Zeuglodon Read Free Page A

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.