Zeuglodon (19 page)

We went up the Passage, bound for home, with Lala and her father going on ahead and Brendan and Perry and Hasbro a few paces behind, trying to keep the lantern light from shining into the Sleeper’s eyes. Ms Peckworthy and I came along behind them. The bees were quieter now, as if some of them had gone off to work and the hive was emptying out. That worried me, because I didn’t know what it meant.

“Is that strange man still
asleep
?” Ms Peckworthy whispered to me.

I said that he was, and that we were sleepwalking him home. And then I told her what I knew, because she had spent most of the last week being confused about almost everything. I told her that the Passage we were in was part of the Sleeper’s dream, and that he mustn’t wake up, or else the tunnel might go to the place where dreams go when a person awakens, and maybe that’s where we’d go too, although we couldn’t say for sure where that was, and didn’t want to find out. “If I say ‘run,’” I told her, “we have to
really
run.”

She gripped my arm a little bit tighter, and asked, “How do you know such strange things?”

“I read a lot,” I said, and then for a long time we went on in silence, moving along steadily in our little circle of lantern light. I looked back down the tunnel, anticipating the appearance of Dr. Frosticos despite Brendan having cut the bridge loose. I tried to think of how much time it would take him, desperate as he must be, to descend into that gorge, ford the stream, and climb the other side. But that unhappy thought was interrupted by something much worse, although it would have been funny in the light of day.

Hasbro was walking between Lala and the Sleeper now, looking from one to the other as if it was great fun. In a fit of happiness he licked Mr. Peach on the hand, and Mr. Peach said, “Doggy!” just as clear as anything, and very cheerfully.

The sound of his voice speaking out sensibly like that made Lala stop and turn toward him, sort of gaping in fear, and when she did, Perry nearly ran into the back of her. He yanked the lantern sideways so that it wouldn’t burn her, and the lantern knocked against the rock wall of the tunnel. The glass broke, oil spilled out, and thank goodness it didn’t splatter on anyone, because the oil caught fire, and for the space of thirty seconds the spray of oil on the wall and floor blazed away as light as day, and everybody’s horrified faces were frozen in the moment. The Sleeper, thank heavens, didn’t open his eyes. The firelight dwindled, faded away entirely, and left us in darkness.

We went on, of course, but even more slowly, the dark pressing down around us like a weight. After a time the Sleeper began to mutter, his voice rising and falling. Mostly he said wild and nonsensical things, but now and then he threw in a phrase that made daytime sense. Clearly he was waking up, but taking his time about it, thank heaven, like a tortoise that’s been hibernating. I had one hand out in front of me so that I wouldn’t run into Brendan and Perry, and the other on the wall of the tunnel in order to keep straight. Ms Peckworthy held onto a fistful of my jacket and muttered, “Oh my!” and “I just don’t
know
!” pretty steadily under her breath. The wild-eyed Ms Peckworthy of the elephant gun caper had disappeared when the lamp went out.

Very slowly there arose around us the sound of creaking and straining and grinding. It was very faint at first, a noise like you’d imagine an earthquake might make, moving deep within the earth, and at first I thought it must be my imagination.

Then I heard Ms Peckworthy whisper, “What’s that
noise
?” in a fearful way, and Hasbro growled as if he sensed that something bad was happening. The floor of the Passage began to vibrate ominously, and seemed to tilt, and the sound of moving rock grew louder, then dimmed again and fell silent.

Then a light blinked on in the distance, and Brendan said, “It’s old Peach!” just as another rumbling and heaving shook the Passage, nearly throwing us to the ground. It didn’t stop this time, but worsened, as dust and rock cascaded down around us.

Lala shouted, “Run!” and we were all running, not blindly now, but toward the light. There was no more keeping quiet. We were running for our lives. We all knew it, just like you know it in a nightmare. I could see the silhouette of the Sleeper a few feet ahead, sort of skipping along, Lala gripping his hand. I hoped he would linger a little longer in his dream, but the thought vanished out of my mind when I realized that there was no longer anyone holding on to my jacket. I had lost Ms Peckworthy! I stopped and turned, but there was only darkness behind. She had let go of me, but when? How far back? If she had shouted out, I hadn’t heard her….

