Zeuglodon

by James P. Blaylock

  Uncle Hedge said, “What ho, Reginald,” and they shook hands, and Reginald said, “Come see, come saw,” which I didn’t at all understand. He said this in a bubbly way, because—and you’re not going to believe this—the seashell helmet that encased his head was full of water, just the opposite of a diver’s helmet. One of the two hoses ran the water through the canister at his waist, something called a “carbon dioxide scrubber,” and the other hose ran the “scrubbed” air back into his helmet, so that he always had oxygenated water to breathe. Why he breathed water instead of air is a Peach family mystery, as are Lala’s gills and webbed fingers and other things even stranger, things that we didn’t know at the time but were going to find out. The helmet had a built-in voice box so that Reginald could talk, but as I said, he sounded bubbly.

  “Haven’t…gone over, have you?” Uncle Hedge asked him in a low voice, and Reginald shook his head. And then, taking great care, he held up a small piece of paper with the words, “He’s listening,” written on it. When Uncle Hedge had read it, Reginald put the paper into his coat pocket very casually. He made a little jerk of his head, then, toward the ice cliff behind him. When I looked I could see what appeared to be a round, white disk with holes in it, set flat in the ice right there in the face of the cliff, and I knew in an instant what it was—a listening device. We weren’t on one of the random, floating icebergs that had strayed down from the Arctic; we were on an iceberg inhabited by Dr. Hilario Frosticos, and he could overhear our every word.

  As soon as we knew that, we didn’t utter very many words at all, but followed Reginald up the narrow valley between walls of ice that rose away on either side. Seen from up close, the ice wasn’t so immensely blue, but it was quite clear. The valley floor was littered with ice chunks, and we had to step over the small ones and slip between the large ones. It was slow going, and although it seemed to me to be taking a long time, probably we hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards before we went around a corner and there before us lay a lake of calm water.

  It wasn’t a real lake, but was the ocean itself, sheltered from the wind and waves by the barrier of ice around it. The floating ice island was actually a great ring of ice cliffs, and we had gotten to the center of it. The surface of the lake was as smooth as a sheet of glass, and the air was quiet and still, and not nearly so cold as it had been on the beach. I could see schools of fish beneath the calm water, and deeper yet there were slowly moving black shapes, perfectly enormous—sharks, maybe, or some variety of whale.

  There in front of us lay the submarine, ghostly white and moored to a pier that was built right into the ice. There was a wooden shed at the top end of the pier with a stovepipe sticking out of the roof and some fishing poles in a rack against an outside wall. On beyond the pier lay two more shacks on the ice, each with its own stovepipe. There was firewood stacked nearby the shacks as well as some wooden casks of the sort that might hold salted meat or pickles. The shacks were built of scraps of driftwood and broken up pieces of ships, and they had porthole windows and roofs made up of odds and ends of things, including sheets of tin and old wooden doors.

  The submarine itself looked something like a great fish—not like a modern submarine at all. It had a line of pointed fins at the back, angled toward its tail, and great glass windows in front like eyes, and around those windows and along its sides the water glowed white, as if a swarm of fireflies or electric eels swam around it in the water. The submarine was maybe sixty feet long, and air bubbles arose from below and behind it. In the air there was a constant bubbly humming sound, and it was obvious that the humming was the sound of its engines, as if at any moment the submarine might slip beneath the surface of the ocean and disappear.

  The path lay around the edge of the lake, ending at a point just beyond the pier against a sheer wall of ice. It was the only way in or out, which gave me a trapped feeling. Uncle Hedge stopped long before we got to the pier, and we stopped with him, and so did Reginald as soon as he knew we weren’t following him any more.

  “What’s the plan, Reginald?” Uncle Hedge said to him. “Let’s keep it simple.”

  “We parlay on board,” Reginald said in his bubbly way. “Did you bring Basil’s maps?”

  “I said I would.” He took the lead case out of his canvas bag and held it up to show he had them. “Have the Doctor send Lala out. She can return to the boat right now with my three. I need a word with him, and then I’ll be on my way lickety split, and we can all go about our business. If he’s not satisfied, then he’s still got a hostage.”

