Secrets of the Deep

by E. G. Foley

  Dani nodded to confirm this. “All that noise, and she never even stirred. C’mon, Lil. We’re going in now.”

  The little mermaid was still standing on the beach gazing out to sea. Dani went and took her hand before Lil was tempted to follow her sister.

  But Jake had narrowed his eyes, considering Maddox’s suggestion about the gryphon feather. “That’s not a bad idea. Maybe we should try it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if Nixie would go along with that,” Isabelle said as they climbed the stone steps wearily as a group. “Whatever did this to Aunt Ramona, it must have come from a very powerful magic source. Doesn’t Nixie always say you should never mix magic unless you know exactly what you’re dealing with?”

  “Yes, she does,” Dani agreed, “and she also said Her Ladyship was working High Magick, whatever that is. But it sounded serious. I don’t think you should do it, Jake. We don’t want to make things worse. Let’s just send the Inkbug message and let the adults from the Order figure out what to do with her.”

  “Very well. I suppose you’re probably right,” Jake said.

  Isabelle moved aside and let the others walk ahead of her, waiting to go up the steps beside Maddox. In the darkness, they exchanged a shy glance, but said nothing.

  Then they all went back up to the house.

  Unfortunately, the Inkbug’s little wooden box had been thrown across the room when the pirates had stormed through the house, upending furniture and hurling things about. At first, the kids thought the magical caterpillar had run away—or worse—until they finally found the tiny creature cowering under a bookshelf.

  Isabelle managed to coax the Inkbug out of hiding onto her hand, but to their dismay, one of its antennae had been broken, leaving it unable to transmit messages. It would be weeks before a new one grew back. Nor could they fix it with one of Red’s healing feathers.

  A book Jake had found in his library back at Griffon Castle some time ago had said that gryphon magic only worked on mammals and birds, not fish, insects, or plant life forms.

  Izzy opened the lid of its box and let the shaken Inkbug flee back into the comfort of its home, but its injury meant that now they were cut off from the Order.

  They could still send an ordinary message, but the telegraph office didn’t open until nine tomorrow morning.

  She was beginning to wonder if they’d even make it that long, for with Nixie as leverage, Davy Jones could easily force her lovesick brother to fix the orb…and unleash a second watery Armageddon.

  # # #

  Archie and Nixie kept nudging each other with their elbows and squabbling through their masks as they were taken deeper into the sea to be brought aboard the Flying Dutchman.

  This was nothing short of a catastrophe, and Archie knew it.

  He already felt awful for his failure to escape with the orb, and knew enough to dread the consequences of refusing this particular captain’s orders.

  Indeed, the only thing that could’ve possibly made the situation worse was exactly what Nixie had done.

  It was all very admirable of her, of course, but now she was in the most awful danger, all because of him. He had half a mind to throttle her. He never would’ve dreamed they’d have their first official fight under such circumstances.

  Then again, it was most likely to be their last, so they might as well have it.

  “How could you do that?” he whispered for the tenth time.

  “What was I supposed to do? Leave you to fend for yourself?”

  “Oh, I see! You think I’m such a thoroughgoing boob that I would botch this part, too—humph! Well.” He sniffed with indignation. “No doubt I deserve that, after I failed to get away. I admit it, I tarried, but not on purpose. Excuse me if it’s not in my nature to abandon my friends in their time of need!”

  “Oh, would you shut up?” Nixie scolded in a whisper. “What are we going to do?”

  “Die, most likely,” he huffed. Though it probably applied to her, too, Archie couldn’t bring himself to repeat Davy Jones’s threat about chopping him up into pieces if–or rather, when–he refused to carry out the captain’s orders.

  Meanwhile, Jones’s crew had metamorphosed back into various aquatic monsters once they were submerged, similar to the effect that contact with salt water had on the mermaids.

  “See those lights ahead?” Nixie asked, pointing to the dim red and green clouds of illumination glowing ahead, deeper down.

  “I’m not talking to you,” Archie replied.

  “Ridiculous egghead,” she muttered. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “Obviously, it’s the ship!” he retorted.

