Zeuglodon (10 page)

When we awoke the next day the morning was almost gone. Captain Sodbury said that there was nothing to do but wait. Uncle Hedge would pull something out of his hat, or we could call William Sodbury a grass-combing lubber on a lee shore. And it very nearly happened just like he said, except it wasn’t Uncle Hedge who pulled it out of his hat, it was Reginald Peach, pulling it out of his seashell helmet. In any event, nobody had to call anybody a grass-combing lubber.

Reginald’s message came in late that afternoon on the sub-lunar frequency. The submarine, he said, was bound for the west coast of England. That’s the one thing that Reginald Peach told us that wasn’t bubbleized into nonsense. He spoke for maybe fifteen seconds before the radio went dead, and that was that—no news of Uncle Hedge or Lala, just that the submarine was in a desperate hurry to get to somewhere called Morecambe Bay.

That bit of information made sense enough to Captain Sodbury, who said that environs of Morecambe Bay and Lake Windermere were “Lemuel Wattsbury’s bailiwick.” Frosticos used the Morecambe Sands as a sort of hideout, he said, which made no earthly sense to us until he told us about the Morecambe Sands themselves—about how the tide in the bay goes very far out, and exposes vast sand flats. The local people thereabouts call that part of the coast Sandylands, which sounds fun, but is actually deadly. You can walk out onto the sand flats, or even drive across them as a shortcut to some place farther down the coast or across the bay, but only if you’re very careful or very stupid, because much of the sand is quicksand, and some of it is watery quicksand. All of it looks the same, though, and without a warning you find yourself sinking away into this watery sand, and in moments you’re gone forever and you’re living with the fishes.

In olden days the Morecambe Sands swallowed up whole carriages, horses and passengers and all, as well as any number of people who ventured out onto the sands to try to rescue the people who were being drawn under. If you’re in a submarine, though, and if you have very carefully drawn charts, then sinking away out of sight in the watery sands mightn’t be a bad thing, because there’s nobody who would be foolish enough to try to find you. Captain Sodbury said that Dr. Frosticos had “gone to ground” there more than once, and was safe as a baby from anyone who might try to follow, and could make his way unseen into secret water-filled tunnels below the sands—tunnels that flowed out of Lake Windermere. And Lake Windermere, you’ll maybe remember, is the ancestral home of the Peach family. Now it was our destination, too.

That’s how we came to find ourselves, the three of us and Hasbro along with Mr. Lemuel Wattsbury, motoring north toward Bowness-on-Windermere, the Wattsbury bailiwick. The Mermaid was sitting snugly in the trunk of the car and the trunk tied shut with a rope. Her exhibit box had been crated up into an even larger box, which said “Wheelchair” on the outside and “Manchester Theatre Company” below that. That was Charlie Slimmerman’s idea—to disguise it.

Mr. Wattsbury and his wife Susan keep the St. George Lodge. Perhaps you can figure out from the name of their hotel that they’re particular allies of Uncle Hedge and the Guild of St. George. But the Wattsburies aren’t
officers
in the Guild—not like Uncle Hedge is an officer in the Guild. As is true of Mr. Vegeley, the Wattsburies are…helper-outers, you might say. Or perhaps you wouldn’t. Mr. Wattsbury has a bald and very round head. Brendan said it looked like a pumpkin, but I don’t think that’s kind, and I told him so. Mr. Wattsbury is amazingly literary and has read nearly everything there is to read, most of it twice and some of it three times, just for good measure. He told us in strict confidence that armchairs agree with him, and that the more time he can spend in one, the better he feels. He also told us that he is most decidedly not a man of action, but had always wanted to be a “wit.” He said that when he tries to be a man of action, like Uncle Hedge, he generally turns out to be a halfwit, and so he avoids it.

The St. George Lodge is ever so much nicer than American hotels, because it’s really just a big house, and the Wattsburies live there the year round and are always bustling up and down stairs and cooking and watching the television, and taking care of the guests, and going into Windermere to the market for that evening’s supper, and so you feel like company instead of like you’re just passing through on your way to someplace else.

There’s a window in the front of the lodge that’s prodigiously old and is made of stained and leaded glass. On it there’s a picture of St. George slaying the dragon and rescuing the princess. Perry said it was just like Michael the archangel striking down Lucifer during the war in heaven, except that Michael would have had angel wings and also in heaven there wasn’t any princess, although I don’t quite see why there shouldn’t have been. Maybe she was home cooking and sewing. Mr. Wattsbury told us that when we set out to slay the dragon it’s pretty much always the same thing, princess or no princess. I’m certain he’s right, because it sounds so incredibly wise.

Just inside the door of the St. George, there’s a cast iron Humpty Dumpty that’s immensely heavy and is meant as a sort of greeter. It’s amazingly like the Dumpty on the radio shed, and I told Mr. Wattsbury, so, and he said that he wasn’t a bit surprised. I asked him if his was a talisman, but he said it was an egg man, which was meant to be funny, I’m sure.

