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 pl
ace 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.
We found a stick straightaway, but it was too thick, and wouldn’t fit through the crack, and so we found another one that was thin enough but which broke. We needed something just right—thin but hard and tough, like a piece of steel. And we needed it quickly. I told myself that it wouldn’t hurt to take a quick look inside, if only to find out where the stairs led.
“Maybe Mr. Wattsbury has a tool kit in the boat,” Perry said. “We might find a fishing knife or something.”
“A knife!” Brendan said, and he rooted in his jacket pocket and came up with the Creeper’s knife, which you’ll remember he had kept as a spoil of war. “Hah!” he said, and he snapped the blade out, slid it through the crack beneath the latch, and wiggled steadily up at it. The latch was maybe rusty or something, because it took a while, but then there was a scraping sound, a metallic click, and the door swung silently outward, nearly knocking into us. We stepped inside and stood there for a moment listening to the drops pattering on the roof, and the first thing that we noticed was that the dark square in the floor was a stone stairway just as we had guessed, a stairway which evidently descended to a level below the lake itself.
The tools and boards and such that lay on the ground were rusty and dirty from years of lying there, as if the boathouse hadn’t been used for any purpose at all in half a century. There was an old, square, wooden mallet, and a saw blade with no handle, and some oarlocks, and a carving thingy with a curved blade, and some heavy, short nails that had square-shaped heads, as if they’d been stamped out down at Tenpenny Farm, which probably they had been.
Brendan straightaway started down the stairs. “Come on,” he said peevishly, looking back at us, and Perry shrugged and followed him, and I followed Perry. On the stairs we could hear the sound of water lapping against stones, and there was a strong smell of the lake, very musty and weedy. It was quite dark, because the little bit of light through the doorway and the windows dimmed as you went down the steps.
“A lantern!” Brendan said.
And there was a lantern, right there in the wall, shoved into a niche, and beside it sat an old can with a rusty lid, full of what must have been lamp oil. We have oil lamps in Caspar, so lamps and lamp oil were nothing new to us. The lamp felt heavy, as if it was nearly full of oil already, so Brendan struck a match against the stone wall in order to light the wick. The match flashed so brightly that for an instant I saw farther down the stairs, which descended to another floor below. We had to strike three more matches before the moldy old lamp wick stayed lit, and even then it burned very low and smoky.
We started down, Perry first and Brendan following him and carrying the lantern. I came along last, and I had my hand on Brendan’s shoulder. He would usually have shaken it off, because he doesn’t want girls clutching at him (unless they’re Lala Peach) but this time he didn’t shake it off. The corners of the walls were cobwebby, and lake water leaked in between the cracks in the mortar, and the air smelled damp. Almost at once we came to some wooden doors set into the stone on the dry side of the stairs. They looked like cupboard doors, built of planks and studded with great, fat-headed nails and with heavy hinges that were blue-green with age. Each of the doors, maybe a dozen of them, was carved with a name and a pair of dates, exactly as if they were tombstones. The dates went back to the 1600s.
“It’s a sepulcher,” Perry whispered, and the word gave me the creeps even more than the names and the dates did. I prefer my corpses to be buried, not put into cupboards. There was a death date of 1789 on one of them, Artemis John Peach, and another from 1867. This one had a woman’s name on it—Annabelle Crumpet-Peach.
“She sounds like a pie,” Brendan whispered, which should have been funny, except there were too many dead people nearby for us to be laughing.
“Let’s go back,” I said. “I don’t think it’s all that polite to be disturbing the dead.”
“The dead don’t care,” Brendan told me. “That’s why they call them dead.” I gave him a dirty look, which he pretended to laugh at. When Perry started downward once again, I followed along, and we were soon at the very bottom of the stairs, where a tunnel stretched away into the darkness. We went on just a little farther, the lantern casting its glow onto the floor around us. Beyond that circle of lantern light, though, it was pitch dark. The air was cool and desperately silent, with only the sound of gurgling and dripping and the scrape of our shoes on the stones. A wall loomed out of the darkness, and the tunnel turned sharply to the right—in the direction of the manor house.
I stopped then, because a creepy feeling had come over me. I can’t describe it to you, but there was something uncanny in the air, something that made me think of the dark depths of the pool in the hedge maze. I had the strange feeling that I stood at the edge of an immense dark place, like a big, shadowy room in a funhouse, and I didn’t like the feeling at all. “I’m going back,” I said.
