The Witch's Glass Page 3

  Anastasia blanched. “I can barely skip rope without tripping! I can’t fight with a sword!”

  “Well, you’ll have to learn,” Ollie said ominously as they tumbled out the academy entrance. “In case you run into a bloodthirsty witch. Oh—there’s Q!”

  A small fleet of pink Pettifog rowboats bobbed in the lagoon, and a ninth-grade coxswain waited in each one. After grabbing their oars, Anastasia and Gus and Ollie hopped aboard the vessel helmed by Quentin.

  “Tallyho!” Quentin greeted them. “I’ll be escorting you to Mudpuddle Cavern today.”

  “Mudpuddle Cavern?” Anastasia echoed.

  “Yep. It’s one of the exit routes to Dinkledorf,” Quentin explained. “There’s a secret stairwell up to the cuckoo clock shop. Ready, all! Row!”

  The Dreadfuls flurried their paddles.

  “Harder on starboard!” Quentin called, directing them across Old Crescent Lagoon and into one of the canals. Now he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I didn’t want to say anything too close to the academy, but Mudpuddle Cavern is in the same direction as the Cavepearl Theater.”

  “Really?” Anastasia’s eyes glinted. “Should we hop out and visit you-know-where?”

  “But what if Marm Pettifog finds out we—er—lollygagged?” Gus asked. “She’ll flunk us for the entire Applied Navigation project!”

  Ollie snorted. “Here’s our grand chance to get cracking on our secret mission, and you’re worried about schoolwork? Marm Pettifog won’t find out.”

  “Even if she doesn’t, we still need to memorize the canal system,” Gus quibbled. “We’re going to be tested on it.”

  “I can take you out some afternoon in Uncle Zed’s gondola,” Quentin offered. “We’ll get plenty of practice before your final exam.”

  “And I know all kinds of shortcuts,” Ollie boasted.

  Gus considered. “We-ell…okay.”

  Quentin reeled off instructions as they zigzagged deeper into the tunnels. “Take the second left off Limestone Alley—no, that canal doesn’t have a name; you just remember it’s the second left—and then turn right down No Name Way. But there’s no sign for it; you just have to remember that it’s the first right off the nameless canal.”

  Anastasia was completely muddled by the time the Dreadfuls scudded into Rising Star Lagoon. She rubbed her temples. How would she ever forge a tidy mental map of the tangled canal system?

  The Cavepearl Theater loomed upon the lagoon’s far shore. The theater was closed up tight during the day, so no gondolas clustered along its quay, and no playgoers queued at its box office. Quentin quickly leashed the pink Pettifog boat to the dock. “We’ll go through the side entrance,” he said as the Dreadfuls scrambled up the deserted pier. “This way.”

  They charged down a narrow alley, halting at a small black door nooked on the theater’s stone flank. Gold letters gleamed in the light from a nearby lamp:

  AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY (ALL OTHERS: SCRAM!)

  Quentin withdrew a key from his pocket. As first chair saw in the Nowhere Special Orchestra, he was authorized indeed to pass through this grim and forbidding door. The rest of the Dreadfuls, on the other hand, weren’t.

  “The orchestra doesn’t start practicing until afternoon,” Quentin said, “so hopefully we won’t run into anyone. But there might be costumiers or prop people working, so be quiet.”

  The Dreadfuls nodded, and Quentin fitted his key into the lock.

  Were you to enter the Cavepearl Theater through the great arch of its front entrance, you would behold a rococo lobby dripping with chandeliers, and beyond this lobby the great gilded yawn of the playhouse itself, toothed with gilded stalactites. Upon its hallowed stage hundreds of opera singers had bellowed and thousands of silk-slippered ballerinas had pranced. However, not to any of these attractions were the Dreadfuls drawn. No, dear Reader: as is often the case in life, the most important element of the Cavepearl Theater lay behind the scenes.

  Quentin cracked the door open, and the Dreadfuls slunk into a tunnel lit with greeny-glowing luminescent moss. The tunnel curved into the cavernous backstage area, deserted and eerie in the doldrums between performances. They pussyfooted through a forest of papier-mâché pines and past racks of ghostly white tutus, all the way to the darkest and farthermost corner. In this corner lay the jewel of Cavepearl Theater, as far as the Beastly Dreadfuls were concerned. Hidden behind the boughs of an artificial tree lay a small chink in the wall, and through this chink the children crept, one by one.

