The Lightning Key

by Jon Berkeley

  “I think I’ll go back to the cabin,” he said.

  “I’ll come with you,” said Little.

  They took their leave of Baltinglass, who was just then being smoked out of the log by pugnacious pirates, and made their way along the narrow corridor that ran the length of the hull. The curve of the ship made the corridor wider at the top than at the bottom. Stout ribs of oak stood at intervals along the outer hull, alternating with brass portholes that framed circular cloudscapes of spectacular beauty.

  As they approached the door of their cabin Miles’s anxious feeling became sharper, and he was not entirely surprised to see the door standing ajar and the wood splintered around the lock. He put his hand out to stop Little, and her blue eyes widened as she saw the broken door. Miles crept forward. With Tau-Tau and the Great Cortado far below them on the Albatross he had thought they were relatively safe, at least for the moment. It seemed he was wrong. He pushed the door open slowly.

  Whoever had been in their cabin was gone, but the duffel bag had been upended on the lower bunk, and the floor was strewn with clothes. “Who could have done this?” said Little. “Our clothes are all over the place.”

  “That was us,” Miles reminded her, “but someone’s been through the duffel bag too. We’d better check whether anything is missing.” He reached instinctively for Tangerine, but the bear lay quietly in his trouser pocket, just where he had put him when he got dressed that morning.

  Little began to gather up the scattered contents of the duffel bag, and Miles suddenly knew exactly what had been taken. He picked up the overcoat that slouched in a corner and put his hand in the inside pocket. Celeste’s diary was gone.

  A chill crept through him. “It must be Cortado, or Doctor Tau-Tau.”

  “But they’re on the Albatross,” said Little.

  “My mother’s diary is gone,” said Miles. “Who else would even know about that? They must have an accomplice on the Sunfish—a passenger, or even one of the crew.” He thought for a moment. “Either way the diary must still be on board.”

  “But it could be anywhere,” said Little, packing Baltinglass’s eclectic travel kit back into the duffel bag. “How will we find it?”

  “First I’m going to find the captain and tell him there’s a burglar on his ship. You can go to the stateroom and get Baltinglass. The sight of him waving his swordstick around might be enough in itself to make the thief reconsider.”

  Miles had no idea where the captain might be found, so he made his way toward the stern of the Sunfish, where he knew the crew had their cabins. Turning a corner he almost bumped into First Officer Barrett.

  “Mr. Wednesday!” Barrett beamed. “You have the look of a man on a mission. Can I be of assistance?”

  “I’m looking for the captain,” said Miles.

  “A ship’s captain is a busy man,” said Barrett. Standing still did not come naturally to the first officer, and after almost five seconds in the same spot he was beginning to hop from foot to foot.

  “It’s very important,” said Miles.

  “In that case,” said Barrett, his feet easily getting the better of his caution, “I’ll conduct you without delay to the poop deck. Which,” he added with a high-pitched laugh, “is not nearly as rude as it sounds. Follow me.”

  He turned and sped along the corridor, with Miles trotting behind to keep up.

  “Poop, from the Latin puppis,” called Barrett over his shoulder, “meaning a raised deck in the stern of a ship. The real pooping is done in the heads, which are in the front, otherwise known as the bow. Am I going too fast for you?”

  Miles was not sure if Barrett was referring to the speed of his explanation or his progress toward the stern. “I can keep up,” he said.

  “No further need,” said First Officer Barrett. “We’ve arrived.”

  He ran up the wooden ladder that led to the poop deck and opened a hatch at the top. Daylight streamed in, bringing a blast of cold air with it. Barrett disappeared through the hatch, and Miles heard himself announced. “A young man to see you, Captain. He says he has urgent business.” Miles took a deep breath, and without waiting for an invitation he followed the first officer up the ladder.

  The poop deck was as spectacular a vantage point as you are ever likely to see. It was open to the wind, as bright and cold as an iceberg. Above it the huge belly of the helium balloon hung like a gray ceiling, and on all sides a patched snowscape of cloud could be seen, stretching away to the distant horizon.

