Steemjammer: Through the Verltgaat (6 page)

“Three of them,” Will said, “just gone.”

***

Back at Beverkenhaas, there was no sign of Hendrelmus, though Will said he wanted to look around, just to be sure. The girls went to the kitchen to make a quick snack, after which they planned on joining him. Angelica sliced bread and began toasting cheese sandwiches.

“Has Uncle Deet ever vanished before?” she asked.

“Not as often as your dad,” Giselle said, slicing peaches into a bowl of cream. “He went away a couple of times, but Mom made him stop. I think he was with Uncle Henry, looking for Aunt Muriel.”

That was Will and Angelica’s mother, Muriel Calhoun Steemjammer, who’d mysteriously vanished one afternoon several months earlier. The children had been in the back yard with their father learning how to swing a mace and block with a shield. When they’d come in for dinner, she wasn’t there.

A pot of rootkoel - sweet-and-sour
red cabbage
and apple slices flavored with juniper berries - simmered on the stove. A freshly baked ham-and-cheese quiche cooled on the counter, and a loaf of warm bread rested on a cutting board. But she was gone.

Henry hadn’t been too upset at first, insisting she’d be back soon and telling the children not to worry. When she didn’t return, he began to stay up late hammering and tinkering on things. Then, he began disappearing, too, and this time, Will feared he’d run into trouble.

“The thing that makes me so frustrated,” Giselle said, “no, angry – I’m truly angry over this – is how they obviously have a big secret, but they won’t tell us what it is. Like we were still just little kids.”

“Hey,” Angelica objected. “I’m a little kid!”

“Take it as a compliment, then, that I’m starting to think of you otherwise. Look, all this stuff about Holland and Ost Frisia. It’s begekkin!”
Nuts
!

“Ost Frisia? For us it’s Holland and the Black Forest.”

“Right, the Black Forest – land of cuckoo clocks. We’re preparing to ‘go home’ to a place that they can’t even name consistently, and what’s with all the paranoia? Do you know why we live on boats? Because ‘Shadovecht don’t do so well in water!’ Can you believe it?”

Angelica scowled. “I believe my dad.”

They locked eyes. Giselle was surprised to discover the ferocity of her little cousin’s gaze.

“Fine,” she said. “Believe him. But where is he? I still say they should have told us something, so at least we wouldn’t be worried.”

WHACK!

Startled by the sudden noise, they looked around.

“What was that?” Giselle said.

“I don’t know,” her little cousin replied.

WHACK! SMACK! WHACK!

Giselle cringed. “Sounds like the boiler’s thumping. Where’s Will? We need to kill the fire, now, or it will explode!”

Chapter
6

A voice of warning

In the library, Will had passed a breaking point. He knew his father would never approve of what he was doing, but if his parents and Onkel Deet were in trouble, that no longer mattered. Worried that they’d wasted days searching for a secret door, he had to find out what, if anything, was behind the wall. Using the voormaaker, a twelve-pound
sledgehammer
, he began knocking a hole in the plaster.

With each blow, he felt like he was getting closer to resolving something. Not just where his parents were, but years of unanswered questions and frustration.

He recalled the time he’d been sent to public school, because his mother had felt it would be good for him. The math teacher had laughed at him for trying to explain incalculus, while the science teacher had scolded him for believing, as his parents had taught, that there were at least 152 elements on the periodic table and not 118.

“At least,” he thought, “I never told them about the six exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics.”

As he swung the hammer, he remembered whispered voices that he could sometimes understand – his fellow students laughing at his strange clothing and unruly hair. A few kids tried to befriend him, but then others ridiculed them, chasing them away. He felt cast out and alone.

Once he’d summoned the nerve to talk to a girl he found pretty, and she’d actually seemed interested in him – until her friends came and swept her away. Chips flew, and he hammered faster and faster.

“Will, no!” cried a voice behind him.

He stopped but could only see a thick cloud of white plaster dust. As it cleared, his sister and cousin appeared, holding cloths over their faces and coughing.

Vibrations had caused a small glass display box to teeter to the edge of a table, and it was about to fall. Lunging forward, his sister caught it just in time. Inside was a small, lumpy black rock.

“You almost broke Dad’s meteorite,” she said.

“It’s a rock,” Will said, preparing to take another swing. “Only the glass would have been harmed.”

“You’re white as a ghost.”

He realized he was covered from head to toe with plaster dust and laughed. “You will be, too, if you stay.”

“Will, what are you doing?” Giselle said. “Put down the voormaaker.”

