The Poe Estate (19 page)

“I'm sure you would hate to be stranded here,” said Feathertop. He stepped closer to me. “I can smell haunted objects on you. What have you got? I'll just take a look, shall I?” I drew back, but he stepped even closer and stuck his hand in my pocket.

I screamed and hit him. Cole and Andre ran at him. Feathertop took a deep drag on his pipe and blew the smoke straight in Andre's face, then stuck out his foot daintily in front of Cole. Both guys fell sprawling in the sand, Cole clutching his injured ankle and Andre choking for breath.

“Cole! Andre!” I screamed.

Feathertop took another deep drag on his pipe and reached for the cord around my neck, the one my sister's whistle hung from. I twisted away to avoid the noisome blast of smoke, but before I could stop him, he had yanked the whistle free.

“Well, what have we here?” he said. “This summons a spirit, doesn't it? I could use a spirit servant.”

“Give me that! That's mine! You can't have it!” I sounded like a four-year-old. I wished I
was
a four-year-old. Nothing like this would have happened when I was four and my sister was around to protect me. I wished I hadn't told her to leave me alone.

“Jonathan! I can't believe you're doing this!” Elizabeth yelled. She was fishing desperately in her bag for something.

Rigby had jumped into the water—it came up to his chest—and was half swimming, half wading toward us. “All's fair in collecting,” he said. “Anyway,
you're
the ones who are trying to steal from
me
.”

I grappled with Feathertop, trying to get the whistle back.

Then several things happened fast. Feathertop got the whistle to his lips and blew. A stream of evil, shrieking smoke wailed through the whistle. The sound was louder and deadlier and more horrifying than anything I'd ever heard. In one of those abrupt, disorienting time shifts, the sun blinked out
of the sky. And through the smoky, crepuscular gloaming, a phantom came streaming. My sister.

Never before had I seen her so vast and furious. She was unimaginably vivid—and everyone could see her! She might have been any dead horror screaming for vengeance.

“Get the box!” Feathertop commanded her.

Kitty made it clear that he couldn't command her, and the only thing she would be
getting
was Feathertop.

The two of them drew back, then rushed at each other.

I wouldn't have thought anything could hurt a ghost, but apparently something in Feathertop's pipe smoke gave him powers that reached even beyond the grave. But my sister had been summoned by a blast of the same infernal smoke that filled his lungs. They were well matched.

At dusk, a ghost bleeds black. A fiend bleeds glowing ichor. And the agonized cries of each can shatter wood. Branches fell all about us, splintering as they hit the sand.

The worst thing about their fight was how familiar it seemed. I'd watched Kitty fight like that on playgrounds all through my childhood, defending me from bullies, real and imagined. This was a horrible, unstoppable parody of something I'd loved and relied on.

“Jonathan! Curb your creature!” Elizabeth screamed, still fishing in her bag.

“Curb yours!” screamed Rigby.

“She's not my creature!” Elizabeth answered.

“She's not a
creature
! She's my
sister
!” I screamed.

“Both of you, stop!” Rigby yelled, grabbing at Kitty. His hands went through her, but when she cuffed him away, he
went flying across the beach. He crashed into a pile of seaweed and lay dazed.

Elizabeth found what she was looking for in her purse and held it out. “Feathertop! Here!” she screamed.

Feathertop turned his head toward her. She was holding up a mirror.

His eyes went wide. Then he changed. In the dim light I watched his cheeks harden into ridges, his snappy suit fall into rags. The pipe faded and went out, then tumbled to the sand. Suddenly nothing was left of Feathertop but a heap of lifeless objects: a pumpkin-headed scarecrow, a broomstick, and an old clay pipe.

I stared. What had happened to him?

Kitty wailed in wordless exaltation. With a high-pitched shriek like a fighter plane, she flew over Rigby's rowboat. As she passed, the corpses tumbled into the bottom of the boat beneath her, and a cloud of birds flew upward, radiantly white in the gloom. The corpses on the
Ariel
all scrambled into their boat and started pulling on their oars, but before they could reach the Dutch trader, Kitty flew over them shrieking, and the same thing happened: Corpses collapsed; birds flew away.

