Zeuglodon (15 page)

We were suddenly in the open again, with the starry sky above us and the woods behind. There in front of us was the shadowy maze hedge and off to the left lay lake and the dark boathouse. In an instant we were there at the door, breathing hard while Brendan fumbled with the latch, trying to wedge it open with the Creeper’s knife. I said, “Hurry!” but he was already hurrying just as hurriedly as he could. Lala stood there clutching the skeleton key and looking anxiously out at the lake and back toward the woods.

“Let
me
try!” Perry said, but just then the door swung open and we all jumped back out of the way before pushing and shoving each other through. We shut the door, making sure it was latched and wishing there was some way to lock it or wedge it shut. The Creeper and Frosticos had gotten in earlier, and they would do it again. But we couldn’t stop them—couldn’t even try without wasting time. It was better to go on.

The interior of the boathouse was dark, with just the faintest glow of moonlight through the windows, but we found the lantern right enough, although we had to take it back upstairs to the window in order to have enough moonlight to see by. Perry twisted the lid off the can of oil, opened the oil chamber in the lantern, and carefully poured it full. It lit right away this time, first match, and Perry adjusted the wick so that it was bright and not smoky.

We started downward again, taking the oil and the matches with us, and found Patrick Cotter sitting as ever. Lala very boldly slid the key into the keyhole between his ribs and tried to turn it. It wouldn’t budge. She twisted at it, sliding it out a little and trying again, then jiggling it, but it was no use.

“Maybe it’s rusted shut,” I said. “Try some oil.” Lala held out the key, and Perry dribbled lamp oil on it, and Lala tried it again. There was a little snapping sound, the key popped another quarter inch into the lock, and there was a ratchety noise, exactly like the turning of the mechanism in the Mermaid’s box. The skeleton’s handless arm jerked suddenly upward, knocking Lala on the chin with its wrist bone.

She said, “Ow!” and stepped back, and the four of us stood watching to see what the skeleton would do.

Where the hand had been severed from the wrist there was a flat metal disk with a keyhole-shaped hole in it. The metal disk was screwed tight to the cut-off wrist bone. The arm moved inward toward the skeleton’s chest now, and then the bones in his forearm swiveled back and forth, as if it were trying to turn the key, except that without a hand it couldn’t turn anything at all. It finished its turning and swiveling, and the arm ratcheted back again and dropped toward the floor, and the skeleton sat there as ever, probably thinking that it had done its job.

The truth came to me like a poke in the eye. “It’s Patrick Cotter’s hand in the Mermaid’s box,” I said. “He needs his hand!”

You’ll say that I should have figured it out sooner, that I should have known that the skeleton would want his hand. But I hadn’t, and neither had Lala or Perry or Brendan. But now it was clear to all of us, and we started back up the tunnel toward the stairs.

“What will we
do
?” Lala asked, because obviously she didn’t know that the Mermaid had been stowed in her sepulcher.

By then we were already there, and Perry had the door open in a trice. Lala said, “Ah!” very happily. Perry went to work on the sliding pieces of the puzzle box, and Brendan explained to Lala that we had hidden the Mermaid in the sepulcher earlier, which wasn’t precisely true, although there was no point in correcting him.

Soon the Mermaid was going through her revolutions, with all of the mechanism’s metallic noises. The hand slid out and opened up, and of course it was empty. Perry tried to take it out of the box, but it wouldn’t come, and I was afraid that in his hurry to get it out he would break it, but he didn’t. He slid his own hand, which is very skinny, in behind the skeleton hand, fiddled with something, frowned and fiddled again, and the hand came loose. He turned it around, and in the back was a little key-shaped piece of metal that had locked it into the Mermaid’s box, and which would fit perfectly into the keyhole in the metal disk fastened to Patrick Cotter’s wrist bone.

We picked up the lantern and headed back down the stairs, careful this time when we got to the skeleton, not rushing Perry as he fitted the hand carefully onto its arm. A lost finger bone might spell failure or delay, and we couldn’t afford either one. I listened hard for sounds from above, expecting to hear them coming through the door at any moment. Instead there was the satisfying sound of a click as the hand locked into place, and Lala put the key into the keyhole again, and we all held our breath.

Patrick Cotter repeated his movements, but he had a hand now, and he reached up and grasped the key and turned it himself, just like that. There was the sound of ratcheting in the walls again, but this time Patrick Cotter stood up from his stone bench—right up onto his feet, his head maybe an inch from the stone ceiling. We all trod backward, getting out of his way.

Dust fell from his joints and bones. His teeth clacked together like he was trying his jaw out for the first time in an age. He looked down at his hands, although what I mean by “looked” I don’t know, because he hadn’t any eyes. His skull swiveled on his neck, as if he was trying to recall how he’d come to be here, in this tunnel, and under these strange circumstances. His mouth opened and shut, and I was certain that he was going to speak, and I wondered what marvelous thing he would have to say after all those years of sitting and waiting and thinking the thoughts that a skeleton thinks.

