Steemjammer: Through the Verltgaat

by John Eubank

  Stop worrying, he thought. Maybe Dad will be there when we get home.

  As they slowly passed a cornfield, an overly large shadow on the ground caught Will’s attention, and he looked back. What he saw made no sense. A somewhat short but nevertheless menacing man wearing a leather cap with goggles hovered in mid-air, reaching at them with his hand.

  Instinctively Will put an arm in front of his sister and drew back his fist, but the strange man smiled big and gracefully turned his reaching hand into an exaggerated wave. Furthermore, he wasn’t floating. His other hand grasped a rope ladder that descended from a dirigible that’d slowly and silently drifted up behind them.

  Angelica gasped when she saw him and tried to say: “Rasputin!” She was so startled, however, that the word came out as an unintelligible squeak.

  The man’s shiny green coat boasted a double row of brass buttons, decorative gold stitching, and epaulets on padded shoulders. With pale blue eyes, a pencil moustache and a pointed goatee, he could’ve stepped out of a photo from 1890.

  “My young cousins!” he gushed with an English accent and exaggerated friendliness. “How wonderful to meet you at last!”

  “Cousins?” Angelica asked.

  “Why yes, I’m your father’s first cousin, Marteenus Steemjammer Skelthorpe.”

  Will narrowed his eyes. “If you’re family, why were you peeking in our windows?”

  “Peeking? Oh, that. I was merely trying to see if I had the right house. I’ve been looking for you for years.”

  “Why don’t you speak Dutch?”

  The man smile disarmingly. “My word, you’re suspicious.”

  “So you don’t speak any?”

  “Ya, Ick kan Dutch spreken. I also speak a little French and a smattering of German.”

  He took off his cap and bowed his head. The children gasped as dark red kinky hair popped out. Three strong symmetrical cowlicks made it swirl over the top of his head and shoot straight out to the left almost a foot.

  “Why haven’t we met you at family reunions?” Giselle asked, sensing Will’s suspicion.

  “Your father hasn’t told you about me? No, of course he hasn’t, but there’s much I could tell you about him.”

  “I don’t like how you were sneaking up on us,” Will challenged.

  “A surprise, dear boy. I only meant to – whoops!”

  A change in the wind began carrying him off.

  “Regretfully I must tend to my airship,” he said with forced politeness. Pulling an envelope from his pocket, he dropped it. “Be a sport and see that your father gets that. Until we meet again, adieu.”

  Scurrying up the ladder, he slashed a hanging rope with a shiny knife. A brown ballast sack full of sand fell to the ground with a thud. The airship, an oblong beige gas bag perhaps 150 feet in length, rose into the sky. From the gondola they heard a steam engine clatter to life as it began to spin a large wooden propeller.

  “What a creep!” Giselle said.

  Will craned his neck to watch the airship speed away. “He can’t really be our cousin, can he?”

  “He has ‘Amish’ hair,” Angelica observed.

  Will scowled. “I should have grabbed him and made him answer some questions!”

  The girls stared at him wide-eyed. He took a deep breath and looked down. Obviously they hadn’t seen the green-clad man reaching for Angelica, which Will was sure he’d been doing.

  “I’m not certain,” Giselle said delicately, “but I think that would have been ‘against the law.’”

  “Yeah,” he begrudgingly admitted.

  Kidnapping his sister and taking her away in an airship would have been illegal, too, he thought, but not wanting to upset them, he dropped it. Hopping down, he picked up the letter.

  “Open it,” Giselle urged.

  “No,” Angelica said. “It’s wrong to read other people’s mail.”

  “If Dad’s back when we get home,” Will said, “then we hand it to him. Otherwise, we read it.”

  ***

  Giselle hadn’t wanted to even think about her situation earlier. It stressed her too much, but as they neared Beverkenhaas, she decided to tell them what happened to her father, Deetricus Steemjammer. Henry’s twin brother, he was younger by about twenty minutes, and Will and Angelica called him Uncle Deet.

