“Now . . . do you want my help?” Brendan asked. “Should we chuck these?” He pointed to the pictures of Denver Kristoff’s family. The frames were splintered on the floor.
“It doesn’t seem right to throw away somebody’s memories,” said Cordelia, looking at the portraits in the moonlight, especially the ones of baby Dahlia. “It’s weird,” she said. “She was such an adorable baby, so cute and happy—”
“But she grew up to be the Wind Witch,” said Brendan.
“Yeah. There’s no indication whatsoever. Rousseau says that we’re all born as a blank slate, that we learn evil as we get older.”
“Pff, no way,” said Eleanor. “There’s kids in my grade who are already evil. There’s this one, David Seamer, who attacked his brother with a sledgehammer.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Brendan said. “What eight-year-old would be able to lift a . . . Hold on. . . .”
Brendan suddenly ran back down the stairs. “See you soon!”
Cordelia and Eleanor looked at each other. “What got into him?” Cordelia asked.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Brendan searched through the detritus on the floor. Will approached, hearing the commotion. He hadn’t made much progress with the ball-peen hammer.
“What in blazes are you looking for?”
Brendan was too possessed by his latest idea to answer. He grabbed a cluster of plastic shopping bags, a stack of disposable clear Solo cups, and the roll of duct tape. He put two of the cups over his eyes and attached them to his head with rough circles of tape.
“What are you doing?”
“Making water goggles. Now help me blow up these plastic bags.” Brendan demonstrated, inflating a bag like a balloon and tying it off. Air leaked out, but it kept its basic filled-up shape. Will followed, impressed by Brendan’s pluck. Soon they had five bags full of air. Brendan opened the door to the basement.
“You’re going down there?”
“I’m diving down there,” Brendan said. Without further explanation he stripped down to his boxers and handed Will the high-powered Maglite. “Just shine this toward the water.”
With plastic bags looped around his fingers and makeshift goggles on his head, Brendan waded into the flooded basement.
The beam of light cut through the murky water, but the goggles didn’t work as well as Brendan had planned. They immediately filled with briny liquid that made everything fuzzy. He squinted and tried to navigate, seeing only shapes in the gloom: the eerie old mannequin, the BlackoutReady generator . . . the cans!
Brendan had forgotten about the cans. They were scattered on the floor—and the Walkers and Will still hadn’t eaten since breakfast Lunchables. Brendan needed to get those cans; it didn’t matter what was inside. He scooped five of them up in one arm and kept looking for the thing he had come for. He knew that it would be on the floor too—it was too heavy to float. His lungs burned as he felt along the wood grain until he reached . . .
The sledgehammer.
Working quickly, with ripping pain brewing in his chest, Brendan slipped the now buoyant shopping bags over the handle of the hammer. Then he pushed off the bottom with his last bit of strength, swam up, and burst out of the water in front of Will.
“I got it!” he shouted. “A real hammer! And these!” He passed the cans to the pilot.
“Cordelia! Eleanor!” Will called. “Food!”
The Walker sisters arrived in the kitchen almost before Will was finished shouting. They quickly dug up a can opener and got into the Green Giant corn Brendan had salvaged. It might’ve been cold and soggy, but corn had never tasted so good.
“Mm, how much of this do we have?” Cordelia asked.
“Lots,” said Brendan. “I can keep diving down to get them whenever we’re hungry.”
“Are there canned peaches, too, for dessert?” Eleanor asked. Everybody laughed. But Eleanor kept talking. “Or bottled water?”
No one laughed at that. They were all terribly thirsty, and there wasn’t any fresh water in the house; all they had to drink was canned corn juice.
“Sorry, Nell,” said Brendan. “Maybe when we bust open the wall we’ll find some water.”
“Let’s get to it,” Will said, lugging the sledgehammer into the hallway. “Corn gives me strength!”
The Walkers followed. Will lined the sledgehammer up with the X and looked over his shoulder. “I must ask you ladies to stand back.”
“Excuse me?” asked Cordelia. “Have you decided to become sexist again?”
