Dungeons & Detectives Page 4

  “Caltrops,” Frank said. “My Sabers and Serpents character carries a set in his explorer’s pack. They were originally designed as a type of ancient antipersonnel weapon combatants would leave on the ground to take out unsuspecting enemies or their animals when they stepped on them. They were common in medieval European warfare.”

  “How old are those things?” I wondered, gently taking the caltrop from Frank and touching one of the rusty points. “They look like real-deal antiques from the Middle Ages.”

  Frank’s eyes suddenly lit up. “Hmm, I can think of at least one place in Bayport someone might be able to get their hands on real medieval weapons.”

  I smiled. The caltrops had us down two tires, but up one lead. “Wouldn’t be the town’s only replica of a medieval Scottish castle, would it?”

  7 LUCK OF THE DRAW

  FRANK

  WAITING FOR THE CAR TO be towed took up most of our afternoon, so we had to wait until after school the next day to follow the caltrop lead to the castle. We were supposed to pick up the car first, but the tire shop called to tell us they only had one of the type of tire we needed so the car couldn’t be fixed until Thursday. That meant we had to call a cab, which made us even madder at our saboteur, whoever they were.

  One thing was clear when we finally arrived: Castle McGalliard had seen better days.

  The cab dropped us off at the foot of the drawbridge in front of the dilapidated estate’s hillside perch and quickly retreated down the hill toward town. We’d asked the driver to wait, but Old Man McG’s reputation preceded him, and the driver was determined not to get his car—or body—filled with buckshot.

  I kept a tight grip on the bag we’d picked up at the drugstore along the way. Hopefully our plan would work, because we didn’t have a backup.

  The castle’s cracked and weathered assortment of turrets, arches, and towers loomed over us, and the whole hill loomed over Bayport’s shipping docks, which were a couple of miles south of Bayport’s more picturesque Inner Harbor. That stretch of the coastline was shaped like an S, with the Inner Harbor and all its quaint tourist attractions nestled inside the curve at the top. We were in the shadier, industrial part on the round peninsula down at the bottom. Filmore Johnson’s cover illustration for S&S #1 didn’t have all the container ships, smokestacks, and cranes, of course, but there was no mistaking the bayside castle on the hill from the one in the comic.

  There was an iron gate framed by two crumbling pillars at the mouth of the drawbridge, and each one had a date etched in the stone. One said 1432, the other 1745.

  “From what Rob says, the castle was built in 1745 by the first McGalliard to come to America back before the Revolutionary War, when the colonies were still under British rule,” I informed Joe.

  “That’s the Paul Magnus guy from the ledger Murph found, yeah?” Joe asked.

  “If Murph’s theory about the ledger is right,” I said. “But apparently this is an exact replica of their family’s ancestral castle that was built in Scotland in 1432. The American castle was empty for a while before Rob’s uncle Angus emigrated from Scotland to claim it, but it’s been passed down from generation to generation since it was built.”

  “I guess that makes Robert the next heir,” Joe noted.

  “In all its grandeur and the wealth of historic treasures that lie within,” I said in my most pompous tone, repeating the boast I’d heard Robert make so many times at the comic shop.

  “It wouldn’t be hard for Sir Rob to grab a handful of antique caltrops off the shelf on his way out of the house and slip them under our tires,” Joe speculated.

  “We know he wanted us off the case,” I replied.

  “Maybe he heard we were still asking around about it at school? He does have a lot of connections at Bayport High.”

  Our last conversation with Robert had been more than a little suspicious, but would he really stoop to sabotage? And why? Hopefully, we’d find the answers on the other side of the castle’s moat.

  Joe gave the gate a shove, and it swung open easily enough.

  “Lower the drawbridge!” he called across the moat.

  “Um, it’s already lowered,” I pointed out.

  Joe shrugged. “I just always wanted to say that.”

