn't take longer than a couple of minutes. There was only 
one more question I wanted to ask Paul.
    'Paul,' I said softly, kneeling down beside him again. Rheta frowned at me, but it 
was something I had to know. 'Paul did you smell anything in the woods? Was there a smell 
you remember?'
    Paul trembled and twitched, and didn't answer. I hesitated for a moment, and then I 
went into the kitchen, , opened the food cupboard, and rummaged quickly through for a can 
of tuna. I had one small size Chicken-of-the-Sea left, and I took it across to the can 
opener and lifted off the lid.
    Rheta said: 'What are you doing?' as I came back through the dining-room with the can 
opened right up.
    'You'll see,' I told her. 'I don't like to do it, but it could make all the 
difference. Both for Jimmy and Alison, and for me, too.' I raised the can of tuna and 
wafted it under Paul's nose. Then I withdrew it, and waited. He stopped shaking for a 
moment, his hands drawn up to his chest in a weak but self-protective gesture. Then 
suddenly his eyes opened wide and they were nothing but naked white eyeball, and he 
screamed a long, throat-scratching scream of terror and agony. He twisted and writhed on 
the rug, and I had to throw the tuna aside and hold him down. It was all I could do to 
keep him still, even though he was only a nine-year-old boy, and it wasn't until Rheta 
shushed him and calmed him that he began to stop jerking and shaking and settle down 
again.
    There was the falling drone of a siren outside. I sat up, feeling shaken, and I 
looked at Rheta as if the moment that had brought us back here in the first place had 
passed more than a hundred years ago.
    She said: 'It's true, then. What's happened to that mouse, what happened to those 
people in India. It's happened again.'
    I stood up. There were hurried footsteps outside, and a ring at the doorbell. All I 
could say was: 'I don't know. I guess we're going to have to wait until we see Jimmy and 
Alison for ourselves. Meanwhile-for Paul's sake-I don't think we ought to tell Carter 
where they are.'
    Rheta thought for a moment, and then nodded. I went to the door and opened it up for 
the medics, who came briskly into the living-room with a stretcher and an oxygen bottle. 
One of them said: 'Is this your son?'
    I shook my head. 'No. I guess he's just a lost boy.'
    Dan had been waiting for me for fifteen minutes when I arrived at the Bodine house. 
He was sitting on the rail of the front verandah reading a copy of Scientific American. 
He wore a fawn-and-blue plaid coat and a matching cap to cover his bald head, and if I'd 
been a plain twenty-five-year-old girl from just outside of Brainerd, Minnesota, I think 
I might even have taken a fancy to him.
    I said: 'Hi. I'm sorry I'm late. Something interesting'came up.'
    'Oh, yes?' said Dan, a little tartly. He was a dedicated man, and he didn't like his 
time to be wasted.
    'We found the Denton boy. He was in my house, looking for me. He just showed up, 
looking like he'd been dragged through a Venetian blind backwards. He's in the hospital 
now, having treatment for shock and exhaustion.'
    'What happened to him?' asked Dan, folding up his magazine and tucking it into his 
coat pocket. He was just the kind of guy who would carry around a magazine in his coat 
pocket.
    'He, er, well he's all right. He got lost, that was all.'
    We walked around to the back of the house, where the wellhead was. Dan said: 'He got 
lost?
    'Maybe he fell off his bicycle, something like that. Knocked his head. You know, 
amnesia.'
    Dan held my arm. 'Now, wait a minute, Mason. I know when you're telling the truth and 
I also know when you're spinning me a story. I've known you long enough for that.'
    'Dan,' I told him, 'I'm just a simple plumber, plying my trade the best way I know 
how.'
    'You're a goddamned smartass plumber. Now what's up with Paul?'
    I sighed. I looked away across the distant hills. Towards the west, the sky was a 
threatening metallic grey, and it looked as if it might rain in an hour or two. The 
rust-coloured trees swayed and champed in the wind.
    'Paul's found Jimmy and Alison Bodine,' I said. Dan blinked. 'He's found them? What 
do you mean? Where are they?'
    'He says they're hiding in the woods in back of old man Pascoe's place. He says he 
came across them by accident. There's something badly wrong with them, Dan. They're 
keeping themselves covered with blankets, and they won't let anyone come close.'
    Dan looked at me, wide-eyed.
    'There's something else,' I told him. 'It may be nothing more than a wrong guess, but 
I tried waving an open can of tuna under Paul's nose. He went crazy. He screamed like all 
the devils in hell were after him. So my guess is that whatever's happened to Jimmy and 
Alison, it has a lot to do with the smell of fish.'
    Dan coughed. He said, in a thick voice: 'I think I believe you. If you can tell me 
something like that without making a joke of it, then I think I believe you.'
    'You sound like Rheta,' I told him. But he didn't understand that at all and he 
continued to frown in concentrated thought. 'Rheta told you about Austin?' he asked. 'The 
1925 outbreak?'
    'Sure. And the Currie expedition.'
    Dan nodded. 'She was able to track those down in a single morning. If you ask me, a 
good search through the medical history files would turf up a whole lot more. It would 
take time, though. And I'm not too sure how much time we've got.'
    'What's that supposed to mean?' I asked him. 'Just think about it,' he replied. 
'Jimmy and Alison complained about their water Tuesday morning. By the same evening, they 
were infected by whatever their water contained. So was Oliver. I don't know what time of 
the evening young Oliver was drowned, not until the police pathology people give us some 
kind of report, and so I don't know how quickly those scales started to overtake his 
body. But I do know this. It happened damned fast. Now, if this thing is spreading, if 
all the wells around here are infected, then we don't have any time at all. We're going 
to find that the whole damn town of New Milford is turning crustaceous, and once that