Creature Keepers and the Hijacked Hydro-Hide

by Peter Nelson

  Standing on the front step was Jordan—worn, wet, and ragged. Behind him were fifty or so very soggy senior citizens, looking not much better.

  “Hi, Mom and Dad. Place looks great. Got any long-term vacancies available?”

  33

  Jordan stood in the sun-filled backyard. The grass was perfectly manicured, the flower patch was colorful and vibrant, and the freshly painted garden gnome stood watch over a robust herb garden by the kitchen door. This was not the same backyard Jordan stepped into just a week ago.

  His attention drifted to a small, bubbling fountain installed near the wall separating the yard from the Okeeyuckachokee Swamp. He stared at the gurgling water sadly.

  “Hey there, pal!” Jordan jumped at the sound of his father, who was suddenly standing right next to him. “Sorry if I startled ya—I just wanted to say how proud I am of you. Not only for tackling the challenges you needed to in order to pass your Badger Ranger test, but for applying them so well in a real-life situation. Thank heavens you and your fellow Rangers on that Badgeroobilee heard the distress call from that sinking retirement cruise ship! With all this rogue-wave madness hitting the coast of Europe, those old folks are lucky it wasn’t worse—and luckier still you were there to save them! And then to show real Badger Ranger community-service skills by offering them a place to stay here? Your mom and I couldn’t be more proud.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Jordan said glumly.

  “Hey, champ.” Mr. Grimsley’s expression changed. “Why the long face?”

  Jordan wiped away a tear so his father wouldn’t see. “It’s . . . a friend of mine. He . . . didn’t make it, Dad.”

  “Oh, no.” Mr. Grimsley put an arm around Jordan. “That must be hard, son.” He hesitated a moment. “But not everyone can become a Badger Ranger. I’m sure your friend’s happy you made it through Badger training. And I’ll bet he’s proud to have a friend who’s such a shining example of everything a Badger Ranger stands for: bravery, community—and friendship.”

  Jordan looked at the Badger Badge on his shirt.

  “Besides,” his father continued. “There’s always next year. Your friend can try out again then!” Mr. Grimsley held up his to-do clipboard and beamed. “Now, then. Don’t know if you noticed, but your mom and I have been busy taking care of business.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. The place looks really awesome, Dad.”

  Mr. Grimsley flipped through the reams of checked-off chores. “Don’t worry, though. I didn’t forget our project. See?” He flipped to a page and found the only chore that wasn’t crossed out: CUT BACK SWAMP ON BACKYARD WALL.

  “I promised you we’d tackle this challenge togeth—” Mr. Grimsley was looking at the far wall. He turned to Jordan. “You tackled it all by yourself! That’s the Grimsley in ya!”

  Mr. Grimsley dramatically crossed the item off his list, slapped Jordan on the back, and marched inside. Jordan looked at the wall. His father was right—the snarled, weedy swamp growth that had been creeping over it like a giant squid was completely gone. Jordan knew he hadn’t cut all that swamp growth off the backyard wall. And if his parents hadn’t done it, who had?

  “Hey, you brainless guppie.” Jordan spun around to find Abbie glaring at him, arms crossed and eyebrows furrowed. “We need to talk.”

  “Sure. Hey, did you trim the weeds back here?”

  “What? No. I’ve been in charge of your lemonade stand, remember?”

  “Oh, right. You’ll be happy to hear that you won’t have to do that anymore.”

  Abbie’s expression suddenly flashed a hint of disappointment, which she quickly tried to cover. “Oh. Well, I’ve been doing it all week. So I might as well finish doing it the last few days of our cruddy vacation.” Jordan gave her a strange look. “What?” she snapped. “It’s not like I like doing it. I’m doing you a favor. Don’t forget that.”

  “Okay . . . but I’m afraid you can’t do it anymore. The lemons are . . . gone.”

  “Well, get some more.” Abbie seemed more than a little irked about the thought of losing her lemonade-stand duties.

  “I can’t. They weren’t just any lemons. They were, uh, extra-organic.”

  “Ha! I knew it! I knew there was something about those lemons! They’re vitamin boosted, or enchanted, or biologically mutated somehow, aren’t they? Every day you were gone, a bag of those supercharged lemons mysteriously showed up on our doorstep. And every day I used ’em, following your dorky friend’s dorky instructions—and the old people went crazy on the stuff!”

  “Crazy? Crazy how?”

