Free Walkers by Graham Masterton Page B

much faith in being able to find one, not in this case. There was too much
weirdness, too little evidence. And then there were the eels.
    He went back to the book. He poured
himself a large vodka, and leafed through the book again. Page after page of
staring, shining eels. Then he came across a reference to hagfish, any of the
marine fishes of the family Myxinidae, order Cyclostamata, class Agnatha.
Hagfish look like eels, he read, with
no lateral fins and a slight median fin at the end; but unlike eels they attack
other fish, like haddock or cod, and cling on to them, rasping away their flesh
with their tooth-studded tongues.
    All they leave of their prey is the
skeleton. When they are not hunting for food they bury themselves in the mud on
the ocean floor. He read the paragraph twice. Then he swallowed some more
vodka, reached for his telephone, and punched out the number of the Scripps
Institute of Oceanography at La Jolla.
    ‘Doctor Andrea Steinway,’ he
requested.
    ‘May I ask who’s calling her?’
    ‘Jacques Cousteau.’
    ‘Could you hold on a moment, please,
Mr Cousteau?’
    After a long wait, Andrea’s
extension was picked up and her brusque, mannish voice said, ‘Yes, Henry, what
do you want now?’
    ‘Andrea, how are you doing?’
    ‘Don’t ask, Henry. You don’t really
want to know, and I don’t really want to tell you.
    What do you want?’
    ‘Andrea, it’s to do with fish,’
Henry explained, trying to sound both apologetic and desperately in need of
expert advice.
    ‘What kind of fish?’ Andrea
demanded. ‘The only kind of fish that you were ever interested in was baked
flounder.’
    ‘No, no, Andrea – this is different.
This is eels.’
    ‘Eels?’ she repeated, suspiciously.
    ‘Well, I came across an eel on the
beach this morning. It must have been washed up by the tide. I tried to pick it
up but it bit me. I mean, I washed the bite out with antiseptic and everything,
but I was wondering what kind of an eel it was, that might do that. I mean, if
it’s dangerous, maybe I ought to warn the coastguard about it.’
    Andrea said, ‘You’re lying, Henry.’
    ‘What are you talking about? All I
want to know is, what kind of an eel could this be?’
    ‘You and the county police
department and just about every newspaper and television reporter for two
hundred miles around. Come on, Henry, I know all about it.
    Three of my colleagues are down at
the beach now, trying to dig the eels out of the sand. The remains of one of
the eels is being sent up here this morning, so that we can examine it.’
    ‘And?’ asked Henry, because it
didn’t sound to him as if Andrea had finished.
    ‘And I’m expressly forbidden to
discuss any of this with anybody, including my ex-husband, until the police
give me permission.’
    ‘Come on, Andrea, the police
themselves have been round here this morning, talking about it. They want every
scrap of assistance they can get.’
    ‘They won’t get much from you, will
they? Maybe the regurgitated thoughts of Bertrand Russell, God help them.’
    ‘Andrea,’ said Henry, trying very
hard now to be patient, ‘I looked up eels in that Kaiser & Cohen book you
left behind, and it mentioned hagfish. It occurred to me that since these eels
were so vicious, they might not be eels at all, but hagfish.’
    ‘Yes?’ asked Andrea. ‘And what
else?’
    ‘Well, that’s it. It just occurred
to me, that’s all.’
    ‘I see. All right then, thank you.’
    ‘But what do you think?’ Henry
persisted.
    ‘I think you’d better stick to what
you’re good at, which is drinking and thinking in that order. Hagfish, for your
information, have four sets of tentacles around their head, which they use to
grip on to their prey. Although I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see it for
myself, I know for a fact that the eel which the police are asking us to
examine has no such tentacles.’
    ‘All the same, it could be some kind
of mutation.’
    ‘Henry, for God’s sake! You