Metamorphosis Read Free

floorboards as if the house were settling down again after its wild antics. The glow in the room was fading, the night dark beyond the windows. Elmer was gone from the desktop, but he reappeared now near the shadowy corner of the bookcase again, standing stock-still. Max watched him, discerning behind the cat an even darker bit of shadow with a hard edge to it. He felt a breeze waft past him, as if a door was standing open.
    The passage
! he thought, wondering immediately why his mind had chosen to phrase itself in that definite way. But other, more pressing, curiosities crowded out this first reaction. He stood up and slipped a second candlefish over the spindle. Lighting it and holding it out before him he walked toward the cat’s eyes, which were far back in the darkness now, like twin stars in space. He pushed tentatively on the edge of the bookcase, which slid aside, revealing, as he had forecast, a passage leading downward into absolute night, the realm of Elmer and the lizards.
    Wooden stairs, two flights of them, brought him to a deep cellar, where there was a feeling in the air of vast space, although he couldn’t see beyond the pool of candlefish light in which he stood. It was unnaturally warm, almost tropical, the air smelling like riverbank vegetation. He reached blindly for the pull cord to the ceiling lamp, knowing without actually seeing it that it hung there within easy reach. When the light blinked on, there was a quick draft of air and the candlefish went out. The cellar came to life around him. He heard the sound of bubbling and the sigh and whir of mechanical apparatus, as if the cellar itself was a vast clockwork mechanism. There were other rooms, perhaps many rooms, with illuminated terrariums and aquaria bubbling away, driftwood and waterweeds and darting fish, tropical plants moving and rustling. Wood framed glass incubators sat atop a nearby wooden bench under the glare of heat lamps, curious-looking eggs just visible in the sand, two or three of them already broken open.
    He caught sight of scattered paperwork lying on the bench near the incubators, and he stepped across to have a look. A manila envelope lay there with the papers, already stamped and addressed. He didn’t recognize the postage, a three-penny stamp with a picture of a toad on it—surely not enough postage to move the envelope across the street, let alone to Terre Haute, which was the destination. The paperwork was a catalogue from a firm called Benson’s Living Wonders. His uncle had filled out an order for the prehistoric fish that Max had been reading about just a short time ago. He had ordered three trilobites, also, and a nautilus from the late Devonian period. There was a drawing in the catalogue of a squid-looking cephalopod in a narrow cone-like shell. “Guaranteed live delivery,” the catalogue read. “C.O.D.”
    Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement, a big lizard, if it
was
a lizard, lumbering back into the shadows of an adjacent room, and he realized that Elmer had reappeared. He looked strangely satisfied with himself, sitting near a door in the wall nearby, a door that might easily lead to farther rooms.
    Max wondered, though. It was a heavy door, with a mail slot cut into it covered by a hammered copper flap, and with a cat door at the bottom. Elmer turned abruptly and bolted through the cat door, which swung back on its hinges, revealing a rectangle of daylight beyond, despite its being the middle of the night in the world upstairs.
    There were no more rooms beyond the door, Max realized, and his uncle’s house was built on flat ground. He slipped the catalogue order form into the envelope with a shaking hand. This was obviously unfinished business of Uncle Jonathan’s, who was traveling, Max was now certain, somewhere below the horizon of the world, for want of a better way to put it. Now it had become Max’s business, trilobite business, three-cent stamp business. Feeling giddy with anticipation he