  “Like, they had all this energy, like they were young even though they were old, which was actually cool because they weren’t boring like normal old people. They were actually interesting and had the best stories, like when Mr. Truitt told me about his time in the circus, after the war, when he—” Abbie stopped herself. Jordan narrowed his eyes at Abbie’s oversharing. Abbie never overshared. Abbie never regular-shared.

  Embarrassed, she grabbed Jordan’s collar. “Tell me what’s going on—now.”

  Jordan smiled. For the first time, he wasn’t afraid of her. He’d been chased through a swamp at night by a Chupacabra—what could she do to him? She let go and looked at him closer. “You seem less twerpy. It’s like you’ve . . . changed.”

  “Yeah, there’s been a lot of that going around. C’mon. I wanna show you something.”

  34

  Jordan helped Abbie through the opening in the wall and led her into the Okeeyuckachokee Swamp. As she took it all in, he noticed something was different. The vegetation seemed smaller. He spun around and looked back at the wall separating the swamp from his backyard. Sure enough, the plants had shrunk. He crouched down at the base of the wall. The thick, overgrown tangle of vines that had once climbed up and over the wall had regressed, turning back into little sprouts.

  “All that elixir that was kept in the lemon tree lair,” he said. “It was wiped out by the floodwaters and must’ve been reabsorbed into the soil.”

  “Stop that,” Abbie said. “Stop being weirder than me.”

  Jordan dashed past his sister, running as fast as he could, deeper into the swamp. “Hey!” she shouted, and chased after him.

  They reached the small, tranquil lake left by the whirlpool, where the lemon tree once stood. Abbie was frantically catching her breath as she tried her best to yell at him. “What’s your problem, you spaz?”

  “That’s it,” he said, pointing out to the middle of the pool. “When the lair flooded, the Fountain of Youth elixir must’ve shrunk the great lemon tree!”

  “You just said, ‘lair,’ ‘Fountain of Youth,’ and ‘elixir’ in the same sentence. You know who talks like that? Wizards and weirdos. And you’re no wizard.”

  “You said yourself there was something special about those lemons. Well, you were right. And this is where they came from.”

  “A big puddle?”

  “There was a massive lemon tree here. Its roots soaked up the Fountain of Youth water in the soil; then it released tiny amounts into each of its lemons. The lemonade you made from those lemons had just enough of the Fountain of Youth water in them to keep the residents of Waning Acres active and healthy.”

  “So where’d this lemon tree of youth go?”

  “It must’ve been de-aged. There were millions of bottles of the elixir stored underground. When the flood waters came crashing in and spilled them, all that elixir returned to the soil. The tree, the vines, any vegetation that soaked it up have shrunk back into seeds or saplings.”

  “Or . . . this is just a normal little pond, and you’re totally messing with me.”

  Bloop! A bubble burped from the center of the still water. What looked like a leafy bundle of sticks emerged from the depths. Jordan grabbed a long branch from the shore and pulled it to the edge. It was the lemon tree sapling, downsized and uprooted. A few green leaves and budding flowers were on it, as well as a couple of marble-sized lemons. He showed it to his sister.

/>   “Okay, so you’re elaborately messing with me. I’m slightly impressed but not amused.”

  Bloop! Another bubble. A rectangular object floated toward the shore. Abbie pulled it out by its handle. “Wait. I’ve seen this before.” She set the suitcase on the muddy shore and opened it up. She pulled out Grampa Grimsley’s black, furry Skunk Ape mask and looked at Jordan. “I don’t understand,” she said, looking back at the suitcase, a bit dazed by all of this. “How did you—How did this . . . get down there?”

  “Down there is Grampa Grimsley’s lair. He created it years ago. It was the home of the Creature Keepers—protectors of the cryptids of the world. Dedicated to help, hide, and hoax.”

  “Cryptids?” Abbie looked down at the Skunk Ape mask in her hand. “Okay. I don’t know how you planned all of this. But Mom said cryptids aren’t real.”

  “Pff! Your mom ain’t real!” A gruff voice from above startled the two of them, forcing them to look up. Hanging upside down from a high tree branch was a red wad of muscles. The creature also had black, beady eyes, horns on its head, little pointed ears, and a pointed tail. It let go of the branch with its hooved legs and flipped right-side up. Two small, black, batlike wings unfolded and fluttered frantically, barely delivering the bulky, muscle-bound creature to the ground. It landed awkwardly but recovered with attitude, glaring at Abbie. “Drink me in, sweet stuff. I’m about as real as it gets.”

