House of Secrets (21 page)

With supreme confidence, Brendan grabbed one of the wall-mounted lamps—and yanked down with two hands. The lamp snapped off, leaving an ugly wire sticking out and plaster crumbling onto Brendan’s face.

“Have you lost the plot?” asked Will.

Brendan got mad. “Listen, buddy, you might be a hotshot when it comes to flying planes and making my sister angry, but you’re looking at a veteran of hundreds of hours of
New Adventures of Scooby-Doo,
and when Scooby and the gang need to get into a hidden passageway, they always do the same thing—pull on a lamp!”

“Scooby
who
?” Will asked.

“Scooby-Doo—he’s a talking dog who happens to be a detective.” Brendan grabbed the next lamp and pulled. Once again, the lamp snapped off. Will burst out laughing.

“Okay . . . so maybe Denver Kristoff didn’t rig the lamps,” said a frustrated Brendan, picking plaster chunks out of his hair.

Suddenly, a splash of water on Will’s neck made him spin around. “Bombs away!” he heard from upstairs.

He poked his head out the broken window and saw part of a desk drifting in the sea. The moon had risen, and its luminescence made the waves look as if they were laced with crystal.

“Watch out!” Cordelia yelled from above. “Wouldn’t want to hurt your massive male brain!” Will pulled back—just before a broken chair fell from the second-story window and hit the water, sending another burst of sea spray at him.

“Are you mad?” he called up.

“We’re lightening the load on the ship!” Cordelia shouted. “‘Jettisoning the ballast,’ as your naval colleagues might say!”

“That—that—” Will sputtered; Brendan was sure he was going to unleash an insult. “That is a
fantastic idea!
Bloody good thinking! Keep it up!”

“You’re too kind!” Cordelia replied with a healthy dose of sarcasm before tossing a frayed wicker hamper into the water. Eleanor was feeding her an endless supply of ruined items from the master bedroom.

“See?” Will turned to Brendan. “Now your sisters are actually helping, and all you’re doing is pulling on lamps. Stay out of my way and don’t cause trouble.”

“What do you want me to do?” asked Brendan.

“Just bugger off until I break through this wall,” said Will.

Brendan grumbled and kicked a lamp as Will marked an
X
on the wall with the pencil and began hitting it with the ball-peen hammer, trying to focus while an alarm clock—and a shoe tree, and a vacuum cleaner—hit the ocean behind him. Brendan walked to the living room and plopped down on the now-legless piano. Resting on the floor was
Savage Warriors,
the book Cordelia had been reading that she flipped over on the couch—and that reminded Brendan of something important.

“Deal! Nell!” Brendan rushed into the upstairs hall. Cordelia and Eleanor couldn’t keep from smiling as they threw magazines and bookends and paperweights that had migrated into the hall out the window.

“Bren, see how it’s working?” Cordelia said. “We’re lighter!”

“Yeah, that’s great, but I forgot to tell you guys,” Brendan said. “I saw
The Book of Doom and Desire
.”

“What? Where?”

“Before the colossus thing. When I snuck into the woods to set off the grenade. Inside the cliff where the explosion happened.”

“How did it get
there
?” asked Eleanor.

“I don’t think the book exists in just one place. I think it can jump around. Like if we follow our selfish desires, it’ll show up. And we’ll be tempted to open it. But that’s my point:
don’t
.”

“Why?” Cordelia asked. “Did
you
open it?”

“No! I was going to, but—it would’ve been wrong. That book is pure evil.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because it . . . ” Brendan searched for the right words. “As I got closer to the book, it started to have this incredible hold over me. It was an amazing, really kinda awesome feeling. Like I could do anything, like I was stronger and more powerful than anybody. It was like what they talk about at those special assemblies at school, where they teach us about the dangers of drugs? And how you become so obsessed with them they can take over your life and ruin everything? The book was like that. When I was holding it, I didn’t care about anything else. And worst of all . . . I didn’t care about any of
you
. And that’s when I knew . . . I had to do everything in my power to keep from opening it, and throw it away. Because if I had opened it . . . I’m pretty sure I’d still be in that forest. Alone.” Brendan gulped. “And I don’t want to be alone. Okay?”

Eleanor gave him a hug. She couldn’t remember a time when her brother had admitted to needing anyone in his family. Cordelia watched and nodded . . . but she thought,
Maybe the book scared Bren because he’s not the one who’s supposed to open it. Maybe I am.

“Now . . . do you want my help?” Brendan asked. “Should we chuck these?” He pointed to the pictures of Denver Kristoff’s family. The frames were splintered on the floor.

“It doesn’t seem right to throw away somebody’s memories,” said Cordelia, looking at the portraits in the moonlight, especially the ones of baby Dahlia. “It’s weird,” she said. “She was such an adorable baby, so cute and happy—”

“But she grew up to be the Wind Witch,” said Brendan.

“Yeah. There’s no indication whatsoever. Rousseau says that we’re all born as a blank slate, that we learn evil as we get older.”

“
Pff,
no way,” said Eleanor. “There’s kids in my grade who are already evil. There’s this one, David Seamer, who attacked his brother with a sledgehammer.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Brendan said. “What eight-year-old would be able to lift a . . . Hold on. . . .”

Brendan suddenly ran back down the stairs. “See you soon!”

Cordelia and Eleanor looked at each other. “What got into him?” Cordelia asked.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Brendan searched through the detritus on the floor. Will approached, hearing the commotion. He hadn’t made much progress with the ball-peen hammer.

