The Treasure of Dead Man's Lane and Other Case Files Page 4

  “How can we stop him?!” wailed Charlie.

  For a split second, my mind went blank. But then I had a brilliant idea.

  “Hey!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs. “Hey! Tarquin!”

  The sound echoed off the flickering screens and the shiny floor. As one, every last person in sight turned to stare at me. Rippa, with a face like a mad bull, spun on his heels. Without a moment’s thought, he flung his bag of chips right at me, his mouth twisted in a wedge-shaped sneer. The chips bounced and skidded to a halt at my feet.

  “So it’s true,” I said. “He really does throw things at people who call him that.”

  Rippa’s pause gave Ed just enough time to reach him. Rippa almost made a run for it, but Ed took a firm hold of his arm and dragged him out of the line.

  “Open it,” said Ed, pointing to Rippa’s carryon.

  With his free hand, and a grunting sigh, Rippa unzipped the bag. Nestled inside, between some scrunched-up T-shirts and a pair of jeans, was a cardboard folder. Inside the folder was Issue 1 of The Tomb of Death.

  “How did you know?” grunted Rippa.

  “I didn’t,” said Ed. He pointed to me. “He did.”

  “And who are you?” sniffed Rippa, looking me up and down. “Sherlock freakin’ Holmes?”

  “No,” I said with a smile. “My name is Saxby Smart.”

  On the way home, Charlie expected to get a giant, shouting lecture from his brother, but it seemed that Ed was a changed man. “I shouldn’t have been so tough on you over the jelly, Charlie,” he said, as the car chugged back to our town. “If I’d been less crabby, you might have come straight to me in the first place. Sorry.”

  “Does that mean I can read your collection?” said Charlie excitedly.

  Ed said nothing for a while. “Dunno,” he mumbled eventually. “I’ll think about it.”

  Once I was home, I retreated to my shed. I made some notes on the case, and then I settled back in my Thinking Chair. There was a slight ripping sound from the arm. I sighed, and finally had to admit to myself that even a simple repair job like that was beyond me. I’d call my friend Muddy in the morning, I decided. Get a professional on it.

  Case closed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Ohhh man,” said Muddy. “Ohhhh man, oh man, oh man. Ohhhhhhh maaaan.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said grumpily. “Can you fix it?”

  Muddy examined the rip in the arm of my Thinking Chair, prodding it with a grimy finger. “Ohhhh man. Yup, that’s fixable. Should have called me in earlier, though, Saxby. You’ve let this develop into quite a nasty little tear.”

  “I can do without the lecture, thanks,” I said. “I did try to fix it myself, you know.”

  “Yeah, I can tell,” muttered Muddy, doing a bit more prodding. “What a mess. Tape, was it?”

  “Just get on with it,” I grumbled. “Stop enjoying yourself.”

  As I implied in the previous case, my great friend George “Muddy” Whitehouse is a genius when it comes to practical and mechanical things. He goes around looking like he’s been dragged through an assortment of puddles and ditches, but there’s nobody at St. Egbert’s School who’s more skilled at fixing stuff. In less than ten minutes, there was a neatly glued patch on the arm of my Thinking Chair.

  “Leave it for an hour or two before you sit in it,” said Muddy, packing up his toolbox.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You know how important my Thinking Chair is. Do you want to stay for lunch?”

  “Can’t,” said Muddy, with a gleam of excitement in his eyes. “I’m going over to The Horror House. I’m getting a tour this afternoon.”

  “You’re joking,” I gasped. “How? You’ve got to tell me!” Obviously, I couldn’t see my own eyes right then, but I’m pretty certain they had a gleam of excitement in them too.

  The Horror House was something of a local legend. If any building ever deserved a nickname, it was Number 13 Deadman’s Lane. Imagine a spooky old house in a movie. Then imagine it much spookier. Then add a bit more spookiness for added effect, and you still wouldn’t be anywhere near how utterly creepy this place looked.

