After a long wait for his train in Walton Station, Sebastian walked home from Waterloo. There were no messages at the pie stand, but he stopped and exchanged a few words with a couple of cabmen. By now Sebastian was a familiar enough figure to have earned himself a nickname; to the cabbies he was the Bedlam Detective.
Walking on in the late-evening darkness, he thought about trick films and puppets. Something had been said about the tinker having puppets. About how children would bring him rags, and he’d make the puppets dance for them.
But a trick film? That seemed like the least likely explanation of all.
Frances was sitting before the fire, her clenched hand raised to touch her lips, gazing into the flames. The room smelled of coal smoke, along with the ever-present smell of moldering wallpaper that hung around the suite of apartments. She didn’t seem aware of him at first. He stopped to look at her; and in the second or more before she registered his presence, he had the sense that her innermost thoughts would be within his reach, if he were only to ask.
But then she looked at him; and when their eyes met he smiled briefly and found some reason to look away as he spoke to her, much as he always did.
“Where’s Robert?” he said.
“In his room,” she said, “reading the book you gave him.” And then she returned her gaze to the flames.
Robert said, “I can’t do what you asked for.”
“That’s all right,” Sebastian said. “I know it was difficult.”
“It’s not a matter of being difficult,” his son said. “You asked the wrong question.”
“Did I,” Sebastian said.
Usually as tidy as a bug collector’s cupboard, Robert’s room was in some disarray. But it was disarray with a purpose, as Sebastian could see. Spread out across the bed were a dozen or more of his magazines, arranged in some kind of significant order. Some lay open, others had pages marked with slips of paper. There were books close to hand as well, and he had a notebook in which he’d been writing. Sir Owain’s memoir carried even more annotation slips. By the looks of it, Robert was still only halfway through.
Sebastian said, “And what question should I have asked?”
“It’s not a matter of where truth ends and fantasy begins,” Robert said. “You should have said where fact ends and fantasy begins. If that’s what you wanted to know.”
“Isn’t it the same thing?”
“No, it’s not. Mother’s like a spring flower. That’s not strictly a fact. But it is true.”
The phrase sounded familiar. “Where’d you hear that?” Sebastian said.
“I heard you say it once.”
And it was true, he had. He remembered now. In another life entirely.
Robert went on, “In the book, the narrator’s party is dogged by all these various trials and they see terrible destruction along their way. He listens to the stories of the natives and draws conclusions about the causes. He imagines these great creatures and then he looks for the evidence. What you’re calling his fantasies are actually how he pictures his fears. So they may not be factual, but to his mind they represent the truth.”
“Read on,” Sebastian suggested, picking up one of Robert’s older dime novels and looking at the cover. “He becomes more explicit.”
“I hope he does produce some monsters,” Robert said. “A dinosaur or two can gee up a tale no end. There’s not a single one in Along the Orinoco, and it’s all the poorer for it.” He looked up. “Will there be dinosaurs?”
“Not exactly,” Sebastian said, and held up the story magazine. It was issue number 130 of the Frank Reade Library, dated April 3, 1896. Authorship of Along the Orinoco was credited to “Noname,” as well it might be; a glance inside showed the lines to be brief, the language vigorous but rudimentary.
“Where did this one come from?” he said.
“I brought it with me. From home.”
He meant Philadelphia. Laying the magazine down again, Sebastian said, “I can see you’ve been researching the subject.”
“You said you’d pay me a shilling or two for an opinion,” Robert said, reaching out and returning the issue to its proper place in the order. “If I don’t put in the effort, how else am I going to form one?”
“All I’m trying to resolve, Robert, is whether the man who wrote that story believes it to be his actual experience.”
“You want to know if he’s intending fiction or deception.”
“Exactly.”
“Is this for your Lunacy work?”
“It is.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Because I can no more trust in his answer than I can believe in his book.”
Robert turned around and reached for a bound volume that lay on top of a stack of others on his bedside table.
He said, “This one’s called Among the Indians of Guiana. It’s exploration, not fiction. Mister Everard Im Thurn says of the Guiana Indians that they make no distinction between their dream lives and waking lives. If a man dreams of being hurt by his neighbor, he’ll go round and punch him the next morning.”
“Trust a savage not to understand the difference.”
“They don’t believe there is a difference. But their thinking is quite sophisticated. In their world it’s the spirit that’s responsible for the deed, not the body. And the spirit can live in all kinds of forms and cross from dreams to life and back again.”
Reaching into his pocket, Sebastian said, “So a man gone native may lose his sense of what’s real. That’s worth a shilling.”
“I don’t want it,” Robert said. “I haven’t earned it yet.”
“But you’ve given me something that I can tell Sir James. Does this Mister Im Thurn have anything to say about the state of mind of a man who sees monsters?”
“Oh, yes. That’s half the fun of a lost world. The Indians say that every inaccessible place in their jungle is inhabited by monstrous animals. They say there are huge white jaguars and eagles on the plain of Roraima, high above the Amazon. And down by the rivers there are monkey men and water beasts. It’s like Challenger’s world in the serial I’m collecting. That has dinosaurs.”
“Have you not yet reached the episode with the nest of monsters? Or the sea serpent that pursues the rescue boat?”
“No,” Robert said. “But don’t spoil it for me.”