“Now where?” asked Andre. We were standing on a ridge, with a tall hill in front of us. With our backs to the hill we could see the ocean far below us through the trees.
I consulted my compass. It bobbed around in a slow circle, the tip pointing downward. “Hm,” I said. “I think we’re here. Did anyone remember to bring shovels?”
• • •
Andre had three folding shovels in his backpack. It was hard work digging in the humid heat, but it went fast with the four of us—or maybe it just felt as though time wasn’t passing because the sun wasn’t moving. We took turns digging; the one without the shovel sat on the edge of the ledge, scanning the horizon through the trees for sails.
I was standing up to my chin in the hole, heaving dirt over my head and thinking about what a workout my triceps were getting, when Andre hit something hard. “Here!” he shouted.
Elizabeth, who’d been taking her turn as lookout, rushed over. “Wait!” she shouted.
“What?” asked Andre.
“Are we sure it’s safe? Pirate treasure can be haunted. Sometimes they bury a prisoner alive, to guard it. Or they lay a curse. Like in that Stowe story, ‘Captain Kidd’s Money,’ where the devil drags the gold down to Hell, and they barely escape getting dragged down with it.”
“Isn’t it a little late to worry about that?” I asked.
Cole looked stubborn. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not quitting now. We’ve come too far. I’m going to risk it.”
“Me too.” I bit the earth with my shovel blade. Soon we’d cleared the top of an ironbound chest. “Look, no demons,” I said.
“So far,” said Elizabeth.
We scrabbled away at the hole until we’d cleared the whole chest.
“Is this what you saw the ghost holding?” asked Cole.
“Not sure. This might be bigger. The one I saw was all glowy and transparent, so it’s hard to compare,” I said. “How are we going to get it out?”
“I brought rope,” said Andre.
It took us a great deal of coordinated levering with fallen branches, cascading dirt, banged elbows, and rope burns before we managed to haul the chest out of the hole.
“Come on! Let’s open it!” said Cole.
“I expect it’s locked,” said Elizabeth.
It was. Seven times. There were built-in locks on three sides and hasps with heavy iron padlocks, one on each short side and two on the front.
“Well, Andre? Did you bring an ax, too?” asked Cole.
“No. And if we break it open, how are we going to get the gold down to the ship?”
“How are we going to get the chest down to the ship?” I said. “That thing’s heavy!”
“Yeah—but that’s a good thing,” said Andre. “Heavy means lots of gold.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Elizabeth, pushing a muddy lock of hair out of her eyes with an even muddier hand. “Shouldn’t that much gold be even heavier?”
“Maybe it’s not coins. Maybe it’s pearls and rubies and diamonds,” said Cole.
I went over to the stream to rinse my hands and face. There was a clear view over the waterfall, all the way down to the beach. “Whatever’s in it, we need to get it to the ship fast,” I said. “It looks like that Rigby guy found us.”
• • •
People assume it’s easier to go downhill than uphill, but that’s not always true. Not when you’re carrying a pirate’s chest made of oak and iron and covered in slippery mud. Especially not when the chest is so heavy that it takes at least two people to carry it, and the slope is so steep that you need all your hands and feet free to hang onto roots and branches. And extra-especially not when you’re racing against time to get back to your ship before a rival finds you with the loot.
We reached the beach with no broken bones and only one turned ankle (Cole’s). But we were too late. A big, black ship was hovering just beyond the cove, and a boat was rowing toward us.
“Uh-oh, Libbet! Is that what I think?” said Andre.
“Large hermaphrodite brig. Dutch build. Black paint. Tawdry gilt figurehead. Yes, I’m afraid so,” said Elizabeth. “Hurry up! We need to get under way right now or we’ll never outrun them.” She and Andre began dragging the chest as fast as they could down the beach. I pushed from behind.
“You’re afraid it’s what?” asked Cole, limping beside us.
“The Dutch trader from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” panted Elizabeth. “The same Poe novel as our ship. It’s a version of the Flying Dutchman, from the legends.”
