Zeuglodon E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 304

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A skeletal hand clutching an iron key lies hidden within a mermaid's wooden sarcophagus; a hand-drawn map is stolen from beneath the floorboards an old museum; an eccentric sleeping inventor dreams of a passage to the center of the hollow earth, and by dreaming of the passage, brings it into being…. Pursued by kidnappers thinking of riches and murder, Katherine Perkins and her two cousins, junior members of The Guild of St. George, must descend into the depths of the hollow earth in order to return the Sleeper to his ancestral home on the shores of Lake Windermere. But to awaken him might mean the end of his dream, the closing of the Windermere Passage, and the three intrepid explorers marooned in a savage land forgotten by time itself…. Zeuglodon, set in the world envisioned in James Blaylock's The Digging Leviathan, is a landscape of color, mystery, and adventure, in which reality and fantasy are shifting currents, and nothing is quite what it seems to be. "James P. Blaylock's Zeuglodon is the most fun I've had reading in ages, with an unabashed budding cryptozoologist protagonist, mummified mermaid, underground passages, lost world, and the scariest busybody since Margaret Hamilton put Toto in her bicycle basket. Don't miss it." - Locus

Leseprobe

ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

Novels of BalumniaTHE ELFIN SHIP*THE DISAPPEARING DWARF*THE STONE GIANT*

Langdon St. Ives AdventuresHOMUNCULUSLORD KELVIN'S MACHINETHE EBB TIDETHE AFFAIR OF THE CHALK CLIFFSTHE AYLESFORD SKULL

THE DIGGING LEVIATHAN*

THE LAST COIN*

THE PAPER GRAIL*

NIGHT RELICS*

ALL THE BELLS ON EARTH*

WINTER TIDES*

THE RAINY SEASON*

LAND OF DREAMS*

THE KNIGHTS OF THE CORNERSTONE

ZEUGLODON*

Short Story CollectionsTHIRTEEN PHANTASMS*ON PIRATESTHE DEVILS IN THE DETAILSIN FOR A PENNY*THE SHADOW ON THE DOORSTEPMETAMORPHOSIS*

Novels for Young AdultsTHE MAGIC SPECTACLES*

*available as an e-book from Jabberwocky Literary Agency

Zeuglodon

Copyright © 2012 by James P. Blaylock.All rights reserved.

Cover art by Dirk Berger.

Published as an e-book by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD, in 2013.

ISBN: 9781625670342

CONTENTS

Copyright

Also by James P. Blaylock

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

For Kathy, Perry, and Krysta Rodriguez,Secret Members of the Guild of St. George

And, as ever, for Viki, John, and Danny

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m happy to thank a number of people who read this book in its early stages and made sensible and encouraging suggestions or lent me needed inspiration: Paul Buchanan, Heather Buchanan, John Blaylock, Lew Shiner, Tim Powers, Karen Fowler, and our old friends Sue and Barry Watts of the St. John’s Lodge in Bowness-on-Windermere, England.

I first began writing Zeuglodon as a sort of illustration for the students in my Origins and Sources of Fiction class at the Orange County High School of the Arts, so they’re largely to blame for its existence. By now they’ve all gone out to make their way in the wide world, but perhaps the stuff of this book (if they ever run across it) will call up pleasant memories.

Finally, in the writing of this novel I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to a number of luminous books (and the authors who wrote them), many of which books my mother encouraged me to read at an impressionable age, thus sealing my fate as a certain sort of writer: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, At the Earth’s Core, Pellucidar, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Huckleberry Finn, Edith Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, and the seafaring novels of Howard Pease.

“We shall pick up an existence by its frogs. If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte.

One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”

Charles FortLo!

Chapter 1

The Day that Three Things Happened

How it all started was like this. Brendan, Perry, and I were taking Hasbro for a walk one foggy morning last spring, because Brendan claimed he saw a mermaid on the rocks at Lighthouse Beach. He had said things like this before, telling us one time how he had seen a gigantic octopus tentacle come up out of the kelp, and then another time a pterodactyl eating fish on the rocks. The pterodactyl had turned out to be a big pelican, which was better than the octopus, which turned out to be a figment.