Perry and Brendan and I took room 13, on the second floor, although we didn’t end up in that room just by chance or because it’s an auspicious number. We asked for that particular room after walking around the Lodge and having a good look at it and talking it over. We wanted a room that was strategic. One thing is that room 13 looks down onto the street, so that we could keep an eye out—for whom we didn’t know, although it paid off later. Also, there’s a tree outside the window with heavy branches that run out along the wall of the Lodge, past the far corner and shading the driveway. We discovered that if you open the window and step out onto the ledge, you can jump across onto one of the limbs just as easy as kiss my hand. (I borrowed that phrase from Mr. Wattsbury.) But you can’t be afraid to really
jump
, because if you’re timid about it you might not carry all the way across to the limb, and instead you’d fall into the shrubbery below.

Once you were out on the limb you could make your way to the driveway, and if there was a car there you could drop down onto the top of it and then climb down to the ground. Except when you did there might be someone inside the car, just getting ready to leave, but you didn’t know that, and you might give them a nasty surprise and leave smeary footprints on the car, which are the kind of things that make people mad, especially the man and his wife from Michigan who are staying at the lodge and who call you a “little hoser.” All of that not only makes you feel woeful, but it’s counter-productive to being secretive.

So we found another route through the tree out to a low limb just above where the hedge meets the sidewalk. We could jump down easily from there, especially if we hung on and then dropped. From there we could cut straight across the street and into the pine woods on the farther side where there’s a picket fence and a trail that winds down to the lakeside. The faithful Hasbro, alas, lived downstairs in the television room, because he’s not the best stair climber and he’s no good at all at climbing trees or at hanging and dropping.

The thing about Lake Windermere, which is in the north and west of England, is that in the summer it’s full of boats, and even in the winter, in good weather, there are people out sailing or rowing, although when the holiday season is over, and the weather grows dark and cold, the lake is a much more lonesome place than in the summer. When we arrived the summer season hadn’t started yet, and the weather was cool and rainy, not holiday weather at all. The lake is twelve miles from the top, at Ambleside, down to the bottom where it empties into the River Leven, which runs down into Morecambe Bay. There are great stretches of woods along the lake, some of them very old and dark, and here and there you’ll find an ancient farmhouse and sheep pastures crisscrossed with rock walls.

We took Mr. Wattsbury’s motor launch next day when we traveled down from Bowness to return the Mermaid to old Cardigan Peach. It’s a wooden boat that goes very fast, although that day the lake was rough with wind waves, and going fast was a bad idea, because we bounced and smashed and it wasn’t a fun sort of bouncing and smashing. Mr. Wattsbury let me drive the boat once we got going, which turned out to be useful practice. Several miles down the lake we passed a place where a creek comes rushing out of the woods on the west side. There was a farmhouse right there, that’s nothing now but a broken down shack with an old millwheel that was turned by creek water a long time ago. Mr. Wattsbury pointed it out, and said that it was the uppermost edge of the Peach estate. The millwheel, over a century ago, had turned machinery that stamped out nails, and so the farm there was called Tenpenny Farm, because that was the size of one of the nails that they made.

Anyway, this creek, which is really a small river after a season of rains, carries a lot of silt and rock into the lake, which makes the bottom thereabouts shallow and treacherous. Mr. Wattsbury called it “shoal water” and he pointed out how the lake was all chopped up there, with the creek water running into the wind waves and all of it sort of turmoiling over the shallow bottom. I steered away from it, keeping to the deeper channel, but I made a point to remember it, which was easy because of the millwheel. If you want to be any kind of navigator at all, you have to know the shoreline and the bottom and the currents.

A quarter mile farther on we spotted the boathouse at Peach Hall. The manor itself can’t be seen very well from the lake, because it’s nearly hidden by trees in one of the more ancient sections of woods. The old stone boathouse sits right on the lake, and that’s the first thing we saw from Mr. Wattsbury’s motor launch. Through the trees beyond the boathouse I could see the maze hedge that encloses the ornamental water, which in this case means a pool full of waterweeds. Beyond the hedge lay Peach Hall, which was built out of stone and wood ages ago—time out of mind, Mr. Wattsbury told us.

We tied up to an iron ring set into the stone steps at the base of the boat dock. The dock had once been longer, but much of it had rotted, and there were several lone, shattered pilings sticking up out of the water. The boards at the end of the dock were broken and hanging, and in that weather, with the low sky and the deserted lake, the half-ruined dock made the whole world seem lonesome and abandoned. Of course I snapped a picture of the dock. I had been taking pictures of pretty much everything. I have to be fast, though, or Perry and Brendan will leave me behind. They’re bored with my taking pictures, although they’re not bored with looking at them later.

