Zeuglodon (20 page)

That’s nearly the end of my story, and it includes almost absolutely everything that I myself took part in, and that’s really the only part I can tell for sure. There are still things you don’t know, of course, and so now I’m going to finish with bits and pieces of things. First, what happened to Dr. Frosticos and the Creeper? Was the Creeper eaten alive? Was Frosticos crushed by a collapsing dream? Nobody knows. Brendan said it best when he said, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” What happened during the fight at the aquarium? It ended quickly, mainly because of the Creeper’s knife. Ms Peckworthy got taken hostage, and Uncle Hedge and Mr. Wattsbury got locked up behind a barred door. Mrs. Wattsbury had fallen asleep while waiting for Mr. Wattsbury to return, but woke up long past midnight to find that he hadn’t. She found the Old Door standing open like we’d left it and then found the two of them and let them out. They made a beeline to Mr. Wattsbury’s boat, but of course we had taken it, and so they had to wake up a friend and borrow another boat, and by the time they had tied up at the dock and gotten to the boathouse, there we were. The dust of the adventure had already settled and there was nothing left to do but go back to the St. George and eat.

It sounds impossible, but the only time that had passed for us had been in Pellucidar. Our trek through the Windermere Passage, which had seemed like hours, had been measured in dreamtime.

We stayed in Bowness until the end of spring break, and had more adventures, although they were normal adventures, like finding Betina from the King’s Owl and going back down to Peach Manor with her and her old granny. The police were towing the submarine off the shoal when we passed by on the lake, and they took it back up to Bowness and moored it at the dock near the aquarium, where thousands of people flocked down to see it because it was such a marvel.

At the Manor we discovered that Giles Peach had already put Patrick Cotter back together again using what are called cotter pins, and that the giant was back on the job, with the gate locked behind him as ever, even though it’s a gate to nowhere, until another Sleeper opens it again. The Mermaid’s key and Patrick Cotter’s hand are both back in their rightful place in the wonderful South Seas box, which has sadly become the Mermaid’s coffin. Old Cardigan Peach took Betty’s gran out rowing on the lake, and they took Brendan and Lala along with them. It was a sad, hard thing for Brendan to leave that afternoon. For ten cents and a hot dog he would have stayed forever at Peach Manor, and now he writes Lala postcards nearly every day and positively burns through stamps.

There’s only one thing left to tell. A couple of weeks after we returned to Caspar, word came through from Mr. Wattsbury that the submarine had disappeared from the dock in Lake Windermere. How it had gotten out of the lake was a mystery, but no more of a mystery than how it had gotten into the lake in the first place. The newspaper had reported that it was most likely stolen—craned out of the water in the night and carried away on a flatbed truck. But I wonder about that. What if Dr. Frosticos returned to claim it, and it had resurfaced through the Morecambe Sands and escaped into the sea…?

And now I’m at the end of this book, which I hope has been a good one. Summer is long past. Christmas has come and gone, and in a month it’ll be spring again. It’s nearly dark outside, and the moon is already up over the ocean. I can hear the bell buoy moaning off the point and the breakers washing in over the rocks in the sea cove.

On the wall of my bedroom I’ve got two photos that I saved from Pellucidar framed on the wall. One is of a flat rock with three charcoal letters scrawled across it, and the other is of the ruined bathyscaph half overgrown with jungle vegetation.

The sound of the ocean at night always makes me think about my mother, and the moon, which is full tonight, is shining like a lantern in the sky, casting a hopeful light.

The End

Kathleen Perkins

Caspar, California