by Peter Nelson
“Skunk Ape!” Jordan was so excited he nearly forgot that Eldon was missing—at least until he noticed something else in the mud: a much smaller set of footprints, these made by a pair of standard-issue Badger Ranger hiking boots.
A horrible realization struck Jordan.
“Eldon!” He ran as fast as he could, following the two pairs of footprints deep into the swamp. They ended at the base of an enormous tree, where Eldon’s prints suddenly vanished. Jordan walked around the massive tree trunk, looking for any trace of him. Circling back, he looked up, hoping to see Eldon sitting safely in the tree’s branches, ready to apologize for ever doubting him. The branches were filled with hundreds and hundreds of ripe, yellow lemons—and exactly zero frightened, apologetic Badger Rangers.
Jordan backed away and slumped his body against a dark, mossy lump, not caring that his butt was in the muck again. He gasped for air as his mind raced and terror gripped him. He was all alone and definitely lost. But worse than that, he feared something awful had happened to Eldon. He was no master spoorer, but even he could add up the evidence: the Skunk Ape had chased Eldon to this giant lemon tree, where it caught him and—Jordan couldn’t even finish the awful thought of what might have happened next.
He had to calm down and think. He caught his breath and inhaled deeply through his nose. As he did, an overwhelming stench assaulted him, followed by a horrible realization: the Swamp Ape was still out here, probably very close and possibly still hungry. As this thought gripped him, he began to slowly stand. He immediately felt a heavy, horrible force hold him down. A large, black, furry paw was planted firmly on his shoulder. The dark, mossy lump he’d been leaning against was no mossy lump at all.
Jordan opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Panicked, he rolled out from under the Skunk Ape’s grip and scrambled across the swamp floor toward the tree. The Skunk Ape rose up slowly, towering over him. It was black and furry, with wide shoulders, an enormous head, and wild, staring eyes. In a single step, it loomed over Jordan, cornering him at the base of the tree. It raised its massive, hairy arm. But instead of smashing him, it reached up, clutched a branch jutting out of the tree trunk, and yanked it like a lever. The moss beneath Jordan gave way. A trapdoor in the swamp floor opened up, and Jordan felt himself falling, falling, falling into pitch-blackness.
8
Jordan slid down a long, dark slide until he finally tumbled out onto a soft surface, landing with a WHUMP!
He slowly stood and looked around. He was all alone in a room that reminded him of a fancy study or library reading room. The lower walls were dark, caramel-colored wood panels with large bookcases built into them. Above those, the walls turned to dirt, with thick, strong roots burrowing in and out, forming a web of natural support beams. It was one of the strangest and most beautiful places Jordan had ever seen.
Mounted prominently on one panel above the hole he’d slid out of was a large wooden shield, like a family crest, with the letters CK carved on it. On the opposite wall at the far end of the room was a large portrait of an old man, staring down at the entire room. Jordan recognized this man immediately. It was his Grampa Grimsley.
He walked toward the portrait and stopped at a small, square wooden table in the center of the room. Perched atop the table was what looked to be a shiny golden bowl or trophy.
This was no trophy. It was an urn. These were his grandfather’s remains. He reached up and slowly lifted the lid. Inside, the gray ashes looked soft and cool. They reminded Jordan of a picture he’d once seen of an astronaut’s footprint in the dusty surface of the moon.
Footprints! A sudden thought struck Jordan. If he’d fallen down here and survived, then maybe, just maybe—
“Jordan!” A familiar voice spun him around. “About time you got here!”
“Eldon!” He rushed to the grinning Badger Ranger. “I’m so happy to see you! I thought you might’ve been eaten by—” He stopped short and looked around anxiously. “Listen to me,” he said in a whispered tone. “I saw it. I saw the Florida Skunk Ape. He’s alive! He’s real! But you must know that. I saw your footprints, then I didn’t. What happened? Did it chase you? Did it hurt you? Where is it now? What is this place? Why aren’t you freaking out like I am?”
Eldon said nothing. He just stood smiling at Jordan.
