Zeuglodon (3 page)

Perry leaped forward and threw himself against the door, which slammed down, knocking the Creeper back into the hole but banging against his wrist and hand and not closing all the way. We heard him shout, a really angry shout, and Perry tried to kick his hand back under the edge of the door so we could get it down flat and trap him. The hand twisted and caught Perry’s ankle, and Perry tripped and fell away from the trap door with the Creeper still holding onto him. I jumped for it, pushing hard against it, but it was no use, and the door opened hard and threw me backward. Brendan ran in, goggled at us, and ran back out just as the Creeper let go of Perry, tossed an old leather briefcase out of the hole and onto the floor, and hauled himself out. Perry scrambled away, and the Creeper clambered to his feet and bent over to snatch up the briefcase.

Run first
, I told myself, but before I could take a step he lunged straight at me. I screamed and tried to twist aside, but quick as a snake he grabbed me by the jacket, then threw his arm around my waist and started dragging me back toward the window. I screamed again and thrashed around, but he held on tight, and I just knew that he was going to drag me right out through the window, and so I started kicking and flailing my arms around and hitting him with my elbows, and if I could have got to him, I would have bitten him, too.

Perry rushed forward like a hero and tried to grab the briefcase that the Creeper was holding onto, but the Creeper fought him off with his free hand, with Perry bobbing back and forth, and all the time we were backing up toward the window. Old Sally ran into the room clutching a broom and looking as much like an army as any single person can look. Brendan followed behind her, carrying the gummidgefish globe with both hands like he was going to smash the man with it. Then Hasbro dashed in, barking like a mad thing, but very confused and distracted by the hole in the floor until he saw that it was the Creeper who was causing the problem and went after his boot again. Old Sally slammed the Creeper with the broom right on the side of the head, and he grunted and jerked back. My feet left the floor as he picked me up to shield himself from the broom, shouting, “Stop!” so loud that everyone
did
stop, including Hasbro.

Brendan was holding the gummidgefish globe over his head, and Old Sally gripped her broom like a spear. Perry was breathing hard and kind of shaky. Nobody could do anything without hurting me, or without the Creeper hurting me. He shuffled backward a couple of steps, carrying me even closer to the open window. He pitched the briefcase backward out into the rain, and for an awful moment I thought he was going to throw me out the window too. Instead he sort of twisted me around and stared at me. I hoped to never see a face like that again, it was so mean and ugly and hateful.

“Mark my words,” he said in an evil way, “I’ll know you again, pillbug,” and he dropped me onto the floor right then and there and slid out through the window quick as a wink. Old Sally threw the broom, though, and it hit him square in the back, and although he jerked a little and grunted, it didn’t stop him. He picked up the briefcase and ran along the side of the museum in a downpour of rain, heading toward the ocean. Perry grabbed the gummidgefish globe out of Brendan’s hands, because it looked like Brendan was going to throw it through the window, just out of excitement. If it broke, the invisible gummidgefish eye would have been lost forever in the weeds, because it’s very nearly impossible to find an invisible eye once it’s gotten lost.

Old Sally helped me up, and we headed straight out of the workroom and toward the front door of the museum, just as it swung open and Uncle Hedge and Mr. Vegeley came in, a minute too late. One good thing, though—they were carrying the Feejee Mermaid, safe and sound.

“He came back!” Old Sally shouted at them, and she pointed in the direction he had gone just moments before. Mr. Vegeley set down the Mermaid and both of them turned straightaway and went back out into the rain toward the tunnel, moving wonderfully fast for their size. We followed behind them now, Hasbro, too, because nobody had time to tell us not to, and we plunged right into the tunnel with Uncle Hedge leading the way.

The first thing we did was slow down, because it was dark in among the vines and mustard plants, with only a little daylight showing through. The farther we got down the tunnel, the darker it became. It was still kind of dry in there despite the rain, which shows you how thick the vegetation was. You had to stick right to the center, because if you got over to the side of the tunnel, the thorns on the berry vines would scrape you. As it was they kept snatching at my hair and jacket.

