The Dragon in the Sea by Kate Klimo Page B

mysterious talk about the Driftwoods. On top of Emmy’s story, it was enough to keep a person awake all night. She would have to read herself to sleep. She chose a book from her bookcase, then slid under her own seaweed quilt and started reading.
    It was a story about a human girl who went out in a rowboat to fish one day and got lost in the fog. When the fog lifted, she found herself in a sea ofbeautiful giant flowers. She had just met a little mergirl her own age who made her home in one of the big bell-shaped blossoms, when Daisy drifted off to sleep.
    Daisy awoke suddenly in the deepest darkness she had experienced since being trapped in the mines of the hobgoblins. The lantern was dark but she didn’t remember blowing it out. At first, the darkness was alarming. Then she breathed deeply and told herself,
I’ll turn over in my bunk and go back to sleep until six bells
. She was just drifting off again when she heard the noise.
    It was a steady
squeak-squeak
ing sound.
    She sat up and cocked her ear. It was the sound of something rubbing against glass and it was giving her a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.
    Daisy slithered out of her bunk and swam over to the row of windows set high on the wall. An eerie yellow light shone from somewhere outside. Suddenly, a greenish face pressed itself against the glass. Daisy pulled back with a gasp. It was a mermaid with red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. She scraped at the glass with long, blackened fingernails—
squeak! squeak!
—as if begging to be let in.
    In a flash, Daisy was over at Jesse’s bunk, shaking him awake.
    “What? What?” he said, his voice making pale,sparkling bubbles in the dark water. “I was just resting.”
    He sat up and shook his phosphairy lantern until it lit up, as Daisy pulled him over to the window.
    “What?” said Jesse, staring through the glass.
    The face was no longer there.
    Daisy tapped the glass with her fist. “It was a water zombie, Jess. A girl one. She was right there a minute ago. I saw her, I swear!” Daisy said.
    “I believe you,” Jesse said. Then he did what his mother always had done when he was little and shadows outside his window gave him the heebie-jeebies. He took the extra blanket off his bed and draped it over the windows. “Better?” he asked.
    Daisy nodded, but Jesse could tell she was still spooked.
    “We could go up to the poop deck and report it to Yar and Fluke,” he suggested.
    Daisy thought about the long corridor full of portals and the hatchway that was like a deep, dark well. “No,” she said. “I’m sure the hammerhead shiver will protect us.”
    Jesse nodded. He swam back to his bunk, and that was when he saw it—or rather,
didn’t
see it.
    “My softball. Somebody took it, Daisy,” he said in a quiet voice. “I put it on the table right here nextto the lantern … and now it’s gone.”
    “Are you sure?” Daisy had snuggled back under the covers. “Check under the bunk. Maybe it rolled away.”
    Jesse swam around with his lantern and checked, but the softball was not anywhere in the cabin. Now Daisy was asleep and Jesse lay wide-awake. He wondered who would have taken his softball, and
why
?
    Jesse woke Daisy up the next morning, hovering beside her bunk, holding a chipped soup bowl. The seaweed inside the bowl looked like dark blue shredded wheat.
    Daisy sat up and Jesse handed her the bowl.
    “Brekkie in bed,” he said.
    “Don’t you mean
bunk
?” Daisy said as she sat up. “How is everything going in the deep blue sea?”
    Jesse pointed to the windows. Through the sun-shot water, a shiver of hammerhead sharks swam by.
    “I never thought I’d be happy to see sharks,” said Daisy.
    “Eat up,” Jesse said. “When you’re finished with your brekkie, we’re expected down the hall in the Buried Pirate Treasure Portal for the mollycoddle.”
    “What’s a mollycoddle?” Daisy asked around a mouthful of seaweed that tasted much better than it looked.
    “I have no idea but it