CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Lovecraft Corpus

The trip to the repository took longer this time. Elizabeth and Andre flew together on Elizabeth’s walking stick, and Cole and I doubled up on my broom. I had to keep slowing down so Cole could get his balance.

“Why aren’t you using your boots?” I called to Andre, swooping closer so he could hear.

“They’re too fast. Got to stick with you, make sure you don’t get lost.”

“Can’t Elizabeth show us the way?”

“Libbet? Ha. She could get lost in her own bathroom.”

As I wobbled upward through a cloud with Cole hugging me a little too tightly around the waist, I was glad I’d practiced flying with my sister. I just hoped I’d practiced enough.

I remembered Kitty teaching me to ride a bike. Kitty standing at the end of our cul-de-sac to keep the cars away, like a redheaded flag post. Screaming at me, “Pedal, Sukie! Harder! Turn!” And then, when I finally caught the knack of it and she let me ride my bike after hers out onto the quiet streets of our neighborhood, I’d never felt so proud and alive.

For a wonderful moment a couple of weeks ago, as we looped through the air together, I had felt almost as though I’d never lost her.

But a ghost is not a sister, not really. As Cousin Hepzibah had pointed out, Kitty was stuck in the past, unable to change, while I was growing past her. I was starting to think I couldn’t have both Kitty and my real life. Especially not my new friends, Cole and Lola, Elizabeth and Andre. Even Griffin.

“Hey!” I said suddenly. “Where’s Griffin? We left him behind! We have to go back!”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be along soon,” said Elizabeth. “He likes to go haring off after eagles, but he always gets where he’s going in the end.”

Sure enough, the gigantic dog was waiting for us on the roof of the repository when we landed. “Rrrup!” he greeted us.

Cole leapt off the broom and held out his hand to help me down. “That was awesome!” he said.

“Do you believe me now?” I scrambled stiffly off the broom.

Cole said, “It’s not that I didn’t believe you before. But there’s believing and then there’s . . . flying.”

• • •

Cole and I followed Elizabeth and Andre to a room lined with card files.

“Oh, good—there’s Dr. Rust, the head librarian,” Elizabeth said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

Dr. Rust looked like a small, friendly middle-aged lion, with a thatch of reddish hair and even more freckles than my sister. “What a treat! You’re the first fictional girl I’ve ever met. At least, that I know of. Cole, are you another fictional cousin?”

“I don’t think so—well, I guess I could be. Our ancestors are in the same book. Wow, that sounds so weird.” He made a face.

“I’m not sure we’re fictional, actually,” I said. “Does having fictional ancestors make you fictional yourself?”

“It certainly makes you interesting,” said Dr. Rust. “What brings you to the repository?”

“They’re looking for buried treasure,” Elizabeth said. “From Pirate Toogood’s Treasure.”

“What we really need is a treasure map,” said Cole.

“Well, we have several of those—you can look in the subject catalog. We have old Peter’s parchment from ‘Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure,’ and a bunch of Captain Kidd maps, including the one from Poe’s ‘The Gold-Bug.’”

“What’s ‘Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure’?” I asked.

“It’s a Hawthorne story about a man whose great-great-uncle supposedly sold his soul to the devil for gold and hid the money in his mansion. The map’s illegible, so the great-grandnephew ends up tearing down his house looking for the treasure.”

An illegible treasure map didn’t sound all that useful. “Does he find the treasure?”

“Sort of,” said Dr. Rust. “But it’s not gold, just worthless bonds and colonial paper currency.”

“Sometimes I hate Hawthorne,” said Andre.

“I know what you mean,” said Elizabeth.

“What about that other parchment, the bug one?” asked Cole. “What’s that?”

“You never read ‘The Gold-Bug’? It’s one of Poe’s most famous stories,” said Andre.

I made a face. “I find him kind of creepy.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” said Andre.

“Not everyone has your appetite for gore,” said Elizabeth. “In ‘The Gold-Bug,’ a guy finds a solid gold insect next to a piece of parchment with mysterious drawings on it that lead them to Captain Kidd’s buried treasure. The parchment’s not a map, actually, just coded directions for finding the treasure. What does he call it again, Andre?”

