The Hippo at the End of the Hall Read online

  In the center of the room was a long cabinet that ran from the wall on Ben’s left across the room and most of the way to the window. Nowadays it is illegal to collect birds’ eggs, but in the nineteenth century it was quite respectable. Since the Gee Museum dated from the Victorian era, it had a substantial egg collection, which was displayed in this cabinet. The smallest egg, to the left, was the pea-size egg of a hummingbird. Other eggs were arranged by size, until at the far end, near the window, you reached the largest of all: the rare egg of the extinct elephant bird. It was bigger than a football and had a label, which announced that the shell was large enough to hold the contents of 180 chicken eggs.

  Normally Ben would have been fascinated. Not today. Now, as he strode along the length of that cabinet, he was seeking something beyond it, feeling as alert as a wild bird himself, using not only his eyes and ears but also some extra, wilder sense that drew his feet — squeak, tap, squeak, tap — over wide, dark floorboards until he reached the end of the room, where, below a long window, a bright patch of sky was reflected on the wooden surface.

  When Ben rounded the corner of the cabinet, he could see the wall that had been obscured. And he halted in that patch of light. Then, fizzing with recognition, he punched the air with his fist.

  Because this was the place he had visited with his dad.

  Because it had been no dream.

  Because right in front of him was a doorway with an exit sign above it, which led to a long, narrow hall. And waiting at the end of it was a hippopotamus.

  From out of the hallway, Ben heard quiet music echoing, as if it flooded from a faraway open space like a swimming pool. He even recognized the tune, having heard it at school: it was the “Aquarium” music from The Carnival of the Animals. The weirdness of hearing music playing in a museum almost caused him to forget the couple in the café. He forgot about tiptoeing and paced into the hall, ignoring open doorways to the left and right. He passed a silver ship, a room full of fossils, another of insects, and one filled with bottles; he passed rooms displaying a multitude of treasures, and all the while the pipes that lined the length of the ceiling seemed to gurgle in encouragement. Yet, as he strode closer, the hippo began to appear smaller than he had imagined it would be. This made him hesitate. Then, when he emerged from the hallway, he momentarily stopped altogether. Most people did when they entered the central atrium of the Gee Museum.

  The hippo stood on a wooden podium, four steps down, in a sunken courtyard. It was bathed in an opalescent light that spilled from the high glass ceiling. Beside it, on a taller plinth, stood a windup gramophone. The music poured from the gramophone’s horn, which ought to have seemed very strange, but Ben was so excited that he hardly noticed. Instead he was struck to discover what you couldn’t see until you reached this position: the hippo was surrounded by a huge and wonderful menagerie of other animals.

  Near the hippo was a group of baboons, and a sitting polar bear, and a walrus, and a russet kangaroo (which was larger than expected), and a huge moose with antlers like the branches of an oak, and an anteater, and a family of collared peccaries (a sort of wild pig), and there was a black panther, and a golden lioness lying with her cub, and a tawny camel on a patch of sand it shared with a chocolate-colored llama that looked like its child but wasn’t, and Ben could see the brindled shell of a giant turtle, and the curled-up armor of an armadillo, and the white stripes of zebra and okapi, and the jigsaw-puzzle coats of giraffes. There were nine giraffes, though not all of them were whole; some were only displayed as far as their heads or necks, and only two were complete. These stood to one side of the steps that led up to a gallery level. On the other side of the stairs, there was a small dinosaur skeleton.

  Upstairs, among more glass cabinets, he could see there was an empty wooden chair. It had a red cushion that had been pushed to one side, as if somebody had been sitting there recently. But Ben couldn’t see anyone around now. After a moment, he tiptoed down the four steps into the sunken courtyard and stood beside the hippo.