“What legends?” I asked.
“Lots of legends,” said Andre.
“The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship sailed by corpses,” Elizabeth explained. “It can never land, so it just sails around forever. It shows up all over the place in literature. The Dublin Repository in Ireland has the version from the Thomas Moore poem, and the Alba Repository in Scotland has the one from the Sir Walter Scott poem—it’s from a footnote to ‘Rokeby.’ It’s one of my favorite examples of footnote objects. Another one is—”
“Less talking, Libbet. More pulling,” urged Andre.
I redoubled my efforts too. My heels dug deep into the sand as I pushed. “Well, so what’s the problem?” I panted. “If they can’t land, they can’t hurt us.”
“They can stop us from leaving, though. We’re outmanned,” said Elizabeth. “They have a vast crew. And they’re all dead, so they can’t be killed. And we can’t outsail a hermaphrodite brig.”
“What’s a hermaphrodite brig?”
“It means they’re using two kinds of rigging. It makes the ship incredibly fast and maneuverable.”
The dead Dutchman did have a very complicated system of sails: some square, some triangular, with two masts. The sails themselves, though, didn’t look so hot. They were tattered and threadbare, with the sun glaring through holes. And the breeze from the sea carried a stench of rot so bad it belonged in the Lovecraft Corpus.
Cole made a face. “What’s that smell?”
“The crew. Did I mention they’re dead?”
We reached the low-tide mark and were just dragging the chest into the water when the rowboat from the hermaphrodite brig drew near the beach.
There was something very strange about the dead sailors. Stranger than just being dead, I mean. Five or six big seagulls were sitting on each corpse. At first I thought they were eating the bodies—disgusting as it sounds, seagulls will eat rotting garbage, so why not dead sailors? But then I saw they were actually pulling on the corpses’ muscles, moving them like life-sized marionettes. The birds were using the corpses to do the rowing.
A familiar figure hopped out of the rowboat, timing his leap against the waves and holding his smoking pipe over his head to keep it dry. The smell of the smoke mixed horribly with the stench of the rotting sailors at the oars. He frowned at the spray that had splashed his butter-colored linen jacket and matching Bermuda shorts, then shifted his frown to us. “I’ll take that, if you please,” he said, and pointed to the chest.
It was Feathertop.
• • •
“Why should we give it to you?” said Cole.
“Because it belongs to my employer. You found it on his island. Without permission, I might add.”
“It does not,” said Cole. “Our great-great-great-great-granduncle buried it here. Our great-great-great-great-aunt sent us to get it. It belongs to us.”
“The laws governing supernatural salvage are very clear,” said Feathertop. “They favor my employer. His island, his chest.”
“Not as clear as all that,” said Elizabeth. “Sukie and Cole have at least as good a case. Their ghosts, their prophesy, their plunder.”
“Well, perhaps. But there are only four of you.” He waved his hand at the teeming, reeking ship.
Elizabeth
said, “We could just stay here until you leave. Your sailors can’t come ashore.”
“You could, true. But I expect you’ll get tired of parrot fruit sooner or later. And after a year or two, the children will probably begin to miss their parents. If you’re so keen on keeping our property, we might strike a bargain. You have several items we would be happy to consider taking in exchange.”
Andre called to the rowboat, “Yo, Rigby! You down with these gangster tactics?”
A salt-and-pepper head poked out from behind the corpses: the suave man from the flea market. “Feathertop is doing a fine job representing my interests,” he called back. “He offered you a trade. Why not take it?”
“We would happily accept the Yellow Sign, for example,” said Feathertop.
“I don’t have the Yellow Sign anymore,” I said. “And I wouldn’t give it to you if I did.”
“Well, your Hawthorne broom, then. That would be a fantastic bargain for you—the chest is sure to be worth much more.”
“I’m not trading away my heirlooms. Anyway, I didn’t bring the broom.”
“Stop! Look!” yelled Cole, pointing. “They got our ship!”