“‘A lost record of the place of deposit.’”

Elizabeth went on, “We have plenty of other Captain Kidd material, too. Lots of writers wrote about him. There’s that Stowe story, where they use a forked hazel stick like a dowsing rod to look for his treasure. I believe we have the stick.”

“Does it work? Or is the Poe parchment legible? Could we use it to find Captain Kidd’s actual treasure?” Cole asked. “Is Kidd’s treasure real or fictional, anyway?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. We’re not Kidd’s heirs,” I said. “Those maps and parchments and sticks are all for finding other treasures from other books, right? They won’t help us. We need Laetitia Flint’s.”

“Yeah,” said Andre. “You’re right. They’re not really relevant. But they’re still pretty cool.”

Elizabeth, meanwhile, had been copying numbers from a card in the author catalog onto a slip of paper. She waved the slip. “Here’s the call number for Phineas Toogood’s compass. It’s downstairs in the Lovecraft Corpus, in the basement,” she said. “Hey, I just had a thought! Doc, how would you feel about a trade? We could give Sukie the Flint compass in exchange for her Yellow Sign.”

Dr. Rust considered. “That sounds more than fair. Okay with you, Sukie?”

“Totally!” I didn’t want that creepy Yellow Sign. “What does the compass do?”

Elizabeth’s eyes were twinkling. “Haven’t you read the book?”

“Not yet—we just found it. I haven’t had time.”

“It’s a haunted compass. It leads Phineas Toogood to Red Tom Tempest’s buried treasure.”

“You have that downstairs?” said Cole. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”

• • •

The basement of the repository was a long white room with fluorescent tube lights that buzzed and flickered. Dr. Rust led us past rows of metal shelves and cabinets, interspersed here and there with metal doors. It all looked very ordinary, but my hands felt cold and I found that my heart was pounding.

“Here we are,” said Dr. Rust, stopping in front of a door with *LC Love Corp stenciled on it in black paint. “Elizabeth, do you have your key?”

Elizabeth fished in the neck of her blouse, pulled out an iron skeleton key on a long silver chain, and turned it in the lock. Then she squared her shoulders and placed her left hand on the center of the door. When she spoke, her voice sounded deep and hollow.

“Noisome sentinels, stand aside! Yours may be to guard, but mine is to enter. Ope now unto me your tenebrous portal!”

The door swung open with a loud, plopping squeal. A cold wind blew our hair back, stinging our eyes and skin. It carried a stench of rot. Beyond, all was shadow.

“Ugh! Somebody needs to clean out the fridge,” said Cole.

I said, “What is this place? Do we really have to go in there?”

“Only if you want to find your ancestor’s treasure,” said Andre. “Welcome to my favorite Special Collection: the Lovecraft Corpus.” He stepped across the threshold.

“Come on, Spooky. Here goes nothing!” said Cole. He grabbed my arm and pulled me after him through the door.

• • •

We found ourselves in a shadowy room that seemed to be simultaneously closing in on us and dropping away into vast and terrifying chasms. The place felt crowded and chaotic, like the forests you try to run through in those nightmares where you’re being chased by wolves. Threads of fog brushed our faces like cobwebs as we pushed past, leaving a sticky residue on our cheeks. The floor underfoot felt springy yet clinging. Every few steps it suddenly sank; I kept having to grab Cole’s arm to keep from tumbling into some wet abyss.

But the worst thing was the charnel reek, which stung our lungs like acid. “It’s like walking inside someone’s intestine,” muttered Cole.

“Slow down, Andre! Where are we going?” I called. “I can’t see my feet!”

“Oh, sorry. Hang on.” I heard a wet click, and then the floor started to glow unsteadily.

It didn’t help much. The flickering light was a sick, yellowy green, and it cast confusing shadows upward. I couldn’t tell if we were walking past trees or shelves, cliffs or cabinets.

“Are we almost there?” I asked. My voice sounded more panicked than I meant it to.

“What’s the matter, the Corpus creeping you out? I was going to give you a tour, but we can just go straight to the compass if you want,” said Andre. “Wait, hang on, take a look at this.” He handed me something cold and heavy, the size of a bullet.