“This isn’t women’s work,” Will said, and before Cordelia could fire off a comeback, Eleanor interrupted—
“What about your shoulder? You’ll break your stitches!”
“Nonsense,” Will said, even though the pain in his shoulder was intense and he knew he’d have only one chance to do this. Gritting his teeth, he swung the sledgehammer back—
And smashed it through the wall!
It was one clean hit, direct at the X, and given what happened next, even Cordelia had to be impressed with Will’s engineering precision. From the crater in the wall, a single crack sprang up to the ceiling, zigging and zagging as it rained down paint chips, and then two chunks of plaster fell inward in one clean motion.
The Walkers and Will were staring at a large hole in the wall, coughing dust that hadn’t been disturbed in nearly a century.
As the cloud cleared, a passageway was revealed behind the hole, black and foreboding, with a row of unlit torches mounted at eye level. It disappeared into the darkness in both directions.
Cordelia grabbed a candle from the floor and touched it to the nearest torch. With a thick whoosh the torch burst into flame; the hallway was illuminated in flickering orange. In one direction it stretched toward the living room; in the other it went toward the kitchen; but in both ways the corridor seemed to turn at the last minute, leading to points unknown. Aside from the rows of torches it was bare.
“Shall we?” Will asked, moving inside.
“Only if I get to hold the flashlight,” said Eleanor. “I don’t trust torches.”
Cordelia handed it to her as they entered single file. “Which way?” she asked. Eleanor insisted on doing eeny, meeny, miny, moe to determine that they would head toward the kitchen.
Will took the first torch off the wall and used it to light the others. Each torch lit made the passageway a little brighter and less intimidating for Eleanor. Checking over her shoulder to see the way back, she said, “It’s like Hansel and Gretel with the bread crumbs.”
“Didn’t they wind up getting eaten?” Brendan asked.
“Shhh,” scolded Cordelia, but Eleanor had already smacked her brother, sending his hair dangerously close to open flame.
Around the first bend, the corridor widened into an eight-foot chamber. Against the wall was a pale bookshelf—but instead of rushing up to investigate it, Cordelia recoiled.
“It’s made of bones!” she said. Indeed it looked as if the bookshelf were constructed from a bleached human skeleton, with twisting, knobby femurs for legs, and tibiae for shelves, on which the books sat crookedly. Brendan looked closer, tapping his fingers against it.
“It’s just wood, Deal.”
Cordelia’s vision snapped back into place: the bookshelf was made of white driftwood held together with brass screws. The dancing, mocking light of the torches was playing tricks on her.
“Sorry,” she said.
“What are these books?” asked Will. “More Denver Kristoff trash? He was quite the prolific egomaniac.”
“These look different,” said Eleanor.
Cordelia pulled a book off and opened its worn leather cover to find a title page in French with a wood-block print of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden . . . except Adam’s head was split into four sections with brains spilling over the edges and Eve had a withered third leg protruding from her torso. Cordelia shuddered and turned the page to see an etched print of a skull with four eye sockets—and then a rosy-cheeked baby with
stunted flippers instead of arms—
“Ugghh! It’s like an ancient book of medical curiosities,” she said, closing the volume and returning it to the shelf.
“Cool! Let me see!” Brendan exclaimed, but the moment he opened the book, it only took him one glance to close it. “Not really cool.”
Will grabbed a second book. This one appeared to be a Spanish encyclopedia. But the topics . . .
“Human sacrifice,” Will said, showing Cordelia and Brendan a print of a feather-crowned Aztec priest ripping a beating heart from the chest of a terrified victim. Will held the book away from Eleanor to prevent her from seeing the grotesque image.
“This Kristoff dude was into some sick stuff,” said Brendan, opening something called The Gods of Pegāna, one of the few volumes that was in English. “‘Before there stood gods upon Olympus, or ever Allah was Allah, had wrought and rested Mana-Yood-Sushai.’”
“A god of sushi? What’s that about?” asked Eleanor.