  Captain Tripoli stood in the center of the poop deck, a white clay pipe clamped between his teeth. He was tall and straight, with angular features and skin so blue-black that he might have been mined from a seam of coal. He seemed unaffected by the crisp gale that blew across the deck, and looked Miles up and down with a stern expression. It was as much as Miles could do to avoid being blown to the guardrail, but he was careful to stand his ground.

  “Passengers are not allowed on the poop deck,” said Captain Tripoli, looking at his first officer disapprovingly. His voice was deep, like a cello, and rather than whipping it away the wind seemed obliged to blow around it.

  “It’s important,” said Miles. “Our cabin has been burgled.”

  The captain raised one eyebrow. “Then we’d better make an exception,” he said.

  “This boy is a traveling companion of Baltinglass of Araby,” piped up First Officer Barrett.

  “Indeed?” said the captain, looking at Miles with renewed interest. “You may go about your duties; thank you, Mr. Barrett.”

  The first officer disappeared down the ladder, slamming the hatch behind him, and leaving Miles alone on the poop deck with Captain Tripoli and the whistling sky of a fine winter’s morning. The captain consulted the instruments that were set into a waist-high wooden column by his side; then he looked up again at Miles. “Let’s start with your name,” he said.

  “I’m Miles Wednesday,” said Miles.

  “An unusual surname,” said Captain Tripoli.

  “My father’s name was Fumble, and my mother’s was Mahnoosh,” said Miles, “but I grew up in an orphanage. At least until I escaped.”

  “Then we have something in common,” said the captain. “I also grew up without parents, although my escape was from an uncle in whose charge I had been left.”

  Miles was surprised. He had always assumed that to have family of any kind would be better than being raised by strangers. “Why did you have to escape your uncle?” he asked.

  “I learned that he planned to sell me as a camel jockey,” said the captain. “I was only seven years old, but I knew what a harsh fate that would be.” He frowned and changed the subject abruptly. “What was stolen from your cabin?” he asked.

  “A diary that belonged to my mother,” said Miles.

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else,” said Miles. “It’s the only thing of hers that I have.”

  “It’s not easy to get away with a shipboard burglary,” mused Captain Tripoli. “Why would anyone take such a risk?”

  Miles said nothing. He did not want to have to explain what the diary contained, or why it might be of interest to anyone else.

  “You’re not obliged to give me all the details,” said the captain. “A description of the diary will suffice for the moment. I’ll have my first officer conduct an investigation.”

  Miles took his leave of the captain after describing the diary to him. His ears stung from the cold, but he was sorry to leave the spectacular skyscape that the poop deck afforded, and as he walked back along the corridor he made up his mind to find another excuse to visit the captain before their journey ended. He was turning this problem over in his head when a foot suddenly emerged from an open cabin door, and as he tripped over it he felt a jarring blow on the back of his skull that made his teeth knock together and sent him spiraling away into emptiness.

  Varippuli the tiger, soul-snagged and shanghaied, stood waiting in a room where frost bristled on the walls and his breath bil
lowed in clouds of steam. He seemed unaware of his surroundings, and stared through the walls of the frozen waiting room at some half-remembered landscape beyond. Miles found himself standing to the tiger’s left, almost close enough to reach out and touch him. The tiger gave no sign of having seen him, and Miles stayed as still as a mouse. Varippuli was no longer his friend and ally, and he did not want to draw attention to himself.

  He stared at the tiger’s heaving ribs, vaguely aware that he was dreaming, but not daring to blink nonetheless. The wavy black bars of the animal’s stripes seemed to stand out from the gold of his pelt, and the harder Miles stared the more the gold seemed to glow. Soon he was enveloped by glaring sunlight and could not see the black at all. He turned his eyes away from the light and found himself gliding alongside the patched gray flanks of the Sunfish, almost weightless and lifted by the same stiff breeze that had blown across the poop deck minutes before.

