Seven Dead Pirates

by Linda Bailey

  The gasp that followed came from every pirate in the room.

  “Scared?” snarled Jack the Rat. “I’ll show you how scared we be.” Hauling out his cutlass, he lunged toward Lewis. Barnaby Bellows had to hold him back.

  “Of course we ain’t scared.” Captain Crawley stepped neatly between them. “We’re blackguards! Scoundrels! Lived rough as nails and died a rougher death. We’re afeared of nothing!”

  “Excepting maybe …” said Skittles, watching the captain warily, “them things that move so fast.”

  Murmurs of agreement followed, even in the face of Crawley’s glowering.

  “What things?” asked Lewis.

  “On the roads,” breathed Skittles hoarsely. “We seen ’em. They go like lightning.”

  “Try to get across a road,” added Bellows, “and them things runs right through you!”

  “You mean …” Lewis struggled to understand. “Cars?”

  “Cars! Aye, that’s what they’re called.” Skittles shuddered. “It’s unnatural how fast they go.”

  “But …” said Lewis, then petered out. He didn’t know where to begin explaining things like traffic rules and pedestrian crossings to a crew of pirate ghosts.

  “We tried going to that moo-see-um,” said Jonas. “But them car-things! They got us every time.”

  “That’s why we wants you to take us there,” said Crawley. “Past them things and into that little house where the Maria Louisa be waiting.”

  Lewis chewed his lip, unsure of what they knew. “There’s a police station there. It’s right beside the museum.”

  “Police?” snarled Jack. “The law?” He whipped out a dagger and brandished it in the air. “We’ll give ’em a taste, we will! We’ll slice out their gizzards!”

  “Slice ’em out!” chorused Jonas and Bellows.

  Crawley hissed sharply, his hand raised in a warning gesture. Then, offering Lewis another wheedling smile, he spoke in the kind of soft, gentle voice you might use for a baby. “All we wants, laddie, is for you to give it some thought.”

  Backing away from Lewis then, and also from the door, Crawley settled himself on the wicker chair. “Just a wee ponder,” he said. “Ain’t that right, boys?”

  Taking their cues, the others found places around the room. Skittles and Moyle each sank onto a bed, while Bellows, Adam and Jonas settled on the floor. Jack the Rat swept Lewis’s chess set to the floor with a clatter, before hoisting his filthy body onto the dresser.

  Lewis hardly dared breathe. Were they really going to let him go? The door, just steps away, was like a dream.

  He got there in two leaps.

  As he struggled with the knob, fingers slippery with fear, he waited for hands to grab him. He could almost feel the cold, ghostly fingers on his shoulders.

  The knob turned.

  He yanked the door open and ran.

  Skidding down the hall—stumbling, scrambling up—he expected any second to hear a shouted “Laddie!” from behind. But the only sound was his own feet, pounding the floor.

  He hit the stairs in an explosion of thuds and didn’t stop till he reached his father’s study, a small room at the end of a hall. Gasping, he reached for the doorknob …

  And stopped.

  He stared at his shaking hand. Wait, he told himself. Think!

  What would happen if he told his father?

  His father would tell his mother, of course. Then what?

  It was possible they’d believe him. But the more he thought about it, the less likely this seemed. All his life, they’d taught him that ghosts—or monsters or aliens, any such things—were “nonsense.” Even Santa and the Easter Bunny had been half-hearted visitors to the Dearborn house.

  And if they didn’t believe him, what then? Would they think he was nuts? Lying? Having nightmares in broad daylight? What would they do?

  Worry, that’s what. They worried about everything, his parents—in different ways, true, but they would get together on this. He didn’t have to think long to realize that a story about pirate ghosts would turn into a worry so huge—so absolutely colossal, in fact—he wouldn’t get a moment alone for the next year! They’d send him to that child psychologist again, the one who’d tried to get him to play with stuffed animals.

  The study door opened.

  “Ah, Lewis, it’s you.” His father frowned. “You’re panting. Are you all right?”

  “Fine. Just … running.”

  “Would you like to come in?”

  Lewis ducked inside and dropped into a chair. He didn’t have to say anything. He could just sit.

