“What’s happening?” she asked the boy.
Outside, at the base of the front steps, there was a crowd twice as large and loud as the ones that used to attend his parties, faces upturned, cameras snapping like claws.
“So many of them,” he scoffed. “Ever since that damn book.”
She tried to see above the heads but couldn’t.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s get to the front.”
For some reason, she tried to take the boy’s hand, but he had already disappeared. So she moved forward on her own and then stopped. Ricketts was standing on the stairs, his back against the door, something huge and ugly in his hands.
A massive tentacle found his arm. A flashbulb popped. He peeled the tentacle away to reveal a stripe of bloody welts, some of them the size of silver dollars. The crowd murmured and flexed.
“What is it?” yelled one of the onlookers.
“Humboldt squid,” he yelled back, his voice so familiar to her that it almost sounded fake. “Dosidicus gigas. Not usually found this far north.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Came up in one of the nets last night alongside the smaller ones. Seemed to be eating them.”
The tentacles writhed. The crowd surged. He lifted his chin and stared out into the masses, and that’s when she saw him become fully revealed by the strobe of the flashing cameras. He was dressed exactly as she remembered—long apron, knee-high black rubber boots—but his face was different. The beard was gone, and in its absence his cheeks and jaw seemed sunken and creased, a downward slant to the corners of his mouth, a slackness in his lips, his skin bright white against the dark wall behind him. He looked both appreciative of his audience and dismayed by it, like an aging magician who had long since forgotten his best tricks but not the applause that used to accompany them.
Another flashbulb, another wince. His eyes found hers. She clenched her teeth. He appraised her for a moment and then extracted a damp hand from beneath the creature’s mantle and beckoned her to his side. She began to push her way through the crowd again, but her progression seemed ten times as slow and laborious as before.
By the time she reached his side, the crowd was heckling her and she was breathing heavily.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“You remember this fellow? From that very first bucket I sent up the hill?”
She nodded.
“We’ll need to narcotize it before fixation.” He was whispering now, his lips on her ear. “Decrease the salinity—slowly—and add a dash of ethanol if the arms are still moving after a couple minutes.”
She nodded, ignoring the shouts at her back.
“And a formalin immersion won’t work on this one.” He smiled. “Find a syringe. We’ll have to inject.”
Later, she would remember the colors. Skin flashing devil red with the body’s last angry pumpings. The chromatophores’ final, dramatic assertions. A huge eye looking up at her from the bottom of the garbage barrel. The heart-stopping paleness of its sloppy weight as they hoisted it into the tallest glass display cylinder they could find.
When it was all finished, they put the cylinder in the corner because it was too big for the hutch, and then they went upstairs, Ricketts to the kitchen and Margot to the desk. She sat there and waited until he reappeared in the kitchen doorway with a beer in each hand. He put the beers on the bookshelf and ran both hands through his hair, which was sweat-heavy and unkempt, matted down around his temples and sticking up in the back like the plumage of a dark, flightless bird. He opened one of the beers and held it out to her, smiled a bit when she accepted it, and then settled himself into Steinbeck’s old rocking chair. Her breath caught. Inside the lab, the squid safely bottled, he looked nothing like he had outside in front of the crowd. The weariness and pallor had disappeared, replaced by a handsomeness so potent, she could feel it taking up residence inside her.
“I don’t suppose you have anything stronger,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow and stood.
“I’m fresh out of formaldehyde, but let’s see what else I can find.”
He disappeared into the kitchen again and returned with a dusty ceramic jug.
“The boys gave this to me a month ago,” he said. “I took a taste the other night. It cured my toothache, but I couldn’t hear for a full minute afterward.”
She took it from him, removed the cork, and sniffed its contents before putting her lips to the rim. When she drank, the effects were different from what he had described, but just as intense: her jaw went numb and her eyes started to water, almost as if she had begun to weep.
“Nothing has changed in here,” she said, wiping her cheeks and trying not to cough.