The Secret Zoo (2 page)

T
ap! Tap! Tap!

Noah sat up, glanced around the dimly lit room, and listened. Had he imagined it?
Tap! Tap! Tap!
The sound came again.

He jumped out of bed. “Who's there?” he called.

Tap! Tap!
the window answered.

He crept across the floor, not knowing what he might find. Was a branch rapping his window? Could a loose shutter be rattling?

Tap! Tap! Tap!

He stood at the window and peered out. He saw
nothing but the black, starlit sky. No branch, no loose shutter—nothing.

Tap! Tap!

He strained his eyes to see better, but all he saw was the night.

Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!

He swung open the window. The cool air brushed his skin, and goose bumps rose along his arms. A bird had perched on the window ledge. Barely the size of his thumb, it had shiny blue feathers and a bright red bill. As it looked at Noah, it tipped its head from side to side inquisitively.

Relief washed over the boy from head to toe. “You scared me half to—”

The bird sprang off the ledge, flew into his room, and circled near the ceiling.

“Hey!” Noah shouted. “Get outta here!”

The bird fluttered around for several seconds before it perched on a lampshade near the bed. It snapped its head back and forth, staring at Noah as if it expected something.

“Out!” Noah ordered. “Get out!”

Then, as suddenly as the bird had flown into the room, it lifted off the lampshade, dived through the window, and flew out—all in the blink of an eye.

“Good!”

Noah brushed his hands together, happy to be done with the bird. But as he walked toward the window to close it, the winged creature darted back in.

“Get out, I said!”

The bird continuously circled near the ceiling. Each time it veered overhead, Noah jumped up and tried to snag it out of the air. After his fifth or sixth jump, he noticed that the bird was clutching something in its tiny talons—a piece of paper. A moment later, the bird dropped the paper into the hollow of Noah's pillow, headed for the window, and perched on the sill.

Puzzled, Noah stared at the bird. He watched its beady eyes dart from his face to the paper, reminding him of the way his grandmother would restlessly wait for someone to unwrap a present. Its expression said,
Well? This was given to you for a reason!

The paper on his pillow was wrinkled and torn, and it looked as though it had spent a week in a puddle. He picked it up and flattened the creases to reveal a funny-looking monkey with bushy eyebrows, a tuft of hair growing on its chin, and a long tail. The heading above the photo read, “Come to the Clarksville City Zoo and See Our New Friend, Mr. Tall Tail!”

Noah had seen Mr. Tall Tail at the zoo many times. He certainly wasn't a new arrival. This was an old flyer.

“What's going on?” Noah turned toward the bird. “What's—?”

The bird was gone.

Noah looked back at the paper. Mr. Tall Tail stared at him with wide, worried eyes. Noah read it again: “Come to the Clarksville City Zoo and See Our New Friend, Mr. Tall Tail!”

This is nothing. It's trash that a bird picked up, Noah told himself.

But he had read about birds acting as messengers and delivering notes to people.

“Don't be dumb,” Noah muttered. “We have e-mail these days. Besides, this paper doesn't have a message. There's not a—”

He peered at the heading. A few of the words had holes in them—tiny holes that looked as if someone had punched them out with the tip of a pencil. Or maybe with the tip of a tiny beak.

“No way…”

He read out loud only the words with holes: “To the Clarksville City Zoo and Our New Friend.” It made no sense.

“Wait a minute!” He scanned the words
without
holes in them. “Come…See…Mr…. Tall…Tail.”

Was this a message?

“No,” he mumbled. “It can't be.” He read the new
sentence again, without pausing between the words. “Come see Mr. Tall Tail.”

The sentence was complete, structured—even instructional.

Noah raised his eyes to the window. The sill was empty. The wind blew gentle ripples through his ivory-colored drapes. He shivered. The drapes looked like ghosts.

T
he school bell rang and Noah raced for the door, not bothering to slow down when Mrs. Bluss called, “Kids! Walk!” Noah didn't have time for walking. He only had three hours before his parents would be home, so he needed to move fast.

Since Megan's disappearance, Noah's parents had been working late, leading a search campaign out of a friend's office in downtown Clarksville. Considering all that his parents had been through with Megan, they'd originally had concerns about Noah's walking home from school and being by himself at the house. They'd finally decided
to allow it, as long as Noah promised to walk home with his friends. And rather than being home by himself, Noah almost always stayed at Richie's until his parents picked him up after leaving the search headquarters for the day.

