Zeuglodon (5 page)

“It was Lala doing it,” Perry said to me, as we came through the gate into the backyard. “Had to be—the island, the airship, the whole thing.”

“Did you notice the humming noise?” I asked.

“I thought it was a swarm of bees at first.”

“So did I, but I think it was her. Not that
she
was humming. I don’t mean that, but she was making it happen. It stopped when she was distracted by the Creeper’s boat. Like it woke her up or something.”

“Yes,” Perry said. “That’s it exactly. What we saw was mind projection, mass hallucination—the same things that she was seeing in her head.”

The antenna was run up through the roof of the radio shed, which meant that Uncle Hedge was in there talking on his ham radio, which he calls “the Smithfield.” I don’t know why. The radio shed is built out of old lumber that Uncle Hedge and Mr. Vegeley got out of a barn that was being torn apart down in Little River. It’s got many windows that they bought at yard sales and such, and some old painted metal signs nailed to it. One sign says “Penguin Ice, Fort Bragg,” and there’s another one that’s a Humpty Dumpty with a crown on his head.

The radio looks nothing like a ham, really. It’s very large, and most of the inside of the shed is taken up by the apparatus, which has about a thousand dials and lights and glass tubes that glow green and remind you of a deep tidepool on a sunny day. The whole thing makes bleeping and whistling sounds when the radio is warming up.

We went straight inside, where Uncle Hedge was listening hard to the radio speaker, and of course we waited for whoever it was to finish talking even though we were in a sweat to tell him about the appearance of the Creeper. “The fate of the Sleeper hangs in the balance…” the radio voice was saying, but then it suddenly fell silent. There was a burst of static followed by the sound of rickety old music for a moment before there was silence again. “For Pete’s sake!” Uncle Hedge said, twisting a dial. It seemed like a good point to interrupt.

“The Creeper was in a boat in the Sea Cove just now,” Perry told him.

“He turned around like he was going back out again,” I said.

“North or south?” Uncle Hedge asked, getting up out of his chair.

“We don’t know,” I said. “We didn’t wait to see.”

“Just as well,” he said. “Where’s Lala?”

“In the house with Brendan,” Perry told him.

And right then a figure appeared outside the window, trying to peer in, and I nearly jumped out of my wits. But it wasn’t the Creeper; it was Ms Peckworthy, which was just as bad.

Uncle Hedge went to the door and looked out, saying, “So you’ve come to beard us in our den, Ms Peckworthy?”

“Well,” she said, all flustery. “I didn’t intend…” But peeping in at the window is one of the impolitest things there is, and if you peep you obviously intend to do it, so she was tongue tied, and besides that she was cramming something into her handbag—her notebook and pen. Uncle Hedge invited her to step in, and her eyes bugged out when she saw the radio, because who would have an enormous radio like that if he wasn’t up to immense secret schemes? The radio speaker chose that moment to start up again, and the same weird voice said, “The Sleeper grows restless on his bed beneath the Earth,” and then again it fell silent. Ms Peckworthy stood there blinking, as if the voice had made her forget where she was, and maybe even
who
she was.

She recollected herself and asked Uncle Hedge, “Who
was
that odd creature?”

“Which odd creature would that be?” Uncle Hedge asked politely.

“The tiny blond girl. She very nearly knocked me down going through the back gate just now. She dropped her carpetbag, and when I picked it up she didn’t bother to thank me, but snatched it away and bolted down the path. I find that sort of behavior insufferable. Is she another one of yours?”

“We have her on loan,” Uncle Hedge said. And then he looked at Perry and me and nodded toward the house, and I could see that he was worried about Lala even though he was still smiling. We ducked past Ms Peckworthy and ran in through the kitchen door, nearly tripping over Hasbro, who turned around and ran on ahead of us, as if he’d been coming to find us and now here we were. We followed him through the kitchen, and the first thing that we saw was that the Mermaid’s box was open and the hand was sticking out—empty, with the fingers curled shut. Someone had taken the key.