“That’s a rare work by Lord Dunsany: a compendium of invented deities,” said Cordelia. “May I see?”
Brendan handed it over and opened something called The Redolent Garden. Cordelia looked at The Gods of Pegāna before she and Will checked out the other books. It was tough to determine the subject matter, because they were in so many languages—French, Arabic, German—but they seemed to cover indigenous fertility practices, herb cultivation, potion making, witchcraft, and demonology, complete with pictures of howling spirits and the fires of hell. The books even smelled evil—the yellowing pages mixed with the old ink produced a sharp tang.
“Smells like rotting flesh,” said Cordelia.
“Oh,” remarked Will, “and when have you smelled rotting flesh?”
“Well, never, really . . . but I, um . . . I’ve read a lot of detective stories, and they always say that rotting flesh smells like five-month-old lunch meat or red snapper that’s been sitting in the sun for too long,” said Cordelia.
“Rotting flesh smells nothing like this book,” said Will. “And trust me, once you’ve smelled it, you will never forget it.”
Cordelia stopped herself from asking exactly where Will had been when he’d smelled rotting flesh and went back to paging through a book called The Apocrypha Bestiary. She stopped looking after seeing enough flashes of human misery—men pulled apart on the rack, babies torn from their mothers by woolly beasts, corpses feasted on by ghouls—to give her a week’s worth of nightmares. Eleanor calmly looked down the hallway the whole time. She wasn’t worried about what was in the books; she was worried about what was in the house.
“Let’s move on,” said Cordelia, snatching The Redolent Garden out of Brendan’s hands.
“Hey! I was just getting to ‘Painting the Female Body for Ritualistic Sacrifice.’”
“You hate reading.”
“Not stuff like that!”
“We’ve got to stay on course and see where this hallway leads. These books are giving me the creeps.”
The Walkers and Will continued into the bowels of the house, lighting torches as they went. The passageway twisted back and forth but didn’t branch—until they reached a thick, rusted steel door on the left side. The door looked as if it would have a very strong lock, but it stood partially open, tempting them.
“A little too easy,” said Brendan. “Who wants to go first?”
No answer.
“Will?” asked Brendan.
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the oldest.”
“Not by bloody much.”
“Because you have a gun,” Eleanor suggested.
“That won’t help against whatever spirits are down here!”
“Because we trust you,” Cordelia finally said. Will couldn’t back down from that remark. He slowly pushed the door open with his Webley to reveal—
“A wine cellar! Now these are my kind of spirits!”
The room was twice as big as the chamber that held the bookshelf. It was lined with unlit torches—and dominated by a wooden rack cradling countless bottles of wine. Will stepped in.
“1899! A very good year.” He grinned, holding up a bottle.
“Put that back,” said Eleanor. “Isn’t there any soda?”
“They don’t keep fizzy drinks in wine cellars,” said Will. “There’s no corkscrew?”
“She’s right, Will. Put the wine back,” said Cordelia. “Why don’t you and Bren keep exploring the passageway while Eleanor and I look in here?”
“Look for what, exactly?”
“Water!” Eleanor snapped. “Wine doesn’t count!”
“Fine,” said Will.
The two boys stepped out, but not before Brendan warned his sisters, “Careful you don’t lock yourselves in. Looks like this room locks from the inside.” He pointed to a metal bar that could slide into place across the door.
“Thanks, Bren.” Cordelia fired up the Maglite and began to search the wine cellar with Eleanor. The light flashed against a gorgeous antique vanity by the door. The mirror was streaked with dust; its edges were cracked with age.
“I’ll bet Denver Kristoff’s wife spent a lot of time in here,” Eleanor said. “This looks like girl stuff.”
“I think Denver was a vain person. Most writers are,” said Cordelia. “He probably sat here and trimmed his beard and waxed his mustache before hitting the town with our great-great-grandfather.” To prove her point, she opened one of the vanity drawers and pulled out a rusted straight razor. “See? Clearly for a man.”
“Then . . . he wore makeup too?” Eleanor asked, holding up a velvet pouch of beige powder.
