Joe didn’t answer. I could tell he was still figuring out whether she was the victim or the villain.
I nodded to Layla. “And we almost got killed a few times doing it, so I think you’d better tell us what’s going on.”
“Thank you guys so much,” she said. There was no way to read her expression through her mask, but she sounded teary. “I didn’t think anyone would ever find me.”
“So you’re not with them? Then why are you dressed up in that awful costume?” Joe asked, not bothering to hide his skepticism.
“They made me, I swear. You’ve got to believe me,” she pleaded.
“Keep talking and we’ll see,” Joe said.
“Two of them grabbed me off the street after school. I think they drugged me, because at first I thought I was just having a bad nightmare, but I woke up down here. They told me there was no way to escape and that I’d die if I tried, so I went along with it until I could figure something out.”
“Went along with what?” I asked.
“I don’t know if you’ll believe me. It all seems so crazy, I don’t even know if I believe it myself,” she said.
“Try us,” Joe said. “You’d be surprised what we’d believe at this point.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay, well, these guys, the Knights of whatever they call themselves, they’re supposed to be the direct descendants of an old secret society that was started by that Admiral guy from the statue in the town square.”
I nodded.
“So this weird Grandmaster person is the boss, and he gives orders to that Keith creep and some of the others and they give orders to us. Keith said they were recruiting the other descendants to claim some kind of birthright. I told him kidnapping wasn’t exactly recruiting, and he said that some people needed more convincing than others, but according to him, everyone came around and joined the club when they heard what they had to gain.”
“Which is . . . ?” I prodded her.
“Pirate treasure!”
Joe and I exchanged glances. All the myths and legends Mr. Schneider had told us about in the library were turning out to be true.
“I know, it’s wild!” Layla continued. “They say there are loads and loads of it. Enough for everybody to be superrich. I think it’s a bunch of baloney, but who knows? I mean, this place exists, and I never would have believed that if you had told me before I was dragged here. And it does have a big vault. I guess anything’s possible.”
More pieces were starting to click into place. If the Knights thought the Admiral’s treasure was locked in the vault and the vault wouldn’t open without a giant skeleton key roughly the same size as the Admiral’s “key to the city,” well then, the theft of the key from the statue might finally make sense. And if they were targeting descendants of the original Knights, then Layla’s kidnapping made sense too. That is, assuming Sal was right and they were related to the Constable Foreman from the old book Mr. Schneider showed us.
I was tempted to interrupt with questions, but Layla was on a roll.
“But what do I need a treasure for? I’m in high school! And my dad’s practically the sheriff. Like I’d really go behind his back and be a part of some crazy conspiracy. I’d be grounded until I was thirty!” Layla looked around nervously and lowered her voice. “But that’s why they wanted me so badly—because my dad is deputy sheriff. They say they’re going to use the treasure to fund some master plan to take control of all of Bayport. They want me to follow in my dad’s footsteps and rise through the police force so that they can have a Knight to pull strings from inside the department. Nuts, right?”
I nodded, encouraging her to keep talking.
“They say they already have other important people in the mayor’s office, as well as the kid of a city councilman.”
“Is it Daniel Saltz?” I asked. “Councilman Saltz’s son?”
“That would explain the other kidnapped student,” Joe commented. “He must be related to one of the original Knights too.”
Layla shrugged. “I don’t know who it is, because they make everyone wear masks all the time except when we’re alone in our rooms. People gossip when Keith isn’t around, but I don’t recognize their voices, and they all seem totally on board with the plan anyway, so I just keep my mouth shut. You guys are the first people I’ve talked to in a week! I’m totally rambling, aren’t I? You don’t how good it feels to finally be able to tell somebody all this!”
From his face, I knew Joe was struggling with whether or not to believe her. I was distracted by something else, though.
“Um, are those Hot Pockets?” I asked, noticing the contents of the tray she’d been carrying.
“Yeah, that’s about all we eat down here. Hot Pockets, pizza rolls, and instant popcorn. It’s totally killing my diet.”
“But we’re in an ancient underground city halfway to the center of the earth. Do you cook them over hot coals or something?” Joe asked.
“Nah, we use the microwave,” she said nonchalantly.
She must have seen the surprise on our faces.
“Oh yeah, they totally have electricity down here. The whole place is wired. All those torches are just for theatrics, as far as I can tell. There’s actually a full kitchen and a game room with a fifty-inch flat-screen TV and an Xbox.”
“Kind of like Mole Town,” Joe said. He turned to me. “What if Sal is behind this place too?”
It was like Mole Town. The decor was different, but the Secret City had a lot in common with the homeless camp we’d found under the train station. And it was Sal who had engineered the whole thing up there.
“It’s hard to believe Sal would really be capable of all this,” I said to Joe.
“Who?” Layla asked.
We didn’t answer right away. If Layla really didn’t know she had a long-lost homeless great-uncle who might also be a cult leader, I figured now probably wasn’t the time to tell her.
“Do you have any idea who the Grandmaster might be?” I asked her instead.
