The Hotel Under the Sand

by Kage Baker

  “Oh, no! That’s Uncle Roderick!” he cried.

  “You mean the man who sent you to the military school?”

  “Yes! And he hates me!”

  “He must have found out about the Grand Wenlocke reappearing,” said Emma, watching as the yacht got closer, and wishing she had Captain Doubloon’s cutlass.

  “Where’s the rest of the breakfast dishes?” demanded Mrs. Beet, huffing and puffing from her climb up the stairs. Shorty came running after her, yapping excitedly. “Nothing’s come down in the dumbwaiter for five minutes and—oh, blimey, what’s that?”

  “It’s Masterman’s guardian,” said Emma.

  “Really?” Mrs. Beet scowled. “I suppose he’ll want to take the child back to that school now. However did he find us?”

  “He must have been hunting for me,” said Masterman. “He knew I’d go to the Dunes!”

  “But how’d he know we were back in business?”

  “There are these things nowadays, called satellites,” said Emma. “They’re like giant spyglasses in the sky. Maybe he had a way to look at satellite pictures.”

  “How inconvenient,” said Mrs. Beet.

  “Or maybe he had spies in his pay,” said Masterman dramatically. “If the hotel guests found us, other people might have. Look at him! Doesn’t he look like a middle-aged goblin?”

  By this time the yacht had veered very close indeed, and the voice screeching from its bullhorn was clear and unmistakable: “Stop! Stop in the name of the Wenlocke Family Trust! That hotel is stolen property!”

  “Ha!” said Mrs. Beet. She threw open the window and shouted, “You’re wrong, there! Who should own this hotel but a Wenlocke, I’d like to know? And here he is!” She grabbed Masterman by the scruff of his jacket and the seat of his pants, and held him up in the window. Shorty jumped up and down, barking wildly, trying to see out the window.

  Masterman was terrified. “No!” he squeaked. “You don’t understand! He’s evil!”

  Emma had a terrible feeling he was right. The man in yachting clothes spotted Masterman, and the expression on his face was not at all what it should have been if he had been worried over Masterman and eager to see him safe.

  Emma knew that grown people can sometimes be surprisingly blind to evil things, and so she grabbed Mrs. Beet’s arm. “We’re in danger! Let’s get away from the window!”

  “Eh? But that’s his guardian, child. He wouldn’t harm our Masterman,” said Mrs. Beet.

  The man in the yachting clothes rubbed his hands together and shrieked in glee. “Haha! There you are, Masterman! You’ve been a very naughty boy!” He turned and said something to one of the others on deck, who passed the message to the man at the wheel.

  The yacht swung about and revealed her stern, on which was the name DISPARAGEMENT in gold letters. Emma did not spend much time spelling this out, however, for she was busy watching as a hatch slid back from the stern and a platform rose slowly up to the deck from below.

  “Get away from the window!” shouted Winston, running up behind them. “That’s a gun deck!” He tackled Mrs. Beet in a flying leap and they went down with Masterman, just as there was a flash of light from the direction of the yacht.

  Emma dropped flat too, and heard the boom and the whistle overhead as a cannonball shot in through the open window. It smashed into a panel at the rear of the Dining Room.

  “Dear me, Masterman, did they miss? What a shame. Now you’ll have to go back to your classmates!” cried Uncle Roderick. “Minions, reload!”

  “See? I told you he wanted to kill me!” said Masterman. Shorty crouched beside him, growling.

  “Oh, dear, the watered-silk wallpaper—” said Mrs. Beet distractedly.

  “They’ve damaged the hotel!” said Winston, looking angrier than Emma had ever seen him. “They’ve damaged the hotel!”

  “And tried to kill me, too,” said Masterman.

  “You’ll stand to attention in the rain, Masterman! You’ll peel hundreds and thousands of potatoes! You’ll scrub thousands and millions of pots! You’ll march millions and billions of miles!” shouted Uncle Roderick. “Hahahaaaa!”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Emma told Masterman. “He’s just trying to get you to yell back, so he can see where you are.”

  “I won’t stand for this!” Winston scrambled to his feet, and Emma almost shouted to him to get down, before she remembered he was already dead. “No sir, I won’t! Where’s that emergency lever!”