“Okay,” Jordan continued. “You’re in shock. You’ve gone mad with fear. Didn’t you hear what I said? The Skunk Ape is real! Tall, dark, and stinky! It used a trapdoor contraption to capture me, which means it must possess some level of intelligence—”
WHUMP! A large mass of black fur came flying out of the slide behind Eldon. It belly flopped onto the red rug and tumbled past them, landing on a large couch. Slowly, it rose from the couch and stared directly at Jordan. It was the Skunk Ape.
“Sorry. I couldn’t help but overhear,” it said in a calm voice with a slightly refined accent. “Regarding my intelligence. Thank you so much. The tall, dark, and stinky bit I didn’t appreciate, but I’ve decided to let it slide. Get it? Slide?”
Jordan stood frozen in terror. Eldon calmly stepped past him, walking right up to the giant, smelly beast and putting a finger in its face. “Speaking of which, it wasn’t too intelligent, tumbling in like a big, fuzzy wrecking ball. How many times have I told you, you’re too big for the slide? Use the elevator, for Pete’s sake!”
Jordan pointed at the Skunk Ape in the room. “It t-t-talks!”
“Name’s Bernard,” the giant creature said in what was really a lovely-sounding voice. “And the proper word choice in that context would be ‘speak,’ not ‘talk.’ And yes, I do both.”
Eldon and Bernard traded concerned glances as Jordan began breathing very fast. He jerked his head around like a chicken. He noticed there were no doors to this room, and immediately began to feel those beautiful, bookcase-adorned, wood-paneled walls closing in on him. He backed up against one of them, his eyes the size of golf balls. “You stay away from me, both of you! I mean it!” Jordan ran full speed toward the only way he knew to get out—the same way he came in. Eldon and Bernard calmly watched as he dived, frantically trying to scramble up the slide. He slid back down—this time landing in the arms of Bernard. The huge, smelly creature looked down at him like he was a new kind of tree fungus he’d come across.
“If I may, I’d like to insist you try to calm down, my friend,” he said to him.
“Aaaaaaauuuuuuuggghhhh!” Jordan twisted his way out of Bernard’s arms and dropped onto the soft carpet. He crawled across the floor to a nearby coffee table and curled up beneath it, hoping to wake from this very strange nightmare.
Eldon glanced at Bernard and whispered, “Perhaps you should make us some hot cocoa.”
A few moments later, Jordan found himself sitting across from Eldon in a comfy chair in the cozy room, eyeing a ten-foot-tall Florida Skunk Ape as he gently handed them each a warm cup of hot chocolate.
“Thanks, Bernard,” Eldon said. “If you don’t mind, I think it’d be best if—”
“Of course. If you’ll both excuse me.” Bernard quietly crossed to the far side of the room, leaving Eldon and Jordan sitting alone.
Eldon cleared his throat. “Jordan, I’m not sure you’re ready for what I’m about to tell you. It’s probably gonna seem a little . . . well, crazy.”
Jordan’s shaking hand lifted the cup from its saucer. “I was served a hot cocoa by the Florida Skunk Ape. Try me.”
Eldon took a sip. “You were right about your grandfather. His life’s work wasn’t a waste. And he wasn’t a failure. He created all of this, and a lot more. Your grandfather, the great George Grimsley, found the Florida Skunk Ape.”
As this sank in, Jordan gazed up at his grandfather posing nobly in the portrait. He looked much more heroic than he did being hauled away in an ape suit in the newspaper pictures. “I knew it,” Jordan said softly.
Eldon smiled. “But he didn’t just find one Skunk Ape, Jordan. He found more.”
Jordan’s
gaze returned to Eldon. “There’s more than one Skunk Ape?”
“Pff—you wish,” Bernard said from the other end of the room. He was dusting a large, built-in bookcase.
“Bernard’s the only Skunk Ape.” Eldon stood and crossed to where Bernard was dusting. He pointed to a book on the top shelf. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said.
Bernard easily reached up for the book. Eldon walked the book back to Jordan and set it on the table in front of him. It was large, thick, and leather-bound and had the title embossed in gold letters on the cover.
“A Skunk Ape is a cryptid,” Eldon said. “Which, as you know, is a very rare creature. They live for a long, long time, and there’s only one of each type. But what your grandfather discovered was that there are many different types of cryptids in this world. This is his personal account of all the cryptids he encountered.”
