Chapter 2
Uncle Hedgepeth, the Guild of St. George, and the Rest of Us
IT WAS PERRY’S SUGGESTION THAT I start this story with rousing action, which is what I tried to do. He says a reader wants some excitement right off, but I say that although that might be true, it’s both necessary and polite to introduce oneself, and that’s what I’m going to do now, because so far I’ve mostly neglected it. You already know about Hasbro, who like I said has some bulldog in him and several other noble things. You also know something about Ms Peckworthy and Aunt Ricketts, although the less you know about Aunt Ricketts the better. I wish I knew less about her.
At first I thought maybe I should let Perry write all this down, because besides being my cousin, he’s a writer and I’m not. I’m a scientist, although the science teacher at my school, Mr. Collier, says I have too much imagination, but that I might be a scientist when I grow up and forget what I think I know. I say that if a person forgets what she thinks she knows, it’s hardly worth growing up at all. Mr. Collier called that “Peter Pantheism,” but I don’t believe in isms, even if they involve Peter Pan.
My name is Kathleen, which is an Irish name. Uncle Hedge calls me Kath sometimes, but mostly he calls me Perkins, which is what Perry and Brendan call me, too, and it’s the name I prefer. I’m eleven years old and I’m what is called a cryptozoologist, which is a scientist who studies legendary animals, although the only reason they’re legendary is that they don’t appear very often. But how often does a comet appear? Most of the time it’s out wandering around in space, which is the same with so-called legendary animals, which wander around in the ocean, or in the high mountains, or in some other very distant and lonesome place, like Scotland, and you can hardly blame them. That’s why I carry the evidence camera. You never know when a giant octopus or a mermaid is going to rise up out of the ocean.
What do I look like, you ask? I’m not very tall, and I have dark hair that I keep short because it’s easy. I have brown eyes, and although Brendan won’t admit it, I’m taller than he is, if you measure carefully and he doesn’t cheat. And I’m older too, by more than a year. In three months I’ll be twelve, and he’ll still be ten, which seems to bother him. But he’s young, and so maybe he’s sensitive. Brendan was named after the great Irish navigator who came to America in a small boat with nothing but a telescope and a fishing pole and who is now a Saint. (I’ll tell you more about Brendan some other time, when he’s not looking over my shoulder to see what I’m writing down, which is rude if it goes on for very long, which it very definitely has.)
I was named after Kathleen Ricketts, who is also our Aunt Ricketts. Sometimes I wish I were named after Joan of Arc instead. When Joan of Arc went off to war, someone said very rudely that she should stay home to cook and sew, and she told them that there were already plenty of women to cook and spin, which showed a great deal of spirit. Of course later they burned her at the stake, but probably not just because of her comment about cooking and spinning.
Just so you know, Perry is tall, especially for his age, which is thirteen. He’s already as tall as Uncle Hedge, and very skinny. He has dark hair that falls into his eyes and makes it seem like he’s peering at everything. He reminds me of Sherlock Holmes in the old movies, even his nose, except he doesn’t smoke a pipe and he doesn’t wear one of those coming-and-going hats.
The town we live in is called Caspar, which you pronounce like the name of the friendly ghost. It’s near the city of Fort Bragg in northern California. Caspar can be a lonesome place, especially in winter. When I look out my bedroom window, down toward the Sea Cove, there’s nothing but ocean for eleven thousand miles, and then you run into Japan, which is another thing that some people thought was legendary until three Portuguese sailors washed up on the beach in a storm and “discovered” it.
Our great Uncle Hedgepeth is our mothers’ uncle. Perry and Brendan don’t have the same mother as me, but our mothers had the same uncle because they were sisters, and that uncle is Uncle Hedge. Uncle Hedge has a sister, too, and that’s Aunt Ricketts. Perry and Brendan are orphans.
