20 UNDER THE SURFACE
JOE
COME ON! LET’S GO AFTER him!” I’d called to Frank a few minutes earlier as I lifted myself off the floor, grabbed the ancient sword from the pile of armor that had concealed Filmore’s corpse, and took off after the map-stealing knight as he disappeared into the smoke in the direction of the right-hand passageway.
Frank must not have heard me amid all the chaos, because he wasn’t behind me. Or maybe he was lost like I was. The corridor to the right had taken a series of quick twists and turns. I’d managed to keep up with the knight until he dropped another smoke bomb at an intersection where the tunnels forked. When the smoke cleared, I found myself alone and totally turned around.
Whoever that dark knight was, he was smart. He was costumed from head to toe in black, but not all of it was armor. He’d worn sneakers so I couldn’t hear his feet clank against the stone floor. It took me a while to pick up his trail from the prints he left in the dust, and by that time he was probably long gone. I followed anyway. I wasn’t sure I could find my way back, and I wasn’t about to let our perp get away with the treasure map after everything we’d been through on this case.
The sneakers hadn’t been the knight’s only smart move. I didn’t know how long he’d been spying on us in the chamber with Filmore’s corpse, but he hadn’t just grabbed the map from us the first chance he got. He’d lain patiently in hiding until we’d decoded most of it for him, too. Frank, Murph, and I had been so excited about our discovery, we’d let our guard down entirely. The knight had another treasure-hunting advantage on me as well: he seemed to know where he was going, while I didn’t have a clue. If I had to guess, I’d say the tunnel had been winding me back in the general direction of Angus’s tower on the east side of the castle, but I couldn’t be sure.
The corridor grew narrower and narrower until it felt like the walls were closing in on me. Then it just ended altogether. At least that’s what it looked like. When I got closer, I noticed there was a vertical gap in the wall just wide enough for a person to fit through. Unless you got right up close to it, you’d never know it was there. It looked like it had once been sealed over with stone and mortar, but whatever they’d used to seal it 275 years ago had crumbled away.
When I peered through with my flashlight, all I saw was darkness. Before I had a chance to second-guess myself, I took a deep breath and squeezed inside. Luckily, the wall was only a couple of feet deep, and I popped out into a wider tunnel a few seconds later. It was wider, but definitely not wide, and led me on a downhill curving path deeper under the castle.
When I first heard the thump in the distance, it was so soft I thought I’d imagined it. But the closer I got, the louder it grew.
Thump Thump Thump Thump THUMP.
A dim bluish light appeared in the distance, and I immediately flicked off mine and put it in my pocket. I didn’t want to give my position away. I crept forward, gently placing every step so as not to make a sound, my hands gripping the sword tightly.
I soon found myself standing at the mouth of a subterranean chamber roughly half the size of our high school gym. I realized the light I’d seen was actually moonlight seeping into the depths of the castle’s underground tunnels from somewhere high above. Moonlight wasn’t the only thing seeping into the chamber either. From the steady dripping sound and glistening walls, I had a pretty good hunch where both the light and the water were coming from. The old well that was by the tower. There was no other way I could think of for moonlight to reach that far underground.
And that’s when it hit me. The knight had grabbed the map before we’d had a chance to work out the other part of the riddle. Beneath the windmill I lay awaiting, a drop in the bucket and a chain afar. We knew “beneath the windmill” was under Angus’s tower, and thanks to Frank paying Frank-like attention to every detail in class, we knew “a chain afar” meant sixty-six feet away. And now, thanks to the moonlight and the dampness, I knew “a drop in the bucket” meant the old well.
The treasure was buried under the tower, sixty-six feet away from the well—and the map-stealing dark knight had led me right to it!
It made perfect sense. The knight’s ability to ambush us and then confidently make his escape meant he had to know his way around the castle a lot better than we did, and with us onto the treasure as well, he’d headed straight under the tower to try and unearth the gold ASAP, before we discovered either it or him.
Too late, buddy, I thought, stepping quietly inside the chamber.