  Through a gap in the clouds below him he could see the Albatross crawling like a beetle on the corrugated blue of the sea. The soaring sensation was exhilarating, and he tilted himself, cautiously at first, to test his control. He spotted a cannon poking from the hull of the Sunfish, and he swooped down past the network of cables and ropes by which the hull was suspended to take a closer look.

  It was not a cannon at all, he realized as he got closer, but a head. It looked as if someone were trying to climb out through a porthole. “That’s not very wise,” said Miles into the wind. There was something disturbingly familiar about the tousled head, and with a shock he realized what it was. “That’s my head!” he said aloud. The head was lolling and the eyes closed, and he could see shoulders now, and his arms pinned to his sides by the narrow hole. There was no doubt about it: He was being posted out through a porthole, just as he had posted Little through the back window of the Mermaid’s Boot, except that the only thing waiting to break his fall was the freezing ocean a thousand feet below.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A PRACTICAL JOKE

  Miles Wednesday, soul-soaring and billy-jacked, swooped down closer to his unconscious body. It was vital that he return to himself at once so that he could fight back, but he had no idea how to do it. He tried calling on Little for help, but his voice was lost in the wind and she was nowhere to be seen. “She can’t hear me when she’s awake,” he told himself. He reached his inert body and tried to push himself back through the porthole, but he found himself as nebulous as the cloud he had tried to sit on during his first visit to the Realm. His hands plunged straight through his own shoulders. It was a disturbing feeling, and he pulled them out again in a panic.

  If you have ever seen iron filings stampeding toward a strong magnet you will have a picture of what happened next. Not a very accurate one, but a picture nonetheless. A strong magnetism exists between a person’s body and his soul, and once Miles had touched his unconscious self he was sucked back in like, well, like iron filings stampeding toward a strong magnet.

  He was almost sorry when he found himself back inside his own predicament. He was suspended halfway out of a flying ship, and his frozen head throbbed from the blow that had knocked him out. He could not move his arms, and he was about to fall to his death in a body that definitely would not be able to learn to fly on the way down. He could feel strong hands gripping his legs and pushing him slowly out through the narrow porthole. His own hands were almost free now, but once they were it would be too late to use them.

  He kicked out desperately with his feet and felt them connect with something solid. The hands loosened their grip on his legs for a moment, then grabbed him again with renewed strength. He kicked again, but their grip was like iron. The hands now seemed to be pulling him back in, and he stopped kicking while he tried to work out this puzzling development. His arms and shoulders were bruised and aching, but at least he was now moving in the right direction.

  His legs gave way the moment he was back inside the ship, and he would have fallen to the deck had it not been for First Officer Barrett, who supported him with one hand while closing the porthole with the other. Miles looked around him, shaking uncontrollably, and tried to make sense of the situation. Captain Tripoli stood like a rod of ebony, grasping a shirt collar in each of his strong hands. The shirts in question were occupied by none other than the Great Cortado and Doctor Tau-Tau, the former white-faced with fury, and the latter plum with embarrassment. The captain released his grip (the Great Cortado’s feet dropped several inches to the floor), and dusted his hands slowly.

  “Mr. Wednesday,” he said, “are you all right?”

  “I’m a bit shaky,” said Miles.

  “I’m not surprised,” said Captain Tripoli. “Do you know these men?”

  “Yes,” said Miles. “That one is called Cortado, and the other man is Doctor Tau-Tau.”

  “I am the Great Cortado,” the ringmaster corrected him. He was struggling to master his anger.

  “Explain yourself, Mr. Cortado,” said the captain icily.

  The Great Cortado forced a smile. His regrouping mustache had reached a stage where it resembled one of those extremely bristly caterpillars, and together with the scar and the eye patch it lent his smile a particularly shifty air.

  “It was just a bit of high spirits,” he said. “A practical joke, if you will. The boy and I go back a long way.”