“Baby,” Brendan said, which was mean of him, and so I told him that being a baby was better than being stupid, and he said, “I’m not as stupid as you look,” which he thinks is very clever, but is not.
“Just one peek around the corner,” Perry said, “and then we’ll all go back.”
Brendan mumbled something disagreeable, but I said, “All right, but just one,” and we all stepped forward and peered past the corner, holding the lantern out, and for the space of five seconds we stared straight ahead, our mouths hanging open with horrible surprise. The corridor was blocked by a heavy iron gate a few feet farther along. And sitting in front of the gate on a sort of bench built right into the stones of the wall was an enormous skeleton, staring straight back at us through black, sightless eyes.
Chapter 15
Patrick Cotter, The Irish Giant
And I mean enormous—maybe eight or nine feet tall if he had stood up. He was sort of slumped forward, though, and peering straight at us, as if he wanted to see who it was that had disturbed his sleep.
Before any of us could say anything, or take another step closer even if we had wanted to, a shadow fell across the rock wall far down the tunnel—the shadow of someone carrying a lantern, coming in our direction, looming up silently. We saw that it was old Cardigan Peach in his black coat, just as he had looked in Lala’s photo. He peered toward us from a distance of maybe fifty feet, and I could quite clearly hear him humming something, although it sounded more like a beehive than human humming. And then abruptly he vanished, as if his lantern had gone dark. Before we could turn to leave, poof!, there he was again, fifteen feet closer to us, coming along hummingly, and with his lamp lit again. He moved in a stuttery way, like an old jumpy filmstrip, and the humming was louder now, and it came to me that it was the same humming that I’d heard in the sea cave with Lala. There was the same water-on-rock smell, too, although mingled now with the burning oil smell of the lantern.
Then in the flicker of an eye Cardigan Peach stood right beyond the gate, still smiling, just a few feet from us, his eyes staring, holding up his lantern so that the light shone on his face. In that moment Brendan turned and pushed straight into me, and for another few seconds we were all shouting and pushing and trying to run. Then our lantern went out, and we were in darkness so black that I knew what it was like to be blind. I walked forward with my hands out straight until I reached a wall, and then followed it back to the stairs, which were just barely visible because of light from above. I leaped up them two at a time, looking behind me, expecting to see the illuminated face of Cardigan Peach following along behind me like a floating balloon.
Then it was light again. Perry and Brendan had stopped right ahead, and were stowing the lantern in its niche. Perry was staring upward, at a strangely-shaped shadow that was descend
ing the stairs toward us, shuffling along. Mr. Wattsbury appeared just then, walking down backward and carrying one edge of the Mermaid’s exhibit case. Evidently he had taken it out of the Manchester Theatre Company box. Behind him appeared, impossibly, old Cardigan Peach himself, looking toad-like and grim and wearing a tweed coat and heavy trousers—not the black suit he had been wearing only moments ago. And he wasn’t holding a lantern, either, and he wasn’t humming a tune. Perry and Brendan were looking very gawkily at him, and I suppose I was too.
They set the Mermaid’s box down on the landing. “This is Mr. Cardigan Peach,” Mr. Wattsbury said, dusting off his hands.
“At your service,” he said, nodding to us.
I told him that I was Kathleen Perkins and was very glad to meet him, and Brendan and Perry said so, too, although of course they said their own names. Mr. Peach didn’t look as terrifying as I had feared, but he was extremely amphibious, with a wide mouth and pale frog-like skin. His hands were partly webbed, too, like Lala’s.
“Mr. Wattsbury has told me that you befriended Eulalie,” he said. His voice was as strange as he was, very high and piping.
We nodded.
“I’d like to thank you for that. Perhaps some day I can return the favor.”
I found myself thinking that he could do me the favor of coming home with me to meet Mr. Collier, just to make Mr. Collier’s eyes shoot open.
“It’s time to lay her to rest,” he said to Mr. Wattsbury, and they went on down the stairs where Mr. Peach opened one of the sepulcher doors, revealing an empty stone cupboard inside. The two of them lifted the Mermaid into it. Mr. Peach took one last look at her, mumbled a few words under his breath, and then shut the door, entombing her in the darkness before turning around and ascending the stairs again. We followed silently up into the boathouse itself, where he paused by the windows, looking out onto the lake, which was dark now with the stormy weather. I was trying to think of some way of apologizing for having been meddling in the boathouse at all, but Mr. Peach was apparently sadly distracted, and so I stayed silent.
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