The knight stood on the other side of the chamber, ankle-deep in a shallow, moonlit pool where some of the water had collected. His helmet was off, but he had his back to me, so I couldn’t see his face. Water and wood chips flew as he feverishly tried to hack through the submerged plank floor with his ax. Frank probably could have recited off the top of his head the scientific process explaining exactly how the submerged wooden floor had managed not to rot after all these years, but all I knew was that it hadn’t. And that there was a good chance eight crates of gold were hidden underneath.
21 MISSING THE MAP
FRANK
I’M REALLY SORRY ABOUT THIS, Frank,” Dennis said, sounding bizarrely sincere given the current circumstances. “The dungeon master getting to lock his players in a real dungeon is pretty amazing, I gotta admit, but I still wish you guys hadn’t blown our cover so we could have left you out of it.”
A furious, swirling ball of questions ricocheted around inside my skull as I tried to make sense of our predicament. They’d have to wait, though.
“Whatever trouble you got yourself in, I can try to help you through it, but you have to let us out before someone gets hurt,” I told at Dennis calmly, hoping he could still be reasoned with. I turned back to my fellow prisoners.
I focused on Charlene first. Our perpetually cranky, possibly murderous third dungeon mate Angus was tied to a chair in the central room with me. I figured he could wait a few minutes. Charlene was in one of the smaller stone cells, with a set of bars between us. I pressed myself against the bars and reached through them, stretching my arm as far as I could, hoping to at least remove the tape so she could talk. I strained against the bars until it hurt, my fingers just inches from her, but that was as close as I could get.
“Don’t worry, Charlene, I’ll get you out of here,” I said as confidently as I could, hoping it was a promise I could keep.
I could read the expression in her eyes, though, and it wasn’t worry. It was fury. She tried yelling through the tape. I couldn’t make any of it out, but I was pretty sure the angry, muffled diatribe was aimed at Dennis, and none of it was complimentary.
“I think she might be as good an investigator as you guys,” Dennis said from the other side of the dungeon gate. “I didn’t think anyone would see through our alibi. If this were an RPG, I’d award her an inspiration point.”
Inspiration points were coins that game masters gave to players when their characters did something exceptional. In a game, you could spend your inspiration point to throw out a bad dice roll and roll a new one. Too bad metaphorical coins given out by masters of real dungeons didn’t work the same way. It sounded like Charlene really had been on the verge of cracking the case, not that she could tell me what she’d found out.
“You and Joe get inspiration points too, for finding the map and decoding it for us,” Dennis said. “As a game master, I’m really proud of the ingenuity and problem-solving you guys have shown on this quest.”
It was maddening how sincere Dennis sounded, and more than a little disturbing.
“We’re not role-playing, Dennis,” I said, trying to shake some sense into him. “This is real life, not a fantasy quest. Someone’s going to get hurt, and when people get hurt in real life, they don’t just lose hit points like they do in a game.”
“Yeah, that part of it really stinks,” Dennis said, frowning guiltily. “You guys kind of have me in a pickle, though. If I let you go, I’ll probably go to jail, and
I’ve got way too many games I still want to run to let that happen.”
Dennis’s logic about staying out of jail may have been twisted, but I suspected he had more crimes on his conscience than just locking us in a dungeon, and his concern about jail time basically confirmed it.
He twisted his lips, forcing his frown upside down as the perkiness returned to his voice.
“So I figure if it’s got to go down like this, we might as well all look on the bright side and stay positive, right? And seriously, man, this adventure has given me all kinds of great material for the next Sabers and Serpents campaign I’m planning. How often does a game master get to know more about a game than the guy who invented it?” Dennis nodded toward Angus. “You may have pulled one over on us with that comic, but we knew there was a real treasure.”
Dennis kept referring to “we,” “us” and “our,” and his admission about the map helped confirm that the dark knight was his accomplice. If they’d been the ones to steal the map, then it wasn’t hard to guess what else they might have stolen.