  “Ugh!” Ollie said as he squeezed out on the other side. “Sickle Alley still gives me shivers.”

  “It’s ominous,” Gus agreed, eyeing the cracked streetlamps. “But Marm Pettifog is much scarier. Let’s hurry.”

  “There’s a rumor that some of the merchants along here sell black-market witch goods,” Quentin said.

  “Really?” Ollie’s eyes rounded. “But wouldn’t that be illegal?”

  Quentin grinned. “Sure. That’s why it’s the black market, silly.”

  “Having old witch stuff is treason,” Ollie said. He pressed against a grimy shop window and peered into the darkened cavern beyond. “It looks like this shop sells Shadowsilk. I don’t see any witch things.”

  “They wouldn’t exactly have a big display of potions out, would they?” Gus said. “Come on, Ollie. We don’t want Marm Pettifog to hear that we were hanging around Sickle Alley during school hours.”

  But Sickle Alley was abandoned. No pedestrians hustled down its muddy cobbles, perhaps because most of the shop windows lay shuttered or unlit. Anastasia wondered whether the sorts of customers who ventured into the creepy shopping district reserved their errands for the wee hours. Did the Sickle Alley dealers really peddle witch paraphernalia? Queen Wiggy had banned magic from the Cavelands at the beginning of the Perpetual War.

  Of course, there were still pockets of magic tucked away in Nowhere Special, forgotten or hidden, lurking like poison ivy creeping around a picnic site. If you didn’t watch your step, you just might rub up against something nasty. Most Morfolk avoided magic like the plague.

  However, the Dreadfuls weren’t like most Morfolk.

  They edged through a crevice in Sickle Alley’s craggy wall and sidestepped down the narrow passage beyond for a few breathless minutes until blurting into a musty little cavern. The cavern had once belonged to a witch named Mrs. Honeysop, and it was chock-full of old magic. This magic grabbed the Dreadfuls by the scruffs of their necks and set them adrift among clouds of luminescent twinkling beetles. Mrs. Honeysop’s parlor, you see, wasn’t bound by the normal laws of gravity. Witchcraft, like nimble fingers untying a tricky knot, had untethered the peculiar chamber from the earth’s gravitational pull. Anyone visiting the cavern floated around much in the manner of astronauts in a space shuttle. However, few Morfolk dared set foot into the enchanted nook. As you will remember, Morfolk steered clear of magic; in fact, entry to Mrs. Honeysop’s former abode was strictly forbidden, just like owning witch artifacts.

  “Whee!” Ollie twisted into a slow-motion somersault.

  “We don’t have time to horse around, Ollie,” Gus said sternly, brushing a floating cuckoo clock out of his way.

  Anastasia frogged toward the silver grille spanning Mrs. Honeysop’s fireplace. She removed a screwdriver from her satchel (she kept it handy for just this purpose) and made quick work of removing the bolts fastening the screen across the hearth. As she twisted the final screw loose, the screen detached from the wall and drifted aloft.

  “Well done,” Quentin praised, lighting the tapers of a candelabrum and handing it to her.

  “Thank you.” Anastasia ducked under the mantel and, lighter than a wisp of smoke, floated up the chimney. She floated all the way to its tippy-top, to the secret trapdoor discovered by the Dreadfuls only four days before. She twisted its knob. She took a deep breath. She steeled her resolve.

  And up Anastasia popped into the secret lair of history’s most notorious witch.

&n
bsp; ANASTASIA HOVERED, HER petticoats puffing up around her waist (she was glad, today, for her silly pantaloons), and gazed around the snug beyond the trapdoor: the floating carved desk and matching chair, the library of drifting books, the witchy trinkets and knickknacks and doodads suspended midair. Shadow puppets glided about like big, slow black angelfish.

  It was, Anastasia fancied, like swimming in a cabin of a wrecked ship. She crossed her ankles and bucked her legs, pretending for a few seconds to be a mermaid. Something slithered against her knee, pricking her skin into goose bumps—just one of the puppets, she realized, heaving a sigh. The warlock’s hollow had her properly spooked! Anastasia swatted the paper figure away and paddled across the study to its far wall.