I turned and ran back without anyone knowing. If I had shouted to let them know, Brendan and Perry and Hasbro would have followed me, and then there would have been five of us in trouble instead of two. I didn’t
want
to go back. I’ll tell you that truthfully. Dr. Frosticos was back there somewhere, and the whole Passage was alive with rumbling. I wanted to follow the others toward the light. I wanted to see the sun or the moon, it didn’t matter which, and I wanted to be back at the St. George lying in my bed.

But I had to find her. Ms Peckworthy had saved us. She had stuck by us ever since that first day on Mrs. Hoover’s front lawn, whether we wanted her to or not. Even the idea of Aunt Ricketts didn’t matter—not in that moment.

I groped through the blind darkness, feeling the tremors in the rock, hearing the grinding and shifting again, louder now. There was a shock, like the first jolt of an earthquake, and I fell, tearing the knees out of my jeans. The only thing that would save me or Ms Peckworthy, though, was speed, and so I got up and went on.

Tiny firefly lights began to blink on here and there, as they had when we were entering the room of dreams, but this time they weren’t winking out again. It was as if daylight were filling up the Passage.
He’s waking up
, I thought, and in that moment I saw Ms Peckworthy, twenty feet farther along, sitting on the floor and holding her head in her hands. She apparently heard my footsteps and looked up, clearly surprised that she could see. “Child!” she started to say, but I said, “No time to talk,” and I hauled her to her feet.

“You
shouldn’t
have come back!” she moaned as I tried to get her moving. “I was worn out—nothing but a rusty old sea anchor.
Now I’ve dragged you down with me
. G…g…go on!” she said, “Save yourself! Your Aunt Ricketts would want it! I don’t matter!”

“It’s Aunt Ricketts that doesn’t matter,” I told her, angry on Ms Peckworthy’s behalf. But it was then that I saw him coming—Dr. Frosticos, running through the darkness. I could scarcely believe it. He seemed to be glowing, too, in the firefly light, as if his ghastly white hair and skin was luminescent. He rushed up the tunnel like a nightmare, his eyes wide, his mouth half open. I screamed and gave Ms Peckworthy a tremendous yank. She suddenly came alive, and within moments she was running like a greyhound, with me behind her now, shouting, “Go! Go!” completely unnecessarily.

I could feel his presence behind me, like a rushing shadow. The ground shook again, hard this time, and both of us lurched sideways, colliding with the wall. There was a terrific grinding noise, and the sound of rocks clattering like boulders tumbling into a canyon. It was the sound of the dream collapsing in on itself.

Suddenly Cardigan Peach appeared forty or fifty feet from us, holding the lantern out before him, showing us the way through a haze of rock dust. We ran toward him, with such a banging and rumbling and grinding in the air that it sounded like the end of the world. I saw Patrick Cotter’s gate swinging open ahead, and I saw Perry and Brendan beyond, looking back at us with wild fear on their faces.
Stay!
I shouted, knowing they meant to come to our rescue, but before the shout was uttered, the Passage collapsed behind us with a great, howling, crashing boom that nearly slammed us over.

A dusty wind swept past, and the gate swung on its hinges, and I could smell the weedy, wet smell of the boathouse cellar. Then I saw Patrick Cotter’s bones scattered on the stones of the floor and the fallen lock with the key still in it, and Brendan and Perry and Hasbro still staring back toward the Passage. That’s when I slowed down and stopped, almost unable to take another step.

There was a silence now, no rumbling or crashing. No sound but our breathing and the quiet splashing of water against the outer wall of the boathouse. Behind us, beyond the open gate, there was no sign of the tunnel, no sign of Dr. Frosticos, only solid rock. The Windermere Passage had closed.

We all went up the stairs together, hearing noises above. A full moon shone through the windows of the boathouse, where Uncle Hedge and Mr. Wattsbury were just coming in through the door, which Lala and her father had opened for them. I was so relieved that I almost laughed out loud. Ms Peckworthy looked like a skinny goblin in her ragged dress, and Giles Peach stood blinking around, still wearing his pointed cloth nightcap and obviously groggy from a long sleep. Lala was hugging him, and he was hugging her, and Hasbro was bounding around as if it had been nothing but a big fat adventure, which is one of the glories of being a dog, because almost everything is.

