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  Angus was nearly shaking as he recounted the events of that night.

  “Furious, I became. Was this make-believe treasure worth more to him than our dream? More than our friendship? Be his precious treasure real or not, was he so selfish, so greedy that he would burn us out and ruin me entire life just to claim it? I demanded that he give me the copy he was holding so I could at least try to reproduce it. To salvage something from his betrayal. The look in his eyes when I reached for it, the way he shrieked, it was as if me friend Filmore was gone and Gollum had taken his place.” Angus looked away as if trying to hide from the memory and took a deep breath.

  “He turned to run and began tearing out the map as he had with the other copies. I tried to grab the comic back from him. The struggle lasted only a few seconds. To this day, I can still hear the sounds of the pages ripping free and Filmore’s scream. He stumbled to his knees, and when I looked down, he was holding the torn pages in one hand and his wounded side with the other. It was all a blur of rage and confusion. I didn’t know if he’d fallen on the dagger accidentally, or—” Angus let the thought trail off into nothing. Dennis and I were both riveted in place, waiting for him to continue.

  “He collapsed at me feet and moved no more. Even in death, Filmore’s grip on the pages wouldn’t release,” he went on. “Such was the hold of that accursed fairy-tale map on his greed-addled mind.”

  Dennis gripped the dungeon bars and glared at Angus.

  “That’s why you killed Filmore Johnson? Because he was selfish and greedy?” he asked in disbelief. “You better look in the mirror, man. First you lie to me about the comic still having the treasure map, and then you double-cross me and steal the comic back from us so you can keep it for yourself, and you’re mad about someone else being selfish? I can’t believe you betrayed me twice like that after promising us a share of the treasure. Honestly, I’m glad we locked you down here before I went up to the party to spy on the Hardy boys.”

  Angus was so lost in the fog of his own memory that he ignored Dennis’s outburst entirely. I didn’t, though. Angus’s confession had angered Dennis into making his own. He’d as much as admitted to conspiring with Angus to steal Robert’s comic and then locking the old guy up for stealing it back from him. The dungeon had suddenly turned into confession central!

  Now that I knew Angus had double-crossed him, it wasn’t hard to guess why Dennis had been spying on us at the party. Undoubtedly for the same reason Murph had: he hoped our investigation would lead him to the still-unaccounted-for copy of Sabers & Serpents #1. Spying had paid off for him, too, just in an unexpected way. The comic Angus had stolen back from Dennis was still missing, but he’d witnessed our discovery of the notorious treasure map.

  Dennis and I now both knew the treasure wasn’t the fairy tale Angus thought it was—and from the sound of Angus’s story, Filmore hadn’t merely cracked the treasure’s code, he’d been on his way to the tower’s underbelly to find it when Angus killed him.

  “I don’t think greed had anything to do with it, did it, Angus?” I asked, turning from Angus back to Dennis. “He doesn’t believe in the treasure, let alone care about it, and he didn’t want the comic stolen back from Robert because it’s so valuable. He wanted you to steal the comic for him because the bloodstained pages inside are evidence directly linking him to his partner’s death.”

  “When it happened, when Filmore…” Angus began speaking again as if in a daze, before trailing off and starting over. “I did not know what to do. No one would believe it had been an accident. I did not even know for certain. I had already lost Sabers and Serpents and every shilling I had along with it. I wasn’t about to lose me freedom, too, not for Filmore, not after what he’d done to me. To us. So I hid him and the knife away in a suit of armor in a forgotten part of the castle and tried to forget about him myself. The police had no reason to suspect me. To them, I was still the victim. Outside the castle walls, though, people talked. About the fire and the disappearance and the tragedy of it all. Others whispered words like “revenge” and “murder.” So I stopped going outside. Soon the world mostly forgot about Filmore and Sabers and Serpents. If only it had stayed that way.”

