Tunnel of Secrets

by Franklin W. Dixon

  “I’m not sure it would be in my best interest to tell you that. Not that it would do you much good anyway,” Zeke said, brandishing the dagger. “I have a treasure to retrieve. I just thought it was important that you understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. Not just for me, but for Bayport. Sometimes unpleasant sacrifices are necessary evils on the path to greatness.”

  We’d gotten our confession, but I could tell Zeke never doubted for a second that he’d still get away with it. He wasn’t the only one who knew his way around a tunnel, though, and I was willing to bet that he didn’t have any Urbex training under his belt.

  While Zeke had been talking, the water in the drainpipe had started inching its way to our ankles. That meant it was probably raining aboveground, and one of the first things all urban explorers learn is, “When it rains, no drains!”

  Zeke narrowed his eyes and lunged at us with the dagger.

  Layla grabbed on to me. And I grabbed on to the metal ring on the wall. Zeke, who had his back to the rumbling sound that suddenly erupted from the tunnel, didn’t grab anything. The rumble turned into a roar as an angry wall of water burst out of the darkness.

  “Flash flood!” I cried.

  By the time Zeke turned around, it was too late. The wave crashed into us with the force of a tsunami and carried him away screaming.

  Which was kind of inconvenient, considering he still hadn’t gotten around to telling us where the treasure was.

  I held on to the ring with all my strength as the wave carried Zeke past us.

  “Hold on!” I yelled to Layla.

  “I was gonna tell you the same thing!” she yelled back.

  The water started to slow to a steady rush. It hadn’t stopped rising, though; it was already past our waists and steadily growing higher.

  “We’re going to have to swim for it!” I screamed.

  “Ready when you are!” she yelled.

  I’m a good swimmer, but the current was so strong that it took everything I had to get to the hatch in the sewer’s ceiling. I grabbed on to the bottom rung of the ladder with one hand and reached behind me for Layla with the other. Together we swam to safety through the open hatch.

  Okay, maybe “safety” wasn’t the right word. We’d made it through the hatch into the portal above, but the portal was sealed! The door above it was locked tight, trapping us inside with the water rising second by second. The water surged higher and higher until there were only a couple feet of air left.

  “I don’t want to drown, Joe,” Layla pleaded as the water inched past our necks.

  17

  ZOMBIE GRAVEYARD

  FRANK

  SAL HAD BEEN SMART ENOUGH to clear out of the way before I started swinging the trident around me in a circle. I felt like samurai master Miyamoto Musashi in The Book of Five Rings, sending the rest of the Knights diving out of the way while Joe and Layla made their escape.

  By the time I stopped spinning, I was dizzy enough to fall over. Sal didn’t miss a beat, though. He ran past the dazed Knights, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me through a hidden exit behind the vault. A few twists and turns later, we stepped out into a dark, rainy alley. By now, I had a pretty good guess as to where the treasure was. The Admiral’s letter in the vault had said the only other person who knew where the treasure was hidden was his wife. Seeing as she was already dead when he wrote the note, I knew exactly where to find her.

  “Come on, Sal, let’s make for the Admiral’s Tomb,” I said.

  Sal shook his head so hard I thought he might give himself whiplash.

  “I know you’re worried about ghosts, but there’s no scientific evidence that they actually exist,” I explained.

  Sal shook his head no again. He took out the soggy pad of paper and wrote two words before the ink smeared: The Curse.

  I tried a different tactic.

  “The Admiral said the curse was for people seeking the treasure, right? But we’re not even doing that. We’re trying to save Layla and Joe. The Admiral would have done the same.”

  Sal nodded slowly and took his first step in the direction of the graveyard, a look of grim determination on his face.

  I gave him a reassuring pat on the back. “Layla is lucky to have you as a great-uncle, Sal. I think the Admiral would approve.”

  The corner of Sal’s mouth turned up just a little.

  I made a quick stop on the way, ducking into a convenience store to grab Sal a fresh notepad and use the phone before we reached the cemetery’s ancient black gates.