But he didn’t speak. He simply fell to pieces. He shivered like a person with a bad chill, and he collapsed downward in a clacking heap of loose bones, as if he had been poured out of a sack. His skull bounced away down the tunnel, and the locking mechanism in his rib cage clanked to the stones of the floor with the key still in it.

We stood there gaping with disbelief. Patrick Cotter had waited patiently through the long years of darkness, only to stand up and fall to bits when his heroic moment finally arrived. What a tremendous disappointment, I thought, feeling badly for him. Hasbro sniffed interestedly at a leg bone, but Perry told him to leave it alone.

The tunnel gate swung slowly open now. It had never been locked at all, really. It was Patrick Cotter that had kept it shut. Patrick Cotter himself had been the skeleton key.

Lala shut the gate behind us and tried to make it stay, but it swung open again on its hinges. By opening it for ourselves, we had opened it for everyone, including our enemies, and by starting up Patrick Cotter, we had ended him. At that moment we all heard a fierce banging on the boathouse door above. Without a word we ran, including Hasbro, and like Mr. Boskins, we didn’t look back. We ran and we ran and we ran, with Brendan in the lead, holding out the lantern as steadily as he could, and all the time we were going downward, deeper and deeper into the earth until I began to wonder where exactly we were running to and how long we could keep it up.

Finally we slowed down and began to catch our breath, but we kept walking fast, and it was some time before any of us could talk. The wet and weedy smell of the lake and of damp stone had long faded, and instead there was a dry, cold, dusty smell. There was no sound yet of anyone following—no running feet and no light behind us. But they were back there somewhere, and they weren’t going to go away. They would follow us if ever they could, and the only thing to do was to keep moving and hope they fell far enough behind and got lost.

“I wonder if there’s bats,” Brendan said.

And Lala said, “There’s no bats in the Sleeper’s belfry,” and then laughed, but none of the rest of us got the joke, and it was just as well, as it turned out, because we caught on soon enough, when it was too late to turn back.

We had walked, it seemed, for ever so long, when Brendan said that his arm was tired from holding up the lantern, and so Lala took it and we went on again, although not hurrying now, but pacing ourselves. Perry had the can of lamp oil, and I took that, just to keep things fair. After a time there was a fork in the tunnel, one heading downward and one going along straight. Lala stopped for a moment and thought about it, and I could hear her sort of murmuring to herself, although not in any language I could understand, and then we were away again, along the downward fork.

“We might need a rhyme,” Lala said suddenly. It sounded meaningless to me. A rhyme?

“What sort of rhyme?” Perry asked. “Like ‘Simple Simon’?”

“Or ‘Kits cats sacks and wives’?” Brendan asked.

“I think ‘Humpty Dumpty’ should do the trick,” Lala said. “If we all have the same rhyme we could say it together.”

“What trick is that?” I asked.

“To keep our minds occupied, should they need it.
Sometimes words get going around in your head and don’t let other things in. A rhyme is like a charm.”

“What ‘other things’?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. I had no idea of
needing
a rhyme to keep my mind occupied, but I recited “Humpty Dumpty” to myself anyway, just to keep the rhyme within easy reach. I forgot about it, though, when we saw something glowing ahead, a glow like a lantern through fog, and at once I thought of Frosticos and the Creeper, but it couldn’t be them. The tunnel opened onto a big, subterranean grotto, stretching away upward and outward so that you couldn’t see its end. Not too far ahead of us, partly blocking the path, was a pool of water within a low rock circle.

“Just keep walking,” Lala said. And I heard her reciting “Humpty Dumpty” under her breath. Brendan and Perry started to say it, too, but I didn’t. I got distracted when I realized that the pool was exactly like the one within the hedge maze, exactly like it, except that there were no waterweeds here, just still, clear water with no bottom. I saw that the glowing light seemed to come from deep within the pool itself, and I paused to look down into it. The others moved on, I guess, although I didn’t know. I had forgotten all about them. After a moment of staring, I saw what looked like the small dark shapes of fishes swimming far, far below.

It seemed to me that I could see forever downward, and I gazed deep into it and…lost myself in it, I guess you could say. By and by (I don’t know how long) I saw that one of the fish was growing slowly larger, as if it was swimming upward. I waited and watched as it rose in lazy circles. After a time it was just below the surface, peering up at me, and with a shock that caught my breath in my throat I saw that it was a mermaid, and not a fish at all. She had the face of my mother. A feeling came over me, just as it had in my dream on the night before Lala arrived. I was filled with sadness and happiness at the same time, and I put my hand into the water, which was blood-warm. In that moment it came to me that perhaps I could slip away beneath the surface of the pool and simply breathe the water in, just like in a dream, and that I could stay there with my mother, where it would be always light and warm….

Then I felt myself being pulled back, so that I sat down hard on the ground. For a moment I had no idea where I was, or that I was anywhere at all. “You nearly fell in!” Brendan said. “You were going over the side!”