Today, however, Noah needed to break the rules. In the hallway, he tossed his books into his locker, scanned the crowd to make sure Ella and Richie couldn't see him, and then squirmed his way to the main exit. Outside, he ran across the schoolyard, kicking up gravel and dust.

He hadn't slept since the bird's strange visit the previous night. He still couldn't make sense of what had happened. Did it mean something, or had a bird simply flown through his window and dropped a piece of trash in his room? Whatever it might be, there would be no harm in paying Mr. Tall Tail a visit.

He walked down the drive, turned onto Jenkins Street, and walked alongside the concrete wall of the zoo. After rounding the corner onto Walkers Boulevard, he reached the zoo and bolted for the entrance, where he flashed his membership card to a startled attendant and crashed through the turnstile.

Because the day was so cold, the zoo was nearly empty. Noah stormed across the pavement, weaving in and out of the exhibits. He'd been to the zoo so many times that he knew the shortest path to the langur house without thinking about it. When he reached the small,
ivy-draped building, he pushed through the entrance, turned a corner, and nearly crashed into a small group of people.

The exhibit had no traditional bars or concrete walls. An enormous dome-shaped net kept the langurs inside, where they relaxed on trees, looking bored. Their tails were so long that Noah wondered how the animals managed to keep them from becoming knotted in the branches. Mr. Tall Tail had the longest tail of all. As the monkey rested on a high branch, his tail dangled below his rear end like a furry snake.

Now that Noah was inside the exhibit, he felt a bit foolish. What did he expect to see?

The visitors gradually wandered off, and the building fell silent. The langurs turned their eyes toward Noah occasionally, but they showed little interest in him.

“Psssttt!”
Noah said. “Mr. Tall Tail!”

The monkey ignored him. He was more interested in a large leaf that was trapped in the ceiling of the net.

“Mr. Tall Tail! Can you hear me?”

The monkey picked a closer leaf, popped it in his mouth, and chewed casually.

“Um…okay,” Noah muttered, scratching his head. “Why am I talking to a monkey?”

The entrance door swung open, and a security guard stepped inside. He had a thatch of fire engine red hair
and plump lips, and his face and arms were covered in freckles.

“Hello,” Noah said, feeling stupid and embarrassed. After all, this man had nearly caught him talking to a monkey.

The guard didn't answer, and an awkward silence filled the air. He strolled past Noah, observing him skeptically. Noah stared at the langurs, pretending that he was enjoying himself. The sound of the guard's footsteps softened as he rounded the exhibit. Finally Noah heard the exit door open and close. He was alone again with the langurs.

“Talk about creepy,” Noah mumbled.

He glanced at Mr. Tall Tail once more and said, “Nothing to show me, huh?”

Mr. Tall Tail stared into space and idly chewed his leaf, working his jaw from side to side.

Feeling like an idiot, Noah decided to leave and turned toward the exit. At that moment, something fell on his shoulder, and in a reflex reaction, Noah swatted his back. He swung around and yelped. A long, black, furry thing slithered across his forearm. It jumped off and floated in the air. Then Noah realized what it was—Mr. Tall Tail's tail!

Seeing Noah turn to leave, the langur had leaped to the front of the net, deliberately poked out his tail, and brushed it over Noah's shoulder. What's more, a slip of
paper was wrapped in the tip. Noah knew it was crazy, but Mr. Tall Tail was handing him the paper.

The monkey waved his tail as if to say,
Are you gonna take this, or what?

Noah crept forward. He reached out his trembling arm and snatched the paper.

“What is this?” he said.

Mr. Tall Tail leaped back up to the trees and relaxed in his previous spot in the branches. He picked another leaf and chewed. His dark eyes gazed blankly into the distance, as if nothing had happened.

For a second, Noah thought he'd imagined the whole incident, but the paper was in his hand—crumpled, ripped, and spotted. A few langur hairs even clung to it. Noah opened it carefully. The moment he saw the message inside, he thought he'd faint.

The front door creaked open again, and he thrust the paper into his pocket. For the second time, the redheaded security guard walked in. He eyed Noah suspiciously, and as he approached, his heels angrily smacked the floor. What Noah had read on the paper was making his stomach roll and his head ache.

“You okay, kid? You ain't lookin' too hot,” the guard said.

“Yeah…fine.” Noah was anything
but
fine. He could barely breathe. “I gotta go,” he managed to say.

He hurried for the door, slammed through it, and burst into the cool air.

“Have a nice day,” the guard called out.

The door crashed as it closed. Gasping, Noah leaned against a wall. He pulled out the paper and looked at it again. It was red with purple lines and blue stars in the corners. He'd seen it before.