“So you locked up Charlene for pegging you and your evil knight friend for robbing Comic Kingdom, but why is Angus here?” I asked, trying to bait him into a confession.
Dennis shrugged noncommittally. “The less you know, probably the better.”
I walked closer to Angus. His hands and feet were bound to the chair and he had tape over his mouth as I well. I loosened the straps on Angus’s hands and feet so they were a little more comfortable, but I thought better of completely untying a possible murderer until I knew what was going on. Dennis didn’t seem dismayed when I went to remove the tape from Angus’s mouth.
“He gave us an earful, but he won’t talk to you,” Dennis said. “We’ve got too much dirt on him. He’s not going to rat himself out. Right, Mr. McG?”
Too much dirt, huh? Was Dennis’s dirt as incriminating as the dump-truck load I was about to drop on Angus? I didn’t know how long Dennis had been spying on us before the knight grabbed the map, but even if he had heard our theory about the identity of the skeleton in the suit of armor, Angus still hadn’t. And it just might persuade him that silence wasn’t the right answer.
“Ouch!” Angus yowled as I pulled the tape off. “Oh, thank you, kind lad. Now if you’d just let an old man free so he can stretch his achy limbs…”
“I’m sorry, Mr. McGalliard. I’d like to, but I think we ought to have an honest conversation first,” I told him.
“An honest conversation? What are you implying? I never have anything but,” he protested, sounding hurt. “I’m a mere victim here. I know nothing of what this hooligan is talking about. I’ve done nothing wrong. I was minding me own business this afternoon as I always do, when I was kidnapped from me tower for no reason.”
“I believe you’re a victim of kidnapping, all right, and I plan to help get you out of here, but the ‘nothing wrong’ and ‘no reason’ parts I’m not so sure about,” I said. I wasn’t buying his meek-old-man act.
“Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he claimed innocently.
“Would you know more if I told you my brother and I just ran into Filmore upstairs?” I asked.
Angus’s eyes went wide as I continued.
“He was still holding the pages he tore out of the comic the last time he saw you. He didn’t look too happy about it either.”
“Im-impossible,” he stammered, sounding and looking as if he’d just seen a ghost. “No one’s seen Filmore since he burned down that warehouse all those years ago.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see him one more time after that?” I persisted. “Right here in the castle?”
“That’s preposterous,” he said with a shaky voice.
“Actually, technically it was Lucky who ran into Filmore, or the suit of armor that’s been hiding his corpse for the last forty years, to be more precise,” I said, rolling my best metaphorical deception check as I did. I had a strong hunch that those bones belonged to Angus’s ex-partner, but I couldn’t prove it, not without either a DNA test or Angus’s help. “The copy of Sabers and Serpents that Robert found in your old stuff wasn’t just missing the map Filmore tore out. It was also covered in stains, and thanks to Lucky, we know exactly what made them: blood. Lucky must have smelled the stolen comic somewhere else already, because he picked up the scent again at the party and led us straight to the matching bloodstained map that had been torn out of Robert’s copy—only it was still clutched in Filmore’s hand, where I’m guessing you left it after you killed him.”
“That’s cold-blooded, man. I’m definitely putting that in my next campaign,” Dennis commented, whistling for good measure. “I don’t see how that changes anything, though.”
“Because I think Angus is going down for killing his Sabers and Serpents partner, and I think he’ll go down a lot easier if he turns over the crooks who robbed his nephew’s shop, kidnapped a couple of innocent teenagers, and held them captive in a dungeon.”
“Don’t fall for it, Mr. McG,” Dennis said calmly, playing it cool and unconcerned. “He’s trying to trick you.”
“I didn’t kill anyone, and no one can prove otherwise,” Angus barked, all traces of the feeble victim he’d pretended to be a few minutes ago now gone.
“Oh, I think there’s a good chance we can. Our friend Murph was there too, and he ran to get Chief Olaf from the party upstairs,” I said, desperately hoping that really was where Murph had run off to. “If that skeleton is Filmore, the crime lab will confirm it pretty quickly, and that’s not all they’ll confirm. I’m willing to bet they’ll find plenty of your DNA all over Filmore and that suit of armor you crammed him into.”