“Nope. He’s not around much, and when he is, he never takes off his mask,” she said, pausing to think. “He does seem older than everyone else, though. At least I think it’s a he. He never speaks, so it’s hard to tell. He always just stands there with his big trident and has Keith speak for him.”
Joe and I exchanged a look. So the Grandmaster was a brilliant treasure-obsessed engineer who never spoke? That was a pretty unique criminal profile, and I could think of only one person who fit it.
Layla’s great-uncle Sal.
“It’s got to be him,” I said to Joe.
“What are you guys talking about?” Layla asked.
Joe hesitated. “I want to be able to trust you, Layla—I just don’t know if I can.”
“You have to believe me,” she pleaded, grabbing hold of the bars like she was the one locked inside instead of us. “What can I do to convince you I’m telling the truth?”
“Do you think you could get us out of here?” I asked.
She fidgeted nervously before answering. “I don’t know. But I’ll try.”
Then she reached through the bars and grabbed Joe’s hand. “Thank you for coming to find me. It’s the sweetest, bravest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“I, um, you’re welcome” was all he managed to stammer before footsteps interrupted him.
“I have to go,” Layla said, withdrawing her hand and quickly pushing the tray of food through the bars. “I’ll do my best to come back for you.”
Another Knight stepped around the corner. “They need us down at the altar. Keith says it’s time.”
Layla gave us a quick glance and hurried after the other Knight.
“Time for what?” I asked as they disappeared around the corner.
“I think we’re about to find out,” Joe said, pointing to the amphitheater below.
A dozen or so Knights in masks and robes gathered around the altar, where an object was draped in red cloth. Layla and the other guard ran u
p to join the rest of them as Keith raised his cane in the air.
“Behold, the Grandmaster approaches!”
14
FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE
JOE
I WATCHED IN AMAZEMENT AS another figure approached the altar dressed in the same robe and mask as the rest. He carried a trident that looked just like the one in the Admiral’s statue.
The Grandmaster walked to the top of the steps in front of the vault, lifted the trident, and banged the blunt end on the ground three times. The rest of the Knights folded their arms and bowed their heads.
The Grandmaster banged the trident on the ground three more times, and everyone lifted their heads to face him.
“Are you seeing this?” I whispered to Frank.
“It’s like we’ve traveled back to the eighteenth century,” he said in hushed awe. “We may be the first outsiders to witness something like this.”
“Yeah, and it’s freaking me out,” I said.
Keith stepped forward and bowed to the Grandmaster, who banged his trident on the ground another two times. Keith turned to face the rest of the Knights.
“Our exalted and benevolent Grandmaster says that it is time to unlock the mysteries left to us and claim our inheritance. The Secret Order of the Knights of the Bay must again rise to the wealth and power that is our destiny!” he announced to wild cheers.
“Unveil the Key to the City of Fortune!”
Two Knights stepped forward and dramatically swept away the red cloth, revealing the giant bronze key that had once hung from the Admiral’s statue. Keith lifted the key and carried it up the steps to the waiting Grandmaster, kneeling before him to present it.
The Grandmaster took the key from Keith and held it aloft to more cheers. Then he turned to the vault door.
“Here we go,” I whispered, secretly excited to see if Sal was right about the pirate treasure.
The room went totally silent. The Grandmaster inserted the key into the giant keyhole. It fit perfectly.
The door swung open slowly on its own. The crowd inched forward to see what was inside.
The vault was cavernous—big enough to hold more treasure than anyone could imagine—only it was empty. The only thing in the center of the stone floor was a single sheet of paper.
Gasps and murmurs filled the room as it dawned on the Knights that their treasure—the one they’d given up their normal, aboveground lives for—wasn’t there.
Keith rushed into the vault to pick up the sheet of parchment.
“It’s from the Admiral,” he said, earning more gasps from the Knights. He began to read aloud:
“To those whose eyes have invaded this, the Temple’s innermost sanctuary, without invitation, you have a choice. Choose wisely and be granted treasure, though perhaps not the kind you seek.
Ever since my beloved wife passed away, leaving me with no heirs of my own, it has been my sincerest wish to leave my fortune to my brothers in the Knights. This was in order to carry on our sacred mission of bringing prosperity to Bayport. However, I have since discovered that greed has driven those same brothers to betray me. This is as crushing to me as the loss of a cherished family member. It is with heaviness in my soul that I choose to revoke my brothers’ inheritance.
My treasure now resides out of the reach of treacherous hands, close to my heart, and only my beloved and I hold the keys.”
There were murmurs and angry grumblings.
“Hold on, there’s more,” Keith said, and continued reading:
“There is, however, another even more valuable treasure to be retained by the honest among you. Turn away from your greedy pursuits and you shall keep the greatest treasure: your own life. Should you still embark on stealing that which gleams and sparkles, do so at the peril of your own soul. For a curse is upon it, and should you seek it with impure intent, you shall only be rewarded with agony. After traveling to the world’s darkest corners, my ships have returned with more than mere treasure. I have come to possess a dark magic so powerful that even my own death cannot stop it. Choose to defy me—and desecrate the Knights’ legacy—and I shall own your soul. And that soul I shall destroy.”
