House of Secrets (22 page)

“What are these books?” asked Will. “More Denver Kristoff trash? He was quite the prolific egomaniac.”

“These look different,” said Eleanor.

Cordelia pulled a book off and opened its worn leather cover to find a title page in French with a wood-block print of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden . . . except Adam’s head was split into four sections with brains spilling over the edges and Eve had a withered third leg protruding from her torso. Cordelia shuddered and turned the page to see an etched print of a skull with four eye sockets—and then a rosy-cheeked baby with stunted flippers instead of arms—

“
Ugghh!
It’s like an ancient book of medical curiosities,” she said, closing the volume and returning it to the shelf.

“Cool! Let me see!” Brendan exclaimed, but the moment he opened the book, it only took him one glance to close it. “Not really cool.”

Will grabbed a second book. This one appeared to be a Spanish encyclopedia. But the topics . . .

“Human sacrifice,” Will said, showing Cordelia and Brendan a print of a feather-crowned Aztec priest ripping a beating heart from the chest of a terrified victim. Will held the book away from Eleanor to prevent her from seeing the grotesque image.

“This Kristoff dude was into some sick stuff,” said Brendan, opening something called
The Gods of Pegāna,
one of the few volumes that was in English. “‘Before there stood gods upon Olympus, or ever Allah was Allah, had wrought and rested Mana-Yood-Sushai.’”

“A god of sushi? What’s that about?” asked Eleanor.

“That’s a rare work by Lord Dunsany: a compendium of invented deities,” said Cordelia. “May I see?”

Brendan handed it over and opened something called
The Redolent Garden
. Cordelia looked at
The Gods of Pegāna
before she and Will checked out the other books. It was tough to determine the subject matter, because they were in so many languages—French, Arabic, German—but they seemed to cover indigenous fertility practices, herb cultivation, potion making, witchcraft, and demonology, complete with pictures of howling spirits and the fires of hell. The books even
smelled
evil—the yellowing pages mixed with the old ink produced a sharp tang.

“Smells like rotting flesh,” said Cordelia.

“Oh,” remarked Will, “and when have you smelled rotting flesh?”

“Well, never, really . . . but I, um . . . I’ve read a lot of detective stories, and they always say that rotting flesh smells like five-month-old lunch meat or red snapper that’s been sitting in the sun for too long,” said Cordelia.

“Rotting flesh smells nothing like this book,” said Will. “And trust me, once you’ve smelled it, you will never forget it.”

Cordelia stopped herself from asking exactly where Will had been when he’d smelled rotting flesh and went back to paging through a book called
The Apocrypha Bestiary
. She stopped looking after seeing enough flashes of human misery—men pulled apart on the rack, babies torn from their mothers by woolly beasts, corpses feasted on by ghouls—to give her a week’s worth of nightmares. Eleanor calmly looked down the hallway the whole time. She wasn’t worried about what was in the books; she was worried about what was in the house.

“Let’s move on,” said Cordelia, snatching
The Redolent Garden
out of Brendan’s hands.

“Hey! I was just getting to ‘Painting the Female Body for Ritualistic Sacrifice.’”

“You hate reading.”

“Not stuff like
that
!”

“We’ve got to stay on course and see where this hallway leads. These books are giving me the creeps.”

The Walkers and Will continued into the bowels of the house, lighting torches as they went. The passageway twisted back and forth but didn’t branch—until they reached a thick, rusted steel door on the left side. The door looked as if it would have a very strong lock, but it stood partially open, tempting them.

“A little too easy,” said Brendan. “Who wants to go first?”

No answer.

“Will?” asked Brendan.

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the oldest.”

“Not by bloody much.”

“Because you have a gun,” Eleanor suggested.

“That won’t help against whatever spirits are down here!”

“Because we trust you,” Cordelia finally said. Will couldn’t back down from that remark. He slowly pushed the door open with his Webley to reveal—

“A wine cellar! Now
these
are my kind of spirits!”

