The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon, стр. 11

It rang again. “Well, answer it,” Pete said.

“I will.” Jupiter picked it up. “Hello?” he said into the phone. “Hello?”

He held the telephone close to the microphone so that Pete could hear what was said, too. They heard a rasping sound.

“Hello!” Jupe said again. There was no answer.

“Maybe it’s a wrong number,” Pete said.

“I — don’t think so,” Jupiter said. “Listen!”

They heard the strange rasping sound again. The sound was like that of somebody trying to breathe, gasping for air with great difficulty.

The curious breathing sounds changed to a voice that seemed to be strangling, as if the speaker had only a few moments of life left.

“Keep — ” the strangling voice said. Then, as if it were the most tremendous effort imaginable, the voice continued.

“Away,” it said. “Keep… away.”

Then it became a heavy breathing sound again. “Keep away from what?” Jupiter asked the telephone.

“My… cave,” the voice said. There was another long gasping sound and then silence.

“Why?” Jupiter asked. “Say, who is this?”

The voice sounded hollow now. “Dead… men,” it said slowly, “tell… no… tales!”

There was a long trembling gasp, and then silence. Jupiter hung up. For a moment, he and Pete sat staring at the phone. Then Pete hopped up.

“I just remembered we’re having dinner early tonight,” he said. “I’d better get on home.”

Jupiter jumped up. “I’ll leave, too. Aunt Mathilda might want me to clean up the yard a little.” Quickly both boys bolted from the trailer.

They hadn’t had any trouble understanding what the ghostly voice had told them. It was a very simple message.

Keep away from my cave!

Dead men tell no tales!

Old Mr. Allen had told them about a dragon entering a cave.

He hadn’t mentioned a dead man — or a ghost!

10

The Death of Seaside

Meanwhile, Bob had showered and changed his clothes. By the time he reached the Rocky Beach Public Library, where he had a part-time job, he felt more cheerful.

As he walked in, Miss Bennett, the librarian, looked up and smiled.

“Oh, Bob,” she said, “I’m really glad to see you today. It’s been one of those busy days. So many visitors, and now, of course, so many books to put back on the shelves. Could you get right to it?”

“Sure,” Bob replied.

He picked up the sizable stack of returnable books and put them away one by one. Then he turned to the reading-room tables. A lot of books had been left out, and he gathered them up. The title of the one on top was Legends of California. He flipped the pages idly and saw one chapter entitled “Seaside: Dream of a City That Died”.

“Hmmm,” Bob said to himself. “That might be interesting.”

He put it aside thoughtfully. This was a lucky find. Anxious to return to the book when he had finished his duties at the library, Bob attacked the stacks of books lying about with record speed.

When he had finished putting them all back on the shelves, Miss Bennett asked him to mend some books with torn bindings. He took them into the back storage room and secured the covers with plastic tape. In a little while, he had done everything that had to be done.

He returned to Miss Bennett’s desk.

“Everything’s in order, Miss Bennett. I have some research to do now, if there isn’t anything else you need me to do — ”

Miss Bennett shook her head, and Bob hurried to the reading table with the book of Californian legends. He didn’t know very much about Seaside at all, he realized. Neither Jupiter nor Pete knew much about it either. Certainly none of them had ever heard a word about the town dying!

Quickly he opened the book to the chapter about Seaside. It started with these words:

There are cities which are plagued by ill fortune, just as people.Seaside’s dreams of becoming a key resort community went up in smoke fifty years ago.

The bright and bustling city its planners had visualized and gambled their fortunes on, was never to be. The elaborate canal sand waterways, constructed to remind visitors of Venice, have crumbled and been replaced with factories. The once elegant hotel shave been boarded up or bulldozed to make way for motorway construction going north and south.

Perhaps Seaside’s most bitter disappointment was the failure of its underground railway, the first on West Coast. Investors,as well as the public, were cool about plans for a rapid transport system linking the coastal part of seaside with the business section and other nearby communities. As a result, the underground network was never completed, and its few miles of tunnel remain boarded up and forgotten, a ghostly secret and costly reminder of the city that died before it had a chance to grow up.

“Wow!” Bob said to himself. The town of Seaside meant more to him now. It was more than fifty years since it had died—the book he was reading was several years old. If he hadn’t found it by accident, he probably never would have known the story of the place they had visited.

He wrote down some of the main facts about Seaside and put the book away. Then he sat thinking. He had a great deal to tell Jupiter, but he decided to wait until after dinner. It was almost that time now and he was hungry.

He said goodbye to Miss Bennett and cycled home. His mother was preparing dinner, and his father was reading his newspaper and smoking his pipe. He greeted Bob with a smile.

“Hi, son,” he said. “I understand you came home with enough mud on you to test our washing machine to the limit of the manufacturer’s most exaggerated claims.”

“Right, Dad,” Bob said. “I fell into a hole. At first I thought it was quicksand, but it turned out to be mostly mud and water.”

“Quicksand? Nothing like that round here, to my knowledge.”

“Not Rocky Beach,” Bob said. “It was at Seaside. We’re on a case that took us down there. We were investigating one of the caves.”

His father nodded, and put his paper down. “In the old days it would have been worth your life to stick your nose into one of them. A lot of the caves around Haggity’s Point there were used by rum-runners, and before that by pirates.”

“So I heard,” Bob said. “And I just came across a book in the library that told all about how Seaside was a city that died before it grew up. Did you know that?”

His father was a newspaperman who always seemed to have a secret store of knowledge. He nodded again.

“A lot of people lost their shirts and went broke when they guessed wrong about that town. After the big fire at the amusement park, its luck turned bad.”

“It didn’t look that bad to me,” Bob said. “It’s as big as Rocky Beach here.”

Mr. Andrews smiled. “Since then, they’ve had fifty-odd years to rebuild and it’s a bustling, thriving city now. But not what it was intended to be, a big resort. Now it’s just another place to live and make money.”

“Tough,” Bob said. “I read they even started their own underground railway but never got round to finishing it.”

Mr. Andrews leaned forward. “That particular decision cost one of the early Seaside planners his life. He committed suicide after losing his personal fortune pledged to the building of the underground system.” He frowned, and puffed on his pipe. “His name escapes me now, but he was the big man with the big dream. If enough people had shared his conviction and enthusiasm, Seaside might have become what he wanted — the biggest Fun City of them all.”

Mrs. Andrews’ voice interrupted, clear and firm. “Dinner’s ready.”

Bob wanted to hear more but his father got up and went to the table. Bob followed and sat down. There was a lot Jupiter should know.

“I say we forget all about finding Mr. Allen’s lost dog,” Pete was saying firmly. “It may be only a missing pet to him, but to me it’s also a dragon, and two nasty-looking skin divers with loaded spear-guns who don’t like kids. Not to mention that mud hole that sucks in people, and the staircase that falls apart when you run down it. Plus whatever it was that called on the telephone warning us to keep away from its cave. That sounds like good advice to me, especially coming from a dead man!”