Brendan was hanging onto the leash and Hasbro was pulling him along toward Mrs. Hoover’s house. Hasbro is part bulldog, you see, and he’s very strong, and there’s no holding him back if he’s anxious to be walking. He’s kind of fat, too, although Uncle Hedge says he’s actually just portly, which is a pleasant way of saying fat, and there’s no reason not to be polite around dogs as well as around people. I could see Mrs. Hoover working in her front garden, in among the roses. She’s our neighbor three doors down, and a very nice neighbor, too, as you’ll see. There was a woman talking to her, a tall, thin woman, who looked sort of picklish and who was writing in a notebook. We didn’t know it then, but the woman was Ms Henrietta Peckworthy, who is a member of a very troublesome do-gooder society. Ms Peckworthy was about to become our nemesis, our soon-to-be-sworn-enemy.

What happened was that Hasbro spotted Mrs. Hoover’s Persian cat, whose name is Pete and whose face is entirely flat. Hasbro followed Pete along the edge of the bushes toward the Hoover backyard, pulling Brendan with him. Pete started running, and when Hasbro tried to chase him he yanked Brendan over onto his face in the wet grass and got away into the fog, which was very thick now. Perry ran after Hasbro, and I bent over to help Brendan up. It was just then, when both of us were hidden by fog and bushes, that I overheard Ms Peckworthy talking.

“No rules at all is what they tell me,” she said to Mrs. Hoover. “A steady diet of doughnuts and ice cream. Up at all hours and roaming the bluffs and beaches. I understand that the small boy tumbled down the side of the cliff and broke his arm.”

“That would be Brendan,” Mrs. Hoover said. “Boys will be boys.”

“I daresay they will, if they’re allowed to be. And that poor little girl with no mother to look after her. A perfect little tomboy. Her aunt is very worried about her. Toliver Hedgepeth might mean well enough, but he’s an eccentric of the first water, and he’s no kind of parent for three impressionable children.”

That was me, the “perfect little tomboy.” And John Toliver Hedgepeth is our Uncle Hedge. Who is the aunt that’s so very worried about us, you ask?—Aunt Ricketts, who lives in Los Angeles and shoves her nose into everyone else’s business, because it’s a very long nose. We’re not fond of Aunt Ricketts.

“And the small boy will no doubt fail in school this year,” Ms Peckworthy was saying. “No doubt at all.”

I saw that Brendan was boiling mad now, because there really was some doubt, although not a lot. Ms Peckworthy was obviously a treacherous informer and spy, and that’s the thing that Brendan hates most in the world.

Perry was coming back with Hasbro now, and I motioned for him to keep hidden, and so he ducked down and crawled toward us across the lawn, hanging onto Hasbro’s leash with his teeth. Unlike Brendan, Hasbro was in a very happy frame of mind, and his head, which is large, was bobbing from side to side, like one of those dashboard dogs with his head on a spring. I was afraid that he was going to start barking, which he often does when he’s happy. So I shook my head at him and gave him a hard look.

“Mrs. Ricketts intends only to do what’s right for the children,” Ms Peckworthy was saying now. “She would hate to bring Social Services into the matter, but there’s the children’s welfare to think about. I fully intend to take them back to Los Angeles when I return south at the end of the week. I’ll leave my card with you.”

“That’s as may be,” Mrs. Hoover said boldly, “but I don’t care a rap about your Mrs. Ricketts and what she wants. I’ve never heard of the woman.”

Ms Peckworthy started up again. I don’t know what-all she said, because I was thinking about that last terrible thing: “…take them back to Los Angeles.” If she had said that the world was going to explode at the end of the week it wouldn’t have been nearly so bad. Without my having a chance to stop him, Brendan stood up, put his thumbs in his ears, and waggled his fingers at her while sticking his tongue out and squinching up his eyes. He often does this to show contempt.

Ms Peckworthy was apparently astonished to see him, popping up out of nowhere like this, looming through the fog and making faces. I stood up, too, and Ms Peckworthy stepped backward and put up her hands as if we were going to leap over the bushes and attack her. Before I could say anything useful, Pete the cat appeared on the lawn behind her, having come all the way around the house. Hasbro made a dash at Pete straight through the bushes, and Ms Peckworthy stepped back onto his leash, which was coming along like a snake. Somehow she fell over backward and said, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Mrs. Hoover went to help her and so did Perry, except that Ms Peckworthy shouted, “Assassin!” and wouldn’t let Perry near her but acted as if he meant to harm her.