  And so it was.

  The Flying Dutchman floated at anchor midway between the tossing silvered surface overhead and the sandy seabed below. The sinister red and green gleam of its signal lanterns revealed the ominous silhouette of the jet-black, three-masted ship.

  As their captors propelled them closer, he glimpsed the figurehead under the bowsprit: the grinning skull of a cloaked Grim Reaper skeleton with its scythe at the ready.

  Archie gulped, but it was probably due to Jake’s influence that a small part of him was excited to be going aboard the legendary Flying Dutchman. He shook his head at his own illogic. I’m becoming as mad as he is.

  “All aboard!” yelled the thresher shark man, whom Archie had heard addressed as Carnahan.

  The fellow kept giving him dirty looks. Apparently, he hadn’t forgotten Archie shooting him with the blunderbuss in Driftwood.

  Then Captain Jones turned to him and Nixie. “Now, are you two going to cooperate, or do I need to put you in soul cages?”

  They assured him they wouldn’t cause any trouble, so they were allowed to remain on deck under the big round watchful eyes of Squid Head, a.k.a. Lebrec.

  “Make sail!” the captain barked. Bubbles trailed up from his mouth as he gave his crew several more orders. “Mr. Carnahan, find a good landing spot and take her down!”

  “All the way, Cap’n?” Thresher Shark asked.

  “Aye, Carny, all the way,” Jones said heartily, “but not so deep that these two pop. A hundred feet or so should do it.”

  “Aye, sir.” With an eager flick of his long, angled tail, First Mate Carnahan bounded over to the weather deck, passing the ship’s huge double steering wheel, which was taller than he was. He checked a chart on the wall; Archie wondered how it did not dissolve as he waited to see what would happen next.

  Carnahan turned to the four waiting helmsmen and gave them their bearings. At this, the four muscular shark men—two on either side of the two connected wheels—took hold of the spindles and began to turn them as directed.

  For his part, the first mate swam over to a big lever jutting up from a long slot on the deck a few feet from the wheel. The beam was as thick as a railroad tie, but Carnahan planted his feet and seemed to have no trouble hauling it toward him.

  “Aha,” Archie said to himself, realizing the lever controlled the up-and-down pitch of the ship, while the great helm wheels steered it left or right.

  “Make ready to descend!” Carnahan yelled.

  Jones turned to Nixie and Archie. “Hold on, ye lubbers!”

  Startled, they gripped the nearest railing as the ship lurched, but their feet floated up off the deck a bit as the Dutchman left its current mooring and began gliding down and down toward the seafloor.

  Archie and Nixie exchanged a look of amazement.

  The captain stood boldly at the bow, his long black frock coat flapping behind him in the current as he watched his ship fly down through the water, which turned increasingly dark and cold.

  They sailed only for about twenty minutes before the ship came to rest in a dark, lonely spot somewhere on the seafloor.

  While Carnahan pushed the big lever so that it stood upright in the center of the slot, a flurry of sailors hurried to turn the capstan, lowering the anchor. The ship gently bumped along the seabed, raking up clouds of sand until one of the ma
ssive flukes of the gigantic anchor dug in deep enough to stop its motion entirely.

  “Good,” said Jones. “Abandon ship! Not you two. Come with me,” he ordered Archie and Nixie, while the shark men cleared the decks. “You two lubbers should feel honored. You’re going to see something few living folk have ever witnessed.”

  Full of trepidation, they swam warily after Jones as he strode across the deck to the very point of the bow. The crew had swum off to tread water several yards back from the ship.

  Archie was confused. He looked at Nixie, who shrugged in response, while Jones climbed over the railing just beside the long, pointy bowsprit bristling off the ship’s nose.

  Nixie and Archie peered over the railing up front and saw that the captain had climbed down alongside the Grim Reaper figurehead.

  “Now watch this,” Jones said, clearly enjoying having an audience.

  Of course, they already knew from the puppet show incident that he was vain.

  He took hold of the figurehead’s skull and, to their surprise, turned the Grim Reaper’s head so it was looking backward.

