Zeuglodon (11 page)

We found a stick straightaway, but it was too thick, and wouldn’t fit through the crack, and so we found another one that was thin enough but which broke. We needed something just right—thin but hard and tough, like a piece of steel. And we needed it quickly. I told myself that it wouldn’t hurt to take a quick look inside, if only to find out where the stairs led.

“Maybe Mr. Wattsbury has a tool kit in the boat,” Perry said. “We might find a fishing knife or something.”

“A knife!” Brendan said, and he rooted in his jacket pocket and came up with the Creeper’s knife, which you’ll remember he had kept as a spoil of war. “Hah!” he said, and he snapped the blade out, slid it through the crack beneath the latch, and wiggled steadily up at it. The latch was maybe rusty or something, because it took a while, but then there was a scraping sound, a metallic click, and the door swung silently outward, nearly knocking into us. We stepped inside and stood there for a moment listening to the drops pattering on the roof, and the first thing that we noticed was that the dark square in the floor was a stone stairway just as we had guessed, a stairway which evidently descended to a level below the lake itself.

The tools and boards and such that lay on the ground were rusty and dirty from years of lying there, as if the boathouse hadn’t been used for any purpose at all in half a century. There was an old, square, wooden mallet, and a saw blade with no handle, and some oarlocks, and a carving thingy with a curved blade, and some heavy, short nails that had square-shaped heads, as if they’d been stamped out down at Tenpenny Farm, which probably they had been.

Brendan straightaway started down the stairs. “Come on,” he said peevishly, looking back at us, and Perry shrugged and followed him, and I followed Perry. On the stairs we could hear the sound of water lapping against stones, and there was a strong smell of the lake, very musty and weedy. It was quite dark, because the little bit of light through the doorway and the windows dimmed as you went down the steps.

“A lantern!” Brendan said.

And there
was
a lantern, right there in the wall, shoved into a niche, and beside it sat an old can with a rusty lid, full of what must have been lamp oil. We have oil lamps in Caspar, so lamps and lamp oil were nothing new to us. The lamp felt heavy, as if it was nearly full of oil already, so Brendan struck a match against the stone wall in order to light the wick. The match flashed so brightly that for an instant I saw farther down the stairs, which descended to another floor below. We had to strike three more matches before the moldy old lamp wick stayed lit, and even then it burned very low and smoky.

We started down, Perry first and Brendan following him and carrying the lantern. I came along last, and I had my hand on Brendan’s shoulder. He would usually have shaken it off, because he doesn’t want girls clutching at him (unless they’re Lala Peach) but this time he didn’t shake it off. The corners of the walls were cobwebby, and lake water leaked in between the cracks in the mortar, and the air smelled damp. Almost at once we came to some wooden doors set into the stone on the dry side of the stairs. They looked like cupboard doors, built of planks and studded with great, fat-headed nails and with heavy hinges that were blue-green with age. Each of the doors, maybe a dozen of them, was carved with a name and a pair of dates, exactly as if they were tombstones. The dates went back to the 1600s.

“It’s a sepulcher,” Perry whispered, and the word gave me the creeps even more than the names and the dates did. I prefer my corpses to be buried, not put into cupboards. There was a death date of 1789 on one of them, Artemis John Peach, and another from 1867. This one had a woman’s name on it—
Annabelle Crumpet-Peach
.

“She sounds like a pie,” Brendan whispered, which should have been funny, except there were too many dead people nearby for us to be laughing.

“Let’s go back,” I said. “I don’t think it’s all that polite to be disturbing the dead.”

“The dead don’t care,” Brendan told me. “That’s why they call them dead.” I gave him a dirty look, which he pretended to laugh at. When Perry started downward once again, I followed along, and we were soon at the very bottom of the stairs, where a tunnel stretched away into the darkness. We went on just a little farther, the lantern casting its glow onto the floor around us. Beyond that circle of lantern light, though, it was pitch dark. The air was cool and desperately silent, with only the sound of gurgling and dripping and the scrape of our shoes on the stones. A wall loomed out of the darkness, and the tunnel turned sharply to the right—in the direction of the manor house.

I stopped then, because a creepy feeling had come over me. I can’t describe it to you, but there was something uncanny in the air, something that made me think of the dark depths of the pool in the hedge maze. I had the strange feeling that I stood at the edge of an immense dark place, like a big, shadowy room in a funhouse, and I didn’t like the feeling at all. “I’m going back,” I said.