We all stared, dazed. Rigby sat up, rubbing his head.

“What happened to the corpses?” said Cole.

“Can't you stop her? She's scaring off my gulls!” yelled Rigby.

“Not our problem,” said Andre. “You're the one who summoned her. Your creature did, anyway.”

“But I'm going to be stranded here!”

“Oh, the irony,” said Elizabeth.

The moon rose, blazing quickly up the sky, and the corpses on the mother ship leapt into action. Elizabeth was right about the ship's speed. It could outpace a ghost, apparently. Soon the ship had slipped beneath the horizon, my sister streaming after it. Her howls echoed back to us for a long time after they'd both vanished.

A Dead Man's Chest

C
ole breathed. “What just happened?”

Kitty's blue whistle glinted in the moonlight next to Feathertop's remains. I picked it up. “When Feathertop blew my whistle, he summoned my sister. After that, I have no idea.”

“What is all this trash?” Cole nudged the pumpkin with the toe of his shoe. It made a disgusting squelching noise.

“Careful with that!” said Rigby. He bent over the pile of stuff and rummaged through it with gingerly distaste, picking out an old clay pipe and a broom that looked a lot like mine.

“What happened to Feathertop?” said Cole. “How could a person turn into all
this
?”

“Feathertop wasn't a person, exactly,” said Elizabeth. “He was a satiric literary construction, a sort of Pygmalion variant.”

“A what?”

“It's a Greek myth about a sculptor who brings his statue to life. This is one of Hawthorne's versions. He was kind of obsessed with the myth. Did you ever read his story ‘Feathertop'?”

We shook our heads.

“It's like a snarky twist on Pygmalion. A witch builds a scarecrow out of a pumpkin, some old clothes, and her broom. She likes him so much she decides to bring him to life, so she gives him her pipe to smoke.”

“
That
pipe?” I asked, pointing to Rigby's hand.

“Yes. It's the jewel of my collection,” said Rigby.

“The pipe has demonic powers,” said Elizabeth. “Whoever controls it can summon a fiend to light it with an infernal ember and keep it filled with diabolical tobacco.”

We all looked at Rigby. “You smoke diabolical tobacco lit by hellfire? I guess that explains your challenged ethics,” I said.

It was hard to tell in the moonlight, but I thought Rigby looked offended. “Oh, like
you
don't fly around on diabolical broomsticks? Anyway, I don't smoke it
myself
,” he said. “I made my scarecrow smoke it. And there's nothing wrong with
my
ethics.
You're
the one who's stealing from
me
.”

“Whatever,” said Cole. “How does the pipe turn a scarecrow into a creep?”

Elizabeth said, “In the Hawthorne story, the smoke turns the scarecrow into a dandy—the kind of guy who wears expensive clothes and tries to worm his way into high society. He gets his name from the feather in his hat. But whenever the tobacco runs out, Feathertop has to summon the demon to refill it and light it, and if the demon's not quick enough, he starts to change back into a scarecrow.”

I had seen Feathertop start to change, I realized, that time his pipe went out at the flea market. “So what happened here? Did the pipe somehow go out?” I asked.

“No. I showed him my mirror. It reflected his true self. He's
so vain, whenever he sees his true form, he throws down the pipe in despair and turns back into a scarecrow.”

“Which is a total pain, thank you very much,” said Rigby. “Where am I going to get another pumpkin on this forsaken island?”

“Seriously, Jonathan? You threaten to strand us on a desert island, you sic your creature on us, and then you complain when I disable him?” Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

“Hey,
your
creature attacked first.”

I said, “I keep telling you, that's my
sister
! She's
nobody's
creature!” I wondered where Kitty had gone and when I would see her again. I was way too freaked out by her new, fierce vividness to summon her now, though.

“Well, she drove off my seagulls, and it's going to take forever to find them, and who knows where my ship is by now,” said Rigby. “Can you give me a lift back? Just drop me at any annex port along the railroad line.”