  He hesitated then, unsure what to do. It was the same hippo, all right: the same shiny mud-gray hide, the same cracked face, the same smell of mothballs and honey. Close up, it was indeed a smaller animal than it had seemed when viewed from the confines of the hall. It was hardly bigger than a Shetland pony. But that was because it wasn’t an ordinary hippopotamus at all: it was a pygmy hippo, which is an altogether different species of animal. Yet despite its small size, it still had great dignity, and a haunting air of importance that made it seem more present than anything else in the room. Ben felt safe standing beside it. He was reluctant to move anywhere else, though the skeptical, mature part of him knew he must have imagined it talking to him in the past.

  What am I hoping for? he wondered.

  The wistful part of him that wasn’t so eager to grow up wished very hard that the hippo would speak. Because if it could, maybe it would tell him something, just anything, about his dad.

  Abruptly the gramophone needle reached the end of the record and played a repeated crackle.

  Crackle bump!

  Crackle bump!

  Ben looked at it. Who had set the record turning?

  Crackle bump!

  Seven, eight, nine cycles of the needle. Crackle bump!

  The sound pressed on him, like a trap slowly cranking shut.

  Ten, eleven times.

  Crackle bump,

  crackle bump . . .

  All at once a clock chime rattled through the gramophone horn!

  It chimed seven chimes!

  It was the chime from the clock in the lobby, yet the sound of it was broadcasting straight through the speaker horn.

  So, he had guessed correctly: the casement clock did function as an alarm.

  Abruptly the gramophone horn began broadcasting other sounds from the lobby. Ben remembered the brass button he’d stepped on. He guessed it must work like one of those monitors people use to hear a sleeping baby in another room.

  This is what he heard through that monitor horn: footsteps on the flagstones, the front doors slamming shut, then two voices speaking from the lobby — a man and a woman.

  It was the couple from the café.

  They’ve walked in without knocking, he thought.

  In a horrible rush he realized that the front doors must have been left unlocked, ready for them to make their way inside.

  “They were invited!” he moaned out loud. “I’m the trespasser.”

  It got worse. He could hear them through the speaker horn, and this is what they said:

  “Look, it’s only a child’s bike. Could be anyone’s,” the man declared.

  “It could be,” the woman said. “But I still think that boy was listening to us. I bet it’s his bike out there.”

  “So what if it is his bike?” said the man. “A boy that age wouldn’t have understood. Probably just drooling over the cake you weren’t eating. I haven’t seen him before, and I’m a regular. The waitress had never seen him either — she said so.”

  “All the same . . .”

  “Well, even if he did hear us, what’s a kid going to do? We’re making a totally legit offer for the building and the collection. Nothing wrong with that. Should suit everyone. And this time the old lady must be interested — she’s invited us for tea, hasn’t she? Can’t imagine she’ll let some kid put her off the whole deal.”

  “You’re right,” fluttered the woman’s voice. “Sorry to be jittery. Those bees outside made me nervous — I’m sure they shouldn’t be there at this time of year. And there’s so much at stake. Some of these clocks are fabulous.”

  “Worth the effort, isn’t it? Think what you could do with them.”

  “If I had the room.”

  “Well, you will have the room when I’ve built it. Think about the nice new extension I’m going to build on to the Discovery Museum — and forget the kid. He’s not important.”

  “He couldn’t already be with the old lady?”

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; “Don’t be paranoid. The doors were shut, weren’t they? The old lady said to come right in and she’d meet us upstairs, so she’s not likely to have met the kid at the door. If by any tiny chance he got inside in the last five minutes, he’ll be close by.”

  “And if he is?”

  The man grunted. “Then I’ll deal with him.”

  Hide till they’ve gone! Ben told himself.

  Where?

  Behind him a large ebony cabinet displayed small mammals on glass shelves against a map of Africa. It didn’t run the whole length of the wall; there was a small gap at one end between the cabinet and a corner of the building. He dashed for that gap. The upper half of the cabinet was glass, so he had to wedge himself in backward, hunkering down below the glass-line, to be sure of being hidden. He was very cramped.

  Tock, tock, tock: the woman’s pointed heels clacked on wood, so they must have reached the egg room. The footsteps paused.

