Behind us, a corridor angled away like a hallway in a house. There were doors along it, two of them barred suspiciously on the outside. If Uncle Hedge was here, as he almost surely was, he was no doubt locked into one of those rooms. We left Reginald Peach to his fretting and went straight on down the hallway toward the two barred doors. The others didn’t interest us. At the first door we slipped the bar out of its hangers, opened the door a foot, and looked in. Immediately someone stood up in the dark room—a shadow shaped just like Uncle Hedge. The shadow said, “You!” in a tone of vast surprise.
Chapter 19
The Battle in the Aquarium
Well it was us, and it was also Uncle Hedge, not dead or disappeared at all, and so much for Ms Peckworthy. He put his finger to his lips to quiet us down before we all started talking, and then he motioned us into the room. I pushed the door nearly shut, taking the wooden bar inside with us, so that no one would come along and lock us in. The first thing he said was that he had never in his life seen anyone more welcome than us, which made our sneaking out of the St. George worth it ten times over.
“We must find Lala,” he told us. “And we must return with her to Peach Manor. She’s desperate to save her father before the others find him, desperate enough to come all the way to California alone looking for the key. Without the key she couldn’t get into the Passage, and without getting into the Passage, she couldn’t rescue her father. There’s more to it than that—even I don’t know all of it—but you should understand that Lala was only doing what she thought she had to do. She must bring her father home before Dr. Frosticos and the Creeper find him. He’s in some sort of terrible danger. What makes it difficult is that now they’ve got the key. We’ve got to recover it.”
Our hearts sank, or at least mine did. “They’ve already taken the key and gone,” I said. “Reginald sent Mr. Boskins to tell Mr. Wattsbury, and Mr. Wattsbury was to come round at nine o’clock sharp to meet Reginald, and to sort things out and rescue you and Lala while Dr. Frosticos and the Creeper were down the lake.”
“But Mr. Wattsbury’s not here yet,” Perry said, “and we don’t know why.”
Uncle Hedge didn’t look happy. After a moment of thinking, he said, “If the key fits, and I’m certain that it must, they might simply go on toward the Center, although navigating the Passage without Basil’s maps would be a dangerous business unless they had a guide. And I know they don’t have the maps, because I sank them. The only available guide is Lala. If they took her with them…”
“They didn’t,” I said. “I saw them on the lake, and it was just the two of them.”
“And of course they don’t have the key,” Brendan said matter-of-factly, and with a great huge smile on his face. “They only think they have the key.”
We all stared at him as if he had lost his mind. He said nothing more, letting his words sink in, glorying in them. And then very slowly he reached inside the neck of his shirt and drew out a silver chain with the Mermaid’s key dangling at the end of it.
Right then I knew what he had done, because I was the only one who had seen him meddling with the Mermaid’s box back home in the middle of the night. I had thought that he was trying to open it, but now I saw that he already had opened it and taken the key. I had caught him in the act of closing the box back up.
“I knew the key wasn’t safe,” Brendan said, “and so I opened the Mermaid’s box and took it out, and put in that iron jailer’s key that we had on the key ring in the toy box. I knew if the Creeper or someone tried to steal it, they wouldn’t know the difference.”
“Then Lala took the false key!” Perry said.
“That’s right. And all of you blamed me. And you’ve kept on blaming me, and now you have to eat crow.” Brendan said this to Perry and me, of course, since Uncle Hedge hadn’t done any blaming and so didn’t have to eat any crow.
“Hah!” Uncle Hedge said. “Foxed them, did you? Good. Keep it safe, Brendan. If something goes wrong, you three run for it, and don’t look back. Helping Lala rescue her father is your mission, not rescuing me or Wattsbury or anyone else. We’ll see to ourselves.”