  Angus went silent again, lost in his own thoughts. It wasn’t the case Joe and I had originally set out to solve, but I had Angus McGalliard’s confession to the killing of Filmore Johnson over forty years ago. I’d been right that it had been a crime of passion and not premeditated, and I believed him that it might have been an accident. But solving the legendary disappearance of comic book artist Filmore Johnson didn’t do me much good right now. I was still trapped in a dungeon, and I still needed Angus to help me finish cracking the case on the crimes it had spawned: the theft of the comic from Robert’s shop and our current imprisonment by Dungeon Master Dennis.

  “But Robert showed up and unwittingly dug up the evidence,” I said, prompting Angus to continue.

  “Aye, I should have left that no-good nephew of mine to the loan sharks in Scotland,” he lamented. “Fans and collectors pestered me now and again over the years, but they were easy enough to shoo away.” Angus scowled across the dungeon at Dennis. “It wasn’t until this hooligan showed up asking about the copy of Sabers and Serpents Robert found that I even remembered having kept it.”

  “So you two knew each other before the comic was stolen?” I asked, looking from Angus to Dennis.

  “I just wanted to find out more about it,” Dennis said. “I’d heard about Sabers and Serpents from old-school tabletop gamers, but when Comic Kingdom opened and I got to see the comic and play the game for myself, I got hooked. I wasn’t thinking about treasure or if there was a real map or anything; I just loved the fantasy world they’d created. Since Robert wouldn’t show us what was on the missing page, I figured I’d go straight to the source. I knew people said Old Man McG wouldn’t talk to anyone, but I thought I might be able to persuade him—you know, game master to game master, once he saw how much I appreciated it.”

  I thought about how flattered Angus had been a few days ago when he’d been holding Joe and me at gunpoint and I’d told him I was a fan. It made sense that if anyone could get the old recluse to talk, it would be a serious fantasy RPG aficionado like Dennis. But I also knew how wily Angus could be, and I knew he wouldn’t have bothered if there wasn’t an angle he could work.

  “I knew even back then that I shouldn’t have kept that copy,” Angus recriminated himself. “It was just that a single copy of the game manual was all I had left of Sabers and Serpents. I didn’t know if any other copies of the comic had survived after the fire, and I couldn’t bear the idea of the thing I’d worked so hard for not existing at all. Couldn’t bear to look at the blighted thing either, so I buried it in a box somewhere and hid it away with the rest of the castle junk. I couldn’t have found it again after all these years if I’d wanted to, and I figured no one else could either. I figured I was safe. But then Robert found a copy of the comic in the castle, and I knew it had to be the same one.”

  “Which also means you knew about the stains inside and how they got there,” I pointed out. “Robert thought the stains in the copy he found were just random blotches and spilled ink, but you knew they came from Filmore’s blood. Robert had no idea that he was holding the clue to Filmore Johnson’s disappearance. But you did.”

  “The past was returning to haunt me. I had to get the comic back before anyone else opened it up and started asking questions,” Angus confirmed. “Only I ain’t left the castle in so long, it would look more than a wee bit suspicious if I did now.”

  “So you played along with Robert’s lie that it was a bank-breaking one-of-a-kind complete copy and got Dennis to steal it for you?” I asked. I had a hunch that was where this was going, but I was still having trouble seeing my former friend DM Dennis as a hired thief.

  “Robert’s the one who stole it from me first. I was just asking my new young friends to fetch it back for its original owner,” Angus corrected defensively.


  Dennis snorted. “Oh, the original owner, huh? From the way you just told it, you took that comic out of Filmore’s hands right before he died. The way I see it, I have as much a right to that comic as anyone.”

  “Filmore…,” Angus muttered to himself.

  “Was the dark knight who attacked us and took the map the same accomplice who helped you rob Comic Kingdom while you were away at the LARP camping trip?” I asked Dennis, trying to reconstruct what had happened the night of the crime.

  Dennis threw his hands up. “Don’t look at me. I voted against having this conversation.”

  Charlene kept trying to interject, but all that came out were frustrated mumbles. I felt awful ignoring her, but it was impossible to understand her through the tape, and I didn’t have a way to take it off.

  “I’m so sorry, Charlene,” I said, hoping she’d understand. “I know you’re ahead of me on a lot of this stuff, but I can’t tell what you’re saying.”