  Reginald stood there regarding us through his faceplate. His eyes were weirdly enlarged by the glass, like the eyes of a deepwater fish. I could hear water swishing through the tubing and wheezing through the oxygenator at his belt. “The Doctor won’t send her out,” Reginald said. “You’ve got to come aboard.”

  “If it’s the maps he’s worried about, you can believe that I’ve got them right here in the box. I’m not fool enough to have come all this way without them. The bargain was clear. We trade Lala for the maps. I’ve got the maps. You tell him to send Lala out.”

  “He’ll do things his way, not mine and not yours. You know that’s how it is with him.”

  I could see that there was no chance of Uncle Hedge striking a bargain with Reginald Peach. Peach was too frightened of Dr. Frosticos. You could see it in his face. He looked like a man holding a burning stick of dynamite and wondering what to do with it. I looked at the submarine now, and I could see a face behind the glass of one of the big fisheye windows in the front. It was just a shadow, but I knew who it was.

  “Head back to the boat,” Uncle Hedge said to us, but none of us moved. “Now,” he said. “Take the inflatable back across. Return for me or Lala when you see either of us on the beach.”

  We did as we were told, turning around and heading back up the path along the lake. Uncle Hedge went ahead with Reginald Peach. When we were near the place where the path entered the ice valley, I looked back. The two of them were just then stepping up onto the pier. I had a very bad feeling about things. Uncle Hedge had sent us away because he knew something was wrong, and something was wrong, and wronger every moment. There was a tiny vibration beneath my feet, as if the ice island was humming, and when I looked down at where the ocean lapped against the icy shore of the lake, I saw something that was very strange. Ocean water was flowing up over the shore now, as if the tide were coming in and the path would soon be submerged. But if the island were floating, it would rise with the tide. The tide wouldn’t “come in.” I had the oddest feeling of movement, a very definite feeling.

  Perry and Brendan felt it too, because they stopped and looked down at the water, and then we all looked at each other. We were moving. The whole ice island was moving, although how fast it was moving and in what direction was impossible to say, because the ice cliffs and the pier and the submarine were all moving together. Tentacles of fog swirled in around the most distant of the ice cliffs now.

  “Hurry!” Perry shouted, and we set out running, all of us knowing that if we were going to help Uncle Hedge and Lala we had to save ourselves, which meant getting back to the Clematis before we lost sight of it in the fog. When we ducked into the shadow of the little valley I glanced back again just in time to see Uncle Hedge and Reginald Peach disappearing into the door of the submarine. Uncle Hedge looked up just then, and I saw him move quickly back toward the pier, as if he saw that there was treachery. He raised the lead box as if to throw it into the ocean, but what happened next I can’t say, because we were in the ice valley itself now, and we ducked around the first little turn and the lake was lost from view.

  We had to slow up when we got to the chunk ice, but we scrambled and slid our way over it and through it, jamming our cleats against the big chunks and against the cliffs on either side, and kind of running up and over ice boulders that would have stopped us cold if we hadn’t had the cleats. I banged my knee against an outcropping of ice and fell, and Brendan looked
back and stopped and came running to help me up, and it slowed everybody down. But then we were scrambling along again, and to heck with being careful.

  Suddenly right ahead of us there was sunlight glowing through the entrance to the valley, and in a moment we were out into that sunlight on the beach, and there was the inflatable right where we’d left it.

  Except there was someone sitting in it now, waiting for us. It was Lord Wheyface the Creeper, as ugly as ever, and he was eating one of the sandwiches out of Charlie Slimmerman’s tin picnic box. Where he had been hiding when we arrived on the island I can’t say, probably in among the spires of ice, but it was him sure enough, and he had an evil smile on his face this time.