  The cemetery was the oldest—and spookiest—in Bayport, filled with three-hundred-year-old graves, raised marble mausoleums, and strange statues. The Admiral’s Tomb was the cemetery’s most famous mausoleum, which is a monument that houses the chamber where the actual corpse is, usually in some kind of stone sarcophagus.

  The tomb had large marble columns that framed a giant slab of a door engraved with an Eye of Providence—like the one over the Secret City vault, only bigger and more piercing. I’d shrugged off Sal’s fears, but the place was bone-chilling!

  We had almost reached it when Sal came to an abrupt stop and took off running like he’d seen a ghost. Only it wasn’t a ghost. Not technically, at least.

  I stood there gaping as the door to the Admiral’s Tomb creaked open, and pair of gore-drenched zombies came stumbling out!

  18

  TOMB RAIDERS

  JOE

  THE HATCH DOOR WOULDN’T BUDGE no matter how hard I pushed and pounded. At the rate the water was rising, Layla and I had only a minute tops before we were entirely submerged. Then I realized why I couldn’t get it open. I was supposed to pull instead of push! There was just enough of a groove in the metal for me to hook my fingers into and yank. It flew open, dumping a few hundred years’ worth of dirt onto our heads in the process.

  I managed to drag myself out, pull Layla up after me, and slam the hatch door before it could overflow. “Are you okay?” I asked, panting.

  “Thanks to you I am,” she said breathlessly. “I didn’t think we were going to make it out in time.” She looked around. “Where are we anyway?”

  That was a good question. There was just enough light to make out shapes and shadows. Which meant that wherever we were, it was either on the surface or close to it.

  We were in a large room with high ceilings and creepy statues lurking in the corners. There were also more cobwebs than I wanted to think about and a platform that held a pair of long, rectangular boxes.

  I started to get a sinking feeling. The boxes looked just about the right size to be . . .

  “Uh, Joe, are those coffins?” Layla asked with a quiver in her voice.

  “I think I know where we are,” I said as the pieces started to click into place.

  “We’re in some kind of tomb, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah. I wonder if it’s the Admiral’s.”

  “Is this where the treasure is hidden?” she asked.

  “It would make sense,” I replied. “The letter said the treasure was out of reach, where only the Admiral and his wife could get it. And his wife has been in here the whole time.”

  “You don’t think this place has a light switch, do you?” Layla joked, picking up a tall candelabra that held three ancient, mostly melted candles. “I left my fire-making spell back at Hogwarts, and this place is giving me the willies.”

  “I don’t know about a light switch, but maybe this will help,” I said, pulling the emergency kit from my pocket. I had totally forgotten about it until Layla spotted the candles. I just hoped the kit’s plastic case had kept the water out.

  I removed a match, scraped it against the wall, and—bingo!—it lit on the first try. The old wicks on the candelabra sparked and fizzed stubbornly, but they lit too.

  “And let there be light!” I announced as the tomb became visible. Thick cobwebs covered just about everything, and there was so much dust floating around that the air itself seemed to shimmer in the candlelight. And those statues I
’d spotted? Gargoyles with mouthless, bird-beaked faces . . . just like the ones on the Knights’ masks.

  “I think this place may have been less creepy in the dark,” Layla muttered. She turned to me and started laughing. “You look ridiculous!”

  “I, what . . . ?” And then I laughed too. We were both covered with so much muck from our crawl through the hatch that we barely looked human.

  I tried not to shudder as I pushed aside a curtain of cobwebs on my way toward the giant slab of marble that I figured must be the tomb door.

  I paused for a last look at the coffins.

  “Rest in peace, guys,” I said.

  I was about to turn back toward the door when something caught my eye. The his-and-hers coffins were decorated with strange markings. One had a big trident and that creepy eye symbol, which had to be the Admiral’s, and the other had an angel, which I figured was his wife’s.

  Hers also had an intricate design carved into the top. I crept closer and I realized there was something hidden in the center of it: a keyhole. And it looked like it would fit the key the Admiral had swallowed before he died.