“That’s actually strange; I didn’t think men still wore makeup in Kristoff’s time.”
Eleanor opened another drawer containing a tin of cream, a book of matches, and an old, yellowed photo, which she handed to her sister. Cordelia examined the photo and saw an inscription on the back.
“‘The Lorekeepers, 1912. The Bohemian Club.’”
The picture showed a group of men standing on a grand spiral staircase in an ornate hall, with tiny gargoyles carved into the posts of the banisters. The men wore black robes and huge powdered wigs that rose a foot above their heads.
“This is the club that Rutherford Walker wrote about!” said Cordelia.
“And those are the Lorekeeper guys he talked about,” said Eleanor.
“What a ridiculous sense of fashion. I mean, powdered wigs were retro even in 1912!” Cordelia began scanning the faces in the picture; there were about forty men. “There! Denver Kristoff.”
She pointed to a man with a stern face and a perfectly manicured beard—the same face they had seen in the photo upstairs. The man had eyes that both stared at Cordelia and seemed to gaze unfocused into empty space, as if looking out at horrors only they had seen.
“See our great-great-grandfather anywhere?” asked Eleanor.
“I’m not sure. Try and find someone who looks like Dad,” said Cordelia, but no matter how hard they looked, they couldn’t find anyone. After a while the faces began to look the same.
“It’s useless! I hate it!” Eleanor yelped, grabbing the picture to rip it up—but Cordelia stopped her.
“Nell, no. It’s another piece of the puzzle. We can’t let our emotions get the best of us. Think. Denver Kristoff and Rutherford Walker were best friends in 1906, but by the time this picture was taken, six years later, it looks like Walker’s nowhere to be seen. So what came between them?”
While Cordelia and Eleanor pondered that question, Brendan and Will arrived at another door in the hallway. This one wasn’t metal; it was made of decaying wood. Will held one of the torches from the wall for light; the torchlight played off the grain.
“This time, you go first,” suggested Will.
“Only if I get your gun,” said Brendan.
“Nice try. I’ll cover you.”
Brendan stepped forward nervously, turning the doorknob and pushing in. The door wouldn’t budge.
“D
’oh,” he said, “I guess it opens out.” He pulled the door open—and collapsed back with a shriek as a skeleton fell on top of him!
Will almost shot the skeleton, but he quickly realized that it wasn’t a threat, even though it was covering Brendan with clacking bones. Brendan scrambled away. “What the—what?”
The open door revealed an empty closet; the only thing inside had been the skeleton, whose bones were kept together by screws or glue. It lay on the floor now, splayed out as if it had belly flopped there, the toothy face staring at Brendan. Just above the left eye was a chip in the skull.
“Calm down,” said Will, picking the skeleton up by its head. The bones draped limply. “Looks like an old medical prop. Haven’t you ever heard of a skeleton in the cupboard?”
“Not funny,” Brendan said. “That used to be a real human being.”
Will shrugged and pushed the skeleton back in as Cordelia and Eleanor came running down the hall to find out what their brother was screaming about.
“Tell them we saw a spider or something,” Brendan whispered to Will. “If Eleanor sees that skeleton she’ll need like twenty years of therapy.”
“What happened?” Cordelia asked.
“No worries. Brendan opened this closet. There was a spider inside,” said Will.
“How big?” asked Eleanor.
“Huge,” said Brendan. “Probably a tarantula.”
“A tarantula?” exclaimed Eleanor. “I’ve never seen a real live tarantula!”
She whisked open the closet before Will or Brendan could stop her.
Once again, the skeleton fell out, this time directly on top of Eleanor, covering her like a bony blanket. Eleanor shrieked and grabbed it to get it off, but the jumble of fingers, bones, and teeth got caught in her hair and clothing. She tried to shake it away, but as she twisted and turned, it only got more tangled up with her. For a moment it looked as if the two were doing a high-speed Cirque du Soleil routine—before Eleanor took off running back down the hall, screaming her head off, with the skeleton still attached.
House of Secrets Page 14