House of Secrets (31 page)

“You’re getting seasick,” Cordelia said. “The ship is moving more than the house did. Go to the window for fresh air.”

Eleanor did—but it was too late. Spit was flooding her mouth. She got on her tiptoes and tried to aim out the window . . . but nothing came out. She was dry heaving.

“Ick!” she said, wiping stringy spit from her mouth. “I haven’t eaten in so long I can’t even
throw up
!” She started crying—

And suddenly three sizzling porterhouse steaks appeared on the bone plates, along with hand-cut french fries and creamed spinach.

“Whoa,” Brendan said.

Root beer rose inside each skull goblet until fizzy bubbles popped out. Brendan lurched toward the table—

“Don’t do it.” Eleanor grabbed him. “I haven’t eaten anything but corn for the last two days, but even still I know it’s not right to eat that stuff. There was something in
The Heart and The Helm
about it . . . it’s some kind of test the pirates set up to protect them from their enemies.”

“It can’t be that big of a deal, right?” asked Brendan.

“Probably not,” said Cordelia.

Cheese appeared on the fries. Dripping, creamy, orange cheese.

Brendan shoved Eleanor aside, grabbed a fork, and constructed a bite of steak, fries, and cheese that filled his mouth with 100 percent pleasure—which became 200 percent when he washed it down with a swig of root beer. Brendan didn’t even realize it, but he closed his eyes as he ate, and when he opened them he was looking at Cordelia, who was having just as good a time, slicing off her second strip of meat.

“Cordelia!” screamed Eleanor. “You’re supposed to be the logical one!”

“I
doummppphht
”—Cordelia chewed quickly, swallowed, and continued when she could properly articulate her response—“I doubt that I’m gonna die from this food after all the other insanely dangerous stuff we had to go through.”

“You guys are
idiots
!” Eleanor said. “I’m happy that I’m seasick!” She headed for the door—

As Brendan slumped on the floor. Unconscious.

“Bren!”

Cordelia and Eleanor rushed to him. His head was twisted back, and his tongue stuck out. “I told you!” Nell said—

And Brendan sat up and laughed.

“You—”
Cordelia shrieked, smacking her brother as she showed off some of the new vocabulary she’d learned from Captain Sangray’s men.

“Lighten up!” said Brendan. “Can’t we have a little fun?”

“Not like that! We thought you were
dead
!”

“Whatever.” Brendan returned to his plate. Cordelia joined him. When the two siblings finished, taking care not to eat so much that they would get sleepy, they picked up the cutlass and spear that Brendan had pulled off the wall.

“Why are you staring at me?” Cordelia asked Eleanor.

“I’m waiting for you to shrink to the size of an ant or get super fat like in
Alice in Wonderland
.”

“Very funny.” The Walkers left the cabin and stepped into the lower decks of the
Moray
, holding the cutlass and spear.

Tiptoeing so as not to arouse the interest of any pirates who weren’t partying above, they moved a few feet . . . to what had to be Captain Sangray’s cabin.

Hanging on the door was a stuffed goat’s head with emerald eyes. Muffled screams came from inside.

Brendan put his hand on the doorknob—but then it started to turn on its own. The Walkers scrambled behind a barrel as the door swung open and Tranquebar, the first mate, stepped out of the room.

“Captain’s starting to really lose it,” Tranquebar mumbled to himself, scratching absently at his eye patch as he walked down the hall.

“Can we do this?” Brendan asked when Tranquebar was gone. He put his hand back on the doorknob. The Walkers looked at each other. Brendan had the cutlass; Cordelia had the spear; Brendan still didn’t have a shirt on. They were covered with dirt and cuts and bruises; Brendan had lost the tip of his ear. They almost looked like pirates.

“Let’s do it,” said Cordelia.

Brendan opened the door.

Captain Sangray’s cabin resembled a witch doctor’s den. It had Polynesian masks on the walls, many small candles on the floor, and two huge black cauldrons next to the door, seated on coals, filled with bubbling black fluid.

In the center of the room was the table, made of gray stone.

On it were Will and Penelope.

They were chained to the table, covered in thick black tar; it looked like they’d been fished out of a bog. They struggled desperately against their chains . . . and they screamed through the gags around their mouths, which were two slimy, thick, dead eels.

Captain Sangray stood over them, wearing the mask the Walkers had seen through the stained glass: a rat mask with a giddy, toothy face and a long nose that ended in walrus whiskers. He held a wavy dagger over Penelope’s chest.

“My friends!” His voice boomed through the mask’s too-white teeth. “Welcome! You’ll make a fine addition to my bone collection!”

T
he Walkers’ hearts and mouths and hands froze. If Captain Sangray hadn’t been masked, and he hadn’t made Will and Penelope into pitch-dark golems, and his cabin didn’t look like a place where children got turned into newts . . . then they might have charged him and taken him out. But hesitation breeds hesitation. Sangray smiled behind his rat teeth.

“Oh, so you came to watch? Then let the vivisection
begin
!”

“Nuh!”
Penelope Hope begged underneath him.

Sangray unleashed a high-pitched laugh.
He
sounds
like a rat,
thought Brendan in some far-off corner of his brain. Penelope twisted back and forth on the table, trying to bite through the eel that gagged her—

But Captain Sangray sank the knife into her chest.

“Nnnngggggggggeeee!”

Penelope’s gag couldn’t muffle her scream. “First,” Sangray said, “we open up the chest cav—”

“No!”
Brendan shouted, charging with his cutlass.