  I tried to remember what his letter had said. Something about the treasure being close to his heart in a place only he and his wife knew about. “Layla, do you remember exactly what the Admiral’s letter said? The last part about him and his wife having the key to the treasure?”

  “Sure. I thought it was kind of sweet, actually. He said, ‘My treasure now resides out of the reach of treacherous hands, close to my heart, and only my beloved and I hold the keys,’ ” Layla recited.

  I pulled the bandanna-wrapped key from my pocket. “I wonder if this is the key he was talking about.” There was no way the detective in me was going to let me leave after finding the keyhole that might unlock the entire mystery.

  “Um, Joe, what are you doing?” Layla asked as I started to creep toward the coffin.

  “Just one second,” I said absently. “I want to see something.”

  I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and inserted the key into the keyhole. It fit perfectly.

  “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” Layla said.

  She was right. It probably wasn’t.

  But I turned the key anyway.

  There was a faint metallic click. I held my breath.

  A little hidden compartment popped open. Candlelight flickered over something inside, only it wasn’t treasure.

  It was yet another, even smaller, bronze key.

  19

  NIGHT OF THE LIVING BRO

  FRANK

  FROZEN IN FEAR, I RACKED my brain for a rational explanation for the two monstrous creatures that had just pushed their way out of the Admiral’s Tomb. That’s when one of the zombies started yelling my name.

  It was Joe and Layla! They were a mess, but they were very much alive.

  “Frank!” Joe shouted, looking more human by the second as the rain rinsed off the mud that covered him.

  “For a second there I was sure you were a couple of zombies!” I shouted back.

  “Nope, we’re very much un-undead, although I’m not sure we smell like it,” he said, cringing as he took a sniff.

  “Where’s Zeke?” I asked. “Did he get away?”

  “Well, more like swept away. Kind of like a goldfish flushed down the toilet of life,” Joe said cryptically.

  I was trying to figure out what that meant when Sal crept out from his hiding place behind a tombstone.

  “Hey, Sal! They made it! They’re not zombies at all!” I said, happy to see him.

  “Um, guys, you were going to explain what you meant before when you said he was my uncle,” Layla reminded us.

  “Oh, uh, well . . .” I could tell Joe was fumbling for the right way to break it to her that she had a secret uncle her mom had neglected to tell her about.

  “Maybe we should let Sal explain,” I suggested. “Would that be okay, Sal?”

  Sal nodded and pulled out the fresh notepad I’d picked up at the convenience store.

  We gave Layla and her newly discovered uncle a little privacy to get acquainted, while Joe filled me in on the soggy showdown with Zeke. He also told me how he’d used the key we’d found in the Admiral’s stomach to unlock a third key hidden in a secret compartment in Mrs. Bryant’s coffin.

  “No wonder the Admiral thought the key we found was important enough to swallow before he died,” I said. “He and his dead wife actually had both keys! And without his key, a would-be thief wouldn’t be able to retrieve his wife’s key, so that must mean you need both keys before you can unlock the treasure.”

  “All three keys, actually,” Joe said. “Because you need the giant key from the statue to unlock the vault to even discover you need the other keys. This guy must have been really paranoid about security.”

  “Well, someone did kill him over it,” I reminded Joe.

  “So what’s next, another key?”

  “I don’t think there is one,” I said as it began to hit me just how clever the Admiral had been. “I think the key you found in the tomb is the key to the treasure.”

  “Okay, but we can’t unlock a vault we can’t find.”

  “I think the Admiral gave us everything we need to solve the mystery in his letter,” I told Joe. “The Admiral wrote, ‘My treasure now resides out of the reach of treacherous hands, close to my heart, and only my beloved and I hold the keys.’ The part about the keys is literal, but the rest of it’s a riddle. He’s telling us exactly where the treasure is!”

  “Um, he is?” Joe asked.

  “Yup. Think about it. He said it’s out of reach and close to his heart. There’s only one place that meets both those criteria, and I have a good hunch exactly where that is.”

