The Splendid Baron Submarine

by Eric Bower

  “It’s his ship,” I interrupted. “It says so on the side of it. See? ‘Captain Affect’s Ship.’”

  It’s certainly not the most creative name for a ship that I’d ever heard, but I suppose it got its point across.

  “Errr . . . right,” P said as he began to circle the shipwreck. “But you should all understand that there is a chance that the treasure might not be there. Someone might have already taken it, or it might be buried beneath the ocean floor, or maybe it was never there to begin with. We shouldn’t de—”

  “Nope,” M interrupted. “There it is. I see the treasure. Right there.”

  M pointed to a large treasure chest on the deck of the shipwreck, right across from where the mast had snapped in half. The treasure was sitting there, out in the open, just waiting for someone to take it. It almost seemed too easy. All that we had to do was go and get it. And by “we,” they meant “me.”

  “Would you mind, son?” P asked sheepishly as he pointed out the window.

  “I mean, if it’s not too much trouble?” added M. “And try to breathe normally this time.”

  I sighed.

  “Just give me the stupid rubber suit.”

  P handed me the underwater suit. He had glued the crack in the helmet and replaced the air hose, so it was almost as good as new. He told me that it should be fine as long as the glue didn’t get too wet.

  “Ready, W.B.?” Rose asked.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  M pulled me aside and whispered to me.

  “Are you sure your mind is alright, W.B.? I’m still worried about you.”

  “My mind is as good as it’s ever been,” I assured my mother.

  For some reason, that didn’t appear to make her feel any better.

  After I slipped the underwater suit and helmet back on, M opened the back of the submarine, and I stepped out onto the ocean floor. This time, I wasn’t as frightened as I was before. I was actually excited to collect the treasure, which Vice President Levi P. Morton would use to save the country. I’d be a hero, a national hero, and for a reward, my family would be presented with the Wish Diamond, a diamond so beautiful and enchanting that I was actually tempted to steal the picture of it from the Vice President’s book.

  I slowly made my way to the shipwreck and climbed onto the deck. Though the sails had disintegrated, the cannons had rusted, the mast had snapped in two, and most of the wood had splintered and rotted, I could still imagine how impressive Captain Affect’s ship must have been several hundred years ago. It was incredible to be standing on a part of history that most people thought had disappeared forever.

  Using every ounce of might I could muster, I reached down and carefully lifted Captain Affect’s lost treasure chest. It was much heavier than I thought it would be, but my excitement had given me twice my usual strength.

  As I held the treasure in my hands, I felt something pass through my mind that I can only describe as a warm sort of tickle, as though someone had poured hot tea into my ears and added a squirt of honey.

  I assumed it was the feeling of pure joy.

  Standing there on the deck of the sunken pirate ship, with a literal fortune in my arms, I took a moment to appreciate the silent beauty around me. There were many people in the world who would have given anything to be where I was, so that they could learn the secrets of what went on at the bottom of the sea. I felt like the luckiest person on the planet.

  And then I spotted something out of the corner of my eye which was either a sea monster or a giant collection of seaweed floating towards me. When I had finished bravely screaming, I decided that I had appreciated the ocean for long enough and quickly made my way back to the submarine.

  P used his tools to break down the old and rusty locks that fastened the treasure chest shut. While he did that, M took a rag and wiped the sea gunk off the chest, revealing the name “CAPTAIN AFFECT,” which had been carved into the chest with a chisel. There were also several carvings of skulls and crossbones under the name, which, I suppose, were meant to frighten away people who tried to steal the treasure. Or maybe the captain was simply practicing his artwork. Either way, they were very nice and pirate-ish, which made the treasure seem very authentic.

  After P had removed the lock, he placed his hands on the corners of the chest and prepared to open it.

  “Is everybody ready?” he asked.

  “Yes!” we all cried.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!” we all cried again.

  “Are you positive?”

  “Yes!!!”

  “Are you surely positive?”

  “McLaron,” my mother said with a forced smile, “just open it.”

  “Right.”

  My father opened the chest, revealing a treasure which no one had seen in hundreds of years.

  It was the most beautiful thing imaginable.

  No. It was even more beautiful than that.

  Have you seen pictures of pirate treasurers? This was 4,578 ½ times better than that because it was real and because it was right there in front of us. There were shiny coins, and glittering rubies and emeralds and sapphires, pearl and diamond necklaces, and bracelets, crowns and tiaras, golden swords, silver daggers, and so much more. It lit up the inside of the submarine with a rich and vibrant glow.

  We dropped to our knees with our mouths wide open because it was so overwhelming. Several minutes later (when we were all nice and normally whelmed), we jumped up and began to celebrate, whooping like maniacs as we did the happiest happy dance imaginable. We danced every dance we could think of, including “the stinky onion,” which we danced until my head somehow got stuck in the stove.

  The fun always stops when my head gets stuck in the stove.

