Creatures of the Pool Read Online Free PDF

“It’s the damp. It gets to your throat,” he croaks as if to demonstrate.
    “That doesn’t sound like much of a selling point.”
    “They can have a damp course put in if they want.”
    As I wonder why anybody wouldn’t, my mother says “Come in, you two. It’s still drier in than out. I’m Gillian.”
    A series of hollow boxy clatters fills the narrow hall as my father runs upstairs. I could almost fancy he’s fleeing the intrusion, but he dumps his burden somewhere and is down just as fast. “I didn’t get the chance to tell you, Deryck,” Lucinda says. “I’m in a little place on top of Edge Hill.”
    “Sounds like you’re near the tunnels.”
    “Nearer than I thought. They’ve found another one and they’re clearing it now.”
    I feel as if she and my father are reminding me of my job. In the early 1800s Joseph Williamson employed dozens of workmen to excavate a labyrinth of tunnels under Edge Hill, and nobody’s sure why. After his death the tunnels were found to extend for at least a mile, but the explorers retreated for fear of becoming hopelessly lost in the dark. Since then many of the tunnels have been blocked by debris. Recently the Friends of the Tunnels have devoted themselves to reopeningthe labyrinth. I’ve yet to work out how to include the tunnels in a tour. “About time they left well alone,” says my father. “They want to remember how old Joe the Mole used to carry on. Half the time he’d no sooner have a tunnel dug than he got his men to brick it up.”
    “What are you saying that means?” Lucinda wonders.
    “Think about it,” he says, but to me, and tramps into the front room.
    The pile he took upstairs was just a sample of the apparent chaos. Books and magazines and photocopies and printouts are strewn all over the already crowded room, on the tapestried fat suite of furniture and beside it, around the television and the player heaped with discs of Westerns, on the dresser wherever there’s space between the best china, even on the mantelpiece, among the photographs documenting my progress from a round-faced baby to my present lanky popeyed big-nosed self. As he selects another armful by some principle I can’t fathom, my mother says “Well, I’m glad you’re clearing up after I’ve been asking you for weeks. Would everyone like a cup of tea?”
    “I’ll do it,” he declares and hurries to the kitchen with his burden, which he dumps on the table. He’s about to fill the kettle from a large plastic bottle out of the refrigerator when he turns on my mother. “You haven’t been refilling this, have you?”
    “I wouldn’t dare. It isn’t worth the trouble,” she assures him before murmuring “He’s got a thing about the tap water. It tastes like it always has to me.”
    “Nothing to boast about,” my father mutters and, having spilled a few drops from the bottle into his hand to touch his tongue to them, sets about filling the kettle.
    “This is just silly,” my mother says and strides into the front room, where she transfers all the material that’s occupying the sofa to my father’s chair. “Now you can sit down,” she says and asks Lucinda “Have you come to hear Deryck holding forth as well?”“I’d be interested to hear what he has to say.”
    “I wouldn’t take too much notice of some of it. I don’t know where he’s been dreaming up—”
    My father appears in the doorway, and his frustration homes in on me. “You could help.”
    “Tell me how.”
    “Saints help us, Gill, what have we brought up? Grab all you can carry,” he directs me, “and put it where you’re told.”
    However rough his mockery is, it isn’t far from welcome. I’ve been growing uneasy that since we arrived he hasn’t adopted a single playful voice. As I pick up a pile of books I’m disconcerted to feel how damp the carpet is; even the cover of the volume on the bottom of the pile seems to be. “I could too,” Lucinda says. “It’s part of my