Eleanor stomped her foot. “No more fighting!”
They all winced. Eleanor could be super loud when she wanted.
“We don’t know who to trust because we don’t know anything! We don’t know which book we’re in, we don’t know if the Wind Witch is telling the truth, and we don’t know if those horse-killing warriors are coming back! Until we find that out, there’s no point doing anything!”
“How do you suppose we find the answers?” Brendan asked. “Do you see Wikipedia around here?”
“We can read,” suggested Cordelia.
“Read what?” asked Brendan.
“Kristoff’s novels,” said Cordelia. “All of them.”
“Say, that’s a good idea,” said Will. “That will show us which books we’re trapped in.”
“We already know some of the stuff here is from Savage Warriors,” said Cordelia, “and Will’s from The Fighting Ace, but is there more we need to find?”
“Sounds cool,” said Eleanor. “Like a scavenger hunt!”
“Exactly,” said Cordelia. “But first . . . Will, can you stand guard at the door? If Slayne and his warriors show up—”
“Or baldy butt breath,” added Brendan.
“Or that giant wolf that almost bit my head off,” added Eleanor.
“Right, if anybody shows up, call us, and shoot them,” Cordelia said. “Not necessarily in that order.”
Will saluted. “Happy to do my duty.”
“I’m going upstairs to get that RW trunk open,” said Cordelia. “That might be a clue too.”
“I want to open the trunk,” Eleanor started, but then she caught herself. “Right. I mean, no fighting.”
Eleanor and Brendan went to the library. With the sun just reaching the top of the sky, there was plenty of light to search the books. Eleanor had already separated Denver Kristoff’s novels from the rest, so she felt like a bit of an expert, at least enough to boss her brother around.
Brendan didn’t mind. He started reading a Kristoff book called Gladius Rex. He got twenty pages in before he decided it wasn’t one of the ones they were trapped in. (He was glad, too, because it was full of people getting eaten by lions.) He looked at Eleanor. She was trying to read Savage Warriors.
“How far are you?” he asked.
Eleanor scrunched her mouth. “Page thirty.”
Brendan could tell she was lying. “That’s great, Nell, but here, why don’t we switch?” Brendan knew that reading Savage Warriors might be the difference between life and death. He handed her Gladius Rex. “I think there might be some good stuff in here.” Eleanor accepted the trade and Brendan got into Savage Warriors quickly.
It wasn’t only about Slayne and his men. It was also about their boss, an evil queen named Daphne, who lived in a castle called Castle Corroway. Brendan recognized those names from his run-in with Slayne. But there was another side to Savage Warriors: the Resistance, a group of freedom fighters who were trying to stop Queen Daphne. They were common townspeople who secretly had jobs as spies and archers and weapon makers. They were led by a general, but more interesting to Brendan was the general’s daughter, this heroic girl named Celene.
Celene had purple eyes. She was smart and pretty and she wasn’t scared of anybody when she believed in something. Precisely the sort of girl who Brendan never came close to meeting in his school, where the only thing the girls were into talking about was one another. Brendan thought Celene was awesome.
He kept reading, getting scared when he came to a part of the book that featured a creature thousands of times more powerful than Slayne, when Eleanor called, “Bren! This book you gave me isn’t helpful! It’s all ancient Rome stuff!”
“Uh, is it?”
“Don’t play dumb with me! You gave me some book you know we’re not trapped in to keep me busy, because I don’t read fast enough!”
“Nell, that’s not true—”
“And now you’re lying! I’m going to help, whether you believe in me or not.” Eleanor put down Gladius Rex and picked up The Heart and the Helm, a book about pirates. “Maybe we’re trapped in this one too.”
Brendan gave her a hug. “You are helping, Nell. You are.”
Meanwhile, upstairs, Cordelia was secretly nearing the end of The Fighting Ace, but the book had a horrifying conclusion. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t finish it. You’re being ridiculous, she thought. He’s just some stupid boy. He’s not even out of high school. (The Fighting Ace had revealed that Will had lied about his age to get into the Royal Flying Corps. He was seventeen.) But no matter how she denied it, Cordelia cared about his fate.