It was true. While we were arguing with Feathertop, a boatload of corpses had landed on the Ariel and were busily hoisting the sails.
“I’m sure you would hate to be stranded here,” said Feathertop. He stepped closer to me. “I can smell haunted objects on you. What have you got? I’ll just take a look, shall I?” I drew back, but he stepped even closer and stuck his hand in my pocket.
I screamed and hit him. Cole and Andre ran at him. Feathertop took a deep drag on his pipe and blew the smoke straight in Andre’s face, then stuck out his foot daintily in front of Cole. Both guys fell sprawling in the sand, Cole clutching his injured ankle and Andre choking for breath.
“Cole! Andre!” I screamed.
Feathertop took another deep drag on his pipe and reached for the cord around my neck, the one my sister’s whistle hung from. I twisted away to avoid the noisome blast of smoke, but before I could stop him, he had yanked the whistle free.
“Well, what have we here?” he said. “This summons a spirit, doesn’t it? I could use a spirit servant.”
“Give me that! That’s mine! You can’t have it!” I sounded like a four-year-old. I wished I was a four-year-old. Nothing like this would have happened when I was four and my sister was around to protect me. I wished I hadn’t told her to leave me alone.
“Jonathan! I can’t believe you’re doing this!” Elizabeth yelled. She was fishing desperately in her bag for something.
Rigby had jumped into the water—it came up to his chest—and was half swimming, half wading toward us. “All’s fair in collecting,” he said. “Anyway, you’re the ones who are trying to steal from me.”
I grappled with Feathertop, trying to get the whistle back.
Then several things happened fast. Feathertop got the whistle to his lips and blew. A stream of evil, shrieking smoke wailed through the whistle. The sound was louder and deadlier and more horrifying than anything I’d ever heard. In one of those abrupt, disorienting time shifts, the sun blinked out of the sky. And through the smoky, crepuscular gloaming, a phantom came streaming. My sister.
Never before had I seen her so vast and furious. She was unimaginably vivid—and everyone could see her! She might have been any dead horror screaming for vengeance.
“Get the box!” Feathertop commanded her.
Kitty made it clear that he couldn’t command her, and the only thing she would be getting was Feathertop.
The two of them drew back, then rushed at each other.
I wouldn’t have thought anything could hurt a ghost, but apparently something in Feathertop’s pipe smoke gave him powers that reached even beyond the grave. But my sister had been summoned by a blast of the same infernal smoke that filled his lungs. They were well matched.
At dusk, a ghost bleeds black. A fiend bleeds glowing ichor. And the agonized cries of each can shatter wood. Branches fell all about us, splintering as they hit the sand.
The worst thing about their fight was how familiar it seemed. I’d watched Kitty fight like that on playgrounds all through my childhood, defending me from bullies, real and imagined. This was a horrible, unstoppable parody of something I’d loved and relied on.
“Jonathan! Curb your creature!” Elizabeth screamed, still fishing in her bag.
“Curb yours!” screamed Rigby.
“She’s not my creature!” Elizabeth answered.
“She’s not a creature! She’s my sister!” I screamed.
“Both of you, stop!” Rigby yelled, grabbing at Kitty. His hands went through her, but when she cuffed him away, he went flying across the beach. He crashed into a pile of seaweed and lay dazed.
Elizabeth found what she was looking for in her purse and held it out. “Feathertop! Here!” she screamed.
Feathertop turned his head toward her. She was holding up a mirror.
His eyes went wide. Then he changed. In the dim light I watched his cheeks harden into ridges, his snappy suit fall into rags. The pipe faded and went out, then tumbled to the sand. Suddenly nothing was left of Feathertop but a heap of lifeless objects: a pumpkin-headed scarecrow, a broomstick, and an old clay pipe.
I stared. What had happened to him?
Kitty wailed in wordless exaltation. With a high-pitched shriek like a fighter plane, she flew over Rigby’s rowboat. As she passed, the corpses tumbled into the bottom of the boat beneath her, and a cloud of birds flew upward, radiantly white in the gloom. The corpses on the Ariel all scrambled into their boat and started pulling on their oars, but before they could reach the Dutch trader, Kitty flew over them shrieking, and the same thing happened: Corpses collapsed; birds flew away.