The room was twice as big as the chamber that held the bookshelf. It was lined with unlit torches—and dominated by a wooden rack cradling countless bottles of wine. Will stepped in.

“1899! A very good year.” He grinned, holding up a bottle.

“Put that back,” said Eleanor. “Isn’t there any soda?”

“They don’t keep fizzy drinks in wine cellars,” said Will. “There’s no corkscrew?”

“She’s right, Will. Put the wine back,” said Cordelia. “Why don’t you and Bren keep exploring the passageway while Eleanor and I look in here?”

“Look for
what
, exactly?”

“Water!” Eleanor snapped. “Wine doesn’t count!”

“Fine,” said Will.

The two boys stepped out, but not before Brendan warned his sisters, “Careful you don’t lock yourselves in. Looks like this room locks from the inside.” He pointed to a metal bar that could slide into place across the door.

“Thanks, Bren.” Cordelia fired up the Maglite and began to search the wine cellar with Eleanor. The light flashed against a gorgeous antique vanity by the door. The mirror was streaked with dust; its edges were cracked with age.

“I’ll bet Denver Kristoff’s wife spent a lot of time in here,” Eleanor said. “This looks like girl stuff.”

“I think Denver was a vain person. Most writers are,” said Cordelia. “He probably sat here and trimmed his beard and waxed his mustache before hitting the town with our great-great-grandfather.” To prove her point, she opened one of the vanity drawers and pulled out a rusted straight razor. “See? Clearly for a man.”

“Then . . . he wore makeup too?” Eleanor asked, holding up a velvet pouch of beige powder.

“That’s actually strange; I didn’t think men still wore makeup in Kristoff’s time.”

Eleanor opened another drawer containing a tin of cream, a book of matches, and an old, yellowed photo, which she handed to her sister. Cordelia examined the photo and saw an inscription on the back.

“‘The Lorekeepers, 1912. The Bohemian Club.’”

The picture showed a group of men standing on a grand spiral staircase in an ornate hall, with tiny gargoyles carved into the posts of the banisters. The men wore black robes and huge powdered wigs that rose a foot above their heads.

“This is the club that Rutherford Walker wrote about!” said Cordelia.

“And those are the Lorekeeper guys he talked about,” said Eleanor.

“What a ridiculous sense of fashion. I mean, powdered wigs were retro even in 1912!” Cordelia began scanning the faces in the picture; there were about forty men. “There! Denver Kristoff.”

She pointed to a man with a stern face and a perfectly manicured beard—the same face they had seen in the photo upstairs. The man had eyes that both stared at Cordelia and seemed to gaze unfocused into empty space, as if looking out at horrors only they had seen.

“See our great-great-grandfather anywhere?” asked Eleanor.

“I’m not sure. Try and find someone who looks like Dad,” said Cordelia, but no matter how hard they looked, they couldn’t find anyone. After a while the faces began to look the same.

“It’s useless! I hate it!” Eleanor yelped, grabbing the picture to rip it up—but Cordelia stopped her.

“Nell, no. It’s another piece of the puzzle. We can’t let our emotions get the best of us. Think. Denver Kristoff and Rutherford Walker were best friends in 1906, but by the time this picture was taken, six years later, it looks like Walker’s nowhere to be seen. So what came between them?”

While Cordelia and Eleanor pondered that question, Brendan and Will arrived at another door in the hallway. This one wasn’t metal; it was made of decaying wood. Will held one of the torches from the wall for light; the torchlight played off the grain.

“This time, you go first,” suggested Will.

“Only if I get your gun,” said Brendan.

“Nice try. I’ll cover you.”

Brendan stepped forward nervously, turning the doorknob and pushing in. The door wouldn’t budge.

“D’oh,” he said, “I guess it opens out.” He pulled the door open—and collapsed back with a shriek as a skeleton fell on top of him!

Will almost shot the skeleton, but he quickly realized that it wasn’t a threat, even though it was covering Brendan with clacking bones. Brendan scrambled away. “What the—
what
?”

