Tunnel of Secrets (11 page)

Zeke was seething, and I could tell from that last comment that his anger had settled on me.

“I didn’t mean to offend you when I called the underground dwellers mole people,” I said. “The town under the station is awesome. It seems like you and your friends have a good home there.”

“I’m not like them,” Zeke spat back. “None of those people have an ounce of ambition, and half of them are just plain crazy.”

He smiled. “But Sal. Sure, he was off his rocker, but there was something different about him. I didn’t know who his parents were when he first started showing up underground; I was just drawn to how determined he seemed. Like he was on a mission. I made it my business to get to know him better.”

“Sal didn’t tell you about the treasure! He was shocked you even knew about it,” I said, hoping to keep him talking.

“Oh,
there are ways to get to know a person without talking to them.”

“You followed him to the Secret City?” Layla asked eagerly.

“Not without getting lost or stumbling into a trap, you didn’t,” I cut in. “It would have been impossible for you to find it on your own, and Sal said he burned all his plans and blueprints.”

“I found out about the Secret City long before Sal burned those documents.” Zeke laughed meanly. “Once I realized who he was, I was determined to figure out what he was up to. The way he was always looking over his shoulder and carrying strange bundles made it obvious he was hiding something. He would vanish for days, giving me plenty of time to locate those documents in his train car and copy them.”

Zeke shook his head. “At first I thought the whole thing was just a bunch of make-believe. I almost threw away all the copies I’d made, but something told me not to. Good thing I didn’t. One of those papers was a map that led me right to the Secret City, and once I saw the vault with my own eyes, I knew the treasure was real.”

“So you stole Sal’s plans?” I accused.

“I didn’t steal them,” he growled, “I implemented them! At first I just meant to take the treasure for myself, but I needed help to carry out his plans properly. And I realized that using the treasure to rally a new order of Knights was my chance to take back everything that had ever been stolen from me.
With patience and careful planning, I could rule the entire town . . . just like the Admiral!”

Zeke was getting caught up in his own story, gesturing wildly and punching the air with his dagger for emphasis.

“Every king needs subjects,” he said. “So I re-formed the Knights with the descendants of its original members and became their Grandmaster. Some of my followers were skeptical at first, but once they saw the Secret City they became believers.”

Layla cleared her throat and raised her hand. “Hello, nonbeliever here.”

“You would have believed once you saw the treasure,” Zeke said, disappointment creeping into his voice. “You could have helped make right what your family did to me.”

I could see the confusion on Layla’s face, but there wasn’t time to explain.

“You can’t blame Sal’s whole family for what his parents did years ago,” I shouted at Zeke.

“I gave her a chance,” he sneered before turning to Layla. “But I can’t trust you anymore. Which means you don’t leave me any choice.”

Zeke raised the dagger and began to splash toward us through the tunnel.

Either I figured out a way to keep him talking, or we were going to be getting a closer look at that dagger. “You still haven’t told us what Sal wrote on that piece of paper earlier,” I said, hoping he’d take the bait.

“I’m
not sure it would be in my best interest to tell you that. Not that it would do you much good anyway,” Zeke said, brandishing the dagger. “I have a treasure to retrieve. I just thought it was important that you understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. Not just for me, but for Bayport. Sometimes unpleasant sacrifices are necessary evils on the path to greatness.”

We’d gotten our confession, but I could tell Zeke never doubted for a second that he’d still get away with it. He wasn’t the only one who knew his way around a tunnel, though, and I was willing to bet that he didn’t have any Urbex training under his belt.

While Zeke had been talking, the water in the drainpipe had started inching its way to our ankles. That meant it was probably raining aboveground, and one of the first things all urban explorers learn is, “When it rains, no drains!”

Zeke narrowed his eyes and lunged at us with the dagger.

Layla grabbed on to me. And I grabbed on to the metal ring on the wall. Zeke, who had his back to the rumbling sound that suddenly erupted from the tunnel, didn’t grab anything. The rumble turned into a roar as an angry wall of water burst out of the darkness.

