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  Thomas Edison’s last breath was still in the jar, or at least the jar was still in the cabinet and the lid was still waxed onto it. The spirit telephone was next to it in a glass box, safe and sound. We went on down the aisle and right away we saw what was gone. It was the Feejee Mermaid, which is in a sealed box made out of glass and wood. I don’t mean the fake mermaid that P.T. Barnum the circus man had, which was sewn up out of monkeys and carp skin, but the real Feejee Mermaid, which washed up out onto a South Seas island in a storm and dried out in the sun until she was the color of a coconut and had shrunk down to about three feet tall.

  Perry found a footprint in the dust, and he went back after the gummidgefish magnifying glass in order to detectify it. Brendan and Hasbro went off to look around the rest of the exhibits to see whether anything else was gone. But it would have taken both hands to carry off the Mermaid, and so I didn’t think that the thief could have stolen anything else, not if he was escaping on foot. I went to ask Old Sally whether the Mermaid had maybe been put somewhere else and hadn’t been stolen at all. Old Sally said that the Mermaid must have been what the thief was carrying when he ran, the filthy scoundrel, because the box was just that size.

  I went back into the museum where right away I ran into Perry acting suspiciously. There’s a workroom off the hallway that’s about as big as someone’s garage, with lumber in it and sheets of glass and tools and cans of paint. It has a wooden floor that’s kind of beat up and stained, with a piece of carpet in the middle of it. Perry was standing in the hallway, leaning over and looking in through the open door. He turned and waved at me to hurry, and he put his finger to his lips. When I looked past him, I saw right off that the window was pushed wide open. The cold wind that was blowing in smelled like rain, and the floor was wet around it, and there were muddy footprints leading from the window to a place in the middle of the floor where the rug had been hauled back and a trap door was standing open.

  I didn’t need a magnifying glass to figure out what had happened. The thief hadn’t gone down to the beach at all, but had stowed the mermaid somewhere and come in through the window to finish the job. Perry made a pushing gesture, meaning the trapdoor, and I nodded. We tiptoed forward like Hansel and Gretel sneaking up on the witch, listening to the shuffling and scraping under the floor. We were very nearly close enough when suddenly we saw a hand come out, and we stopped dead. The rest of him was hidden by the open door, so he couldn’t have seen us yet, although maybe he heard our footsteps on the floorboards. Very slowly he peered past the edge of the door straight at us. It was Lord Wheyface the Creeper, and the look on his face was poisonous.

  Chapter 4

  Out Through the Window

  Perry leaped forward and threw himself against the door, which slammed down, knocking the Creeper back into the hole but banging against his wrist and hand and not closing all the way. We heard him shout, a really angry shout, and Perry tried to kick his hand back under the edge of the door so we could get it down flat and trap him. The hand twisted and caught Perry’s ankle, and Perry tripped and fell away from the trap door with the Creeper still holding onto him. I jumped for it, pushing hard against it, but it was no use, and the door opened hard and threw me backward. Brendan ran in, goggled at us, and ran back out just as the Creeper let go of Perry, tossed an old leather briefcase out of the hole and onto the floor, and hauled himself out. Perry scrambled away, and the Creeper clambered to his feet and bent over to snatch up the briefcase.

  Run first, I told myself, but before I could take a step he lunged straight at me. I screamed and tried to twist aside, but quick as a snake he grabbed me by the jacket, then threw his arm around my waist and started dragging me back toward the window. I screamed again and thrashed around, but he held on tight, and I just knew that he was going to drag me right out through the window, and so I started kicking and flailing my arms around and hitting him with my elbows, and if I could have got to him, I would have bitten him, too.

  Perry rushed forward like a hero and tried to grab the briefcase that the Creeper was holding onto, but the Creeper fought him off with his free hand, with Perry bobbing back and forth, and all the time we were backing up toward the window. Old Sally ran into the room clutching a broom and looking as much like an army as any single person can look. Brendan followed behind her, carrying the gummidgefish globe with both hands like he was going to smash the man with it. Then Hasbro dashed in, barking like a mad thing, but very confused and distracted by the hole in the floor until he saw that it was the Creeper who was causing the problem and went after his boot again. Old Sally slammed the Creeper with the broom right on the side of the head, and he grunted and jerked back. My feet left the floor as he picked me up to shield himself from the broom, shouting, “Stop!” so loud that everyone did stop, including Hasbro.

