The Hippo at the End of the Hall Read online

  “But it’s now or never,” he told himself, thinking of the words on the back of the ticket.

  Nevertheless, going there tomorrow meant he would have to miss school to arrive before it closed. He would be skipping school for the first time ever.

  He sat up. Surely they’d phone Mom if he didn’t turn up.

  Unless he left after lunch.

  They wouldn’t be able to phone Mom in the afternoon, because she’d be out at that meeting. And Mom didn’t have a cell phone since her last one had broken, and she hadn’t had the money to replace it.

  He waited until he heard her go to bed.

  He waited until he thought she’d be asleep.

  Then, feeling treacherous, he slunk out of bed, tiptoed past her room, and sneaked upstairs to the shop.

  He had taken the blue stone along with him for luck, and as he sat down, he tucked it carefully to one side of the computer. In the glow of the screen, he tapped away with nervous sweaty hands. After a moment he found the template Mom used for shop letters and began to type:

  The printer uttered a mechanical groan as the letter slid out. Ben froze. No sound from Mom. Ben looked at the letter. He decided it was quite good. He crept back to his room and hid it in his school bag. After that he slept like a hippo. If he had not been so sleepy, perhaps he would have realized that he hadn’t deleted the letter on the computer.

  When Ben arrived at the museum that Monday afternoon, he hid his bike in a rhododendron bush near the hive entrance.

  “Look after my bike,” he whispered up to the hive when a couple of bees appeared. Then he fled for the front door. He still wasn’t comfortable around bees, but he was uncomfortable everywhere that day because he felt horribly guilty about missing school.

  What if Mom finds out? he worried. And what about Mrs.Conway? Ben felt especially guilty about his teacher — she had been so trusting when he handed her the forged note. At school everyone thought he was a good kid.

  Was he a good kid?

  Today he’d been so sneaky, so dishonest, yet he still didn’t know if the museum would be open. While he was dithering on the steps, the great doors swung apart. He took that as his answer and nipped through them before anyone spotted him.

  This time the ticket booth glowed with an amber light. Amber reflections gilded the clocks, gleamed on the glass, glittered in the eyes of the birds so that they seemed knowing — as if they knew Ben should have been at school.

  “Hello?” he croaked to whoever might be listening.

  Nobody answered.

  But presently he noticed there was a call bell on the counter that hadn’t been there the day before. It had a sign next to it. Taking care to avoid the brass trip button on the second flagstone, Ben crept over to read the sign:

  Did he want attention, though?

  He looked around for Flummery and was dismayed to see that the owl’s perch on top of the casement clock was empty. What a blow. He had been planning to discuss the blue stone with the owl; indeed, he had been thinking about it all morning. Biting the skin on the side of his thumb, he wondered what to do instead. He decided he ought to find Miss Garner-Gee. But before that, since he seemed to be quite alone, he would take a quick peek at the bottle room. He only intended to check it out. He couldn’t see the harm in that.

  As Ben walked down the hallway, he could hear other visitors in the atrium. Soon he saw a small girl in a pink rain jacket crossing behind the hippo. Her mother followed. With any luck, they would distract the hippo while Ben sidled into the bottle room.

  The room was small and dark, with a low ceiling and no windows. The air in there smelled musty, and slightly sweet, and wrong. Ben thought it looked like a witch’s store cupboard, for shelved on the walls from ceiling to floor were a multitude of lugubrious specimens: bottled toads, and pickled lizards, and frogs, and slugs, and many types of spotted newts, and seahorses, and numerous snakes, and several species of octopuses. Every bottle had been labeled in the same neat handwritten print. Each contained something different, yet their contents looked remarkably similar, as most of the creatures had faded to the pallor of uncooked chicken and glowed softly in their amber brew like a drowned demon army.

  But all of these were glass specimen jars and bottles. Ben couldn’t see a single silver bottle.

  Actually, he felt relieved, because he wanted to leave this room. There was something unpleasant about it: the shadows seemed thick with questions and secrets, and he felt as if all those bottled fungoid creatures were watching to see what he would do next.

  Just as he was about to go, a reflection flickered yellow across all the glass surfaces. Something had moved behind him.

  He spun to face a table cabinet. He hadn’t noticed it earlier because it was positioned behind the door. Leon was climbing onto its glass tabletop. He must have intended to be visible, for his skin was decked out in the colors of a ripe banana.

  “Hello, Leon,” Ben said warily.

  The chameleon turned his head to watch Ben from over his shoulder. One golden eye was focused on Ben, but he directed the other to the cabinet as he climbed on top of it.

  “Care to take a peek?”

  “Why?” said Ben, though he’d guessed why. He began to say, “The hippo and Flummery said I shouldn’t —”

  “But since you’re here . . .” Leon coaxed, both black-dot pupils fixed on Ben. “After all, nobody said you shouldn’t look. Isn’t that why you came in here?”