We left the Mermaid in the boat and followed Mr. Wattsbury along the path toward the manor. The path skirted the maze and then joined a road that curved around to our left and disappeared back into the forest. On ahead of us and to the right it became a broad driveway, paved with flat stones and running up toward a carriage house and then to the manor itself. There were weeds growing through the paving stones and dead leaves lying about, and it looked like ages since the last car had driven across it or since anyone had swept away the leaves.

The cornerstones of the manor house were perfectly enormous, and the old, weathered wooden beams must have been cut from entire trees they were so large. We walked up onto a wide porch with a piece of roof overhanging it. On the ground floor there were very high windows with diamond-shaped panes covered with old lacy curtains. It was dim inside, and I even when I squinted I could only make out the shadows of things—very large pieces of furniture, maybe. The name PEACH was carved deeply into the heavy door, and beneath it was an immense knocker made of greenish-colored bronze in the shape of a carp, with a heavy body and large scales and a hinge in its tail so you could use the tail to whack the door. Mr. Wattsbury banged away with it, but nobody answered, so he banged away again.

Beyond the curtains one of the shadows shifted and moved off, and I could hear the sound of tapping, like someone walking with a cane.

“He’s in there,” Mr. Wattsbury said.

“Why doesn’t he answer?” Brendan asked.

“He’s contemplating it. Old Cardigan Peach has lived a long, long time, and he’s disinclined to hurry. His motto is ‘measure twice, cut once’.”

“Can we look around?” Brendan asked him. “Down along the lake? There might be a frog.”

“Or a salamander,” I said helpfully.

“Why not?” said Mr. Wattsbury, and then he told us not to go too far because it looked like bad weather was setting in.

We headed straight back down the path toward the maze, which is exactly what Brendan had in mind. The frog was just an excuse, as was the salamander. The maze isn’t a big one, and it was built in such a way that if you trailed your right hand against the hedge, following every single blind alley, you could find your way to the center and then back out again. That was how we found the ornamental water—a circular pool, about waist-deep above ground, built from the same cut stones as the house. Ferns and mosses grew from between the stones, and water seeped out here and there, and in the depths of the pool there were the same waterweeds that grew in the lake. You couldn’t see the bottom, though, because the pool seemed to be prodigiously deep.

Perry threw a dime into the center, and all of us leaned out over the rocks and watched it drift downward into the depths, shining for a few moments in the little bit of sunlight before it was swallowed up by darkness. In the instant before it winked out of sight, a big glittery fish swam out of the weeds near the surface and angled down into the deep water, flipping its tail and darting away after the dime. It had been a carp, I think—a great giant carp, gold and black and with enormous shining scales.

There was something troublingly dark and lonesome about the pool, and as the sky got cloudier it became even more forbidding and strange. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to walk back out to the path. Mr. Wattsbury wasn’t on the front porch any longer, but had disappeared, perhaps into the manor itself. We made our way along the lake toward the boathouse, a long, low building, again built of stone, with great beams holding up the roof. The ends of the roof beams were carved into the likeness of mermaids that were very much worn away by time and weather. The door was made of heavy wooden boards banded in iron and arched on the top, and it was shut tight, with no pull or knob or anything on the outside, just smooth planks.

“We need to open it,” Brendan said.

I wasn’t so sure. “Maybe we should ask first,” I said. “It’s not our boathouse.”

“Go ask,” Brendan said. “Take your time.”

And then right away, before I could think of something to say that would irritate Brendan, Perry said, “Let’s try a window,” and we all went back down along the side of the building, which was sheltered by overhanging trees. We saw right off that it was no use. The windows weren’t the kind that opened, and also they were barred like a jail cell. Even if they weren’t barred, they’d be too small to crawl through. We looked through them, trying to make things out in the dim interior. I saw an old rowing boat hanging on the far wall, and some oars beneath it, and ancient wooden planks and tools scattered on the ground. More windows looked out onto the lake from inside.

Dead center in the floor of the room was a shadowy square where there was nothing at all except darkness, exactly as if there were a hole there, a stairwell perhaps, or a ladder going down into a cellar or maybe leading to a tunnel to Peach Manor. From where we stood we could see that the boathouse door was fastened inside with an iron latch-and-lever contraption. There was no lock visible, but there was no need for one, because, like I said, there was no knob or anything on the outside. You could get out of the boathouse from the inside, but you couldn’t get in from the outside. A door like that doesn’t need a lock.

“Come on,” Perry said, and all of us headed back around to the door. Perry bent over and had a look past the crack at the edge, where the latch was. Almost at once he said, “Look here!” and pointed to a place where the stone had chipped away over the years, or had
been
chipped away, maybe from strangers trying to get in. Because of the chipped-away stone you could see the bottom of the latch mechanism. And that meant that we might lift the lever, if only we had something to slide in underneath in order to press up on it.