We shouted Brendan’s name but there was no answer. Hasbro started up the stairs and we followed him, still calling for Brendan, and when we went into Perry and Brendan’s room we saw that the closet door was shut and that a wooden chair with a sweater laid across the top was shoved under the knob, as if the sweater was meant to muffle the sound of the chair knocking against the door. Hasbro put his nose to the door and barked, and we heard a voice from inside telling him to go away. It was Brendan, trapped.

But when we took the chair away and opened the door, he got mad at us. He didn’t know he was trapped.

“Who locked you in?” I asked him.

“No one
locked
me in,” he said. “Lala and I are playing hide and seek, and I’m hiding in the closet. Now if you’ll kindly leave before you spoil everything…”

“Lala’s gone off,” Perry said. “Ms Peckworthy saw her on the sea path. She took her suitcase.”

“Peckworthy’s a scum-pig liar,” Brendan said, getting really furious. (He can say
awful
things when he’s angry, usually involving pigs, scum, swill, and filth, which he rearranges. When he’s angry with himself it’s worse.) “Lala’s downstairs looking for me,” he said, but I could see doubt in his eyes now.

“Who put the chair under the door knob?” I asked him.

“What door knob?”

“
This
door knob!” Perry shouted. “Lala sneaked in and slipped it under there! What we want to know is did
you
take the Mermaid’s key?”

For a moment he looked surprised and frightened both, and I didn’t blame him. “No,” he said in a small voice. “You’re always accusing me.”

“
Someone’s
opened the box,” I said, “and the key’s not there. Nobody’s accusing you. It was Lala who took it.”

“She played on your affections like Nero played the fiddle,” Perry said, “and Rome burned in the offing.”

“Stow it, can’t you?” Brendan said, but the truth was obvious, even to him. Lala had taken the key and gone, and she had taken her stuff with her because she wasn’t coming back. She had hoaxed us. We ran back out to the radio shed to report this to Uncle Hedge, just as Ms Peckworthy was leaving. She looked at Brendan as if she thought he was some kind of culprit, but then she saw the terrible Hasbro coming along behind us and she put her back to the wall, just in case she had to fight him off.

“That animal is a menace,” she said.

“He’s a pure bred peccadillo,” Uncle Hedge told her, “half peccary and half armadillo,” and then he looked significantly at me, and I shook my head to signify that Lala was gone.

“Well, I know nothing about dogs,” Ms Peckworthy said. “You mark my words, then, Mr. Hedgepeth—I’m keeping an eye on these children.”

“An eyeball peeled for the great big shoe, eh? I’m in your debt, Ms Peckworthy, although I’m monstrously busy right now. Allow me to show you to the gate. We’re just going in that direction ourselves.”

“A big shoe? No doubt that’s meant to be humorous. And, by the way, there’s a particularly shady looking man lurking below the bluffs. I saw him motoring ashore in a small boat—a perfectly awful, treacherous looking character. If these three children were mine, I’d keep them in the house with the doors locked, Mr. Hedgepeth. You mark my words.…”

But we never learned what words to mark, because all of us, Uncle Hedge included, were running out toward the sea path now and down along the bluffs, and Ms Peckworthy was left talking to the air. We saw the Creeper halfway to the bottom of the trail down the cliff, carrying Lala over his shoulder like a sack of grain, holding onto her with one hand as he half-climbed and half-slid down the steep path, kicking rocks loose with the heels of his boots. Her tapestry bag lay on the beach far below, where the Creeper had no doubt thrown it.

Brendan shouted and scrambled rashly down after him, and the Creeper looked back up at us, lost his footing, and for a moment stood there just barely balanced, waving his free arm like a windmill. I thought he would fall for sure, and Lala with him, but instead he sat down hard and started sliding, still holding onto her, sliding faster and faster until he sort of threw himself to the side and made a wild grab at a heavy root alongside the path.