She crawled to her feet, picked up the little notebook, shook it at us, and walked off very quickly without saying another word, looking back over her shoulder with her pickle face. She got into her tiny red car and drove away. So ended the first awful appearance of Henrietta Peckworthy.

That wasn’t the end of anything else, though, not by a long sea mile, as our old friend Captain Sodbury would say. Brendan wanted to get down to Lighthouse Beach in order to find his mermaid before the fog got any thicker, and so we forgot about Ms Peckworthy, said goodbye to Mrs. Hoover, and pursued our course along the bluffs, with me minding Hasbro now. The sea path runs right along the edge of the cliffs, with the ocean breaking on the rocks two hundred feet below, and it can be dangerous in the fog, especially with the cliffs all crumbly after last winter’s rain. Brendan hurried on ahead, but I shouted at him to slow down, because the fog was getting heavier all the time. And sure enough, very soon the fog closed behind him like a gray curtain, so thick that we couldn’t tell right from left except for the sound of the ocean away below us and the grumble of trucks out on the Coast Road.

After a moment the fog swirled on the sea breeze, clearing just a little, and we spotted Brendan up ahead, standing still at the end of a dirt road that comes down from the highway. He wasn’t alone. There was a car parked there, turned around and facing back out. A man stood beside it. The car door was open, and the motor was running. Steam was coming up from the exhaust pipes, mingling with the fog, and you could see the taillights glowing red like the eyes of a deep-sea fish. There was no license plate on the car. It was then, at the worst time ever, that I realized I’d forgotten my evidence camera. I never forget my evidence camera, but now I had, and there was no going back for it.

“Krikey,” Perry said in a low voice, “I believe it’s the legendary Lord Wheyface the Creeper.” He pointed with his walking stick, a piece of driftwood that he had found on the beach and dubbed “the Melmoth Walker,” which made no more sense than calling the stranger “Lord Wheyface the Creeper.” That’s Perry’s brainy way of being funny. Some people find it obscure.

The man was very pale, almost the color of the fog, and he was tall, with long scraggly black hair and a hooked nose. He wore a worn out velvet trench coat with gold buttons, like a gypsy or a pirate would wear, and a pair of heavy black boots and tight-fitting black gloves. He had the look of someone who was from someplace else, and a not very pleasant place, either. He waved at us in a way that was meant to look friendly, but there was nothing friendly about him, especially his smile, which must have been surprised to find itself on his face because it didn’t seem to want to stay there.

“I’ve lost my little dog,” he said in a wheedling voice when we came closer. He looked around at the empty bluffs, shaking his head sadly. “His name is…Bucket.”

“Bucket?” Perry said. “What kind of dog?”

“A Shih Tzu,” he said, pronouncing it wrong, although I won’t say how. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Bucket!” out toward the ocean, shaking his head sadly. “Bucky-boy!”

“It’s pronounced ‘shid-zoo,’” Perry told him.

“Of course it is, the poor little thing. She’s no bigger than that.” He held his hands together now, indicating that the dog was maybe the size of a tuna can. “You’ve got a dog yourself,” the Creeper said, gesturing at Hasbro. “You understand how sad I feel. I thought maybe the four of us could find little Bucket easier than I could by myself, alone in all this fog.” He waved roundabout himself at the empty bluffs.

“The four of us?” Perry asked him shrewdly. “How did you know how many of us there were? Some of us were hidden in the fog until just a moment ago. You must have thought there was only one of us and not four.”

“I could hear your footsteps,” he said. “I counted them and divided by two.”

“Except that we have ten legs,” Perry said shrewdly, “because one of us is a dog. You must have thought there were five of us.”

“I’ll tell you what I thought,” the Creeper said, sounding very nasty all of a sudden. Then he tried to smile again, but his smile was rickety, like a broken thing. “Smart lad,” he said. “You remind me of myself, when I was your age. A ready answer for…. Oh my heavens what’s that!”