We agreed, but not happily, and then we all left the room in order to search for Lala, shutting the door behind us and barring it again for looks. There were three more doors remaining, all on the other side of the hallway, but of course we went for the barred door again, and sure enough Lala was behind it. When we opened it she stood up looking very wild and ferocious and ran straight at us, as if to take us by surprise and escape. But then she saw who we were, and she stopped short and burst into tears. As funny as it sounds, Brendan looked miserable when she started crying, although she had locked him into the closet and treated him shabbily and made a fool of him. That was a testimony to love, of course, but only a very brief testimony, because there was a loud shout from somewhere near by and the sound of running feet, followed by the crash and clang of something heavy hitting the floor.
Uncle Hedge shushed us and slowly opened the door in order to look out, just as the bent figure of a man staggered past down the corridor. He was clawing the air and sort of flopping along like…a fish out of water, I guess you could say, although perhaps it wouldn’t be altogether nice, because it was Reginald Peach, without his seashell helmet and canister. He uttered a long, inhuman, burbling cry that sent a chill straight through me. They’re back! I thought. Frosticos and the Creeper had done this terrible thing to Reginald Peach because he had helped us. But they would only know he had helped us if Mr. Wattsbury had come. Whatever that meant, it wasn’t good.
Uncle Hedge stepped out into the hallway, and we followed. Reginald collapsed with his eyes rolled up into his head and making awful gasping noises. It came to me that we might try artificial respiration, but then I knew that wouldn’t help, being that he was a human fish with gills instead of lungs, and was drowning in the air. Lala pushed out behind us and said, “Put him into the water!” which of course was the only sensible thing to do.
We hoisted him up and half walked, half carried him out into the room full of aquariums, looking around for the Creeper or Frosticos, who were nowhere to be seen, at least for the moment. Uncle Hedge lifted Reginald’s hands so that he could grip the top edge of one of the big aquariums, but he hung there like a man half dead, his head lolling back onto his shoulders, unable to help himself.
“Reginald!” Uncle Hedge shouted. “You’ve got to hoist yourself up, man!
“Climb, Uncle Reginald!” Lala said, and we all latched onto his legs and under his feet and heaved him upward, saying, “Climb! Climb!” Reginald seemed to recover his senses for a moment, and to grasp what we were trying to do, and he blinked around, goggling at us, his head lolling pitifully. He tried to pull himself upward now, making a last, desperate effort to save himself.
“Heave-ho now!” Uncle Hedge cried, and we grabbed Reginald by the ankles and feet and heaved him upward like a sack of potatoes or hamsters or some other weighty thing. Reginald teetered against the edge for a moment before toppling into the aquarium, slopping out gallons of water like Archimedes climbing into the bathtub.
“What a great deal of tumult,” a voice said from behind us, very flat, almost machine-like. It wasn’t the Creeper. It was a voice I had never heard before, and it was worse by far than the Creeper’s. If you can imagine the voice of a dead man…but you can’t—not until you’ve heard it.
Reginald was floating in the aquarium among the frightened fish, his feet hidden in the water plants and his coat sort of billowing out around him in the bubbles. He wasn’t dying anymore, though, and that was good. What was not good is that the man who had spoken was Dr. Hilario Frosticos. He was pure white, like laundry detergent. He wasn’t any age you could identify, but looked as if he might be a corpse, kept alive by artificial means, or as if perhaps had died and then been brought back to life, but only after a fairly rotten week had passed. There was something more to him—something evil. You could feel it more than you could see it. H
e made me think of a poisonous white spider, except that spiders can’t help being what they are.
Beside him stood the Creeper, whose hand was in his coat. Clearly he had a hidden weapon, probably one of his knives, and I was afraid that Brendan would haul out his own knife, which would be an utter stupidity. Brendan, however, had a remote look on his face. He was thinking about something, but it wasn’t knives.
“Reginald has betrayed us, Hedgepeth,” Frosticos said. “And you’ve betrayed us. Betrayal seems to be in the air. I rather expected it from Reginald, who summoned your man Wattsbury when we left for the Manor to try the key, but I hardly expected it from you. Not when there were young lives at stake.”
“I haven’t betrayed anyone,” Uncle Hedge said evenly. “I assumed that the key was genuine, as did Lala. Where’s Lemuel Wattsbury?”