  Brendan was holding the gummidgefish globe over his head, and Old Sally gripped her broom like a spear. Perry was breathing hard and kind of shaky. Nobody could do anything without hurting me, or without the Creeper hurting me. He shuffled backward a couple of steps, carrying me even closer to the open window. He pitched the briefcase backward out into the rain, and for an awful moment I thought he was going to throw me out the window too. Instead he sort of twisted me around and stared at me. I hoped to never see a face like that again, it was so mean and ugly and hateful.

  “Mark my words,” he said in an evil way, “I’ll know you again, pillbug,” and he dropped me onto the floor right then and there and slid out through the window quick as a wink. Old Sally threw the broom, though, and it hit him square in the back, and although he jerked a little and grunted, it didn’t stop him. He picked up the briefcase and ran along the side of the museum in a downpour of rain, heading toward the ocean. Perry grabbed the gummidgefish globe out of Brendan’s hands, because it looked like Brendan was going to throw it through the window, just out of excitement. If it broke, the invisible gummidgefish eye would have been lost forever in the weeds, because it’s very nearly impossible to find an invisible eye once it’s gotten lost.

  Old Sally helped me up, and we headed straight out of the workroom and toward the front door of the museum, just as it swung open and Uncle Hedge and Mr. Vegeley came in, a minute too late. One good thing, though—they were carrying the Feejee Mermaid, safe and sound.

  “He came back!” Old Sally shouted at them, and she pointed in the direction he had gone just moments before. Mr. Vegeley set down the Mermaid and both of them turned straightaway and went back out into the rain toward the tunnel, moving wonderfully fast for their size. We followed behind them now, Hasbro, too, because nobody had time to tell us not to, and we plunged right into the tunnel with Uncle Hedge leading the way.

  The first thing we did was slow down, because it was dark in among the vines and mustard plants, with only a little daylight showing through. The farther we got down the tunnel, the darker it became. It was still kind of dry in there despite the rain, which shows you how thick the vegetation was. You had to stick right to the center, because if you got over to the side of the tunnel, the thorns on the berry vines would scrape you. As it was they kept snatching at my hair and jacket.

  “This is no good,” Uncle Hedge said, stopping at last. He looked behind him and was surprised to see us. “You children go back. Now,” he said. He wasn’t smiling when he said this, and we turned around and started back like he told us. I didn’t mind, because the rainwater had started dripping from the tangle of vines overhead now, and was running down my neck and the back of my jacket, and the tunnel smelled like old moldy leaves and other discarded things.

  I was glad to get back to the museum kitchen, where the heater was going, although as soon as I got in and was safe, the strangest thing happened. I started shaking all over and then started to cry, because I couldn’t help it. It was as if I could feel the Creeper’s arm around me and see his face again. Brendan and Perry told me it was all right to cry, and so did Old Sally, who poured hot cocoa for us and found some cookies i
n the larder, as she calls the pantry, and pretty soon I was all right again.

  In about ten minutes Uncle Hedge and Mr. Vegeley came back empty-handed. They hadn’t caught the Creeper, who had probably doubled back up the Glass Beach trail and gone into the lumberyards. Old Sally poured cups of coffee for the two of them and then poured one for herself, and Uncle Hedge had us tell him the story from the beginning—how Perry had hear suspicious noises, which led him to the workroom, and how he and I had tried to imprison the Creeper by closing the trap door, but had failed.

  “So he took the briefcase!” Uncle Hedge said when I got to that part. For some reason he didn’t seem unhappy about it, which was strange, although it wasn’t something that I paid attention to at the moment. “And the three of you!” he said, looking narrowly at us. “I believe I told you to stay out of trouble, and here you were attacking this Creeper fellow with your bare hands. He might have hurt you just because you had gotten in his way, and nothing served by it either.”

