House of Secrets (26 page)

“It must be the third book we’re trapped in,” said Cordelia to Brendan. “Remember? Three books grew in front of you.
Savage Warriors
with Slayne and the colossus,
The Fighting Ace
with Will, and now
The Heart and the Helm
.”

“Guys!” shouted Eleanor. “Look at them! They’re all staring at our house!”

Eleanor pointed to the pirates gathering on the deck of the ship. The sun had leathered their skins to a nut-brown color. They were dressed in a variety of felt hats, scarves, and bandannas. Their faces sported thick scars, elaborate earrings, and a gold tooth for every missing tooth—except on the ones who opted for the toothless maniacal-grin look. Over their shoulders were pistols slung in sashes; in their hands were cutlasses and axes.

“Weird,” said Cordelia. “None of ’em are as cute as Johnny Depp.”

The pirates spat and barked as they neared Kristoff House; every word that reached the Walkers’ ears was a profanity of notable color and conviction.

“Hey! Who’s that?”
A pirate on the deck pointed at the cannonball hole. He wore an eye patch—but apparently that didn’t stop him from having very good eyesight.
“I see you in there!”

Brendan pushed Cordelia aside. Now that they’d been spotted, Brendan thought honesty might be the best policy.

“We’re kids and we need help!”
he yelled back.
“We’re sinking!”

The pirate with the eye patch smiled and nodded to the front of the ship.

Another boom sounded.

The Walkers scrambled up the spiral stairs, just managing to avoid the next cannonball. It smashed through the kitchen and the wall at the far side of it; Brendan glanced down in terror.

“Occupants of this floating house!”
called a voice outside. It wasn’t the pirate with the eye patch; this voice was booming and theatrical.
“You have been spotted by my first mate
,
Tranquebar! You have strayed into my territory! Prepare to be boarded!”

A shadow fell over the two holes in the wall as the ship pulled up to the house.

“Oh no,” said Eleanor. “They’re here!”

Scraping noises sounded from above, followed by whoops of glee, a host of snarled curses, and the thud of heavy boots.

“They’re on the roof!” Brendan said. “They’re going to get Will and Penelope!”

The Walkers dashed into the upstairs hall. Cordelia was the first to reach the entrance to the attic. She was about to pull herself up when she heard a window smash—and Brendan tugged her into Eleanor’s tiny bedroom.

“They’re already inside! C’mere!”

“No!
We can’t leave Will and Penelope up there!”

“We don’t have a choice! Will has a gun! He’ll protect himself!”

Brendan gathered his sisters and heard the crack of gunfire upstairs, followed by Penelope screaming and Will yelling,
“Let her go! Don’t touch me! Who the hell are you?”

“Don’t move!”
interrupted the thunderous voice they’d heard before.
“Drop your pistol, runt! Try anything funny and I’ll hack up the lady and toss her to the sharks—except, of course, for the bits I keep to myself!”

The voice laughed: a high, squealing laugh two octaves up.

“That’s Captain Sangray,” Eleanor said.

“You call that a terrible laugh?” Brendan said. “He sounds like a four-year-old on nitrous oxide.”

Something hit the attic floor with a clank. “Will’s Webley,” said Cordelia in disbelief. They all knew how the pilot guarded his gun.

“We have to go up there!” whispered Eleanor.

“It’s too late,” said Cordelia. “They must be surrounded.”

“But Captain Sangray’s going do experiments on them! You don’t understand: in the book, he wanted to be a doctor, but he got kicked out of medical school for killing his professor. So now, as a pirate captain, he studies the human body by cutting people open while they’re still alive!”

“Don’t say any more,” Cordelia said. “It’s too horrible.” She hung her head. She knew she had left the attic to help Eleanor—but she wished her last words to Will had been kinder. Now they might be the last words she ever said to him.
And Penelope! Did we raise her from the dead just so she could get tortured by an evil pirate?

Powerless to act, the Walkers were forced to stay quiet and listen to what was happening upstairs.

“Ow!”
Penelope cried.
“That’s too tight! You’ll break my wrists!”

“Good!”
said Captain Sangray.
“Broken wrists can’t untie ropes.”
He let out another laugh before asking, “Where are the others?”

“There’s no one else here,” said Will. “Just the two of us.”

“Liar!”
screamed the Captain.
“There was some scrawny, ugly little boy talking to us from down below!”

Brendan’s face turned red and almost looked like it was starting to swell. Nobody called him names and got away with it. From above, Will continued to deny the existence of the Walkers.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen anyone else in the house.”

The Captain cursed, and shouted to his men,
“Phenny, Frowd, Ogle, take these two back to my quarters!”

“What about the rest of the house, Cap’n?” asked a pirate with a froggy voice.

“Have at it, Stump! You boys are entitled to every trinket you can find, and be on the lookout for more valuable treasure, for it’s not every day one finds a floating house. I suspect enchantment. And when you see that little ankle biter and his friends, shoot to wound.” Captain Sangray’s voice got almost philosophical, and Eleanor could picture him tapping his chin (she had an idea of what he looked like from the book). “A nose, a kneecap . . . be creative. I want them permanently disfigured.”

“Aye aye, Cap’n!”

There was a clamor of boots and weapons as the pirates moved toward the hole in the attic floor.

“Let’s get outta here,” Brendan said. “How am I gonna talk to girls with no
nose
?”

“But what about Will and Penelope?” Cordelia asked.

“We’ll hide in the wine cellar—it locks, remember? And then we’ll come up with a plan to get them free. It’s the only way. If we get killed, they’re really done for.”

Brendan pulled his sisters toward the bedroom door but stopped when he spotted something through the crack between the hinges. One pirate had already dropped into the hall and drawn his sword.