  Then we dove into the treasure chest, trying on the crowns and necklaces and rings, tossing the gold coins into the air and letting them rain down over us. We dug through the treasure as though we were greedy pirates ourselves, pulling out bejeweled cups, and diamond encrusted pins, silver plates and golden mirrors, feeling richer and more successful than we’d ever felt before.

  After we spilled the rest of the treasure onto the floor of the submarine, we found the prized jewel of the loot, the piece of the treasure that had been promised to us by the Vice President of the United States as a reward: the Wish Diamond.

  My mother picked up the giant diamond with hands that shook with awe. The diamond shimmered brightly in the torchlight of the submarine. It was a perfect shade of light blue and reminded me of the glaciers that we had seen in the frozen arctic when my family traveled around the world in our Air Oh! Plane. It was the most stunning object that my eyes had ever had the pleasure of eyeballing.

  In fact, it was the most stunning object that any of our eyes had ever eyeballed, and, because of that, we couldn’t look away from it. We just sat there on the floor and stared at the grapefruit sized diamond, the huge diamond that would make us the richest inventor family in the country, maybe even the world.

  When our eyes began to grow sore from staring at the Wish Diamond, M and P started up the submarine, and we began our journey back to the California coast. The trip home would be long, but we didn’t care. We had our beautiful diamond to keep us company, our one-of-a-kind diamond which would make us rich enough to have the life that we had always wanted. And not only would we be wealthy, we would also be national heroes. Maybe Vice President Morton would give me another medal to place beside my WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDMA medal. Maybe one that says I’m also the world’s greatest grandpa.

  I was so distracted that I didn’t realize we’d forgotten a former furry passenger of ours back on the island: the common squirrel monkey that had saved my life.

  I also didn’t realize that there were three new passengers on the submarine, passengers who only I could see.

  I first spotted the new passen
gers a few days later, when I was waking up from a nap in my bunk. I opened my eyes and saw three floating ghosts, ghosts who couldn’t possibly be there because my scientist mother had told me that ghosts don’t exist.

  “Hello,” one of them said to me in a friendly voice. “I warned you about taking the treasure. Remember? Now we’re going to have to haunt you. And because you weren’t honest with your parents, and you didn’t give them our warning, we’re going to double haunt you.”

  “You aren’t going to haunt me or double haunt me or even triple haunt me,” I whispered back, “because you aren’t real. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  Then I closed my eyes and turned over, pulling my blanket over my head. Before I fell back asleep, I heard one of the ghosts whisper to another.

  “Wait, if we aren’t real, does that mean I don’t have to pay you back the seven dollars that I owe you?”

  A Very Weasely-Looking Face

  The trip back home felt shorter than the trip to the island, but that was mostly because everyone was in such a great mood because of the treasure. We were at sea for almost a week before I realized that we had forgotten little Waldo.

  “We aren’t turning back for a monkey,” P told me after I had mentioned it to him. “And living on that island will be great for him anyway. There’s plenty of fruits and nuts for him to eat, and plenty of tall trees for him to climb. He’ll be happy there. Probably.”

  “Though he will be pretty lonely,” one of the ghosts added. “The killer monkeys who live there aren’t very friendly. And the ghosts who used to live on the island are no longer there to keep him company.”

  “I don’t think that’s correct,” another one of the ghosts said to him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said that the ghosts who used to live on the island are no longer there.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Ghosts aren’t alive,” the ghost pointed out. “They can’t be living on the island if they aren’t alive.”

  “Oh. Good point. But it would sound really strange to say that there were ghosts deading on the island, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose. Perhaps we could say that the ghosts were ghosting on the island.”

  “Oooh, I like that. Ghosting. Good word. Well done.”

  “Thank you. I thought of it while I was ghosting earlier this morning.”

  “Ghosting.”

  “Ghosting.”

  I kept telling myself that the ghosts weren’t there, and that my brain was wrong, and that I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing or hearing what I was hearing. I was clearly suffering a brain injury from one of the 6,548 times that I’d accidentally hit my head, and the best thing for me to do would be to ignore the impossible and pay attention to the possible. Instead of focusing on the ghosts who weren’t there, I focused on my final pirate book instead, though I can’t say that I was enjoying the story very much. It was about a ghost that haunted an old sunken treasure, and, quite frankly, I was a little tired of the subject.

  “That’s a great story,” one of the ghosts told me as he tapped my book with his see-through ghost hand. “I know the ghost from it quite well. He’s an old buddy of mine. His name is Frank. Good guy. Cooks a delicious meatloaf.”

  I told myself that the ghosts would disappear once we left the submarine, once my brain had finally had enough time to heal from the terrible injuries that had scrambled it like an omelet. I would start thinking clearly again, and everything would go back to the way it was before.

  But several days later, when we arrived at the California coast, the ghosts were still there with me. The three of them sat beside me as the Air Oh! Plane took off and headed towards Pitchfork. They took turns licking their ghost fingers and sticking them in my ears, but I kept ignoring them. They were just a part of my wild and stupid imagination.

  Sometimes I really hated my wild and stupid imagination.

