Zeuglodon (4 page)

From my bedroom window that night I could see the bluffs above the Sea Cove, and the path winding along until it disappeared downhill toward the ocean. My mind was certain that the Creeper was somewhere out there in the shadows, watching our house. I tried to believe it had been Brendan’s mermaid at the window, but I couldn’t. I didn’t believe in Brendan’s mermaid at all. It occurred to me that Ms Peckworthy might be out there too, haunting the neighborhood, waiting patiently for the end of the week when she would load us into her tiny red car and take us away. Rain beat against the roof on and off, and there was the sound of water running in the gutters. When the rain dwindled away I could hear waves breaking in the cove and the moaning of the wind under the eaves of the house. I tried hard to sleep, but it was no use, and the time passed slowly.

I started thinking about how deep the ocean is and how lonely it must be for a mermaid who has gotten lost and been washed away by deep sea currents. I pictured the dark waters and the strange fish that swim there, and by and by I must have fallen asleep, because I began to dream about the Mermaid down among the waterweeds and fishes. In my dream she was in a bedroom of her own beneath the sea, with a bed made of pearls and shells. Then suddenly it was me in the underwater bedroom, and my mother was sitting at the foot of my bed, with the waterweeds moving behind her in the current. She spoke to me, and she reached out and took my hand in her hand, and I remember that I was
very
happy.

When I tried to say something to her I actually
did
speak, right out loud, and the sound of my own voice woke me from the dream. I can’t tell you how sad it was waking up and finding her gone, because I don’t quite know how to tell it. The thing about sleep is that people you’ve lost can come back to you in dreams. When you awaken they’ll be gone all over again, but you know that some dark night they’ll return when you really need them to, and you can speak with them again.

I lay there looking at the darkness, trying to recall the dream before it faded from my mind. By and by I saw a light go on out in the hallway. For a moment it shone like a yellow ribbon beneath the closed door. Then it went out again, leaving things even darker than they had been. I sat up in bed and listened. Hasbro wasn’t barking, so whoever was out there was one of us. I waited for the stair tread to creak halfway down, but it didn’t, which meant it wasn’t Uncle Hedge. It was someone being stealthy. I waited a little longer, listening for him to return, but he didn’t return, and that made me
very
suspicious indeed, so I climbed out of bed and peeked out into the hallway. The living room downstairs was dark, but I could see that there was a light glowing in the back of the kitchen, probably the pantry lamp, which would just be enough to lighten the breakfast nook, where the kitchen table was. And where the Mermaid was.

Halfway down the stairs I stepped carefully over the creaky tread and then went on down to the landing, where I stopped and listened again, hearing the ratchety sound of the Mermaid’s box. I sneaked up to the kitchen door, and it was right then, when I bent down and looked in sideways, that I sneezed. Brendan (it was him at the kitchen table) jumped about half a mile into the air and he jammed both hands into the pockets of his pajamas as he spun around and gaped at me.

He had the very Face of Guilt, like an illustration in a book, and for a moment he made fish lips at me as he tried to speak. The Mermaid’s box was open or nearly open. I could see that the little finger-pieces of wood had been worked away from the sides, but that was all I could make out before he stepped in front of it, looking as if he had just eaten something ghastly.

“
You better not tell!
” was the first thing he said. (Actually, he says that a little too often, although Perry and I wouldn’t tell on him anyway. We’re not rats.)

“I won’t,” I said. “But what are you doing?”

“
Doing
?” he asked. “What’s
that
supposed to mean? I’m not
doing
anything. I just wanted my turn to open it.
Perry
got to open it. Nobody
let
him, he just
did
it. And now when I do it, it’s a big crime.”

“Nobody said it’s a crime,” I said. “I just asked what you were doing.”

“And I told you I’m just having a look at the box, but now you’ve
spoiled
it!” He turned his back on me and started pushing the puzzle part of the box back together again, and the Mermaid turned around once, and the box shut itself up, and in a moment you couldn’t tell anybody had been meddling with it. “
There
,” he said. “I suppose you’re
happy
that you’ve spoiled it.”

“I didn’t spoil anything,” I said. “I just saw a light on and came down here.”

“Well you
did
spoil it, and you’ll have to live with that.” He walked past me looking very dignified and headed toward the stairs. “Forever and
ever
,” he said.

