Chapter 3
What Happened at the Secret Museum
I REMEMBER IT WAS FOUR in the afternoon, which Uncle Hedge calls “the doughnut hour” after the famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose middle name sounds like bubblegum if you’ve got a really lot of it in your mouth. We drove down to the Albion in Uncle Hedge’s Cadillac Coupe de Ville, which is very old, and which has tremendous long fins in the back. You can’t really call it a “car” which is too small a word. Uncle Hedge calls it “the vehicle,” and Mr. Vegeley calls it “the rig.” We three call it the “Zeuglodon,” which you pronounce like zoo, but with a glow-don attached to it. Zeuglodons were enormous sea creatures that supposedly died out during the Cretaceous period, many millions of years ago, although I have my suspicions about that. We have the bones of one in the Secret Museum.
The Zeuglodon automobile is a sort of watery blue, with balloon-like white-wall tires. Uncle Hedge keeps it ferociously clean. One time when it got a dent in it Mr. Vegeley popped the dent back out with a plumber’s helper, the rubber kind you use to unplug sinks. It left a big round mark that wouldn’t wash off. Perry and I told Brendan it was from the tentacle of a giant octopus, which maybe gave Brendan “ideas,” as they say, since he’s been seeing giant octopi ever since.
We were the only ones in the doughnut shop besides Mr. Vegeley, who is always in the doughnut shop unless he’s not. He serves doughnuts in little plastic baskets, pink, blue, or yellow, with a sheet of waxed paper. It’s all very decorative. Mr. Vegeley calls glazed doughnuts “the true quill” and he often quotes an old Irish saying that goes, “A plain glazed doughnut is your only man,” which Brendan finds confusing despite his illustrious namesake having been Irish. By late in the afternoon, the sugar on the outside of the glazed doughnuts has hardened into little sheets, like crisp paper, and it’s really very good—so good that it was hard to pay attention to Brendan, who was yammering on about what he calls his “general theory of navigation,” telling us that he’s never in his life been lost, because direction is perfectly simple. North, he was telling us, is always straight ahead. That’s how St. Brendan the Navigator found North America and why sailors follow the North Star. If they follow the North Star they always get there, wherever it is, and it’s naturally always straight ahead. But I pointed out to him that if you’re at the North Pole, standing right on top of it, and you start from there, then south is always straight ahead and north is always behind you, which makes a sad mockery of his theory of navigation. What Brendan knows about navigation you can put in your hat, and Perry was just telling him he could put it there when the phone rang, which it hardly ever does at a doughnut shop.
Mr. Vegeley said “Uh huh” three times and then hung up the phone, looking worried and untying his apron. “It’s Old Sally,” he said to Uncle Hedge. “Someone’s broken into the museum.”
“She’s not hurt?” Uncle Hedge asked anxiously, but already he was out of his chair and heading for the door.
Mr. Vegeley was switching around the “Open” sign so that it became a “Closed” sign, and was saying that Old Sally wasn’t hurt, but had been locked into the kitchen by the intruder and had just now gotten free. Outside we climbed into the Zeuglodon, with Hasbro sitting on the back seat with the three of us, and we drove away hell for leather toward Glass Beach and the Secret Museum. (I borrowed that phrase from Perry. I don’t really know what “hell for leather” means besides fast, and neither does Perry.)
The sky was cloudy now from a storm coming in off the ocean, which had blown the remnants of the morning fog away. The clouds were moving along very low on the sea wind, and the ocean was dark and rough and streaked with foam. Glass Beach is on the north side of Fort Bragg, nearly to Pudding Creek. You turn left past the Skunk Train and past the lumber mill and hundreds of stacks of piled up lumber to where the road turns to dirt. The museum is in a big open field on your right. It’s made of gray wood, the color of fog, and it looks like a warehouse, which in fact it was, back in the old days. Behind the museum, all the way down to the cliffs above Glass Beach, there’s another open field, although it’s not really “open,” because it’s over your head in mustard weeds and berry vines, so thick that unless you know about the tunnels that go through it you can’t get across it at all, but have to take the Glass Beach Trail. We drove up to the museum just as it was starting to rain hard. Old Sally was standing out front waiting for us, holding an open umbrella and looking large and irritable. She’s got what is sometimes called a “rough-and-ready” face.
“He’s gone into the shrubbery,” she said at once, pointing into the field.
“What did he look like?” Uncle Hedge asked her, but she said she didn’t know for absolute certain. She had only seen his shadow when he slipped up on her unawares and shut her into the kitchen. Then he had pushed something against the door, done his dirty work, and gone out again, the stinking pig. She had seen only his dark shadow ducking away into the field. He was carrying something—almost certainly one of the exhibit cases. But she couldn’t be sure what it was, and the Secret Museum is full of exhibit cases.
Uncle Hedge told the three of us to “stay out of trouble,” and then he and Mr. Vegeley headed down the open trail toward Glass Beach. The tunnel through the vegetation leads that same way, and once the man came out of the tunnel and onto the beach they would have him trapped. Because of the surf and the rocks at the top end of the beach, he couldn’t get away to the north, and unless he meant to swim for it he would have to come back down the beach toward the trail and the lumberyards at the south end in order to escape, and there they’d have him. We went inside the museum with Old Sally to look for clues, although Old Sally wasn’t interested in clues, but wanted to put on a pot of coffee.