  “It happened last week,” she said, staring at the slowly passing scenery. “The sleeping boat had sprung a leak. Mom was off sewing for people, and Dad sent me to the junk boat to get some tar. By the time I got back, he was gone. Vanished.”

  She and her parents lived in a brightly painted cluster of houseboats in Muddy Creek Bay, off Lake Erie. The sleeping boat housed their bedrooms, while their junk boat, fashioned after the Chinese sailing vessel of the same name, was used for storage. The living boat had a parlor, dining room and galley or ship’s kitchen. The steam boat not only towed them around, it housed their boiler. When anchored, a network of pipes ran from it to their other vessels.

  “Did it sink?” Angelica asked.

  “No,” she said. “I figured Dad was busy below decks, so I patched it. But when I looked around, he was gone. I did hear a weird splash, but it was too far away from the boats to have been him.”

  A stray thought caused Will to frown. “A splash? Know what that makes me think?”

  “He didn’t fall in!” his cousin said defensively. “And even if he did, he’s a really good swimmer.”

  “I don’t think he drowned. I meant that creepy guy and his airship.”

  “Huh?”

  “What if he kidnapped your dad, and the splash came from him cutting the sandbag so he could get away?”

  Giselle furrowed her brow skeptically. “Is that even possible? He didn’t look that big, so how could he have carried my dad up a rope ladder?”

  “I guess it was a dumb idea,” Will admitted. “What did Tante Yvette say?”

  Their Aunt Yvette was Giselle’s mother.

  “Not much,” she said bitterly. “They never tell us anything, except annoying little fairy tales to keep our minds busy. Don’t you hate it?”

  Will wanted to nod. Part of him did hate it, but he was loyal to his parents and preferred not to criticize them. Angelica seemed relieved he didn’t answer.

  “Anyway,” Giselle continued, “Mom’s totally freaked out. She detached the steam boat and went to Buffalo. One of her cousins lives there, and she thinks he might know something. I told her I’d stay with you and ask Uncle Henry to help. But now this.”

  “Three of them,” Will said, “just gone.”

  ***

  Back at Beverkenhaas, there was no sign of Hendrelmus, though Will said he wanted to look around, just to be sure. The girls went to the kitchen to make a quick snack, after which they planned on joining him. Angelica sliced bread and began toasting cheese sandwiches.

  “Has Uncle Deet ever vanished before?” she asked.

  “Not as often as your dad,” Giselle said, slicing peaches into a bowl of cream. “He went away a couple of times, but Mom made him stop. I think he was with Uncle Henry, looking for Aunt Muriel.”

  That was Will and Angelica’s mother, Muriel Calhoun Steemjammer, who’d mysteriously vanished one afternoon several months earlier. The children had been in the back yard with their father learning how to swing a mace and block with a shield. When they’d come in for dinner, she wasn’t there.

  A pot of rootkoel - sweet-and-sour red cabbage and apple slices flavored with juniper berries - simmered on the stove. A freshly baked ham-and-cheese quiche cooled on the counter, and a loaf of warm bread rested on a cutting board. But she was gone.

  Henry hadn’t been too upset at first, insisting she’d be back soon and telling the children not to worry. When she didn’t return, he began to stay up late hammering and tinkering on things. Then, he began disappearing, too, and this time, Will feared he’d run into trouble.

  “The thing that makes me so frustrated,” Giselle said, “no, angry – I’m truly angry over
this – is how they obviously have a big secret, but they won’t tell us what it is. Like we were still just little kids.”

  “Hey,” Angelica objected. “I’m a little kid!”

  “Take it as a compliment, then, that I’m starting to think of you otherwise. Look, all this stuff about Holland and Ost Frisia. It’s begekkin!” Nuts!

  “Ost Frisia? For us it’s Holland and the Black Forest.”

  “Right, the Black Forest – land of cuckoo clocks. We’re preparing to ‘go home’ to a place that they can’t even name consistently, and what’s with all the paranoia? Do you know why we live on boats? Because ‘Shadovecht don’t do so well in water!’ Can you believe it?”

  Angelica scowled. “I believe my dad.”

