Steemjammer: Through the Verltgaat (8 page)

“Are you okay?” Giselle shouted.

“I’m fine,” he shouted back, and his voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a deep well.

“Don’t leave us!” his sister yelled.

“I’ll be right back.”

He stepped away, and they could no longer see him.

“Will!”

Angelica teetered on the verge of a panic attack.

“It’s okay, he’ll be right back,” Giselle soothed, wishing she’d sounded more confident.

Unable to bear the thought of losing her brother, the little girl leaped through the world hole.

Giselle gasped. “Angelica!” But it was too late. Her young cousin quickly moved out of her field of view.

***

On the other side, Angelica found herself standing in a large, corroded old iron boiler. The only light came from the softly glowing verltgaat. Noticing an open hatch, she climbed onto a stone tiled floor in the middle of a huge, dark room. The silhouettes of large machines towered over her, and she noticed a stack of huge iron gears leaning against a pillar – one almost thirty feet in diameter.

“Will?” she whispered.

“What are you doing here?” he said, and she followed his voice until she found him by a wall.

“Is he here?”

“Dad? No, but there’s this.”

She gasped as he cracked opened a curtain and revealed an amazing view. They stood in a large building on the third or fourth floor, and she saw a canal and a wooded park surrounded by a wall, bathed in bright sunlight. Beyond that stretched a city made of colorful stone and brick buildings.

“This must be New Amsterdam,” he whispered.

The place buzzed with activity. The canal teemed with barges and houseboats towed by funny little brightly colored steam boats that reminded them of the ones Giselle lived in. On a distant street they could make out odd bicycles with enormous front wheels, fanciful trolleys, and strangely shaped cars and trucks powered by steam. The hazy sky, stained by countless smokestacks, was dotted with several airships and a lime green hot air balloon.

“It’s amazing,” Angelica whispered with awe.

They heard a noise. A door opened in the far wall, and someone holding an oil lantern looked in. Thin light flooded the chamber. Letting the curtain fall shut, Will and Angelica saw they had no chance to make it back to the boiler unseen, so they hid behind a nearby crate.

“Another bloody junk room,” they heard a gravelly voice mutter with a thick English accent.

“Sh!” said a young voice. “This is the sort of place I might find it, ‘hidden in plain sight.’” His accent was also English but refined, with a nasal tone. “Watch the hall.”

As the sphere of dim lantern light moved slowly through the room, Will and Angelica risked peering over the crate. They could make out a row of giant locomotives, steam shovels, tractors, and other contraptions.

Briefly they got a look at the person searching. Tall and slender, he appeared to be Will’s age and wore a stylish, dark leather coat stitched from strips of various kinds of exotic skins. Pale skinned with brown eyes and black hair, he had a somewhat shocking streak of bone-white hair in the front.

Called a white forelock, it grew from a widow’s peak at the top of his forehead and was combed to the side. Something about it startled them – plus the intense look on the young man’s face. Will wondered if he was a Rasmussen.

The lantern glow moved closer and closer to the old rusted boiler. They could see a faint glow from the verltgaat coming out of the open hatch on their side. A few more steps and the boy wouldn’t help but notice it.

“Bram,” whispered the gravelly voice from the doorway.

Will and Angelica could see the outline of a large man there. He signaled with his hand, which meant that someone was coming down the hall. Bram hooded the lantern, plunging the room into darkness.

Sensing their moment, Will and Angelica made their way quickly towards the faint glow of the boiler hatch. He brushed against something, and it fell with a loud
clang
.

“Who’s there?” the young man hissed.

They went faster.

Hearing footsteps but unable to see, Bram couldn’t hide the fear in his voice. “Show yourself!” He became defiant. “I warn you, my family’s very powerful!”

Will helped his sister through the hatch and scurried in after her. Finding Giselle standing in the boiler, they urged her to follow them through the verltgaat, and in seconds they were back in Beverkenhaas.

He tugged the lever. For a moment nothing happened. The hole between worlds stayed open, and they feared the youth might find it and come through, but then the verltgaat snapped shut and disappeared.