Jordan reached out to open the great book, but Eldon put his hand on the cover, stopping him. The Badger Ranger smiled at him as he held it closed for one more moment. “Jordan, your grandfather didn’t just find these cryptids. He befriended and protected nearly all of them. That was his life’s work.”
Dun-dun-DUN! Dramatic music suddenly punctuated the moment, startling Jordan. Bernard sat in a chair at the far end of the room, playing a tuba. Eldon shot the cryptid a stern look. “Bernard, could you please go into another room to practice your tuba?”
Bernard shrugged, stood up, and pressed a panel. One of the bookcases opened like a large door. He and his tuba exited through it.
Jordan slowly opened the field guide. Page after page was filled with old photographs of his grandfather, over many decades, standing and smiling alongside the most incredible creatures Jordan had ever seen. “Tasmanian Globster . . . New Jersey Devil . . . Fiji Mermonkey . . . Southwestern Giant Desert Jackalope . . . West Virginian Mothman . . . Florida Skunk Ape . . . Pacific Northwestern Sasquatch . . .” Jordan stopped. He looked up at Eldon, his mouth hanging open in disbelief.
“My grandfather knew Bigfoot?”
“Syd? Everyone knows Syd. Terrible poker player. Can’t bluff to save his life. But you can bet your bottom dollar your grandfather met him first.”
Jordan chuckled as he flipped back to the very first picture in the book. It was an old Polaroid photo, quite unlike the others. More of an action shot than a posed one, it was labeled Chupacabra, Puerto Rico, 1977, and showed a horribly vicious doglike creature, its eyes glowing red. The thing looked enraged by the flash of the camera, like it was about to attack whomever took the picture. “Where’s my grandfather in this one?”
“Holding the camera, probably about to run for his life. That was his very first encounter with a cryptid. The Latin American Chupacabra. Like I said, your grandfather befriended nearly all of them.”
Jordan flipped ahead of the disturbing image to the later pictures again, this time focusing not on the incredible creatures, but on the incredible man standing beside them. He looked so happy, so alive. “Tell me about him,” Jordan said.
Eldon stood and stepped beneath the giant portrait of George Grimsley, looking up at it admiringly. “Your grandfather turned his back on the stuff most men strive to attain. He’d found a higher calling, and didn’t care that the outside world might think he was a failure, or worse, crazy. See, the outside world could never know his secret, sacred mission—to protect and keep hidden the most rare and legendary animals mankind has never known. Under the noses of men who would have exploited his amazing discoveries for fame or profit, he created a secret society of guardians responsible for keeping the mysterious creatures of the world just that—a mystery. He created the Creature Keepers.”
Jordan’s mind was racing as he tried to take everything in. “But, you’re revealing it all to me. You dragged me through the swamp, scared the daylights out of me, and dropped me in the middle of this place. Why?”
Eldon stepped over to the shiny, golden urn. “I suppose so we could see just how much of your grandfather you had in you.”
“We? Who’s ‘we’?”
Eldon smiled. He stepped to the urn and knocked on it the rhythm from some dorky, old-fashioned tune Jordan had never heard before: “Shave and a haircut, two bits!”
The gonglike ringing of the last two knocks vibrated throughout the room. The panel beneath the portrait of Grampa Grimsley rumbled and rattled clumsily, lowering like a drawbridge. As it did, the portrait slid up. The two moving objects separated, creating a passageway the size of an open garage door. Jordan stood in amazement as he took in what was on the other side.
“Jordan, welcome to Creature Keeper central command.”
Shoooo-PAHHHH . . . Shoooo-PAHHHH . . . A horribly mechanical, heavy breathing sound suddenly rattled throughout the chamber. Just inside the passageway, Bernard stood in a washtub filled with water. He wore too-small swim fins stretched over a few of his toes, a diving mask tightly wedged on his face, and a tiny air tank on his hulking back. He stopped his creepy breathing and turned to them, his voice muffled through the fogged-up mask.
“Sorry, did you tell me to go practice my tuba, or my scuba?”
9
The room was much larger than the library, with its high, root-burrowed dirt walls reaching far overhead from a factorylike floor cluttered with large worktables, rows of desks, and huge maps mounted on rolling easels. Like the library room Jordan had tumbled into, this larger cavern seemed like it was from another age—all wooden furniture and very old, very clunky-looking machinery.
