Zeuglodon Page 11

  Presently there was the sound of bees droning on the still air again, very loud and insistent bees, although I couldn’t see any bees flying around. I could smell rain on dry stone, and again I was swept up in the idea that I was caught up in a dream—someone else’s dream. Mr. Peach was quite still now, as if he had wandered off into his own memory, just as Lala had done in the sea cave….

  And now through the boathouse window the lake was impossibly bright and clear under a summer sun—no more clouds, no rain. There were trees standing as ever on the shore opposite, but they were green with leaves, and out from among the trees, as if it had been hidden in a little inlet, came a low wooden boat with two people in it, a man and a woman. The man was rowing, and so had his back to us, and she was dressed in a bright bonnet, very old fashioned, and was trailing her hand in the water. It was a perfectly golden afternoon, and the lake was as calm as water in a bathtub, and the only noise was the telltale droning of bees.

  Abruptly the boat flitted closer to us, and then closer again, exactly as Cardigan Peach had done in the tunnel below. It was like turning the pages of a flipbook—all jumpy and hurried. I heard the woman’s laughter, sounding as if it were falling out of the sky, and the man rowing turned his head and looked our way for a moment before turning back. The man was Cardigan Peach, but many, many years younger. And right then, when he looked back at us, the boat and the two people in it vanished. The sun disappeared, and the rain was falling, and it was no longer spring.

  I was filled with the sadness of things passing away, of lost time, and although I wanted to say something to Mr. Peach, I couldn’t, because I didn’t know how to say it. He smiled at me, though, as if he knew my thoughts, and then turned toward the open door, going out into the weather without another word. I was very sure of something at that moment—that Cardigan Peach, and Lala too, have the power to make you see things that aren’t there, things that are hidden within their own memories. Don’t ask me how they do it. I don’t know how. I can’t explain it. They just do.

  §

  It began to rain harder, and the lake was gray and empty and choppy. We left straightaway, back down to the dock and into the boat and across the lake, bounding along with our jackets pulled over our heads to keep out the rain, and all fairly bursting with questions now that we were out of the spell of the boathouse and in the open air.

  “You go first,” Perry said to me.

  “I’m second,” Brendan said.

  I thought for a moment and started boldly. “That looked like Mr. Peach in the rowboat on the lake,” I said to Mr. Wattsbury. “And it was in a different season, and a long time ago. What’s up with that?”

  “What’s up indeed,” he said. “You might have asked Mr. Peach that question.” He talked loudly in order to be heard above the sound of the motor.

  “We saw Cardigan Peach down in the tunnel, carrying a lantern,” Brendan told him. “But then he was upstairs, too. But he couldn’t have gotten there ahead of us.”

  “He was even dressed differently,” I said.

  “There are many things about Cardigan Peach that are different,” Mr. Wattsbury told us. “His clothes are the least of it.”

  “But when he was in the tunnel, was that really him?” Brendan asked.

  “Ah, there you have me,” said Mr. Wattsbury. “The tunnel under Peach Manor is a vast mystery. I know of nobody who has navigated it and returned to tell the tale.”

  “And what about the giant skeleton?” Perry asked.

  “That I know something about,” Mr. Wattsbury said, steering us into the channel opposite Tenpenny farm. “It’s rumored to be the remains of Patrick Cotter, the Irish Giant, who died in Bristol two centuries past. He’s known among the very few as ‘the Guardian of the Gate’.”

  “What’s down there?” Perry asked. “What’s he guarding?”

  “The Passage, apparently,” said Mr. Wattsbury.

  “But a passage to where?” Brendan asked, because of course there was a passage. We had seen it. The passage wasn’t newsworthy.

  “I can’t say absolutely,” Mr. Wattsbury said, “but it’s rumored to lead to the realm of the Sleeper.”

  “Him again,” I said, but then realized that I hadn’t told either Perry or Brendan what I heard in the fog aboard the Clematis.

  “Him, who?” Brendan asked. “What sleeper?”