  Joe leaned forward in anticipation.

  “It’s in—” I began.

  “HARDYS!” an angry voice bellowed. Sirens pierced the air as Chief Olaf came huffing toward us.

  “Welcome back, Chief!” Joe said cheerfully as he slid the key back into his pocket. “Did you have a nice vacation?”

  “Don’t you ‘nice vacation’ me. I leave town for a few days and the whole place falls apart. Literally!” the chief muttered. “I should have figured you two were caught up in the middle of this. Now, do you want to tell me why I’m getting calls from a high school newspaper telling me the Hardy boys need backup at the cemetery? Because if this is some kind of prank, I’m going to toss you in jail so fast your spinning will alter the rotation of the earth’s axis.”

  “Nice analogy, Chief, although your science is a little off,” I said, unable to help myself. “But it’s no prank,” I added quickly.

  On the way to the cemetery, I’d used the phone at the convenience store to leave a message for Charlene, telling her to have the cops meet us at the Admiral’s Tomb.

  Charlene marched up right on cue, notepad in one hand and digital recorder in the other.

  “Hi, Charlene,” I said.

  “You want to tell me what this is all about, Hardy?” Charlene and Chief Olaf said at the exact same time. “Well—” I began, when Charlene cut me off.

  “Is that Layla? What’s she doing with the silent homeless guy?” she asked as Layla walked up with Sal.

  “Hi, Chief,” Layla said.

  “Layla? But—what—where—” the Chief fumbled. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks to Sal and Joe and Frank I am, anyway.”

  “Sal?” the Chief asked with a dumbfounded expression. “What does he have to do with—?”

  “Dad!” Layla yelled, cutting him off as Deputy Hixson sprinted around the corner and swept her up in a huge hug.

  “Baby girl, you have no idea how good it is to see you.”

  Joe put his arm around my shoulder. “Nothing like family, huh, bro?”

  I didn’t have to say anything. My brother already knew I was thinking the exact same thing.

  “What about Daniel?” Deputy Hixson said as he pulled awa
y from Layla. I explained that Daniel was safe and quickly described where he was in the Secret City. Deputy Hixson dispatched a crew of officers to rescue him.

  “You’re in real trouble, Hardys,” the chief said from behind us. “I’d toss you in a cell right now for interfering with a police investigation if I didn’t need you to tell me what the heck is going on here first.”

  “Excuse me, Chief,” Deputy Hixson said, walking over to us with Layla and Sal on either side. “You’re right, the boys have some explaining to do, but the important thing is that everyone is safe.” The deputy pulled Layla close to him. “These three have been through a lot today. I think we can let Joe and Frank off the hook just this once. I have a feeling we’ll have plenty of other chances to yell at them in the future,” he said with a wink in our direction. “What do you say, Chief?”

  “I think I need another vacation, is what I say,” the chief said, getting a laugh out of everyone whether he meant to or not. “Fine, Deputy. I left you in charge, so it’s your call.”

  “Yes!” Joe and I said at the same time, throwing each other a high five.

  “But!” the chief barked, interrupting our celebration. “I want a full debriefing right this instant.”

  I was probably pressing my luck with the chief, but with the deputy on our side, I took my chances. I said we’d tell him everything . . . just as long as Charlene could sit in on it too.

  Charlene eagerly agreed and jotted something down on her notepad, which she casually tilted in my direction so only I could see it.

  Hardy—Ur the best.

  Just then, I felt like it too.

  Joe, Layla, and I brought everyone up to speed on everything: from Sal’s discovery of the Secret City, to our discovery of Zeke’s discovery of Sal’s discovery, to Zeke’s resurrection of the Admiral’s secret society and the empty vault, to Zeke washing away in the tunnel beneath the Admiral’s Tomb.

  Okay, so there may have been a detail or two we “forgot” to mention.

  Like the fact that the treasure wasn’t just lost to history. And that we had a pretty good idea where it was.