“I…know,” I said, which must have sounded strange. But I
did
know. I had been about to
let
myself fall in. There was no mermaid now, but only the small fish once again swimming in the depths, unless perhaps they were very large fish, and very much farther away. Perry and Brendan hauled me back when they saw that I didn’t want to leave. I knew that it would do no good to tell what I had seen, although Lala was looking at me as if she suspected.

“That’s why you want the rhyme,” she said. “We’ll all want it before we’re done.”

We hurried on our way again, out of the grotto and into another tunnel, and we didn’t slow down until Hasbro growled as if to warn us of something. We stood in silence then and listened, and we could plainly hear the sound of footfalls echoing out of the tunnel behind us. Then there were voices—voices that might have been a great distance away or very close, because sound travels strangely underground. There was no doubt at all, though, that it was Frosticos and the Creeper, and so we were off again, running quietly, and we kept on running until we reached a triple turning in the tunnel and had to stop again to figure out the way.

Almost at once we saw a light in front of us, a long way off down the center tunnel, what looked like lantern light. Just like last time, it couldn’t be Frosticos and the Creeper, because they couldn’t have gotten past us. The light flickered and was abruptly closer, as if it had moved fifty feet in that instant of flickering. It shone on someone, too—someone walking. It was Cardigan Peach, holding the lantern out before him, just as we had seen him doing earlier that very day, or perhaps yesterday now. His black cloak and coat and trousers were almost invisible against the darkness, so he appeared to be a floating head.

“It’s old Peach!” Perry whispered.

“Good old Peach!” Brendan put in. “He’s out patrolling!”

“It’s not him,” Lala said. “Not really. He’s gone to bed hours ago. It’s a dream image. He’s been wandering these corridors ever since my father descended to the Center and fell asleep. We’ll take his route.” We set out up the center tunnel, and soon his lantern flickered again, and old Peach stood before us, but looking past us, as if we weren’t there at all.

I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Hello, Mr. Peach,” but of course he said nothing. He simply stood there, as if barring the way. Hasbro stepped toward him sniffing, but his head went right through Mr. Peach’s leg, and in that moment Mr. Peach started forward again and passed through Hasbro and then Brendan and the rest of us like a ghost. We watched the glowing lantern move away down the tunnel, floating along. It flickered again and was gone.

We walked on in silence, the path angling ever downward. Other tunnels opened onto our own, all of them leading away in random directions, some upward and some down. Some were choked with rocks, as if the ceilings had fallen in, and some of them revealed open, empty pits that were murmuring vague noises and what sounded like breathing. Sometimes I could hear voices or laughter, but always from very far away. Some of the voices were familiar, as if I was hearing them inside my own memory, and I recited Humpty Dumpty continuously and stayed carefully to the middle of our own tunnel, not going near the open pits.

After a time it came to me that I could see beyond our circle of lantern light. There was a sort of twilight ahead of us, like being outdoors on a moonlit night, except there wasn’t any moon. We had entered another vast cavern, with stalactites and stalagmites towering away either side, and with more visible in the far distance. None of them cast a shadow, and neither did we, as if the light were imaginary. I was just about to point this out when Brendan said, “Listen!”

I heard a noise like wind blowing through tree branches, a swishing and rustling, and then the sound of someone talking—not like the murmuring from the pits in the ground, but real human speech. It stopped abruptly, and there was a dead silence, and we all held our breath listening, and in the silence a voice said, “Bear left,” quite clearly. Then another voice said, “I tell you we took the wrong turning.” I had heard the Creeper speak maybe three sentences in my whole life, but I would never forget his voice, and it was him who had spoken last.

“We’re in the Whispering Gallery,” Lala said, with her hands cupped over her mouth so that the sound of her voice couldn’t fly away into the emptiness. “They might be very close or they might be far away. Sound carries in the Whispering Gallery.” She put her finger to her lips, and we nodded, and started forward again, moving as soundlessly as we could. The windy swishing continued, with now and then a clearly uttered sentence or the distinct sound of footfalls. Sometimes it sounded as if it came from ahead of us, sometimes from behind us.

Then in an otherwise silent moment, Perry coughed, and we all stopped dead still and held our breath. We heard a woman’s voice this time—Ms Peckworthy, no doubt—saying, “What’s that?” very sharply, as if frightened.

“It’s them!” said the Creeper’s voice.

We heard the scuffling of feet, distinctly now, very close, and Ms Peckworthy’s voice saying, “Don’t leave me behind!” And then the Creeper saying, “Don’t be a-clinging to me!” Then a light appeared, bobbing in the darkness, far away to our left—how far we couldn’t tell—and three dark figures were moving in the light.

“Krikey!” Perry said. “He’s got an elephant rifle!”

I didn’t know about the elephant part, but the Creeper had a rifle, right enough—an immense thing, slung over his shoulder. If we could see them, then of course they could see us. Instantly we were running again, deeper into the earth, and never mind the noise.