perhaps a humorous sense of invention. This morning there had been the sound of clinking glass out on the porch, and he had looked out to discover bottles of milk, a dozen eggs, cheese, and a loaf of bread. Happily, there was no bill, and the delivery person had already disappeared.
He got back to work now, pulling down a likely looking volume and losing himself in an account of stick insects of the genus Phasmidae, which the book referred to as “specters.” Max got up to take a look in the insect cabinets, where his uncle kept dozens of sticklike and leaf-like insects ranged alongside the sticks and leaves they were meant to mimic. He studied the creatures with a magnifying glass, marveling at the uncanny and sometimes minute likenesses to their relevant sticks and leaves.
He noticed by chance a small, hinged door in a bookcase above the insect drawers. Carved into the door were block letters spelling out “ILLUMINATION,” and his natural curiosity compelled him to open it. Inside was a fold-up satchel made of soft leather marked with the word “Candlefish,” and inside the satchel, rolled in oiled silk, were several dozen eels, nearly a foot long. Also in the niche lay a box of kitchen matches and a long spindle affixed to a block of solid copper, tarnished and blue with streaks of verdigris.
Hearing something, Max glanced up and saw the familiar green eyes in the shadows at the edge of the bookcase. Elmer emerged out of the darkness like black smoke, seeming to coalesce into the shape of a cat. He stood for a moment, his tail twitching, and then returned to the shadow, the glowing eyes staring back at Max for a moment out of the darkness. Then he vanished, although there was apparently no place for him to vanish into, no magician’s hat. It occurred to Max that the backward glance had been very much like a summons, an invitation to follow the cat down into the underworld.
He dismissed the idea uneasily, turning his attention back to the eels now, searching out books on ichthyology, browsing his way to a discussion of the candlefish of British Columbia, not a true eel, but a variety of very oily smelt, caught wholesale by local Indians in wickerwork baskets, dried out, and used as torches. The spindle in the niche suddenly made perfect sense to him, and he carefully removed one of the fish from the leather bag, slipped the specimen head-downward over the spindle, then struck a kitchen match and lit the tail, which flared up, throttled back down, and then burned steadily, with an orange glow that was somehow entirely in keeping with what had become the night’s work. He switched off the desk lamp and found that he could still read well enough in his little pool of light.
Highly satisfied, Max lost himself in Montrose’s
Fishes of the Upper Nile and Its Tributaries
—an account of an ichthyologic expedition that had successfully brought back specimens of a leaf-mimicking climbing perch, undoubtedly related to a similar South American species, giving rise to compelling theories that the two continents were connected by a chain of islands in the Late Mesozoic, one of which might or might not have been Atlantis. Realizing that he didn’t know half enough about the Mesozoic, or about Atlantis, for that matter, he pulled down a heavy book on paleontology, evidently well-read by generations of uncles, because it was full of dog-eared pages, margin notes, and slipped-in pieces of paper containing further notes that were peppered with exclamation marks, musings, and admonitions such as “Needs independent confirmation. Maracot?” Or “Plesiosaur? See Osborne, ‘77 and City of Baltimore, ‘79. Graphic.”
Puzzled, Max set out to do as he was told with this last one, which was a particularly enticing reference, especially the idea that Baltimore had perhaps been visited by a plesiosaur a century and a quarter ago. But after a half hour of searching, he still couldn’t find the name “Osborne” on the spines of