“I’ll try,” I said to his back. It wasn’t clever. You never think of the really clever things till later. I switched off the light in the pantry and went back up to my bedroom, taking one last look out at the empty bluffs and the moon on the ocean before I lay down and fell asleep. The next thing I knew, the light was on and Perry was shaking me awake.

“It’s
her
,” he said, nodding hard over his shoulder. “The mermaid Brendan saw at the Sea Cove?
She’s in the livingroom
right now
!”

I followed Perry down the hall toward the stairs, with Brendan coming out of the bedroom behind us, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “What’s the fuss?” he asked.

“There’s mermaids afoot,” Perry said, and Brendan said, “ha, ha, ha,” very ironically, but by then we could see downstairs into the livingroom, and there she sat, in Uncle Hedge’s big stuffed chair, spritzing herself with what looked like a perfume atomizer.

“
Seawater
,” Perry whispered.

She was short, so short that
her feet didn’t reach the ground. (I mean when she sat in a chair.) I don’t really know how to describe her skin, but it was so white that it was almost a pale green that reminded you of the ocean. And she had gills, too, or something like them. You could see them low on her neck (although you tried not to stare—unless you were Brendan). They weren’t flappy things, like a fish’s gills, but were more like scars, maybe, the same on each side, and not useful. (Perry said they were called “vestigial” but of course he didn’t say that until later. It’s not the sort of thing you say in the presence of someone who’s part mermaid.) Her hands were webbed like a frog’s hands. You couldn’t really see how much until she opened her fingers, which is just what she did when she gave me a little wave, because I guess I was kind of gaping at her and not saying anything, which isn’t manners.

“I’d like to introduce Eulalie Peach,” Uncle Hedge told us. “Her friends call her Lala. She’s my old friend Basil’s granddaughter, and she’s come to us all the way from Lake Windermere. It’s quite a surprise.”

We all said how do you do, but we were too curious to be sociable yet. She was wearing a raggedy orphan dress and shoes that looked more like ballet slippers than proper shoes. They were black with orange embroidered koi goldfish on the toes, like the cloth shoes you see in Chinatown shops. Her hair was a little bit wild, because she had just come in out of the wind, and she had taken off her coat and dropped it onto the rug next to a worn out carpetbag made of tapestry material. She had flown into San Francisco and then taken a Greyhound bus up the coast, she said, which had left her off at the bus stop near the Albion, and she had walked up from there.

All of this made me highly suspicious, partly because she had a look on her face as if she thought everything was just a little bit funny, but also because Brendan had told us that he had seen her twice before, the first time being yesterday morning. I hadn’t believed him, like I said, except now here she was, and so Brendan must have been telling the truth, because it’s
way
too coincidental that he made up a lot of nonsense about a mermaid and then the nonsense had come true. All of us must have been thinking this same thing, even Uncle Hedge, but Uncle Hedge seemed happy to see her, and so I tried to put away my suspicions and be happy to see her, too.

What was she doing on our doorstep? She wanted to warn us about the Creeper, she said (although she described him, she didn’t call him that) who had come out to this part of the world in order to steal something that belonged to her family, and he mustn’t be allowed to.

“He already
did
steal it, just yesterday,” Brendan said. “At least he tried to.”

“Tried?” she asked him anxiously. “Then she’s safe? The mermaid?”

Brendan told her yes, she was safe, and that we had beaten the Creeper witless with all manner of weapons and he had fled into the shrubbery.

“The other one…?” she asked, looking at Uncle Hedge now. He shook his head, and Lala looked relieved, but what it all meant I couldn’t say. Now I know that she meant Dr. Frosticos, whose name she couldn’t bring herself to utter.

We all went into the kitchen to make breakfast then, where the Mermaid still sat on the table. (Perry said that I should spell the Mermaid in the box with a capital M, because it was
the
mermaid, and had no other name. Lala must remain the lower case mermaid, because she does have a name, and by now we were getting used to it.) Anyway, Lala had come a long way to see the Mermaid, and she looked immensely relieved. It was awkward, actually, because no one wanted to say, “Are you related to this Mermaid in the box? You have gills and frog hands, after all,” although we were all thinking it. Uncle Hedge started mixing up buckwheat pancakes, and pancakes are a good distraction, because eating gives you something to do besides talk. While we were spreading peanut butter on them, dipping them in syrup, and stuffing them down, she stole glances in the Mermaid’s direction, as if she was trying to puzzle something out, and I wondered what it was.