It was shadowy inside the museum even though the lamps were on and even though what was left of the day was still coming in through skylights in the high ceiling. There was the sound of rain on the roof as we walked up and down the aisles between the exhibits, which are sort of frozen, staring back at you from behind dusty glass. Some of them are stuffed and some of them are floating in alcohol or formaldehyde, and some of them are boxed up in crates so that you can’t see them at all. The first thing you notice, because you can see it from everywhere, is the skeleton of the zeuglodon—not Uncle Hedgepeth’s car, but a real zeuglodon skeleton, sort of, that’s eighty feet long and looks like a giant sea serpent. Its toothy, long head is way up by one of the skylights in the ceiling, and its long neck curves down and down into its body, which is shaped like a narrow egg, if you can imagine that, but an egg with flippers. It was the terror of the seas back in the Mesozoic era. All of it is just bones, of course. Silver wires hold it to the ceiling. I said it was a sort of real skeleton because actually it was made out of pieces of four skeletons that were dug up in Arkansas a long time ago by the charlatan Dr. Albert Koch, who fastened four sets of neck bones together to fool people into thinking it was a very long sea serpent and not a zeuglodon at all. Here’s what’s funny: when people found out that they were being fooled, they didn’t care, but came to see it anyway, and paid to see it, which is another thing that goes to show you.
Anyway, almost as soon as we started looking for clues, Brendan shouted that the Hopkinsville Goblin was missing. But it wasn’t. Brendan was in the wrong aisle. The goblin was in its glass case next to the mummified Mayan Princess and the Fish Eye Array, which is two dozen glass globes with fishes’ eyeballs floating inside. The biggest is a whale’s eye that’s as big as your head, and the smallest is the eye of a gummidgefish, which you can’t even see without an immense magnifying glass, and even then it might just be a speck of dust on the lens.
“Concentrate,” Perry said. “What would a thief break into the museum to steal?”
Before anything came into my mind, Brendan shouted, “Thomas Edison!” and we all rushed over to the cabinet with Thomas Edison’s last breath inside. His breath isn’t just floating around in the cabinet. It’s in a jar with a twist-on lid that’s very old and a little rusty and with wax melted around the edge of the lid to seal it so that the breath doesn’t escape. Henry Ford himself captured it in the jar when Mr. Edison expired (which means died and which also means breathed, which I think is very interesting indeed). Henry Ford was famous for inventing the assembly line, which Uncle Hedge says is one of the most famous of all the lines, including the equator, although he says it’s inferior to the chorus line. When Mr. Edison died he was in the middle of building a spirit telephone that would allow you to talk to dead people. It worked, too, except nobody knew the number, or at least that’s what Uncle Hedge told us. The spirit telephone is in the museum, too, and some day we’re going to crank it up and see who answers.
Thomas Edison’s last breath was still in the jar, or at least the jar was still in the cabinet and the lid was still waxed onto it. The spirit telephone was next to it in a glass box, safe and sound. We went on down the aisle and right away we saw what was gone. It was the Feejee Mermaid, which is in a sealed box made out of glass and wood. I don’t mean the fake mermaid that P.T. Barnum the circus man had, which was sewn up out of monkeys and carp skin, but the real Feejee Mermaid, which washed up out onto a South Seas island in a storm and dried out in the sun until she was the color of a coconut and had shrunk down to about three feet tall.
Perry found a footprint in the dust, and he went back after the gummidgefish magnifying glass in order to detectify it. Brendan and Hasbro went off to look around the rest of the exhibits to see whether anything else was gone. But it would have taken both hands to carry off the Mermaid, and so I didn’t think that the thief could have stolen anything else, not if he was escaping on foot. I went to ask Old Sally whether the Mermaid had maybe been put somewhere else and hadn’t been stolen at all. Old Sally said that the Mermaid must have been what the thief was carrying when he ran, the filthy scoundrel, because the box was just that size.
I went back into the museum where right away I ran into Perry acting suspiciously. There’s a workroom off the hallway that’s about as big as someone’s garage, with lumber in it and sheets of glass and tools and cans of paint. It has a wooden floor that’s kind of beat up and stained, with a piece of carpet in the middle of it. Perry was standing in the hallway, leaning over and looking in through the open door. He turned and waved at me to hurry, and he put his finger to his lips. When I looked past him, I saw right off that the window was pushed wide open. The cold wind that was blowing in smelled like rain, and the floor was wet around it, and there were muddy footprints leading from the window to a place in the middle of the floor where the rug had been hauled back and a trap door was standing open.
I didn’t need a magnifying glass to figure out what had happened. The thief hadn’t gone down to the beach at all, but had stowed the mermaid somewhere and come in through the window to finish the job. Perry made a pushing gesture, meaning the trapdoor, and I nodded. We tiptoed forward like Hansel and Gretel sneaking up on the witch, listening to the shuffling and scraping under the floor. We were very nearly close enough when suddenly we saw a hand come out, and we stopped dead. The rest of him was hidden by the open door, so he couldn’t have seen us yet, although maybe he heard our footsteps on the floorboards. Very slowly he peered past the edge of the door straight at us. It was Lord Wheyface the Creeper, and the look on his face was poisonous.