Zeuglodon by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

bluffs and the moon on the ocean before I lay down and fell asleep. The next thing I knew, the light was on and Perry was shaking me awake.
    “It’s her ,” he said, nodding hard over his shoulder. “The mermaid Brendan saw at the Sea Cove? She’s in the livingroom right now !”

Chapter 7

    The Unexpected Guest
     
    I followed Perry down the hall toward the stairs, with Brendan coming out of the bedroom behind us, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “What’s the fuss?” he asked.
    “There’s mermaids afoot,” Perry said, and Brendan said, “ha, ha, ha,” very ironically, but by then we could see downstairs into the livingroom, and there she sat, in Uncle Hedge’s big stuffed chair, spritzing herself with what looked like a perfume atomizer.
    “ Seawater ,” Perry whispered.
    She was short, so short thather feet didn’t reach the ground. (I mean when she sat in a chair.) I don’t really know how to describe her skin, but it was so white that it was almost a pale green that reminded you of the ocean. And she had gills, too, or something like them. You could see them low on her neck (although you tried not to stare—unless you were Brendan). They weren’t flappy things, like a fish’s gills, but were more like scars, maybe, the same on each side, and not useful. (Perry said they were called “vestigial” but of course he didn’t say that until later. It’s not the sort of thing you say in the presence of someone who’s part mermaid.) Her hands were webbed like a frog’s hands. You couldn’t really see how much until she opened her fingers, which is just what she did when she gave me a little wave, because I guess I was kind of gaping at her and not saying anything, which isn’t manners.
    “I’d like to introduce Eulalie Peach,” Uncle Hedge told us. “Her friends call her Lala. She’s my old friend Basil’s granddaughter, and she’s come to us all the way from Lake Windermere. It’s quite a surprise.”
    We all said how do you do, but we were too curious to be sociable yet. She was wearing a raggedy orphan dress and shoes that looked more like ballet slippers than proper shoes. They were black with orange embroidered koi goldfish on the toes, like the cloth shoes you see in Chinatown shops. Her hair was a little bit wild, because she had just come in out of the wind, and she had taken off her coat and dropped it onto the rug next to a worn out carpetbag made of tapestry material. She had flown into San Francisco and then taken a Greyhound bus up the coast, she said, which had left her off at the bus stop near the Albion, and she had walked up from there.
    All of this made me highly suspicious, partly because she had a look on her face as if she thought everything was just a little bit funny, but also because Brendan had told us that he had seen her twice before, the first time being yesterday morning. I hadn’t believed him, like I said, except now here she was, and so Brendan must have been telling the truth, because it’s way too coincidental that he made up a lot of nonsense about a mermaid and then the nonsense had come true. All of us must have been thinking this same thing, even Uncle Hedge, but Uncle Hedge seemed happy to see her, and so I tried to put away my suspicions and be happy to see her, too.
    What was she doing on our doorstep? She wanted to warn us about the Creeper, she said (although she described him, she didn’t call him that) who had come out to this part of the world in order to steal something that belonged to her family, and he mustn’t be allowed to.
    “He already did steal it, just yesterday,” Brendan said. “At least he tried to.”
    “Tried?” she asked him anxiously. “Then she’s safe? The mermaid?”
    Brendan told her yes, she was safe, and that we had beaten the Creeper witless with all manner of weapons and he had fled into the shrubbery.
    “The other one…?” she asked, looking at Uncle Hedge now. He shook his head, and Lala looked relieved,