“Flash flood!” I cried.

By the time Zeke turned around, it was too late. The wave crashed into us with the force of a tsunami and carried him away screaming.

Which was kind of inconvenient, considering he still hadn’t
gotten around to telling us where the treasure was.

I held on to the ring with all my strength as the wave carried Zeke past us.

“Hold on!” I yelled to Layla.

“I was gonna tell you the same thing!” she yelled back.

The water started to slow to a steady rush. It hadn’t stopped rising, though; it was already past our waists and steadily growing higher.

“We’re going to have to swim for it!” I screamed.

“Ready when you are!” she yelled.

I’m a good swimmer, but the current was so strong that it took everything I had to get to the hatch in the sewer’s ceiling. I grabbed on to the bottom rung of the ladder with one hand and reached behind me for Layla with the other. Together we swam to safety through the open hatch.

Okay, maybe “safety” wasn’t the right word. We’d made it through the hatch into the portal above, but the portal was sealed! The door above it was locked tight, trapping us inside with the water rising second by second. The water surged higher and higher until there were only a couple feet of air left.

“I don’t want to drown, Joe,” Layla pleaded as the water inched past our necks.

S
AL HAD BEEN SMART ENOUGH
to clear out of the way before I started swinging the trident around me in a circle. I felt like samurai master Miyamoto Musashi in
The Book of Five Rings
, sending the rest of the Knights diving out of the way while Joe and Layla made their escape.

By the time I stopped spinning, I was dizzy enough to fall over. Sal didn’t miss a beat, though. He ran past the dazed Knights, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me through a hidden exit behind the vault. A few twists and turns later, we stepped out into a dark, rainy alley. By now, I had a pretty good guess as to where the treasure was. The Admiral’s letter in the vault had said the only other person who knew where the treasure was hidden was his wife. Seeing as she
was already dead when he wrote the note, I knew exactly where to find her.

“Come on, Sal, let’s make for the Admiral’s Tomb,” I said.

Sal shook his head so hard I thought he might give himself whiplash.

“I know you’re worried about ghosts, but there’s no scientific evidence that they actually exist,” I explained.

Sal shook his head no again. He took out the soggy pad of paper and wrote two words before the ink smeared:
The Curse.

I tried a different tactic.

“The Admiral said the curse was for people seeking the treasure, right? But we’re not even doing that. We’re trying to save Layla and Joe. The Admiral would have done the same.”

Sal nodded slowly and took his first step in the direction of the graveyard, a look of grim determination on his face.

I gave him a reassuring pat on the back. “Layla is lucky to have you as a great-uncle, Sal. I think the Admiral would approve.”

The corner of Sal’s mouth turned up just a little.

I made a quick stop on the way, ducking into a convenience store to grab Sal a fresh notepad and use the phone before we reached the cemetery’s ancient black gates.

The cemetery was the oldest—and spookiest—in Bayport, filled with three-hundred-year-old graves, raised
marble mausoleums, and strange statues. The Admiral’s Tomb was the cemetery’s most famous mausoleum, which is a monument that houses the chamber where the actual corpse is, usually in some kind of stone sarcophagus.

The tomb had large marble columns that framed a giant slab of a door engraved with an Eye of Providence—like the one over the Secret City vault, only bigger and more piercing. I’d shrugged off Sal’s fears, but the place was bone-chilling!

We had almost reached it when Sal came to an abrupt stop and took off running like he’d seen a ghost. Only it wasn’t a ghost. Not technically, at least.

I stood there gaping as the door to the Admiral’s Tomb creaked open, and pair of gore-drenched zombies came stumbling out!

T
HE HATCH DOOR WOULDN’T BUDGE
no matter how hard I pushed and pounded. At the rate the water was rising, Layla and I had only a minute tops before we were entirely submerged. Then I realized why I couldn’t get it open. I was supposed to pull instead of push! There was just enough of a groove in the metal for me to hook my fingers into and yank. It flew open, dumping a few hundred years’ worth of dirt onto our heads in the process.

