“Roll on the sushi,” I muttered to Jonathan.
Miss Finch pointed out, quietly, that in addition to the danger of parasites, it was also the case that bluefin tuna, swordfish, and Chilean sea bass were all being overfished and could soon be rendered extinct, since they were not reproducing fast enough to catch up.
The Third Room
went up for a long way into the darkness. The original ceiling had been removed at some time in the past, and the new ceiling was the roof of the empty warehouse far above us. The room buzzed at the corners of vision with the blue-purple of ultraviolet light. Teeth and shirts and flecks of lint began to glow in the darkness. A low, throbbing music began. We looked up to see, high above us, a skeleton, an alien, a werewolf, and an angel. Their costumes fluoresced in the UV, and they glowed like old dreams high above us, on trapezes. They swung back and forth, in time with the music, and then, as one, they let go and tumbled down toward us.
We gasped, but before they reached us they bounced on the air, and rose up again, like yo-yos, and clambered back on their trapezes. We realized that they were attached to the roof by rubber cords, invisible in the darkness, and they bounced and dove and swam through the air above us while we clapped and gasped and watched them in happy silence.
The Fourth Room
was little more than a corridor: the ceiling was low, and the ringmaster strutted into the audience and picked two people out of the crowd—the stocky woman and a tall black man wearing a sheepskin coat and tan gloves—pulling them up in front of us. He announced that he would be demonstrating his hypnotic powers. He made a couple of passes in the air and rejected the stocky woman. Then he asked the man to step up onto a box.
“It’s a setup,” muttered Jane. “He’s a plant.”
A guillotine was wheeled on. The ringmaster cut a watermelon in half, to demonstrate how sharp the blade was. Then he made the man put his hand under the guillotine, and dropped the blade. The gloved hand dropped into the basket, and blood spurted from the open cuff.
Miss Finch squeaked.
Then the man picked his hand out of the basket and chased the Ringmaster around us, while the Benny Hill Show music played.
“Artificial hand,” said Jonathan.
“I saw it coming,” said Jane.
Miss Finch blew her nose into a tissue. “I think it’s all in very questionable taste,” she said. Then they led us to
The Fifth Room
and all the lights went on. There was a makeshift wooden table along one wall, with a young bald man selling beer and orange juice and bottles of water, and signs showed the way to the toilets in the room next door. Jane went to get the drinks, and Jonathan went to use the toilets, which left me to make awkward conversation with Miss Finch.
“So,” I said, “I understand you’ve not been back in England long.”
“I’ve been in Komodo,” she told me. “Studying the dragons. Do you know why they grew so big?”
“Er…”
“They adapted to prey upon the pygmy elephants.”
“There were pygmy elephants?” I was interested. This was much more fun than being lectured on sushi flukes.
“Oh yes. It’s basic island biogeology—animals will naturally tend toward either gigantism or pygmyism. There are equations, you see…” As Miss Finch talked her face became more animated, and I found myself warming to her as she explained why and how some animals grew while others shrank.
Jane brought us our drinks; Jonathan came back from the toilet, cheered and bemused by having been asked to sign an autograph while he was pissing.
“Tell me,” said Jane, “I’ve been reading a lot of cryptozoological journals for the next of the Guides to the Unexplained I’m doing. As a biologist—”
“Biogeologist,” interjected Miss Finch.
“Yes. What do you think the chances are of prehistoric animals being alive today, in secret, unknown to science?”
“It’s very unlikely,” said Miss Finch, as if she were telling us off. “There is, at any rate, no ‘Lost World’ off on some island, filled with mammoths and Smilodons and aepyornis…”
“Sounds a bit rude,” said Jonathan. “A what?”
“Aepyornis. A giant flightless prehistoric bird,” said Jane.
“I knew that really,” he told her.
“Although of course, they’re not prehistoric,” said Miss Finch. “The last aepyornises were killed off by Portuguese sailors on Madagascar about three hundred years ago. And there are fairly reliable accounts of a pygmy mammoth being presented at the Russian court in the sixteenth century, and a band of something which from the descriptions we have were almost definitely some kind of saber-tooth—the Smilodon—brought in from North Africa by Vespasian to die in the circus. So these things aren’t all prehistoric. Often, they’re historic.”