House of Secrets (30 page)

The first was hulking; it had to be Captain Sangray. The other two were limp bodies he carried over his shoulders. Cordelia recognized Will (with his lanky frame) and Penelope (with her massive shoulder pads).

“It’s them! Are they
dead
?”

“I don’t think so,” said Brendan. In silhouette, as if he were part of a grotesque puppet play, Sangray heaved Will and Penelope onto the table and chained up their wrists and ankles.

“What’s he doing with them?”

“He’s gonna do his horrible experiments,” said Eleanor, stifling a gulp.

“Live human vivisection,” intoned Brendan, remembering the words Sangray had used to threaten him.

In his cabin, the captain stepped away from the bodies and took a mask with a long tapered nose off the wall. He strapped it to his face and kicked his head back. The Walkers heard his laughter over the waves.

“Oh no,” said a frightened Eleanor. “It’s just like it was in the book. And that was the grossest, sickest thing I’ve ever read in my—”

“Let’s go,” interrupted Cordelia, stepping toward the ropes and almost tripping over her phone. It was right where she’d left it, dried out.

“Try it,” Brendan said. Cordelia turned it on. The screen lit up. Brendan gave her a look like,
Who’s the man?

“Don’t get too excited; still no bars.” Cordelia pocketed the phone. “Follow me, guys. Maybe we can cause a distraction and get Will and Penelope out of there.”

The Walkers approached the thick ropes that were towing Kristoff House. They stretched high and taut over the water to the stern of the
Moray
and looked like they could slice skin open on contact.

Cordelia took a breath and slowly reached for a rope, but Brendan said, “Let me.”

He took one in his fist. It felt strong, secure. A lifeline.

“We can do this,” Brendan said in his best pep-talk voice. “Between us we have like nine hundred years on these guys.” He slung himself under the rope and started across the waves, hand over fist, hanging upside down. Cordelia smiled.
Sometimes my little brother really does seem grown-up.

“Not looking down,” Eleanor said, following Brendan, trying to ignore the wind lashing at her clothes. Cordelia brought up the rear. Soon the Walkers were fifteen feet from the
Moray
, then ten, then five . . . Then a pirate appeared.

The Walkers went absolutely still. “Nobody move,” whispered Cordelia. The pirate was totally wasted, clutching a bottle of “enchanted” wine, stumbling along the deck, singing a sea chantey whose lyrics spoke of unmentionable horrific acts in contrast to its cheery tune. He turned back toward the front of the ship.

“Sweet,” said Brendan. “He’s leaving. We made it—”

The pirate tripped. The wine bottle flew out of his hand, flipped through the air, and fell into the sea. He swore and ran to the ship’s stern. “Yesh took m’drink! Yesh greedy ocean!”

The pirate broke down and started crying into the waves. The Walkers felt their hands cramping and collectively willed him to go away . . . but before he did, he saw them.

“Issh . . . ish the ankle biters!” He pointed his gun at the Walkers. “Come aboard—and if ye try anything, I’ll blasht ye inter the sea!”

Eleanor’s brain spun. “I know who that is!” she whispered to her siblings. “One of the pirates in the book: Ishmael Hynde.”

“What do you remember about him?” asked Cordelia.

“He’s from England. . . . He’s a ‘womanizer,’ but I don’t know what that is,” she said, trying to remember. “He’s good with a bow and arrow, superstitious, believes in all sorts of supernatural stuff . . . ”

“That’s good,” said Cordelia, who had a plan. “Start making sounds. Like this:
Woooo-
oooh.”

“What, like we’re at a party?” Brendan said.

“Silence! Come for’ard—”

“Like we’re in a graveyard! Like we just climbed out of maggoty old coffins. C’mon!”

Eleanor understood. She let out an eerie cry as Cordelia called to the pirate on the ship,
“We’re spirits of the dead!”

“No ye aren’t. Yer just the ankle biters, and ye somehow got away from them sharks! How’d ye manage that?”

“We’re
ghossstss-sss
!” Cordelia insisted.

“Yez think I’m gonna fall for that, jesh because I had a few dips of the grape? Ghosts
float
!”

“Ooooo-eeee,”
Brendan said. “Everyone knows ghosts can’t float over water,
chuuuump
—”

Cordelia cut him off. “Aren’t you Ishmael Hynde?” she asked.

“What?” the pirate blurted. “How’d ye know my—”

“Father!” Cordelia called.

“I ain’t yer daddy,” said Hynde.

“We are the ghosts of your unborn children,” said Cordelia.

“My
unborn
children?!”

“Why have you abandoned us, Father? Why have you left us alone, to fend for ourselves, in all the corners of the world?”

“Naw, ye can’t be. I got no children—”

“Were you ever in Barcelona?” asked Cordelia.

“Yes,” said Hynde, smiling. “Spent five glorious days there!”

“And I am the fruit of those days!”

“Yer a liar!”

“And the boy here?” said Cordelia, pointing at Brendan. “He’s from Monaco!”

“But I only spent three hours in Monaco!”

“And for those hours he will haunt you forever”—as Cordelia spoke, she reached for her phone—“for being a deadbeat dad. I mean for abandoning us—” Her fingers slipped!

Cordelia’s phone fell. She let go of the rope and grabbed it in a desperate swoop, hanging by her legs with her ankles wrapped around each other.

“Deal! Are you—I mean,
Ooooo-oooo
!” Brendan called to Hynde.

“Yer not me children!” the pirate screamed, taking aim. “What kinder ghosht has ta keep itself from
falling
?”

