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By Root 300 0

this trade been – as trades dealing in the seemingly endless lusts of men usually are – that eventually a whole subculture of Dampford villagers, male and female, had been established in London, forming the amorphous borough of Wetwick that I had stumbled upon. To increase these innocents' isolation and thus reduce the chance of their escaping from Lord Bendray's and Mollie Maud's domination, Lord Bendray had created a mock religion for them, centred upon the fictional Saint Monkfish. To avoid detection, the Church of Saint Monkfish has no set place of worship, but rather floats from place to place in the city. The denizens of Wetwick – for so their supposed benefactors Lord Bendray, had named them – are summoned to services by a bell that Lord Bendray had especially cast for the purpose, with a note pitched too high for ordinary humans to hear; the selkie crossbreeds, with their seaborne origins, have a range of hearing different from that of ordinary human beings. The elderly of the tribe (as with humans long in tooth), having lost the highest-pitched portion of their hearing, have dogs trained to listen for the striking of their church bell and to guide them to the location of the services. Just such a "bell-dog" was the eponymous Abel, sleeping below-deck in my cabin. The dogs served another, even more sinister purpose: they were useful for various cabbies catering to depraved tastes, in order to deliver their passengers to the district where their pleasures could be catered to by the wretched employees of Mollie Maud. The coiner Fexton, as a convert to the worship of Saint Monkfish, had need of such an animal as well. Lord Bendray, with his thorough scientific mind, had even created an alternative economy for the Wetwick residents; its coinage, with the portrait of the mythical Saint Monkfish upon it, also served as an identifying emblem for those humans who had been initiated into the secrets of the borough's clandestine existence.

However, even as dull-witted as the Wetwick crossbreeds were, they had come to suspect that things were not as their patron Lord Bendray had told them. In addition to creating their own religion for them, he had blasphemously told them that the Christianity practised by the ordinary population surrounding them, was a faith all the sacraments of which dealt with fishing, a practice that the piscine Wetwick denizens would naturally view with horror. The bedecking of the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe in London with fishing tackle and copies of Izaak Walton was a scheme concocted by Lord Bendray to confirm in the minds of his deluded parishioners the belief in the basic hostility of the human race towards them.

All this, the Brown Leather Man had learned from his own investigations. Some call in his blood had motivated his leaving his sea home by Groughay, and finding these lost cousins of his tribe. Thus, he had found how cruelly they had been exploited to service the lusts and greed of land-bound man. Another reason prompted this pilgrimage: he had wished to determine what knowledge of the potentially dangerous principles of sympathetic vibrations taught to Dower's father still remained in the possession of the land-dwellers. This had been the reason for his visit to my shop, bearing one of my father's Regulators that had been left by him on the island of Groughay. In his haste caused by the broken watch-spring tearing his leather "skin", the Brown Leather Man had mistakenly given me the Saint Monkfish crown, collected by him on a visit to the borough of Wetwick.

His overriding goal, however, was the re-establishment of his own race. Having discovered the fate of the spores that had been carried in the seaweed fertilizer, he first had gone to London in hopes of obtaining ova to be quickened with his own seed; these he had hoped to carry back to the ancestral seaweed beds near Groughay, and thus breed back to the original line. His normally forgiving nature had been outraged by the servile and deluded state of the Wetwick denizens; he had tracked down the coin forger Fexton in order