  Rather unsettling, that.

  Jones climbed back up onto the deck, looking pleased with himself. “Step one,” he announced. “Now for step two. Follow me.”

  They did. He marched back to the weather deck, sheltered beneath the overhang of the quarterdeck. There they watched him seize hold of the Flying Dutchman’s massive double wheel.

  What sort of inhuman strength the devil of the deep blue sea possessed, Archie could not say, but where it had taken four of his crew to steer the ship, Davy Jones singlehandedly pulled the whole contraption down from an upright position, until the ship’s double wheels now sat horizontally atop their squat pedestal.

  “What’s all this about, Captain?” Archie asked, marveling.

  “You’ll see. Now clear off—back up to where my men tell you. And don’t do anything foolish like trying to escape. You’re here for a reason, and you’ve got work to do.”

  Carnahan and Lebrec had swum forward again, and now roughly escorted the two of them about twenty yards away from the Flying Dutchman. The captain, left behind, began turning the great double wheel all by himself.

  It was then they discovered—much to their wonder and dread—that it was not just Davy Jones’s crew that underwent such dramatic physical transformations. So did his ship!

  First, the yardarms spun the sails in like roller-blinds whirling up on their springs; then the spars and yards alike slammed upright, flush against the three towering masts, which, in turn, began telescoping in upon themselves, withdrawing down into the ship. The bowsprit did likewise, retracting, while the pulleys came alive.

  The planks buckled and groaned, began to slide and fold, while winches everywhere whirred wildly. Ropes snaked about with a will of their own in the eerie green glow.

  “What’s it doing?” Nixie cried.

  “You’ll see,” Carnahan said, his impassive stare fixed on the vessel, which seemed to be collapsing, twisting in on itself.

  The captain could no longer be seen amid the churning water. Archie’s heart pounded as he looked on, bewildered.

  They heard a thunderous succession of muffled booms coming from inside the transforming vessel as different levels of the decks slammed down on top of each other, bulkheads heaving from horizontal to vertical positions and vice versa.

  A long, boxy shape the size of a building was assembling itself out from the crumpled hull of the Flying Dutchman. At last, the whole thing turned upside down; the ship shuddered and buckled and finished its tortured metamorphosis from a sleek wooden sailing vessel into a giant version of a…

  Sea locker.

  The long wooden box that, according to Dani’s brother, could become a sailor’s coffin.

  The name engraved on the huge rusty plaque on the side of this one, writ large, said: David W. Jones.

  “Ohhh!” Archie breathed.

  Nixie glanced at him, her dark eyes round as they both realized—Davy Jones’s ship was his locker.

  His own giant, traveling wooden coffin—to which he was confined for all time, inescapably.

  The crew did not seem perturbed by this procedure—but one last touch still remained.

  The bilge pump poked up through the roof like a smokestack and belched out a huge burst of water from inside. Expelled from the interior, the fizzing water bubbled violently over the Locker for a moment, but had no sooner dissipated than a door swung open on the side, just beneath the giant brass plaque.

  Jones peered out of the doorway and beckoned them inside.

  The resemblance to a giant wooden coffin was unmistakable, but Archie thought the ship-turned-building resembled a simple, plain warehouse or an undersea bunker of some kind.

  “Go on,” Carnahan grumbled, poking him in the back to get him moving.

  Archie snapped out of his daze. Some of the sailors stayed outside, taking up posts around the building to keep watch, but with Carnahan prodding him and Lebrec shoving Nixie, they had no choice but to move.

  Into the belly of the beast they went. Indeed, Archie felt a bit like Jonah swallowed by the whale as he swam, heart thumping, into Davy Jones’s Locker.

  He was careful to keep an eye on Nixie. This would certainly be a story to tell Jake if he survived.

  Inside the Locker, everything shiplike was upside down now. It was hard to tell for certain because it was very dark, the water lit only by the phantasmagorical green illumination.

