Zeuglodon Read Free Page B

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.

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