It was two in morning when we left Lala and Mr. Peach behind after saying our goodbyes. We left Mr. Wattsbury’s boat on the beach, not having any gas, and came home in the boat that Mr. Wattsbury and Uncle Hedge had commandeered in order to come after us. A half hour after setting out from the dock at Peach Manor, we sat down around the table at the St. George and ate an early morning breakfast that Mrs. Wattsbury put out for us. This time I
did
eat it, too, with about ten rashers of bacon and a ton of toast and jam. And all the time we were shoving it down we were telling our stories.

There was no sign of the sea anchor in Ms Peckworthy, who joined right in, and said that if it wasn’t for me, she would have been left behind and buried in the Passage. She was grateful, she said, and owed me her life, and she meant it, too. We said the same to her, and told Uncle Hedge and the Wattsburies about the elephant rifle, and about the footbridge and what happened to the Creeper. The really funny thing was that Ms Peckworthy realized that she had got caught up in one of Uncle Hedge’s shenanigans. Now that she was safe and eating bacon and eggs, it seemed like a very glorious shenanigan to her all the way around.

She went on about how she had followed Mr. Wattsbury through town when he had left for the aquarium, but had lost sight of him near the lake. When she caught up with him again, he was lying on the ground bleeding, and she had gone in through the open door, sure that we were in terrible trouble, and not knowing that Mr. Wattsbury had come to his senses and followed her. She had whacked them and whacked them with her umbrella, she said, as if she couldn’t wait to do it all again, cave bear and all. St. George himself would have given her three cheers by the time she was done telling it.

Brendan got up and went upstairs, and when he came back down he shocked us all. He was carrying Ms Peckworthy’s notebook! He hadn’t burned in the sea cave at all, nor read it either, because he had started feeling ashamed that he had stolen it. He gave it to Ms Peckworthy now and apologized like a gentleman, and she apologized for having underestimated us, and by the end of breakfast we were great good friends, and Ms Peckworthy said that she had been wrong to say that we were troublemakers and layabouts, and that she meant to tell that very thing to Aunt Ricketts and Social Services and anyone else who needed to be told.

What does that go to show you? That people can change, and that they
do
change, sometimes in big ways, which it’s easy to forget when you start thinking of someone as your nemesis and forget that you don’t really know them at all.

It was nearly dawn when I took out my camera to snap a photo of the whole jolly scene. That led to my looking at the pictures from Pellucidar, and everyone crowding around to see. Mrs. Wattsbury said they were “unbelievable,” which they were. The word made me think of Mr. Collier, and how his face would look when I handed in my photographic diary, which would be like nothing he had imagined. I had been worried that the pterodactyl would look like a pelican, but it didn’t. It looked like just what it was, soaring through a blue sky with the jungle-clad cliffs beyond. The snails looked perfectly enormous because of the trees and plants behind them, and the wooly mammoths on the meadow didn’t appear to be a museum exhibit at all, unless the exhibit was the size of a football field. But the best was the zeuglodon, half out of the water and twisted around toward us, with the ocean and the rocks as a backdrop. Brendan’s face was in the bottom of the picture, all wide-eyed and with his mouth open, as if he was looking at his doom.

I had taken only twelve photos in all, but no one who looked at them would have any doubt. The photos would take the “crypto” out of “cryptozoology.” The Windermere Passage had closed, but the proof of Pellucidar still resided inside my camera. I sat there thinking about it, happy and tired and full. But as so often happens, one thought led to another, and somehow I began to think about the explosion of that elephant rifle echoing in the distance and the look on Lala’s face when she heard it.

The sound of people talking cheerfully filled the room around me, but I wasn’t listening now. I was remembering the look that Lala had given me when she first saw my camera outside the mouth of the cave. It came into my mind that a camera could be just like an elephant rifle if you aimed it at the wrong thing and didn’t think very hard before you set it off.

I sat there for a time, just thinking. Then I erased the photo of the pterodactyl. Before I could talk myself out of it, I kept on going, sending the mammoths and the snails and the birds and even the zeuglodon back to their rightful home.