  “My knowledge gets a little thin there,” Mr. Wattsbury said. “I’ve never even been inside the boathouse until today. Almost no one has, except the three of you, and you shouldn’t have been. Not without asking.”

  We were suddenly very abashed, as you can imagine. Brendan mumbled something about having wanted to get in out of the rain, but it wasn’t convincing, and we sped along in silence most of the way back up the lake, having lost our boldness when it came to asking questions.

  There are some things I need to say that I haven’t had a chance to yet, and they’re answers more than questions. I’m going to say some of them now, if you don’t mind. In that moment in the tunnel, when we were all gaping at Patrick Cotter’s skeleton, just before we turned to run, I saw that there was a locking mechanism set in between two of his ribs—an iron plate with a big keyhole in it. That’s one thing. The other thing is that the skeleton’s right hand was missing. There were just the bones of his arm hanging straight down toward the floor. Uncle Hedge had told us that the Mermaid’s key was a skeleton key. Where was it now? Very likely it was in the hands of Dr. Hilario Frosticos himself, safely hidden aboard the submarine deep beneath the Morecambe Sands. There on the boat I didn’t say anything about Brendan’s losing the key, because Brendan, like I already said, is sometimes sensitive, and I try to be sensitive to his sensitivity as long as it’s sensible. I knew it was important, though—more important than we could have guessed, and of course Brendan knew it, too.

  When we were drawing near to Bowness-on-Windermere, Mr. Wattsbury asked me, “Do you want to take her on in?” Of course I said I did. “Head for the petrol shed,” he said, moving out of the way of the wheel and nodding at a wooden shed at the end of a short dock. But as we drew near we could see that the station was closed and the shutters had been drawn over the windows, and so I went on past, throttled back all the way into reverse to slow us down, and eased the launch into the boat slip, hardly bumping at all.

  “Good job, Perkins!” Mr. Wattsbury told me, which made me feel particularly happy. We covered the launch with a canvas, but before we did, Mr. Wattsbury looked roundabout to make sure we were unseen, and then held up the ignition key to the boat engine. He slipped it under the canvas and down behind the seat cushion of the front seat. “I never lose it this way,” he said, and winked.

  The water was empty, dark, and foreboding, and I was just telling myself that we were the last people out on the lake, when I saw that we weren’t. A couple of hundred yards farther down, along a brushy stretch of shoreline, a boat was just putting out from a lonesome wooden pier. Its motor was nearly silent—I could just hear a bubbly whir on the air. There were two men in the boat, one of them with white hair that stood out like a tiny patch of snow in the twilight. The other man sat at the wheel, his face hidden behind an upturned coat collar and a hat pulled down over his forehead. As we started our trek up the hill, they made a wide turn and headed for the far shore, angling down the lake in the direction of Peach Manor. But it was in the direction of a hundred other places, too, and so I didn’t give it another thought.

  §

  It was quiet in Bowness, the evening settling in and the houses lamp-lit and cozy. The streets were almost deserted, with only now and then someone hurrying along, holding onto his hat and hunched over out of the drizzle. There was smell of suppers cooking, and I was suddenly hungry and anxious to be home. We had gotten to the St. George and were turning up the walkway toward the lodge, when I heard the sound of a motor coming down from the town of Windermere, a town that’s a mile up the road from Bowness. Within moments a bus came looming out of the misty
evening with the lights on inside, looking warm and cozy.

  Inside the bus, wearing a hat and sitting very stiffly and staring straight ahead, was Henrietta Peckworthy, and no doubt about it.

  The bus passed us, heading down toward the lakeside where it went around a corner and out of sight.

  Chapter 16

  The Mysterious Stranger

  The sight of Ms Peckworthy had flabbergasted us. Brendan couldn’t speak, but gaped around, looking back down the road and then at Perry and me. Our nemesis had picked up our trail. But why? Surely not to recover the stolen notebook—unless Brendan had been right and there was something more to the notebook than we had thought. But even if that were true, the notebook was burned up anyway.

