“I did!” he said, hitting the shovel on the ground again, this time with an extra-strong wallop. That was when the ground gave way underneath his feet and he tumbled down into the darkness.
Harry flailed in the air, barely hanging on to his hook. He was falling, the wind blowing in his face. He nearly retched. His stomach heaved. He was weightless and then he wasn’t. With a great splash, he struck water. He had fallen a good distance, and he did not hit the water lightly.
“It might as well have been concrete,” he mumbled, splashing around.
He was in a great underground lagoon, black as night and as still as ice on a frozen lake. Harry frantically tried to keep his head above water. A pair of light trousers and a thin shirt would have been useful in such circumstances, but pirates wore neither, and Harry’s heavy clothes threatened to draw him down. He threw off his jacket and paddled to the shore. At least he did know how to swim.
Harry checked for injuries—water can break bones after a fall from such heights—but he was intact. His back stung from when he’d struck the surface, but that pain would fade. Only his pride was truly damaged—he’d landed in the ultimate belly flop. Luckily, no one had been around to see it.
His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, but there wasn’t much to see. He could not even make out the far side of the lagoon. Harry looked up and found only an enveloping darkness.
He was trapped. “Help!” he cried. “Help! I’m down here!”
But there was nothing but silence. Where was everybody?
He reached an area of rocks at the edge of the lagoon and tried to get some kind of hold on the muddy walls surrounding him, to find some kind of footing, but it was too slippery, and he fell back in the water every time. “Hey! Anyone up there? Help!” he called again.
Ominously, from the darkness, he heard a sound that was all too familiar.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
Maybe after all this time, Harry would get his real hook at last. He found he wasn’t looking forward to that possibility as much as he’d imagined.
“Get me out of here!” He scrambled against the slick mud walls, trying to use his hook for leverage, but it kept slipping off the surface. Harry was about to panic. It was dark and the lagoon was deep. He could not see the far side, so he dared not try to swim across it. He was stuck here at the rocky edge of the water, clambering for a foothold.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
Once old Tick-Tock got a taste of him, he was sure to want more.
He fumbled over more rocks, tripped, and hit the water. He stood and tried again, feeling his way through the darkness.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
Closer and closer.
Harry ran backward, splashing across the narrow edge of the lagoon, but the sound only got louder. It was all around him. There was no use in running. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to go. So he did the first thing that came to mind: Harry shut his eyes and prepared to be chomped.
A moment passed.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
That terrible ticking persisted, but no crocodile arrived. He waited for the titanic jaws to close around his head, for the forelegs to clamp his neck, but nothing touched him. There was only darkness, the water, and the rocks.
He stepped back, and his foot touched sand. It was dry and sturdy. The hole he’d fallen in was larger than he’d realized. Out of the water, he followed a sandy beach, stumbling in the dark, hoping his head wouldn’t smash into some unseen wall.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
The sound hadn’t been coming from the water: it was out on the sand somewhere. Harry had a good idea what was making it, so this time he ran toward it.
The cave opened into a wider space where a hole in the distant ceiling sent shafts of light streaming into the cavern like golden spears. They faintly illuminated a great pile of discarded objects, including an old alarm clock.
“So that’s what made all that ticking,” he said, though there was no one else within earshot. Now that he thought about it, the tick-tock had been a bit too loud to be the tick-tocking of the clock the old croc had swallowed.
Harry rooted through the pile, finding glass canisters full of strange and wondrous items: NEWT’S SPLEEN read one, EAGLE EYES another. There were candlesticks and candelabras, silver snuffboxes, crystal balls, iron cauldrons, and bloodstained tarot cards. He threw each and every piece aside until at last, beneath all that junk stood a treasure chest, exactly as Sophie had described.
He grabbed it and tucked it under his arm, just as he heard his name being called.
“Harry!” Uma said, materializing in the darkness, holding a torch above her head. He almost jumped out of his boots at the sound of her voice.
“You all right?” said Uma. “We didn’t know where you went. All we saw was this crumbling hole in the ground. It collapsed just after you fell through it, but we dug it out again. We tried calling to you, but you didn’t answer, so we just climbed down after you.”
Harry grinned. “Yeah, I’m all right. Thanks, Captain.”
She smiled, and Harry realized it was the first time he’d fully acknowledged that she was captain and meant it.
Behind her was the rest of the crew, ropes coiled around their shoulders. “Ooh, what’s that?” Gil said, seeing a skull in the assemblage of magical items.
“Don’t touch it!” cried Uma, but it was too late.
A whirling red cloud shot out of the skull, and the pirates cowered, fearing the worst. But the red mist only turned into a butterfly and dissipated.
“Phew,” said Gil.
“Don’t touch anything else!” barked Uma. “Leave it all alone!”
“Look,” Harry said. “I found it.”
“The treasure chest!” Uma cried. “Open it.”
Harry set the treasure chest on the ground gently. All of them gathered around it, Harry and Uma, Gil, and the rest of the pirates. They’d come far and risked much to find this little chest. All of them were eager to see its contents.
“Ready?” Harry asked.
“Ready,” said Uma. “Show me my mother’s necklace.”
Harry pried the lid of the treasure chest and it opened with a great creak.
And that’s when all the skeletons appeared.
Ben didn’t argue against Mal’s urgent assessment of the situation. Whatever it was, it had to be dire if Mal wanted them to hurry like that. “You guys go,” urged Jane. “I’ll keep an eye on things over here and make sure my mom doesn’t meddle again.”
“Thanks, Jane,” said Carlos. “You saved us.”
“It was the least I could do,” she said, flushing pink. “Now go, run. Go do what you need to do.”
Ben commandeered the royal racer, the fastest car in all of Auradon, and they all crowded into it, which was kind of a problem since it was built for two and the backseat was designed for carting either dogs or picnic baskets, and certainly not three friend-size bodies.
“You guys all right back there?” he asked, taking the wheel with Mal in the passenger seat.
“Sort of,” said Evie, who had the advantage of being small and flexible, while the boys contorted themselves to fit in the space.