  The moat surrounding the castle had long ago gone dry, and thankfully the drawbridge was in fact already down—and from the looks of the rusty gears on the other side, it had stayed that way for a long time. Looking up, I could see one of the towers on the castle’s right rising higher than the rest, its battered peak standing in relief against the ominous gray sky as crows circled. A small chill went through me. Not only did it look like it had leaped straight off the pages of Sabers & Serpents, it looked downright frightening.

  Joe walked confidently toward the castle’s enormous wooden door, and I followed a little more tentatively, wondering if the cabdriver hadn’t had the right idea after all.

  Joe hefted the huge iron knocker and banged it against the door three times. The sound echoed around us as we waited. And waited. There was one of those little portals that slide open so the person inside can see who’s there, but it remained tightly shut.

  “Anybody home?! We’re friends of Robert!” Joe shouted, then mumbled under his breath, “Sorta.”

  “If the stories about Angus never leaving the castle in the last forty years are true, then I’m guessing he’s here and just not answering,” I said, peering doubtfully toward the right of the castle, where a path curved through a long-neglected garden and vanished around the side.

  Joe had the same thought I did but was quicker to put it into action. “Good idea, bro! Let’s scope out the grounds and see if we can at least get a look in a window or something.”

  There were windows, all right, but most of them on this side of the castle were high enough that you’d have to scale the wall to reach them. We passed an old well with a bucket and pulley system to the right of the tall, creepy tower at the back of the garden. Beyond that, there was another door. A normal-size one.

  We were a few yards away when a ghoulish howl brought us to a stop, followed by the thump of heavy paws shaking the ground at our feet.

  “Um, what is—?” Joe began to ask.

  Before he could finish the thought, an enormous bloodhound with a large plastic veterinary cone around its neck came charging around the side of the castle, its huge jowls and ears flopping as it ran toward us.

  I dodged out of the way, but Joe never got the chance.

  “Ahhhhhhh!” he screamed as the bloodhound leaped up, putting its enormous paws on his shoulders and tackling him to the ground—where it tried to lick Joe’s face with its giant tongue. Luckily for Joe, the cone prevented the dog from getting too much slobber on him.

  Joe laughed as he pushed the overly friendly dog off him. “Personal space, dude, personal space!”

  I reached under the dog’s plastic cone of shame and flipped over the tag.

  “Come here, Lucky,” I said, reading the name etched above a phone number I recognized as Robert’s.

  Lucky swung around at his name only to clunk his plastic cone into my leg, almost knocking me over in the process.

  “Ironic name choice,” I said, reaching inside the plastic cone to scratch the klutzy dog’s big, floppy ears as Joe made his way back to his feet. There were stitches on Lucky’s rear end, which the cone was undoubtedly meant to keep him from licking.

  “WOOF,” Lucky barked as he ran back toward an oversize doggie door carved out of the regular-size door on the side of the castle—only with his cone on, his noggin was too big to fit inside, so he just smashed into the frame and pushed the entire (fortunately) unlocked door open with his face instead.

  “WOOF,” he said again, trotting through what looked like a large storage pantry and disappearing into the castle beyond.

  “I’d say that counts as an invitation to enter from one of the home’s residents, wouldn’t you, bro?” Joe asserted confidently.

  I st
ared at the open door. It was definitely tempting, but with Old Man McG’s reputation, did we really want to risk just walking in on him?

  I was still contemplating my answer when Joe decided for us and stepped inside.

  “I hope we don’t regret this,” I said, following my brother into the dusty old pantry.

  “I guess Old Man McG is a big fan of potted meat and sardines,” Joe observed, running his fingers along one of the shelves, which were filled with enough tins of canned meat and fish products to last decades. “I wonder if this is part of the historic treasures Robert was bragging about.”

  The dusty pantry led to a less dusty but equally dilapidated and impressively large kitchen that looked like someone had given a medieval kitchen a 1970s makeover. The well-worn lime-green appliances were from the twentieth century, but the antique cast-iron pots and pans hanging from the ceiling looked like they might have been there when the castle was built in the 1700s.

