Zeuglodon (8 page)

“Maybe he aims to get in through the Passage and back out again before Peach wakes up and closes it down. There’s something Frosticos wants to bring out, I’d say.”

“So I thought. But I’m starting to think there’s more. Whatever he’s aiming to do, it frightened Lala into coming out to Fort Bragg to get hold of the key. She was in the same kind of hurry. We know that now. If the Doctor was after a bucketful of diamonds, why would
she
care about what he did? It’s no loss to her. To my mind she means to put a stop to something more sinister than anything you can carry in a bucket, and she means to do it alone. She doesn’t trust anyone outside the family.”

It was right then that the
Clematis
sailed out of the fog and into one of those clear spaces that I told you about, and my iceberg wish came true. Lying a quarter mile off the starboard bow was a floating ice island. The ice was blue along the edges, a deep aqua blue like the color of the Zeuglodon. I guess you could call it an iceberg, except that it had a long, low area along one edge, like a beach, and so it looked more like an island than like a berg. “There she blows,” Captain Sodbury said, and Uncle Hedge said, “I guess it’s time.” They were standing ten feet from me, but the fog had been so thick a minute ago that we’d all been invisible.

I watched the nearby ocean for the appearance of a submarine, but there was no submarine to be seen. The ship’s engines fell off, and we ghosted along for a moment and then stopped dead still. The anchors rattled down and quickly found the bottom, because as I said, it’s shallow in those seas. I took pictures of the island and of the small waves breaking along the beach, and Uncle Hedge watched the island through binoculars. Hasbro prowled up and down, sniffing the cold air, as if he knew something was about to happen, and Brendan and Perry came on deck. Perry said, “Crikey,” but Brendan said nothing at all.

Rising above the beach were steep ice cliffs, one behind the other, with a dark valley in between two of the highest. As we watched, an enormous long chunk of ice broke away along the farther edge of the island and fell crashing into the sea, sending up a plume of water and a wave that ran out away from the island and soon passed beneath us. I was anxious to go across and actually walk on the ice myself, which Uncle Hedge had said we might do if he thought it was safe.

“Look there!” Perry said suddenly, just as a man walked out from within the shadows of the ice valley. He was curiously dressed, but it wasn’t until Uncle Hedge handed me the binoculars that I could make any sense out of his strange garb, and even then it was hard to believe. Over his head he wore a diver’s helmet made out of what looked like an enormous spiral seashell, and the sunlight glanced off its circular glass faceplate. There were two hoses spiraling away over his shoulders, connected to a cylinder suspended in front of his stomach by a strap that went around his neck. He was dressed in a baggy pair of pantaloons with a long overcoat with a fur collar.

“It’s Reginald Peach,” Uncle Hedge said in a low voice. “Back from the dead. I’ll be dipped in a sack of dung.”

“Aye, it’s Reginald,” Captain Sodbury said. “It appears that he’s gone over to the other side.”

Uncle Hedge shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s always been bad blood between him and Basil, but he wouldn’t harm Lala. She’s his grand niece after all. It’s a mystery what he’s doing here, but either we’ll know the truth soon enough, or we’ll be homeward bound and it won’t matter.”

Uncle Hedge turned around and went back into the ship, heading down the companionway in the direction of the chart room, and when he returned he was carrying the lead-encased box with the journal maps inside. As he walked he slipped them into a canvas bag on a strap and hung it around his neck. Like I said, if things went bad, and we were betrayed, the lead box was meant to carry the maps to the bottom of the sea. But if Frosticos kept his word, and handed over Lala, then Uncle Hedge was to give him the box, and just like that Frosticos would have won. What we would do then, or what Lala would do, I didn’t know. There was the matter of the key, also, and I wondered whether they would have any idea by now that Lala possessed it. Uncle Hedge would have to tell them, of course, to keep up his side of the bargain, and then they’d have to take it away from Lala. What a mess, I thought.

Charlie Slimmerman handed us each a pair of strap-on ice cleats—attachable shoe soles with spikes sticking through for walking on ice. He told us not to put them on yet, because we didn’t want to punch holes in the bottom of the boat, which was an inflatable. He also gave us a big tin box with a lunch inside, and then he and Captain Sodbury lowered the inflatable into the water and put down the ladder. The four of us were going across, while Charlie, the Captain, Wise Norton, and Hasbro stayed behind.

