I waded farther into the room. It was still impossible to say i where the water was 
actually coming from. The only difference | between this room and the landing outside was 
that, in this? room, the walls were wet almost up to the ceiling. The crissi cross 
patterned wallpaper was damp and wrinkled, and there was | a clear tide-mark right up by 
the picture rail. Impossible as it; might have been, it looked as if the entire room had 
been filled i with water. |
    Dan said: 'Mason.'
    I turned. His face looked distinctly odd. He pointed at the; floor behind me, and 
said again: 'Mason. Look down there.'
    I shone the flashlight downwards. The bed itself may have' been empty, but I hadn't 
looked under the bed. And in the pale; oval beam of the flashlight, I could see something 
stirring there, something white and strange. I bent down closer, my hand; shaking with 
nerves, and tried to make out what it was.
    'Jesus wept,' said Dan. 'It's a foot.'
    Together, splashing in the water, we took hold of the foot and the leg that went with 
it and dragged it out from under the bed. I dropped the flashlight once, but it still 
worked when I picked it up, and I directed it downwards on to the face of a young boy,: 
his cheeks pale and his lips blue, and his eyes staring sightlessly'^ upwards. Dan 
pressed down on his chest, in a hopeless attempt to see if there was any life left in 
him, but the boy's mouth and; nose gushed water, and it was plain that he was dead. T. 
recognized him, of course, even though I hadn't seen him in a( while. He was Oliver 
Bodine, Jimmy and Alison's son, and he was drowned.
    'We'd better call for Carter,' said Dan. 'This is police business?
    now.
    I stood up. The feel of Oliver's cool, soft flesh still haunted my fingertips. The 
water seemed to stir, and Oliver's body stirred too, still dressed in his 
Six-Million-Dollar Man pyjamas.
    'Oh, Christ,' I said. 'This is too much for one day. This is all too goddamned much. 
Look at this poor kid.'
    Dan stood up too, and nodded. 'I don't know what happened here. It sure looks like he 
drowned. Although how in hell anybody managed to fill up the whole bedroom with water, I 
don't have any idea. It couldn't have been done slowly, either. The window isn't sealed, 
and neither is the door.'
    'We'd better check the other rooms,' I said, unenthusiastically. 'Supposing Jimmy and 
Alison are-well, supposing something's happened to them, too?'
    'Okay,' said Dan. He looked about as keen to go searching for more bodies as I was. 
'I guess you'd better bring the flashlight.'
    We left poor young Oliver Bodine's body where it was, and splashed back on to the 
landing. We tried the master bedroom first, but apart from water stains on the rug where 
the wet had crept in from outside, it was quite dry, and empty. The brass colonial bed 
with the pink bedspread was neatly made, and nobody had slept in it. On the dark pine 
dressing-table, Alison's hairbrush and hand-mirror and bottles of perfume remained 
undisturbed, and on the wall by the carved pine closet was a colour photograph of Jimmy 
and Oliver on the beach at Cape Cod. I shone the flashlight on it, and then looked at 
Dan, and shrugged.
    We tried the next two bedrooms. They were both empty, both reasonably dry, both 
untouched. We gave them a nervous onceover, opening the cupboard doors as if we expected 
to find monsters lurking in them, and then retreated to the sodden landing. The water was 
slowly beginning to subside, and it was clear that it hadn't come from a burst pipe at 
all.
    'It seems to me that Oliver's room was filled up with water somehow, but that was all 
the flooding there was,' I said. 'Now his room's emptied out, that's it. There's no leak, 
no fractured tank, no damaged faucet, nothing.'
    Dan turned towards me with an expression on his face that made him look like an 
anxious Humpty Dumpty. 'Who did it, though?' he asked me. 'And what's even more 
pertinent, how did they manage it? I just don't see how anybody could physically fill up 
a room with water. It's impossible.'
    'We haven't looked at the bathroom yet,' I reminded him. 'Maybe there was some kind 
of freak back-up in the pipes.'
    'You don't believe that any more than I do.'
    I took out my cigarillos and offered one to Dan. He shook his head. 'I have to start 
rationalizing sometime,' I told him, taking out a book of matches from The Cattle Yard. 
'I might as well start now.'
    We opened the bathroom door. It was noticeably cold in there, not just ordinary 
winter-evening cold, but damply and clammily cold. I sniffed, and even though I was 
smoking a cigarillo, I was sure that I could detect that odd, unpleasant odour of 
metallic fish, the same smell as the sample of water that I had brought out from the 
house only this afternoon.
    'Do you smell that?' I asked Dan.
    He nodded.
    'What does it remind you of?' I said.
    He had a long think. Then he said: 'Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, on my last 
vacation. Shellfish and diesel fuel, all mixed up.'
    'Me too,' I told him.
    The shower curtain was drawn across the tub. It was misty plastic, with pictures of 
turquoise fish swimming across it. I shone the flashlight that way, but there didn't 
appear to be anybody in there. I stepped across the cork floor and pulled the shower 
curtain back.
    Lying in the bath was something that looked like a thin, bony helmet. It was larger 
than a helmet-in fact, you would have needed a head that was twice the normal size to 
wear it. But it had that kind of dull, tough shine and that kind of curved, nut-like 
shape that put you in mind of a helmet.
    'Dan,' I said cautiously. 'What do you think it is?'
    He leaned forward and peered into the tub. He stared at the 'helmet' for a while, and 
then he reached in and lifted it out.
    'It's light,' he said. 'It's some kind of shell, or bone. But look.'
    He held it up in front of the flashlight beam and showed me. It was formed out of two 
halves, like the halves of a clam or a mussel shell, and it was hinged down the centre by 
some scaley but flexible material like celluloid. All down the hinge were black hairy 
spines, short and bristly and sharp.
    'Is it real?' I asked him.
    'Real? You mean, does it come from a real creature?'
    'I guess so, if you have to put it that way.'
    Dan tapped it, and looked it over as best he could in the dim light. Then he said: 
'It looks real. It looks like the discarded carapace of some pretty big kind of armoured 
insect.'
    I didn't know whether I wanted to burst out laughing or run out of that house as fast 
as inhumanly impossible. I looked at that scaley, bony piece of creature and I felt as if 
I was right in the middle of one of those nightmares that doesn't frighten you until you 
wake up and see how gloomy it is in your bedroom, and hear those noises and whispers that