***

Exhilarated, Will and Angelica told their cousin what had happened. At last they felt like they might find their father, but the machine, which had been idling when they found it, was now shut off completely.

“We have to figure out how this works,” Will said excitedly, “and go back.”

“But how?” his sister asked.

He studied the complex control panel and made a face. This wasn’t going to be easy.

They noticed that Giselle stared with interest at a nearby table. “This may be a ridiculous question, but is that a book?”

BONG! The Steemjammer kids almost jumped out of their skins. Indeed a leather-bound book sat on the table, and as much as it interested Will, the bone-jarring noise from upstairs took all his attention.

The door gong, which often went silent for weeks at a time, had sounded. They could tell when the hideous face popped out, because a muffled scream ripped the air.

“What is wrong with these people?” boomed a commanding female voice.

Chapter
8

trouble comes knocking

“Open up!” the forceful female voice reverberated through the door. “We know you’re in there!”

Giselle, who’d raced after her cousins upstairs, stepped back with alarm. Angelica moved behind her.

Will set his jaw and faced the door. “Let me handle this.” They were only too happy to let him.

Opening it a crack, he peered out. A gaunt, tan man in a blue uniform that read “School Police” jumped back with fright and then settled himself, trying to pretend nothing was wrong. It was he who’d screamed, and at an embarrassingly high pitch. An African-American woman in a light gray business dress with her long hair piled on top of her head in a tight bun stood next to him.

Behind them towered the large woman with the powerful voice, Waverly Norman. Will found that he couldn’t take his eyes off her strange, unnatural-looking black hair.

“I’m Officer Ahmed Watib of the School Police,” the skinny man in the uniform told Will, pronouncing it AK-med Wa-TEEB.

“And I’m Jane Gables, Assistant Health Inspector,” said the woman with the hair bun.

“We need to speak with your parents.”

“They aren’t here,” Will said and shut the door.

Waverly thundered, “He can’t do that, can he?”

“I’m not ringing that thing again!” the officer said.

Will realized he had to face them – and that he had a large dagger in his belt. He wondered what would happen if they found the crossbows, swords, and axes scattered throughout the house. They also had an old steam-powered fighting suit in the barn, which would make the other weapons even harder to explain. Hiding the dagger in an urn, he stepped outside but stayed near the door.

“What do you want?” he asked guardedly.

“Your neighbor, Mrs. Norman,” Ahmed began politely but was interrupted.

Waverly jutted out her ample chin. “That’s me.”

“She claims that you and your sister don’t go to school.”

“Thirty-seven years experience! I know every trick you deviant miscreants have.”

Ahmed grimaced. “Are you enrolled anywhere?”

“We do home-schooling,” Will said.

“Aha!” Waverly said, shoving Ahmed aside and stepping forward. “If your parents aren’t here, then you aren’t being schooled – as if they even could. Are they trained educators? Do they have teaching credentials?”

“It’s perfectly legal to home-school, Mrs. Norman,” Ahmed said, placing himself between her and the boy.

“Well, it shouldn’t be!”

“But they have to enroll with an approved program. Young man, which are you using?”

“My mom knows,” Will said. “She handles that.” It was true. She’d taken care of this before her disappearance, but still, he felt bad not telling the whole story. He had to exert himself not to blurt out more.

Ahmed handed Will a card. “When your mother gets back, have her call me.”

“That’s it?” Waverly deplored, aghast. “No arrests? No citations? How do you expect her to call, anyway? They’re completely off the grid!”

“It’s legal to be off the grid,” Jane, the Assistant Health Inspector, said defensively.

Waverly flared and attempted to skewer her with an intimidating gaze, but the official didn’t budge.

“Is it legal,” Mrs. Norman challenged, “not to have a hookup to the sewage main? Is it legal to raise children swimming in filth?”

“No sewage main comes out here, ma’am. They’re on a septic tank and leach line system, just like you.”

“
What
?”

