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gummy black. What was left of the dead child --
little more than a glistening black cannonball -- had fastened itself to him.
His arms flailed as he struggled to his feet and staggered blindly across the
room. The other two men rushed to his aid, but all they could do was to cling
to his thrashing arms as the dark mass on his face flattened, then shaped
itself into a lumpy approximation of features. Steam was seeping out from under
the muck and one could hear hissing, as if something were being seared.
    A voice other than the professor's
came bellowing out of the newly formed face -- it was guttural, garbled as it
repeated a single phrase over and over. "Six oceans...six oceans...six
oceans..."
    The black substance rearranged
itself further, taking on a loosely ovular shape with rib-like striations that,
for a moment, made it look like an obsidian trilobite. Then, it melted straight
into the center of Professor Wakefield's face. The two men who had tried to
help him suddenly backed away.
    The penetrating mass shaped a
vacuous, smoothbore crater. Pond was close enough to get a look into the hole
which, he would assert in his journal, appeared to reach deeper than the
circumference of a human head would allow.
    "All at once a great sucking
wind took up," Pond wrote. "Papers flew to the hole, books were drawn
violently to it and swallowed, even myself and Nigel had to fight against the
force of the vacuum."
    The professor had ceased his
flailing at this point, and took several resolute steps toward the other men.
Wagner managed to get a hold of the door frame and called for Pond to follow,
but Pond was determined to remain. He pawed at his shelves even as their
bottles flew off and disappeared into Wakefield's face.
    The gangly figure stepped closer
and closer to Pond, thrusting its orifice forward. It was a horrid sight,
bending down as if to kiss Albert, its wild red hair dancing in the wind. The
blaring vacuum increased its intensity and Pond started to slide across the
floor toward it.
    Wagner saw Pond's hands come up --
one let go of a small open bottle of ether, the other a lit cigarette lighter.
Both items were drawn into the hollow.
    There was a flash and a thunderous
roar that could not have simply come from a small bottle of ignited ether.
Professor Wakefield was tossed in one direction, Pond in the other. Nigel
grabbed his friend and pulled him to safety as the examination room was
suffused with flame.
    Appalling screams came from the
burning chamber, a multitude of voices echoing away as if Pond and Wagner were
listening to a string of mountain climbers falling into a cavernous chasm.
    Firemen arrived in time to save
the Queen Anne, although the examination room and part of Pond's study were
destroyed. Professor Wakefield's charred remains were dragged from the rubble;
they had been obliterated from the neck up. All traces of the enigmatic
infant's body were lost, as were most of the photographs that Pond had taken of
it. The only one that remained was burnt along one side so that the
seashell-face was no longer visible.

    Nana was a collector as well as a
naturalist. When she died the attic of her house was filled with treasures stored
in boxes of yellowed cardboard. There were shed snake skins like coils of
brittle brown lace, shriveled horse chestnuts that once were dark and polished
as mahogany; there were stones and pine cones and dead insects she had found
and delicately interred in beds formed from cotton balls. These things were as
valuable to her as jewelry might be to another.
    There were shells, of course, all
manner of shells. They were scalloped and spiraled, smooth, textured, colorful
and dark. She even had a pair of ponderous conches with shiny pink mouths and
pale petrified horns. They were like the skulls of demons or some
unclassifiable prehistoric thing.
    On the subject of shells... Dr.
Pond writes of the shell that he removed from the child. "While the
remains of the infant were lost, I was