  Was she searching for him?

  Ben imagined her pointed face goggling into every corner. Was this hiding place good enough? He wasn’t sure, yet he didn’t dare look for somewhere better. All he could do was take deep ragged breaths to calm his hammering heart. Unfortunately the corner was as dusty and grimy as a vacuum bag, so the deep breathing made him feel sneezy. He couldn’t sneeze now!

  Desperately he nipped the bridge of his nose. That didn’t work: his nose and eyes throbbed with the itch. He wriggled his nose; he made wild anti-sneeze faces; all his attention was bent on not sneezing, and none of his attention was focused on the creatures in the cabinet.

  Whereupon the nearest one made a face back at him!

  Ben’s sneeze vanished, shocked clean away, because he saw — right beside him on the other side of the glass — the shrew from the long-ago tea table.

  He stared. The creature was motionless. Did I imagine it moving? he thought.

  He examined the label beside it:

  This sengi was so obviously stuffed, tatty, battered at the edges — he could even see the seams. The bead-black eyes gazed ahead, glassy.

  “You didn’t move,” Ben whispered firmly, trying to convince himself.

  As he said that, she leaped, rearing up so that her hairy face and tiny brown-pink paws pressed on the glass, alarmingly close to his nose.

  Ben jerked, bashing his head on the wall. “Ow!”

  “SHHH!” scolded the tiny creature. She had a shrill, high voice, clear as a squeaky cat toy, even from behind the glass. “And don’t you dare back away. You stay and listen — seeing as you can hear me.”

  “I . . . I’m not going anywhere,” said Ben shakily.

  “You’d better not. How you’ll get out of this fix, I can’t imagine. Trapped now, aren’t you? So hush up or they’ll hear you.”

  And Ben, who was astonished beyond measure, discovered that he had reached a state of mind where nothing was too astonishing to believe and found himself talking back to the shrew. “Maybe you should hush. They might hear you.”

  “Grown-ups only hear what they expect to hear,” said the sengi. “That rarely includes me.”

  “They might expect to hear me,” said Ben.

  “Well, then, you’d better be quiet!” The shrew grabbed her tail and gnawed at it.

  But Ben was unable to be silent now. “You’ve got to watch those people,” he whispered. “I overheard them planning something really bad. I need to tell the old lady who runs the museum about it. If she’s here.”

  “She’s here all right, but you’d better stay hidden.”

  This was only too obvious. Ben could hear the couple coming down the hall. Tock, tock, tock went the lady-sharp heels, followed by another pause. He guessed they were searching for him in one of the side rooms.

  “What did you overhear?” asked the sengi, wriggling her long nose restlessly. (She could gyrate that nose in a circle, almost as cleverly as an elephant can gyrate its trunk.)

  “That man said he wanted to buy the museum so that he can knock it down and build new —”

  “We know that,” spat the shrew. Her tail shot out of her mouth and shook like an angry question mark. “Julian Pike’s been sniffing around here for years. Our director has always told him No sale!”

  “A . . . you mean your human director? D’you mean the old lady?”

  “Her name is Constance Garner-Gee, and she’s more than a director. She’s the curator of this museum too, and the owner, and chief label-writer, and cleaner and duster, and never in all these years has she ever, ever, ever agreed to talk to one of those building-smasher people. But it’s different now that Miss Tara Snow’s involved.”

  “Tara Snow?”

  “That woman out there.”

  “She runs the Discovery Museum,” said Ben. “She isn’t very nice either.”

  “She’s the civilized face of destruction,” declared the shrew.

  “I . . . suppose you could say that,” said Ben. He was peering beyond the shrew to the hall entrance, dreading the couple’s appearance. Yet the shrew was scuttling back and forth, trembling with agitation. What if they noticed her moving when they came into the room? They easily might if she carried on like this. And then they might spot him too.

  “I do say that,” said the shrew. “Tara Snow has decided that there’s only room for one museum in this town — hers — and she wants to pinch the best bits from the Gee collection and put them in her museum and then let Julian Pike smash up our lovely home.”