She put the book down and went to the RW trunk. The heavy padlock was impossible to deal with, so she tried to smash the latch with a hammer. Unfortunately, the only one she could find was a tiny ball-peen hammer that she got from downstairs under the sink. The hammer didn’t work and she put it back.
She tried to pick the lock. Hanger . . . bobby pin . . . the rusty sword from one of Brendan’s old Civil War toy soldiers that had been blown into the bedroom during the attack . . . nothing worked.
“Will!” Cordelia called downstairs. “I need help!”
Within moments, Will reached the second-floor bedroom. Cordelia explained, “I can’t open the trunk. Do you have any ideas on how I—”
BLAM!
Will smiled and held up his revolver. A whiff of gunpowder slid past his face. The lock lay splayed open on the floor.
“Unnecessary machismo,” commented Cordelia.
Will shrugged. Brendan and Eleanor rushed into the room. “Cool,” Brendan said, looking at the shot-open trunk. “Will, do you think you could teach me how to use your gun?”
Will stashed his weapon. “It’s not a gun. It’s a Webley Mark Six revolving pistol. And it isn’t a toy. I don’t want you going near it, Brendan.”
“Fine,” said Brendan as Cordelia yanked open the trunk. It was a superbly made vessel, suffused with a pleasant tang of oak and brass, but all she cared about was what was inside.
“Yes!” she yelled. “Finally, we might be onto something!”
Brendan didn’t understand what Cordelia was so excited about. The trunk was full of brown accordion folders packed with stacks of yellowed papers.
“Documents? What are we gonna do with these?”
“Don’t you see the name?” Cordelia said. “Bren, you were right!” She handed him one of the accordion folders. A stamp on top said RUTHERFORD WALKER, MD.
“Our great-great-grandfather . . . ,” Brendan said, trailing off as he turned the folder around in his hands. He thought back to the pictures of the Kristoff family in the hallway. Time really does make things important, he decided. Once these were just ordinary papers. Now they’re history. My history. He was almost afraid to look. He thought about his parents and how they were still missing, how he was missing too. There are probably news broadcasts about the disappearance of the Walker children. What if my history ends with me?
“What kind of documents are they?” asked Eleanor.
“They appear to be medical records,” said Will.
“Correct,” said Cordelia, examining a folder on her lap. “Dr. Walker’s records for each patient. Let’s see . . . ‘Mrs. Mary Worcester of Duboce Avenue, San Francisco. Date of first visit: March sixteenth, 1899. Complaint: nervous distress. Treatment: one vitality tonic.’ Huh.”
“What’s a vitality tonic? Like a Red Bull?” Eleanor asked.
“I don’t think so. More like—”
“Quackery,” interrupted Will.
“Excuse me?” said Brendan.
“It’s quite clear. Your great-great-grandfather was a flimflam man.”
“A what?”
“Bamboozler. Con artist. Sham druggist.”
“Druggist? No. He was a doctor! MD, hello?” Brendan said.
“That may be, but he prescribed panaceas that—”
“Pana-what? Isn’t that a piece of land surrounded by water on three sides?
” asked Eleanor.
“That’s a peninsula,” said Cordelia.
“A panacea is a medicine that people wrongly expect will cure all sorts of ills,” said Will. “Look at the rest of this list. Mrs. Worcester was given a new ‘vitality tonic’ every two weeks at the cost of forty cents, for ‘mercurial eruptions’ and ‘neuralgia,’ and she kept coming back for a year, at which point her husband probably told her to stop seeing that Walker quack—”
“That’s our family you’re talking about!”
“Calm down. I’m not blaming the man. You Yanks are wild for your ‘elixirs’ and ‘supplements’ and ‘Coca-Cola.’ Put a healthy label on something and you can make a fortune in America!”
“He has a point,” Cordelia said. “Like acai berries. But anyway, maybe there’s a connection in these records between Rutherford Walker and Denver Kristoff.”
For the next ten minutes the Walkers searched their great-great-grandfather’s records. None of them liked to think of the man as being a sham, any more than they liked to think of their father and “the incident,” but they found no evidence to the contrary. Other than the vitality tonics, people who visited Rutherford Walker were prescribed “catarrh snuff,” “Oxien,” and “Indian root pills.”