  They locked eyes. Giselle was surprised to discover the ferocity of her little cousin’s gaze.

  “Fine,” she said. “Believe him. But where is he? I still say they should have told us something, so at least we wouldn’t be worried.”

  WHACK!

  Startled by the sudden noise, they looked around.

  “What was that?” Giselle said.

  “I don’t know,” her little cousin replied.

  WHACK! SMACK! WHACK!

  Giselle cringed. “Sounds like the boiler’s thumping. Where’s Will? We need to kill the fire, now, or it will explode!”

  Chapter 6

  A voice of warning

  In the library, Will had passed a breaking point. He knew his father would never approve of what he was doing, but if his parents and Onkel Deet were in trouble, that no longer mattered. Worried that they’d wasted days searching for a secret door, he had to find out what, if anything, was behind the wall. Using the voormaaker, a twelve-pound sledgehammer, he began knocking a hole in the plaster.

  With each blow, he felt like he was getting closer to resolving something. Not just where his parents were, but years of unanswered questions and frustration.

  He recalled the time he’d been sent to public school, because his mother had felt it would be good for him. The math teacher had laughed at him for trying to explain incalculus, while the science teacher had scolded him for believing, as his parents had taught, that there were at least 152 elements on the periodic table and not 118.

  “At least,” he thought, “I never told them about the six exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics.”

  As he swung the hammer, he remembered whispered voices that he could sometimes understand – his fellow students laughing at his strange clothing and unruly hair. A few kids tried to befriend him, but then others ridiculed them, chasing them away. He felt cast out and alone.

  Once he’d summoned the nerve to talk to a girl he found pretty, and she’d actually seemed interested in him – until her friends came and swept her away. Chips flew, and he hammered faster and faster.

  “Will, no!” cried a voice behind him.

  He stopped but could only see a thick cloud of white plaster dust. As it cleared, his sister and cousin appeared, holding cloths over their faces and coughing.

  Vibrations had caused a small glass display box to teeter to the edge of a table, and it was about to fall. Lunging forward, his sister caught it just in time. Inside was a small, lumpy black rock.

  “You almost broke Dad’s meteorite,” she said.

  “It’s a rock,” Will said, preparing to take another swing. “Only the glass would have been harmed.”

  “You’re white as a ghost.”

  He realized he was covered from head to toe with plaster dust and laughed. “You will be, too, if you stay.”

  “Will, what are you doing?” Giselle said. “Put down the voormaaker.”

  Realizing he had some explaining to do, he set it down and wiped his face clean. “I’ve had it with all this mystery. We’re going to find out what’s in there.”

  Angelica winced. “What will Dad say?”

  “I don’t care anymore. If he’s angry, I’ll say, ‘Dad, you shouldn’t have left us like that. What did you expect?’ Now step back.”

  Again he swung the voormaaker. This time it made a resounding thud against a brick wall behind the plaster. Plugging their ears, the girls gave him space, and soon a clump of bricks fell into a space beyond.

  Will peered through the hole. “There’s a room!”

  Giselle stepped up to look.

  “Open it more,” she urged, sneezing from the dust.

  “Too many pipes in the way,” he said. “Over here.”

  Moving to the left, they carefully took down an old painting of a 17th Century Dutch couple standing by a windmill. The man, who wore a floppy hat with a long feather, held a sword and a hammer. His pretty wife wore a white lace cap and cradled a baby in her arms.

  “I’ve always wondered,” Giselle mused, reading the name painted on the bottom, “who ‘Rembrandt’ was.”

  “Dad says those are Steemjammers,” Angelica told her, pointing at the painting’s subjects. “Great-great-times-whatever grandparents.”

  Will swung the voormaaker. After several minutes of steady bludgeoning, he pounded a hole through the bricks that he could just squeeze through.

  “Lantern, please,” he said, and Angelica passed one through the hole.

  They followed him into a dark chamber the size of a small bedroom. It smelled musty, like an old book that had been left too long in a damp place. The bare brick walls were lined with cobweb-strewn pipes and control valves. Besides a small table, they could see little else. Will frowned. This wasn’t what he was expecting.