  He strode into the Lobby. Crash, another cannonball shattered a window! Thwap, it buried itself in the oak paneling, but Winston ignored it as he stepped behind the desk.

  Emma followed him as far as the doorway, keeping almost flat to the floor and crawling behind furniture whenever she could. Winston opened the glass case and yanked hard on the lever there. Emma heard a deep grinding sound from somewhere down under the floorboards. Suddenly, a section of the marble floor slid back, and something of gleaming gray steel rose up and forward from below. As it moved into place, the Lobby doors opened automatically.

  “We have our own cannon?” Emma asked.

  “We certainly do,” replied Winston. “My Mr. Wenlocke, he was no fool.”

  “Thank you, Great-Grandfather!” said Masterman from his hiding place in the dining room.

  “Oh, Masterman! It was wicked of you to run off like that, and leave your poor dear guardian wondering where you were! Everyone at good old Pavor Noctis has given you up for dead, you know! Why, if something awful were to happen to you right now, no one would ever hear about it!” yelled Uncle Roderick from his yacht.

  “Oh, shut up!” said Masterman, but very quietly. He grabbed Shorty, who was growling and snapping as though he’d like to jump out the window and attack Uncle Roderick himself.

  On the platform beside the cannon, behind a blast shield of plate steel, was a neat pyramid of stacked shot canisters. Emma scrambled to it, keeping well behind a sofa until she was there. Winston was already opening the loading chamber of the gun when Emma handed him a canister. He slid it into the breech and rammed it shut.

  “May I fire it?” asked Emma. Like most well-brought-up children, she had always wanted to shoot off a real cannon.

  “Don’t be silly, dear, that’s nothing a little girl should be doing,” said Mrs. Beet, who had followed her. “You might kill someone, after all. Let me fire it.”

  “Just somebody fire it!” begged Masterman, who had crawled behind one of the marble columns, holding Shorty tightly in his arms.

  “What do you mean, turn and run?” On his yacht, Uncle Roderick had turned to berate a minion. “Look at that hotel! It’ll make us millions! Watch for the boy! The minute he sticks his head up, fire! MASTERMAN, THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO COME OUT!”

  The yacht swooped in close, for her crew hoped to get a broadside in, and it threw a drenching bow wave up that splashed through the broken windows.

  “Why, those—that’ll ruin the paneling!” said Winston. As he stood straight up in his indignation, the gunner on the yacht had a clear shot at him, and fired. Close as they were, the shot went right through the Lobby, and through Winston too. Emma and Mrs. Beet had thrown themselves flat, so they didn’t see the moment of impact, though they heard the smash as the ball hit the front desk.

  Emma looked up cautiously through all the smoke, not knowing what to expect. She didn’t think anything very terrible had happened, since Winston was already dead, but she saw Masterman looking up in horror. Shorty whimpered. She rolled over and saw a great gray plume of smoke coiling up from where Winston had been standing. She heard a noise like a man roaring in anger.

  As she watched, the smoke was joined by a thread of ashes and whirling sand, seeping from the urn in the Lobby. It thickened and flowed out the broken window, seeming to stretch out two dark arms. There were no gold buttons, no stars: only a terrible shadow with the suggestion of bones. She just glimpsed it becoming something very scary indeed as it extended out on the verandah. The laugh
ter of the men on the yacht broke off. They began to yell in terror instead as the dark thing flowed over the water toward them.

  “Now, child!” Mrs. Beet scrambled up and grabbed the lanyard that fired the cannon. “Get me another canister!”

  She yanked the lanyard and the cannon fired. The canister exploded, peppering the yacht with small shot. One ball plucked Uncle Roderick’s bullhorn right out of his hand, and the others whizzed through the yacht’s sails, leaving neat round holes.

  “Stop! What are you doing?” wailed Uncle Roderick. “Give them another broadside—Oh! What are you? Keep away from me!”

  Emma loaded the cannon again. This time Mrs. Beet aimed it, because the yacht was now speeding away on another tack. Emma got to fire the cannon at last, but it didn’t do much harm, because the yacht was flying out of range as fast as her tattered sails would take her. The shot kicked up the white water in her wake in a satisfying way. There was a double blast on the whistle from the By-the-Wind-Sailor, as Captain Doubloon signaled triumph.

