The distant lantern light was jogging along toward us now. It wasn’t Cardigan Peach. It was Frosticos and the Creeper and no doubt Ms Peckworthy, too. They had obviously taken the same wrong turn that we had. We followed Lala and Hasbro, straight back out of the cave mouth, but this time we didn’t stop to sightsee, but slipped and slid down a sandy little trail until we came upon a tumble of immense boulders nearly blocking the path. We picked our way around them, out of sight of the cave mouth now and at the edge of a plateau covered with a forest of giant tree ferns. Lala left the trail, waving for us to follow, into the shadows of the ferns.
There were chattering noises and birdcalls, but there was an unearthly silence, too—a sort of emptiness in the afternoon air, if it was the afternoon. The ground was moss covered, and our footfalls made almost no noise as we moved single file along a narrow game trail, me coming along last beneath a canopy of immense, drooping leaves. There were moving glints of sunlight on the moss as the breeze shifted the leaves overhead. Hasbro started growling, and off to our right a creature the size of an enormous pig, but with a long snout, moved away into the undergrowth, disappearing into the shadows. I snapped a quick picture of it, which I knew would show almost nothing more than the back end of a pig. Almost as soon as the pig creature disappeared, three bright blue birds with enormously long tail feathers flew past low overhead with a rush of beating wings, and I snapped their picture, too, hoping there was enough sunlight for the color to come through.
The trail went upward for a time and then downward again. We seemed to be circling the mountain, roughly in the direction of the inland sea, but I wasn’t paying any real attention, because there was too much to look at, and I kept imagining Mr. Collier’s face when he saw my photo diary. The only problem was that the pterodactyl had been so far away that it might be mistaken for a pelican, and the blue birds were beautiful, but they weren’t evidence, if you see what I mean. Part of me wanted to see something really amazing—a triceratops, maybe, or a saber-toothed tiger—but part of me didn’t want to see any such thing, because I wasn’t anxious to be eaten or trampled. I got a picture of a line of six snails in long spiral shells, moving along in single file. They were almost as large as Reginald Peach’s water helmet, and they were the most beautiful tiger-striped brown and gold. But would they look like giants to someone who was seeing the photo for the first time, or like a picture of six small aquarium snails taken close up? I called Brendan’s name, hoping to get him to crouch down by the snails, but Brendan was gone, and I had to run to catch up.
Brendan said something sharp to me about lollygagging, but before I could think of a reply we were interrupted by the sound of an explosion, followed by two more.
“Gunfire!” Perry said.
Brendan nodded. “The elephant rifle!”
“They’re too close,” Lala said. “They’re tracking us!”
She had a look of intense loathing and anger on her face as well as fear, and I was reminded of the way she had looked at my camera back at the mouth of the cave. The sound of the rifle was simply wrong, if you understand what I mean—the sound of ruination. It was out of place in Pellucidar. Had the Creeper killed something? Would it be the first of many things that would die now that the two of them had arrived? Then it came to me that except for Lala, all of us were interlopers, and I wondered whether this was actually the beginning of the end of Pellucidar.
There was the sound of another rifle shot, and I said, “I’m afraid of the Creeper,” without really thinking.
“It’s not him that you should fear,” Lala said after a moment. “It’s the other one.”
I already knew that, and I didn’t really want to think about it. “Why are they tracking us?” I asked. “They’re already here. Isn’t that what they wanted? He said that they needed you down in the Passage. We’re not in the Passage now.”
“They want something…more,” she said, but she was already turning away, and we were moving on, as fast as ever, forced to climb upward again by a high wall of dark, volcanic rock, and then downward again through a steep little canyon that twisted and turned until I had no idea whether we were going in any sensible direction or were just wandering. Lala pressed on, though, as if she knew exactly where we were going.
It seemed to me that we were running away from something and toward something both, but why? “What do they want?” I said, sort of gasping the question out.
She surprised me by stopping again and turning around. “They want to kill my father,” she said. The Lala who talked in riddles and half answers had suddenly turned into the Lala who was deadly serious.