  Bracketed in place by stalactites and stalagmites, gleaming in the flicker of the candelabrum, was a cabinet wrought entirely of glass. It was a peculiar, baroque thing. Clouds of spun glass crowned its top, and great ribbons of glass, stretched like glass taffy, curled round its curving flanks. The cabinet was unlike anything Anastasia had ever seen, and she had beheld some wondrous strange stuff in the Cavelands.

  However, fantastical as the glass chest was, the Dreadfuls were far more interested in its contents. Anastasia peered beyond branches of coral and floating seashells and little bottles, deep into the cabinet’s shadowiest nook.

  “The Silver Hammer,” Gus murmured behind her.

  Morfolk had speculated for centuries about the Hammer’s whereabouts. Knights and explorers and detectives (and detective-knight-explorers) had combed the globe seeking it. People had died looking for it.

  Why, you might ask, would anyone risk their life hunting for a hammer, of all things? Ah, but my good Reader: the Silver Hammer was no ordinary nail-walloper! It was the weapon Calixto Swift wielded to execute his Dastardly Deed. It was the key, you must understand, to Anastasia’s grandfather’s freedom.

  Nicodemus Merrymoon’s whereabouts were a great mystery, but all Morfolk knew he was trapped in a magical silver trunk. Calixto Swift had put him there. Eight spellbound nails studded the lid of this trunk, and only the Silver Hammer could prize these nails loose. And the Dreadfuls had found the Hammer.

  They just didn’t know how to get it.

  Calixto Swift’s curious cabinet lacked a door.

  “Maybe the door just blends in….It must be concealed….” Gus ran his palms over the glass.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that Calixto Swift left the Silver Hammer in a glass case?” Ollie asked. “Anyone who came up here could see it!”

  “But no one comes up here,” Anastasia said. “At least, no one has for hundreds of years. This is a secret study, after all.” She stifled a shudder, imagining the odious Calixto Swift lurking within the murky lair, plotting to zonk Grandpa Nicodemus.

  “Still, you’d think a mighty warlock would come up with a better hiding place. When I hide something, I put it well out of sight,” Ollie said. “Like my secret stash of Toffee Mucker bars. I wouldn’t just leave them sitting out in a glass jar, plain as the nose on your face! What if a sweet-toothed burglar broke into our apartment?”

  “So what’s your great hiding place, Ollie?” Gus asked, diving beneath the cabinet to examine its base.

  Ollie darted a look at Quentin. “Not telling.”

  Quentin rolled his eyes. “You keep them in your pillowcase,” he said. “And I don’t know how you can sleep on that lumpy thing. Any luck, Gus?”

  “Nope. I don’t see a door, or a keyhole, or anything.” Gus emerged, a fine layer of dust coating his wig.

  “But how did Calixto take things out of the cabinet?” Anastasia asked. “And how did he put them inside in the first place?”

  The Dreadfuls stared at the glass conundrum.

  “It’s just like Uncle Zed’s ship in a bottle,” Ollie declared. “Very mysterious, how that schooner got inside.”

  “This is a bit more complicated, Pudding,” Quentin said. “If there isn’t a door, Calixto must have used magic.”

  “Like a magic key?” Anastasia asked.

  “Maybe,” Gus said. “Or maybe he just chanted a spell and made a door appear.”

  Ollie chewed his lower lip. “We don’t have magic.”

  Anastasia frowned. “Well,” she said, “glass breaks, after all.”

  As a Beastly Dreadful and budding detective, Anastasia was inclined toward trespassing, eavesdropping, and general sneakery. She was not, however, prone to vandalism—usually. Desperate times call for desperate measures, you understand, and Anastasia was desperate indeed to find her father. And Nicodemus Merrymoon, trapped inside Calixto’s Silver Chest, was the only person equipped with a foolproof way to do so.

  The tattoo upon Nicodemus’s right hand was no ordinary ornament. It was no run-of-the-mill skull and crossbones, nor heart emblazoned MUMSY, nor any of the other usual doodles you might spot upon your friends and neighbors. Nicodemus’s tattoo was a compass, and it was magical: it always pointed the way to Fred. If Anastasia could find her grandpa and release him from the Silver Chest, then she could find her father.

  “You think we should just smash the cabinet?” Gus asked.

  “We need the Hammer. My dad…” Anastasia’s thoughts flitted back to Fred’s face evaporating from her dream. She swallowed. “The longer my dad is missing, the worse it is. If CRUD has him, he’s trapped somewhere bad. And if he’s hiding, then I have to find him before CRUD does.”