Brendan’s jab pierced Sangray’s hand. The captain cried out and dropped the knife. Cordelia threw her spear but missed; it clattered off the stained-glass window behind Sangray.

“Split up!” Cordelia yelled.

She and Eleanor ran for opposite corners of the room. Sangray tore off his mask to inspect his wound. “You cut a hole in me,” he mused, rotating his bloody hand in front of his face, staring at Brendan through the slice in his palm. Then he charged.

Brendan backed against the cabin door. Sangray jerked his chin up—left, then right—to draw out the curved razor-sharp daggers that were attached by straps to his beard. As he ran toward Brendan, he whirled his head in circles, spinning the knives like helicopter blades. The daggers spun so fast that Brendan could only see flashes of chrome. Brendan held up his cutlass, trying to sever the straps—

But one of the whirling blades slammed into Brendan’s sword. He dropped it.

“Help!”
Brendan called, knowing that the electric tremor in his arm was the last thing he’d ever feel. “He’s gonna chop me into tuna tartare!”

At that moment Eleanor pushed over one of the bubbling cauldrons. The tar inside hissed as it hit the wood of the cabin, causing Sangray to turn his head. His spinning daggers were inches from Brendan’s face.

Brendan took the opportunity to kick Sangray in the groin. Penelope had taught him well.

The captain fell, his beard blades clattering to the floor as his injured hand landed in steaming tar.

“Rraaaggh!”
He shot to his feet and turned to Eleanor, spiraling his beard.
“I’ll kill you all!”

The sound of the rotating blades was the worst part, like an industrial fan in a wind tunnel. Eleanor dove—but one of the blades caught her shoulder, slicing deeply. She screamed as she landed next to Cordelia, who was unchaining Will from the table, and then she gritted her teeth and started crawling toward Cordelia’s spear.

Cordelia had already freed Will’s ankles; she was working on his wrists, unwilling to touch the smelly eel wrapped around his mouth.

“Guh thuh uv muh!”
Will said.

Cordelia closed her eyes and grabbed the eel from behind Will’s neck, yanking down, causing the creature to burst into two slimy pieces that fell away from his face.

“
That’s
more like it!” the pilot exclaimed, spitting out some bits of eel guts, as Cordelia freed his wrists. Sangray turned, his head still spinning the deadly blades, and moved toward Will. The pilot rolled off the table and hit the floor. Sangray’s blades struck the stone, shooting out sparks that hit his greased beard—

And turned into flames that licked up his face!

The captain cursed and stopped in his tracks, patting out the fire with his good hand. Eleanor retrieved the spear and handed it to Cordelia—and Cordelia thrust it into Sangray’s chest, holding on to the shaft as if to drive it through his heart.

The captain was too strong for that. Even as his beard filled the room with the smell of singed hair, he grabbed the spear’s shaft and turned it, wrenching Cordelia’s arm aside. She cried out as her elbow twisted the wrong way. She let go of the spear. Sangray ripped it out of his chest. Will crept along the floor toward a wooden chest in the corner.

Captain Sangray opened a wall cabinet and removed a brass pistol inlaid with niello. It was a beautiful gun, and he admired it for a moment as Eleanor snuck behind him, opened her mouth, and bit down hard on his ankle.

“
Ankle biter!
” Sangray cried. Eleanor bit through the skin, drawing blood, and then scampered up the captain’s back and climbed onto his shoulders.

“Come here!”
Sangray roared, trying to grab her. Eleanor gripped the two straps that hung from his beard and flipped over the top of his head like a parkour expert, taking hold of the leather just above the beard blades. She hit the floor and sank them into the pile of cooling tar. The blades stuck fast. Sangray tried to pull away, but he was trapped like a cockroach in maple syrup.

“You—”
he screamed at Eleanor, letting out a string of curses.

“I know you are but what am I!”

Eleanor scampered away. Sangray wanted terribly to shoot her, but he was stuck, so he aimed his gun at Will, lying by the trunk—

But Will had already gotten what he wanted out of that trunk.

His own gun.

BLAM!

The bullet from the Webley Mark Six hit Captain Sangray’s weapon, sending off a cascade of sparks. . . .

And when the sparks hit the tar, it erupted in flames . . .

Completely engulfing the captain.

“Aiieeeeee!”
Sangray screamed. He was suddenly flailing, his entire body sheathed in orange flame, trying to release himself from the fiery tar, trapped by the stuck daggers.

“Put him out!” Cordelia yelled. “He’s going to set the whole ship on fire!” Brendan started looking for something he could use to douse the captain, but just then the flames ate through the straps that connected Sangray’s beard to the blades. Sangray was free.

He lurched forward, grabbing for his enemies in a rage like the Cyclops in
The Odyssey
, his face a grotesque melting roar, his eyes dark pits behind fire—

And then he crashed through the window and fell!

Everyone ran to the edge of the cabin. For a shining second Captain Sangray was a meteor, screaming and smoking, his arms pinwheeling—

And then he hit the ocean with a
kssssssssssh.

For a moment the Walkers had nothing to say. Then Brendan said, “Tonight those sharks are getting barbecue.”

“Help me with Penelope!” Will yelled behind him. He had found a cask of water and used it to put out the burning tar; now he was standing over the maid, who was still chained to the table.

“Is she okay?” Cordelia asked. Penelope’s condition made them all forget their moment of triumph. They rushed to Will.

The pilot, who had tar flaking off his RFC uniform, pulled Sangray’s dagger out of Penelope. Her chest was a sunken pool of blood and tar. He scraped her neck clean and felt for a pulse with trembling fingers.

“She’s alive!” he said. “We can save her!”