Uncle Hedge yelled at Brendan to stop, but Brendan shouted, “I can catch him!” and kept going. Perry followed him down and so did I, because I could see that Brendan wasn’t going to stop, no matter what, and it would have been bad for him to battle the Creeper by himself if he
did
catch him. Uncle Hedge started down behind us, shouting warnings at us, and when I looked back up at him, I saw Ms Peckworthy above on the sea path, with her mouth gaping open and her eyes wide with astonishment. If she wanted proof that we were “up to something” she had enough now to fill her notebook.

The Creeper lurched to his feet, still carrying Lala, and he loped down the last twenty feet of trail and straight out onto the sand and rocks where there was a little motorboat moored. Lala was pounding him on the back with her fists and yelling, but he simply ignored her as he dumped her into the boat, picked up her tapestry bag and dumped that in too, and then shoved off, yanking twice on the rope to start the engine, and steering straight out to sea. The fishing boat that we had seen earlier was floating on the swell some distance out. They didn’t have far to go.

Brendan leaped down onto the beach now and stood at the water’s edge. But like I said before, it quickly gets deep, and Brendan can’t swim well, so that was the end of the chase. If they had been closer to shore, I think Brendan would have jumped in, because he can be rash when he’s riled up, and of course he was desperately in love with Lala even though she had fiddled with his trust. He threw some rocks, which wasn’t a well thought out idea, because one of them thunked into the boat and nearly hit Lala. She turned and looked back at us and then stood up, and I believe that she was going to leap overboard, but the Creeper lunged forward and grabbed a handful of her dress and sat her back down. The boat went all swervy in the water so that a wave hit it sideways and nearly capsized it. But in a moment they were headed out to sea again, and there wasn’t a single thing that we could do about it but go back up, which we did.

By the time we were at the top again the Creeper and Lala were already aboard the fishing boat and the Creeper was getting away clean. The five of us took off running again, right past Ms Peckworthy. We didn’t stop to chat, but ran all the way home to the Zeuglodon and piled in. When we headed down the driveway I looked back, and there was Ms Peckworthy, coming along in a hurry and gaping at us. She didn’t get much of a gape, because we zoomed away, straight down to the Coast Highway where we turned north toward Fort Bragg, which is the closest harbor to Caspar and was perhaps the Creeper’s destination.

I won’t reveal how abashed Brendan was when he told Uncle Hedge about showing Lala how to open the Mermaid’s box—only because she had asked him so nicely—and then how she had suggested they play hide and seek. I started feeling bad for Brendan, because
he
didn’t steal the key; he had only showed Lala how to open the box, and he had done that because she had played upon his affections, as Perry had put it. She had hoaxed us all, even Uncle Hedge. And what about me? I hadn’t trusted her from the start, but there was no joy in being right about her, because all it meant was that I was a bigger fool than anyone for not speaking up. So we were all as glum as hedgehogs, even Hasbro.

After we had all taken turns blaming ourselves, Uncle Hedge pointed out that besides being a slippery character, Lala was also the granddaughter of Basil Peach, and so she had to be found and recovered from the Creeper, whatever it took.

We turned off onto a viewpoint over the ocean, but there was no fishing boat to be seen, which meant that perhaps the Creeper was hugging the shore and so was hidden by the cliffs. It also might mean that he had doubled back and gone away south rather than north. We drove down to the harbor, but he wasn’t there either. It soon became evident that he wasn’t anywhere, and that we were burning daylight and couldn’t just sit around waiting for him to turn up, so we drove over to police headquarters and talked to Captain Smith again, who called the Coast Guard straightaway and put them on the lookout for the fishing boat and the Creeper.

It took two days for them to find it, run aground on a lonesome beach ten miles down the coast. The Creeper’s car was abandoned at the Little River Airport with the keys still in the ignition. Captain Smith identified it with the photos he had taken of the tire tread out on the bluffs.

Lala had come all the way out to Caspar from Lake Windermere to fetch the Mermaid’s key, because she was worried that the Creeper would find it first. Now she had played right into his hands just by fate, and the Creeper would have the key after all, and she was a prisoner.