Zeuglodon (2 page)

A little while later
 
—and this was the third bad thing of the day—a man named Mr. Asquith came out from Social Services and talked with Uncle Hedge and with Mrs. Hoover about the “attack,” as Ms Peckworthy had reported it (and that’s how we found out her name). Mrs. Hoover said it was all a lot of malarkey, that it wasn’t any kind of attack at all, and that Ms Peckworthy was a busybody who had tripped over her own feet. Then she said nice things about the three of us (leaving out Brendan’s making rude gestures) and about Uncle Hedge and Hasbro. Mr. Asquith nodded and said he was glad to hear it. Then he said he was parched, and he drank a glass of water in our kitchen where he chatted more with Uncle Hedge, although we were sent into the other room. Before he drove away he patted Hasbro on the top of the head and called him “old son,” which Hasbro very much appreciated. It seemed to me that Mr. Asquith was way too pleasant to take sides with someone like Ms Peckworthy.

But after Mr. Asquith left, Uncle Hedge called us together for another confab. He told us that we must take Ms Peckworthy very seriously, and not do anything that she could write down in her notebook. Thank goodness, he said, that she didn’t know about our run-in with the Creeper, because that was just the sort of thing that Aunt Ricketts would seize upon to prove that we were living in an unsafe environment. We didn’t want another visit from Mr. Asquith, Uncle Hedge told us, no matter how nice he seemed to be. He said this in a way that made even Brendan look worried.

It was Perry’s suggestion that I start this story with rousing action, which is what I tried to do. He says a reader wants some excitement right off, but I say that although that might be true, it’s both necessary and polite to introduce oneself, and that’s what I’m going to do now, because so far I’ve mostly neglected it. You already know about Hasbro, who like I said has some bulldog in him and several other noble things. You also know something about Ms Peckworthy and Aunt Ricketts, although the less you know about Aunt Ricketts the better. I wish
I
knew less about her.

At first I thought maybe I should let Perry write all this down, because besides being my cousin, he’s a writer and I’m not. I’m a scientist, although the science teacher at my school, Mr. Collier, says I have too much imagination, but that I might be a scientist when I grow up and forget what I think I know. I say that if a person forgets what she thinks she knows, it’s hardly worth growing up at all. Mr. Collier called that “Peter Pantheism,” but I don’t believe in isms, even if they involve Peter Pan.

My name is Kathleen, which is an Irish name. Uncle Hedge calls me Kath sometimes, but mostly he calls me Perkins, which is what Perry and Brendan call me, too, and it’s the name I prefer. I’m eleven years old and I’m what is called a cryptozoologist, which is a scientist who studies legendary animals, although the only reason they’re legendary is that they don’t appear very often. But how often does a comet appear? Most of the time it’s out wandering around in space, which is the same with so-called legendary animals, which wander around in the ocean, or in the high mountains, or in some other very distant and lonesome place, like Scotland, and you can hardly blame them. That’s why I carry the evidence camera. You never know when a giant octopus or a mermaid is going to rise up out of the ocean.

What do I look like, you ask? I’m not very tall, and I have dark hair that I keep short because it’s easy. I have brown eyes, and although Brendan won’t admit it, I’m taller than he is, if you measure carefully and he doesn’t cheat. And I’m older too, by more than a year. In three months I’ll be twelve, and he’ll still be ten, which seems to bother him. But he’s young, and so maybe he’s sensitive. Brendan was named after the great Irish navigator who came to America in a small boat with nothing but a telescope and a fishing pole and who is now a Saint. (I’ll tell you more about Brendan some other time, when he’s not looking over my shoulder to see what I’m writing down, which is rude if it goes on for very long, which it very definitely has.)

I was named after Kathleen Ricketts, who is also our Aunt Ricketts. Sometimes I wish I were named after Joan of Arc instead. When Joan of Arc went off to war, someone said very rudely that she should stay home to cook and sew, and she told them that there were already plenty of women to cook and spin, which showed a great deal of spirit. Of course later they burned her at the stake, but probably not just because of her comment about cooking and spinning.