“You're kidding! Why shouldn't we leave you here, like you were going to do to us?” asked Andre.

“You won't do that. I know you and Elizabeth,” said Rigby. “You're far too nice.”

I said, “Even if we take you back, we're keeping the treasure.”

“No, you're not. The treasure's mine,” said Rigby.

“Bye, then,” I said, grabbing a corner of the chest. “Come on, Cole, help me get this thing onto the
Ariel
.”

“Okay, okay, we'll split the treasure,” said Rigby. “Half for me, half for you two. You know it's my island!”

Cole and I looked at each other. After all, Rigby had a
point. “A third for each of us,” I said.

“Done,” said Rigby. “That looks heavy. Let me give you a hand.”

• • •

Back on the
Ariel
, Cole and I wanted to dump the corpses overboard, but Rigby argued that they were a valuable part of his collection and would be perfectly usable once he'd reassembled his seagulls. We agreed to let him pile the corpses in the Dutch trader's rowboat and tow it behind us.

I regretted the decision as soon as we started sailing. In a sailboat, the wind generally comes more or less from behind. We spent the whole trip holding our noses.

To my surprise, Jonathan Rigby turned out to be a great sailing companion. He taught Cole and me how to tie seventeen different kinds of knots, kept us entertained with sea shanties, and knew the names of all the different kinds of seaweed.

“You're kind of fun for a monster,” I said when he showed me how to attract flying fish by threading little bits of parrot fruit on a string—and how to drop them gently back in the water before they suffocated.

“I'm not a monster myself. I just collect them,” he told me.

The trip home seemed to take far less time than the trip out. Maybe it was the prevailing winds or the ocean currents, maybe just the pattern of daytime and nighttime. Or maybe there was some kink in the geography, and the way back actually
was
shorter than the way out. Whatever the reason, the Flint compass brought us back to our port of origin in what felt like no time at all.

• • •

Even after we landed, the reek of the corpses clung to our clothes and hair. “No offense, Spooky, but you stink,” said Cole. “Stinky Spooky.”

I made a face at him. “Very mature. You're not exactly a bouquet of roses yourself, you know.”

Back onshore, Jonathan's acquisitive, competitive streak came roaring back. He wanted to buy my whistle, my Hawthorne broom, my compass. To his credit, though, he didn't threaten to drown me or strand me when I said no. He just argued. “What do you need the compass for? You already found the treasure.”

We'd borrowed a wheelbarrow from one of the warehouses down by the docks and were taking turns pushing it up the brick streets. It rattled so hard I kept biting my tongue.

“That's assuming this
is
the treasure. We don't actually know what's in this chest. How are we going to get it open?” I said.

“You mean you don't have the key?” Jonathan sounded pleased.

“I don't know if there even is one. It's not mentioned in the book, and the ghosts didn't say anything about it, either.”

“I bet Doc can help,” said Andre. “We've got all kinds of keys in our collection.”

We reached the station just as our train was pulling in. “Quick! It's bad luck to miss a spectral train,” said Elizabeth, starting to run.

I pushed the wheelbarrow after them as hard as I could. “How did the train know we were coming?” I panted.

“Spectral trains are like that,” said Andre, scrambling aboard.

We barely had time to pull the doors shut behind us before the train belched smoke and clattered into motion.

Jonathan Rigby spent the whole ride staring out the window looking green.

“You okay?” Andre asked. “You think you're going to throw up? The washroom's that way.”

“How come you collect ships if you get motion sickness?” Cole asked.

Jonathan sniffed at them. “The problem's not my stomach, thanks for your kind concern. It's your collection.” He waved his hand at the window. “I can't believe you snagged the House of Usher. That should be mine!” He whipped his head around to watch the castle disappear behind a hill. I thought he looked less about to throw up than about to breathe fire. But when he turned around again, the scene up ahead didn't seem to make him feel any better. “Oh! Is that Bly? How on
earth
did you get your claws on
Bly
?” He actually gnashed his teeth.

It was a relief when we pulled into Lost Penn Station, where Dr. Rust was waiting for us with Griffin. Andre tilted the chest down the train steps.