  “You cowards!” Masterman shouted gleefully after the yacht. He crawled from behind the column and stood up. “Nice shooting, ladies!”

  The cloudy darkness that had been out on the verandah now seemed to spill back in through the broken windows, like the vapor from dry ice. It trickled along the floor, growing brighter and more solid as it came together, and mounded up in a sort of pillar shape beside the big vase in the Lobby. For a moment Emma glimpsed the grisly grim specter that had frightened Uncle Roderick away, before Winston resumed his old friendly appearance.

  “I must apologize,” he said. “I hope I didn’t scare you. It’s not an awfully nice shape to take, but, by gosh, I was so darned mad! Look at the mess they’ve made!”

  “Look at them go!” said Masterman, running to the window. The yacht was fast disappearing over the horizon. “So much for you, Uncle Roderick!”

  24

  THE ISLAND

  THERE WAS NO further pursuit by wicked Uncle Roderick. No bully is a match for a dreadful ghost, nor for two determined ladies with a cannon.

  Emma and Masterman swept up the broken glass and splinters, while Winston went into the storerooms to see what might be there to repair things. He found plenty of glass, putty, and spare paneling on hand.

  The only thing of which there wasn’t any extra was the watered-silk wallpaper, but after digging the cannonball out and sanding the edges of the hole smooth, they hung a painting of a peaceful country brook over it. You would hardly have known there had been any disturbance at all—at least, not once the cannon was retracted back under the Lobby floor.

  They saw many interesting things during the rest of the voyage, such as leaping dolphins and spouting whales, and albatrosses with wings big as airplanes. The guests, who had noticed the noise of the sea battle but assumed it was sound effects for the cinematograph, played shuffleboard on the verandah when the weather was fine.

  At last they came in sight of a beautiful green mountain rising from the sea, with waterfalls and palm groves. There were pink and green parrots chattering in the groves, pulling flowers from the hibiscus bushes. There were green meadows and clear pools of water. But there was no hotel whatsoever for anyone who might land there. Captain Doubloon cut the engines on the By-the-Wind-Sailor and lay her to, and came out on deck to call across to the hotel.

  “Here it is! If this wasn’t a desert island, there’d be no end of cruise ships stopping here. We give folks some nice civilized amenities and they’ll be lining up to go ashore!”

  “This looks like a nice place,” said Emma to Winston, who had come with her to the verandah. The guests, who had been having breakfast in the Dining Room, all rushed to the windows and exclaimed in admiration. Mrs. Beet hurried up from the Kitchens. Even Masterman struggled to his feet and came staggering out.

  “Oh, it’s land!” he said fervently. “Let’s stop here!”

  “What do you think?” Emma asked Winston. “Would we be able to run the hotel from here?”

  “Well, sure,” Winston said. “Look at all that fine scenery, and freshwater!”

  “Oh, my, look at all those coconuts,” said Mrs. Beet. “I can bake fresh coconut custard pies.”

  “Please don’t talk about food,” said Masterman, turning green again. “Drop anchor here, Captain!”

  So Captain Doubloon dropped anchor in the blue bay. He came over to the hotel in his rowboat, and for a while went back and forth, ferrying people ashore.

  The beautiful people set up beach chairs on the sand, put on sunglasses, and immediately lay down and basked in the sun. The Freets went at once to the hibiscus bushes and wandered among them, exclaiming happily in their strange speech. The People of the Sands led their camels off to graze under the palm trees.

  Mr. Eleutherios and his lady friends gathered coconuts and pineapples, and very quickly invented a new kind of fruit punch. They found a shady place under the trees and threw a party. Mr. Eleutherios played surfing songs on his guitar.

  “Well, it looks like the guests are having a lovely time,” said Emma. She squinted up at the Grand Wenlocke, where it bobbed quietly offshore, just beyond the breakers. Winston stood at the window, looking out wistfully. She waved to him. “The only problem we have now is how to get the hotel ashore.”

  “That’s no problem at all,” said Masterman, who sprawled in the warm sand with Shorty curled up at his feet. “See those big palm trunks up there? We just run the cable around them and use some pulleys to winch the hotel onto the land.”