  Abbie screamed. Jordan ran to her, crouching down between his sister and the red demon-creature. He still had the lemon tree sapling in his hand, and was waving it around ridiculously as if it were a weapon. “Stay back! You hear me?”

  “HAW-HAW!” The creature laughed, its quivering red lips flashing a row of tiny, daggerlike, sharp teeth. It turned and yelled to the base of the tree it had just alighted from. “Yo, Eldon! I thought you said this kid was a Grimsley!”

  Eldon stepped out from behind the tree. Its trunk cast a thick shadow, and for a second Abbie thought she saw something else stir within it.

  “He is a Grimsley, Lou,” Eldon said. “More than anyone here, it turns out.” He reached down and helped Jordan up. “I heard what you did for the others.”

  “Then you must’ve heard about Bernard, too,” Jordan said sadly. “He’s gone.”

  Eldon nodded, then scratched his head, as if trying to remember something. “Although . . . if Bernard’s gone, then who was it that told me what you did?”

  “Wasn’t me, boss,” the red creature said, picking something out of his teeth. Abbie was staring at him with a look of slightly disgusted horror on her face.

  “Gosh, how rude of me.” Eldon gestured toward her. “Lou, I’d like to introduce Abigail Grimsley. And this is her brother, Jordan Grimsley, grandkids of the great George Grimsley. Guys, this is Lou. The Jersey Devil.”

  “Sorry if I got too real back there. That’s kinda my thing. Keepin’ it real, I mean.”

  Jordan remembered his first encounter with a real, live cryptid and hoped he didn’t look as stupid then as Abbie did now. He looked at Eldon. “Hey, what did you mean when you said—”

  Bloop! BRAAAP!

  They all turned to the pool. This time the burping bubbles revealed a shiny, golden object. At first Jordan thought it might be his grandfather’s urn. He heard it again. BRAAAP! It didn’t sound like an urn. He knew that sound.

  It was a tuba. Specifically, it was Bernard’s tuba. And it was rising out of the water. And it was being played—horribly. There was only one Skunk Ape Jordan knew who played as horribly as that. BRAAAAAAP! Jordan dived into the water.

  “Bernard!” The Skunk Ape moved the tuba to reveal he was wearing his diver’s mask and scuba tank. Jordan swam up to him and hugged him. He was so happy he didn’t even notice that the only thing smellier than a Skunk Ape was a wet Skunk Ape.

  “You’re alive!” he yelled. “I can’t believe it! How did you survive down there?”

  Bernard smiled back at him. “Skunk Apes can hold their breath for a really long time,” he said. “Kind of a helpful skill to have when you smell like we do.”

  Jordan hugged him again, and Bernard lifted Jordan out of the pool and set him down on the shore. Then he turned to greet Abbie, who was suddenly having a very complicated day. “Hello again,” Bernard said, extending a wet paw. “We met a week or so ago. I was clean-shaven, in disguise, and not wearing flippers, so I understand if you don’t recall us being introduced.”

  “No,” Abbie whispered. She looked paler than usual. “I—I remember. Nice to, uh—hi.”

  They walked through the damp swamp as the twilight shadows grew long. Eldon told Jordan of his adventures up North, and how he felt when he found the great lemon tree replaced by a big watering hole. He feared the worst, assuming Gusto must have attacked again, until a very out-of-breath Skunk Ape suddenly emerged from the waters. After telling Eldon what had happened, Bernard began deep well diving to try to salvage what he could from Grampa Grimsley’s underground (now underwater) lair. There wasn’t much left.

  “What about the field guide?” Jordan asked as they reached the wall to Waning Acres.

  “I’m afraid not,” Bernard said. “The entire library room is completely caved in.”

  As this sunk in, Eldon pulled two Badger Ranger hats out of his backpack and turned to Jordan and Abbie. “Okay, you guys are clear on the plan, right? Tell your folks you’re going on one last Badger Ranger outing, and you’ll be back in a coupla days.”

  Lou chuckled. “The ‘last outing’ part’s true. Dunno about the ‘coming back’ part.”

  “That’s quite enough, Lou,” Bernard said.

  “Just keepin’ it real,” the red cryptid shot back.

  “Real dumb.”

