Perry sat at the table staring closely at the Mermaid’s box, as if he was studying things out. The bottom of the box was built of strips of wood that appeared to be glued together to make a board, and had been carved with the likeness of a moon and clouds on all four sides, with the tops of palm trees below the moon like a tropical island. There was the same sort of carving on each side, except that the moon was in different phases, with an old moon in front, very round and full, and a new moon on the fourth side, not even visible at all, but just a dark circle hidden by the shadow of the Earth.
Perry started fiddling with the edge of the box, where the strips of wood came together like little interlocking fingers. “It’s loose,” he said, frowning. “These pieces of wood are loose.”
“Then leave it alone,” Brendan told him. “You’ll break it. Then what would you say to Uncle Hedge? He’s already suffered enough.”
“You’ll be the one to suffer if you don’t keep your opinions to yourself,” Perry said. Right then he gave one of the wooden strips a push, and it moved a little bit, like the side of a Chinese puzzle box. It was the strip with the moon carved on it.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Brendan said. “If you break the hermit seal and the air gets in the Mermaid will turn to dust.”
“I don’t think it’s called a ‘hermit seal,’” I told Brendan. But Brendan wasn’t listening anyway, and neither was Perry, because the moon on the opposite side of the box had moved too, just a fraction of an inch, and that, I can tell you, was very exciting. Perry glanced up with the greedy look he gets when he’s made a discovery, and we all crowded around the table to have a better view. There was a lightning flash just then, with a crash of thunder this time. Normally I love a lightning storm, but right now I scarcely noticed it.
Perry pushed on the opposite moon piece, and it slid open a quarter inch, which allowed him to push the first strip farther, too, and then a third one after that. One panel locked the other in place, you see, and when he pushed the two opposites apart, that unlocked the other two, and then he could push those apart, and when he did, the moon on all four sides of the box moved across the night sky above the palm trees.
“Let me try,” Brendan said, but right then a sound started up from within the box, a curious sound, like a hive full of metal bees. There was a heavy click, and then a sort of ratchet noise, and the Mermaid herself began to rotate. We all stepped back from the table with our eyes wide open. She made one complete turn and then stopped, looking out the window again just as she had been. Weirdly, the strips of wood began to move on their own now, one after another, opening and shutting and opening again with more little clicking and whirring noises, until three of the sides ended up shut. The bottom front of the box remained open, though, and we could see that it was hollow inside.
Perry bent over to look, and just then the Mermaid began to turn slowly away from us again so that she was looking at the wall, and as she turned, the oddest thing happened. An immense skeletal hand reached out from inside the box, twice as big as a normal hand and with the bones fastened together with wire. The fingers were closed up, and within them lay a large, black iron key. The hand slowly began to open, as if to allow us to take the key if we wanted it. I wasn’t at all sure that we did. Brendan reached for it, but Perry stopped him.
“It might be a trap,” he said. “It might grab you.”
The idea of it was just too horrible, and we all stood there staring at the hand, waiting for it to do something further. But it was apparently waiting for us, too, and perhaps had been waiting for a long, long time.
“It’s like our jail keys,” Brendan whispered, meaning the three iron keys that were in the toy box upstairs. And he was partly right, because the jail keys are also rusty looking and very large and heavy. But this was older, like a key that opens a pirate’s treasure chest and has been buried in the sand for centuries, and it had little wavy designs carved into it, and when you looked at it you knew that it had to be the key to something, and not just any something.
Brendan started yelling for Uncle Hedge, and ran off toward the study to fetch him, and when they returned Uncle Hedge stood staring just like we did. After a moment, he reached out his own hand and carefully took the key. The skeleton hand closed and slid backward into the box. The Mermaid swiveled around to face us again, and one by one the strips of wood began opening and shutting, whirring and clicking, until the box was shut up tight and looked to be just as solid as it had been.
“I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Uncle Hedge said, which was what he often said when he was mystified. “I believe this is a skeleton key.”
“For a very big skeleton,” Brendan said.
“You were clever to figure it out,” Uncle Hedge said to Perry. “This key might prove to be crucial.”