I’m not an orphan, although my father died very young—too young for me to remember him. I live with Uncle Hedge because my mother, Abigail Perkins, is missing. When her deep sea submersible vanished in the Sargasso Sea two years ago, she was searching for the oceanic tunnel that connects our own Atlantic Ocean with the ancient ocean that lies within the land at the center of the hollow earth. If you’ve read Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs (who called the land Pellucidar) you’ve heard of it. Probably you think it’s a made up place, but I know for a fact that it’s not. My mother’s submersible was never found, and the scientific research vessel that took her to the Sargasso Sea sank with all hands, although nobody knows how or why or quite where, because the Sargasso Sea is vast and empty and is a place where strange and cryptic things occur.
I don’t talk about what happened to my mother, because when I do, people get a sort of frozen stare on their faces, like they’ve been petrified. I wrote a paper about the interior world for my science class after reading a book called The Hollow Earth by Dr. Raymond Bernard. The book is a scientific account of Admiral Richard Byrd’s discovery of the polar opening to the interior world, and about his finding warm water currents flowing out of that world into the icy water of the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, carrying flowers and seeds and the leaves of extinct species of trees. Mr. Collier said that the book was a barrel of half-baked baloney, but for a cryptozoologist like me it’s very interesting indeed, no matter how much it’s baked.
You can believe in Pellucidar or not, and I won’t blame you if you don’t. But like I said before, no one believed in Japan, either, until they got there, and then there they were. Uncle Hedge worries when I talk about my mother still being alive, partly because he blames himself that she’s gone, and partly because he thinks I’m getting my hopes up and will only be disappointed. But I think that up is the only place to get your hopes, because otherwise they’re not hopes.
There are two things I have to tell you about Uncle Hedge, and both of them are actually very strange. One thing is that he’s the caretaker of the Secret Museum near Glass Beach in Fort Bragg. It’s a museum that’s a kind of warehouse rather than the kind of museum you buy a ticket to, and it’s full of odd and unlikely things, which you’ll learn about very soon. Another thing is that John Toliver Hedgepeth is one of the secret geniuses of the world. And I don’t mean that he’s one of the secret smart people of the world when I say that. I mean genius like in “evil genius” except that Uncle Hedge is one of the good sort, unlike Professor Moriarity or Fu Manchu or Dr. Hilario Frosticos, or other infamous bad people who have their vile fingers in every variety of crime. (The word “vile” spells “evil” if you mix the letters around. Perry pointed this out, and is writing a codebook of significant words.) The thing is, you don’t as often hear about the good geniuses as you do the evil ones, and even if you did hear about the good ones you wouldn’t know whether they were merely very good and very smart both together, or whether they were some other kind of thing.
That’s what John Toliver Hedgepeth is—some other kind of thing. And he isn’t the only one. They’re a kind of secret society, except Uncle Hedge doesn’t really keep it a secret, because no one believes it anyway, which he says is way better than a secret. They call themselves the Guild of St. George, after George of Merry England, who famously killed the dragon and slew the necromancer Ormadine and became one of the Seven Champions of Christendom. It’s the Guild that actually owns the Secret Museum. Uncle Hedge’s able assistant is Old Sally, who lives at the museum and is our great good friend. Who is Dr. Hilario Frosticos, you ask? He’s the nemesis of the Guild of St. George, but I don’t want to talk about him until I absolutely have to.
Uncle Hedge didn’t tell us about his being a secret genius, by the way, because that would be too much like bragging. Mr. Vegeley told us. Mr. Cyrus Vegeley owns the Albion Doughnut Shop out on the Coast Highway in Caspar. Believe it or not, it’s a haunted doughnut shop, although that doesn’t figure into this story, and so I’m not going to mention it. Its address is number 13, which is one of the three significant numbers, especially if something is haunted, and which might or might not be a coincidence depending on whether you believe in coincidences. I mostly don’t.
Later that afternoon, when Mr. Asquith left, we drove down to the Albion and ate doughnuts, because Uncle Hedge said that we wanted a little something to “put us back on our feet.” And that’s where the next chapter starts, with the Principal Characters eating doughnuts at the Albion Doughnut Shop, Number 13, The Coast Road, Caspar, California, on the very far edge of the Western World.