We climbed down into the inflatable and I started the outboard motor (which is one of things I’m good at, because my mother taught me) and all the time I was afraid that Uncle Hedge would change his mind and decide that it was too dangerous for us, but he didn’t. We were to stay well back, he told us, and under no circumstances were we to come anywhere near the negotiations, which shouldn’t take more than sixty seconds, because he intended to keep his word and hand over the maps. If anything “went south” as he put it, we were to head straight back to the ship in the inflatable, even if it meant leaving him behind.

I steered us toward the distant beach, very carefully and slowly, too, so that we didn’t ship any water. A few yards off, I cut the power, and we cocked the engine forward so that the propeller wouldn’t get damaged beating against the ice. The inflatable slid up onto the ice shelf, riding a small wave, and we climbed out, putting on our ice cleats and crunching up the beach toward the man in the seashell helmet. 

Uncle Hedge said, “What ho, Reginald,” and they shook hands, and Reginald said, “Come see, come saw,” which I didn’t at all understand. He said this in a bubbly way, because—and you’re not going to believe this—the seashell helmet that encased his head was
full of water
, just the opposite of a diver’s helmet. One of the two hoses ran the water through the canister at his waist, something called a “carbon dioxide scrubber,” and the other hose ran the “scrubbed” air back into his helmet, so that he always had oxygenated water to breathe. Why he breathed water instead of air is a Peach family mystery, as are Lala’s gills and webbed fingers and other things even stranger, things that we didn’t know at the time but were going to find out. The helmet had a built-in voice box so that Reginald could talk, but as I said, he sounded bubbly.

“Haven’t…gone over, have you?” Uncle Hedge asked him in a low voice, and Reginald shook his head. And then, taking great care, he held up a small piece of paper with the words, “He’s listening,” written on it. When Uncle Hedge had read it, Reginald put the paper into his coat pocket very casually. He made a little jerk of his head, then, toward the ice cliff behind him. When I looked I could see what appeared to be a round, white disk with holes in it, set flat in the ice right there in the face of the cliff, and I knew in an instant what it was—a listening device. We weren’t on one of the random, floating icebergs that had strayed down from the Arctic; we were on an iceberg inhabited by Dr. Hilario Frosticos, and he could overhear our every word.

As soon as we knew that, we didn’t utter very many words at all, but followed Reginald up the narrow valley between walls of ice that rose away on either side. Seen from up close, the ice wasn’t so immensely blue, but it was quite clear. The valley floor was littered with ice chunks, and we had to step over the small ones and slip between the large ones. It was slow going, and although it seemed to me to be taking a long time, probably we hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards before we went around a corner and there before us lay a lake of calm water.

It wasn’t a real lake, but was the ocean itself, sheltered from the wind and waves by the barrier of ice around it. The floating ice island was actually a great ring of ice cliffs, and we had gotten to the center of it. The surface of the lake was as smooth as a sheet of glass, and the air was quiet and still, and not nearly so cold as it had been on the beach. I could see schools of fish beneath the calm water, and deeper yet there were slowly moving black shapes, perfectly enormous—sharks, maybe, or some variety of whale.

There in front of us lay the submarine, ghostly white and moored to a pier that was built right into the ice. There was a wooden shed at the top end of the pier with a stovepipe sticking out of the roof and some fishing poles in a rack against an outside wall. On beyond the pier lay two more shacks on the ice, each with its own stovepipe. There was firewood stacked nearby the shacks as well as some wooden casks of the sort that might hold salted meat or pickles. The shacks were built of scraps of driftwood and broken up pieces of ships, and they had porthole windows and roofs made up of odds and ends of things, including sheets of tin and old wooden doors.

The submarine itself looked something like a great fish—not like a modern submarine at all. It had a line of pointed fins at the back, angled toward its tail, and great glass windows in front like eyes, and around those windows and along its sides the water glowed white, as if a swarm of fireflies or electric eels swam around it in the water. The submarine was maybe sixty feet long, and air bubbles arose from below and behind it. In the air there was a constant bubbly humming sound, and it was obvious that the humming was the sound of its engines, as if at any moment the submarine might slip beneath the surface of the ocean and disappear.