The three of us stood blinking at her. “But why?” I asked. “Why would they do that?”
“Because they don’t want him to wake up. Ever. They want the Passage to be frozen open. If a Sleeper dies in the middle of a dream, the dream doesn’t die. It’s suspended, floating there like a soap bubble for years. They want to be able to come and go through the passage. They want this to be theirs.” She gestured with her hand, taking in all of Pellucidar. “They’ll exploit it and spoil it and kill things and take things away, and everything that it is will pass away. Forever. There would be no bringing it back.”
“So this has happened before?” Perry asked shrewdly. “The death of a Sleeper? That’s how you know?”
“Yes,” she said, turning and moving on again, talking over her shoulder. “Two hundred years ago. The Sleeper was Eulalie Peach, my grandmother ten generations back. I’m named after her. She was a mermaid and she was born here. It’s her in the glass casket that was in the museum. The Passage remained open for years after she died in her sleep, although it was very dangerous to traverse, because the lingering dreams could drive you mad and because portions of it kept collapsing. People tried to get through it, though, and it had to be guarded day and night. When the Passage finally closed again the skeleton gate was devised to lock it off, and the key was hidden in the casket.”
“Now Frosticos is going to make it happen again,” Brendan said.
“Make it happen, yes. Before the moon is full, and that’s soon. Very soon. That’s why they’re in a hurry.”
“So we can’t wake him up and we can’t let him sleep,” Perry said.
“Yes,” she said, and then, “no,” and that was the end of the conversation.
We came out of the canyon into a jungle, with vines and cascades of flowers hanging from the trees, which towered away overhead. There were birds moving through the trees and what must have been monkeys, although they were hidden in shadow. We could hear them chittering away and see branches moving. Immense butterflies fluttered overhead. The ground was completely shaded, too shady for underbrush, but with mosses and ferns and gigantic orchids growing from the tree trunks. In the distance, through the trees, lay a big meadow, knee deep in grass and wildflowers. And on the meadow, like figures in a diorama in a natural history museum, stood half a dozen wooly mammoths, perfectly enormous and shaggy, with long, bent tusks. They were twice the size of African elephants—as big as houses.
Perry said, “Krikey,” again, which pretty much expressed what we were all thinking, and I forgot everything else and crept nearer to the tree line to get a clearer picture—thinking that even Mr. Collier couldn’t argue with a wooly mammoth, something that no living human being on the surface of the earth had seen. I got off exactly two pictures before Lala had already disappeared, and we had to go on again or be left behind. We weren’t important to Lala, and neither was a herd of mammoths. Nothing could be more important to Lala than saving her father’s life, and saving her father’s life meant saving Pellucidar from the likes of Frosticos and the Creeper. And if the Sleeper woke up in the meantime, we’d all be in trouble. Trouble, I mean to say, loomed on every side.
We moved away downhill now, toward the edge of the sea, the ground getting rockier and the smell of salt in the air instead of rotting vegetation. It was suddenly cooler, too, when we came out of the trees onto a long, rocky sh
elf, full of tide pools. Waves washed across the pools, and crabs the size of car tires scuttled around on the rocks waving giant pincers, disappearing down into crevasses and walking out into the ocean. Sea birds no different from our own sea birds flew through the air, swooping down into the water after fish. The wind blew off the sea, straight into us now that we were out of the shelter of the jungle.
We crossed the rocks and jumped down onto a stretch of hard-packed sand. House-sized rocks stood up out of the sea like a half circle of islands, blocking the waves and wind and creating a sort of bay. The shallow water along the edge of the bay was a golden-blue, like the sky, but only a few feet from shore it was a deeper blue, shading to black. The surface of the bay seemed to be roiled up, as if something big was swimming right under the water, or maybe a lot of somethings—a dense school of fish, maybe.