“What is it?” I peered into my hand, but I couldn’t really make out anything.

“Poe’s gold-bug.”

“Cool!” I squatted down and held it closer to the glowing floor. The insect had six hideous little scratchy legs, feathery antennae, and black markings on its back that made it look like a tiny skull. Griffin leaned down his vast head, snuffled at it, and sneezed.

“Can I see?” asked Cole.

The horrible little legs tickled my palm as I transferred it to his hand. “Ew! Is it alive?” I gasped.

“Not exactly,” said Dr. Rust. “I wouldn’t call anything in this room alive, exactly. Well, except us.”

“But it moved!”

“The living are not all that move.”

I had to admit that was true. I knew it from personal experience.

“What’s the gold-bug for, exactly?” Cole asked. “What does it do? You said it leads people to treasure—could we use it to find Phineas Toogood’s?”

Andre shook his head, making the shadows flicker oddly up his cheekbones. “No, unfortunately. In the story, they just drop the bug through the left eye socket of a skull that’s nailed to a tree to find where to dig. They could have used anything—a pebble or a bullet or whatever.”

“Oh, too bad.” Cole handed him back the gold-bug.

Andre put it away with a rustling noise and moved on a few paces. “Here’s your compass, Sukie.” He put a cold, round object in my hand.

Something howled not too far off. As its lugubrious echoes fell away, Dr. Rust spoke. “Let’s wrap this up, shall we? This place is a bit too fetid even for me.”

• • •

What with the trip back through the Lovecraft Corpus and the broomstick ride home, it was dinnertime when we returned.

Cole and I stumbled off my broom in the field behind the house and brushed stray twigs off each other, and he walked me to the kitchen door. “That smells good!” he said.

“Mom must be making her pesto lasagna. Want to come in for dinner?”

“Oh, yeah!”

Mom was taking the lasagna out of the oven when I pushed the kitchen door open. “There you are,” she said. “I was starting to worry.”

“Mom, Dad, this is Cole Farley. He’s lab partners with me and Lola in science class. We just came back from the library.” Well, that was kind of true, at least. “Can he stay for dinner?”

Mom and Dad exchanged a glance I couldn’t interpret, with a hint of a smile and a hint of alarm. “Come on in, Cole!” said Dad heartily. “Grab a plate and sit down.”

“Nice to see you again, Cole,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

“Oh, do you two know each other?” asked Mom.

“Yeah, Cousin Hepzibah was telling me about your family when I was here before. She has some great stories! Like my grandpa’s. And it even turns out we’re related, if you go way back to that pirate.”

“Pirate? What pirate?” asked Dad. “You never told me about any pirates, Sally!”

“I don’t know that story,” said Mom. So Cousin Hepzibah told it again, only I noticed she left out a lot, mostly the parts about the dead baby. She probably didn’t want to remind my parents to be sad.

After dinner, Cole offered to help with the dishes, but he looked relieved when Dad said, “Looks like it might snow. I’ll run you home in the truck before it starts.”

As he was putting on his coat, Cole said, “Don’t start that lab project without me, Sukie.”

“What lab project?”

“You know! The one we were talking about in the library. With the compass.”

“Oh, that project!” Was he kidding? I had a magical compass that would help me finally find pirate treasure, and Cole wanted me not to use it?! “I don’t know, Cole.”

“You can’t start without me! Promise you won’t?”

I nodded reluctantly.

“You have a science project with a compass? I thought you were doing physiology,” said Mom.

Cole made a good save. “It’s just the Pitch with her extra credit. Ms. Picciotto, I mean, our science teacher. She’s always writing these hard problems in the corner of the whiteboard. It takes serious brains to solve them. That’s why I need Sukie.”

Mom nodded. She’d seen me working on Ms. Picciotto’s extra-credit problems.

When Cole and Dad were gone, I piled up the dishes and filled the sink with hot water.

“Cole seems like a nice boy,” said Mom.

“I guess.” I shrugged.

“He is,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Warmhearted and respectful.”

“I’m glad you’re making friends,” said Mom.