  Especially when it got the inside of my ears wet with ghost spit.

  We arrived at the Baron Estate later that morning, and found a very annoyed looking Aunt Dorcas sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch. She glared at us as we stepped out of the winged flying machine, which P then shrunk with his Shrinking Invention. She clearly hadn’t forgiven us for abandoning her for over a month without telling her where we were going.

  Again.

  We tend to abandon her a lot.

  “What is that thing?” she asked, as she pointed to the treasure chest that Rose Blackwood and I lugged inside.

  We had promised Vice President Morton that we wouldn’t tell anyone about the treasure, and that included Aunt Dorcas.

  “It’s nothing,” M told her.

  “Nothing at all,” P agreed.

  “Yup, it’s nothing,” Rose said.

  “What treasure chest?” I asked, as the four of us went inside.

  It was wonderful to be home again. I had missed the Baron Estate terribly. It was dry, safe, quiet, boring, and totally free of sharks and eels. I walked across the familiar living room, up the familiar steps, and down the familiar hallway, until I reached my favorite place in the world: my familiar bedroom. It was just as I had left it.

  . . . With the exception of my three new roommates.

  “Sheesh, you’ve got a lot of books, kid,” one of the ghosts told me as he stared at my bookshelf.

  “Do you happen to have a spare bed that I can sleep in?” another asked. “I have a bad back, and I can’t really sleep on the floor.”

  “It smells oddly like cheese and stale pie in here. But other than that, it’s a pretty nice place,” the third ghost said. “I’m really going to enjoy haunting this room for the next sixty or seventy years.”

  It’s a good thing that those ghosts weren’t really there. Otherwise, I might have been a bit frightened.

  The Vice President had told us to wait at the Baron Estate after we returned with the treasure and that he’d be in touch with us shortly. So we waited and we waited. And then we waited some more. And then some more. And then some more. And some more.

  “Maybe we should write to Vice President Morton?” P suggested one morning, when we were all sick and tired of waiting.

  “He told us that he would contact us, McLaron,” M said. “Remember? We’re just supposed to wait here and guard the treasure. I don’t want to disobey an order from the Vice President of the United States.”

  It made us nervous, having all that treasure in the house. It was literally a fortune—the biggest fortune that anyone in Arizona Territory had ever seen. Because of that, my parents didn’t feel safe leaving the house. They were convinced that if they left for even an hour, then someone would break into the Baron Estate and steal the treasure. Which of course, meant that they would steal our Wish Diamond as well—after all, there was a very good reason why that diamond was the most stolen diamond in history. It was so beautiful that I often wanted to steal it, even though I was technically one of its owners. It just had that special stealy quality to it.

  M and P didn’t want Rose and me to leave the house either, in case we accidentally told someone about the treasure, someone who might be tempted to come over to see it in person. They didn’t even feel comfortable letting Aunt Dorcas leave the Baron Estate, which my aunt found quite confusing, because she didn’t even know about the treasure.

  “Why can’t I leave the house?” she asked my mother. “I’m supposed to meet my best friend Madge Tweetie in town for tea. If I don’t show up, she’ll say all sorts of foul things about me to the other ladies. She’s always looking for opportunities to say foul things about me to the other ladies. Madge, that stinker . . .”

  “I can’t tell you why,” M said. “Please just trust me, Dorcas.”

  I guess you could say that we all ended up growing pretty paranoid. We thought we heard noises at night, noises that sounded like s
omeone prowling around outside of the Baron Estate. We began to wonder if perhaps someone was spying on us. Suddenly, my parents didn’t feel comfortable having everyone go to sleep at the same time, just in case someone broke into the Baron Estate and stole the treasure while we were all asleep in bed. M and P decided that we should trade off staying up all night, keeping watch over the treasure to make sure there was an eye on it at all times.

  The first night, my father stayed awake and guarded the treasure. And then the next night, my mother stayed awake, and then Rose Blackwood had a turn, and then the following night my father said that he would stay awake with the treasure again.

  “What about me?” I asked. “I haven’t had a turn yet. I can guard the treasure if you like.”

  Rose, M, and P all looked at each other with doubtful expressions on their faces.

  “Well, W.B.,” Rose finally said, “we would give you a turn. But you’ve been acting really funny lately.”

  I didn’t know what she meant.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “W.B.,” my mother said gently, “you’ve been talking to yourself a lot lately, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Your father and I sometimes talk to ourselves when we’re deep in thought. But lately, you’ve been arguing with yourself as well, and telling yourself that you aren’t going to listen to yourself because you aren’t really there. You tell yourself that you’re imaginary, scientifically impossible, and that you aren’t going to allow your damaged brain to trick you. And also that you should keep your ghost spit to yourself. It’s really quite weird.”

  “It’s very weird,” my father said. “So we think you should rest for a while until your brain is better. Or at least less weird.”

  “My brain is fine,” I argued, and then, before I could stop myself, I shouted, “and the three of you need to stop making faces at me!”