I could see that Brendan was irritated that Uncle Hedge had said Perry was clever and not him, because Brendan prides himself on being clever. And now I’d best reveal something about Brendan. He’s kind of a glory pig, perhaps because he’s young. Also he was still a little bit angry with us because we made fun of his theory of navigation, and he very much likes to be right and for us to be agreeable. When he wants to be right but we won’t let him, he becomes really quite sure that he’s right, and when that happens he convinces himself to do something foolish in order to show everybody. That’s the mood he was in right now. I could see it in his eyes, which were frowny.
“Teach me how to work the box,” Uncle Hedge said, and he watched closely as Perry pushed and pulled on the little strips. The box began to whir and make its ratcheting noises again, and Uncle Hedge said, “A clockwork mechanism!” to himself, just as the strips began to open and shut and the Mermaid turned around, and the hand slid out, and the fingers opened again, and the box fell silent.
“Perkins shall have the honor,” Uncle Hedge said, and he handed the key to me. I set it back on the hand, exactly as it had been, and immediately everything reversed itself. The hand closed on the key and drew back into the box, and the box went through all its complications and noises until it was closed up and done and the Mermaid was gazing out the window as if nothing at all had happened.
Just then Brendan shouted and trod back into the edge of the table, staring hard at the rainy window and gulping air like a goldfish. We all turned to look, and for a split second I saw what Brendan had seen—a pale face ducking away outside the window.
There was the sound of footfalls—someone running down the drive and into the back yard, heading for the bluffs. Uncle Hedge strode toward the back door with all of us following, and he turned on the backyard lights in time for us to see the gate swinging shut but nothing else except the rain and the darkness. Perry said we should “give chase,” but Uncle Hedge wouldn’t hear of it. “Did you get a good look at him?” he asked Brendan, after shutting and bolting the door.
“It wasn’t a him,” Brendan said, looking more amazed than anything else. “It was a her.”
“What her?” Perry asked.
Brendan stared for another moment and then said in a sort of whisper, “It was the mermaid from Lighthouse Beach!”
Chapter 6
Troubled Sleep
From my bedroom window that night I could see the bluffs above the Sea Cove, and the path winding along until it disappeared downhill toward the ocean. My mind was certain that the Creeper was somewhere out there in the shadows, watching our house. I tried to believe it had been Brendan’s mermaid at the window, but I couldn’t. I didn’t believe in Brendan’s mermaid at all. It occurred to me that Ms Peckworthy might be out there too, haunting the neighborhood, waiting patiently for the end of the week when she would load us into her tiny red car and take us away. Rain beat against the roof on and off, and there was the sound of water running in the gutters. When the rain dwindled away I could hear waves breaking in the cove and the moaning of the wind under the eaves of the house. I tried hard to sleep, but it was no use, and the time passed slowly.
I
started thinking about how deep the ocean is and how lonely it must be for a mermaid who has gotten lost and been washed away by deep sea currents. I pictured the dark waters and the strange fish that swim there, and by and by I must have fallen asleep, because I began to dream about the Mermaid down among the waterweeds and fishes. In my dream she was in a bedroom of her own beneath the sea, with a bed made of pearls and shells. Then suddenly it was me in the underwater bedroom, and my mother was sitting at the foot of my bed, with the waterweeds moving behind her in the current. She spoke to me, and she reached out and took my hand in her hand, and I remember that I was very happy.
When I tried to say something to her I actually did speak, right out loud, and the sound of my own voice woke me from the dream. I can’t tell you how sad it was waking up and finding her gone, because I don’t quite know how to tell it. The thing about sleep is that people you’ve lost can come back to you in dreams. When you awaken they’ll be gone all over again, but you know that some dark night they’ll return when you really need them to, and you can speak with them again.