Brendan guessed this was Stump. He was a little over five feet tall, with a squat, muscular physique and two eyes veering off in different directions.

“Hallway’s been compromised,” Brendan said, but before he could form a new plan, the door snapped open and Stump was right there, grinning.

“Cap’n Sangray! Found ’em!”

Stump grabbed a gun slung across his chest. Brendan quickly turned to Eleanor. “Nell, you took swim camp last year?”

“What—yes—
what
?”

Brendan scooped her up.

“Hey! Stop!” shouted Stump as he tried to get his gun to work.

“Bren? What are you—?” Cordelia yelled.

“Follow me!” Brendan said. Holding Eleanor tightly in his arms, he smashed through the window shoulder-first.

B
rendan and Eleanor plunged toward the ocean. The ship was in front of them and the house was behind them and there were enemies on both sides—but they were moving too fast and they’d done something too crazy. Brendan pointed his toes and shouted, “
Pencil dive!”

Pirates on the
Moray
shot at the falling pair, but the ocean spray made some of their pistols click harmlessly. Others shot wide. Brendan and Eleanor hit the water, and the world turned freezing.

Brendan opened his eyes—the salt burned, and he wished he had those makeshift goggles from before. A column of bubbles next to him dispersed to reveal Eleanor, kicking for the surface. Brendan grabbed her ankle and shook his head, pointing to the underside of Kristoff House.

There were the earthquake barrels, strapped to the foundation, with ropes trailing off them in the water . . . and streams of bubbles escaping from their seams. Eleanor nodded; they both swam toward them.

Back inside, Cordelia was face-to-face with stumpy Stump. He came after her with his cutlass, but Cordelia was too fast, diving gracefully out the broken window, slicing into the water fingertips-first.

She surfaced, calling,
“Bren! Nell!”—
and realized that the only answer she was going to get was from the pirates above. She dove as they opened fire, anticipating the burn of a shot any second—

But it never came. In the slow world beneath the waves, the bullets missed her by inches. Through their watery, zipping paths she saw the silhouettes of her brother and sister. They were at the Kristoff House barrels—for a horrible moment she thought they were dead, but then she saw that they were moving, pushing their faces into the roiling bubbles that poured from the barrels’ sides.

Cordelia swam to them and held her face against a flow of air, her lungs burning. She got a mouthful of seawater that made her cough and heave. Brendan silently showed her how to press her lips against the barrel cracks, drawing out precious air while sealing off water. Her first pull of oxygen was so wonderful that she almost swallowed it. She gave her brother and sister a thumbs-up and raised her eyebrows:
What now?

Brendan pointed to a spot under the house where there was a breach in the foundation. He puffed out his cheeks, miming a deep breath, and jammed his face against the barrel to fill his lungs. Then he held up his fingers—
three, two, one
—and broke off with his sisters behind him.

They swam through the breach into a different part of the Kristoff House basement, a part they hadn’t seen before. It was totally bare with dark walls. They saw light coming through a hole above and swam toward it. . . .

And the world turned noisy again as they flopped back onto a solid floor. They looked around. The surrounding walls were dimly lit and familiar.

“The secret hallway!” Cordelia said, seeing the torches above her.

“Did I come up with a brilliant plan or what?” Brendan said. “I gotta get a little credit for that!”

“How’d you know we were gonna be able to breathe underwater?” asked Eleanor.

“It’s like in classic
Sonic
, in the Scrap Brain Zone, when . . . hello? No? Forget it.”

“Brendan, look!” Cordelia said. “The flooding’s a lot worse!”

Indeed, a foot and a half of water now filled the hallway, pouring in from the hole the Walkers had swum through. Brendan looked at the wall and saw a cannonball hole right around the waterline.

“The second cannonball! It came in here from the kitchen, angled down and hit the floor, and got water rushing in. This place is going to sink even faster!”

Even as the Walkers spoke, the water was rising. To their left they saw the entrance that Will had made with the sledgehammer. Light seeped in, giving the hallway a bluish tinge that was just enough to make out shapes and larger details. A book floated past—the book of medical curiosities that had freaked Cordelia out earlier.

“Pff,”
she said.

“What?” Brendan asked.

“Just thinking: even the scariest book is better than being shot at.”

“Gilliam hears yez!”
a voice called.

The Walkers turned to see a pirate sticking his head through the sledgehammered section of wall. He was enormous and bald with hunks of ivory hanging down from both ears and one side of his face covered with a dolphin tattoo.

“And Gilliam’s gonna
get
yez!” he concluded.

Brendan, having just saved his sisters with a brilliant scheme, was feeling particularly bold. “I’d like to see you try!”

“Bren! Don’t taunt the pirates,” Cordelia warned—but Gilliam had already pulled his pistol and fired.

The Walkers dove; Brendan hit the water and thought he was safe in the split second before the pain traveled from his left ear to his head.

He screamed with his mouth closed and covered his earlobe. Blood ribboned in front of him. Two feet of water filled the hallway now, enough to float in, and his sisters were swimming away. Brendan had to fight the pain as he followed, doing the breaststroke as the light grew dimmer. The Walkers heard Gilliam order them to stop each time they came up for air—until they entered the wine cellar.

“I’ve been shot!!”
screamed Brendan, clutching the bottom of his ear. Blood poured down the side of his face.

“Lemme see,” said Cordelia. She gently moved Brendan’s hand, barely able to look at the damage. The bullet had seared off the tip of his left earlobe.

“It’s a flesh wound, okay? It’s just causing a lot of bleeding. You don’t have to freak out—”

“I’m freaking out!”
yelled Brendan.
“I’m dying! This time I’m really dying!”

“No, you’re gonna be fine!” said Cordelia. “Dad always said that getting hit anywhere in the head causes a lot of bleeding, but it isn’t necessarily fatal.”