  Chapter 12

  The Fight on the Beach

  The Clematis was a gray ghost, because the fog had closed in, and our sunny bit of ocean was getting smaller and smaller by the moment. Waves no longer ran up the beach, but rapidly fell away as the island picked up speed, moving across the water directly away from the Clematis, bound for who knew where, and us with it. The Creeper stepped out of the boat onto the ice now, reaching into his coat, and right then Brendan yelled, “Get him!” and without thinking we all went for him, with no one holding back, until we saw him draw a knife from within his jacket. We put on the brakes, then, and I was thankful for the ice cleats.

  The Creeper would have been thankful for a pair of ice cleats, too, because he was wearing his boots, and he slipped now on the wet ice and threw his hands out to keep from falling. The knife flew out of his hand and skittered away. He lunged after it, trying to keep from slipping. It was a stupid thing to do, because if he had wanted to stop us from leaving all he would have had to do was push the inflatable out into the ocean and set it adrift, or stab it all over with the knife, and deflate it.

  But he wanted the knife, and he surely didn’t want us to have it, and in his wild hurry he slipped again. Brendan ran to the knife and snatched it up, and Perry ran past the Creeper to the inflatable, where he pulled one of the wooden oars out from under the thwarts. The Creeper was just then clambering to his feet again when Perry came up behind him, shouted “Melmoth!” and leveled a great blow at his back, knocking him forward. His feet went out from under him, and he slammed down onto the ice and slid nearly to the ocean, throwing his hands up to protect himself. Perry took another heavy swing at him, but the oar glanced off his shoulder and slipped out of Perry’s hands and flew off into the water.

  The fog closed in upon us then. A wash of mist swirled through, milky white, the last of the sun shining through it. I looked up and saw the tops of the ice cliffs disappear just like the Clematis had disappeared, and on the instant we were swallowed up too, the white mist turning to gray. The Creeper, who was just a few feet away, was a dark shadow, angling to cut Brendan off from the inflatable, but he was slipping and sliding on the wet ice. Brendan got there first, with me right behind him. Perry had pushed the inflatable into the water by now and climbed in, flopping down onto his rear end and pulling off his cleats so that they didn’t stab things full of holes.

  Brendan sort of bounced in over the side of the inflatable, the Creeper staggering forward now, maybe fifteen feet away, his arms out in front of him for balance. In another instant I was climbing into the boat, too, and yanking off my cleats, one of which I lost into the ocean because I was in such a terrible hurry. At that moment the Creeper caught up to us, looming up out of the fog. His face was petrified with rage. He took a desperate lunge at the boat as we drifted away, trying to throw himself aboard, grabbing hold of the motor so that the inflatable slewed about crazily. The ice island was rapidly leaving us behind now, and leaving the Creeper behind, too.

  I crouched in the bow of the inflatable to stay out of the Creeper’s reach, glad to see that he couldn’t stand up in the deep water. Except then he began pulling himself up the back of the motor in order to boost himself in, and tried to get a foot on the propeller. Perry slipped the second oar from under the thwarts, and held it with both hands, aimed at the Creeper’s forehead. “Let go now,” Perry said, “while you can still swim to shore.” He started to count to three, but the Creeper interrupted, calling him a skinny little something-or-other. Perry speared the end of the oar toward the Creeper’s forehead, but then jerked it back before it struck him. The Creeper let go of the engine with one hand as if to grab the oar, throwing half his body up over the edge of the boat and catching hold of the painter, the piece of rope that ties the boat up to the dock.

  Perry gave it to him for real now with the end of the oar, knocking him right in the chest, and the Creeper fell backward again, yanking down on the stern of the boat, which plunged downward, a great wash of ocean rolling in over the side. Perry lost his balance and teetered on one foot, dropping the second oar into the sea. I reached forward and grabbed Perry’s jacket, seeing that the Creeper still had hold of the rope and was dragging himself forward again. But Brendan leaned out, holding the Creeper’s knife now, and in an instant he had sawed through the painter, and the Creeper fell back and sank beneath the water, his arms flailing. Perry sat down hard on the thwart, and I went for the engine. It was time to go, plus some.