“He’s bluffing,” Dennis called through the dungeon gate, but this time I could hear the uncertainty in his voice.
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” Angus responded. I could hear the uncertainty in his as well.
“They’re going to catch you either way, Mr. McGalliard,” I leveled with him. “Talk to me and help us out of this situation, and I know the chief will go a lot easier on you. The crime you committed was a long time ago, and there might be mitigating circumstances. Filmore did basically burn down your business and your life’s dream along with it, so you couldn’t have been thinking clearly at the time. Prosecutors and juries can be sympathetic to crimes of passion like that. You know what no one is sympathetic to? Murderers who are also accessories to assault, kidnapping, and false imprisonment of minors. They throw everything in the book at them and lock them up for the long haul. So unless you want to kiss your castle goodbye forever and spend the rest of your life in prison—” I let the thought linger for Angus to fill in the blanks for himself.
If this had been an RPG, that would have been a persuasion roll. And it seemed to be working.
Angus sighed, and it sounded like resignation to me. Dennis must have thought so too.
“Don’t you say a word, Mr. McG,” he warned nervously.
“Or what? I think Mr. McGalliard is too smart to go down for your crimes as well as his own,” I said. “And if you don’t like it, why don’t you open the dungeon door and do something about it?”
That was what we’d call rolling for intimidation. DM Dennis had talked about looking on the bright side. Well, this time, being locked inside the dungeon actually turned out to be an advantage. We might not be able to get out, but there was nothing Dennis could do to stop Angus from spilling the beans without opening the door and coming in. Dennis was a great game master when it came to tabletop role-playing games, but he wasn’t that great at the live-action stuff. I was confident that I could take him in a tussle if it came down to it. He knew it too.
“Crud. Well played, Frank. You outmaneuvered me,” Dennis conceded. “You know, I am pretty curious to hear what happened to Filmore too. Did you really murder him and stuff him in a suit of armor, Mr. McG?”
“I didn’t mean to do it,” Angus confessed softly.
“You put h
im in a suit of armor by accident?” asked Dennis.
“Not that part, you ninny,” Angus said. “It was all because of that blasted map. It was the night after the fire. I was in shock. Me own partner, me friend, had ruined me. There was nothing left. No business, no money, not even a single copy of the comic book for me to replicate or even to memorialize our creation. It was all gone, including Filmore. The police were looking, but they thought he had already left town. I told them about his obsession with that nonsensical old map, and they reasoned he’d burned the warehouse down to keep anyone else from seeing it and had gone off on a delusional errand in search of his own fantastical Treasure Island. If only he had. I was roaming the castle halls late that night, trying to make sense of it all, when I heard a noise. I don’t remember what I thought, perhaps that it was a burglar. I can’t have imagined Filmore would come back after what he had just done. I grabbed an old dagger from the wall and went to investigate. And there he was, sneaking down under the castle.”
“So that’s when you stabbed him?” Dennis asked eagerly.
“I only meant to confront him,” Angus snapped, but then his voice softened. “To ask why he’d done it. But when he turned around, he was holding the comic. The last surviving copy, I thought, the only one not destroyed by the fire. And it was folded open to that horrible map. He saw me and became frenzied, speaking nonsense about how the treasure was inside the castle and he’d share it all with me, but I couldn’t let anyone else know.” Angus’s voice began to rise.
“I demanded to know why he’d set the warehouse ablaze. Babbled senselessly, he did, about needing more time to decipher the final piece of the code and to excavate the crates before anyone else discovered the secret. He’d cracked it, he said, and now the crates of gold could be ours. I knew there was no code, no crates, but I tried playing along with his delusion. I said we still could have published the comics and just kept people out of the castle until we found the treasure, but it was as if he’d lost touch with reality entirely. He lashed out and blamed me for the fire! He screamed that it was my fault for not believing him about the treasure!”
Dungeons & Detectives Page 11