  “We didn’t know who he was,” I said, “and we didn’t want to fight with him.” It sounded like a lame excuse, because it was.

  “It was very brave of you,” Uncle Hedge said in a kindly way. “And I honor you for it, but it was the wrong thing to do. It was an IQ test, and you two failed it. I believe a possum could have passed it. I’ll remind you that Ms Peckworthy would take a dim view if one of you were to be knocked on the head or carried away. Let me attend to the man, if he needs attending to. Probably he’s long gone by now, and with any luck he’ll keep going.”

  “What was that thing he stole?” Brendan asked. “That old briefcase?”

  Uncle Hedge thought for a minute, as if he were making up his mind whether to tell us or not, because maybe it was too dangerous to tell us. I could see that he didn’t want us mixed up in this thing at all, whatever it was. But then because we were already mixed up in it, he did tell us, and this is what he said: the Creeper had stolen some hand-written journals—the journals of a man named Basil Peach, a member of the Guild of St. George, and an adventurer and explorer. Peach’s explorations took him to far-flung parts of the world, and he made maps of secret places, which he drew right into the journals. Some of his maps charted openings into the land at the center of the Earth, and it was one of those maps that had led my mother into the depths of the Sargasso Sea, never to return. The Feejee Mermaid belonged to Basil’s ancient father, Cardigan Peach.

  Uncle Hedge hadn’t seen Basil Peach for a long time, nearly twenty years, and during that time the Mermaid and the briefcase with the maps and journal had been stored in the Secret Museum for safe keeping, except it turned out not to be all that safe after all. The Creeper wanted the very two things in the museum that were the rightful property of the Peach family. But why? That was the unanswered question. There was a silver lining to the whole thing though. Uncle Hedge had removed the most important maps from the journals back when my mother made her fateful trip to the Sargasso, and he kept them locked up safe at home. The Creeper thought he had the maps, you see, but he didn’t, or at least he didn’t have the ones that mattered.

  By the time we left the museum, taking the Mermaid with us, it was dark. The rain had stopped, but the night was cold and the sky was full of tearing clouds, with the moon appearing and then disappearing behind them. When we turned up the Coast Road, past the Skunk Train Station, what should I see parked in the lot but a tiny red car with someone sitting inside. “Ms Peckworthy!” I said, and everyone looked, and sure enough it was her, alone in the dark car, waiting.

  But waiting for what? Or perhaps for whom? We drove along in silence, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether the Creeper had gone out of our lives now that he had gotten the briefcase, or whether he had been drawn more deeply into them. “Mark my words,” he had told me. “I’ll know you again.” The memory of it made me shudder, and I had to force myself to think about other things.

  Chapter 5

  The Black Iron Key

  That night after dinner we were eating vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup in the kitchen. Uncle Hedge let us dish it out, because it had been a long day, and we had four scoops apiece in big bowls with so much chocolate syrup that there was a chocolate lake in the bottom. Brendan said the lake was a tar pit and the scoops of ice cream were the sinking bodies of albino wooly mammoths, but he had only just thought this up when Uncle Hedge cleared his throat in a meaningful way. We forgot about the mammoths and the tar pits because he looked serious and thoughtful.

  “You recall Mr. Asquith?” he said, and of course all of us did.

  “I think he was nice,” Brendan said.

  “That he was,” Uncle Hedge said, “and lucky for us that he was nice. This business at the Museum has set me thinking, though.” He took off his spectacles and polished them on the tail of his shirt, and then he held them up and looked through them before putting them back on. I could see that he was trying to think up the right words to say, as if they were important words, but even so I was surprised at what he said next.

  “Ms Peckworthy has something important to tell us,” he said, “and I want all of us to listen to her.”

  “Peckworthy!” Brendan said, snorting it out through his nose.

  Uncle Hedge held up his hand and shook his head. “Never you mind her for the moment. What I mean to say is that…is that I’ve tried to be a father to you three, and maybe sometimes I haven’t done as good a job as I might have.”

