The Poe Estate (18 page)

Broken Isle

G
laring white beaches ringed the island, and a tuft of green trees stuck straight up in the middle like a feather headdress. A rocky scar to the east looked as though something had hacked off a huge chunk of land: an earthquake, or maybe a giant's ax. That must be what gave Broken Isle its name.

We sailed around to the northern end and dropped anchor in a sandy cove. The air here was soft and warm. We had already taken off our coats and sweaters. Now we rolled up our pants legs, hung our shoes around our necks by the laces, put on our backpacks, and splashed ashore.

“Now what?” asked Cole, wiggling his toes in the sand. “Ask the compass.”

“Well, compass?” I said. “Where did Red Tom Tempest bury his treasure?” The compass swung eagerly toward the densely wooded interior. “It wants us to go up there,” I said, pointing.

“Time to get our bearings,” said Andre. “Find the best path up.”

“Your job. I don't have any bearings,” Elizabeth pointed out.

“Good one, Libbet! Just stick close.”

A freshwater stream ran down to the beach from the interior of the island. We followed it upstream along a path beside it that seemed to have been made by animals. I hoped they
weren't the carnivorous kind.

It was steamy in the jungle and heavy going, especially for Andre, who had to walk half bent over to keep from banging his head. Thick roots grew across the path. My backpack made my back sweaty. Whenever we tripped, we heard chuckles and hoots high above us, as if something in the trees found us funny. Monkeys? Parrots? Ghosts?

There were definitely parrots around—we often caught a red flash of wing or tail, followed by a burst of squawks and a downpour of nutshells. Phinny must have come this way a couple of centuries ago. I imagined him looking for a parrot to bring home to Windy as a pet.

Cole picked up something mango-yellow that the birds dropped. “What is this? It's kind of good.”

“You're not
eating
that? Gross!” I said.

“It's perfectly safe—the birds are eating it too, and they're fine.”

“That's why it's gross! Half-chewed parrot leftovers.”

“Well, I'm sick of salt pork! Try some. It's good.”

Elizabeth caught a piece the next time the parrots flew by. “Cole's right, it's good. Kind of like a cross between a banana and a papaya.”

The forest got noisier, with a hissing, crashing sound that made it hard to understand each other's consonants. Soon we came to the source of the noise: a waterfall. Our path beside it
fanned upward and faded out in what looked like a green wall. “We supposed to go up
there
?” said Andre.

I consulted the compass. “Looks like it.”

He shrugged. “Here goes, then.” With his long arms and legs, he soon disappeared into the shaking green wall.

“Good thing I practiced climbing on the boat,” said Cole, following him. Elizabeth started up the steep, clifflike slope after him.

I waited for her to get up a few yards, then took a deep breath and pulled myself up. Thick vines and tree roots covered the steep slope, with plenty of rocks poking out for footholds. It was like climbing on a rope net.

Halfway up, something heavy, wet, and soft hit my head. I whipped around, startled. It was just one of those yellow fruits, growing on a vine. Balancing carefully, I picked a bunch of them and dropped them down my shirt.

When I reached the top, Cole and Andre pulled me up the last few feet by the arms. “Whoa, Spooky, what happened to you? Did you swallow a snake?” said Cole, pointing to my shirt front.

I fished one of the fruits out of my shirt. “Clean and parrot-free. Want some?” I took a bite. Elizabeth was right—they were sort of like a banana and a papaya, only tarter and juicier. I found I had been thirsty. I ate two.

“Now where?” asked Andre. We were standing on a ridge, with a tall hill in front of us. With our backs to the hill we could see the ocean far below us through the trees.

I consulted my compass. It bobbed around in a slow circle, the tip pointing downward. “Hm,” I said. “I think we're here.
Did anyone remember to bring shovels?”

• • •

Andre had three folding shovels in his backpack. It was hard work digging in the humid heat, but it went fast with the four of us—or maybe it just felt as though time wasn't passing because the sun wasn't moving. We took turns digging; the one without the shovel sat on the edge of the ledge, scanning the horizon through the trees for sails.

I was standing up to my chin in the hole, heaving dirt over my head and thinking about what a workout my triceps were getting, when Andre hit something hard. “Here!” he shouted.

Elizabeth, who'd been taking her turn as lookout, rushed over. “Wait!” she shouted.

“What?” asked Andre.

“Are we sure it's safe? Pirate treasure can be haunted. Sometimes they bury a prisoner alive, to guard it. Or they lay a curse. Like in that Stowe story, ‘Captain Kidd's Money,' where the devil drags the gold down to Hell, and they barely escape getting dragged down with it.”

“Isn't it a little late to worry about that?” I asked.

Cole looked stubborn. “I don't know about you, but I'm not quitting now. We've come too far. I'm going to risk it.”

“Me too.” I bit the earth with my shovel blade. Soon we'd cleared the top of an ironbound chest. “Look, no demons,” I said.

“So far,” said Elizabeth.

We scrabbled away at the hole until we'd cleared the whole chest.

“Is this what you saw the ghost holding?” asked Cole.

“Not sure. This might be bigger. The one I saw was all glowy and transparent, so it's hard to compare,” I said. “How are we going to get it out?”

“I brought rope,” said Andre.

It took us a great deal of coordinated levering with fallen branches, cascading dirt, banged elbows, and rope burns before we managed to haul the chest out of the hole.

“Come on! Let's open it!” said Cole.

“I expect it's locked,” said Elizabeth.

It was. Seven times. There were built-in locks on three sides and hasps with heavy iron padlocks, one on each short side and two on the front.

“Well, Andre? Did you bring an ax, too?” asked Cole.

“No. And if we break it open, how are we going to get the gold down to the ship?”