“Discommoded, I fear. Knocked on the head when he was coming in through the Old Door on his way to meet with our fishy friend here.” He gestured at Reginald, who was probably safer now than we were.
Frosticos reached into his coat pocket then and took out a heavy iron key—the jailer key from our toy box.
“Useless,” Frosticos said, and he tossed the key into the aquarium, where it sank to the bottom. “I’ll take the authentic key, and I’ll take it now.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” Uncle Hedge said. “I don’t have it.”
“Nonsense. You wouldn’t have come all this way without it. I’m a patient man, Hedgepeth, but I won’t put up with someone who plays the fool. That’s not an instrument I’ve ever been able to abide.”
I saw Lala mouth something to Brendan, who crossed his arms over his chest now, as if he had something to hide, which he did. His jacket was open, and the front of his shirt had been pushed all over the place in our struggle with Reginald. One of the buttons had come loose, and you could see the silver chain and the top of the key.
“For the sake of the children, then, Hedgepeth,” Frosticos said, glancing our way.
“I tell you that I don’t have the key,” Uncle Hedge said, but Frosticos wasn’t paying attention. He was looking straight at Brendan now, and he had a calculating look on his face. Somehow he knew what Brendan was hiding.
What happened next happened very quickly. Lala said “Now!” and she turned and ran, straight toward the spiral stairway and the window on the lake. At the very same moment, Brendan yanked the key off his neck, breaking the chain, and threw it hard at Lala, and then spun around and bolted past the Creeper and Frosticos, back toward the pub, running fast.
The Creeper drew his knife, and I believe he would have thrown it at Brendan out of anger, but before he could, Uncle Hedge hit him hard on the side of the head, and the Creeper staggered backward, waving the knife in the air. He got his balance soon enough, but by then Brendan was out of sight.
“Don’t bother with the boy,” Frosticos said. “He can’t go far. It’s the Peach girl we’ll need!”
The Creeper strode away toward the stairs, where there was a small splash beyond the window. It was too late for him to do anything at all, unless he could swim like a fish. Lala appeared beyond the glass, her hair floating in a sort of halo around her head. She peered in at us for one long moment, showing us that she had the key, the broken chain still hanging from it, and then she turned around and began to swim away under water, disappearing out of the circle of light and into the darkness of the lake.
It was then that Brendan reappeared, walking back toward us. Behind him strode Ms Peckworthy, holding her umbrella as if she meant to poke someone in the eye, and with her mouth all pickled up with determination. Mr. Wattsbury lurched along behind her, with blood running out of his hair so that he looked like a gory apparition, not at all the bookish man in the armchair. It looked like a standoff to me, but it didn’t stay that way long, because Lala Peach had finally gotten what she had gone to California to get. But Dr. Frosticos had nothing, not the key, not the maps, not Lala.
Chapter 20
Death or Glory
Ms Peckworthy stared at the lot of us for a long moment, apparently recognizing the Creeper, either as the mysterious, lurking, Lala-kidnapping stranger from back home, or as a partner. You couldn’t tell which. Then she spotted Reginald Peach, who appeared to be an aquarium exhibit, and the look in her eyes made it seem as if every strange and awful thing she had ever imagined had finally come true. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but she never had a chance.
“Death or glory!” Mr. Wattsbury shouted suddenly, breaking the astonished silence, and he hurled himself in the direction of the Creeper like a wild man. Uncle Hedge shouted, “Run!” (meaning us) and he charged forward at the same moment and plowed into Frosticos. The momentum carried them both forward so that they slammed into the Creeper just as Wattsbury got to him, and they all went down in a heap with Ms Peckworthy wading in to beat all of them to pieces with her umbrella. Perry grabbed my hand and we were running, back up the corridor in the direction of the pub, with Brendan just ahead of us. Before we knew it we were at the door in the tunnel wall, the Old Door, which stood wide open now.
There was a warning shout from behind us, and a shattering crash, and someone shouted, “Look out for the knife!”