Keith paused and looked up. “It’s signed, ‘the Last Knight, Admiral James T. Bryant.’ ”
Shaking with rage, the Grandmaster tore the letter from Keith’s hands and roared so loudly that the sound echoed off the walls.
The other Knights gasped. The Grandmaster had broken his silence.
It was something mute Sal never would have been able to do. “Preposterous!” the Grandmaster bellowed in a distinctively deep, gravelly growl.
That voice didn’t belong to Mr. Schneider, either. And it definitely wasn’t Delia Hixson’s. I knew that voice—this wasn’t the first time I’d heard it say that word.
The Grandmaster was Zeke!
15
AT DAGGER POINT
FRANK
WE’D BEEN RIGHT ABOUT OUR culprit being a tunnel-dwelling mole-man—we’d just picked the wrong mole. I knew it from the second the Grandmaster opened his gravelly mouth.
The really preposterous thing was how nice Zeke had seemed when he was giving us the lay of the land in Mole Town. I didn’t like to be duped, but any thoughts of getting back at him would have to wait.
“Bring me the prisoner!” Zeke screamed.
I gulped. As far as I knew, my brother and I were the only prisoners around.
“Do you think he knows about the key we found in the Admiral?” I asked Joe.
He patted his pocket to make sure the key was still there. “I don’t know, but after hearing that letter, I can pretty much guarantee he’d want to get ahold of it if he did.”
“I say we make another run for it the second they open the gate,” I told Joe.
Joe nodded. “It may be the only chance we get.”
I was seriously contemplating swallowing the key like the Admiral had when two Knights dragged a raggedy-looking man in shackles to the altar.
Sal.
“Tell me where the treasure is!” Zeke yelled in Sal’s face. Apparently he’d given up the whole silent shtick altogether.
Sal, on the other hand, hadn’t. But for him it wasn’t a shtick. No matter how much Zeke screamed and yelled, Sal wasn’t going to answer. Because he couldn’t.
“Tell me where it is now, you bum, or I’ll show you what a real curse feels like!” Zeke stabbed the air with his trident.
Sal looked terrified but stood his ground.
Keith piped up, “Um, excuse me, Grandmaster, sir, but I don’t think he can talk.”
“Just because he can’t talk doesn’t mean he can’t tell us what he knows.” Zeke jabbed a gloved finger at Sal’s chest. “You know where the Admiral hid that treasure, and you’re going to write down exactly how to find it.”
One of the Knights ran up with a notepad and a pen. Zeke grabbed it and thrust it into Sal’s hands. “Now start writing.”
Sal scribbled something and handed it to Keith. “He says he can’t,” Keith said. “That it’s cursed.”
“You really are crazy if you think a phony curse is going to stop us from claiming what’s rightfully ours,” Zeke bellowed. “Tell us where it is or I will throw you into that vault and seal it.”
Sal looked absolutely petrified, but that didn’t stop him from dropping the notepad on the ground and shaking his head vigorously. Zeke turned to Keith. “Throw him in a cell. He has exactly one hour to write us a story, and if it doesn’t have a happy ending, into the vault he goes.”
Sal struggled as Keith and Scott dragged him away, only to reappear minutes later as they threw him into the cell next to ours.
Joe and I rushed to the gated window between the cells as soon as the Knights left.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Sal was so startled he just about jumped out of his boots. It took him a second to realize the four eyes peering at him through the little window belonged to a couple of regular dudes and not ghosts.
/> Sal scribbled a note.
Who are you? How did you get here?
“Frank and Joe Hardy,” I said. “The underworld’s best teenage detectives.”
He thought about it for a second and then scribbled another note.
If you’re such great detectives, why are you locked down here?
“He has a point,” Joe said.
No one is supposed to know about the Secret City, he wrote. How’d you find it?
It had been one of the most eventful days in the history of eventful days and we didn’t have time to explain it all, so I did my best to give him the short version.
After we had caught him up on the basics, Joe finished with, “So, um, we actually kind of thought the bad guy might be you.”
“Sorry about that,” I said sheepishly. “But it’s been Zeke the entire time! He’s the Grandmaster.”
Sal looked baffled as he scrawled another note.
Zeke? What does he have to do with it? And why is the Admiral’s ghost trying to steal its own treasure? It’s supposed to be guarding the treasure from thieves.
“Ghost?” Joe repeated.
“He must think Zeke and his gang are the treasure-guarding ghosts from the story Curly told us,” I whispered to Joe. I turned back to Sal. “Those aren’t ghosts. It’s just Zeke and a bunch of people who think they’re descendants of Admiral Bryant’s secret society.”
Sal thought for a moment before replying.
I thought the Admiral’s ghost sounded familiar. But I traced the forebears myself. He’s not related to any of the original Knights. Sal held up the paper, mouthing the words I don’t understand.
“We were hoping you could explain it to us,” I said. “We know you’d been obsessed with finding the treasure before you lost your, uh, before your accident, and we know you told your niece that Layla was taken here.”
Sal wrote quickly, his hand flying across the page.
I was sure only I knew about the Secret City. When I saw the Knights carrying away Layla last week, I thought the Admiral had sent his ghosts to take revenge on me for opening the vault.
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