  “You wanna piece of this, stinky?”

  “Knock it off, you two,” Eldon said. He took the suitcase from Lou and handed it to Jordan. “We won’t be needing this. Might as well hide it back where you found it.”

  “I don’t know if I can. I think my parents turned the attic into a tearoom.”

  “Get Doris to help you. She knows every inch of that house, and might even remember a secret hiding spot. Bring it to her. She’ll know what to do with it. Okay. You guys know where and when to meet, right?”

  “Boathouse. At dawn,” Jordan said. Abbie was distracted, staring off into the swamp behind them. Both boys noticed.

  “Abbie. You okay?”

  “Yeah, I just . . . I keep thinking something’s in the shadows, following us.”

  “Very perceptive,” Eldon said. “That’s Kriss. The Mothman. He’s shy, but sooner or later he’ll come out of his cocoon. Or, he won’t. Either way, good eye, Abbie. Glad you’re on board.”

  He offered her a Badger Ranger hat. She looked at it. “Like I’d ever wear that.” She ducked through the swamp wall. Jordan shrugged, then shoved the suitcase through. He went to follow her but stopped, turned back, and gave Bernard a very big hug.

  35

  The old Grimsley place was a beehive of activity—if the hive were a huge, beautifully refinished house, and the bees were giggly, overexcited eighty-year-olds. Jordan’s parents were running from room to room to room delivering hot tea and fresh cookies, spreading blankets, filling heating pads, fluffing up pillows, and telling bedtime stories. And their children couldn’t remember ever seeing them happier.

  Jordan was happy, too, with all the Creature Keeper crew easing so comfortably into a forced and rather violently sudden retirement. He knew they’d want the latest news on the plan to save Nessie, and of course would be eager to hear that Bernard was alive. So Jordan and his sister made their rounds, too, dropping by each bedroom to whisper into hairy old ears what was happening. Jordan was especially surprised at how Abbie seemed to enjoy spending time with the old folks—but decided it was probably best not to point that out to her.

  The last room Jordan visited belonged to Doris, on the very top floor. He lugged the old suitcase to the end of the hall, just before the attic stairs. Setti
ng it down outside her door, he entered and offered her a cup of hot cocoa.

  “It’s an ancient Skunk Ape recipe.” Jordan smiled. “From an old friend.”

  “Thank goodness he’s all right. He gave us all quite a scare.” She smiled and took a sip. “Eldon told me it was your fine detective work in Nessie’s cave that led you to her kidnapper. Any clue where she’s being held now?”

  “The Hall of the Chupacabra is in Mexico, but Eldon says its exact location died with my Grampa Grimsley. That evil madman thinks I’m my grandfather, and so assumes I know where to find them.”

  “You’re a wonderful boy.” Doris chuckled. “And you’re clearly a Grimsley. But dearie, you’re not your grandfather.”

  “I wish I was. I’d lead everyone straight to the Chupacabra’s front door, bang it down, and get Nessie out of there. Gusto must’ve promised that horrible beast he could deliver my grandfather in return for something.”

  “Trust me, that cryptid doesn’t work with anyone. It’s always been a loner.”

  “I saw it lurking outside the crypto-zoo the night I overheard Gusto talking to Harvey. There’s gotta be a connection, or Gusto wouldn’t have chosen the Mexican location as a trap. But I’m not my grandfather, so I don’t have a clue where they are.”

  “I wish there was something I could do to help.”

  Jordan remembered something. “You can help me with this.” He got up and carried the suitcase in to her and placed it on the bed.

  Doris sat up. She seemed startled. “Where did you get that?”

  “Up in the attic. But I need a new place to stash it. Its old hiding place has been taken over by loveseats and tea cozies. Any ideas?”

  She stared at the case. “Y’know, I was caretaker of this place for years. Including the night your grandfather died.”

  “But he died in the swamp.”

  “That stormy night, he showed up in soaking wet pajamas, frightened, saying how he was going to be taken away, wouldn’t be able to continue his life’s work. I’d heard what he’d done, how he was responsible for Skunk Ape Summer, and that he’d been arrested in Leisureville.” She closed her eyes. “I ordered him to leave. He told me that this was his house. That scared me. No one knew but me that I didn’t rightfully own this house. I couldn’t afford him getting me in any trouble. I couldn’t have him here.” A tear ran down her cheek. “So I turned him away. I turned a frightened old man away from his own home.”