The Mystery of Wandering Caveman - M. V. Carey [12]
The boys didn’t answer. They turned away from the cave and went out past a display of shiny key chains and small plastic cave men. These were for sale, along with T-shirts that had “Citrus Grove, Cradle of Humanity” printed on them.
“We’re all set now,” said Newt McAfee. He snapped off the lights and locked the door. “John the Gypsy will be on guard here tonight so nobody can get in and mess things up.”
“John the Gypsy?” said Jupe.
McAfee nodded towards the thin man who now sat on the bed inside the van.
“That’s him. We call him John the Gypsy ’cause he lives in that van, ’stead of having a real home.”
McAfee stalked off to his house, and John the Gypsy got out of the van.
“Okay,” he said. “He wants me to keep watch, I’ll keep watch. But that dead one in there ain’t going to like it. I sure wouldn’t like it if they was coming in to look at me lying there in my bones.”
“But he won’t know,” Pete pointed out. “He’s dead, isn’t he? Dead people don’t know when somebody’s looking at them.”
“You sure of that?” said John the Gypsy.
Chapter 6
A Disturbance in the Night
DINNER THAT NIGHT was more hamburgers at the Lazy Daze Cafe. Afterwards the boys bought ice cream from the van near the depot. Then they went back to their loft and lay watching through the window as the sun went down and the moon came up.
There was a chill in the air. Wisps of fog floated above the meadow, and the stars winked out. At last the boys pulled their sleeping bags around them and dozed off.
Sometime in the cold dark of the night, Jupe woke to hear the sound of a door opening. Someone had come into the barn — someone who whimpered like a frightened animal.
Jupe sat up and listened.
The whimpering ceased for a moment, then began again.
Pete stirred and sat up. “What’s that?” he whispered.
Jupe crept to the top of the ladder and peered down into the blackness below.
“You boys?” croaked a hoarse voice. “Is that you?”
It was John the Gypsy. No sooner had he spoken than he fell, crashing over something in the dark.
Bob yelped with fright, and Pete groped for the torch he had left next to his sleeping bag. When he found it, he scrambled to the ladder and flashed the beam down at the barn floor.
John the Gypsy had stumbled into a carton of empty tin cans. Now he lurched to his feet and squinted up at the light. “Is that you?” he cried with panic in his voice.
“Answer me, why don’t you?”
“It’s us,” said Jupe. He and Bob and Pete went down the ladder, and John the Gypsy leaned on the fender of Newt’s pickup truck and trembled.
“What’s the matter?” said Jupe.
“That … that dead one!” said John the Gypsy. “I told you he wasn’t going to like all this staring! I told you! Didn’t I tell you?”
“What about it?” said Pete. “What happened?”
“He got up and left, that’s what he did,” John the Gypsy declared. “Serve old Newt right when tomorrow comes and there ain’t no bones there! He’ll say I took
’em, but he’ll be wrong. That one walked away by himself! I seen him go!”
The barn door was open, and the boys looked out and up the slope to the little museum. It was just visible in the moonlight. Its door seemed to be firmly closed.
“You must have had a dream,” said Bob gently.
“No.” The man shook his head. “I was in my van and I heard a door open. I looked out and there was that cave man. He had a fur over him like the skin off something he killed. I could see his eyes. They was terrible — staring straight ahead, and they had a kind of fire in them. And his hair — it was long and raggedy. He went past me and ran straight away across the meadow.”
John the Gypsy closed his eyes as if to blot out the memory of the fearful sight.
“We’ll go and look,” said Jupe.
They walked close together, as if they feared that it was possible for the prehistoric being in the cave to have got up, clothed itself again in flesh and animal skins, and fled across the fields.
But the museum door was locked. When Jupe rattled the knob, Newt McAfee appeared on the porch of his house.
“What’s going on there?” cried McAfee. “What you boys been doing?”