  “Looks like a maintenance room,” Giselle said. “I don’t think there’s anything special here.”

  “Verdoor,” Angelica sighed. “We’re in trouble!”

  “But why hide it?” Will said. He spotted a brass knob. “Hey, that’s the backside of a hidden door. It must open into the dining room.”

  “Let’s see,” his sister said.

  She took a step toward the secret door, but Will grabbed her. “Stop!”

  A hand-drawn sign on the floor read: “GEVOOR!”

  “That means ‘DANGER!’ in Dutch,” Giselle said.

  Will tossed a loose brick at the sign. A trap door opened, and the brick vanished into a dark pit.

  “Begekkin!” Giselle cried as the spring-loaded trap door snapped shut. Crazy!

  Angelica grabbed her brother. “This is totally wankenzink!” Insane!

  “Yes, it is,” Will agreed. “So be careful.”

  “Someone could have died!” Giselle said. “I wonder who put that sign.”

  Will carefully pushed open the trap door with his foot. Peering down with the lantern, he saw a twelve-foot deep pit with smooth walls and a padded mattress at the bottom.

  “Dad must have,” he said. “He didn’t want us getting hurt if we found this place and fell in. There must be something important here. Otherwise, why hide it so well, and why trap it?”

  Giselle opened a drawer in the table. “Look! It’s from Uncle Henry.”

  She held up a wax cylinder that had “H.S.” inscribed on one end and “Listen to this now!” on the other.

  “A phonograph cylinder?” Angelica asked.

  “This is the soft kind,” Giselle said excitedly, “that you can record on. You shout into a cone, and a needle makes a special groove. Maybe he left a message.”

  “If it’s just a song,” Will remarked, “I’ll go berserk!”

  ***

  In a corner of the living room between the knobbed couch and a spike-leafed potted plant that occasionally grew odd, cube-shaped red berries sat the old family phonograph. Will wound it up with a brass crank, while Giselle carefully placed the wax cylinder inside. He set it spinning and gently dropped the brass arm, putting the needle into the groove with a loud POP.

  After a moment’s hissing, Henry’s voice, faint and crackly, came from the device’s large brass horn: “My dearest children, if you’ve found this, it probably means I’ve been gone some time and that you’ve been searching Beverkenhaas for a
nswers. There are many things your mother and I’ve been meaning to tell you, but it was for good reason that we kept you in the dark all these years. Here are some useful things that you need to know.”

  Will felt his body quiver with anticipation. Was he at last going to get some answers?

  “Always keep the reservoir full!” Henry’s voice said.

  “Eenvoodink!” Angelica quipped with frustration. Obviously! “Tell us where you’ve gone, Dad!”

  They had to stop it and reset the needle, because she talked over his next sentence.

  “Patience,” Will said. “Let him finish.”

  Again the recording played, and Henry went through the list of things to do, such as keeping the machinery greased and the animals fed. The kids tensed, worried that they weren’t going to learn a thing.

  “Obviously you’re curious,” Henry’s voice continued, “so I’ll reward you with information that should satisfy you, but I’ll be asking you to do something in return.

  “As you know we’re not from Ohio, but our true home – this is so hard to explain. Almost 400 years ago our ancestors were driven by war to Amsterdam. Even there we didn’t feel safe, so we found a way to go to another place. For many generations we thrived there.

  “What place? Where? For now, trust me that it’s far away and very difficult to reach. Things went bad there, and we had to flee back here, to escape disaster.

  “We did not leave our homeland by choice. There, the Steemjammer name has great reputation. ‘They have the highest steem,’ it is said of us. At our workshop, we created wonders the likes of which no one had seen or imagined.

  “So, what went wrong? This you should know.

  “Over the years, problems grew, things we should have taken seriously but didn’t. Rivalries developed between the great engineering and scientific families. Some turned dark, consumed by greed and envy, especially a powerful family with the name Rasmussen.”

  Angela gasped. “See? I told you!”