“All houses on this street are.”

Waverly’s eyes opened wide with shock, and her glasses almost slid off her nose. “You mean our sewage just leaks into the yard?”

“Into the soil, where microorganisms consume it. It’s perfectly sanitary.”

“Perfectly revolting!” Waverly shuddered. “What about that mountain of manure in their back yard? And that smokestack belching out foul vapors! They’re causing global warming, I tell you!”

“I’ll admit that’s a peculiar chimney,” Jane said, “but they have the right to burn wood and keep livestock. These lots aren’t zoned.”

“You mean you’re going to just let them off, like this Ahmed character’s done?”

“Wait,” said Jane, scanning through records. “Young man, where does your water come from?”

“The faucet?” Will said.

“How does it get there? You’re not on our line, and you’ve never applied for a water well inspection.”

He almost told her they pumped it from a hand dug well in their back yard, but he became suspicious. What if that broke the county rules? To his horror, he couldn’t fight off an urge to blurt out something.

“A reservoir,” he said, panicking. “Ask my father. He’ll be back later. Good bye!”

He darted inside and slammed the door. This time he locked it and ran upstairs to watch from a window. The large woman with the strange hair berated Ahmed and Jane a while, but they grew tired of her and drove off.

Scowling at Beverkenhaas, Waverly Norman turned and stormed across the street. Will sighed. This was no victory, he knew. Something told him that Mrs. Norman was just getting started.

He faced his sister and cousin. “We’ve got problems.”

***

“Sir?” said a short, wiry man into a brass speaking tube. He had long, thinning black hair and oily skin. “Activity in the aether. The Steemjammers have opened another verltgaat.”

Staas Floombach sat on a hard stool in a cold, dimly lit basement laboratory, carefully monitoring a series of oddly configured, steam-powered devices that were scientific in nature. Shivering, he buttoned his wrinkled black lab coat.

Because his great great uncle had married a Rasmussen, Staas was marginally part of the Greater Rasmussen Protectorate, as they’d started calling it. Had he actually been descended from a Rasmussen, his standing would have been much greater. As it was, he was barely a grade above servant.

“Where?” demanded a stern voice with a slight English accent on the other end of the speaking tube. Staas cringed as he recalled the frightening face that went along with it: Clyve Harrow, a Rasmussen - even though he didn’t have the surname - and the man in charge of the complex where he worked.

“It didn’t last long enough to get a fix, sir,” Staas said. “Somewhere in New Amsterdam. I’ll see if I can get a position, anyway.”

“Let’s see that you do.”

Staas shuddered. They’d been working hard to improve their detection technology, and his superiors now thought that it should work. If he failed, he was one step closer to another trip to the Shadoverks -
Shadow Works
- for punishment.

Six years ago he’d been made to endure two weeks of torment there. It’d seemed like an eternity and had nearly driven him mad.

Fear drove his mind to places he shouldn’t have allowed it to venture. Could he run away? Where would he go? If he tried to change his appearance and disappear into a distant city, would they find him? Could he survive far away in the wilderness? Could he even get out of the Rasmussen compound?

No, probably not, he decided. He knew too many secrets for them to let him escape, and if he somehow did, they’d surely track him down.

Seeing no other option, he drove the fear out of his head, copied down numbers from his detection machinery, and laid out several pairs of steel wires over a map of New Amsterdam. The area it suggested, however, was far too large to be useful. With a sigh of resignation, he realized his main hope was that the Steemjammers would leave a verltgaat open long enough to get a precise location.

Then, he wouldn’t have to live in fear. He might even get promoted.

***

THUNK!

“Got her!” Angelica whooped.

Tucking another rock snugly into her leather sling, she spun it to the side, faster and faster. With a snap of her wrist, she sent it flying. THUNK!

“Right on the nose!”

Her target, an overturned bucket, sat in a corner of the sub-basement under Beverkenhaas. Made to look like Waverly Norman with a dirty old mop for hair and charcoal markings for a face, it was gathering a considerable collection of dents. An old can with red snapdragons tied on top to resemble Marteenus’s hair had already taken quite a beating.