  The kitchen led to an antechamber with a hallway off to the side. I followed Joe past the hall into a massive dining room with chandeliers dangling two stories off the floor and an assortment of shields, spears, and trophy heads mounted on the stone walls. Daylight seeped through stained-glass windows high over our heads, depicting knights in battle.

  “Now that’s more like it,” Joe said, admiring a pair of crossed seven-foot-tall medieval lances.

  “Looks authentic, too,” I said, thinking about the caltrops that had taken out our back tires.

  An immense wooden table that looked like it could seat forty people occupied the center of the room. It was empty except for a candelabra in the middle and a dirty plate with sardine remnants at the head.

  “I’m really not sure this is a good idea, Joe,” I said, eyeing the plate of partially eaten little fishes.

  “It’s cool, dude,” he reassured me, then cupped his hands to his mouth and called, “We’re here to help Robert out! We come in peace!”

  He turned back to me as he stepped out of the dining hall. “See? No problem, bro.”

  “For some reason, that doesn’t make me feel a lot better,” I muttered, following Joe into an even larger hall with super-high ceilings and a spiral staircase vanishing under an arched stone doorway to our right. The doorway was covered by a wrought-iron gate that appeared to be bolted shut from the inside.

  I gave it a small tug to confirm that it was locked and peered through the iron bars. There were a handful of swords mounted on the wall as the staircase curved out of view. I could only see the closest one clearly, but I recognized the style of the strange, wavy blade from RPG weapons guides as a flamberge. I could make out the shapes of stars and moons etched into the metal. It looked like it was straight out of a medieval fantasy tale, making the place feel even more creepy. Creepy can be fun in a role-playing game, but it’s a lot more unsettling when you’re sneaking around a real castle without an invitation.

  “I bet that staircase leads to the weird tower we saw outside,” I whispered with a shudder as I followed Joe toward the other end of the hall. “I wonder why they keep the gate to it locked when the front gate and the pantry door are both open.”

  “This place is huge,” Joe said, looking around the room. There was a larger open doorway at the other end, guarded by an empty suit of armor on either side—I gulped—at least I hoped they were empty. One of them was wearing a plaid golf cap, which made it slightly less threatening. A long, dark tunnel curved into the distance beyond the entranceway.

  Joe rapped the hatless knight on the helm with his knuckles. “Should we go through here?”

  There was a cold metallic click behind us.

  “To your graves is where you’ll be going,” growled a deep, raspy Scottish accent.

  When we turned around, we were staring down the gaping barrel a three-hundred-year-old blunderbuss.

  8 SWEET TOOTH

  JOE

  FROM ALL THE STORIES AND the accent, it wasn’t hard to guess that the short old guy pointing an ancient pirate gun at us from behind the locked gate to the spiral staircase was Angus McGalliard.

  Old Man McG had a big, bald head like Robert, only he was a lot more grizzled and shorter than his nephew, and he had a perfectly round potbelly beneath an imperfectly white undershirt and bright red suspenders. The gun looked like a cross between a short musket and a trumpet, with a flared muzzle. I didn’t know if a gun that old would still work, and I didn’t want to find out.

  Frank stood frozen stiff with his mouth hanging open, so it looked like it was up to me to talk our way out of this predicament. And to be fair, I was the one who’d gotten us into it.

  “Don’t shoot, sir!” I pleaded. “We’re friends of Robert’s!”

  “Ah, even more reason I should shoot ya!” he snapped.

  That’s when I remembered the shopping bag Frank was holding. I grabbed it out of his hand as Angus unlocked the gate and stalked toward us with his ancient gun.

  “We come bearing gifts!” I shouted, holding the drugstore shopping bag out in front of me like a shield. “Tasty gifts!”

  Angus snatched the bag with one hand, keeping a firm grip on the firearm with the other. I was looking for a chance to knock the gun away, but the old guy cleverly looped the bag’s handles over the gun’s muzzle so he could look inside with his left hand and keep his finger on the trigger with his right.

  He squinted curiously into the bag and pulled out a package of assorted milk chocolates in the shapes of ghosts, bats, and jack-o’-lanterns. Robert had mentioned that his uncle could be bribed with chocolate, and I sure hoped he was right, because we didn’t have a plan B.