  “Breaking a warlock’s cabinet seems dangerous,” Ollie protested. “What if it’s hexed? Maybe any Morfo who shatters that glass will be cursed, just like the archaeologists who opened Tutankhamen’s tomb!”

  “There wasn’t really a curse,” Gus said. “That was a myth.”

  But the group fell into uneasy silence.

  “You can wait in Sickle Alley,” Anastasia said. “But I’m taking the Hammer today.”

  “We’ll stay,” Quentin said. “Credo of the Beastly Dreadfuls: all for one, and one for all—right, Ollie?”

  Ollie huffed. “Fine.”

  Anastasia snatched up a massive bust of Shakespeare. Outside Mrs. Honeysop’s house and burdened by gravity, the statuette would have been heavy indeed; however, in Calixto’s weightless lair, the Bard’s marble noggin was featherlight. It was nonetheless very solid. Clutching the bust with both hands, Anastasia raised her arms above her head.

  “It seems a shame to smash that beautiful case,” Quentin murmured. “It really is a work of art.”

  “Like something out of a fairy tale,” Ollie agreed wistfully.

  Anastasia hesitated.

  “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” Gus prompted.

  “Gus!” Ollie said. “I didn’t know you were interested in cooking.”

  “I’m not,” Gus said. “It’s just an expression. Go on, Anastasia. Smash it.”

  Anastasia closed her eyes. She swung the bust.

  CLUNK! Shakespeare’s face skidded across the cabinet. Anastasia blinked and stared at the Bard’s nose, or rather, she stared at where his nose had once been. The force of the impact had knocked it clean off. Contrarily, Calixto’s glass case remained completely intact. It wasn’t even scratched.

  “Try again,” Quentin urged.

  CLUNK!

  “Why isn’t it breaking?” Ollie asked.

  CLUNK!

  “Let me try.” Gus took the statuette from Anastasia.

  CLUNK!

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Quentin muttered. He pulled his foot back, aimed it at the cabinet’s crystalline front, and kicked. “Ow!” His foot skated across the glass, and he flipped into a backward somersault.

  “It must be the magic,” Ollie said. “That’s magic glass.”

  Anastasia touched the cabinet with the tip of her index finger, thinking. How might Francie Dewdrop, the hero of her favorite book series, approach the puzzle of a cabinet without doors? Over the course of her distinguished career as a detective-veterinarian-artist, Francie had contended with plenty of mysteri
ous chests and coffers. In The Case of the Tight-Lipped Tooth Bandit, Francie discovered a code nestled within the scribblings of a murdered dentist (“Miss Knox has gold fillings in left molar 17, right molar 32, and right molar 1”), and she used this code to infiltrate a vault full of pirates’ doubloons. In The Ink Slinger’s Cipher, Francie had realized a mammoth old typewriter was actually a combination safe, and the combination was an odd sentence found typed on crumpled pages throughout the author’s study (unlock my writer’s block with my black and many keys). And while solving The Candle Maker’s Secret, Francie discovered a tiny key hidden inside a wax votive, and with that key she had unlocked an intriguing jewelry box.

  Yes, Francie Dewdrop had sniffed out plenty of codes and keys squirreled away in ingenious hiding spots. Anastasia now swiveled her gaze around the warlock’s study. While Francie had never contended with magic, perhaps her ace snooping methods could help with unlocking the glass cabinet. “If there is a key to the chest, maybe Calixto hid it somewhere in here,” she suggested. “Or we might find an ‘open sesame’ spell in one of his books.”

  The Dreadfuls set to plundering the study. Gus grabbed a promisingly thick tome full of handwritten notes and began perusing, and the others rummaged through nooks and pigeonholes. Anastasia opened the desk drawers, and out drifted loose papers and half-full bottles of ink and a sheaf of black-feathered quills. Really, a zero-gravity chamber was rather an unpractical place for an office! How had Calixto sat at his desk without floating up from the chair? Just the simple task of scribbling a few words would be difficult! As soon as the warlock uncorked the bottle, wouldn’t the ink spill upward and into the air? Maybe, Anastasia reasoned, the cunning warlock used a bit of witchy magic to keep his work things from floating away midtask.

  “This journal reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks,” Gus said. “There’s all kinds of diagrams and drawings in here….Here’s a blueprint for some kind of flying machine….I think Calixto was a genius.”