  When I turned back to Angus, there was a faraway look in our dungeon mate’s eyes.

  “Aye, ’twas a ghostly, dark knight that attacked me as well,” he said with a shudder. “The fiend kidnapped me from my tower this afternoon and dragged me down here before Robert got home. Like a monster we might have put in Sabers and Serpents, it were. ’Twas as if”—Angus paused—“as if that devil-horned knight were Filmore himself come back from the dead to haunt me.”

  22 LIVE ACTION

  JOE

  MY FIRST INSTINCT WHEN I saw the knight was to rush in with my sword and stop the thief from stealing the treasure, but my defeat in last weekend’s LARP made me think twice. I fancied myself pretty good with a sword, but from the way my would-be foe was handling his ax as he chopped through the floor, he might be better. Forget the “RP,” this was all live action, no role-play in sight. Getting stabbed with a foam weapon that looked real was one thing. The only thing that got hurt was your pride. If that knight whacked me with his ax, it wasn’t going to take two hits to knock me out, and no one was going to be tapping me back in to play another round.

  The smart thing to do was lie in wait like the knight had before stealing the map, learn his identity, and wait for a safe opportunity to apprehend him.

  I took a step back so he wouldn’t see me, being careful not to slip. The stones under my feet weren’t submerged in a few inches of water like the sunken wood-plank floor on the other side of the chamber over by the knight, but they were plenty slick. As I slid my foot back, I realized it wasn’t just the damp that made it slippery. In the faint pale light, I saw a sheet of paper stuck to the sole of my shoe.

  My first thought was that the knight must have accidentally dropped the stolen treasure map. I leaned down to pick the crinkled paper up. It was a map of sorts, all right, but it hadn’t come from the comic. There was just enough light for me to make out a simple, hand-drawn floor plan of the castle’s layout sketched on drawing-pad paper. The ink had started to fade, but I could tell from the ballpoint pen the artist had used that it couldn’t be super old, and I could tell from the way they measured distance in meters instead of feet that they probably weren’t American, since most of the rest of the world uses the metric system. My guess was that the floor plan had been drawn by Angus to map the castle after he moved in. Wherever the knight had found it, it explained how he knew his way around the castle so well. Even after Frank, Murph, and I had decoded that the treasure was hidden beneath Angus’s tower, I wouldn’t have had a clue how to navigate through the tunnels under the castle to find it. The knight had known where to go right away.

  I folded the paper as quietly as I could and slipped it into my back pocket. Then I pulled out my cell phone to capture the evidence on video. Only I’d been gripping the sword so tightly with both hands that they were stiff, and the phone slipped through my fingers. I quickly picked it up, hoping the knight didn’t notice since the sound of the phone hitting the ground wasn’t loud. But it was loud enough.

  The knight swung around to face me. The last time I’d seen that face, it had greeted me with a friendly smile. This time it sneered, and the knight charged at me with the ax.

  23 DIE DON’T LIE

  FRANK

  SO YOU NEVER MET DENNIS’S accomplice before he kidnapped you earlier today?” I asked Angus, wondering if the dark knight and the person who’d helped Dennis pull off the Comic Kingdom heist were one and the same.

  “Aye, I met him. The night of the robbery, but he was wearing all black clothing and a mask like you suspect a burglar might, and he spoke with an accent that was peculiar to me ears. The only person I deigned to speak to about the comic before that was him.” Angus narrowed his eyes at Dennis. “An easy mark, he was.”

  Dennis cleared his throat conspicuously and grabbed the dungeon keys from their hook on his side of the door, jingling them to remind Angus where he was. Angus ignored him and kept on talking.

  “I knew folks be thinking the missing page was a map,” he said, looking smugly at Dennis. “This one was eager to believe anything I told him, so I fed him Filmore’s fantasy about the treasure being real and said I could find it for us if he brought me the map.”

  I had to laugh. It fit Angus’s MO perfectly: conning people into doing things for him by promising them a fortune that he didn’t think really existed. It was a lot like how he had lured Robert to America with a bogus inheritance.

