The Fantastic Family Whipple (7 page)

The previously plucky band of rescuers stared up at the unwelcoming wall of stone.

“So what now, Arthur?” demanded Cordelia.

“Um…well, maybe it landed just past the wall,” the boy suggested. “Could we try to reel it in?”

Cordelia rolled her eyes and tugged halfheartedly on the line. To her surprise, the line actually moved. “I can feel the rocket on the other end!” she exclaimed, grinning to the others as she began pulling it toward her.

Arthur could hardly believe his luck. It appeared there was still hope for the rescue team after all.

But when Cordelia had reeled in four yards of the line, it refused to give any further.

The girl arched her brow and gave a tug. “I think it’s snagged on something,” she said.

After all they had been through, Cordelia was not about
to be thwarted by such a minor detail. She pulled harder and harder on the line—but still, it would not budge. She leaned back on the line with all her weight and gave one last tug—and with that, the string abruptly gave way, sending Arthur’s sister tumbling to the ground.

Somewhere on the other side of the wall, the line had snapped.

“Are you all right, Cordelia?” asked Arthur, running to help her.

“I was—until you decided to ruin
everything
!” she shouted. “It took me months to perfect that rocket, and now we’ll miss our launch—and we’ll never break enough records in time!” She put her head in her hands and started to cry.

It broke Arthur’s heart to see his sister crying; it was even worse knowing he was the cause of her tears.

“I’ll get it for you, Cordelia,” he said.

Cordelia sniffled and glanced up at her little brother. “But how? That wall must be twelve feet high.”

“It doesn’t look completely unclimbable,” replied Arthur, sounding far more confident than he actually was.

He glanced down to find his little sister, Beatrice, tugging at his shirt. Ever since he had rescued her from the rogue piece of French toast, he wondered if she didn’t look at him just a bit differently somehow.

“But Arthur,” Beatrice whispered, “what about the ghosts?”

“Oh, right. The ghosts,” said Arthur.

In his eagerness to atone for losing the rocket, he had momentarily forgotten about the Crosley estate’s ghastly reputation.

“Um…they don’t come out until dark, do they?” he asked, gazing up at the fading light of the now heavily clouded sky.

Beatrice shrugged.

This was not the response Arthur had hoped for.

“I’m pretty sure ghosts can more or less come out whenever they please,” remarked Cordelia, who had perked up considerably after evaluating her brother’s offer. Then, sensing his growing discomfort, she added, “But don’t worry, Arthur. Ghosts don’t generally murder mortals whose hearts are pure. And you’re fairly pure of heart, aren’t you?”

Arthur looked puzzled. “I suppose so,” he said.

“Yep. You’ll be fine,” said Cordelia. “But you should probably be heading out now—if you want to make it back before dark.”

“Oh. Right,” said Arthur.

His soul-searching cut short, the boy stepped up to the towering wall and began searching for a handhold. But before he started his ascent, he turned to his sister one last time. “Oh, um, Cordelia,” he added, “do you think you might be able to time me?”

Cordelia shot him a bewildered glance.

“It’s just that, well,” Arthur explained, “it’s not every day one gets the chance to break the record for Fastest Time to Scale a Twelve-Foot Stone Wall. I was just
reading about wall scaling in the
Grazelby Guide
the other day. I believe the current record is forty-nine seconds—which doesn’t seem like it should be
too
difficult to break.”

But Arthur wasn’t being entirely forthcoming about his motives. The truth was, he could not bear the thought of being murdered by ghosts before he had broken even a single world record.

With a sigh, Cordelia removed a stopwatch from her coat and held it at the ready.

“Thanks, Cordelia. I really do appreciate it,” said Arthur, his mind slightly more at ease as he turned to face the wall once again.

Luckily, the wall was quite rough, with stones of different shapes and sizes protruding from its face, thus providing plenty of footing for Arthur’s benefit. Considering the wall’s perilous height, however, it did not seem to him the sort of climb that should be overly rushed.

“And, go,” said Cordelia, long before her brother was ready.

Arthur clutched at a stone far above his head and scrambled to jam his right foot into a crevice between two stones at the base of the wall. Heaving himself up with his arms, he straightened his right leg and shifted his weight onto it. As Arthur’s other foot left the ground, he realized there was no turning back. He would have to retrieve the rocket or die trying.

After several harrowing moments of hunting for handholds
and hoisting himself higher and higher up the wall, Arthur briefly paused to catch his breath. He had always heard that one should refrain from looking downward when climbing at extreme heights, so he had been careful to avoid all eye contact with the ground below. But the more he thought about it, the more curious he became, and the more tempted he was to peek. He fought back and forth with the destructive impulse to look, until finally, he could no longer contain his curiosity, and the impulse prevailed.

Arthur peered over his shoulder—and started at his distance from the ground. It was only three feet away.