  “A practical joke,” said Captain Tripoli, “generally involves an element of humor. Had I not intervened when I did, this boy would have fallen to his death. Perhaps you could explain the amusing aspect.”

  The Great Cortado scowled. “The boy cheeked me,” he said. “I was merely teaching him some manners. Perhaps I was a little overzealous, but I had no intention of letting him go.”

  The captain’s arm shot out like a piston and grabbed the collar of Doctor Tau-Tau, who had turned and begun to inch away down the corridor. “You are not dismissed,” said the captain, turning to the fortune-teller. “What’s your explanation?”

  Doctor Tau-Tau straightened his fez with shaking fingers. “The boy is a notorious troublemaker,” he said, avoiding Miles’s eye.

  “These are the men who stole my mother’s diary,” said Miles indignantly. “And now they’re trying to kill me.”

  “You see, Captain,” said the Great Cortado smoothly, “the boy is a compulsive liar. That’s just another of his wild accusations.”

  The captain turned abruptly to the Great Cortado and fixed him with a hard stare. “Mr. Cortado, this ship is fitted as a pleasure cruiser, and I regret to say that there is no brig. You and your associate will remain locked in your cabin for the rest of this voyage instead, except at dinnertime, when you will join me at my table. Is that clear?”

  The Great Cortado and his quasi-mustache bristled with indignation. “You propose to lock us up on the basis of this worthless whippersnapper’s whoppers?” he said.

  “Try saying that ten times in a row,” said First Officer Barrett in a gleeful whisper.

  “You are forgetting, Mr. Cortado, that I caught you red-handed trying to squeeze this boy through a porthole. On this ship my word is law, and you had better obey it without question. You will bring this boy’s property to the table this evening, or I will personally see to it that you are locked up for life when we reach Al Bab.”

  He let go of Doctor Tau-Tau’s collar again. “If, however, your behavior is exemplary for the rest of the voyage, I will leave it to the boy whether he wants to press charges. Mr. Barrett, please escort these men to their cabin and take charge of the key. That is all.”

  “You come with me and I’ll fix you a medicinal drink,” said the captain, smiling at Miles. He took the boy’s arm in a firm grip and guided him toward his cabin in the stern.

  The captain’s cabin was fastidiously neat. It had three small windows with leaded panes, which sloped outward and gave a spectacular view of the dappled clouds and the ocean far below. There was a polished writing desk spread with a detailed chart, and brass dividers for calculating headings and d
istances. On the wall were framed certificates and diplomas from the finest naval academies, all bearing the captain’s name in ornate script, and a locked glass case containing a pair of dueling pistols with a powder flask and rods.

  “Take a seat, Mr. Wednesday,” said Captain Tripoli.

  Miles sat in a plush red chair while the captain mixed a drink from a small cabinet in the corner. The drink steamed and fizzed slightly. It burned Miles’s throat, but his shaking began to subside at once, and warmth spread to his fingertips.

  “What makes those men so interested in your mother’s diary, I wonder?” said the captain. His jaw was edged by a neatly trimmed beard, Miles noticed, as though he had been outlined with a heavy pencil.

  “The diary contains information that may be the key to something else they stole from me,” said Miles.

  The captain raised one eyebrow. “I’m curious to know why you would choose to sail with men who obviously mean you no good.”

  “We thought they were aboard the Albatross,” said Miles.

  “Why did you think that?” asked the captain.

  “I saw Doctor Tau-Tau speaking to someone on the deck of the Albatross the morning we left.”

  “Indeed?” said Captain Tripoli. He was silent for a moment; then he leaned across the desk, his long fingers intertwined. “There was a thick fog that morning,” he said.

  “I’m sure it was him,” said Miles. “I don’t know anyone else who wears a hat like that.”

  The captain gave a deep chuckle. “You won’t be able to use the fez as a form of identification once we reach Al Bab,” he said.