“You wouldn’t really hurt that old lady, would you?” Giselle said, watching with growing concern.

Angelica scowled. “She better leave us alone!”

Sitting at a table, Will grinned.

“Maybe you should stop,” he said. “What if you miss and break something?”

“I never miss!” Angelica huffed.

“True, but a rock could make a crazy bounce.”

She reluctantly agreed, and he went back to studying the old book they’d found. To their delight, it had turned out to be Hendrelmus Steemjammer’s journal, with page after page filled with cryptic notes, charts, and equations. Parts, Giselle thought, had been written by her father, Deetricus, as well.

“I just want to know,” Angelica said, walking over, “if it says where Dad is.”

Will sighed. “It says a lot of things, Angie-bee, like how he and Onkel Deet rebuilt the machine, but a lot of stuff’s abbreviated. They also use code words.” He turned a page. “Here he talks about something called ‘Glass Dragon’ and how dangerous it is.”

Angelica made a face. “A real dragon made of glass?”

“I can’t imagine that would be dangerous, because you could shatter it with one stone from your sling, right? That’s why I think it’s a code.”

“I guess. Why doesn’t it say where he is?”

“Gedult,” her cousin said.
Patience
. “What makes you think he’d write that down, anyway?”

“There’s got to be a clue!”

“There might be, but look at all those pages.”

“Well, there’s one clue,” Will suggested, pointing to an entry. “Dad wrote here – well, you translate it.”

Giselle took the journal. “‘Where is it? Where, by the Great Maker’s Beard, would he have put it?’”

Angelica wrinkled her nose. “Huh? The Great Maker’s
Beard
?”

“It must be a saying. The point is-”

Her little cousin interrupted excitedly. “Oh! Dad was
searching
for something!”

“Right,” Giselle said, finding another page. “‘Must find it or risk losing all!’ But there’s no hint as to what it is.”

“Now look at this,” Will said, taking the journal and flipping the page. “‘Feel like my mind’s coming unhinged. What could it possibly mean -
hidden in plain sight
?’”

Angelica’s hand went to her mouth. “Didn’t the boy with the white stripe in his hair say the same thing?”

“That’s what worries me. Was it a coincidence? If not, how did he know?”

“If Onkel Henry couldn’t figure this out,” Giselle groused, “what are our chances?”

While Will thumbed through the journal, Angelica frowned hard, causing deep wrinkles on her forehead.

“Hidden in plain sight?” she said. “That could be anywhere. And even if we find it, how will we know we have it if he doesn’t he say what ‘it’ is?”

Will sat up suddenly. “Whoa!”

“What?” his cousin asked hopefully.

“Here’s a list of places he went, in order. See these numbers?”

He pointed at the last entry Henry had made on the list, and then he pointed at some numbered dials on the ancient control panel of the Verltgaat machine.

Angelica hopped with excitement. “They’re the same!”

“To go where he went,” Will said, “we just change the numbered settings and do something called ….” He flipped to an earlier part of the diary. “‘Tuning the crystals.’ It seems pretty simple.”

“Simple?” Giselle retorted. “The first time Onkel Henry’d set it up, and all you did was hit the lever. You’re talking about tearing the fabric between worlds! One little mistake, and we could open a hole deep in the ocean or the middle of a volcano!”

He made a face, imagining high pressure sea water or lava spewing through. “Verdoor. I didn’t think of that.”

***

“Look at them,” Waverly Norman said that evening, peering through rhinestone studded opera glasses at the house across the street. “They must think I’m a fool!”

Ron sighed. He was trying to read a book on space travel and had reached a fascinating chapter on worm holes.

“Looks to me like they’re doing homework, dear,” he said, glancing through a window and seeing the kids sitting at table piled with books, reading.

“A Potemkin Village. It’s so obvious what they’re up to. They hide comics in their textbooks. No, I see right through their little trick. They’re mocking me.”