I managed to drag myself out, pull Layla up after me, and slam the hatch door before it could overflow. “Are you okay?” I asked, panting.

“Thanks to you I am,” she said breathlessly. “I didn’t
think we were going to make it out in time.” She looked around. “Where are we anyway?”

That was a good question. There was just enough light to make out shapes and shadows. Which meant that wherever we were, it was either on the surface or close to it.

We were in a large room with high ceilings and creepy statues lurking in the corners. There were also more cobwebs than I wanted to think about and a platform that held a pair of long, rectangular boxes.

I started to get a sinking feeling. The boxes looked just about the right size to be . . .

“Uh, Joe, are those coffins?” Layla asked with a quiver in her voice.

“I think I know where we are,” I said as the pieces started to click into place.

“We’re in some kind of tomb, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. I wonder if it’s the Admiral’s.”

“Is this where the treasure is hidden?” she asked.

“It would make sense,” I replied. “The letter said the treasure was out of reach, where only the Admiral and his wife could get it. And his wife has been in here the whole time.”

“You don’t think this place has a light switch, do you?” Layla joked, picking up a tall candelabra that held three ancient, mostly melted candles. “I left my fire-making spell back at Hogwarts, and this place is giving me the willies.”

“I don’t
know about a light switch, but maybe this will help,” I said, pulling the emergency kit from my pocket. I had totally forgotten about it until Layla spotted the candles. I just hoped the kit’s plastic case had kept the water out.

I removed a match, scraped it against the wall, and—bingo!—it lit on the first try. The old wicks on the candelabra sparked and fizzed stubbornly, but they lit too.

“And let there be light!” I announced as the tomb became visible. Thick cobwebs covered just about everything, and there was so much dust floating around that the air itself seemed to shimmer in the candlelight. And those statues I’d spotted? Gargoyles with mouthless, bird-beaked faces . . . just like the ones on the Knights’ masks.

“I think this place may have been less creepy in the dark,” Layla muttered. She turned to me and started laughing. “You look ridiculous!”

“I, what . . . ?” And then I laughed too. We were both covered with so much muck from our crawl through the hatch that we barely looked human.

I tried not to shudder as I pushed aside a curtain of cobwebs on my way toward the giant slab of marble that I figured must be the tomb door.

I paused for a last look at the coffins.

“Rest in peace, guys,” I said.

I was about to turn back toward the door when something caught my eye. The his-and-hers coffins were decorated with
strange markings. One had a big trident and that creepy eye symbol, which had to be the Admiral’s, and the other had an angel, which I figured was his wife’s.

Hers also had an intricate design carved into the top. I crept closer and I realized there was something hidden in the center of it: a keyhole. And it looked like it would fit the key the Admiral had swallowed before he died.

I tried to remember what his letter had said. Something about the treasure being close to his heart in a place only he and his wife knew about. “Layla, do you remember exactly what the Admiral’s letter said? The last part about him and his wife having the key to the treasure?”

“Sure. I thought it was kind of sweet, actually. He said, ‘My treasure now resides out of the reach of treacherous hands, close to my heart, and only my beloved and I hold the keys,’ ” Layla recited.

I pulled the bandanna-wrapped key from my pocket. “I wonder if this is the key he was talking about.” There was no way the detective in me was going to let me leave after finding the keyhole that might unlock the entire mystery.

“Um, Joe, what are you doing?” Layla asked as I started to creep toward the coffin.

“Just one second,” I said absently. “I want to see something.”

I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and inserted the key into the keyhole. It fit perfectly.

“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” Layla said.

She was right. It probably wasn’t.

But I turned the key anyway.

There was a faint metallic click. I held my breath.

A little hidden compartment popped open. Candlelight flickered over something inside, only it wasn’t treasure.

It was yet another, even smaller, bronze key.

F
ROZEN IN FEAR, I RACKED
my brain for a rational explanation for the two monstrous creatures that had just pushed their way out of the Admiral’s Tomb. That’s when one of the zombies started yelling my name.