“How are we going to get the
chest
down to the ship?” I said. “That thing's heavy!”

“Yeah—but that's a good thing,” said Andre. “Heavy means lots of gold.”

“I'm not so sure,” said Elizabeth, pushing a muddy lock of hair out of her eyes with an even muddier hand. “Shouldn't that much gold be even heavier?”

“Maybe it's not coins. Maybe it's pearls and rubies and diamonds,” said Cole.

I went over to the stream to rinse my hands and face. There was a clear view over the waterfall, all the way down to the beach. “Whatever's in it, we need to get it to the ship fast,” I said. “It looks like that Rigby guy found us.”

• • •

People assume it's easier to go downhill than uphill, but that's not always true. Not when you're carrying a pirate's chest made of oak and iron and covered in slippery mud. Especially not when the chest is so heavy that it takes at least two people to carry it, and the slope is so steep that you need all your hands and feet free to hang onto roots and branches. And extra-especially not when you're racing against time to get back to your ship before a rival finds you with the loot.

We reached the beach with no broken bones and only one turned ankle (Cole's). But we were too late. A big, black ship was hovering just beyond the cove, and a boat was rowing toward us.

“Uh-oh, Libbet! Is that what I think?” said Andre.

“Large hermaphrodite brig. Dutch build. Black paint. Tawdry gilt figurehead. Yes, I'm afraid so,” said Elizabeth. “Hurry up! We need to get under way right now or we'll never outrun them.” She and Andre began dragging the chest as fast as they could down the beach. I pushed from behind.

“You're afraid it's
what
?” asked Cole, limping beside us.

“The Dutch trader from
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
,” panted Elizabeth. “The same Poe novel as our ship. It's a version of the
Flying Dutchman
, from the legends.”

“What legends?” I asked.

“Lots of legends,” said Andre.

“The
Flying Dutchman
is a legendary ghost ship sailed by corpses,” Elizabeth explained. “It can never land, so it just sails around forever. It shows up all over the place in literature. The Dublin Repository in Ireland has the version from the Thomas Moore poem, and the Alba Repository in Scotland has the
one from the Sir Walter Scott poem—it's from a footnote to ‘Rokeby.' It's one of my favorite examples of footnote objects. Another one is—”

“Less talking, Libbet. More pulling,” urged Andre.

I redoubled my efforts too. My heels dug deep into the sand as I pushed. “Well, so what's the problem?” I panted. “If they can't land, they can't hurt us.”

“They can stop us from leaving, though. We're outmanned,” said Elizabeth. “They have a vast crew. And they're all dead, so they can't be killed. And we can't outsail a hermaphrodite brig.”

“What's a hermaphrodite brig?”

“It means they're using two kinds of rigging. It makes the ship incredibly fast and maneuverable.”

The dead
Dutchman
did have a very complicated system of sails: some square, some triangular, with two masts. The sails themselves, though, didn't look so hot. They were tattered and threadbare, with the sun glaring through holes. And the breeze from the sea carried a stench of rot so bad it belonged in the Lovecraft Corpus.

Cole made a face. “What's that smell?”

“The crew. Did I mention they're dead?”

We reached the low-tide mark and were just dragging the chest into the water when the rowboat from the hermaphrodite brig drew near the beach.

There was something very strange about the dead sailors. Stranger than just being dead, I mean. Five or six big seagulls were sitting on each corpse. At first I thought they were eating
the bodies—disgusting as it sounds, seagulls will eat rotting garbage, so why not dead sailors? But then I saw they were actually pulling on the corpses' muscles, moving them like life-sized marionettes. The birds were using the corpses to do the rowing.

A familiar figure hopped out of the rowboat, timing his leap against the waves and holding his smoking pipe over his head to keep it dry. The smell of the smoke mixed horribly with the stench of the rotting sailors at the oars. He frowned at the spray that had splashed his butter-colored linen jacket and matching Bermuda shorts, then shifted his frown to us. “I'll take that, if you please,” he said, and pointed to the chest.

It was Feathertop.

• • •

“Why should we give it to you?” said Cole.

“Because it belongs to my employer. You found it on his island. Without permission, I might add.”

“It does not,” said Cole. “Our great-great-great-great-granduncle buried it here. Our great-great-great-great-aunt sent us to get it. It belongs to us.”

“The laws governing supernatural salvage are very clear,” said Feathertop. “They favor my employer. His island, his chest.”

“Not as clear as all that,” said Elizabeth. “Sukie and Cole have at least as good a case. Their ghosts, their prophesy, their plunder.”

“Well, perhaps. But there are only four of you.” He waved his hand at the teeming, reeking ship.

Elizabeth said, “We could just stay here until you leave. Your sailors can't come ashore.”

“You could, true. But I expect you'll get tired of parrot fruit sooner or later. And after a year or two, the children will probably begin to miss their parents. If you're so keen on keeping our property, we might strike a bargain. You have several items we would be happy to consider taking in exchange.”

Andre called to the rowboat, “Yo, Rigby! You down with these gangster tactics?”

A salt-and-pepper head poked out from behind the corpses: the suave man from the flea market. “Feathertop is doing a fine job representing my interests,” he called back. “He offered you a trade. Why not take it?”

“We would happily accept the Yellow Sign, for example,” said Feathertop.

“I don't have the Yellow Sign anymore,” I said. “And I wouldn't give it to you if I did.”

“Well, your Hawthorne broom, then. That would be a fantastic bargain for
you
—the chest is sure to be worth much more.”

“I'm not trading away my heirlooms. Anyway, I didn't bring the broom.”

“Stop! Look!” yelled Cole, pointing. “They got our ship!”

It was true. While we were arguing with Feathertop, a boatload of corpses had landed on the
Ariel
and were busily hoisting the sails.