“This is no good,” Uncle Hedge said, stopping at last. He looked behind him and was surprised to see us. “You children go back. Now,” he said. He wasn’t smiling when he said this, and we turned around and started back like he told us. I didn’t mind, because the rainwater had started dripping from the tangle of vines overhead now, and was running down my neck and the back of my jacket, and the tunnel smelled like old moldy leaves and other discarded things.

I was glad to get back to the museum kitchen, where the heater was going, although as soon as I got in and was safe, the strangest thing happened. I started shaking all over and then started to cry, because I couldn’t help it. It was as if I could feel the Creeper’s arm around me and see his face again. Brendan and Perry told me it was all right to cry, and so did Old Sally, who poured hot cocoa for us and found some cookies in the larder, as she calls the pantry, and pretty soon I was all right again.

In about ten minutes Uncle Hedge and Mr. Vegeley came back empty-handed. They hadn’t caught the Creeper, who had probably doubled back up the Glass Beach trail and gone into the lumberyards. Old Sally poured cups of coffee for the two of them and then poured one for herself, and Uncle Hedge had us tell him the story from the beginning—how Perry had hear suspicious noises, which led him to the workroom, and how he and I had tried to imprison the Creeper by closing the trap door, but had failed.

“So he took the briefcase!” Uncle Hedge said when I got to that part. For some reason he didn’t seem unhappy about it, which was strange, although it wasn’t something that I paid attention to at the moment. “And the three of you!” he said, looking narrowly at us. “I believe I told you to stay out of trouble, and here you were attacking this Creeper fellow with your bare hands. He might have hurt you just because you had gotten in his way, and nothing served by it either.”

“We didn’t know who he was,” I said, “and we didn’t
want
to fight with him.” It sounded like a lame excuse, because it was.

“It was very brave of you,” Uncle Hedge said in a kindly way. “And I honor you for it, but it was the wrong thing to do. It was an IQ test, and you two failed it. I believe a possum could have passed it. I’ll remind you that Ms Peckworthy would take a dim view if one of you were to be knocked on the head or carried away. Let
me
attend to the man, if he needs attending to. Probably he’s long gone by now, and with any luck he’ll keep going.”

“What was that thing he stole?” Brendan asked. “That old briefcase?”

Uncle Hedge thought for a minute, as if he were making up his mind whether to tell us or not, because maybe it was too dangerous to tell us. I could see that he didn’t want us mixed up in this thing at all, whatever it was. But then because we were
already
mixed up in it, he
did
tell us, and this is what he said: the Creeper had stolen some hand-written journals—the journals of a man named Basil Peach, a member of the Guild of St. George, and an adventurer and explorer. Peach’s explorations took him to far-flung parts of the world, and he made maps of secret places, which he drew right into the journals. Some of his maps charted openings into the land at the center of the Earth, and it was one of those maps that had led my mother into the depths of the Sargasso Sea, never to return. The Feejee Mermaid belonged to Basil’s ancient father, Cardigan Peach.

Uncle Hedge hadn’t seen Basil Peach for a long time, nearly twenty years, and during that time the Mermaid and the briefcase with the maps and journal had been stored in the Secret Museum for safe keeping, except it turned out not to be all that safe after all. The Creeper wanted the very two things in the museum that were the rightful property of the Peach family. But why? That was the unanswered question. There was a silver lining to the whole thing though. Uncle Hedge had removed the most important maps from the journals back when my mother made her fateful trip to the Sargasso, and he kept them locked up safe at home. The Creeper thought he had the maps, you see, but he didn’t, or at least he didn’t have the ones that mattered.

By the time we left the museum, taking the Mermaid with us, it was dark. The rain had stopped, but the night was cold and the sky was full of tearing clouds, with the moon appearing and then disappearing behind them. When we turned up the Coast Road, past the Skunk Train Station, what should I see parked in the lot but a tiny red car with someone sitting inside. “Ms Peckworthy!” I said, and everyone looked, and sure enough it
was
her, alone in the dark car, waiting.