  It was a large, looming house, with huge bay windows on either side of a low-set front door, from which protruded an ornate, stone-columned porch. There were two upper floors, each with a series of tall, narrow windows that gave the impression of gapped teeth. The roof was sharply angled, topped with a ridge of crested tiles, and a couple of dormers poked out of it, looking like narrowed eyes above the grinning skulls of the windows below.

  Nobody had lived at 13 Deadman’s Lane for years. The place was boarded up, set back from the road behind a high fence of corrugated metal sheeting. People started calling it The Horror House because of its weird looks, and because it was an ideal reference point if you wanted to give someone directions to the mall (“Go straight past The Horror House and take a left at the light.”).

  “But how are you even getting in there?” I said. “It’s all locked and barred.”

  “Not since Monday, it’s not,” said Muddy, grinning. “Jack’s parents bought it.”

  “Jack Wilson, from class?” I said. “He sure kept that quiet.”

  “He didn’t even know himself until Monday. His mom and dad didn’t know if they’d get the money for it. They’re going to fix it up and turn it into a hotel. Jack says his dad says they’re up to their eyeballs in debt until they can renovate the whole place. The electricity hasn’t been updated since 1955, and it’s got a heating system dating back to 1937. A broken heating system, of course.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I take it they’re getting started right away?”

  “The heating pipes got taken out on Tuesday,” said Muddy. “Man, I’d love to get my hands on a bit of vintage material like that—it’s too bad. They’ve been ripping out stuff every day. Which is lucky, really, because otherwise they wouldn’t have found the secret scroll.”

  “Secret scroll?” I said, intrigued.

  “Oh, Jack says his dad says it’s not a real one. But it sounds like fun, all the same. It claims there’s hidden treasure somewhere inside that building.”

  I steered Muddy out of the shed and into the house. “I want to hear more about this mysterious scroll,” I said. “You’ve changed your mind, you’re staying for lunch.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  As Muddy and I sat at the kitchen table, picking at our astonishingly burnt grilled-cheese sandwiches, he told me about the parchment.

  “Jack and his dad found it the other day,” said Muddy, twisting the bread into shapes. “They were ripping out some old wooden wall panels in one of the upstairs rooms. The paneling had been put in when the house was built, about two hundred years ago, you can tell by looking at the wall behind it, apparently. But mold had recently gotten to it, and it was past saving. Anyway, they were stacking up all these big pieces of wood, and Jack suddenly noticed a sheet of paper wedged into a sort of slot at the back of one of the panels.”

  “A sort of slot?” I repeated.

  “Jack’s dad took a look at it,” said Muddy. “There was a removable section in that panel, quite low down, behind a spot they’d removed a radiator from. A kind of hidden storage box, no bigger than a lunch box. They’d have never found it without removing all those panels.”

  “And this scroll is a treasure map?”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s not so much a map, more like a description of where the treasure is. Although apparently the description doesn’t make much sense. Anyway, Jack says his dad says it’s not as old as it looks. He thinks it was probably put there by the foster children.”

  “Foster children?” I said, chewing at a triangle of leftover crust.

  “During World War Two the house was a shelter for kids whose parents were involved in the war effort. Tons of people have lived in that house over the years. It’s only recently that it’s been empty and run down.”

  “And those foster kids made the scroll?” I said.

  “That’s the
theory. It’s just the kind of thing a bunch of kids would do, isn’t it? They come to live in a spooky old house, and they start making up games about hidden treasure and stuff. This piece of paper must’ve been left over from one of those games.”

  “And how did they find the hidden compartment?”

  Muddy shrugged. “Just came across it one day, I guess. Then left their treasure map in there by mistake, maybe. Of course, it might not have been the foster kids at all. Could have been hippie radicals from the ’60s or ’70s or something. The house was still lived in until 1987. Anyway, Jack says his dad says it was most likely those children.”