  Ben couldn’t resist. He shuffled closer. He saw that this cabinet was full of bottles too, but these didn’t belong with the specimen bottles. These were curiosities, displayed together only because they were all bottles of one sort or another. One of them contained a fully rigged ship; another, which was misted in algae, held a message inked onto an old piece of parchment. There was a cluster of Bohemian glass perfume bottles in tints of cranberry, amber, and lavender; there were blue apothecaries’ bottles labeled Poison, and there was a bottle made of pink quartz filled with distilled roses. Farther along the row, a pale-green bottle bore a label marked Bottle for collecting tears; another displayed a slug impaled on a thorn, and next to that was a brown bottle, which apparently held a charm for clearing warts.

  The chameleon shifted to reveal that he was sitting directly over a bulbous silver bottle. When Ben bent to read the angular writing on that label, the hairs on the back of his neck rose.

  “I don’t need any more trouble,” Ben said, stepping backward.

  “Not tempted, then? Even when it’s almost under your paws?”

  “I bet nothing would happen if I did open it.”

  “And what will happen if you don’t open it?”

  “Why hasn’t Miss Garner-Gee?”

  “Who knows? Sometimes she pretends not to believe in magic; other times she says the bottle would be spoiled if it were uncapped. The truth is, she’s never had the nerve. You’re our last hope . . . and your mother’s. Poor us.”

  “There’s the diamond,” Ben blustered. “What if we found that instead?”

  “Pixieshine,” said the chameleon.

  “And a witch in a bottle isn’t?” said Ben nervously.

  “What a timid turtle you are,” said Leon. “Your father had more courage. He’d have opened it like a shot if he’d ever come back.”

  “What do you know about my dad?”

  “Haven’t you figured that out yet? Dear me, the others were so sure you’d have worked it out for yourself, but — as you’re clearly not the brightest of bunnies — I suppose it’s my duty to tell you —”

  But in fact he didn’t tell Ben anything. This was because a child came running down the hallway. The chameleon skittered down the table leg and squirmed through the metal grate in the floor.

  “What were you going to say?” asked Ben urgently. He knelt down to the grate.

  “Ask me later. Constance is coming,” hissed the chameleon.

  Outside in the hallway, the child scampered past the door. Two pairs of grown-up
feet followed more sedately. Ben could hear the adults’ voices echoing in the larger space of the egg room. They were saying goodbye in that grown-up rambling way that can go on and on. The child stomped in boredom.

  “They’ve gone right past. Please come out,” Ben begged.

  But Leon had disappeared.

  Ben stood up. The grown-ups talked. The girl stomped again. He felt drawn to the bottle; it was a strange feeling, as if both he and it were faintly magnetic. He knew that the cabinet would be locked, so he wasn’t seriously trying to open it when he tugged experimentally around the lid.

  It wasn’t locked. It sprang up.

  It was a large lid and, being also a tabletop, was awkward to hold and very heavy. Ben tried to close it but the catch seemed stuck, so he had to continue to prop it up, and he panicked because he knew if he were to drop it hard, the glass might break. In the end he pushed it all the way up until it rested against the wall. Then he tried to fix the catch.

  Without the barrier of the glass, the bottle looked more substantial: the brindled silver gleamed, the milky stopper glowed. He couldn’t resist reaching out to touch the curved edge of it. And the instant he did, he longed to hold it.

  Before he picked it up, he promised himself he would put it back immediately. It felt smooth and unexpectedly warm as he cradled it in his palms. It looked very old. The silver had a yellowed moonlike glow to it. The stopper looked solidly sealed. That was good; he didn’t think he could have opened the bottle if he’d wanted. That being so, he couldn’t help giving it an experimental wiggle . . .

  Pop!

  The stopper came out between Ben’s fingers!

  He half expected green smoke or sparks. There were none. Nothing happened at all.

  “There’s no witch,” Ben told himself in a whisper. Yet he noticed a slight metallic, thunderstorm scent. And he couldn’t rid himself of the impression that something had changed — like the silence in a room when someone has just left it.

  The front door slammed as the last visitors of the day left the museum. The old lady was returning. Ben’s fingers fumbled as he tried to jam the stopper back into the bottle; the stopper was oddly resistant, so that by the time he had resealed it her footsteps were very close. Yet here was the cabinet still wide open!

  He bumped the lid down, flinching at the sound. Luckily this time the catch worked smoothly, but somehow — and he never could decide afterward how he could have been so stupid — he had forgotten to put the bottle back inside.

  He was still holding it!

  And he had made too much noise. The door of the bottle room began to open. All he could do was hide the bottle in his pocket.

  “Oh, I thought everyone had left. . . .”

  She was right behind him.

  Ben turned, caught in his guilt like a rat in a trap.

  “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” said Constance Garner-Gee.

  Did she see me pocketing that bottle? Ben thought. He needed to answer politely. At a loss for words, he remembered the invitation. He pulled it out and thrust it into her hands.

  Her eyes shot open. “Who gave this to you?”

  “I . . . I found it.”

  “But we don’t send these out anymore. I haven’t seen one in years. Where did you get it?”

  “It came with the milk.”

  “The milk?”

  “It was in an envelope behind the milk bottles.”

  She frowned.

  “It really was,” he insisted.