But waiting for what? Or perhaps for whom? We drove along in silence, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether the Creeper had gone out of our lives now that he had gotten the briefcase, or whether he had been drawn more deeply into them. “Mark my words,” he had told me. “I’ll know you again.” The memory of it made me shudder, and I had to force myself to think about other things.

That night after dinner we were eating vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup in the kitchen. Uncle Hedge let us dish it out, because it had been a long day, and we had four scoops apiece in big bowls with so much chocolate syrup that there was a chocolate lake in the bottom. Brendan said the lake was a tar pit and the scoops of ice cream were the sinking bodies of albino wooly mammoths, but he had only just thought this up when Uncle Hedge cleared his throat in a meaningful way. We forgot about the mammoths and the tar pits because he looked serious and thoughtful.

“You recall Mr. Asquith?” he said, and of course all of us did.

“I think he was nice,” Brendan said.

“That he was,” Uncle Hedge said, “and lucky for us that he
was
nice. This business at the Museum has set me thinking, though.” He took off his spectacles and polished them on the tail of his shirt, and then he held them up and looked through them before putting them back on. I could see that he was trying to think up the right words to say, as if they were important words, but even so I was surprised at what he said next.

“Ms Peckworthy has something important to tell us,” he said, “and I want all of us to listen to her.”

“
Peckworthy
!” Brendan said, snorting it out through his nose.

Uncle Hedge held up his hand and shook his head. “Never you mind her for the moment. What I mean to say is that…is that I’ve tried to be a father to you three, and maybe sometimes I haven’t done as good a job as I might have.”

Immediately we all shouted that he had too, but he waved us quiet and went on. “Sometimes a man is good at being a father because there’s a good mother alongside of him.”

“There’s Old Sally,” Brendan put in.

“And we’re lucky to have her. But she’s not a mother, is she? And I’m not a father,” he said, “not really, although I do what I can.”

He drew in a deep breath and fell silent for a moment. Old Sally had told me once that our mothers were the daughters that Uncle Hedge never had, although now he’s got me, which I hope makes up for it a little bit. Perry and Brendan were very quiet now, and I was, too, because I was thinking about my mother, just like they were probably thinking of their mother, and I knew that Uncle Hedge was at least partly right. It didn’t matter to me that Ms Peckworthy had called me a perfect little tomboy, because of sticks and stones and all that, but there were times, a lot of times, when I wished I could talk to my mother, if only for a few minutes, to ask her things that I couldn’t ask Uncle Hedge. It was hard right then not to cry, but I didn’t, because I knew that Uncle Hedge felt bad enough, and I didn’t want to make it worse for him. If
he
started to cry it would just be too awful.

“What I mean to say,” Uncle Hedge told us, “is that we can’t let Ms Peckworthy be right.”

“She’s
not
right,” Brendan said. “I’m doing better in school. I did my history paper on John Adams and what’s-his-name, the other Adams, and I did my leaf collection, and I did extra credit for science, too. We proved that thing about hot air, didn’t we, Perry? With the balloon in the oven?”

“Charles’s Law,” Perry said. “Gas volume and temperature.”

“That had an explosive result, as I recall,” Uncle Hedge said. He didn’t add that it also had a stinking result when the burst balloon glued itself onto the floor of the oven.

“That’s what proved it,” Brendan said proudly. “I wrote up a hypothesis and everything, and even a graph with the explosion at the end of the line. I used colored pencils.”

“Very scientific of you,” Uncle Hedge said. “But we’ve got to be sure that we aren’t failing any classes, or even coming near it. Do you understand me, Brendan?”

Brendan poked at his melting wooly mammoth and nodded his head.

“And we won’t trouble Ms Peckworthy with nonsense of any other variety? Or give her any other sort of evidence to cudgel us with?”