  “You forgot to tell him the part where you stole the comic at gunpoint as soon as the glass case was open,” Dennis said.

  “I can’t steal what’s already mine,” Angus insisted sanctimoniously. “If anyone here did any stealing, it’s him.” He jutted his chin in Dennis’s direction. “Your mate Dennis here got that masked henchman of his to help break into Robert’s shop. The masked burglar came to the castle alone rolling a suitcase behind him, about an hour after midnight on the night of the break-in, it were. Met me out back in the stables like I’d arranged, so Robert was sure not to stumble upon us. They planned well, I’ll give them that. Came prepared with the proper tools to break open the case protecting me comic, just like I asked. Won’t be walking around barefoot in the stables no more with all the wee bits of glass everywhere, but it did the trick.”

  Glass everywhere, huh? The origin of the cut on Lucky’s tush may not have been the highest-priority mystery in this case, but now I knew how he’d ended up with stitches and a plastic cone.

  “Aye, the burglar came prepared, but I had a tool he didn’t,” Angus continued, a mischievous gleam in his eye. “And he wasn’t expecting old Angus to be so quick on the draw. I let him do all the work, and then once the comic were free, I pulled out me blunderbuss and sent them packing!”

  “Yeah, because you’re a backstabbing crook,” Dennis said.

  “Me? A crook?” asked Angus innocently. “I didn’t break into me nephew’s comic shop. Nay, you’re the crooks, not me, least that’s the way the coppers would have seen it. A rather brilliant plan, if I do say so meself. It’s not like you could stroll into the local precinct and say you robbed me nephew’s store and I wouldn’t give you your pilfered loot back.”

  Dennis gnashed his teeth in frustration. “Grr, as a game master, I gotta admit you outmaneuvered me, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re still a backstabbing crook.”

  “He came back to the castle to whine about it, he did, but I chased him off easily enough,” Angus told me smugly.

  “I believe your exact words were, ‘I never seen ye before in my life. Now get off me property before I call the coppers on ye fer trespassing, ye miscreant,’ ” Dennis recalled in a pretty good approximation of Angus’s Scottish accent.

  “And there weren’t nothing ye could do about it neither!” Angus proclaimed.

  Dennis smiled and dangled the keys in front of the bars for him to see. “This is the part of the story where I remind you that you’re the one locked in a dungeon, not me.”

  “As an objective observer, I think it’s safe to say that you�
�re both crooks,” I commented, hoping to put a stop to their bickering.

  “I didn’t help steal the comic for the money, in case that’s what you’re thinking, Frank,” Dennis said matter-of-factly. “It was the adventure of it. I spend so much time helping other people have make-believe adventures as a game master, I couldn’t turn down the chance to go on a real adventure of my own. I’m a good guy. I’m just chaotic good, I guess.”

  “So what’s the point of keeping Angus locked up? We’ve already established he couldn’t have made good on his deal anyway because the copy was missing the page with the map,” I said. “He was just playing you to get you to retrieve the evidence of Filmore’s death and keep himself out of prison.”

  “Kind of ironic given where he is now,” Dennis observed, rapping on the bars of the dungeon gate.

  “It’s not up to you to punish him. Keeping him locked up here is only going to make things worse for you when you get caught,” I warned Dennis.

  “I’m not keeping him down here to punish him. I kind of like the cranky old guy, to be honest,” said Dennis fondly. “Originally, we just put him in here to persuade him to give us the comic so we could get the map. I was down here trying to get it out of him before dressing up and going upstairs to the party to spy on you.”

  “I ain’t hid it, I got rid of it!” Angus cut in. “I already told ye.”

  “I might believe you if I hadn’t found this when I was searching your tower right after we locked you up,” Dennis said, pulling a chewed-up piece of the comic book’s back cover from inside his wizard’s robe. “Lucky had been chewing on it, and I figure if there’s one page, the rest of them are probably still somewhere in the castle as well. Not that it matters as much now that we have the map.”