  Scanning the spooky, algae-covered space in all directions, Archie did not see Jones. Fishing nets draped here and there looked like vast spider webs, and against the walls, Archie could just make out stacks of what looked like crab traps or lobster cages built big enough to hold humans.

  They were quickly hurried through this first broad space to a ladder on the far end, which they ascended at Carnahan’s behest, swimming up through an open hatch to a second level. The ladder continued up to a third level, but the square wooden hatch at the top of this one was closed.

  Brushing past them, Carnahan swam up to it and knocked three times.

  “Come!” the captain answered from above.

  “When I open the hatch, climb up quickly,” the first mate ordered them. “He doesn’t like it getting wet.” Then he pushed the hatch upward, opening it.

  At once, Nixie and Archie scrambled up the top steps of the ladder, startled to find that their watery environment had given way to air. As they hurried in, dripping, Jones quickly closed the hatch behind them and secured it.

  The masks on their faces automatically released. Archie took his off, and, seeing it was safe, Nixie followed suit. Davy Jones was standing there, fully dry somehow.

  Archie looked around, thoroughly puzzled. The top floor of the Locker was relatively dry. An inch or so of water sloshed about here and there, or pooled in uneven dips across the warped wooden floor, but everything else was dry.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Well, if the ship were the ship, it’d be the cargo hold,” said Jones, handing them each a towel.

  “Thank you,” Nixie mumbled.

  “But since it’s now the Locker, it’s just…I dunno, the Locker. Captain’s quarters, I suppose.”

  “Yes, but how is it dry in here?” Archie demanded, his curiosity piqued.

  “You think I know?” Jones exclaimed. “It was always like this for me. You’re supposed to be the genius.”

  “He still thinks he’s dealing with science,” Nixie said.

  Archie frowned at her, but Jones snorted.

  “Follow me.” He still clomped when he walked, even though he had long since lost the bucket shoes. As he went ahead of them, Archie noticed the captain was carrying the knapsack containing the pieces of the orb.

  He led them through the long, low-ceilinged wooden space, dimly lit by a few oil lanterns hanging overhead, and crowded with various stores of supplies and a great many barrels—probably full of grog or rum or whatever it was
that cursed pirates drank, Archie thought. Frankly, he was still annoyed that he did not understand how it could be dry down here, but he told himself it must be some sort of diving bell effect.

  It was not a satisfactory explanation, but it would have to do.

  Then a word printed in large letters on one of the barrels caught his eye: Gunpowder.

  Archie drew in his breath. At once, his heart started thumping with the stirring of inspiration, but he kept his thoughts to himself and followed his captor.

  “Right,” Jones said, passing through the long, crowded storage section, “here’s where you can work.”

  At the far end of the cargo hold, they arrived at a space that looked exactly like the inside of an old English pub, or at least part of one. There was a teakwood bar with ale taps, a line of waiting pewter tankards, and many rows of bottles—all of which were empty.

  Set into the wall like a ghastly decoration was the Grim Reaper skull with its unnerving grin, watching over all. Somehow the figurehead had ended up there after all the ship’s agonized twisting.

  A chill ran down Archie’s spine as he realized Nixie had been right. The worst sort of darkness was at work in the fate of Captain Davy Jones. Perhaps the Devil himself had created the Flying Dutchman/Locker, for Archie believed the bizarre scene before them was a replica of the tavern where Jones, the barkeep, had once carried out his crimes. This bitter replica was surely meant to remind him forever of what he’d done, how he’d ended up here.

  He recalled what Dani had told them, courtesy of her Navy brother, Patrick. How, as a mortal, Jones had sold the poor drunkards who passed out in his pub into shipboard slavery under the press gangs, and how he, in turn, was now forced to helm this vessel of doom until the end of time.

  Cruel. Archie almost felt sorry for the man. After all, he wasn’t so bad. He could’ve killed them in Driftwood…

  Suddenly, a thought gripped him. It was greed and corruption that had landed Davy Jones here, not murder. “Captain?”

  “Aye, lad?”

  “Say I fix the orb—”

  “You will fix the orb.”

  “That is—even if I get it working—”

  “When.”