Lala stood some distance ahead now, looking into a little clearing at the edge of the sand. Brendan and Hasbro ran on ahead to catch up with her, but she didn’t wait. She went on up into the trees again. The jungle grew almost down to the shore there, and at the edge of the jungle, in that clearing, someone had built a driftwood hut. Pieces of driftwood formed the skeleton frame of a roof, tied together with long shreds of leaf, although much of it had been blown to pieces or rotted away. There were fern and palm leaves tied to the top to keep the rain out.
On the ground in front of the hut stood a ring of stones from a campfire. Burned driftwood and ashes lay within the ring, half covered in sand. One of the rocks had been moved into the shelter of the hut itself—a flat, circular stone, the bottom black from the fire, and on the top of the stone someone had very neatly written her initials in charcoal. I say “her” because the initials were “A. W. P.”—Abigail Wallace Perkins, my mother. I stood staring at it. I didn’t need any other proof that it had been her. Who else could it have been? She had been looking for a passage to the interior world, and she had found it. She hadn’t drowned in the depths of the Sargasso Sea. She had descended beneath it.
“Perkins,” Perry said softly, and nodded up toward the jungle. Half hidden by vegetation that had grown up around it lay a big glass sphere, maybe seven feet in diameter, banded with metal rings. It was my mother’s bathyscaph. I had seen a picture of it once, standing on bent legs with arms for reaching and grappling things, and with my mother standing next to it, smiling. But the legs were broken off now and were nowhere to be seen. A piece of one of the arms was still attached to the sphere, snapped off and twisted out of shape. One of the heavy glass panes was shattered.
My mother was alive. She had found the submarine passage somewhere deep in the Sargasso and had gotten through it in the bathyscaph. She had bobbed to the surface of the interior ocean and floated ashore. She had built a hut on the beach, made a fire, rolled the wrecked bathyscaph up onto dry land, and…what?
Walked away? To where? There were no footprints, no arrows carved into tree trunks, nothing but four thousand miles of a wide, empty, primeval world. Could she have survived at all, alone in this world? What had wrecked the bathyscaph? What terrors had she faced here, alone on the beach? I took a picture of the bathyscaph. It would mean nothing to Mr. Collier, but everything to Uncle Hedge. To me it meant hope.
“Holy moly,” Brendan said, very softly.
“Yeah,” I said, not really listening.
“What is it?” Perry whispered. “Perkins!”
They were staring at the bay, at the moving water. A black, humped shape was cutting through it now. It was vast, the size of a whale, and abruptly it disappeared beneath the surface. It had to have been thirty or forty feet long, perfectly enormous. I raised my camera very slowly in case it came back up. But all was still, and we stood there holding our breath, looking at nothing at all.
And then the water simply exploded, like a bomb had gone off. “Zeuglodon!” I shouted, as the creature threw itself into the air, its great, angular head rising twenty and then thirty feet, its mouth open, showing rows of triangular teeth. Its black, glittering eye looked small in that enormous head, but must have been the size of a grapefruit.
I snapped a picture at the same time that I was turning to run, and I saw the creature slam back down again, thrashing around toward us. I realized that I was screaming now, as a wall of water washed across the beach, knocking down the driftwood hut and carrying it up into the jungle.
We kept running even though we knew that the zeuglodon was an ocean-going reptile and that we were safe from it. We were angling uphill, running blindly toward a bend in the trail ahead, thinking only about catching up with Lala, with not being left behind, when out from the shadows of the trees stepped the Creeper, grinning a snaggle-toothed grin and holding the elephant rifle in his hands, blocking the path. I heard Perry shout a useless warning, and I stopped cold, but Brendan slammed into my back and we both fell over in a heap. When I scrambled back up to my feet, there was nowhere to run.
Chapter 25
The Third Arrival of Ms Peckworthy
“What have we here?” the Creeper asked, as if he was really curious. “It’s the three little scallywags, or I’m a Dutchman!” There was a noise behind us, and I turned to see Dr. Frosticos staring at us, although with no real interest, as if we were a plate of yesterday’s food and he wasn’t hungry. His eyes were simply cold. Compared to him the Creeper seemed to be made of cardboard.