He glanced back at his siblings, and found—instead of the impromptu cheering squad he had been imagining in his head—a row of perplexed faces, baffled by their brother’s ineptitude at timed stone-wall climbing.

Apparently sensing the awkwardness surrounding him, Hamlet trotted up to Arthur and licked him on the cheek (which still wasn’t much higher than the dog’s normal eye level)—as if to say, “It’s all right, little friend—you can start climbing now.”

Arthur turned back toward the wall and did his best to resume the ascent, hoping that by focusing on climbing, he might forget about his recent embarrassment. Finding a solid handhold to his left, the boy pulled himself up a few more inches.

After an exhausting climb (and more than a few near falls), Arthur finally planted his feet on the murky turf of the Crosley estate.

“I made it!” he shouted back over the wall.

There was a strange silence, and for a moment, Arthur wondered if his siblings had left him behind. But then the comforting sound of his older sister’s condescending voice met his ear.

“Eight minutes, seventeen seconds,” called the voice. “I don’t think you quite broke the record there, Arthur.”

He had suspected as much, but now it was official. His last possible record attempt before his impending doom had failed. Miserably.

“I can’t see the rocket from here,” Arthur called back. “I’m going to try and follow the string.”

“Best shove off soon,” urged Franklin. “There’s a stiff breeze blowing nor’-nor’-west with a bit of the old ‘sea smoke’ on it.”

“Looks like prime spider habitat,” added Penelope. “Bring me back a specimen if you can.”

“Be careful, Arthur,” Beatrice warned in a loud whisper.

“And try not to anger the ghosts,” called George.

Arthur turned toward the Crosley grounds. In the haze of the setting sun, he could hardly make out the glint of the fishing line through the tangled branches overhead—but he did his best to follow it as it led away from the massive stone wall behind him.

Though the Crosley estate was horribly overgrown with gnarled trees and twisting vines, it was—at least so far—surprisingly ghost free. This, of course, was no small comfort to Arthur.

Perhaps it isn’t haunted after all
, he thought.
Perhaps I’ll actually make it home alive
.

But after walking through mud and brambles for several minutes, the boy’s doubts came swiftly racing back. Hard as he tried, he could no longer see the guiding string above him. Glancing backward, he found he could no longer see the wall either. A thick fog had rolled in and surrounded him on all sides, not only inhibiting his quest—but his escape, as well. Not knowing what else to do, Arthur pressed forward, hoping he might regain sight of the line further up ahead.

There was only one problem with this course of action: Arthur no longer had any way of knowing which direction “forward” was.

By the time he realized this, however, it was too late. He’d become completely and utterly lost. From where he stood, the scenery looked eerily similar from every angle as dark, contorted branches stabbed at him through the grayish fog.

Arthur thought of all the stories he’d read in which some poor child has found himself lost in the woods and suddenly discovers that the trees have come to life, their branches mutating into massive spiky hands, clawing at the poor child in an attempt to pull him into a gaping,
fanged mouth that only moments before had been merely an oversized knothole. Luckily, Arthur was not so gullible. He knew that such stories were largely exaggerated, and that trees—however sinister they might appear when you were lost amongst them—did not generally eat children. He had learned long ago from Dr. Twigg, his Record-Breaking Botany instructor (and one of the Whipple children’s many tutors), that trees gained the vast majority of their nutrients through the process of photosynthesis, while receiving water and minerals through the soil. Indeed, the amount of a tree’s diet that was composed of lost children was so minuscule, Dr. Twigg had explained, that really, it was almost not worth mentioning.

And so, feeling he had a far greater chance of falling into a bottomless pit or being murdered by ghosts than he ever had of being eaten by a tree, Arthur decided to sit himself against the nearest trunk and wait for the fog to clear.

With each passing minute, Arthur fell deeper and deeper into despair. The fog was not clearing. And with fog so thick, and daylight fading so quickly, he had no idea how he would ever find the rocket and escape before nightfall. Cordelia and Abigail would be forced to cancel their official launch the next morning, and in the days to follow, someone would find Arthur’s cold, lifeless, recordless body still leaning against the spookiest tree on the Crosley estate—with no rocket to show for his efforts. Once again, he would prove to be an utter disappointment to the Whipple family name.

In a fit of desperation, Arthur flung his head back against the tree—and was suddenly filled with hope.

There, in the branches above him, was the faint outline of what appeared to be a model rocket.

Until that moment, Arthur had felt so down, he had entirely forgotten to look up—and now he could scarcely believe his eyes. But there it was, on a branch about eight feet up—the rocket, in all its miniature glory, waiting patiently to be found.

The boy leapt to his feet. Though he was no record-breaking tree climber (unlike his brother Edward, who held several records in the sport), the thought of actually living to see his twelfth birthday gave him a sudden boost of energy.

Arthur made light work of the trunk and quickly clambered through the tree’s lower branches—until he reached the limb that held the object of his quest.