Zeuglodon by James P. Blaylock

If it’s a calm day, though, really dead calm and not windy, there’s no point in even trying to have a fire, because it would mean suffocation, which we found out the hard way one time.
    In the summer you can spot whales from up there. You have to watch for their spray but sometimes there’s dozens that go by in an afternoon, and you can see their dark shapes rising up out of the ocean and then disappearing again. There are otters, too, that come into the cove, and sea lions, and one time a sea elephant that was perfectly immense. It’s the kind of place where you can sit for hours, listening to the sound of the waves crashing and the crying of the seagulls and the wind blowing across the cliffs with a kind of shuddery sound.
    After a time we quit staring at the ocean and started talking, although none of us were asking what we were thinking: whether Lala had been at Lighthouse Beach yesterday morning and had peered in at the kitchen window last night. Maybe we didn’t want to hear her lie about it. Lala took her atomizer out of the little bag she carried and spritzed herself on the face and arms. “It keeps my skin moist,” she said, seeing that we were wondering about it.
    “You’ve got very moist skin,” Brendan said, gazing at her, or maybe at her skin.
    Lala smiled at him, and said that she wanted to know more about our adventure with the Creeper, or at least Brendan’s part in it. Then we asked her questions about Peach Manor, which was her home on Lake Windermere. I think she wanted to talk more than she wanted to listen, because once she got started she didn’t stop, and that was fine, because all of it was strange and wonderful.
    “What about old Cardigan Peach?” Perry asked her, Cardigan Peach being her grandfather. “We heard that he was really old. Over a hundred. Uncle Hedge says he was born before the automobile.”
    “Before which automobile?” Brendan asked. “There wasn’t just one, you know.”
    “That’s just a saying,” Perry told him.
    “Like ‘old as Methuselah,’” I said.
    “Or old as hydrogen,” Perry said.
    “He is old,” Lala put in, before Brendan got himself into a state. She took a billfold out of her bag and showed us a picture of a man who looked a little bit like a human toad, his face being amphibious and goggle-eyed. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but that’s what he did look like. He was dressed in a black cape and a little bow tie, and he carried a walking stick. He was standing by a pool of water enclosed by a stone ring, and he was looking down into the water, as if he saw something interesting in the depths. Lala told us about how her father, Giles Peach, was an inventor who had a workshop on the grounds of Peach Manor. Sometimes she didn’t see him for days when he was inventing. He had built an anti-gravity vessel, she said, out of barrel hoops, an electric fan, and a wooden rowboat, with oars that rowed by themselves using a perpetual motion engine. It had floated up into space one night carrying a cargo of his smaller inventions and was by now out rowing among the stars.
    Then she told us about the land at the Earth’s core, where there were still dinosaurs because they had been protected from the great extinctions, and where there were cave people and mer-people, and where nature was still wild and unspoiled because there weren’t any machines or factories or engines. She told us how you could sail into the hollow Earth aboard a hot air balloon by going farther and farther south until the oceans spilled over the edge of a vast hole into the interior seas. Without even knowing it you drifted downward, soon finding yourself inside the Earth instead of outside it, and when the balloon landed you were held to the walls by the centrifugal force of the spinning of the planet. It was just like gravity.
    While Lala talked, rain clouds came in off the ocean, moving very quickly. Waves began to break against the shore one after another, so that the