  I thought hard for a minute or two. No, Jack’s dad was definitely wrong. Perhaps he was distracted by the huge job he’d taken on, but there was an obvious flaw in his theory. From what Muddy had told me so far, I knew that the scroll had to be nearly a century old, at the very least. And I knew that those kids couldn’t possibly have put it there: it was a question of historical events…

  Have you spotted it?

  Muddy had told me that the heating system dated back to 1937. He’d also told me that it had only been removed on Tuesday, the secret compartment being behind where a radiator had been fixed. Which meant that during the whole of World War Two, 1941–1945, the foster children couldn’t have gotten to the compartment. In fact, nobody could have gotten to that compartment since 1937, so the scroll had to be at least that old, and possibly much older.

  I decided then and there that learning dates for History class was useful after all!

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s take a look at that piece of paper. I think it could be perfectly genuine.”

  “Hang on,” called Muddy, as I sped off, “I gotta finish my grilled cheese!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Now that is spooky,” I whispered.

  “It’s like it’s looking back at you,” Muddy replied.

  The Horror House stood like a huge, crouching goblin. It was set back from the road, and surrounded by a gnarling, overgrown yard. Behind it, we could see the tops of the trees in the wooded area that led down to the local river. (Those woods were equally gloomy, and had an equally sinister nickname: The Hangman’s Lair. I once solved a very puzzling mystery there. I might write up my notes on that case one day.)

  Number 13 stood well away from the other houses on Deadman’s Lane, as if it was being snooty and didn’t want to talk to its neighbors. The tall sheets of corrugated metal that had fenced in the house for as long as I could remember had all been torn down. They were stacked in a huge heap amid the tangle of thistles and thorns that stuck to us as Muddy and I walked up the cracked driveway to the front door.

  Jack Wilson greeted us like an excited puppy. The human equivalent of an excited puppy, I mean. He didn’t lick our faces. Or have a tail to wag. Or bark. But you get the idea. Jack’s a round, bouncy boy, with a face that always looks like he’s just gotten some really good news. He ushered us into a large, shadowy front hall.

  “Wowww,” gasped Muddy, taking it all in.

  “So this is The Horror House,” I said, gazing up at the high ceiling.

  “It’s revolting,” breathed Muddy, eyeing the cracked plaster and the peeling paint and the moldy shreds of wallpaper clinging in miserable patches above the high wainscoting.

  “Yeah, it’s not too great at the moment,” agreed Jack. “Still, if it was beautifully decorated, we’d have been calling it The Lovely House all these years, wouldn’t we? Look out for that floorboard, Saxby, it’s rotten. Mom put her foot straight through it yesterday. I laughed till I cried.”

  Sounds of heavy-duty machinery were echoing from somewhere upstairs. We picked our way carefully up the wide, curved staircase and waited on the landing until the loud sawing noises stopped and the cloud of dust that was drifting out of one of the bedrooms subsided.

  Jack’s dad emerged from the dusty haze, wielding a huge circular saw. The saw’s battered power cord hung from his other hand like a lasso. From the heels of his boots to the bald patch on his head, he was caked in a mixture of sawdust, white plaster dust, and more sawdust.

  “Hello,” he said, grinning. “Watch where you step.”

  “The rotten floorboards?” asked Muddy.

  “No, our rotten cat. Dirty little scamp,” said Jack’s dad. “He sees a pile of sawdust and thinks it’s a litter box. S’cuse me, I’ve got to knock out some old plaster before Jack’s mom gets back from the hardware store. Then I’ve got the man from the Building Department coming. Then I’ve got to find the broom I left around here somewhere.”

  “Yeah, the floor could use a good sweep,” said Jack.

  “No, I was going to whack the cat with it,” muttered Jack’s dad. “Dirty little scamp, he repeated.”

  We left Jack’s dad to work his way through his To-Do list. The sound of a sledgehammer breaking stuff followed us along the hallway. As Jack showed us into a large, dusty room overlooking the street, Muddy told him about our conversation.

  “You really think that scroll is as old as the house?” said Jack. Our shoes crunched against the grit that littered the bare floor.