  “How d’you reckon we’ll manage?” said Captain Doubloon. “The guests ain’t going to take kindly to being asked to haul on the cables, and we can’t do it alone.”

  “Don’t be silly!” said Masterman, in such a superior voice Captain Doubloon scowled at him. “I can do it myself, once we get everything arranged according to plan.”

  “A shrimp like you?” Captain Doubloon roared with laughter. “Not likely! I’ll bet you half me treasure you can’t do it.”

  Masterman leaped to his feet, causing Shorty to jump up in excitement. Uh-oh, thought Emma, seeing the gleam in Masterman’s eyes.

  “The bet’s on!” said Masterman. “You have obviously never heard of Archimedes.”

  “Who?” said Captain Doubloon.

  “There’s an encyclopedia in the library. Look him up sometime,” said Masterman, as he ran for the boat. “Come on, Emma!”

  Captain Doubloon had to row them out and help them unhook the cable drum from the By-the-Wind-Sailor, and he helped them get it ashore. After that, though, Emma and Masterman were able to run the cable around the palm trunks themselves. There was some complicated work involving a lot of pulleys borrowed from the ship, and Emma lost count of all the intricate twists and turns they made. At last Masterman fastened the winch where he wanted it. With a smug smile he began to crank the handle.

  Inch by inch, slowly but quite easily, the Grand Wenlocke moved ashore and then up the beach, as though it weighed no more than a rowboat. Captain Doubloon gaped at it, and his parrot laughed.

  “That’ll teach me,” groaned the captain. “Half me treasure’s yours, boy.”

  “Thank you,” said Masterman. “Where shall we put the hotel?”

  “What about that nice green lawn up there?” suggested Emma, pointing.

  When the Grand Wenlocke was where they wanted it at last, Captain Doubloon went around and removed all the cable and empty barrels. The hotel sank into the green grass, but only a little, and then stopped.

  “Hurrah!” said Winston, flinging open the doors. “What a beautiful view!”

  He got very busy after that, washing the salt spray off the windows and unfastening everything that had been lashed in place while the hotel moved over the rolling waves. Emma and Masterman helped him, while Captain Doubloon and Mrs. Beet went strolling arm in arm, looking for coconuts.

  No sooner had they gone off among the trees than a raft came floating up to shore, with a lot of people wavi
ng from it. It turned out that the castaways were players from a ballroom orchestra who had been in a shipwreck, and very conveniently saved their instruments—all except for the pianist, who was disconsolate. He brightened up considerably, however, when he learned that the Grand Wenlocke had a piano. He set about tuning it right away, and soon there was music flooding out of the open windows of the Ballroom.

  That night there was finally a Grand Ball in the Grand Ballroom to celebrate their safe arrival. Emma was able to wear the splendid pink party gown at last! She came slowly down the stairs in her finery, like a princess in a fairy tale.

  As the band played, the beautiful people danced only with one another, sleek elegant ballroom dancing. Mr. Eleutherios and his lady friends, by contrast, danced very wildly, scattering grapes and leaves everywhere, but they had a great deal of fun and their faces became very flushed. The Freets danced a sort of minuet, slow and dignified. The People of the Sands disliked dancing, but sat to one side of the Ballroom with their camels, listening to the music.

  Captain Doubloon, resplendent in what looked like an old Navy uniform, bowed very low and invited Mrs. Beet out on the dance floor, where they waltzed in a stately if slightly lopsided fashion. Winston lifted Emma in his arms and danced with her, round and round under the twinkling stars. Masterman watched them awhile, pouting, and at last took Shorty’s front paws in his hands and joined the dancing as well.

  So the Grand Wenlocke settled into its new location, safe at last. It shone on its green lawn, with the sunlight glinting off its windows. Cruise ships passing by spotted it and put in at once. It was a great success.

  Captain Doubloon did indeed propose to Mrs. Beet, and they got married by a missionary, who paddled over in a canoe from a nearby island. Mrs. Doubloon (as she was called now) sent the missionary back with an advertisement for kitchen help to put in his local paper. Soon she was able to hire a large staff to work in the Kitchens with her, so she didn’t get so tired or need to sit and put her feet up so often.