“Hello, pillbug,” the Creeper said to me now in a smarmy voice. “Finally I’ve a chance to thank you for throwing that ring-a-ding to me. Because of that we meet again in this lovely place!”
“Bind them,” Frosticos said in a flat voice. “To the tree there. Be quick about it. The Peach girl has apparently gone on ahead.”
The Creeper set the big rifle against a low tree limb and then drew a coil of rope out of a canvas pack. He made a slip-loop in the end of it, then grabbed Brendan by the shoulder and spun him around, wrenching his hand behind his back and tying his wrists. “You next,” he said to Perry. But he must have seen something in Perry’s face, because he said, “Don’t even think about any of your billy-club capers, young bunion. There’s no one to help you here. Your dear old uncle is as dead as a pickled herring. They’ll have him on ice by now, I should think.”
“Liar!” Brendan shouted at him.
The Creeper shook his head sadly. “Quite dead, I’m afraid. He put up a gallant struggle, but in the end his blood was as red as the next man’s, as the quaint old saying goes.”
“Then who’s that,” Perry said, pointing farther along the path. The Creeper and Frosticos both looked, and so did I—looked at nothing, because the path was empty—and in that moment who should step silently out from among the trees behind us but Ms Peckworthy, still carrying her umbrella, although it was nothing but ribs and tatters now. Perry had seen her, and she must have given him a sign, although what she thought she was up to I didn’t know.
The Creeper looked back now and saw her. He stood staring for a moment before he started to speak, which was a big mistake, because she very calmly flung the umbrella in his face like a spear at the same moment that she bent forward and snatched up the elephant rifle, which must have weighed nearly as much as she did.
“Poppycock!” she said, hoisting the rifle to her shoulder and looking at the Creeper in a deadly way, as if she’d had enough of him. It dawned on me with a wild gladness that Ms Peckworthy was one of us, and not our nemesis at all. Her arrival last night on the Manchester bus had been one of the worst things in my life, but her arrival here in the middle of the jungle was one of the best.
“Be careful now, my good woman…” the Creeper started to say, and he took a cautious step toward her, waving both hands in front of himself as if trying to reason with her. The rifle went off right then, the explosion so loud that my ears rang. I sprang back, covering my face, and when I opened my eyes I saw that the Creeper had thrown himself to the ground. At first I thought he had been shot, but the rifle was pointed skyward. Ms Peckworthy lowered it again, still
glaring at him. Dr. Frosticos stood there like an ice sculpture, staring right through her, simply biding his time.
“My father taught me to shoot when I was a girl,” Ms Peckworthy said, narrowing her eyes. “In the Michigan woods. I never thought I’d put the talent to use.”
In that moment the Creeper lunged forward, snatching at the barrel of the rifle, but Perry stuck his foot out and tripped him, so neatly that it looked like judo or something, and the Creeper sprawled forward in the dirt again as Ms Peckworthy backed off a step.
“You detestable skunks!” she said to both of them. “You oily cretins! You unnatural crocodiles!” She stared down the barrel of the rifle, letting the Creeper writhe in his own slime for a moment. Then to Perry she said, “Untie your brother and then tie these two pieces of human detritus up tightly.” And then to the Creeper: “You! Put your hands together and hold them out in front of you, where the boy can get a rope on them. You too, Doctor, if you are a doctor and not a miserable fraud.” She pointed the rifle straight at Frosticos now. She had a wild gleam in her eye, as if she had been waiting for just this moment, and was relishing it.
“You wouldn’t leave us here?” the Creeper said, making his sad face. “Tied up like a Sunday roast? You saw that great bear near the cave!”
“You’d leave the children here, wouldn’t you?…you…you prevaricating gudgeon! When that bear reared up from the rocks, you scuttled off thinking it would eat me, and it very nearly did! You two can sit here until doomsday and consider your evil ways as far as I’m concerned, and if a bear bites either of your heads off…too bad for the bear!”
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