Realizing he had some explaining to do, he set it down and wiped his face clean. “I’ve had it with all this mystery. We’re going to find out what’s in there.”

Angelica winced. “What will Dad say?”

“I don’t care anymore. If he’s angry, I’ll say, ‘Dad, you shouldn’t have left us like that. What did you expect?’ Now step back.”

Again he swung the voormaaker. This time it made a resounding thud against a brick wall behind the plaster. Plugging their ears, the girls gave him space, and soon a clump of bricks fell into a space beyond.

Will peered through the hole. “There’s a room!”

Giselle stepped up to look.

“Open it more,” she urged, sneezing from the dust.

“Too many pipes in the way,” he said. “Over here.”

Moving to the left, they carefully took down an old painting of a 17th Century Dutch couple standing by a windmill. The man, who wore a floppy hat with a long feather, held a sword and a hammer. His pretty wife wore a white lace cap and cradled a baby in her arms.

“I’ve always wondered,” Giselle mused, reading the name painted on the bottom, “who ‘Rembrandt’ was.”

“Dad says those are Steemjammers,” Angelica told her, pointing at the painting’s subjects. “Great-great-times-whatever grandparents.”

Will swung the voormaaker. After several minutes of steady bludgeoning, he pounded a hole through the bricks that he could just squeeze through.

“Lantern, please,” he said, and Angelica passed one through the hole.

They followed him into a dark chamber the size of a small bedroom. It smelled musty, like an old book that had been left too long in a damp place. The bare brick walls were lined with cobweb-strewn pipes and control valves. Besides a small table, they could see little else. Will frowned. This wasn’t what he was expecting.

“Looks like a maintenance room,” Giselle said. “I don’t think there’s anything special here.”

“Verdoor,” Angelica sighed. “We’re in trouble!”

“But why hide it?” Will said. He spotted a brass knob. “Hey, that’s the backside of a hidden door. It must open into the dining room.”

“Let’s see,” his sister said.

She took a step toward the secret door, but Will grabbed her. “Stop!”

A hand-drawn sign on the floor read: “GEVOOR!”

“That means ‘DANGER!’ in Dutch,” Giselle said.

Will tossed a loose brick at the sign. A trap door opened, and the brick vanished into a dark pit.

“Begekkin!” Giselle cried as the spring-loaded trap door snapped shut.
Crazy
!

Angelica grabbed her brother. “This is totally wankenzink!”
Insane
!

“Yes, it is,” Will agreed. “So be careful.”

“Someone could have died!” Giselle said. “I wonder who put that sign.”

Will carefully pushed open the trap door with his foot. Peering down with the lantern, he saw a twelve-foot deep pit with smooth walls and a padded mattress at the bottom.

“Dad must have,” he said. “He didn’t want us getting hurt if we found this place and fell in. There must be something important here. Otherwise, why hide it so well, and why trap it?”

Giselle opened a drawer in the table. “Look! It’s from Uncle Henry.”

She held up a wax cylinder that had “H.S.” inscribed on one end and “Listen to this now!” on the other.

“A phonograph cylinder?” Angelica asked.

“This is the soft kind,” Giselle said excitedly, “that you can record on. You shout into a cone, and a needle makes a special groove. Maybe he left a message.”

“If it’s just a song,” Will remarked, “I’ll go berserk!”

***

In a corner of the living room between the knobbed couch and a spike-leafed potted plant that occasionally grew odd, cube-shaped red berries sat the old family phonograph. Will wound it up with a brass crank, while Giselle carefully placed the wax cylinder inside. He set it spinning and gently dropped the brass arm, putting the needle into the groove with a loud POP.

After a moment’s hissing, Henry’s voice, faint and crackly, came from the device’s large brass horn: “My dearest children, if you’ve found this, it probably means I’ve been gone some time and that you’ve been searching Beverkenhaas for answers. There are many things your mother and I’ve been meaning to tell you, but it was for good reason that we kept you in the dark all these years. Here are some useful things that you need to know.”

Will felt his body quiver with anticipation. Was he at last going to get some answers?

“Always keep the reservoir full!” Henry’s voice said.

“Eenvoodink!” Angelica quipped with frustration.
Obviously!
“Tell us where you’ve gone, Dad!”

They had to stop it and reset the needle, because she talked over his next sentence.

“Patience,” Will said. “Let him finish.”

Again the recording played, and Henry went through the list of things to do, such as keeping the machinery greased and the animals fed. The kids tensed, worried that they weren’t going to learn a thing.

“Obviously you’re curious,” Henry’s voice continued, “so I’ll reward you with information that should satisfy you, but I’ll be asking you to do something in return.