  “We know it must predate 1937,” I said. “And if that storage compartment was as well hidden and as precisely sized as Muddy says, then it’s quite possible that it was built into the wood paneling specifically to hide that one piece of paper.”

  “That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?” said Muddy. “To build a compartment into a wall just for that? If what’s written on the paper is that secret, why write it down at all? Why not just memorize it?”

  “Exactly,” said Jack. “It’s a spooky-sounding bunch of nonsense that someone made up and hid years and years ago, giggling away, knowing that someone else would come along and get all excited about it. It really is just gobbledegook. I think you’re wrong, Saxby, I think it’s a long-lost practical joke.”

  “This is the room you found it in?” I said. It was a large but unremarkable room, with two tall windows—two of those “teeth” in the front face of the building—and an irregularly shaped wood stove built into one corner.

  “I’ve got it over here,” said Jack. From the deep windowsill he grabbed a box file, the kind of solid cardboard bin for holding papers that you see in offices. He flipped it open and handed it to me.

  Inside it was a sheet of thick paper, about twelve inches high and six inches wide. Its left-hand edge was slightly jagged, the others neatly cut. It was yellowed with age, with brownish spots and blotches here and there across its surface, but it was surprisingly smooth and substantial to the touch. Obviously very expensive paper (the exact opposite of the kind encountered in the case of The Tomb of Death!).

  On the paper, in angular but flowing handwriting, were lines written in black ink, all neatly aligned on the page. The words had clearly been written with one of those old-fashioned dip-in-the-ink pens: you could see where the ink kept thinning out every few words, then suddenly became thicker again when the pen was dipped. In all, it said:

  “Well,” said Jack, reading the paper again over my shoulder, “I’ve come across some pretty strange clues for scavenger hunts, but this takes the cake! It’s nonsense. It’s a joke, it has to be.”

  “It’s not nonsense,” I said, peering closely at the scroll in the gray light from the window. “It’s simply a complicated puzzle. It leads to this ‘dark and mighty treasure,’ I’m sure of it. It’s far too elaborate to be nothing more than a practical joke.”

  “Okay, then, make some sense out of just one line,” said Jack. “Show me exactly what one line means, and I’ll believe you.”

  I read through the words again. They certainly seemed to defy logic! But, assuming that I was right and they did actually mean something, it was possible to make a guess about what the first line might mean. After all, if you were writing an important document, what would you be most likely to put at the top?

  “I can tell you the exact date this was written,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?”
said Jack.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I just need to check a historical fact.”

  I flipped open my phone and called The Fountain of All Knowledge (or Izzy, as she prefers to be called). “Quick fact check,” I said. “Think you could look up the date on which Napoleon Bonaparte was finally defeated?”

  “Who?” muttered Muddy.

  “French guy. Late eighteenth century, early nineteenth,” I said. “I think. If I’m remembering what I read in The Boy’s Big Book of Facts correctly.”

  There was a click on the line as Izzy returned. “Battle of Waterloo,” she said. “1815. Is something interesting going on?”

  “Something very interesting indeed. I’ll get back to you. I may need a lot of background info for this one.”

  I pocketed my phone, turned to Jack, and pointed out the first line on the treasure “map,” up to the part that said “my dark and mighty treasure.”

  “There’s the date,” I said. My math is generally about as strong as a soggy tissue, but with a bit of lateral thinking and a bit of simple math, I could see that the first part of the sentence was a date and a month. And then, using a bit more math and a bit of general scientific knowledge, I could see that the second part of the sentence gave a year.

  Can you work it out?

  “This was written in August 1844,” I said.

  “Three by itself of eighth,” I said. “Our whoever-it-was is putting the date at the top of his work. ‘Three by itself’ could simply be the number three, on its own? But not if this is meant to be a puzzle! That would be far too easy. No, I think it’s three times itself, three times three. Nine. Of course, I can’t be sure of that, but I bet that’s probably it. And ‘of eighth’? Of the eighth month? August.”