We all looked in the direction he pointed, and in that instant he leapt forward and snatched at Brendan, who shouted and sort of back-pedaled, falling over a rock, which was lucky, because the Creeper would have had him for sure instead of empty air. Hasbro sprang forward, and I let go of the leash, and in two seconds Hasbro had gotten hold of the Creeper’s boot with his teeth. The Creeper edged toward Brendan again, hauling Hasbro with him and shouting, “Get off! Get off!”

Perry ran past me, raising the Melmoth Walker over his head with both hands and slamming it down on the Creeper’s shoulder hard enough to snap the stick in two. The Creeper reeled backward, clutching at his shoulder, with Hasbro still clamped onto his boot.

“You filthy little…!” he started to say, and he moved menacingly toward Perry now, dragging Hasbro like a ball and chain. Perry raised the broken-off piece of stick and stepped back a pace, just as Brendan sprang to his feet and ran for it, darting past the Creeper and straight down the path toward home, shouting for Uncle Hedge.

“Run!” Perry hollered, and I did, and so did Perry. We ran as fast as we could while Hasbro held onto the Creeper’s boot long enough for us to get away. Then Hasbro let loose and tore out after us, still barking, and passing us like a meteor. Through the fog I saw Mrs. Hoover’s back fence looming ahead, and I thought we were safe, but when I looked back again the Creeper was running hard, scary close. But his heavy coat billowed out behind him, slowing him down like a parachute, and his boots were real clompers. I heard a grunt and an unpleasant shout, and I looked back again to see that he had fallen flat. He got up, looked in our direction, and turned around, limping back toward his car in a hurry. In about ten seconds Uncle Hedge appeared, just in time to get a good look at the man’s back before the fog rolled in again, hiding the bluffs and the Creeper and the Creeper’s car.

When we came in through the kitchen door, Uncle Hedge dialed the police in Fort Bragg, talking to his friend Captain Smith, who knew a little bit about Uncle Hedge and his “work” with the Guild of St. George, which I’ll tell you about later. We met him twenty minutes later at the end of the road back out on the bluffs, although now there was nothing of the Creeper left to see except tire tracks. Of course we described him as best we could, but none of us could tell Captain Smith about his car, except that it was old and green, and in the fog it was hard to say whether it wasn’t maybe more gray than green or the other way around. It had no license plate, of course, so we told him that much, but Captain Smith said, “He’ll have put it back on by now,” meaning that the Creeper had taken if off on purpose, so that didn’t help much either. What would have helped? It would have helped if I had brought my camera. But I didn’t, and it was nothing but spilt milk under the bridge.

Captain Smith took a picture of the tire tracks and boot prints, but there wasn’t much else to do. He told us that it was unlikely we would see the Creeper again, because he was a conspicuous stranger, and now it wasn’t safe for him in Caspar, not lurking around dressed like that. And anyway, he told us, we were “a tough crowd,” and had probably put the fear into him. Then he gave us a lecture about talking to strangers. The story of the little dog was a lie, which of course we had known all along, and so we were fools to listen to it for even a moment.

“Run first,” Captain Smith told us, “and ask questions later.”

By now the fog was so heavy that the air was wet, and none of us were in the mood to go on down to the beach to look for Brendan’s mermaid, even if Uncle Hedge had let us, which he didn’t. He said it was a good day for staying inside while he tried to sort things out.

“We need to have a confab,” Uncle Hedge told us when we were back in the kitchen eating a bowl of Weetabix with bananas. He looked very grim, which isn’t usual for him, and so when he is grim you pay attention. “There’s more to this Creeper fellow than meets the eye,” he said. “I want you to give him a wide berth. Keep your eyes peeled for the man, and if you see him again, try to make sure he doesn’t see you. Call me or call Captain Smith. He won’t try to trick you next time. He’ll strike, and quickly, too.”

“Who is he?” Brendan asked.

Uncle Hedge sat there silently for a moment, poking at his soggy Weetabix with a spoon, before saying, “I’ve seen him once before, and heard of him a couple of times, but there’s a great deal about him that I don’t know. I’ve got my suspicions. But even if I did know what he was up to, that wouldn’t protect us from him. We’ll have to use our wits for that. Confronting the man out on the bluffs today was witless. I’ll tell you that straight out. You’ve got to use your heads for something besides hat racks.”