“Deep breaths,” he told himself. “It's okay…it's okay…it's okay….”

But even as he repeated the words, he didn't believe them for a second.

N
oah sat on a bench in a quiet part of the zoo. He glanced over both shoulders to make sure nobody was around and pulled Mr. Tall Tail's paper out of his pocket. Neat cursive handwriting covered every inch. All the letters were joined by smooth arcs, and the dots on the
i
's were carefully placed. Though the ink was faded and smeared, he knew the penmanship. It was Megan's. There was no mistaking it.

Noah glanced around again; still, no one was nearby. A wind swept across the zoo. Noah took a breath, gathered his courage, and read the page. It started in the middle of a sentence.

The bottom of the page was missing. Noah flipped it over. The writing at the top was too smeared to read. The words he could decipher began in the middle of a sentence and the middle of a new thought.

The page was torn. Noah flipped the paper over repeatedly, hoping to find something in the margins.

He dropped against the back of the bench and stared into space. What was going on? What did all this mean? Why had Megan been making trips to the zoo without informing the family? And how had a langur got hold of a page from her diary?

Noah's first instinct was to tell somebody. An adult at the zoo. But Megan had been suspicious of the zoo worker—and hadn't he just had a strange encounter with a security guard? What did all this mean?

The leaves fell around him like colorful snowflakes. He was stunned and confused.

“I don't get it,” he muttered. “I don't get it at all.”

But one thing Noah did understand was that he had to act—and he had to act quickly. In two hours, the zoo would close. That would be more than enough time to take a tour of the Forest of Flight and perhaps to examine the wall with the unusual crannies and holes.

T
he Forest of Flight exhibit was in a building that stood forty feet high. Because of its enormous dome roof, the building always made Noah think of a giant igloo. The walls and roof were made of the same tinted glass that was used on the windows of fancy cars. The exhibit was open; people could walk among freely flying birds.

The moment Noah strolled through the entrance, the earthy smell of soil and tree bark invaded him. Trees and flowery plants filled the dome with fragrance and rich oxygen. Small waterfalls cascaded down rocks and threw mist into the air. The Forest of Flight looked and
felt like a miniature jungle. Birds soared overhead, and a variety of sounds echoed off the walls—water splashing, children laughing, streams rumbling, and birds chirping and squawking.

A poster with a chart was pinned to the wall near the entrance, displaying pictures of fifty different birds, just as Megan had described. Noah stopped for a minute to search the chart. Halfway down, he recognized one of the birds and gasped. It had a blue body, a bright red bill, and an orange belly. Without doubt, this was the tiny bird that had flown into his room. The chart said it was a malachite kingfisher named Marlo.

“Marlo,” Noah said aloud. He looked to the treetops. “Marlo, are you in here?”

He headed down a misty path, where enormous umbrella leaves draped above him like a live green ceiling. Droplets of water plopped on his shoulders and the top of his head. Around him, a variety of birds perched on branches and steel beams, while a few floated on streams and ponds and others pecked at seeds on the ground, looking more bored than hungry.

Noah scoured the Forest of Flight for Marlo but couldn't find him. His search led him to a concrete wall—the wall that had the holes in it, which was what he'd come to see. The holes were about ten feet up from the ground and eight inches across. They were dark—the
kind of dark that someone could keep secrets in.

Noah took a seat on the bench that Megan had written about. He folded his hands across his lap and said under his breath, “This is where Megan sat not long ago.” The thought of her sitting here alone made him sad.

Noah watched the wall and waited…and waited…and waited. Birds flew in and out of the holes. One had a beak full of straw, and Noah guessed that it was building a nest. He continued to sit and watch. An hour later, a voice announced through a loudspeaker that the zoo was preparing to close. Within minutes, people had cleared out of the Forest of Flight. Noah was alone. If something significant was going to take place, he thought it might be now.

More time passed. Except for the chirps and fluttering of the birds, the building was silent. Now that Noah was alone in the building, it seemed larger than ever. Through the glass walls, he watched the sky dim as the sun fell into its autumn slumber. Noah began to worry that he might be locked in the zoo for the night.

Suddenly a tiny bird swooped down and perched on a branch directly in front of him. It had a blue body, a red beak, and an orange belly.

“Marlo?”

The bird cocked his head, first to one side and then to the other. He ruffled his feathers and blinked so many times
in a split second that Noah couldn't count the blinks.

The boy rose from the bench. “Marlo, do you…do you understand me?”

Marlo cocked his head back and forth again and leaped into the air. He circled a clump of trees and landed back on the branch in front of Noah.