The open door revealed an empty closet; the only thing inside had been the skeleton, whose bones were kept together by screws or glue. It lay on the floor now, splayed out as if it had belly flopped there, the toothy face staring at Brendan. Just above the left eye was a chip in the skull.

“Calm down,” said Will, picking the skeleton up by its head. The bones draped limply. “Looks like an old medical prop. Haven’t you ever heard of a skeleton in the cupboard?”

“Not funny,” Brendan said. “That used to be a real human being.”

Will shrugged and pushed the skeleton back in as Cordelia and Eleanor came running down the hall to find out what their brother was screaming about.

“Tell them we saw a spider or something,” Brendan whispered to Will. “If Eleanor sees that skeleton she’ll need like twenty years of therapy.”

“What happened?” Cordelia asked.

“No worries. Brendan opened this closet. There was a spider inside,” said Will.

“How big?” asked Eleanor.

“Huge,” said Brendan. “Probably a tarantula.”

“A
tarantula
?” exclaimed Eleanor. “I’ve never seen a real live
tarantula
!”

She whisked open the closet before Will or Brendan could stop her.

Once again, the skeleton fell out, this time directly on top of Eleanor, covering her like a bony blanket. Eleanor shrieked and grabbed it to get it off, but the jumble of fingers, bones, and teeth got caught in her hair and clothing. She tried to shake it away, but as she twisted and turned, it only got more tangled up with her. For a moment it looked as if the two were doing a high-speed Cirque du Soleil routine—before Eleanor took off running back down the hall, screaming her head off, with the skeleton still attached.

“C
ome back!” called Brendan, but Eleanor wasn’t listening. She didn’t stop running until the Walkers and Will caught up with her by the driftwood bookshelf.

“Nell! Stop moving! You’re just gonna get more tangled up!” Cordelia said.

“It’s
alive
!” Eleanor screeched. “It’s trying to strangle me!”

“You’re imagining things.” Cordelia knelt in front of her sister just like Mrs. Walker always did. “Relax. Everything will be fine.”

Cordelia slowly began extricating the clingy skeleton from Eleanor, first removing the fingers from her shoulders and then untangling the arms and legs. Within moments, the fearsome hanger-on was reduced to a jumble of bones on the floor.

“He left bone marks on my
clothes
, see?” Eleanor asked. She was breathing in gasps, with tears streaming down her face.

“I see,” said Cordelia, licking her thumb to rub clean the imaginary spots Eleanor insisted were on her outfit. “All gone, see?”

“And there’s something here . . . ,” said Eleanor, plucking a very
un
imaginary skeleton’s tooth from her ear and handing it to Cordelia.

“Ew,” said Brendan, watching with Will. Cordelia gave Eleanor a hug as she dropped the tooth and motioned for the pilot to take care of the bones. Will picked up the skeleton and carried it down the hall. Only the tooth was left winking on the floor.

“Sorry, Nell,” Brendan said as he hugged his sister. “I made up the part about the tarantula because I didn’t want you seeing that thing.”

“I’ll take a million tarantulas over a dead skeleton!” said Eleanor. “From now on just tell me the truth. I’m old enough to handle it.”

Brendan nodded and took his sister’s hand. Cordelia took the other . . . and a few minutes later the three Walkers stepped out of the hole in the secret hallway and back into the “normal” side of Kristoff House—to the extent that any part of it could be considered normal. Will followed, extinguishing torches.

“Did you lock the closet?” Eleanor asked.

“Unfortunately, there’s no lock, but that skeleton’s not going anywhere. He’s dead as a doornail.”

“In this house? I wouldn’t count on anything staying dead,” said Brendan.

“That’s why I’m sleeping between you guys tonight,” said Eleanor.

“It
is
bedtime,” said Cordelia. “We’ve had a long day.”

“And I’m
so
thirsty,” said Eleanor. “I hate even saying it, because it’s making my lips feel extra dry. It’s like my body is shriveling up inside.”

“Eleanor’s right,” said Will. “We need to drink something. Dehydration kills. We’ve used up all the melted ice?”