“As you know we’re not from Ohio, but our true home – this is so hard to explain. Almost 400 years ago our ancestors were driven by war to Amsterdam. Even there we didn’t feel safe, so we found a way to go to another place. For many generations we thrived there.

“What place? Where? For now, trust me that it’s far away and very difficult to reach. Things went bad there, and we had to flee back here, to escape disaster.

“We did not leave our homeland by choice. There, the Steemjammer name has great reputation. ‘They have the highest steem,’ it is said of us. At our workshop, we created wonders the likes of which no one had seen or imagined.

“So, what went wrong? This you should know.

“Over the years, problems grew, things we should have taken seriously but didn’t. Rivalries developed between the great engineering and scientific families. Some turned dark, consumed by greed and envy, especially a powerful family with the name Rasmussen.”

Angela gasped. “See? I told you!”

Will had to lift the needle. “He said
Rasmussen
, not Rasputin.”

“Oh.”

“Huh?” Giselle asked, totally lost.

“Later,” Will said, replacing the needle.

“For many years,” his father’s voice resumed, “they plotted against us, but we thought ourselves invincible. We only realized our foolishness when their leader, Zander Rasmussen, led a surprise attack on our stronghold. His aim was to overwhelm us, take control of our machines, steal all our secrets, and as hard as I find this to believe, either exterminate or enslave all Steemjammers.

“Because of the heroism of my father, your groesvader, and others, the venomous Rasmussens failed. The bloodshed was terrible, but most of us escaped to this place we now live.

“Since then we’ve been rebuilding, looking for our moment to strike, to take back what is ours and see that the Rasmussens never threaten us again. This is why I’ve taught you
steem
and how to fight, because when we move, each of us must give our total effort!

“That time, however, is not now.

“The task at hand is to find and bring home your mother. I have reason to believe that she is alive and safe, but very far away. This is something that I must do alone. Wilhelmus, Angelica, you must be sterk, strong and tough, as we’ve taught you. Take care of each other and Beverkenhaas.

“If there’s any trouble, seek help from Uncle Deet, Tante Yvette and Giselle. Shut down the boiler and ride the wagon to Lake Erie if you have to.”

“He made this before my dad vanished,” Giselle noted during the pause that followed.

“You can trust Cousin Alfonz,” Henry’s voice continued. “Other family members you may not have met might drop in. Most will be helpful, but at all costs avoid my cousin Marteenus!

“He has strong cowlicks which aim his hair to the left. It sticks out parallel to the ground and is dark red and kinky. No matter how nice he seems, chase him away at once. You may have to threaten him.”

“Marteenus,” Will said, lifting up the needle to pause the phonograph. “The guy on the airship!”

“Why haven’t they told us any of this?” Giselle complained. “How are we supposed to deal with such problems when we don’t know anything?”

Heartsick from the sound of her father’s voice, Angelica tugged her brother’s arm. “Keep playing it.”

“I said earlier,” Henry’s voice continued after Will replaced the needle, “that I’d ask you to do something. Here it is: stop searching Beverkenhaas.

“It’s dangerous. As proud as I am of you, as much as you’ve learned, you must not go further.

“Do not look for me. Trust that I’m safe and sound, just far from home but always on my way back to you. Maybe this time with Mother. Have faith, stick with your studies, and stay out of trouble.

“Keep your fire stoked and your steem high! Know that your mother and I cherish you beyond words. This is your loving father, Dad.”

The phonograph hissed and thumped as the needle was pulled out of the groove. Tears streamed down Angelica’s face, and she couldn’t hold back sobs. Will found his eyes were welling up, too, and even Giselle had to sniffle.

“That’s it, then?” Will said with disbelief. “After coming this far, we have to stop?”

“He said so,” Angelica said with difficulty, wiping her eyes. “That means we have to, right?”

Will didn’t like the sound of that. Giselle put a hand on his shoulder. “I think we should stop.”

“I disagree,” he said. “Dad made that before Uncle Deet vanished, and what about this Marteenus guy? He tried sneaking up on us with an airship! What if Dad’s stuck somewhere and needs our help?”

“But he said it’s dangerous.”

Will tried to argue, but no words came out. His mind churned with turmoil. Could he violate a direct order from his father, even if it didn’t make sense? Maybe not. Going on felt wrong, but doing nothing felt even worse.

He had to do something. Unable to think of anything else, he realized he’d forgotten about something. He pulled out the envelope Marteenus had tossed at them and, before his sister could tell him not to, ripped it open.