  “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?” Mr. Dearborn peered over his glasses.

  Lewis glanced around. There was a parcel on his father’s desk. One side was open, revealing a thick stack of paper.

  “Is that your book?”

  Mr. Dearborn ran his fingers through the last few hairs on his balding scalp. He tried to smile. “It’s come back. Again. That’s eleven now.”

  Lewis struggled to focus. Eleven. That meant publishers. The parcel contained the book his father had written, Daily Life Among the Ancient Minoans. As Mr. Dearborn often said, the book had been his daily life for more than six years. It was 693 pages long, and Lewis was sure it must tell everything that was ever known about the ancient Minoans and therefore be a book many people would want to read. But the publishers kept turning it down.

  “Don’t worry,” said Lewis automatically. “Someone will publish it. Next time.”

  Mr. Dearborn shook his head. “This was my last chance. There aren’t any other publishers who do this sort of book.”

  “Oh!” Lewis was shocked into genuine attention. He had never imagined his father could run out of publishers.

  “Ah, well.” Mr. Dearborn sat down and stared at a blank spot on the wall. Clasping his fingers together, he pressed them against his lips.

  Lewis watched, his panic giving way to sadness. “You could get another teaching job. In a college. Right?”

  “What?” said his father in a flat monotone. “Oh, sure. Maybe.”

  But Lewis knew this wouldn’t happen. He wasn’t sure why his father had lost his teaching job and couldn’t get another one. But he suspected, from bits he’d overheard, that his father wasn’t a good enough teacher. His mother, who also taught at a college—mathematics, not Minoans—had tried to coach his father to become better at teaching. In the end, though, Mr. Dearborn had given up. He’d written his book instead.

  Lewis took a deep breath. His heart wasn’t beating quite so hard now. He held out his right hand. Almost still.

  “I think I’ll sleep down here tonight,” he said and waited for his father to ask why.

  But his father just kept staring at the wall through smudged glasses. “Oh? Well, sure. That’s fine.”

  Lewis left. He wandered into the parlor and settled into a rocking chair. Rocking jerkily, desperate to understand, he began to re-live his morning—every terrifying moment.

  Was it true that Great-Granddad had sent him to the pirates? If so, the old man really had lost his marbles. Even he should have seen that Lewis was not the kind of boy who could lead a gang of pirate ghosts through the town of Tandy Bay—and past the Tandy Bay police station! He was the last boy on earth who could do such a thing. Great-Granddad should have known that.

  The more he thought about it, the more he saw it as an awful trick. It was like sending him into a cage full of tigers. Lewis could hardly believe his own relative would do such a thing.

  He thought back, remembering how Great-Granddad used to shout at the furniture. It hadn’t been the furniture. Lewis could see that now. Great-Granddad had been yelling at the pirates. He knew them well! And before he died, he had set Lewis up. His own great-grandson.

  Libertalia. You!

  That night, Lewis slept on a pullout couch in the tiny room beside his parents. The corners were crammed with boxes, and the air had a sour smell that made him breathe through his mouth. A single sma
ll window faced the driveway, with a view of the family car. Instead of crashing waves, he heard his mother’s voice, complaining through the wall.

  “The water pressure’s non-existent. Half an hour to run a bath. It trickles out.”

  His father mumbled a reply.

  “Nothing works! The furnace is an antique.”

  Another mumble. Longer.

  “Well, I know why he’s sleeping downstairs. He’s too young to be on his own. I told you that, didn’t I?”

  Lewis rammed his head into his pillow. But his parents’ voices continued … mumble … electricity … mumble … toilets.

  Shutting his eyes, he thought about Libertalia. He conjured up the blue-and-white walls, the ship in a bottle, the roaring sea. He imagined it so well that waking next morning, he thought he was there. What a shock to open his eyes and see his mother’s old sewing machine and the bins labeled “Winter Clothes.”

  In the days that followed, his life became, like his new room, shrunken and drab. He tiptoed around the ground floor, trying to stay clear of the adults, alert for thuds or voices in the walls. He wanted to go down to the beach—he loved that beach!—but his mother wouldn’t hear of it.