Just so you know, Perry is tall, especially for his age, which is thirteen. He’s already as tall as Uncle Hedge, and very skinny. He has dark hair that falls into his eyes and makes it seem like he’s peering at everything. He reminds me of Sherlock Holmes in the old movies, even his nose, except he doesn’t smoke a pipe and he doesn’t wear one of those coming-and-going hats.

The town we live in is called Caspar, which you pronounce like the name of the friendly ghost. It’s near the city of Fort Bragg in northern California. Caspar can be a lonesome place, especially in winter. When I look out my bedroom window, down toward the Sea Cove, there’s nothing but ocean for eleven thousand miles, and then you run into Japan, which is another thing that some people thought was legendary until three Portuguese sailors washed up on the beach in a storm and “discovered” it.

Our great Uncle Hedgepeth is our mothers’ uncle. Perry and Brendan don’t have the same mother as me, but our mothers had the same uncle because they were sisters, and that uncle is Uncle Hedge. Uncle Hedge has a sister, too, and that’s Aunt Ricketts. Perry and Brendan are orphans.

I’m not an orphan, although my father died very young—too young for me to remember him. I live with Uncle Hedge because my mother, Abigail Perkins, is missing. When her deep sea submersible vanished in the Sargasso Sea two years ago, she was searching for the oceanic tunnel that connects our own Atlantic Ocean with the ancient ocean that lies within the land at the center of the hollow earth. If you’ve read Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs (who called the land Pellucidar) you’ve heard of it. Probably you think it’s a made up place, but I know for a fact that it’s not. My mother’s submersible was never found, and the scientific research vessel that took her to the Sargasso Sea sank with all hands, although nobody knows how or why or quite where, because the Sargasso Sea is vast and empty and is a place where strange and cryptic things occur.

I don’t talk about what happened to my mother, because when I do, people get a sort of frozen stare on their faces, like they’ve been petrified. I wrote a paper about the interior world for my science class after reading a book called
The Hollow Earth
by Dr. Raymond Bernard. The book is a scientific account of Admiral Richard Byrd’s discovery of the polar opening to the interior world, and about his finding warm water currents flowing out of that world into the icy water of the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, carrying flowers and seeds and the leaves of extinct species of trees. Mr. Collier said that the book was a barrel of half-baked baloney, but for a cryptozoologist like me it’s very interesting indeed, no matter how much it’s baked.

You can believe in Pellucidar or not, and I won’t blame you if you don’t. But like I said before, no one believed in Japan, either, until they got there, and then there they were. Uncle Hedge worries when I talk about my mother still being alive, partly because he blames himself that she’s gone, and partly because he thinks I’m getting my hopes up and will only be disappointed. But I think that
up
is the only place to get your hopes, because otherwise they’re not hopes.

There are two things I have to tell you about Uncle Hedge, and both of them are actually
very
strange. One thing is that he’s the caretaker of the Secret Museum near Glass Beach in Fort Bragg. It’s a museum that’s a kind of warehouse rather than the kind of museum you buy a ticket to, and it’s full of odd and unlikely things, which you’ll learn about very soon. Another thing is that John Toliver Hedgepeth is one of the secret geniuses of the world. And I don’t mean that he’s one of the secret
smart
people of the world when I say that. I mean genius like in “evil genius” except that Uncle Hedge is one of the good sort, unlike Professor Moriarity or Fu Manchu or Dr. Hilario Frosticos, or other infamous bad people who have their vile fingers in every variety of crime. (The word “vile” spells “evil” if you mix the letters around. Perry pointed this out, and is writing a codebook of significant words.) The thing is, you don’t as often hear about the good geniuses as you do the evil ones, and even if you did hear about the good ones you wouldn’t know whether they were merely very good and very smart both together, or whether they were some other kind of thing.