But unlike the library, this space was clearly built for business, not comfort. Seated at the wooden tables, chairs, desks, and workstations were dozens of kids, all about Jordan’s age. Many wore old-timey radio headsets, tuning in to radio signals at old-timey switchboards, tapping out messages on old-timey telegraph machines, and reading printed messages off old-timey ticker-tape printers. It looked like a set from a movie—an old-timey movie. Jordan wondered where all the computers were.
The worker kids wore khaki Badger Ranger uniforms and were taking their responsibilities very seriously. Still, Jordan noticed they were as interested in him as he was in them. As Eldon led him around, each kid would stop whatever strange task he or she was doing and size him up before returning to work.
“This nifty gang of go-getters makes up Creature Keeper central command. They’re the main support center for the Creature Keepers we have in the field. They provide us with essential research, sighting surveillance, crisis control, everything we need to run a smooth operation, all day, every day, in real time.”
“Kinda like online tech support for my home computer,” Jordan said. Eldon stared blankly at him for a moment, and a few of the nearby kids looked up at him with equally confused expressions. “Uh, never mind.”
“From this base,” Eldon continued, “the CKCC monitors and assists our heroic Creature Keepers all over the world, as well as the cryptids each one is responsible for.”
“And what do the Creature Keepers do, exactly?”
Eldon turned and pointed above the passageway door behind them. “Basically, all the stuff on our official banner up there.”
Jordan turned and looked up at the massive tapestry hanging over the doorway.
“So when do I get to meet a Creature Keeper?”
Eldon stuck his hand out, just like when they first met. “Eldon Pecone. Chief Creature Keeper, Skunk Ape Division. I kind of run things around here, but my primary responsibility is to protect and preserve a certain local cryptid.”
BRAAP! Bernard was still standing in the bin of water with his mask on, but had replaced his snorkel with his tuba, which he used to blast a deep, offensive-sounding note. He gave them a nasty look, stepped out of the tub, and stormed out of the room in his swim fins. Flop-flop-flop. “Did I say something wrong?” Jordan said.
“No, I did. Most cryptids think they don’t need their keepers. Some more than others. A consequence of our work to keep them hidden is that some have forgotten how dangerous the world
is.” He directed his words very loudly at the door Bernard had just flopped through. “THEY FORGET THAT WITHOUT US KEEPERS, THEY’D BE HUNTED DOWN, THROWN IN A CAGE—OR WORSE!” He glanced at Jordan, slightly embarrassed to have lost his temper. “Sorry you had to see that. Not very Ranger-like of me. C’mon.”
Making their way down a long, narrow staircase and through a series of hallways and passageways, Eldon and Jordan passed more kids in Badger Ranger uniforms.
“So, this central-command crew. Are they all Badger Rangers, too?”
“Ha! No. There aren’t Badger Badges for the top secret work they do.”
“So what’s with the uniforms?”
“I just think it’s a nifty look. Don’t you?”
As they descended deeper, Jordan was trying to keep his millions of questions from bursting out all at once. “Are the Creature Keepers kids, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You said the cryptids would be hunted if men found them. Is that why?”
“That’s one reason. But not the only one.”
“But who are all these kids? I mean, where are their families?”
“This is their family. Many of them were abandoned and forgotten when they joined us—their parents and friends long gone. They needed protection, too.”
“But those creatures in the book—how can they be cared for by just kids?”
“They’re special.”
“Of course they’re special. So how can you trust them to just some orphan kid—”
“No, no. Not the creatures. The Keepers are special. Their age doesn’t really matter. They have an ability to connect, to earn trust, because their hearts are young and pure. And cryptids can be taught to sense that. There were many years, long before the Creature Keepers came along, when cryptids weren’t always so well hidden. Once humans spotted or discovered them, stories were told and passed along for centuries, describing horrible monsters and demons. They learned that men would hurt them and couldn’t be trusted. Your grandfather was the first human to establish trust with a cryptid. Then another, then another. It became the purpose of his life. It took sacrifice, patience, and kindness—as well as another discovery he made right here, in this swamp.”