  Immediately we all shouted that he had too, but he waved us quiet and went on. “Sometimes a man is good at being a father because there’s a good mother alongside of him.”

  “There’s Old Sally,” Brendan put in.

  “And we’re lucky to have her. But she’s not a mother, is she? And I’m not a father,” he said, “not really, although I do what I can.”

  He drew in a deep breath and fell silent for a moment. Old Sally had told me once that our mothers were the daughters that Uncle Hedge never had, although now he’s got me, which I hope makes up for it a little bit. Perry and Brendan were very quiet now, and I was, too, because I was thinking about my mother, just like they were probably thinking of their mother, and I knew that Uncle Hedge was at least partly right. It didn’t matter to me that Ms Peckworthy had called me a perfect little tomboy, because of sticks and stones and all that, but there were times, a lot of times, when I wished I could talk to my mother, if only for a few minutes, to ask her things that I couldn’t ask Uncle Hedge. It was hard right then not to cry, but I didn’t, because I knew that Uncle Hedge felt bad enough, and I didn’t want to make it worse for him. If he started to cry it would just be too awful.

  “What I mean to say,” Uncle Hedge told us, “is that we can’t let Ms Peckworthy be right.”

  “She’s not right,” Brendan said. “I’m doing better in school. I did my history paper on John Adams and what’s-his-name, the other Adams, and I did my leaf collection, and I did extra credit for science, too. We proved that thing about hot air, didn’t we, Perry? With the balloon in the oven?”

  “Charles’s Law,” Perry said. “Gas volume and temperature.”

  “That had an explosive result, as I recall,” Uncle Hedge said. He didn’t add that it also had a stinking result when the burst balloon glued itself onto the floor of the oven.

  “That’s what proved it,” Brendan said proudly. “I wrote up a hypothesis and everything, and even a graph with the explosion at the end of the line. I used colored pencils.”

  “Very scientific of you,” Uncle Hedge said. “But we’ve got to be sure that we aren’t failing any classes, or even coming near it. Do you understand me, Brendan?”

  Brendan poked at his melting wooly mammoth and nodded his head.

  “And we won’t trouble Ms Peckworthy with nonsense of any other variety? Or give her any other sort of evidence to cudgel us with?”

  “No, sir,” Perry said, and I said it, too, and so did Brendan, although Brendan didn’t look sure about it, and I knew it wou
ld be necessary for Perry and I to take him aside and threaten him, because if Brendan turned out to be the weak link, it would be curtains for all of us, curtains being Aunt Ricketts.

  “Your parents would be very proud of you,” Uncle Hedge said after a moment. “And you can be very proud of them.” It seemed as if he wanted to go on and explain what he meant, but he didn’t because he saw that there wasn’t any need to. Some hard things needn’t be said at all, when everyone already knows them. Uncle Hedge said he had work to do then, and he went off toward his study, which is very like a library, full of old books of every sort and with maps and sea charts on the wall and mementos from distant lands cluttering the shelves.

  We went back to our ice cream, but I couldn’t concentrate on it, because I was thinking about my mother, and because the Mermaid was sitting right in front of me on the kitchen table, looking out through the window into the darkness. And it was dark outside. If there was a moon in the sky it stayed hidden, and every now and then raindrops pattered against the window. There was a flicker of lightning, too, out over the ocean, although it must have been very distant, because there was no thunder to be heard, at least not yet. It was a good night to be inside the house eating ice cream where it was warm and dry.

  I began to wonder what language the Mermaid had spoken when she was alive—maybe some kind of bubble language—and whether she had a mother and a father and a kitchen to eat ice cream in, or whatever mermaids eat. Her bottom part was a tail, exactly like you would imagine, with big scales about the size of nickels, and the kitchen light shone on them so that they reflected little rainbows that were really quite pretty. The Mermaid herself must have been much prettier, too, before the sun poached her. Her eyes were made of glass, but they twinkled as I imagined her eyes must have twinkled long ago, and she seemed to be gazing into the Great Beyond, maybe recalling her life in the Sargasso Sea and longing for her final resting place.