That’s what John Toliver Hedgepeth is—some other kind of thing. And he isn’t the only one. They’re a kind of secret society, except Uncle Hedge doesn’t really keep it a secret, because no one believes it anyway, which he says is way better than a secret. They call themselves the Guild of St. George, after George of Merry England, who famously killed the dragon and slew the necromancer Ormadine and became one of the Seven Champions of Christendom. It’s the Guild that actually owns the Secret Museum. Uncle Hedge’s able assistant is Old Sally, who lives at the museum and is our great good friend. Who is Dr. Hilario Frosticos, you ask? He’s the nemesis of the Guild of St. George, but I don’t want to talk about him until I absolutely have to.

Uncle Hedge didn’t tell us about his being a secret genius, by the way, because that would be too much like bragging. Mr. Vegeley told us. Mr. Cyrus Vegeley owns the Albion Doughnut Shop out on the Coast Highway in Caspar. Believe it or not, it’s a haunted doughnut shop, although that doesn’t figure into this story, and so I’m not going to mention it. Its address is number 13, which is one of the three significant numbers, especially if something is haunted, and which might or might not be a coincidence depending on whether you believe in coincidences. I mostly don’t.

Later that afternoon, when Mr. Asquith left, we drove down to the Albion and ate doughnuts, because Uncle Hedge said that we wanted a little something to “put us back on our feet.” And that’s where the next chapter starts, with the Principal Characters eating doughnuts at the Albion Doughnut Shop, Number 13, The Coast Road, Caspar, California, on the very far edge of the Western World.

I remember it was four in the afternoon, which Uncle Hedge calls “the doughnut hour” after the famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose middle name sounds like bubblegum if you’ve got a really lot of it in your mouth. We drove down to the Albion in Uncle Hedge’s Cadillac Coupe de Ville, which is very old, and which has tremendous long fins in the back. You can’t really call it a “car” which is too small a word. Uncle Hedge calls it “the vehicle,” and Mr. Vegeley calls it “the rig.” We three call it the “Zeuglodon,” which you pronounce like zoo, but with a glow-don attached to it. Zeuglodons were enormous sea creatures that supposedly died out during the Cretaceous period, many millions of years ago, although I have my suspicions about that. We have the bones of one in the Secret Museum.

The Zeuglodon automobile is a sort of watery blue, with balloon-like white-wall tires. Uncle Hedge keeps it ferociously clean. One time when it got a dent in it Mr. Vegeley popped the dent back out with a plumber’s helper, the rubber kind you use to unplug sinks. It left a big round mark that wouldn’t wash off. Perry and I told Brendan it was from the tentacle of a giant octopus, which maybe gave Brendan “ideas,” as they say, since he’s been seeing giant octopi ever since.

We were the only ones in the doughnut shop besides Mr. Vegeley, who is always in the doughnut shop unless he’s not. He serves doughnuts in little plastic baskets, pink, blue, or yellow, with a sheet of waxed paper. It’s all very decorative. Mr. Vegeley calls glazed doughnuts “the true quill” and he often quotes an old Irish saying that goes, “A plain glazed doughnut is your only man,” which Brendan finds confusing despite his illustrious namesake having been Irish. By late in the afternoon, the sugar on the outside of the glazed doughnuts has hardened into little sheets, like crisp paper, and it’s really very good—so good that it was hard to pay attention to Brendan, who was yammering on about what he calls his “general theory of navigation,” telling us that he’s never in his life been lost, because direction is perfectly simple. North, he was telling us, is always straight ahead. That’s how St. Brendan the Navigator found North America and why sailors follow the North Star. If they follow the North Star they always get there, wherever it is, and it’s naturally always straight ahead. But I pointed out to him that if you’re at the North Pole, standing right on top of it, and you start from there, then
south
is always straight ahead and north is always behind you, which makes a sad mockery of his theory of navigation. What Brendan knows about navigation you can put in your hat, and Perry was just telling him he could put it there when the phone rang, which it hardly ever does at a doughnut shop.

Mr. Vegeley said “Uh huh” three times and then hung up the phone, looking worried and untying his apron. “It’s Old Sally,” he said to Uncle Hedge. “Someone’s broken into the museum.”