I lay there looking at the darkness, trying to recall the dream before it faded from my mind. By and by I saw a light go on out in the hallway. For a moment it shone like a yellow ribbon beneath the closed door. Then it went out again, leaving things even darker than they had been. I sat up in bed and listened. Hasbro wasn’t barking, so whoever was out there was one of us. I waited for the stair tread to creak halfway down, but it didn’t, which meant it wasn’t Uncle Hedge. It was someone being stealthy. I waited a little longer, listening for him to return, but he didn’t return, and that made me very suspicious indeed, so I climbed out of bed and peeked out into the hallway. The living room downstairs was dark, but I could see that there was a light glowing in the back of the kitchen, probably the pantry lamp, which would just be enough to lighten the breakfast nook, where the kitchen table was. And where the Mermaid was.
Halfway down the stairs I stepped carefully over the creaky tread and then went on down to the landing, where I stopped and listened again, hearing the ratchety sound of the Mermaid’s box. I sneaked up to the kitchen door, and it was right then, when I bent down and looked in sideways, that I sneezed. Brendan (it was him at the kitchen table) jumped about half a mile into the air and he jammed both hands into the pockets of his pajamas as he spun around and gaped at me.
He had the very Face of Guilt, like an illustration in a book, and for a moment he made fish lips at me as he tried to speak. The Mermaid’s box was open or nearly open. I could see that the little finger-pieces of wood had been worked away from the sides, but that was all I could make out before he stepped in front of it, looking as if he had just eaten something ghastly.
“You better not tell!” was the first thing he said. (Actually, he says that a little too often, although Perry and I wouldn’t tell on him anyway. We’re not rats.)
“I won’t,” I said. “But what are you doing?”
“Doing?” he asked. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not doing anything. I just wanted my turn to open it. Perry got to open it. Nobody let him, he just did it. And now when I do it, it’s a big crime.”
“Nobody said it’s a crime,” I said. “I just asked what you were doing.”
“And I told you I’m just having a look at the box, but now you’ve spoiled it!” He turned his back on me and started pushing the puzzle part of the box back together again, and the Mermaid turned around once, and the box shut itself up, and in a moment you couldn’t tell anybody had been meddling with it. “There,” he said. “I suppose you’re happy that you’ve spoiled it.”
“I didn’t spoil anything,” I said. “I just saw a light on and came down here.”
“Well you did spoil it, and you’ll have to live with that.” He walked past me looking very dignified and headed toward the stairs. “Forever and ever,” he said.
“I’ll try,” I said to his back. It wasn’t clever. You never think of the really clever things till later. I switched off the light in the pantry and went back up to my bedroom, taking one last look out at the empty bluffs and the moon on the ocean before I lay down and fell asleep. The next thing I knew, the light was on and Perry was shaking me awake.
“It’s her,” he said, nodding hard over his shoulder. “The mermaid Brendan saw at the Sea Cove? She’s in the livingroom right now!”
Chapter 7
The Unexpected Guest
I followed Perry down the hall toward the stairs, with Brendan coming out of the bedroom behind us, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “What’s the fuss?” he asked.
“There’s mermaids afoot,” Perry said, and Brendan said, “ha, ha, ha,” very ironically, but by then we could see downstairs into the livingroom, and there she sat, in Uncle Hedge’s big stuffed chair, spritzing herself with what looked like a perfume atomizer.
“Seawater,” Perry whispered.
She was short, so short that her feet didn’t reach the ground. (I mean when she sat in a chair.) I don’t really know how to describe her skin, but it was so white that it was almost a pale green that reminded you of the ocean. And she had gills, too, or something like them. You could see them low on her neck (although you tried not to stare—unless you were Brendan). They weren’t flappy things, like a fish’s gills, but were more like scars, maybe, the same on each side, and not useful. (Perry said they were called “vestigial” but of course he didn’t say that until later. It’s not the sort of thing you say in the presence of someone who’s part mermaid.) Her hands were webbed like a frog’s hands. You couldn’t really see how much until she opened her fingers, which is just what she did when she gave me a little wave, because I guess I was kind of gaping at her and not saying anything, which isn’t manners.
“I’d like to introduce Eulalie Peach,” Uncle Hedge told us. “Her friends call her Lala. She’s my old friend Basil’s granddaughter, and she’s come to us all the way from Lake Windermere. It’s quite a surprise.”