In answer, Cordelia put the phone under her chin and lifted her head. The bright screen transformed her face into something truly ghostly—especially if you were a sailor with a preschool education who’d never seen an Apple logo. Lit in blue from below, Cordelia’s nose and cheeks cast a shadow over her eyes, turning them into black pits above her shining mouth. She looked like a turquoise-faced zombie from the bowels of the
Titanic
.

“Why have you done this to us, Fatherrrr!”
Eleanor screamed.

“My babies!
” Hynde shrieked. He reached out, tears spurting from his eyes.
“Please forgive me!”

He ran toward the Walkers and leaped over the edge of the ship, stretching his arms out, trying to embrace his “children”—and fell into the ocean. He managed to fight the sea for a few moments, popping above the waves to shout, “
Forgive meeee!”

Within moments Hynde was surrounded by sharks. He started to scream as they tore at his body and dragged him underwater.

“Ugh, that could’ve been us,” Brendan said in a small voice before leading the Walkers the rest of the way to the
Moray
’s stern. When he was close enough to touch the wood, he dropped his feet, held the rope with his hands, and started swinging back and forth.

“What are you doing?” Eleanor asked. “You’ll shake us off!”

“Hang tight, pun intended,” said Brendan.

He gathered momentum and went airborne, pointing his legs at a circular window to the left of Sangray’s cabin. He smashed through the glass with both feet. He had sort of planned ahead, enough to bend his knees to catch himself on the edge of the window—but he hadn’t counted on his head swinging back to
whap
against the side of the
Moray
.

“Ow!”

For a moment, as he hung upside down, Brendan saw stars: literal ones and those of the cartoon variety. Then he tensed his stomach, dug deep for the kind of strength he always needed to do the last sit-up in lacrosse practice, and pulled himself up to peer into the cabin on the other side of the window.

Brendan gasped.

“What?” said Cordelia.

“It’s . . . just . . . forget it. Nothing!” Brendan climbed inside the cabin, steadied himself, and stretched back for Eleanor.

“I’m cool,” she said, waving him off. She had grabbed the thick, rusted bolts that held together the
Moray
’s sides and used them to climb down. She came inside with Brendan—and froze just as he had.

“Whoa.”

“What?” Cordelia started, climbing in last.

It was a small cabin, eight feet by eight feet.

And the floors, walls, and ceiling were covered with human bones.

T
he floor was tiled with leg bones. Tibiae and fibulae interlocked so that there was little space between them. The bones weren’t set in anything, so when the Walkers shifted their feet, the floor moved, clicking and snapping.

“What is this place?” Cordelia asked. The walls were covered with thinner radii and humeri—arm bones—which also didn’t appear to be mounted in anything. “How are those
sticking to the wall?”

“Magic,” said a stunned Eleanor.

“Let’s get outta here,” Brendan said. “They’re only bones; they’re not gonna hurt us. And check this. . . .”

Brendan pointed to a cutlass mounted on the wall. A spear hung beside it along with a bunch of other weapons. They were the only things in the room that weren’t made of bone. Brendan reached for the cutlass and spear—

“Wait, Bren!”

But it was too late. When he pulled them off the wall, he triggered something.

The room started coming alive.

It began at Brendan’s feet. The bones jittered and shook, each activating the one next to it, spreading like a wave until . . .

Brendan froze. Years ago he had seen a nature documentary, and he recalled a vivid scene set in a cave filled with bats, where the floor was so filled with bat poop (
guano
, they called it, but really it was bat poop) that it became a living carpet of mealworms and beetles. You glanced at the guano and it looked like a normal floor, but if you focused for a moment, it wriggled and swarmed. It was one of the freakiest things Brendan had ever seen, and now the floor of bones was doing the same thing.

A femur stood up in the middle of the room. “Duck!” Brendan yelled to his sisters. Cordelia and Eleanor just managed to comply as a humerus zipped past their heads.

“What’s happening?” Eleanor asked.

The bones clicked and clacked and stood and flew, like an explosion played in reverse. Many somersaulted through the air, while others shot forward like arrows. The weapons that were still mounted on the wall went with them. Every bone seemed to have a purpose, flying toward the center of the room, right next to Brendan. He buried his head in his elbow, certain he was about to get hit, and peeked out as the bones and weapons started interlocking. Triquetra snapped in place with cuboids; scaphoids met calcanei; hunks of skull and teeth sailed down from the ceiling. For a minute the Walkers thought some kind of horrible super-skeleton monster was being constructed . . . but then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.

The room was now a simple wooden ship’s cabin.

And the bones had formed a rectangular dining table.

“You okay?” Cordelia asked Brendan.

“Um,
impressed
, actually.” Brendan tapped his fist against the table. It didn’t wobble; the bones had fused together perfectly. And on it were actual place settings!

The plates were made of shoulder blades. Upside-down skulls formed goblets (mounted on tripods of ribs). Finger bones, with toe bones for tines, served as forks. Knives were made of ribs and teeth.

“All that’s missing is food!” Brendan said. He looked up. “Please, God, could we get some food in here?”

“I don’t think God made that table come together,” said Eleanor. “Besides, aren’t those human bones? You can’t eat off human bones!”

“Hey, I’m hungry. Right now I’d split an ice cream sandwich with the Wind Witch,” said Brendan.

Cordelia laughed, but Eleanor held her stomach. “I actually feel sick thinking about it,” she said.

“Are you okay?” Brendan asked.

Eleanor shook her head. “I think I’m gonna throw up.”