“Hang on, Rades, almost there.”
I pedaled in the direction the arrow pointed. It took me to the right of the pretty little pool. There was no need to stop and peer into it from between two of the palms, not when what I’d come for was so close, but I did. And as terrible as what I saw there was, I’m glad. It changed everything, although it would be a long time before I fully understood the crucial importance of that moment. Sometimes we look because we have to remember. Sometimes the most horrible things are what give us strength. I know that now, but at the time all I could think was Oh my dear God, it’s Ariel.
Lying in that pool, once perhaps a soothing blue but now turned silty and dim with decomposition, were the remains of a mermaid. But not Ariel, the Disney princess daughter of King Triton and Queen Athena. No, not her. Most certainly not her. There was no sparkly green tail, no blue eyes, no billow of red hair. No cute little purple bra top, either. I thought this mermaid had once been blond, but most of her hair had fallen out and floated on top of the pool. Her tail might once have been green, but now it was a stupid lifeless gray, like her skin. Her lips were gone, revealing a ring of small teeth. Her eyes were empty sockets.
Yet once she had been beautiful. I was as sure of that as I was of the happy throngs that had once come here to see games or entertainments. Beautiful and alive and full of happy, harmless magic. Once she had swum here. It had been her home, and the people who had taken time to come to this pocket oasis had seen her, she had seen them, and both had been refreshed. Now she was dead, with an iron shaft protruding from the place where her fish tail became a human torso, and a coil of gray guts bulged from the hole. Only a whisper of her beauty and grace remained. She was as dead as any fish that ever died in an aquarium and floated there with all its lively colors faded. She was an ugly corpse partially preserved by cold water. While a truly ugly creature—Hana—still lived and sang and farted and ate her noxious food.
Cursed, I thought. All cursed. Evil has fallen on this unlucky land. That was not a Charlie Reade thought, but it was a true thought.
I felt hate for Hana rise up in me, not because she had killed the little mermaid （I thought the giant would have simply torn her to shreds） but because she, Hana, was alive. And would be in my way going back.
Radar began coughing again, so hard I could hear the basket creak behind me. I broke the spell of that pathetic corpse and pedaled around the pool and toward the pole with the sun atop it.
3
The sundial filled the part of the alcove where the V of the two wings narrowed. Before it was a sign on an iron pole. Faded but still legible, it said ALL KEEP OUT. The disc looked to be twenty feet in diameter, which made it—if my math was right—about sixty feet in circumference. I saw Mr. Bowditch’s initials on the far side. I wanted a good look at them. They had guided me here; now that I was, those last ones might tell me the right direction to turn the sundial. It wasn’t possible to ride Claudia’s three-wheeler across, because the sundial’s circle was rimmed with short black and white pickets about three feet high.
Radar coughed, choked, and coughed some more. She was panting and shivering, one eye gummed shut, the other looking at me. Her fur was matted against her body, letting me see—not that I wanted to—how pitifully thin she’d become, almost skeletal. I dismounted the trike and lifted her out of the basket. Her shivering against me was convulsive: shudder and relax, shudder and relax.
“Soon, girl, soon.”
Hoping I was right, because this was her only chance… and it had worked for Mr. Bowditch, hadn’t it? But even after the giant and the mermaid, I found it hard to believe.
I stepped over the pickets and walked across the sundial. It was stone and divided into fourteen pie-wedges. Now I think I know how long the days are here, I thought. A simple symbol, worn but still recognizable, was engraved in the center of each wedge: the two moons, the sun, a fish, a bird, a pig, an ox, a butterfly, a bee, a sheaf of wheat, a bundle of berries, a drop of water, a tree, a naked man, and a naked woman who was pregnant. Symbols of life, and as I passed beside the high pole in the center I could hear the clickclick-clickclick of the eyes in the sun’s face as they went back and forth, ticking time away.
I stepped over the short pickets on the far side, still holding Radar against me. Her tongue hung limply from the side of her mouth as she coughed relentlessly. Her time had grown short indeed.
I faced the sundial and Mr. Bowditch’s initials. The crossbar of the A had been turned into a slightly curved arrow pointing to the right, which meant that when I turned the sundial—if I could—it would be moving counterclockwise. That seemed correct. I hoped so. If it was wrong, I would have come all this way just to kill my dog by making her even older.