“She’s not hurt?” Uncle Hedge asked anxiously, but already he was out of his chair and heading for the door.

Mr. Vegeley was switching around the “Open” sign so that it became a “Closed” sign, and was saying that Old Sally wasn’t hurt, but had been locked into the kitchen by the intruder and had just now gotten free. Outside we climbed into the Zeuglodon, with Hasbro sitting on the back seat with the three of us, and we drove away hell for leather toward Glass Beach and the Secret Museum. (I borrowed that phrase from Perry. I don’t really know what “hell for leather” means besides fast, and neither does Perry.)

The sky was cloudy now from a storm coming in off the ocean, which had blown the remnants of the morning fog away. The clouds were moving along very low on the sea wind, and the ocean was dark and rough and streaked with foam. Glass Beach is on the north side of Fort Bragg, nearly to Pudding Creek. You turn left past the Skunk Train and past the lumber mill and hundreds of stacks of piled up lumber to where the road turns to dirt. The museum is in a big open field on your right. It’s made of gray wood, the color of fog, and it looks like a warehouse, which in fact it was, back in the old days. Behind the museum, all the way down to the cliffs above Glass Beach, there’s another open field, although it’s not really “open,” because it’s over your head in mustard weeds and berry vines, so thick that unless you know about the tunnels that go through it you can’t get across it at all, but have to take the Glass Beach Trail. We drove up to the museum just as it was starting to rain hard. Old Sally was standing out front waiting for us, holding an open umbrella and looking large and irritable. She’s got what is sometimes called a “rough-and-ready” face.

“He’s gone into the shrubbery,” she said at once, pointing into the field.

“What did he look like?” Uncle Hedge asked her, but she said she didn’t know for absolute certain. She had only seen his shadow when he slipped up on her unawares and shut her into the kitchen. Then he had pushed something against the door, done his dirty work, and gone out again, the stinking pig. She had seen only his dark shadow ducking away into the field. He was carrying something—almost certainly one of the exhibit cases. But she couldn’t be sure what it was, and the Secret Museum is full of exhibit cases.

Uncle Hedge told the three of us to “stay out of trouble,” and then he and Mr. Vegeley headed down the open trail toward Glass Beach. The tunnel through the vegetation leads that same way, and once the man came out of the tunnel and onto the beach they would have him trapped. Because of the surf and the rocks at the top end of the beach, he couldn’t get away to the north, and unless he meant to swim for it he would have to come back down the beach toward the trail and the lumberyards at the south end in order to escape, and there they’d have him. We went inside the museum with Old Sally to look for clues, although Old Sally wasn’t interested in clues, but wanted to put on a pot of coffee.

It was shadowy inside the museum even though the lamps were on and even though what was left of the day was still coming in through skylights in the high ceiling. There was the sound of rain on the roof as we walked up and down the aisles between the exhibits, which are sort of frozen, staring back at you from behind dusty glass. Some of them are stuffed and some of them are floating in alcohol or formaldehyde, and some of them are boxed up in crates so that you can’t see them at all. The first thing you notice, because you can see it from everywhere, is the skeleton of the zeuglodon—not Uncle Hedgepeth’s car, but a real zeuglodon skeleton, sort of, that’s eighty feet long and looks like a giant sea serpent. Its toothy, long head is way up by one of the skylights in the ceiling, and its long neck curves down and down into its body, which is shaped like a narrow egg, if you can imagine that, but an egg with flippers. It was the terror of the seas back in the Mesozoic era. All of it is just bones, of course. Silver wires hold it to the ceiling. I said it was a
sort of
real skeleton because actually it was made out of pieces of
four
skeletons that were dug up in Arkansas a long time ago by the charlatan Dr. Albert Koch, who fastened four sets of neck bones together to fool people into thinking it was a very long sea serpent and not a zeuglodon at all. Here’s what’s funny: when people found out that they were being fooled, they didn’t care, but came to see it anyway, and
paid
to see it, which is another thing that goes to show you.