“No, sir,” Perry said, and I said it, too, and so did Brendan, although Brendan didn’t look sure about it, and I knew it would be necessary for Perry and I to take him aside and threaten him, because if Brendan turned out to be the weak link, it would be curtains for all of us, curtains being Aunt Ricketts.

“Your parents would be very proud of you,” Uncle Hedge said after a moment. “And you can be very proud of them.” It seemed as if he wanted to go on and explain what he meant, but he didn’t because he saw that there wasn’t any need to. Some hard things needn’t be said at all, when everyone already knows them. Uncle Hedge said he had work to do then, and he went off toward his study, which is very like a library, full of old books of every sort and with maps and sea charts on the wall and mementos from distant lands cluttering the shelves.

We went back to our ice cream, but I couldn’t concentrate on it, because I was thinking about my mother, and because
the Mermaid was sitting right in front of me on the kitchen table, looking out through the window into the darkness. And it
was
dark outside. If there was a moon in the sky it stayed hidden, and every now and then raindrops pattered against the window. There was a flicker of lightning, too, out over the ocean, although it must have been very distant, because there was no thunder to be heard, at least not yet. It was a good night to be inside the house eating ice cream where it was warm and dry.

I began to wonder what language the Mermaid had spoken when she was alive—maybe some kind of bubble language—and whether she had a mother and a father and a kitchen to eat ice cream in, or whatever mermaids eat. Her bottom part was a tail, exactly like you would imagine, with big scales about the size of nickels, and the kitchen light shone on them so that they reflected little rainbows that were really quite pretty. The Mermaid herself must have been much prettier, too, before the sun poached her. Her eyes were made of glass, but they twinkled as I imagined her eyes must have twinkled long ago, and she seemed to be gazing into the Great Beyond, maybe recalling her life in the Sargasso Sea and longing for her final resting place.

Perry sat at the table staring closely at the Mermaid’s box, as if he was studying things out. The bottom of the box was built of strips of wood that appeared to be glued together to make a board, and had been carved with the likeness of a moon and clouds on all four sides, with the tops of palm trees below the moon like a tropical island. There was the same sort of carving on each side, except that the moon was in different phases, with an old moon in front, very round and full, and a new moon on the fourth side, not even visible at all, but just a dark circle hidden by the shadow of the Earth.

Perry started fiddling with the edge of the box, where the strips of wood came together like little interlocking fingers. “It’s loose,” he said, frowning. “These pieces of wood are loose.”

“Then leave it alone,” Brendan told him. “You’ll break it. Then what would you say to Uncle Hedge? He’s already suffered enough.”

“
You’ll
be the one to suffer if you don’t keep your opinions to yourself,” Perry said. Right then he gave one of the wooden strips a push, and it moved a little bit, like the side of a Chinese puzzle box. It was the strip with the moon carved on it.

“
Now
look what you’ve done,” Brendan said. “If you break the hermit seal and the air gets in the Mermaid will turn to dust.”

“I don’t think it’s called a ‘hermit seal,’” I told Brendan. But Brendan wasn’t listening anyway, and neither was Perry, because the moon on the opposite side of the box had moved too, just a fraction of an inch, and
that
, I can tell you, was very exciting. Perry glanced up with the greedy look he gets when he’s made a discovery, and we all crowded around the table to have a better view. There was a lightning flash just then, with a crash of thunder this time. Normally I love a lightning storm, but right now I scarcely noticed it.

Perry pushed on the opposite moon piece, and it slid open a quarter inch, which allowed him to push the first strip farther, too, and then a third one after that. One panel locked the other in place, you see, and when he pushed the two opposites apart, that unlocked the other two, and then he could push those apart, and when he did, the moon on all four sides of the box moved across the night sky above the palm trees.

“Let me try,” Brendan said, but right then a sound started up from within the box, a curious sound, like a hive full of metal bees. There was a heavy click, and then a sort of ratchet noise, and the Mermaid herself began to rotate. We all stepped back from the table with our eyes wide open. She made one complete turn and then stopped, looking out the window again just as she had been. Weirdly, the strips of wood began to move on their own now, one after another, opening and shutting and opening again with more little clicking and whirring noises, until three of the sides ended up shut. The bottom front of the box remained open, though, and we could see that it was hollow inside.

