Free Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth Page B

a note inside.
    “Look here!”
    He rushed to pick it up. It was a clear glass bottle, a whisky or wine bottle, tightly capped. Dried eelgrass full of sand and tiny musselshells clung round it. The label had been scraped off, all but some white strips where the glue was thickest; the paper inside was folded.
    “Gee
whiz!
” Perse cried. At once he tried to snatch the bottle away, but Ambrose held it well above his reach.
    “Finders keepers!”
    In his excitement Perse forgot to be cynical. “Where in the
world
do you think it come from?”
    “Anywhere!” Ambrose’s voice shook. “It could’ve been floating around for years!” He removed the cap and tipped the bottle downward, but the note wouldn’t pass through the neck.
    “Get a little stick!”
    They cast about for a straight twig, and Ambrose fished into the bottle with it. At each near catch they breathed: “Aw!”
    Ambrose’s heart shook. For the moment Scylla and Charybdis, the Occult Order, his brother Peter—all were forgotten. Peggy Robbins, too, though she did not vanish altogether from his mind’s eye, was caught up into the greater vision, vague and splendrous, whereof the sea-wreathed bottle was an emblem. Westward it lay, to westward, where the tide ran from East Dorset. Past the river and the Bay, from continents beyond, this messenger had come. Borne by currents as yet uncharted, nosed by fishes as yet unnamed, it had bobbed for ages beneath strange stars. Then out of the oceans it had strayed; past cape and cove, black can, red nun, the word had wandered willy-nilly to his threshold.
    “For pity’s sake bust it!” Perse shouted.
    Holding the bottle by the neck Ambrose banged it on amossed and barnacled brickbat. Not hard enough. His face perspired. On the third swing the bottle smashed and the note fell out.
    “I got it!” Perse cried, but before he could snatch it up, Ambrose sent him flying onto the sand.
    The little boy’s face screwed up with tears. “I’ll get you!”
    But Ambrose paid him no heed. As he picked up the paper, Perse flew into him, and received such a swat from Ambrose’s free hand that he ran bawling down the beach.
    The paper was half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, torn carelessly from a tablet and folded thrice. Ambrose uncreased it. On a top line was penned in deep red ink:
    TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
    On the next-to-bottom:
    YOURS TRULY
    The lines between were blank, as was the space beneath the complimentary close. In a number of places, owing to the coarseness of the paper, the ink spread from the lines in fibrous blots.
    An oystershell zipped past and plicked into the sand behind him: a hundred feet away Perse Goltz thumbed his nose and stepped a few steps back. Ambrose ignored him, but moved slowly down the shore. Up in the Jungle the Sphinxes had adjourned to play King of the Hill on the riverbank. Perse threw another oystershell and half-turned to run; he was not pursued.
    Ambrose’s spirit bore new and subtle burdens. He would not tattle on Peter for cursing and the rest of it. The thought of his brother’s sins no longer troubled him or even much moved his curiosity. Tonight, tomorrow night, unhurriedly, he would find out from Peter just what it was they had discovered in the Den, and what-all done: the things he’d learn would not surprise now nor distress him, for though he was still innocent of that knowledge, he had the feel of it in his heart, and of other truth.
    He changed the note to his left hand, the better to wing an oystershell at Perse. As he did so, some corner of his mind remarked that those shiny bits in the paper’s texture were splinters of wood pulp. Often as he’d seen them in the leaves of cheap tablets, he had not thitherto embraced that fact.

PETITION
    April 21, 1931
    His Most Gracious Majesty Prajadhipok, Descendant of Buddha, King of North and South, Supreme Arbiter of the Ebb and Flow of the Tide, Brother of the Moon, Half-Brother of the Sun, Possessor of the Four-and-Twenty