“Look at this. He was officially a snake-oil salesman,” said Cordelia, finding a prescription for Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment.
“This is depressing,” said Brendan. “I don’t wanna read any more.” He reached his hands into the trunk—by now they were almost at the bottom—and flung the remaining folders aside, ready to storm out—
But he stopped. He was staring at a book. Right there at the bottom of the trunk. The Book of Doom and Desire.
“No way,” Brendan said. “It was that easy?”
The book’s cover had the eye that the Wind Witch had shown them. Brendan reached down—but Cordelia was faster, snatching it.
“Stop!” Eleanor called. “That’s not safe!”
“Relax,” Cordelia said. “This isn’t the book. It’s just the same symbol. See? It’s black, not burgundy. And the symbol isn’t burned in; it’s drawn with a pen.”
“Looks like a journal,” said Will, peering over Cordelia’s shoulder.
“I don’t think we should open it,” said Eleanor. “Could be a trap.”
“We have to open it,” said Cordelia. With a deep breath she turned to page 1, which was filled with the same script as the patient records. “Rutherford Walker’s handwriting! We found his diary!”
“Journal,” Will corrected. “Men don’t keep diaries.”
“Whatever—start reading!” said Eleanor.
They all sat around Cordelia, as if she were sharing a campfire story, while she began.
“‘April tenth, 1906. Dear Diary.’” Cordelia shot Will a look; he rolled his eyes. “‘Today I awoke with my head still spinning, thanks to the lecture I witnessed last night, delivered by the astounding Dr. Aldrich Hayes.’”
“Dr. Hayes! The Wind Witch mentioned that dude!” said Brendan.
“‘The lecture was entitled “Mythology and Magical Lore of the Californias.” It more than lived up to its name. In previous months I had heard rumors of this secret talk in salons and séances about town. The lecture was to be delivered at the Bohemian Club, where my less-than-spectacular aristocratic standing made it impossible for me to get in. I feared I would never see Dr. Hayes, who is both a lauded Yale professor and the rumored leader of the Lorekeepers.’”
“Lorekeepers? Who are they?” Eleanor asked.
“Doesn’t say,” answered Cordelia. “Now where was I . . . ?”
“There,” said Will, pointing to her place on the page. He had been reading along. Cordelia smiled and continued.
“‘When it seemed all hope was lost, I was called upon by my dear friend, a man who was never short of ideas: Denver Kristoff.’”
“Kristoff!” Brendan exclaimed. “You were right, Deal! Our great-great-grandfather did know him!”
“Keep reading!” urged Eleanor.
“‘Kristoff, like myself, was obsessed with matters of the occult. He felt it would be criminal to miss Dr. Hayes’s lecture. So he concocted an equally criminal plan: the two of us would sneak into the Bohemian Club. Surreptitiously, we smashed a basement window at Six twenty-four Taylor Street and wiggled in like worms. We made our way to the lecture hall and heard Dr. Hayes’s amazing speech.
“‘He spoke of many things that more “level-headed” men deny: the untapped powers of the human mind, the existence of spirits, and the haunted places of California. But most shocking was the moment when he spoke of a haunted place in our own backyard: Goat Island.’”
“We have a goat island in our backyard?” asked Eleanor.
“He wasn’t being literal,” said Brendan. “By ‘our own backyard’ he means the city. Fortunately, I know a lot about San Francisco’s history.”
“Ugh, Bren, we know,” said Eleanor as Cordelia rolled her eyes.
“Goat Island is called Yerba Buena Island now. When you go over the Bay Bridge and you see signs for Treasure Island? That’s connected to Yerba Buena.”
Cordelia kept reading. “‘According to Hayes, Goat Island once housed the Tuchayune people, a native tribe, who buried their leaders sitting up.’”
“Creep-ola,” said Eleanor.
“‘The Tuchayunes believed the island was a soft spot in the barrier between the human world and the spirit world, where powerful forces could sneak onto earth and wreak havoc. They buried their leaders sitting up under a carved stone shaped like an eagle to scare off any spirits who did slide through.