I could see that Brendan was a little bit googly about her. He wasn’t eating his pancakes, but was showing off and telling her about navigation and the north star and about how everything in the world is actually made of hydrogen, and she was nodding and saying, “Oh,” and, “I wasn’t aware of that.” Perry pointed out helpfully that Brendan’s brain was filled with hydrogen, like a blimp, and that it would float away if it weren’t encased in his skull. Brendan got furious and called him a big bag of pigswill, and Uncle Hedge had to give them a look so that they’d simmer down, which Lala seemed to find amusing.

After pancakes we went out walking on the bluffs above the Sea Cove, which is nearly behind the house—behind Mrs. Hoover’s house, really. The cliffs are high around the cove, and there’s only a little bit of sand down on the horseshoe-shaped beach, which is mostly under water at high tide and is never very wide even when the tide is out, because the ocean bottom falls away so steeply there. Driftwood piles up on the rocks in the cove, and there’s usually an immense lot of it, which you can use to build a fort, although if the tide comes up high enough, your fort floats away. After a storm you can find seashells there and stuff that gets washed up, like old shoes, although always just one. Once we found a coconut that had drifted in from across the ocean. It turned out to be full of salt water that had leaked into it, which we discovered after we hammered a hole in the top with a nail and paid Brendan a quarter to drink from it. Brendan didn’t think it was as funny as Perry and I did.

Halfway up the cliffs, there’s a cave in the rocks. It’s not deep, but if it’s rainy you can get in out of the wind and stay warm and dry, especially with a driftwood fire. You have to have a pail of water standing by in order to put the fire out when you leave. We take turns going down after the water, because it’s hard to carry it back up. Brendan helped Lala climb across the face of the cliff toward the narrow little path to the cave. Unless you’re Hasbro you have to hold on to scrubby bushes and roots that grow from the side of the cliff, and if you’re not careful you might fall, which Brendan did once and broke his arm, as Ms Peckworthy already revealed. Hasbro just kind of dances across, because he’s nimble despite his portliness. Perry says that dogs don’t know anything about falling, and that’s what makes them safe from it, although I don’t know if that’s scientific.

We started a fire with some of the dry wood that we had stowed there, and it was really jolly sitting and looking out at the ocean, which had calmed down since yesterday’s storm. You might think you would suffocate having a fire in a cave, but the sea wind draws the smoke up the curve of the cave roof and out into the open air, so that you don’t. If it’s a calm day, though, really dead calm and not windy, there’s no point in even trying to have a fire, because it would mean suffocation, which we found out the hard way one time.

In the summer you can spot whales from up there. You have to watch for their spray but sometimes there’s dozens that go by in an afternoon, and you can see their dark shapes rising up out of the ocean and then disappearing again. There are otters, too, that come into the cove, and sea lions, and one time a sea elephant that was perfectly immense. It’s the kind of place where you can sit for hours, listening to the sound of the waves crashing and the crying of the seagulls and the wind blowing across the cliffs with a kind of shuddery sound.

After a time we quit staring at the ocean and started talking, although none of us were asking what we were thinking: whether Lala had been at Lighthouse Beach yesterday morning and had peered in at the kitchen window last night. Maybe we didn’t want to hear her lie about it. Lala took her atomizer out of the little bag she carried and spritzed herself on the face and arms. “It keeps my skin moist,” she said, seeing that we were wondering about it.

“You’ve got very moist skin,” Brendan said, gazing at her, or maybe at her skin.

Lala smiled at him, and said that she wanted to know more about our adventure with the Creeper, or at least Brendan’s part in it. Then we asked her questions about Peach Manor, which was her home on Lake Windermere. I think she wanted to talk more than she wanted to listen, because once she got started she didn’t stop, and that was fine, because all of it was strange and wonderful.

“What about old Cardigan Peach?” Perry asked her, Cardigan Peach being her grandfather. “We heard that he was
really
old. Over a hundred. Uncle Hedge says he was born before the automobile.”

“Before
which
automobile?” Brendan asked. “There wasn’t just one, you know.”

“That’s just a saying,” Perry told him.

“Like ‘old as Methuselah,’” I said.