“I’m going back,” I said, and I meant it. I wasn’t going to leave Uncle Hedge behind, not again.
“We’ve got to find Lala,” Perry gasped at me. “That’s orders.”
“How can we find Lala when she already swam away?” I asked.
“We’ll take Wattsbury’s boat,” Brendan said, “We’ll search the lake!”
“Latch on!” Perry shouted, glancing at Brendan, and both of them grabbed me, one on either wrist, and dragged me through the door whether I wanted to or not, out into a shrubbery of willows that hid everything from view except the sky. We could hear the barking of a dog, and straight off I knew it was Hasbro, somewhere nearby. We shouldered our way through the willows, only to discover that we were very near the water. Hasbro was tied up to a post where Mr. Wattsbury had apparently left him, and he was glad to see us and to be untied.
There was an old wooden dock where the boat was moored that I had seen out on the lake earlier in the evening. At the shore-end of the dock there was a small shack, which hid the stairway and the outside entrance into the aquarium. Within the lake itself there was a patch of water illuminated from underneath, the light glowing out through the big window, and in the light we could see the submarine lying ghostly and still, nearly on the lake bottom. Just the top of it emerged from the water alongside the dock.
“We’ve got to scuttle their boat,” Brendan said, and he was off and running down the dock with us following. But how would we scuttle it? I had no idea. Then I saw that we didn’t need to. The key was in the ignition. They had simply left it there, as if they had thought they were coming right back. With that thought in my mind, I snatched the key out, stomped on the plastic float that was chained to it, and pitched it straight into the lake, where they’d never find it. We couldn’t do anything about the submarine, of course, and so it was time to search for Lala, except there she was, popping up out of the water near the end of the dock where there was a wooden ladder. She climbed out while Hasbro dashed back and forth, barking out a welcome. Then she walked straight up to Brendan and kissed him right on the lips!
I didn’t laugh, because it wasn’t funny. Okay, it was funny, because of the silly look on his face. But more than that it was Brendan saving the day. And anyway there was no time for laughing or for anything like it. We were running again, all five of us, along the shore, and then up onto the walkway that edges the lake, past a crowd of geese that were hunkered down for the night, and a man asleep on a bench under a big coat. We ducked around the ticket house where you pay for lake tours, and out onto the docks where we whipped the canvas cover from the top of Mr. Wattsbury’s boat and crammed it in behind the seats. Brendan fished out the hidden ignition key, and I started up the engine, and in seconds we had backed
out of the slip and were heading out across the moonlit lake, which was so smooth now that it felt almost as if we were flying.
But flying where?—to Peach Manor, of course, but what then?
“Uncle Hedge says we’re supposed to help you,” I shouted to Lala, who must have been freezing in her thin dress, given that she was all wet. I pulled off my jacket and handed it to her, and I could see that Brendan wished he had given her his jacket. Then Brendan gave his jacket to me, and I took it and said thanks. And then Lala traded me my jacket for Brendan’s. Brendan can be very gallant when he tries, and Lala knew just how to make him try.
“What’s our mission, Peach?” Perry asked.
She held up the Mermaid’s key, which she was gripping very tightly. “We have to rescue my father before he wakes up,” she said, which still made not a single bit of sense to me, because it seemed to me that if her father waked up, he could rescue himself. Boy did I turn out to be wrong. But there was nothing to do except race the four miles down the lake, which reflected a glowing avenue of moonlight, straight and true. Hasbro climbed up onto the bow like a doggy figurehead, and the happy thought came into my head that we had gotten clean away.
But that kind of thought is like an unlucky penny, because just when it turns up, things are often about to go bad.
“Look!” shouted Brendan, and he pointed back up the lake in the direction we’d come. There was this strange bulge in the water, moving straight down along the center of the lake in the moonlight, right in our own wake, like a half-submerged alligator, and then the submarine itself rose partway out of the water, pursuing us, and maybe a quarter of a mile behind.
“It’s the submarine!” Brendan yelled unnecessarily.
And Perry said, “Krikey! Step on it, Perkins!”
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