  The Creeper was drifting away from us now, his hand holding onto the little severed piece of rope, which lay on the top of the water like an eel. He sank again momentarily and then beat his way to the surface, a good distance away. We heard him shout something I can’t repeat. Then, just before he disappeared in the fog, I grabbed one of the canvas and foam lifesaving rings that was stowed along the edge of the boat and flung it hard over the side, not quite hitting the Creeper in the head with it. Then the fog was too thick to see.

  §

  We motored away slowly in the direction that we had last seen the Clematis, or at least we hoped it was that direction. Brendan was shaking, and at first I thought he was just cold, but then I saw that he was scared, or something like it, and was staring out into the fog but not really looking at anything, holding the knife in his fist. He had defeated the Creeper, but he looked like the one who had been defeated. Even though it was the Creeper, you see, there was something awful about Brendan’s cutting him loose from the boat—a man who couldn’t swim, and who was wearing heavy boots and a greatcoat that might drag him to the bottom. Brendan bent down and picked up the picnic box, opened it, and put the knife inside. Then he sat and looked at his hand, which he opened and shut slowly.

  “That was quick thinking with the life preserver,” Perry said to me. “Maybe it’ll change his attitude. Frosticos will pick him up in the submarine. You can count on that. When the Creeper doesn’t bring us back, Frosticos will know something’s wrong, and he’ll go looking, and when the Creeper’s not on the beach, they’ll set out to hunt for him. He can’t be seen above the water because of the fog, but below the water won’t be a problem. No fog down there. All he has to do is stay afloat.”

  Brendan just shrugged at the end of Perry’s little speech, but he seemed to be slightly less dismal. He didn’t want to talk about it, though, and neither did I. Maybe it’s shameful, but I didn’t really want Perry to be right. I didn’t want the Creeper dead, but I didn’t want him alive either, and so I just shut up and let it be, and it took me some time before I was actually glad I threw the life vest. Soon we were distracted from all these thoughts anyway when we heard the ringing of a ship’s bell.

  Perry and I thought it sounded away to the left of us, off the port side, but Brendan said it had sounded like it had come from behind us, and so we compromised, and I turned us half around, all of us listening hard. There was nothing to orient us, though, and when we heard the bell again minutes later, it seemed to be off to starboard, farther away, and although I changed direction again, I didn’t have any real hope. We sat in our little inflatable with the gray fog all around, and if it had been midnight it wouldn’t have been any more lonesome and we wouldn’t have been any more miserable.

  Perry said that we should put on life vests ourselves, and so we
did, and then we got situated around the boat so that our weight was evened out. I navigated us back and forth in big loopy curves, but slowly, so that we didn’t run into anyone or anything, because we still couldn’t see twenty feet ahead of us in the murk. Brendan has the loudest voice, and so he yelled “Ahoy!” at intervals, but we heard nothing in reply. After a while Perry took over the yelling, and then all three of us together, but after that we lost interest in it and fell silent.

  Brendan was shivering badly now that the first excitement was over, because he had gotten wetter than the rest of us while trying to rescue the Creeper’s knife. Perry dug out the emergency box from its little cabinet under the seat, and inside we found some very good things. There were rocket flares and a gun to shoot them into the air with, and there was a compass for finding directions, and there were blankets made out of a sort of aluminum foil that were folded up very small, and also there were yellow plastic rain ponchos. We all put on the ponchos, just to keep from soaking up more fog, and we opened one of the blankets and wrapped it around Brendan, who didn’t argue with us.

  There was drinking water, too, in packages, and there was a first aid kit and plastic bottles of red dye that you could squirt onto the surface of the ocean to make a big red splash of color that could be seen from a passing airplane. Except that a passing airplane couldn’t see the ocean at all in a fog like this, even if you dyed it all the colors of the rainbow. The flare gun was similarly useless, and so was the compass. North might as well have been straight ahead. Maybe it was. The most useful thing was a sort of miniature foghorn that was operated by a can of compressed air. Brendan wanted to blast away with it right off, but we took another vote and agreed that we should wait until we heard a ship’s bell again, and then blast away. Otherwise we might empty the can when there was no hope of being heard.