  “You mean she wants to steal the things in here?”

  “Not exactly. She’ll pay money. Not enough, but that’s not the point. The point is, this museum is our home and she wants to move us . . . But not all of us . . . Don’t you understand? She doesn’t want the whole collection in her modern museum. We’ve heard she’s only interested in what she calls ‘the choicest exhibits,’ and on a rotating basis. Do you know what that means?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “It means some of us will be put in storage! Piled in her moldy basement, rotting in the dust where no one can see us and our spirits will shrivel . . . and that’ll be the fate of the luckier ones.” The sengi paused to stuff both paws and tail into her mouth.

  “What will happen to the unlucky ones?”

  “Humans call it recycling,” the shrew said indistinctly. “There won’t be enough storage room for everyone, so some will be sold . . . but most will be sorted into plastic bins and . . .” She stopped then and scrabbled in a circle before squeaking, “We’ll be squished into something else, or burned in a furnace, or thrown in the trash to rot, and no one will care at all.”

  “I care,” Ben said. “Can’t someone do something to stop them?”

  “We’ve already done something. We’ve found you.”

  “You found me?” Ben’s jaw dropped. “What d’you mean? I’m here because a free invitation came with the mail.”

  But the shrew’s whiskers were quivering fiercely. “Who do you think delivered that envelope?” she jabbered. “It wasn’t the mailman. Do you have any idea how hard it was for us to print that ticket? Leon and I struggled for hours with the printing machine. Before that, the bees lost several days of honey production hunting you down, and not a few more were waterlogged carrying that heavy paper in the fog. Then what do you do? You repay our hard work by sauntering in TOO LATE!”

  “I came as soon as I could,” Ben said.

  “Well, it wasn’t soon enough,” snapped the shrew. “And if you can’t think of some clever way to stop them, then our only hope is that Constance will send them away.”

  “Why don’t you talk to her yourself?”

  “Because she can’t hear any of us. She hasn’t heard us since she was about your age. Not that it mattered much — she’s always had a feeling for us and she loves this museum. But nowadays she seems so tired. And old. And we’re worried about her — she’s talking to herself much more than she used to. Mind you, that has its uses because we have an idea of what’s going on from what she says . .
. but it seems to us she’s run out of reasons for living.”

  There was a suspicious wateriness around the sengi’s eyes. She looked so vulnerable and sad that Ben put out a finger and stroked the glass, whereupon she shuddered from her bristling head to the tip of her tail and bared needlelike teeth as she squeaked, “Don’t you dare treat me like a toy.”

  “Shhhhh,” Ben said, wincing.

  “Yes, hush!” said a coppery voice from somewhere in the center of the courtyard. “They’re almost upon us.”

  Julian Pike and Tara Snow emerged from the hallway.

  “You see?” said Pike. “No sign of any boy.”

  “He could be hiding,” said Tara Snow.

  Pike shrugged. “Well, I can’t see him. Can you?” He strutted down the four steps like he owned the place already. “What do you make of this lot?”

  Tara Snow surveyed the animals with disdain. “There’s far too much taxidermy,” she declared. “Though there are a few very fine exhibits I’d be interested in keeping.”

  “What’s taxidermy?” whispered Ben to the sengi.

  “Us,” she replied. “I suppose you would say stuffed animals.”

  The woman pointed at the hippo. “That one’s no good. It’s split at the seams. No use to me like that. Anyway, stuffed animals aren’t so popular these days — times have changed since the Victorians went out hunting and collecting. I’m only interested in displaying a few of the more unusual examples. The rest can be scrapped.”

  Pike winced, raising his eyebrows meaningfully to the ceiling. “Scrapped? Don’t forget, the old lady’s hoping to keep all the collection together. She mentioned scientific importance.”

  “I expect some of it is scientifically important,” said Tara Snow. “But that’s the best I can offer.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mention that till the deal’s done,” said Pike.