  None of us spoke a word about it to Mr. Wattsbury, but followed him into the lodge, where Mrs. Wattsbury was putting dinner on the table—an enormous roast pork with potatoes and applesauce and bread and butter. I can’t tell you whether the food was good or awful, because I didn’t really taste it, but just pushed it around on my plate, dividing it up so that it looked like I was eating. Now and then I said, “Mmmm,” in an appreciative way. Not ten minutes ago I was starved, but now I had lost my appetite. The mere sight of Ms Peckworthy can do that to you. She could hire herself out as a diet.

  I saw that Brendan was secretly sliding pieces of food off his plate and onto a napkin in his lap, especially the vegetables. At home he slips outside and throws it all onto the roof, and for the next couple of days there are all manner of birds and animals up there. He says it’s just like fairy food. The fairies love children for spilling food, because spilled food becomes the legal property of fairies as soon as it lands on the ground. And of course fairies aren’t fond of adults, who get angry about spilled food and set about cleaning it up. Perry was eating everything on his plate, as he always does unless he’s lost in contemplation. He eats very heartily, too, for a thin boy, and nods his head over his food, as if he has just heard some true thing. It’s very difficult to watch him eat.

  It seemed to take forever for dinner to be over, and then we helped Mrs. Wattsbury with the washing up, and so it was another half an hour before we had a chance to go up to our room to talk. “You children must be tired after your long day,” Mrs. Wattsbury said to us before we headed toward the stairs.

  We told her that she had hit the nail squarely on the head. “Rem acu tetigisti,” Perry said, showing off. And Brendan pointed out that at home it was the middle of the night, and that he had half a mind to turn in, and I said I did too. But of course it was only half a mind—there was the other half…. The first thing Brendan did when we got up to the room was to open the window and pitch out the napkin full of cut-up food, which flew like a meteor straight into the neighbor’s shrubbery. “A treat for the hedgehogs,” he said.

  “What do you think?” Perry asked, giving me a shrewd look.

  “I guess hedgehogs would eat it,” I told him, although I didn’t really know what they ate—hedges, maybe. “It seems kind of like cannibalism, hedgehogs eating roast pork. Like with the starving sailors.”

  “Not hedgehogs,” Perry said. “I mean, what about the appearance of Frau Peckworthy?”

  “I’m wondering why she came all this way,” I said. “It must be about us, but….”

  “Maybe it’s not about us,” Brendan said hopefully. “Maybe she’s just on a jolly holiday.”

  “Of course it’s about us,” Perry said. “By stealing the notebook you made it an affaire d’ honneur.”

  “It’s always some kind of Frenchy thing with you, isn’t it?” Brendan asked sulkily.

  “Perry means that stealing the notebook made it personal,” I said. “Peckworthy can’t let us get away with it. It’s an affair of honor now.”

  “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Perry said.

  “I’ll give her a frying pan,” Brendan said ridiculously, but then he looked sharply out the window, stood up, and drew the curtains almost shut. “Hark!” he said. “Here comes someone, and not just anyone, either.”

  Perry doused the lights so that we wouldn’t be seen, and the three of us peered out past the curtain. A mysterious-looking man had come out of the trees on the opposite side of the street. He was quite small—not a midget of any variety, but small—dressed in dark clothes and with a cap pulled down over his eyes. He hesitated for a moment, looking back into the shadows as if he was worried that someone was following. He carried a stick in his hand, but it wasn’t long enough to use as a walking stick—more the kind of stick you’d carry if you thought you might have to clobber someone. He stepped down into the street and hurried across, straight toward the door of the St. George. We lost sight of him, because our view was blocked by the tree outside the window and by the porch eaves, but we could hear him rapping on the door with the stick, and then there was the sound of the door opening.

  We slipped out onto the landing at the top of the stairs and tiptoed down until we got halfway to the bottom. Any farther and they’d be able to see our feet, if they had happened to look. The small man was in the Wattsbury’s parlor now, and even without getting close enough to be actually snooping, we could hear him talking quite clearly.