Noah's jaw dropped. He glanced over his shoulder. As far as he could tell, he was alone—alone with Marlo.

“This is really happening,” he said.

Marlo sprang off the branch and left it trembling. He darted through the air and disappeared into one of the holes.

How deep are those things? Noah wondered. He stepped forward, wrapped his hands around a rail, and locked his gaze on the hole, waiting.

“C'mon, Marlo,” he mumbled. “The zoo's gotta be closing, and I—”

Marlo shot out of the hole, etched another circle in the air, and landed on an open branch. Noah's attention bounced between the bird and the hole. A minute later, another bird darted out. This one was green with a yellow beak.

The idea occurred to Noah that he should be taking notes the way Megan had done. He plucked a pen from his jacket and wrote, on the edge of Megan's notepaper, “Marlo” and “green bird.”

A few minutes later, a bird with long wings emerged from the hole. Under “green bird,” Noah wrote “bird—long wings.” A fourth and fifth bird flew from the hole. Noah simply scrawled the numbers 4 and 5.

He waited, keeping his gaze fixed on the wall and his pen poised on the paper, but nothing happened. He started to wonder whether anything more than this was going to take place. Five birds had appeared, but they seemed insignificant.

All of a sudden, more birds shot out of the hole, each one directly on the tail of the bird ahead of it. They were flying so close to one another that they blurred together in a stream of colorful feathers. In a matter of seconds, hundreds of birds filled the Forest of Flight. They dived through the treetops, perched on the branches, and skimmed the glass walls. Their wings made so much noise that Noah dropped Megan's paper and plugged his ears. He felt as though he was in a dream—a dream that was at once strange and magnificent and terrifying.

“What's
haaapppennniiinggg
?” he hollered.

He closed his eyes and braced himself for what would be next. The birds flew around him, fanning his skin with mild gusts of wind, making him feel as if he were standing in the center of a tiny tornado. The experience was exciting and frightening. He didn't know if he should scream in panic or scream in delight, so he just screamed, “
Aaahhh!
”

Chirping, whistling, squawking, and cawing, the birds circled him and filled the Forest of Flight with their strange musical chatter. Their feathers brushed his cheeks. Noah had no sense of how much time was passing. Several seconds? Or many minutes? He became certain that he would be carried off, that the birds would try to squeeze him into the hole in the wall and take him to some unknown place. But a moment later, the noises stopped and the air became still. Noah heard only the gurgling streams and splashing waterfalls.

He opened his eyes. Leaves and feathers floated around him like ash from a campfire. He looked up at the hole just in time to see the last few birds plunge back into it. As effortlessly as they had filled the exhibit, they had exited. Those that had been there throughout the day went about their normal business, circling treetops and munching seeds. The hole in the wall looked ordinary. A bird coasted out of it, snatched some twigs, and flew back inside.

“Wait! Marlo!” Noah scanned the treetops. He saw no sign of the bird. “Marlo! What happened? I—”

The sound of footsteps rose in the distance. A man with a ball-shaped belly plodded up to Noah, wagging his finger and saying, “Young man! What are you doing here? The zoo's closing!”

“Excuse me?” Noah said. He snatched up Megan's note and slipped it into a pocket in his pants.

“You wanna get locked in here? Come with me! Let's go!”

The man scanned the exhibit. Noah saw his eyes rest briefly on the hole in the wall. He put his hand on the boy's back and escorted him to the door.

Once outside, Noah rushed toward the zoo exit. He was so confused that he felt sick. So much had happened in just a few hours. He pushed through the clutches of the turnstile, raced across the parking lot, and ran down the sidewalk next to Walkers Boulevard.

At his house, he dropped on the couch and sat almost without moving until his parents returned home. He spent the evening in a daze and went to bed before dark. Night fell, but he was unable to sleep. He lay in bed, scanning the shadows in the half-moon light that filtered through the window, thinking about the events at the zoo. His gaze happened upon his jacket, which he'd tossed onto a chair. He saw something sticking out of the pocket—something he hadn't put there. He climbed out of bed, walked to the chair, thrust his hand into the pocket, and pulled out a piece of crumpled paper. This time, it was exactly what he expected—another note from his sister. During the commotion at the Forest of Flight, a bird must have slipped it into his pocket.

He smoothed out the paper and sat on his bed to read it.

When he finished, he clutched it to his chest and declared, “I cannot do this alone.”

He knew he had to find help. That meant it was time to round up the bravest kids he knew. It was time to call on the Action Scouts.