“Or old as hydrogen,” Perry said.

“He
is
old,” Lala put in, before Brendan got himself into a state. She took a billfold out of her bag and showed us a picture of a man who looked a little bit like a human toad, his face being amphibious and goggle-eyed. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but that’s what he
did
look like. He was dressed in a black cape and a little bow tie, and he carried a walking stick. He was standing by a pool of water enclosed by a stone ring, and he was looking down into the water, as if he saw something interesting in the depths. Lala told us about how her father, Giles Peach, was an inventor who had a workshop on the grounds of Peach Manor. Sometimes she didn’t see him for days when he was inventing. He had built an anti-gravity vessel, she said, out of barrel hoops, an electric fan, and a wooden rowboat, with oars that rowed by themselves using a perpetual motion engine. It had floated up into space one night carrying a cargo of his smaller inventions and was by now out rowing among the stars.

Then she told us about the land at the Earth’s core, where there were still dinosaurs because they had been protected from the great extinctions, and where there were cave people and mer-people, and where nature was still wild and unspoiled because there weren’t any machines or factories or engines. She told us how you could sail into the hollow Earth aboard a hot air balloon by going farther and farther south until the oceans spilled over the edge of a vast hole into the interior seas. Without even knowing it you drifted downward, soon finding yourself inside the Earth instead of outside it, and when the balloon landed you were held to the walls by the centrifugal force of the spinning of the planet. It was just like gravity.

While Lala talked, rain clouds came in off the ocean, moving very quickly. Waves began to break against the shore one after another, so that the sound of the ocean was in our ears along with the crackling of the fire and the cries of seagulls. It soon began to rain, and the falling rain was like a curtain in front of us, so that we were completely sheltered from the world. There was the smell of new rain in the air, like when rain falls on a dry sidewalk, and there was a strange droning sound, as if hive of bees lived at the back of the cave. Lala’s voice went on and on, very soft and even. It occurred to me that she was wandering somewhere in her own mind, lost in a memory, and was talking to herself.

And then the strangest thing happened. The rain stopped, the clouds evaporated like steam, and the sky grew clear and sunny. Out over the ocean there appeared an airship that was like an illustration in an old book. It was far away, and yet I could see it quite clearly. It was built of bundles of sticks or bamboo, and had a big whirling propeller that must have been making the beehive sound. The wings were like bat wings, and the tail was more like the tail of a fish than of an airplane. It was humming through the air, moving slowly. Beyond it, hazy and distant, there appeared immensely high dark cliffs, as if an island had risen out of the sea, and the airship was flying above the tall trees of that island, and in the sky around it flew prehistoric birds, turning and gliding.
Am I dreaming?
I wondered. But I wasn’t. 

After a time, I don’t know how long, a gust of wind blew into the cave and billowed the smoke from the driftwood fire out through the cave mouth, hiding the world outside. When it cleared away again, the airship was gone and the prehistoric island along with it. The rainy, north coast day was as it had been. Brendan and Perry both had a look of astonishment on their faces, just like I must have had, but before anyone said anything about the impossible airship and island, we saw that Lala was pointing out to sea, at a fishing boat that was maybe a quarter mile offshore, turning in toward the cove and coming along straight toward us. Because of the deep water, you can actually bring a boat right in close, and for a moment that looked like what was happening, that he was going to run it right up onto the beach. But then the boat slowed and stopped some distance out, and we could see the man at the wheel. He put a spyglass to his eye and peered straight at us.

“It’s
Wheyface the stinking Creeper
!” Perry said, for it was indeed him.

Lala ducked behind Brendan, who told her that she shouldn’t be afraid, and that we had settled the Creeper’s hash once and would do it again if he showed his ugly face. But of course he
was
showing his ugly face. We hadn’t settled his hash or anything of the sort.

“Let’s go,” Perry said, “like Uncle Hedge told us.”

I didn’t have to be asked twice. The fire had burned down, but I made sure that the embers were out with seawater from the bucket, and then we made our way across the trail and up to the top of the bluffs. The boat was still down there, rising and falling on the swell. Brendan shook his fist and shouted bold things, and Lala told him he was very brave, and then she grabbed his hand and they took off running up the sea path like two lovebirds, and within moments we couldn’t see them. When we looked back out to sea, the Creeper was turning the boat around and heading away.