  “Really?” she said, dryly suspicious. “That’s very odd indeed. I don’t charge children admission, so you didn’t need an invitation. But seeing as you have one, perhaps I should show you around until your mother comes for you. Don’t worry — we’re closing for the day soon, but I won’t lock the front door yet. You don’t want to stay in here anyway, do you?” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s a musty little room, I always think.”

  Ben followed her out. His chest felt tight and weak with dread because he didn’t know how much she had seen.

  Did she think he was a thief?

  Might she phone the police?

  Or Mom?

  “Let me show you one of my favorite rooms instead,” she said, ushering him into the insect room.

  It was the last room Ben would have chosen, but he didn’t want to say so; in fact, he was having trouble speaking at all because though he knew he needed to talk, he couldn’t think where to start. He began to understand why Mom had found it so difficult to talk about Dad.

  The insect room was lined from ceiling to floor with narrow wooden drawers, and some of them were open and none of them were locked. You could pull out any one of them to see a parade of dragonflies, or moths, or hornets, or butterflies, or grasshoppers and wasps, or weevils and beetles. There were more beetles than anything else, in every imaginable color and pattern; each one had a tiny handwritten label and was pinned through the thorax to the backboard.

  “When I was your age, I used to think they were like knights in heraldic armor,” said Constance.

  “There’s so many,” marveled Ben.

  “Thousands of them.” She opened more drawers so he could see how many were displayed there in orderly rows. “My family collected most of them before I was born.”

  “That long ago,” said Ben — and then he felt awkward because he knew you shouldn’t make comments about a lady’s age.

  Luckily Miss Garner-Gee seemed so amused that Ben decided she couldn’t have seen him pocketing the bottle. He was beginning to relax when she said, “I remember where I saw you now. You were here yesterday. Mr. Pike chased you away, didn’t he?”

  Ben tensed.

  “Don’t look so frightened,” she said. “I expect you found the door open and wandered in because you liked the look of the place. Children are always welcome here. Mr. Pike had no right to chase you away.”

  Now, as if her kindness had switched on his voice, the words came pouring out of Ben; he felt desperate to explain why he had been trespassing. “Don’t trust that Mr. Pike,” he said. “He wants to throw me and my mom out of our apartment — and he wants to knock down your museum too. I came to tell you what I heard him saying yesterday.” In a great rush he explained what he’d heard in the café, and then he told her about Mom’s shop, and how worried they were about their home — and he might have gotten around to mentioning the visit with his dad except that Miss Garner-Gee held up her hand and interrupted him.

  “It’s very brave of you to come and tell me what you heard,” she said gently, “and I can see why you’re angry. But are you sure you understood what the grown-ups were saying? This notion of a flood — I can’t really believe it.”

  “I did understand him,” said Ben. “Please don’t trust him.”

  She was looking worried now. “It’s not as simple as that,” she replied.

  Ben thought, Yes, it is. Tears pricked his eyes, but the explanations dried up in his throat.

  She tried again: “The lady who was with him is the director of —”

  “I know who she is. Don’t trust her either.”

  “I may have to.” She smiled sadly. “I do love this museum, you know. I’ve spent most of my life caring for it, but —”

  “So why are you going to sell it to them?” cried Ben. Then he blushed red as a raspberry.

  He thought she wouldn’t answer. He thought she would be angry and send him packing. To his surprise, she only sighed. “I can see you already love this museum too,” she said. “It’s a wonderful place, I know, but I can’t look after it forever. The city council doesn’t have any money to help, and I’ve failed to trace any of my family. If I had, things might have been different . . . but now it’s too late. I must think about what will happen to the museum after I go. There’s no one else ready to take it over, but I’d like to know the collection will stay in this city. If it goes to Miss Snow at the Discovery Museum, then children like you will be able to visit it. Wouldn’t that be better than having the co
llection split up and sent all over the country?”

  “No,” Ben said stubbornly. “I think it should stay here.” And he wanted to say so much more, wanted to ask her about all sorts of things — about Dad, about the idea he was formulating about the blue stone, but he couldn’t find the words. Besides, he knew that what she said made sense — boring grown-up sense, the sort that ruined everything. He hung his head.

  “Come and look at my bees,” she said, leading him over to the crystal hive, which stood against the window.

  “I think they delivered the invitation to my house,” he mumbled.

  “That’s not very likely, is it?” Constance replied. Then she invited him to climb the hive steps to take a closer look.

  It seemed rude to refuse.

  The crystal hive had been designed so you could watch the bees working inside. Ben saw hundreds of them, tightly packed and quivering, on row upon row of hexagonal wax cells. He thought it looked almost like a miniature apartment building; indeed, the hive even had its own busy road to the outside — a curved glass tunnel built into the window, fashioned so that the bees could fly outside and forage for food. He watched them traveling back and forth down the tunnel. Some of them were carrying pollen from early-flowering bushes. Others were on some unknown business. None of them paid him any attention.

  “Is there anything else here that’s alive?” he blurted out. Then he felt embarrassed because it was such a childish question.

  To his surprise, Constance Garner-Gee didn’t laugh. She only said vaguely, “Well, there are a lot of exhibits that look lifelike.”

  “Like the owl,” he mumbled.

  “There are several owls here.”

  “There was an owl in the lobby yesterday that wasn’t there today.”