The path lay around the edge of the lake, ending at a point just beyond the pier against a sheer wall of ice. It was the only way in or out, which gave me a trapped feeling. Uncle Hedge stopped long before we got to the pier, and we stopped with him, and so did Reginald as soon as he knew we weren’t following him any more.

“What’s the plan, Reginald?” Uncle Hedge said to him. “Let’s keep it simple.”

“We parlay on board,” Reginald said in his bubbly way. “Did you bring Basil’s maps?”

“I said I would.” He took the lead case out of his canvas bag and held it up to show he had them. “Have the Doctor send Lala out. She can return to the boat right now with my three. I need a word with him, and then I’ll be on my way lickety split, and we can all go about our business. If he’s not satisfied, then he’s still got a hostage.”

Reginald stood there regarding us through his faceplate. His eyes were weirdly enlarged by the glass, like the eyes of a deepwater fish. I could hear water swishing through the tubing and wheezing through the oxygenator at his belt. “The Doctor won’t send her out,” Reginald said. “You’ve got to come aboard.”

“If it’s the maps he’s worried about, you can believe that I’ve got them right here in the box. I’m not fool enough to have come all this way without them. The bargain was clear. We trade Lala for the maps. I’ve got the maps. You tell him to send Lala out.”

“He’ll do things his way, not mine and not yours. You know that’s how it is with him.”

I could see that there was no chance of Uncle Hedge striking a bargain with Reginald Peach. Peach was too frightened of Dr. Frosticos. You could see it in his face. He looked like a man holding a burning stick of dynamite and wondering what to do with it. I looked at the submarine now, and I could see a face behind the glass of one of the big fisheye windows in the front. It was just a shadow, but I knew who it was.

“Head back to the boat,” Uncle Hedge said to us, but none of us moved. “
Now
,” he said. “Take the inflatable back across. Return for me or Lala when you see either of us on the beach.”

We did as we were told, turning around and heading back up the path along the lake. Uncle Hedge went ahead with Reginald Peach. When we were near the place where the path entered the ice valley, I looked back. The two of them were just then stepping up onto the pier. I had a very bad feeling about things. Uncle Hedge had sent us away because he knew something was wrong, and something
was
wrong, and wronger every moment. There was a tiny vibration beneath my feet, as if the ice island was humming, and when I looked down at where the ocean lapped against the icy shore of the lake, I saw something that was very strange. Ocean water was flowing up over the shore now, as if the tide were coming in and the path would soon be submerged. But if the island were floating, it would rise with the tide. The tide wouldn’t “come in.” I had the oddest feeling of movement, a very definite feeling.

Perry and Brendan felt it too, because they stopped and looked down at the water, and then we all looked at each other. We
were
moving. The whole ice island was moving, although how fast it was moving and in what direction was impossible to say, because the ice cliffs and the pier and the submarine were all moving together. Tentacles of fog swirled in around the most distant of the ice cliffs now.

“Hurry!” Perry shouted, and we set out running, all of us knowing that if we were going to help Uncle Hedge and Lala we had to save ourselves, which meant getting back to the
Clematis
before we lost sight of it in the fog. When we ducked into the shadow of the little valley I glanced back again just in time to see Uncle Hedge and Reginald Peach disappearing into the door of the submarine. Uncle Hedge looked up just then, and I saw him move quickly back toward the pier, as if he saw that there was treachery. He raised the lead box as if to throw it into the ocean, but what happened next I can’t say, because we were in the ice valley itself now, and we ducked around the first little turn and the lake was lost from view.

We had to slow up when we got to the chunk ice, but we scrambled and slid our way over it and through it, jamming our cleats against the big chunks and against the cliffs on either side, and kind of running up and over ice boulders that would have stopped us cold if we hadn’t had the cleats. I banged my knee against an outcropping of ice and fell, and Brendan looked back and stopped and came running to help me up, and it slowed everybody down. But then we were scrambling along again, and to heck with being careful.

Suddenly right ahead of us there was sunlight glowing through the entrance to the valley, and in a moment we were out into that sunlight on the beach, and there was the inflatable right where we’d left it.

Except there was someone sitting in it now, waiting for us. It was Lord Wheyface the Creeper, as ugly as ever, and he was eating one of the sandwiches out of Charlie Slimmerman’s tin picnic box. Where he had been hiding when we arrived on the island I can’t say, probably in among the spires of ice, but it was him sure enough, and he had an evil smile on his face this time.