* * * * *

A little while later —and this was the third bad thing of the day—a man named Mr. Asquith came out from Social Services and talked with Uncle Hedge and with Mrs. Hoover about the “attack,” as Ms Peckworthy had reported it (and that’s how we found out her name). Mrs. Hoover said it was all a lot of malarkey, that it wasn’t any kind of attack at all, and that Ms Peckworthy was a busybody who had tripped over her own feet. Then she said nice things about the three of us (leaving out Brendan’s making rude gestures) and about Uncle Hedge and Hasbro. Mr. Asquith nodded and said he was glad to hear it. Then he said he was parched, and he drank a glass of water in our kitchen where he chatted more with Uncle Hedge, although we were sent into the other room. Before he drove away he patted Hasbro on the top of the head and called him “old son,” which Hasbro very much appreciated. It seemed to me that Mr. Asquith was way too pleasant to take sides with someone like Ms Peckworthy.

But after Mr. Asquith left, Uncle Hedge called us together for another confab. He told us that we must take Ms Peckworthy very seriously, and not do anything that she could write down in her notebook. Thank goodness, he said, that she didn’t know about our run-in with the Creeper, because that was just the sort of thing that Aunt Ricketts would seize upon to prove that we were living in an unsafe environment. We didn’t want another visit from Mr. Asquith, Uncle Hedge told us, no matter how nice he seemed to be. He said this in a way that made even Brendan look worried.

Chapter 2

Uncle Hedgepeth, the Guild of St. George, and the Rest of Us

It was Perry’s suggestion that I start this story with rousing action, which is what I tried to do. He says a reader wants some excitement right off, but I say that although that might be true, it’s both necessary and polite to introduce oneself, and that’s what I’m going to do now, because so far I’ve mostly neglected it. You already know about Hasbro, who like I said has some bulldog in him and several other noble things. You also know something about Ms Peckworthy and Aunt Ricketts, although the less you know about Aunt Ricketts the better. I wish I knew less about her.

At first I thought maybe I should let Perry write all this down, because besides being my cousin, he’s a writer and I’m not. I’m a scientist, although the science teacher at my school, Mr. Collier, says I have too much imagination, but that I might be a scientist when I grow up and forget what I think I know. I say that if a person forgets what she thinks she knows, it’s hardly worth growing up at all. Mr. Collier called that “Peter Pantheism,” but I don’t believe in isms, even if they involve Peter Pan.

My name is Kathleen, which is an Irish name. Uncle Hedge calls me Kath sometimes, but mostly he calls me Perkins, which is what Perry and Brendan call me, too, and it’s the name I prefer. I’m eleven years old and I’m what is called a cryptozoologist, which is a scientist who studies legendary animals, although the only reason they’re legendary is that they don’t appear very often. But how often does a comet appear? Most of the time it’s out wandering around in space, which is the same with so-called legendary animals, which wander around in the ocean, or in the high mountains, or in some other very distant and lonesome place, like Scotland, and you can hardly blame them. That’s why I carry the evidence camera. You never know when a giant octopus or a mermaid is going to rise up out of the ocean.

What do I look like, you ask? I’m not very tall, and I have dark hair that I keep short because it’s easy. I have brown eyes, and although Brendan won’t admit it, I’m taller than he is, if you measure carefully and he doesn’t cheat. And I’m older too, by more than a year. In three months I’ll be twelve, and he’ll still be ten, which seems to bother him. But he’s young, and so maybe he’s sensitive. Brendan was named after the great Irish navigator who came to America in a small boat with nothing but a telescope and a fishing pole and who is now a Saint. (I’ll tell you more about Brendan some other time, when he’s not looking over my shoulder to see what I’m writing down, which is rude if it goes on for very long, which it very definitely has.)

I was named after Kathleen Ricketts, who is also our Aunt Ricketts. Sometimes I wish I were named after Joan of Arc instead. When Joan of Arc went off to war, someone said very rudely that she should stay home to cook and sew, and she told them that there were already plenty of women to cook and spin, which showed a great deal of spirit. Of course later they burned her at the stake, but probably not just because of her comment about cooking and spinning.