  “It’s not a swimming beach, Lewis. Those waves could pull you to your death.”

  “I know that,” said Lewis. “I won’t go in the water. I just want to look for shells and things.”

  “What if there’s a rogue wave?” said his mother. “You’re not to go down there without your father.”

  And what, Lewis wanted to ask, would his father do if a rogue wave leaped out of the ocean and swept them both away?

  In any case, his father wasn’t interested. Mr. Dearborn was taking this latest rejection of his book hard, spending long hours alone in his office. When he came out, he wandered like a sleepwalker. Mrs. Dearborn, meanwhile, seemed to have gained all the energy her husband had lost. She thumped through the house, giving orders to workmen—plumbers, telephone installers, appliance repairmen.

  “I don’t care if it’s just six months,” she told her husband. “It has to be liveable.”

  When she wasn’t ordering workmen around, she was bossing Lewis. She only had to see him to find new chores.

  “Break down these boxes, please, Lewis, and stack them in the shed. When you finish, you can get at those weeds in the driveway.”

  At night in his new downstairs room, there were tooth-flossing reminders and vitamin suggestions and shouted commands through the wall. “Lights out now. Go to sleep!”

  And of course his mother was bound to notice that he’d been wearing the same clothes for days. “For heaven’s sake, Lewis, how do you expect us to treat you like an adult? Put on a clean shirt!”

  He headed obediently for the rear staircase. Halfway up, he lost his nerve. On the pretext of a broken lamp, he asked Mr. Dearborn to come with him.

  So it was his father who opened the door to the tower this time. Lewis sniffed the air as he entered, but he hardly noticed the faint whiff of fish because Libertalia was already tugging at his heart … magical, exciting, unbearably familiar. Above all, welcoming. As if it had been waiting.

  “Did you leave this window open again?” His father sounded irritated. “You must remember to shut it, Lewis. If it rains, the floor will get soaked.”

  I did shut it, thought Lewis. I could shut it a thousand times, it wouldn’t do any good.

  “And is this any way to treat your chess set?”

  Lewis looked down. The chess pieces were still scattered across the floor, where Jack the Rat had flung them. Quickly, Lewis gathered them up, glad to see that none were broken.

  He didn’t look out at the ocean. It made him too sad.

  “Is this the broken lamp?” His father was fiddling beside Lewis’s bed. “Seems to work fine.”

  Lewis began stuffing clothes into a laundry bag. “I guess you fixed it. Thanks, Dad.”

  He didn’t look back as they left. Stumbling down the stairs, he felt as if—like the pirates—he’d lost an important body part. An arm, maybe. A leg.

  The only bright spot in his life was food. After some discussion, Mrs. Binchy had been hired for the duration of the Dearborns’ stay in Shornoway, mostly, Lewis figured, because she knew how to work the stove. His father’s cooking skills were limited to toast, and his mother flatly refused to go near the stove—an enormous black monster so old it had once burned logs. Mrs. Dearborn avoided the entire kitchen, in fact, saying it would drive her crazy. Under Mrs. Binchy’s rule, it was a spectacular mess—crusty pots in the sink, greasy puddles and vegetable peelings dotting the counters. But out of the chaos came the most incredible food. Freshly baked bread so meltingly light, it didn’t need butter. Thick roast beefs that practically carved themselves. Hot apple tarts, cinnamon twists.

  Lewis wasn’t used to this. Food in his old house had been plain and sensible. Steamed vegetables. Baked fish. Boiled potatoes.

  He liked the new food. He liked Mrs. Binchy, too, but he didn’t like it when she asked questions.

  “Not very interesting for you, is it, Lewis? Stuck here with us old fogies. Well, I suppose the only real fogy is me. Still, you’ll be glad to get back to school and see your friends, won’t you?”

  Lewis nodded as if he was glad. But the blueberry muffin in his mouth, so delicious a moment before, had turned to sawdust.

  And, suddenly, there was no more avoiding it.

  School.

  The night before, his mother set out his school clothes—the striped shirt and gray pants they had bought for the funeral. Lewis looked at them and knew at once they were wrong. But he wasn’t sure why, and he couldn’t begin to explain.