Anyway, almost as soon as we started looking for clues, Brendan shouted that the Hopkinsville Goblin was missing. But it wasn’t. Brendan was in the wrong aisle. The goblin was in its glass case next to the mummified Mayan Princess and the Fish Eye Array, which is two dozen glass globes with fishes’ eyeballs floating inside. The biggest is a whale’s eye that’s as big as your head, and the smallest is the eye of a gummidgefish, which you can’t even see without an immense magnifying glass, and even then it might just be a speck of dust on the lens.

“
Concentrate
,” Perry said. “What would a thief break into the museum to steal?”

Before anything came into my mind, Brendan shouted, “Thomas Edison!” and we all rushed over to the cabinet with Thomas Edison’s last breath inside. His breath isn’t just floating around in the cabinet. It’s in a jar with a twist-on lid that’s very old and a little rusty and with wax melted around the edge of the lid to seal it so that the breath doesn’t escape. Henry Ford himself captured it in the jar when Mr. Edison expired (which means died and which also means breathed, which I think is very interesting indeed). Henry Ford was famous for inventing the assembly line, which Uncle Hedge says is one of the most famous of all the lines, including the equator, although he says it’s inferior to the chorus line. When Mr. Edison died he was in the middle of building a spirit telephone that would allow you to talk to dead people. It worked, too, except nobody knew the number, or at least that’s what Uncle Hedge told us. The spirit telephone is in the museum, too, and some day we’re going to crank it up and see who answers.

Thomas Edison’s last breath was still in the jar, or at least the jar was still in the cabinet and the lid was still waxed onto it. The spirit telephone was next to it in a glass box, safe and sound. We went on down the aisle and right away we saw what
was
gone. It was the Feejee Mermaid, which is in a sealed box made out of glass and wood. I don’t mean the fake mermaid that P.T. Barnum the circus man had, which was sewn up out of monkeys and carp skin, but the
real
Feejee Mermaid, which washed up out onto a South Seas island in a storm and dried out in the sun until she was the color of a coconut and had shrunk down to about three feet tall.

Perry found a footprint in the dust, and he went back after the gummidgefish magnifying glass in order to detectify it. Brendan and Hasbro went off to look around the rest of the exhibits to see whether anything else was gone. But it would have taken both hands to carry off the Mermaid, and so I didn’t think that the thief could have stolen anything else, not if he was escaping on foot. I went to ask Old Sally whether the Mermaid had maybe been put somewhere else and hadn’t been stolen at all. Old Sally said that the Mermaid must have been what the thief was carrying when he ran, the filthy scoundrel, because the box was just that size.

I went back into the museum where right away I ran into Perry acting suspiciously. There’s a workroom off the hallway that’s about as big as someone’s garage, with lumber in it and sheets of glass and tools and cans of paint. It has a wooden floor that’s kind of beat up and stained, with a piece of carpet in the middle of it. Perry was standing in the hallway, leaning over and looking in through the open door. He turned and waved at me to hurry, and he put his finger to his lips. When I looked past him, I saw right off that the window was pushed wide open. The cold wind that was blowing in smelled like rain, and the floor was wet around it, and there were muddy footprints leading from the window to a place in the middle of the floor where the rug had been hauled back and a trap door was standing open.

I didn’t need a magnifying glass to figure out what had happened. The thief hadn’t gone down to the beach at all, but had stowed the mermaid somewhere and come in through the window to finish the job. Perry made a pushing gesture, meaning the trapdoor, and I nodded. We tiptoed forward like Hansel and Gretel sneaking up on the witch, listening to the shuffling and scraping under the floor. We were very nearly close enough when suddenly we saw a hand come out, and we stopped dead. The rest of him was hidden by the open door, so he couldn’t have seen us yet, although maybe he heard our footsteps on the floorboards. Very slowly he peered past the edge of the door straight at us. It was Lord Wheyface the Creeper, and the look on his face was poisonous.