“‘Kristoff and I couldn’t resist this. We decided that we would travel to Goat Island, find the Tuchayune graves, and dig until we found the skeletons!’”
Cordelia closed the book. “That’s it?” Eleanor asked.
“That’s the end of this entry,” said Cordelia.
“Cool. Our great-great-grandfather and Denver Kristoff were ghost hunters!” said Eleanor.
“More like grave robbers,” said Will, “without a shred of respect for the dead! Imagine. Digging up some poor man who never did them a bit of harm.”
“You’re not thinking about the environment he was in,” said Brendan. “San Francisco has always been a place for freaks and weirdos. Séances and ghost hunting were huge back when this was written. Mediums were like rock stars.”
“Like what?” asked Will.
“The next entry is dated two weeks later,” said Cordelia, reopening the book.
“‘April twenty-fourth, 1906. Dear Diary: The tragedy that has befallen our city is too large and awful to comprehend, and too fresh to write about . . . so I will return to the story of Goat Island, and perhaps the part I played in the overwhelming calamity of our time!’”
“What’s he talking about?” asked Eleanor.
“I know,” said Brendan. “It’s the—”
But Cordelia continued.
“‘Kristoff and I made our journey on April seventeenth. We left in the dead of night. Kristoff had to do everything in the most impractical and exciting manner, so we stole down to the Embarcadero and unfastened a rowboat bobbing in the waves. Given my skill at seamanship I was not troubled by the currents. The moonlight shone clear as day. Taking turns rowing, we reached Goat Island without incident.
“‘I opened a map I had purchased from a Chinatown souvenir shop, showing the location of the eagle stone. With shovels on our backs, we hiked for two hours until we found it. The stone was crowned with an intricately eroded tip, and the moonlight that shone through created a most curious shadow on the ground. I feel no need to describe this shadow, Diary, for I have sketched it on your cover, so that some future explorer might be similarly affected by its odd manner.’”
Cordelia flipped the book around so everyone could see: the eye.
“‘We began digging. After an hour we had gotten only four feet down, but then my shovel jabbed through the ground and registe
red no resistance, as if it were sticking into thin air! Kristoff felt a similar phenomenon, and then the ground gave way beneath us!
“‘Kristoff and I landed on a dirt floor. With only a few minor bruises and scrapes, we lit our lanterns, revealing a chamber around us. It was a rough sphere with a six-foot diameter, hewed out of the earth as if by a giant insect. It was cool and dry . . . and in the center was a seated skeleton!
“‘The man had been a leader, no question. Beside him were a bird-bone whistle and a saw made from a coyote’s hip. But the most fantastic thing about him was what he held in his hands. A book. The skeleton was reading! His elbows rested on his knees. It almost looked as if he were surprised at the book’s contents! Kristoff approached the book. The cover bore the same symbol as the ground above.’”
Cordelia stopped.
“What? What happened next?” Eleanor asked.
“That’s it. The last entry.” Cordelia showed them how the rest of Rutherford Walker’s diary was blank.
“Are you kidding?” Brendan said.
“Infuriating!” Will snorted.
“It was The Book of Doom and Desire,” Cordelia said in a small voice. “Rutherford Walker and Denver Kristoff found it, together. A couple of amateur occult nerds digging up a Native American grave.”
“And that’s not all,” said Brendan. “All that stuff happened on the night of April seventeenth, 1906. You know what happened on April eighteenth?”
They all shook their heads.
“The Great San Francisco Earthquake.”
“Of course!” Will slapped his forehead. “Even I’ve heard of that one.”
“Biggest natural disaster in California history. Whole city was flattened. Three thousand people died. I did a report on it.”
“The day after Walker and Kristoff found the book . . . ,” said Cordelia.
“Not just the day after. At five a.m. So if the diary’s right, it might’ve happened literally as they were taking the book.”
“Who says they took it?”
“How do you think it ended up with Denver Kristoff? I’ll bet he and Gramps stole the book, which angered the spirits, who got their revenge by causing the quake. That’s what Rutherford felt guilty about.”
House of Secrets Page 10