  He sneered at the bag of milk chocolates and tossed it over his shoulder.

  “I prefer dark,” he growled.

  “I told you we should have gotten the fancy kind,” Frank squeaked under his breath as Angus continued to rifle through the shopping bag full of Halloween candy.

  “Ooh, peppermint patties!” he chirped with the enthusiasm of a small child.

  Frank sighed deeply, his shoulders collapsing with relief. Mine kinda did too.

  “You see, we come in peace,” I told Angus. “And peppermint.”

  He stabbed his weapon’s muzzle in my direction.

  “What is it ye want?” has asked brusquely, keeping the gun aimed at me as he backed up toward the wall, grabbed a tattered antique chair that had probably once been pretty snazzy, and sat down so he could open the bag of peppermint patties and still threaten to shoot us at the same time. He grunted, his knee joints cracking as he eased himself into the chair.

  “Friends of Robert,” he added as he tore open the bag, emphasizing the word “friends” in about the least friendly way possible.

  “I’m not sure if you heard, sir, but we’re looking into the copy of Sabers and Serpents #1 that was stolen,” Frank said as politely as he could, and Frank can be pretty polite when he tries.

  “You’re darn right I heard it was stolen!” he barked through a mouthful of minty chocolate. “Stolen from me, by my own backstabbing nephew!”

  “Wait a second, you’re saying Robert stole the comic from you first?” I asked.

  “He told us he found it buried in boxes of old newspapers he inherited when he moved into the castle,” Frank said.

  “Inherited! Ha!” Angus laughed bitterly. “I ain’t croaked yet, and till I do, Castle McGalliard and everything in it is still mine. I don’t know where he dug the old rag up, but it weren’t his to take.”

  “Do you have another copy?” asked Frank eagerly. I was pretty sure he wanted to know more as a gamer than a detective.

  “Humph. Didn’t know I had that one till I heard Rob got it taken from that silly shop of his. Woulda sold it meself if’n I did.” He sighed and looked around at the chipped castle walls.

  “No offense, Mr. McG, but Robert makes it sound like your family is worth a fortune,” I told him. “Surely you don’t need the money.”

  “Ha! Misfortune is more like it,” he s
aid.

  “But Rob said you called him here from Scotland to claim his inheritance and take over as steward of your family’s ancestral estate,” Frank insisted.

  “Aye, it’s true, I called him here to be the new steward,” Angus admitted. “Can’t take care of this blasted place myself at my age, and somebody’s got to pay the electric bill.”

  “I kinda figured Robert was stretching the truth when he said the castle was full of priceless treasures, but even artifacts like those suits of armor and your blunderbuss could be worth a ton to collectors if they’re authentic,” Frank pointed out. “If you really needed the money, I mean.”

  “Oh, they’re priceless, all right,” he said grimly. “If by priceless you mean we ain’t allowed to sell them.”

  “Um, who’s stopping you?” I asked, getting more confused by the second. “It’s your castle.”

  “Me blighted dead ancestor, that’s who!” Angus barked. “Old Paulie Magnus McGalliard, who built this place, wanted to make sure his legacy lasted forever. So the evil bugger done put it in the ancient family trust that it would be passed down from McGalliard to McGalliard until the end of time and ain’t no one could ever sell it or any of what’s in it. See, castle steward ain’t the same as castle lord. We don’t own any of it. We’re just glorified caretakers.”

  Frank and I both gawked at him. It was like being stuck permanently footing the bill on an impractical—not to mention falling-apart—fifty-thousand-square-foot house.

  “So the estate is basically worthless?” I blurted.

  “And Robert still moved here all the way from Scotland to claim it?” Frank asked in disbelief.

  “Hmm, might have forgotten to mention that part of the arrangement till after he got here,” Angus said while casually munching on another peppermint patty.

  9 BURNED

  FRANK

  YOU CONNED ROBERT INTO MOVING across an ocean to inherit a fortune that doesn’t really exist?” Joe blurted.