We all said how do you do, but we were too curious to be sociable yet. She was wearing a raggedy orphan dress and shoes that looked more like ballet slippers than proper shoes. They were black with orange embroidered koi goldfish on the toes, like the cloth shoes you see in Chinatown shops. Her hair was a little bit wild, because she had just come in out of the wind, and she had taken off her coat and dropped it onto the rug next to a worn out carpetbag made of tapestry material. She had flown into San Francisco and then taken a Greyhound bus up the coast, she said, which had left her off at the bus stop near the Albion, and she had walked up from there.
All of this made me highly suspicious, partly because she had a look on her face as if she thought everything was just a little bit funny, but also because Brendan had told us that he had seen her twice before, the first time being yesterday morning. I hadn’t believed him, like I said, except now here she was, and so Brendan must have been telling the truth, because it’s way too coincidental that he made up a lot of nonsense about a mermaid and then the nonsense had come true. All of us must have been thinking this same thing, even Uncle Hedge, but Uncle Hedge seemed happy to see her, and so I tried to put away my suspicions and be happy to see her, too.
What was she doing on our doorstep? She wanted to warn us about the Creeper, she said (although she described him, she didn’t call him that) who had come out to this part of the world in order to steal something that belonged to her family, and he mustn’t be allowed to.
“He already did steal it, just yesterday,” Brendan said. “At least he tried to.”
“Tried?” she asked him anxiously. “Then she’s safe? The mermaid?”
Brendan told her yes, she was safe, and that we had beaten the Creeper witless with all manner of weapons and he had fled into the shrubbery.
“The other one…?” she asked, looking at Uncle Hedge now. He shook his head, and Lala looked relieved, but what it all meant I couldn’t say. Now I know that she meant Dr. Frosticos, whose name she couldn’t bring herself to utter
.
We all went into the kitchen to make breakfast then, where the Mermaid still sat on the table. (Perry said that I should spell the Mermaid in the box with a capital M, because it was the mermaid, and had no other name. Lala must remain the lower case mermaid, because she does have a name, and by now we were getting used to it.) Anyway, Lala had come a long way to see the Mermaid, and she looked immensely relieved. It was awkward, actually, because no one wanted to say, “Are you related to this Mermaid in the box? You have gills and frog hands, after all,” although we were all thinking it. Uncle Hedge started mixing up buckwheat pancakes, and pancakes are a good distraction, because eating gives you something to do besides talk. While we were spreading peanut butter on them, dipping them in syrup, and stuffing them down, she stole glances in the Mermaid’s direction, as if she was trying to puzzle something out, and I wondered what it was.
I could see that Brendan was a little bit googly about her. He wasn’t eating his pancakes, but was showing off and telling her about navigation and the north star and about how everything in the world is actually made of hydrogen, and she was nodding and saying, “Oh,” and, “I wasn’t aware of that.” Perry pointed out helpfully that Brendan’s brain was filled with hydrogen, like a blimp, and that it would float away if it weren’t encased in his skull. Brendan got furious and called him a big bag of pigswill, and Uncle Hedge had to give them a look so that they’d simmer down, which Lala seemed to find amusing.
After pancakes we went out walking on the bluffs above the Sea Cove, which is nearly behind the house—behind Mrs. Hoover’s house, really. The cliffs are high around the cove, and there’s only a little bit of sand down on the horseshoe-shaped beach, which is mostly under water at high tide and is never very wide even when the tide is out, because the ocean bottom falls away so steeply there. Driftwood piles up on the rocks in the cove, and there’s usually an immense lot of it, which you can use to build a fort, although if the tide comes up high enough, your fort floats away. After a storm you can find seashells there and stuff that gets washed up, like old shoes, although always just one. Once we found a coconut that had drifted in from across the ocean. It turned out to be full of salt water that had leaked into it, which we discovered after we hammered a hole in the top with a nail and paid Brendan a quarter to drink from it. Brendan didn’t think it was as funny as Perry and I did.
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