“
Baby
,” Brendan said, which was mean of him, and so I told him that being a baby was better than being stupid, and he said, “I’m not as stupid as you look,” which he thinks is very clever, but is not.

“Just one peek around the corner,” Perry said, “and then we’ll all go back.”

Brendan mumbled something disagreeable, but I said, “All right, but just one,” and we all stepped forward and peered past the corner, holding the lantern out, and for the space of five seconds we stared straight ahead, our mouths hanging open with horrible surprise. The corridor was blocked by a heavy iron gate a few feet farther along. And sitting in front of the gate on a sort of bench built right into the stones of the wall was an enormous skeleton, staring straight back at us through black, sightless eyes.

And I mean
enormous
—maybe eight or nine feet tall if he had stood up. He was sort of slumped forward, though, and peering straight at us, as if he wanted to see who it was that had disturbed his sleep.

Before any of us could say anything, or take another step closer even if we had wanted to, a shadow fell across the rock wall far down the tunnel—the shadow of someone carrying a lantern, coming in our direction, looming up silently. We saw that it was old Cardigan Peach in his black coat, just as he had looked in Lala’s photo. He peered toward us from a distance of maybe fifty feet, and I could quite clearly hear him humming something, although it sounded more like a beehive than human humming. And then abruptly he vanished, as if his lantern had gone dark. Before we could turn to leave, poof!, there he was again, fifteen feet closer to us, coming along hummingly, and with his lamp lit again. He moved in a stuttery way, like an old jumpy filmstrip, and the humming was louder now, and it came to me that it was the same humming that I’d heard in the sea cave with Lala. There was the same water-on-rock smell, too, although mingled now with the burning oil smell of the lantern.

Then in the flicker of an eye Cardigan Peach stood right beyond the gate, still smiling, just a few feet from us, his eyes staring, holding up his lantern so that the light shone on his face. In that moment Brendan turned and pushed straight into me, and for another few seconds we were all shouting and pushing and trying to run. Then our lantern went out, and we were in darkness so black that I knew what it was like to be blind. I walked forward with my hands out straight until I reached a wall, and then followed it back to the stairs, which were just barely visible because of light from above. I leaped up them two at a time, looking behind me, expecting to see the illuminated face of Cardigan Peach following along behind me like a floating balloon.

Then it was light again. Perry and Brendan had stopped right ahead, and were stowing the lantern in its niche. Perry was staring upward, at a strangely-shaped shadow that was descending the stairs toward us, shuffling along. Mr. Wattsbury appeared just then, walking down backward and carrying one edge of the Mermaid’s exhibit case. Evidently he had taken it out of the Manchester Theatre Company box. Behind him appeared, impossibly, old Cardigan Peach himself, looking toad-like and grim and wearing a tweed coat and heavy trousers—not the black suit he had been wearing only moments ago. And he wasn’t holding a lantern, either, and he wasn’t humming a tune. Perry and Brendan were looking very gawkily at him, and I suppose I was too.

They set the Mermaid’s box down on the landing. “This is Mr. Cardigan Peach,” Mr. Wattsbury said, dusting off his hands.

“At your service,” he said, nodding to us.

I told him that I was Kathleen Perkins and was very glad to meet him, and Brendan and Perry said so, too, although of course they said their own names. Mr. Peach didn’t look as terrifying as I had feared, but he was extremely amphibious, with a wide mouth and pale frog-like skin. His hands were partly webbed, too, like Lala’s.

“Mr. Wattsbury has told me that you befriended Eulalie,” he said. His voice was as strange as he was, very high and piping.

We nodded.

“I’d like to thank you for that. Perhaps some day I can return the favor.”

I found myself thinking that he could do me the favor of coming home with me to meet Mr. Collier, just to make Mr. Collier’s eyes shoot open.

“It’s time to lay her to rest,” he said to Mr. Wattsbury, and they went on down the stairs where Mr. Peach opened one of the sepulcher doors, revealing an empty stone cupboard inside. The two of them lifted the Mermaid into it. Mr. Peach took one last look at her, mumbled a few words under his breath, and then shut the door, entombing her in the darkness before turning around and ascending the stairs again. We followed silently up into the boathouse itself, where he paused by the windows, looking out onto the lake, which was dark now with the stormy weather. I was trying to think of some way of apologizing for having been meddling in the boathouse at all, but Mr. Peach was apparently sadly distracted, and so I stayed silent.

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.