“I don’t know a lady in the lake.”
“Albert, please, you must calm down.”
“I am calm.” But Albert knew he was lying because his hands shook as he held the .38s.
Abruptly the spider-shaped hurricane glass pulled free of the lantern, somehow keeping the burning wick trapped inside it. The glass spider with its belly full of fire climbed down the spire and started along the edge of the boat for Albert.
“Now see,” Bob said irritably, “you’ve gotten Morris upset again. Put those bastard guns away or he might bite you.”
Instead, Albert turned the blasters on the glass spider and ripped off two shots. Both of them hit the spider but ricocheted off.
“You can’t harm it,” the boatman said. “Remember? Or mebbe you don’t remember anything at all.”
Albert shook his head in disbelief. “Every time it gets harder for you,” the boatman stated. “I worry about you when you’re gone.” He raised his voice, but it was only a stronger, sibilant whisper. “Morris, leave him be.”
The glass spider froze, glinting cobalt blue crystalline. It stood up on its back four legs and raised the front four as if scenting the sulfurous air. Reluctantly it began the journey back to the lantern base. “I want to go back with the others,” Albert said. “And if you can’t arrange that, I want to go back to Hazard. At least there I understand things.”
“Everything here will be made clear soon,” Bob said in a gentle tone. He continued poling, pushing them out into the center of the river.
“Who is the lady in the lake?” Albert asked.
Even though he knew his blasters were pretty much useless, he found he couldn’t holster them. The idea of going through this with empty hands turned his stomach. Sweat dripped from his face, and he realized that some of the heat he was feeling came from the river water.
More body parts drifted by, some of them bumping briefly against the boat with soft thuds before floating on. There were, he saw, a great number of internal pieces now, as well as body parts. Gobby masses of intestines floated past, looking like obscene jellyfish. Chitin-covered insects clung to them like they were life rafts.
“To know her is to love her,” Bob said with a sigh. “I know I do.”
“What does she want with me?”
Bob turned his rad-blasted face to Albert. “I don’t know. Honestly. The whole concept of her needing you is beyond me. I never thought she did. And I don’t think you’ve fooled her into thinking you care for her.” He poled once more, waited a moment, then put his pole in front of them. “Well, here we are.”
The boat stopped, cresting the gentle current of the slow-moving river.
“Here we are where?” Albert asked. He looked all around the boat, seeing only the black water. But the thought of the undead corpses walking along the bottom unnerved him.
“Where she is,” Bob answered. “The lady in the lake.”
“How deep is the water here?”
Bob took a moment to think about the question, then glanced at the glass spider. “Morris, do you know?”
The glass spider did some quick arithmetic on its four front glass legs, then twisted toward the boatman. The legs flew in quick answer.
“About ninety feet, give or take two or three,” Bob replied.
“Your pole isn’t that long,” Albert argued.
“A gentleman doesn’t talk about the length of another gentleman’s pole.” Bob the boatman drew himself up to his full, tall, thin height and wrapped his robes more tightly around him as if incensed.
“You can’t have been touching bottom all the way to pole us out here.”
Bob drew the pole up, displaying the cracked but polished collection of shinbones that made it up. “Albert, haven’t you ever noticed that no matter how tall or short a man is, his legs always touch the ground? The pole, just because it is a pole, has not lost that ability.”
To Albert that made no sense. Without warning, nausea seized him again, feeling like it had back in the elevator in the redoubt. He dropped his .38s and fell to his knees, retching as he clung to the side of the boat.