Perry bent over to look, and just then the Mermaid began to turn slowly away from us again so that she was looking at the wall, and as she turned, the oddest thing happened. An immense skeletal hand reached out from inside the box, twice as big as a normal hand and with the bones fastened together with wire. The fingers were closed up, and within them lay a large, black iron key. The hand slowly began to open, as if to allow us to take the key if we wanted it. I wasn’t at all sure that we did. Brendan reached for it, but Perry stopped him.

“It might be a trap,” he said. “It might grab you.”

The idea of it was just too horrible, and we all stood there staring at the hand, waiting for it to do something further. But it was apparently waiting for us, too, and perhaps had been waiting for a long, long time.

“It’s like our jail keys,” Brendan whispered, meaning the three iron keys that were in the toy box upstairs. And he was partly right, because the jail keys are also rusty looking and very large and heavy. But this was older, like a key that opens a pirate’s treasure chest and has been buried in the sand for centuries, and it had little wavy designs carved into it, and when you looked at it you knew that it had to be the key to
something
, and not just any something.

Brendan started yelling for Uncle Hedge, and ran off toward the study to fetch him, and when they returned Uncle Hedge stood staring just like we did. After a moment, he reached out his own hand and carefully took the key. The skeleton hand closed and slid backward into the box. The Mermaid swiveled around to face us again, and one by one the strips of wood began opening and shutting, whirring and clicking, until the box was shut up tight and looked to be just as solid as it had been.

“I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Uncle Hedge said, which was what he often said when he was mystified. “I believe this is a skeleton key.”

“For a
very
big skeleton,” Brendan said.

“You were clever to figure it out,” Uncle Hedge said to Perry. “This key might prove to be crucial.”

I could see that Brendan was irritated that Uncle Hedge had said Perry was clever and not him, because Brendan prides himself on being clever. And now I’d best reveal something about Brendan. He’s kind of a glory pig, perhaps because he’s young. Also he was still a little bit angry with us because we made fun of his theory of navigation, and he very much likes to be right and for us to be agreeable. When he wants to be right but we won’t let him, he becomes really quite
sure
that he’s right, and when that happens he convinces himself to do something foolish in order to
show
everybody. That’s the mood he was in right now. I could see it in his eyes, which were frowny.

“Teach me how to work the box,” Uncle Hedge said, and he watched closely as Perry pushed and pulled on the little strips. The box began to whir and make its ratcheting noises again, and Uncle Hedge said, “A clockwork mechanism!” to himself, just as the strips began to open and shut and the Mermaid turned around, and the hand slid out, and the fingers opened again, and the box fell silent.

“Perkins shall have the honor,” Uncle Hedge said, and he handed the key to me. I set it back on the hand, exactly as it had been, and immediately everything reversed itself. The hand closed on the key and drew back into the box, and the box went through all its complications and noises until it was closed up and done and the Mermaid was gazing out the window as if nothing at all had happened.

Just then Brendan shouted and trod back into the edge of the table, staring hard at the rainy window and gulping air like a goldfish. We all turned to look, and for a split second I saw what Brendan had seen—a pale face ducking away outside the window.

There was the sound of footfalls—someone running down the drive and into the back yard, heading for the bluffs. Uncle Hedge strode toward the back door with all of us following, and he turned on the backyard lights in time for us to see the gate swinging shut but nothing else except the rain and the darkness. Perry said we should “give chase,” but Uncle Hedge wouldn’t hear of it. “Did you get a good look at him?” he asked Brendan, after shutting and bolting the door.

“It wasn’t a
him
,” Brendan said, looking more amazed than anything else. “It was a
her
.”

“What
her
?” Perry asked.

Brendan stared for another moment and then said in a sort of whisper, “It was the mermaid from Lighthouse Beach!”