We all stared, dazed. Rigby sat up, rubbing his head.
“What happened to the corpses?” said Cole.
“Can’t you stop her? She’s scaring off my gulls!” yelled Rigby.
“Not our problem,” said Andre. “You’re the one who summoned her. Your creature did, anyway.”
“But I’m going to be stranded here!”
“Oh, the irony,” said Elizabeth.
The moon rose, blazing quickly up the sky, and the corpses on the mother ship leapt into action. Elizabeth was right about the ship’s speed. It could outpace a ghost, apparently. Soon the ship had slipped beneath the horizon, my sister streaming after it. Her howls echoed back to us for a long time after they’d both vanished.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A Dead Man’s Chest
Cole breathed. “What just happened?”
Kitty’s blue whistle glinted in the moonlight next to Feathertop’s remains. I picked it up. “When Feathertop blew my whistle, he summoned my sister. After that, I have no idea.”
“What is all this trash?” Cole nudged the pumpkin with the toe of his shoe. It made a disgusting squelching noise.
“Careful with that!” said Rigby. He bent over the pile of stuff and rummaged through it with gingerly distaste, picking out an old clay pipe and a broom that looked a lot like mine.
“What happened to Feathertop?” said Cole. “How could a person turn into all this?”
“Feathertop wasn’t a person, exactly,” said Elizabeth. “He was a satiric literary construction, a sort of Pygmalion variant.”
“A what?”
“It’s a Greek myth about a sculptor who brings his statue to life. This is one of Hawthorne’s versions. He was kind of obsessed with the myth. Did you ever read his story ‘Feathertop’?”
We shook our heads.
“It’s like a snarky twist on Pygmalion. A witch builds a scarecrow out of a pumpkin, some old clothes, and her broom. She likes him so much she decides to bring him to life, so she gives him her pipe to smoke.”
“That pipe?
” I asked, pointing to Rigby’s hand.
“Yes. It’s the jewel of my collection,” said Rigby.
“The pipe has demonic powers,” said Elizabeth. “Whoever controls it can summon a fiend to light it with an infernal ember and keep it filled with diabolical tobacco.”
We all looked at Rigby. “You smoke diabolical tobacco lit by hellfire? I guess that explains your challenged ethics,” I said.
It was hard to tell in the moonlight, but I thought Rigby looked offended. “Oh, like you don’t fly around on diabolical broomsticks? Anyway, I don’t smoke it myself,” he said. “I made my scarecrow smoke it. And there’s nothing wrong with my ethics. You’re the one who’s stealing from me.”
“Whatever,” said Cole. “How does the pipe turn a scarecrow into a creep?”
Elizabeth said, “In the Hawthorne story, the smoke turns the scarecrow into a dandy—the kind of guy who wears expensive clothes and tries to worm his way into high society. He gets his name from the feather in his hat. But whenever the tobacco runs out, Feathertop has to summon the demon to refill it and light it, and if the demon’s not quick enough, he starts to change back into a scarecrow.”
I had seen Feathertop start to change, I realized, that time his pipe went out at the flea market. “So what happened here? Did the pipe somehow go out?” I asked.
“No. I showed him my mirror. It reflected his true self. He’s so vain, whenever he sees his true form, he throws down the pipe in despair and turns back into a scarecrow.”
“Which is a total pain, thank you very much,” said Rigby. “Where am I going to get another pumpkin on this forsaken island?”
“Seriously, Jonathan? You threaten to strand us on a desert island, you sic your creature on us, and then you complain when I disable him?” Elizabeth rolled her eyes.
“Hey, your creature attacked first.”
I said, “I keep telling you, that’s my sister! She’s nobody’s creature!” I wondered where Kitty had gone and when I would see her again. I was way too freaked out by her new, fierce vividness to summon her now, though.
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