By that time he had reckoned there would be a fifth on one of the rocks off the west shore, between the cancerous tree and the buoy, but he didn’t need to take the boat again. He checked the stump first.
It had been a fir, taken down by lightning or wind decades ago. The trunk section remaining was some four feet tall, laureate with a crown of promising, tender green sprouts. Moss was blotching out half the red monogram. There were no cracks or folds in the bark big enough to hide any treasure.
Nate knelt down, delved his hands in the moist earth, and started digging.
He scratched solid rock pretty soon, but a familiar prickly sensation came first. He felt aware of both Peter and the moon around him holding their breaths as he unearthed a new spherical nest.
He unwrapped it, trying to make out the elongated, soft object that at first he failed to identify.
It helped when Peter yucked away; then he understood.
It was a used tampon.
“Mother—” (Stands up, facing the house.) “—fucker!”
“What?” Peter begged, at a loss.
“He played us, again!” Nate yelled, battling fear and anger and humiliation. “It wasn’t the pentacle in the attic that counted, the pentacle is the whole island! This is the pentacle!” he said, pointing at the monogram and the lines of sulfur that stretched across the fir-plagued landspit. “We formed the pentacle!” He showed the open nest in his hand. “He set us up!”
“Okay…” Peter began, sure to imply how little okay everything was. “But…I mean, how did he do it? He died in ’forty-nine; this stuff had to be laid before we came to the island and brought him back. Who collected all this trash in ’seventy-seven and put it here?”
Nate gazed up at the attic, then at the woods, around the spot where he’d landed from the second floor.
“Help me find my rifle and we’ll find out in a minute,” he grunted, his inner battle almost decided in favor of anger.
—
Andy kicked away the last of the crumbling brickwork and stepped over the debris into the thick, gossamer darkness, panting, ready to switch her pickax from tool mode to impaling device in a second. Tim followed, his bigger slash wound patched up with Kerri’s shirt wrapped around his body, proudly bearing a glowstick in his mouth.
“Clear,” she reported back at the dungeon.
Kerri crawled out, loaded rifle in hand, calling the torchbearer not to stray off. The new room was low, deep, yet broken into narrow corridors by shelves or racks ranked across. A twisted intuition told her it wasn’t wine bottles in those racks.
She stepped back, disturbing a rotten casket, and its contents rattled inside.
“Jesus. These are…”
“Catacombs,” Andy completed. And she watched Tim gleefully pacing by, oblivious to his neon-green halo panning over the sordid rows of stacked coffins piled together, bloated by dampness, cracked open, occasionally toppled onto each other, offering glimpses of leg bones jutting from under unfitting lids and skeletons poured onto their neighbors, smiling in embarrassment.
“But catacombs…how?” Andy reasoned. “The house was built by the Debo?ns, and for all we know it was always one guy for a hundred years. Who are these people?”
“These are no catacombs,” Kerri answered. “It’s a warehouse. This is a necromancer’s storage room.”
She knelt down, with Tim dutifully approaching to assist her, torn cobwebs dangling from his nose. Small labels were glued to the niches and the caskets, handwritten. The first one she checked read “Hutchinson,” followed by a numerical reference. Another one read “S. Orne.” A third one read “Hyppachias.”
Andy located a candelabrum and scratched a match to light it, then remembered she had forgotten to check the oxygen levels. They seemed passable.
“So Nate was right,” she said. “Debo?n stole these bodies from their burial sites, distilled the salts from them, raised the avatars from the salts, and tortured them for knowledge. And this is where he kept the bodies.”
“His personal library,” Kerri capped. “This is where the dead end up.”
Andy winced at the snap of two ideas clicking together like a fractured bone being set. “Where the dead end,” she revised.
She rummaged her pockets, fingers ignoring the ton of annoyingly useful things like ammunition and matches, until she touched the bundle of papers crumpled in the deepest strata of her inventory, then fished out and unfolded an almost forgotten piece of paper. Kerri fingersnapped for the light to approach.
“This is what we found on the dead guy in the mines.”
“Simon Jaffa. Who happened to be Mr. Wickley’s lawyer.”
“And who was carrying a fake ID from RH Corp.”
“And also this map, which looks hand-copied from the blueprints at the city hall. And look at the words here: ‘Debo?n shaft,’ ‘Where,’ ‘Dead end.’ This is a single sentence. This room is where the dead end. This is a map to this room; Jaffa was trying to come here through the mines.”
“But what was he hoping to find?”
“?‘Debo?n Shaft Where Dead End. From W, S-5, E-2, bottom.’?” She scoped out the area, then laid out a hand to Kerri. “Compass?”
Kerri pulled out her Colonel Mustard instrument, consulted it, needle wobbling giddily at first in a Did I hear some heavy action sequences earlier? fashion, and pointed west.
All three strode to that end of the room, then turned on their feet and clacked their heels.
“Now from here, south five,” Andy instructed.
They walked to the right, counting the gaps between the shelves, up to the fifth. Blind rats scuttled away from the torchbearer.
“East two.”
They walked to the second rack of coffins on the right.
“Bottom.”
They crouched and dragged an unbelievably heavy stone coffin into view. The label on its side came loose and fluttered to the floor. It read “Capt. D. Debo?n, 1849.”
“That’s the year Debo?n arrived in Blyton Hills,” Kerri recalled.
Andy pushed the lid off the casket, convinced that there was no skeleton to disturb. For one thing, bones couldn’t possibly be that heavy. Tim hovered the neon-green light over some neatly piled bricks. Then he checked with Andy, equally disappointed.
“Okay, that was anticlimactic,” she said.
“Not really,” Kerri pointed out, hovering the candelabrum over the coffin. Without the green tinge of the glowstick, the bricks showed their true color. “These are gold ingots.”
Andy picked one up. Her second hand came swiftly in assistance of the first, surprised at its density.
“These are…? How much is this worth?”
“What you’re holding in your hands right now?” Kerri said, fighting a chortle. “About the GDP per capita of Monaco.”
“What?! Holy shit!”
She went through her pockets again, excited, this time planning to do some rearrangements.
“I can carry one; can you carry another?”
“Are you for real?” Kerri smiled. “I thought we were here to stop an apocalypse.”
“Yeah, but shit, look!” She didn’t even need the lights; her smile was blazing, daring the dark. “We found pirate treasure! And it’s real! I mean, it’s not like that Redbeard’s plunder of stolen jewelry we found! This is the real thing!”