  “Yes, sir,” he was saying, “down at the old King’s Owl. He was a strange customer, all right.”

  “How do you mean strange, Mr. Boskins?” Mr. Wattsbury asked.

  “I mean he had a bloomin’ great seashell on his head, didn’t he? And it was full of water, and him breathing through a hose into his midsection.”

  Brendan squeezed my arm hard at that point, meaning it was Reginald Peach, but he didn’t really need to, because it was moronically obvious.

  “At the pub?” Mr. Wattsbury asked.

  “Yes, sir. That is to say, not in the Owl itself, sir, but out by the wall opposite that runs down to the lake. Do you know the Old Door?”

  “The wooden door in the wall?”

  “That’s it, sir. He said he’d be back at that very door in an hour if he could manage it, and would wait for you there. Them’s his very words. If he could manage it. It didn’t seem certain. If he could not manage it, then you were to play your part without a script, like the poet said.”

  “Tonight? An hour from now?”

  “That’s it, Mr. Wattsbury. He said it was now or never, that the others were going off to try the key. Mind you, I was specifically to say that they were going to ‘try the key.’”

  They, I thought. Who else but Frosticos and the Creeper? So the Creeper was alive! It was the black cloud and the silver lining both together, although the lining was paper thin.

  Mr. Wattsbury spoke again. “Try the key, do you say? This is all very mysterious, Mr. Boskins. I’m not fond of a mystery.”

  “Nor am I, sir. Nor was your man in the helmet. He seemed frightened nearly out of his wits, I’d say. I came here straight off. He give me five pound for my troubles, and in two minutes I mean to be up the road to spend my earnings. Don’t look back, that’s my motto.”

  “But was there any further message, Mr. Boskins? Anything besides the key and this clandestine meeting? Something I can make sense of?”

  “I was to tell you, ‘the girl is safe.’”

  “And did he mention anyone named Hedgepeth?”

  “Yes, indeed, sir. Hedgepeth ain’t.”

  “Ain’t what, Mr. Boskins?”

  “Ain’t safe, sir. Not by a long chalk. They’re meaning to do him a mischief if the key ain’t right. That’s why it must be tonight that you act, while them others have gone down the lake. Your man in the helmet can’t lift a finger to help or he’ll catch it, and the little girl, too. He put the weight on you, sir, every last punctilio. It’s up to you now. That was the last word from your man in the helmet.”

  It might have been a mystery to Mr. Wattsbury, but none of it was a mystery to us, I can tell you, and we lingered there halfway down the stairs for Mr. Boskins to leave, at which moment we would fill Mr. Wattsbury in on the details. A
nd of course we would go with him to his meeting with Reginald at the Old Door.

  If he wouldn’t let us, we’d go without him.

  But then the door to the St. George opened again—someone else coming in. We heard Mr. Wattsbury say, “May I help you madam?” and I thought that it was a woman wanting a room. But then, in the unmistakable voice of Ms Henrietta Peckworthy, she said, “I’ve come to claim Toliver Hedgepeth’s children.”

  I turned to Perry and Brendan, and Perry held his finger to his lips, and we got ready to listen again, although all of us were thinking the same thing, having to do with the tree outside the window and how long it would take to get down it.

  Mr. Boskins had clammed up, and now he was taking his leave, and Mr. Wattsbury was saying, “Very good, Mr. Boskins, here’s another fiver for your trouble,” and Mr. Boskins said “Cheers,” and the door opened and shut once again, and then Wattsbury said to Ms Peckworthy, “I’m afraid the children have been left in my charge, ma’am. The missus and I are entirely competent to care for them while their uncle is away.”

  “I have it on good authority that Mr. Hedgepeth is not ‘away’ as you put it, but is in fact either dead or missing. And on the basis of that information I have brought a legal document that allows me to take charge of the children on their aunt’s behalf. My heavens, it’s that infernal dog!”