“What in blazes are you looking for?”

Brendan was too possessed by his latest idea to answer. He grabbed a cluster of plastic shopping bags, a stack of disposable clear Solo cups, and the roll of duct tape. He put two of the cups over his eyes and attached them to his head with rough circles of tape.

“What are you
doing
?”

“Making water goggles. Now help me blow up these plastic bags.” Brendan demonstrated, inflating a bag like a balloon and tying it off. Air leaked out, but it kept its basic filled-up shape. Will followed, impressed by Brendan’s pluck. Soon they had five bags full of air. Brendan opened the door to the basement.

“You’re going down there?”

“I’m
diving
down there,” Brendan said. Without further explanation he stripped down to his boxers and handed Will the high-powered Maglite. “Just shine this toward the water.”

With plastic bags looped around his fingers and makeshift goggles on his head, Brendan waded into the flooded basement.

The beam of light cut through the murky water, but the goggles didn’t work as well as Brendan had planned. They immediately filled with briny liquid that made everything fuzzy. He squinted and tried to navigate, seeing only shapes in the gloom: the eerie old mannequin, the BlackoutReady generator . . . the cans!

Brendan had forgotten about the cans. They were scattered on the floor—and the Walkers and Will still hadn’t eaten since breakfast Lunchables. Brendan needed to get those cans; it didn’t matter what was inside. He scooped five of them up in one arm and kept looking for the thing he had come for. He knew that it would be on the floor too—it was too heavy to float. His lungs burned as he felt along the wood grain until he reached . . .

The sledgehammer.

Working quickly, with ripping pain brewing in his chest, Brendan slipped the now buoyant shopping bags over the handle of the hammer. Then he pushed off the bottom with his last bit of strength, swam up, and burst out of the water in front of Will.

“I got it!” he shouted. “A real hammer! And
these
!” He passed the cans to the pilot.

“Cordelia! Eleanor!” Will called.
“Food!”

The Walker sisters arrived in the kitchen almost before Will was finished shouting. They quickly dug up a can opener and got into the Green Giant corn Brendan had salvaged. It might’ve been cold and soggy, but corn had never tasted so good.

“
Mm
, how much of this do we have?” Cordelia asked.

“Lots,” said Brendan. “I can keep diving down to get them whenever we’re hungry.”

“Are there canned peaches, too, for dessert?” Eleanor asked. Everybody laughed. But Eleanor kept talking. “Or bottled water?”

No one laughed at that. They were all terribly thirsty, and there wasn’t any fresh water in the house; all they had to drink was canned corn juice.

“Sorry, Nell,” said Brendan. “Maybe when we bust open the wall we’ll find some water.”

“Let’s get to it,” Will said, lugging the sledgehammer into the hallway. “Corn gives me strength!”

The Walkers followed. Will lined the sledgehammer up with the
X
and looked over his shoulder. “I must ask you ladies to stand back.”

“Excuse me?” asked Cordelia. “Have you decided to become sexist again?”

“This isn’t women’s work,” Will said, and before Cordelia could fire off a comeback, Eleanor interrupted—

“What about your shoulder? You’ll break your stitches!”

“Nonsense,” Will said, even though the pain in his shoulder was intense and he knew he’d have only one chance to do this. Gritting his teeth, he swung the sledgehammer back—

And smashed it through the wall!

It was one clean hit, direct at the
X
, and given what happened next, even Cordelia had to be impressed with Will’s engineering precision. From the crater in the wall, a single crack sprang up to the ceiling, zigging and zagging as it rained down paint chips, and then two chunks of plaster fell inward in one clean motion.

The Walkers and Will were staring at a large hole in the wall, coughing dust that hadn’t been disturbed in nearly a century.

As the cloud cleared, a passageway was revealed behind the hole, black and foreboding, with a row of unlit torches mounted at eye level. It disappeared into the darkness in both directions.

C
ordelia grabbed a candle from the floor and touched it to the nearest torch. With a thick
whoosh
the torch burst into flame; the hallway was illuminated in flickering orange. In one direction it stretched toward the living room; in the other it went toward the kitchen; but in both ways the corridor seemed to turn at the last minute, leading to points unknown. Aside from the rows of torches it was bare.

“Shall we?” Will asked, moving inside.

“Only if I get to hold the flashlight,” said Eleanor. “I don’t trust torches.”

Cordelia handed it to her as they entered single file. “Which way?” she asked. Eleanor insisted on doing eeny, meeny, miny, moe to determine that they would head toward the kitchen.

Will took the first torch off the wall and used it to light the others. Each torch lit made the passageway a little brighter and less intimidating for Eleanor. Checking over her shoulder to see the way back, she said, “It’s like Hansel and Gretel with the bread crumbs.”

“Didn’t they wind up getting eaten?” Brendan asked.

“Shhh,”
scolded Cordelia, but Eleanor had already smacked her brother, sending his hair dangerously close to open flame.

Around the first bend, the corridor widened into an eight-foot chamber. Against the wall was a pale bookshelf—but instead of rushing up to investigate it, Cordelia recoiled.

“It’s made of bones!” she said. Indeed it looked as if the bookshelf were constructed from a bleached human skeleton, with twisting, knobby femurs for legs, and tibiae for shelves, on which the books sat crookedly. Brendan looked closer, tapping his fingers against it.

“It’s just wood, Deal.”

Cordelia’s vision snapped back into place: the bookshelf was made of white driftwood held together with brass screws. The dancing, mocking light of the torches was playing tricks on her.

“Sorry,” she said.