Just so you know, Perry is tall, especially for his age, which is thirteen. He’s already as tall as Uncle Hedge, and very skinny. He has dark hair that falls into his eyes and makes it seem like he’s peering at everything. He reminds me of Sherlock Holmes in the old movies, even his nose, except he doesn’t smoke a pipe and he doesn’t wear one of those coming-and-going hats.

The town we live in is called Caspar, which you pronounce like the name of the friendly ghost. It’s near the city of Fort Bragg in northern California. Caspar can be a lonesome place, especially in winter. When I look out my bedroom window, down toward the Sea Cove, there’s nothing but ocean for eleven thousand miles, and then you run into Japan, which is another thing that some people thought was legendary until three Portuguese sailors washed up on the beach in a storm and “discovered” it.

Our great Uncle Hedgepeth is our mothers’ uncle. Perry and Brendan don’t have the same mother as me, but our mothers had the same uncle because they were sisters, and that uncle is Uncle Hedge. Uncle Hedge has a sister, too, and that’s Aunt Ricketts. Perry and Brendan are orphans.

I’m not an orphan, although my father died very young—too young for me to remember him. I live with Uncle Hedge because my mother, Abigail Perkins, is missing. When her deep sea submersible vanished in the Sargasso Sea two years ago, she was searching for the oceanic tunnel that connects our own Atlantic Ocean with the ancient ocean that lies within the land at the center of the hollow earth. If you’ve read Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs (who called the land Pellucidar) you’ve heard of it. Probably you think it’s a made up place, but I know for a fact that it’s not. My mother’s submersible was never found, and the scientific research vessel that took her to the Sargasso Sea sank with all hands, although nobody knows how or why or quite where, because the Sargasso Sea is vast and empty and is a place where strange and cryptic things occur.

I don’t talk about what happened to my mother, because when I do, people get a sort of frozen stare on their faces, like they’ve been petrified. I wrote a paper about the interior world for my science class after reading a book called The Hollow Earth by Dr. Raymond Bernard. The book is a scientific account of Admiral Richard Byrd’s discovery of the polar opening to the interior world, and about his finding warm water currents flowing out of that world into the icy water of the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, carrying flowers and seeds and the leaves of extinct species of trees. Mr. Collier said that the book was a barrel of half-baked baloney, but for a cryptozoologist like me it’s very interesting indeed, no matter how much it’s baked.

You can believe in Pellucidar or not, and I won’t blame you if you don’t. But like I said before, no one believed in Japan, either, until they got there, and then there they were. Uncle Hedge worries when I talk about my mother still being alive, partly because he blames himself that she’s gone, and partly because he thinks I’m getting my hopes up and will only be disappointed. But I think that up is the only place to get your hopes, because otherwise they’re not hopes.

There are two things I have to tell you about Uncle Hedge, and both of them are actually very strange. One thing is that he’s the caretaker of the Secret Museum near Glass Beach in Fort Bragg. It’s a museum that’s a kind of warehouse rather than the kind of museum you buy a ticket to, and it’s full of odd and unlikely things, which you’ll learn about very soon. Another thing is that John Toliver Hedgepeth is one of the secret geniuses of the world. And I don’t mean that he’s one of the secret smart people of the world when I say that. I mean genius like in “evil genius” except that Uncle Hedge is one of the good sort, unlike Professor Moriarity or Fu Manchu or Dr. Hilario Frosticos, or other infamous bad people who have their vile fingers in every variety of crime. (The word “vile” spells “evil” if you mix the letters around. Perry pointed this out, and is writing a codebook of significant words.) The thing is, you don’t as often hear about the good geniuses as you do the evil ones, and even if you did hear about the good ones you wouldn’t know whether they were merely very good and very smart both together, or whether they were some other kind of thing.

That’s what John Toliver Hedgepeth is—some other kind of thing. And he isn’t the only one. They’re a kind of secret society, except Uncle Hedge doesn’t really keep it a secret, because no one believes it anyway, which he says is way better than a secret. They call themselves the Guild of St. George, after George of Merry England, who famously killed the dragon and slew the necromancer Ormadine and became one of the Seven Champions of Christendom. It’s the Guild that actually owns the Secret Museum. Uncle Hedge’s able assistant is Old Sally, who lives at the museum and is our great good friend. Who is Dr. Hilario Frosticos, you ask? He’s the nemesis of the Guild of St. George, but I don’t want to talk about him until I absolutely have to.