  He stared at his ceiling till nearly 2 a.m. He thought about the pirates, who had stolen the only thing in his life that was any good. He thought about his great-granddad, who had tricked and betrayed him. And he thought about the next morning at school.

  It was terrible. All of it.

  But school was the worst.

  The first day was a disaster.

  He didn’t expect it to go well, of course. But somehow, year after year, he was never prepared for how bad it could be.

  First, there were his parents. They always came with him the first day, he knew that. But he always let himself hope that this year might be different.

  “The other parents don’t come,” he said at breakfast.

  “We’re not other parents,” said his mother.

  It was hard to argue with that.

  Of course, there were plenty of parents who drove their kids to Tandy Bay Elementary on the first day. But they didn’t come into the classrooms. Not if their kids were in sixth grade!

  But there were Mr. and Mrs. Dearborn, large and bulky, wearing dark suits, pushing their way through the milling students to get to the teacher’s desk. They looked like a couple of beetles on an ant hill.

  “Excuse us,” demanded his mother, holding out her cane to clear a path. “Pardon!”

  Kids backed away, giggling.

  The teacher stood up, surprised. She was new, Lewis saw—a pretty young woman with stylish blue glasses and blond hair tied back. She held out her hand. “I’m Ms. Forsley. Can I—”

  “Charlotte Dearborn,” said Lewis’s mother firmly in a voice that carried into the hall. “Dr. Charlotte Dearborn. And this is my husband, Dr. Gerald Dearborn. We’d like a word about our son, Lewis.”

  The class grew quiet, the buzz of voices fading.

  “Well—” said Ms. Forsley. But it was too late.

  “Lewis is gifted, you understand, and he’ll need special …”

  Lewis forced his brain to sing la-la-la so he wouldn’t have to listen. But he heard the laughter behind him and a boy’s voice repeating “Special!” He heard Ms. Forsley’s voice, too, pleasant and friendly, suggesting that they could discuss it later. The teachers always said this, every year, but his parents never learned.

  La-la-la, went Lewis in his head, trying to block out “Lewis’s h
ealth” and “fragile,” and then “asthma” and “allergies.” The other kids were beginning to sit down, so he shuffled sideways and dropped into an empty desk, wishing he could shrivel up like a raisin and fall through a crack in the floor. La-la-la, he continued—forever, it felt like—until Mrs. Dearborn finally stopped. Thunk, thunk went her cane down the aisle.

  As she passed Lewis’s desk, she paused.

  What now, he thought. Suddenly, her hand came out, and—was she really smoothing down the hair at the back of his head? Was his cowlick sticking up again? Who on the whole, stupid planet cared if Lewis’s hair stuck up?

  His mother, that’s who. She made a loud “tsk” sound.

  Mr. Dearborn added his own good-bye—a fond pat on Lewis’s shoulder. Finally, they were gone. Lewis let out all the breath he’d been holding in.

  Then he waited, scrunched tight against the plastic of his chair. Sooner or later, Ms. Forsley would do it. Speak directly to him.

  It didn’t happen right away. When she took attendance, he managed to squeak out a “Here!” It sounded weird and got a few laughs, but she moved on quickly.

  “Danny Divers?”

  No answer. Lewis looked around.

  “Does anybody know where Danny is?”

  From the back, someone said, “He moved away at the beginning of summer.”

  Lewis felt a stab of disappointment. Danny Divers wasn’t exactly his friend. More like an ally. He and Danny had been somehow on the same side. And now Danny was gone.

  When attendance ended, Ms. Forsley welcomed the class and said all the usual things about having a good year together. Then she suggested that they begin by each telling one interesting thing they had done over the summer.

  “I’ll start,” she said. “This summer I traveled to the Rocky Mountains with some friends to go hiking.”

  There was more, but Lewis didn’t hear because of the roar in his ears. His heart began to pound, and his head and upper body filled with warmth. He heard the other kids saying … something. He tried to think of what he had done this summer. Moved to Shornoway, of course. But it didn’t matter. It was hopeless. He was hopeless.

  Some of the kids had long stories, so it took a while to get to him.