“Oh, good—you found it!” said the librarian.

“Ruff,” agreed the dog.

“Doc, do you know if we have the key to this chest?” asked Elizabeth.

“I'm pretty sure we don't.”

“Can you think of anything else we could use to open it, then?”

“Hm . . . let me think. The Golden Key won't work—it's
in the wrong genre. . . . The Key to All Mythologies is just a big, useless joke. . . . We have tons of skeleton keys, but they always lead to such bad puns. . . . Oh! I know. What about Leo's multifunctional tool?”

“Great idea,” said Andre. “He upstairs?”

“No, down here, testing some ectoplasmic trackers he's been working on. I passed him a little while ago on Eldritch Street, on the Lowest East Side. He's probably still there.”

“Is it far?” I asked. My arms were aching from pushing that chest around.

“Yes and no. It depends how you go. You could take the haunted hansom from ‘Consequences'—that might be easier. You and Cole, take the chest with you. The rest of us can meet you on Eldritch Street.”

“What's ‘Consequences'?”

“A Willa Cather story. It's one of those ones where the ghost is really the—”

“Doc! Spoiler alert!” interrupted Andre.

“Right. Sorry. Anyway, the hansom should be able to take you to the Lowest East Side.”

Andre helped us lug the chest to a row of weird-looking vehicles waiting outside the station. The haunted hansom was a small horse carriage drawn by a bony gray horse. The driver wore a red flannel scarf and a broken hat, which he tipped to Elizabeth with the handle of his switch. “Eldritch Street, right away!” he said, and we rattled off through a strangely swirling streetscape.

“This is kind of creepy,” whispered Cole.

“Creepier than everything else?”

“No, but still.”

I secretly agreed and was fighting the impulse to reach out for Cole's hand when we clattered into a broad street crowded with ghostly pushcarts. Blurred phantoms leaned out of upper windows of tenements howling, “Moiiiiishe! Miiiiiiickeeeeeey!! Saaaaaaalvatooooooore!!! HOWWWWWIEEEEEE!!! Ya forgot yer MITTTTTTTENNNNS!!”

Our cabbie pulled on the reins, the bony horse shuddered to a stop, and we stepped out, lugging the chest after us. Apparently either Elizabeth had already paid him or haunted cabbies don't expect tips, because before we could get our bearings, he had clicked his tongue at the old gray horse and vanished into the swirl.

• • •

A guy had been bending over one of the ghostly pushcarts, waving an instrument through it. The instrument consisted of a wand attached by a red cord to a metal box covered with dials and buttons and switches; as it passed through the pushcart, it let out a burst of beeps.

He straightened up at the sound of our carriage and looked at us. He had a long face, with a curl of dark brown hair falling into his warm brown eyes. He seemed around college age, medium height and neatly built, as if an engineer had taken some trouble to get him right.

“Hello! You look real,” he said, pushing the curl out of his eyes.

“Thanks. You do too,” I said.

“Hang on, let me just check.” He adjusted some knobs on his machine, then waved the wand over my head. It beeped again. I jumped back.

He waved it in Cole's face. It beeped again. “Hey!” objected Cole.

“Schist, that's strange!” said the guy. “You're both definitely real, but I'm getting a positive reading for ectoplasm. You're not partially disembodied, are you?” He poked Cole in the chest with the wand.

“Seriously, quit it!” said Cole.

“No disembodiment, your chest seems solid,” said the guy. “You're not off lying in a coma somewhere, are you? Or fractionally dead?”

“Of course not! But
you
will be, if you don't quit poking me with that thing.”

“I'm sorry. You're right, that was rude of me. It's just such an anomalous reading—I can't understand it.”

“Our ancestors are fictional,” I said. “Some of them, anyway. Could that explain it?”

“Fascinating. Yes, maybe. Do you have a few minutes? I would love to get you into the lab and run some tests.”

Suddenly the sky went dark. The air swirled with bats, their high-pitched, skittery pips and clicks weaving confusingly among the howls of the phantom tenement tenants. I ducked instinctively and put my arms over my head.