Uncle Hedge didn’t tell us about his being a secret genius, by the way, because that would be too much like bragging. Mr. Vegeley told us. Mr. Cyrus Vegeley owns the Albion Doughnut Shop out on the Coast Highway in Caspar. Believe it or not, it’s a haunted doughnut shop, although that doesn’t figure into this story, and so I’m not going to mention it. Its address is number 13, which is one of the three significant numbers, especially if something is haunted, and which might or might not be a coincidence depending on whether you believe in coincidences. I mostly don’t.

Later that afternoon, when Mr. Asquith left, we drove down to the Albion and ate doughnuts, because Uncle Hedge said that we wanted a little something to “put us back on our feet.” And that’s where the next chapter starts, with the Principal Characters eating doughnuts at the Albion Doughnut Shop, Number 13, The Coast Road, Caspar, California, on the very far edge of the Western World.

Chapter 3

What Happened at the Secret Museum

I remember it was four in the afternoon, which Uncle Hedge calls “the doughnut hour” after the famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose middle name sounds like bubblegum if you’ve got a really lot of it in your mouth. We drove down to the Albion in Uncle Hedge’s Cadillac Coupe de Ville, which is very old, and which has tremendous long fins in the back. You can’t really call it a “car” which is too small a word. Uncle Hedge calls it “the vehicle,” and Mr. Vegeley calls it “the rig.” We three call it the “Zeuglodon,” which you pronounce like zoo, but with a glow-don attached to it. Zeuglodons were enormous sea creatures that supposedly died out during the Cretaceous period, many millions of years ago, although I have my suspicions about that. We have the bones of one in the Secret Museum.

The Zeuglodon automobile is a sort of watery blue, with balloon-like white-wall tires. Uncle Hedge keeps it ferociously clean. One time when it got a dent in it Mr. Vegeley popped the dent back out with a plumber’s helper, the rubber kind you use to unplug sinks. It left a big round mark that wouldn’t wash off. Perry and I told Brendan it was from the tentacle of a giant octopus, which maybe gave Brendan “ideas,” as they say, since he’s been seeing giant octopi ever since.

We were the only ones in the doughnut shop besides Mr. Vegeley, who is always in the doughnut shop unless he’s not. He serves doughnuts in little plastic baskets, pink, blue, or yellow, with a sheet of waxed paper. It’s all very decorative. Mr. Vegeley calls glazed doughnuts “the true quill” and he often quotes an old Irish saying that goes, “A plain glazed doughnut is your only man,” which Brendan finds confusing despite his illustrious namesake having been Irish. By late in the afternoon, the sugar on the outside of the glazed doughnuts has hardened into little sheets, like crisp paper, and it’s really very good—so good that it was hard to pay attention to Brendan, who was yammering on about what he calls his “general theory of navigation,” telling us that he’s never in his life been lost, because direction is perfectly simple. North, he was telling us, is always straight ahead. That’s how St. Brendan the Navigator found North America and why sailors follow the North Star. If they follow the North Star they always get there, wherever it is, and it’s naturally always straight ahead. But I pointed out to him that if you’re at the North Pole, standing right on top of it, and you start from there, then south is always straight ahead and north is always behind you, which makes a sad mockery of his theory of navigation. What Brendan knows about navigation you can put in your hat, and Perry was just telling him he could put it there when the phone rang, which it hardly ever does at a doughnut shop.

Mr. Vegeley said “Uh huh” three times and then hung up the phone, looking worried and untying his apron. “It’s Old Sally,” he said to Uncle Hedge. “Someone’s broken into the museum.”

“She’s not hurt?” Uncle Hedge asked anxiously, but already he was out of his chair and heading for the door.

Mr. Vegeley was switching around the “Open” sign so that it became a “Closed” sign, and was saying that Old Sally wasn’t hurt, but had been locked into the kitchen by the intruder and had just now gotten free. Outside we climbed into the Zeuglodon, with Hasbro sitting on the back seat with the three of us, and we drove away hell for leather toward Glass Beach and the Secret Museum. (I borrowed that phrase from Perry. I don’t really know what “hell for leather” means besides fast, and neither does Perry.)