Max Tilt: Fire the Depths

by Peter Lerangis

  “It’s not that cold in here,” Max said.

  “I was outside,” Alex snapped, “a couple of hours ago, when it was dark and freezing. I walked to the Angler’s Diner, which has an exquisite pancake breakfast and even more exquisite wall plugs for charging electronics. For use by hardworking, responsible citizens while their lazy little cousins stay home and enjoy their beauty sleep.”

  “You must have had the pancakes à la nasty with cranky syrup,” Max said.

  Alex let out a snort and gave him an astonished glance. “You can be sarcastic!”

  “I’m learning from you,” Max said. “How’d we do with sales? And did you call the electric company?”

  Alex angled the laptop so Max could see it. On the screen was a big spreadsheet with three columns: Item Name, Asking Price, Price Offered. But Max’s eyes went right to the bottom, to the line marked Total.

  $104.93

  “It’s only been a few hours,” Max said. “It’ll get better.”

  Alex nodded. “Of course it will. We don’t have to do it all online either. We may want to have a tag sale on the front lawn.”

  “No,” Max said. “The neighbors will notice. They might call Dad.”

  “Good point. Anyway, so far people have bought cheapo things. Bargains. I may have to relist most of these things at reduced prices. I recalculated my estimation of what we can expect on the low end. About a thousand.”

  “Ugh.”

  “I was going to throw in money from my savings, because that’s the kind of person I am.” Alex turned to him with a grin. “But I can’t. Because I spent it on something else.”

  “Pancakes?” Max asked.

  Alex reached out and messed up his hair, which was extremely annoying. “No, doofus. I contacted the electric company through their twenty-four-hour chat, and the amount due on the bill was just about exactly what I’d saved up. So I did it, I paid the whole thing.”

  “Really?” Max felt stunned. “Thanks, Alex. That was nice.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “Anyway, the good news is we’ll be getting power any minute. But the bad news is . . . well, everything else.”

  “Like, we’re not going to raise enough,” Max said.

  “Nowhere near,” Alex replied. “This stuff is quirky and fun. But the internet is full of that.”

  Max thought hard. “We need to sell something that no one else has. That no one has seen before.”

  “The Jules Verne chest is unique,” Alex said. “We did have interest in it. I gave them our address. They haven’t bid yet, but maybe they’ll come over and see it. I told them they could come any time, any hour, twenty-four seven.”

  Max played back last night in his head. The painting . . . the stuffed animals . . . the newspapers . . . He imagined walking into the secret room and seeing the chest, looking around at all the . . .

  “Hand-painted murals!” he blurted.

  “Whaaat?” Alex said.

  “They’re amazing—beautiful,” Max insisted. “They seemed to move.”

  “I think they’re painted onto the walls,” Alex said.

  “Thin walls,” Max replied. “You can tell. They’re nailed onto the studs. Someone could pull them off. Use them in a kid’s room. Or exhibit them.”

  Alex shrugged. “I don’t know much about art, but I guess it’s worth a try. Let’s get some pictures of them to upload.”

  In the dim light, Max thought the paintings seemed to be emerging from a fog. The balloon, the submarine . . . one seemed to be moving, the other sinking deeper into the sea. “Let’s get the chest out of the room,” Alex said. “A clean view of the murals will be breathtaking.”

  As they dragged the chest back toward the door, something inside thumped.

  Alex and Max froze.

  “Did you hear that?” Max said. “A kind of sliding noise . . . like sssss, and then a thump?”

  “Let’s see.” Alex opened the chest and shone the flashlight inside. A flat metallic floor stared back. “Nope.”

  “Something’s in there, I swear,” Max said. He shut the top and lifted one end of the trunk high.

  Ssssss . . . thump.

  Now Alex was paying attention. She set the chest down and rapped on the base with her knuckles. The sound was deeper than Max had expected. “Hollow,” she said.

  “It’s a trick floor!” Max tilted the chest upward again. Keeping it in place with his knees, he knocked on the bottom and on the inside of the chest floor. “Yes. Two sheets of metal, with space between them.”

  Alex brightened. “Awesome!”

  “The skeleton was scaring intruders away,” Max said. “From . . . whatever was inside.”

  “Or is inside,” Alex said.

  Max gulped. There was no latch, no way at all to open the metal bottom. “We could drop it from the window. The metal doesn’t seem too thick.”

  Alex shook her head. “If I were the hider of something valuable, I would want to be able to get to it again. Which means I would have built into the chest some method to open it.”

  Max grabbed the flashlight and began examining every inch of the chest, beginning with the top, the edges, the molding . . .

  Alex ran her fingers along all of it, tugging, pulling . . .

  “Max, shine it here!” she said, her fingers around the old hasp. It hung from the side of the chest where the lock had broken off—a rectangular brass hinged plate that was wobbly and loose.

  With a strong yank, Alex pulled the entire hasp off the chest and threw it on the floor. In the rectangle where it had been was a rusted metal dial with numbers. In the center of the dial were the initials JV.

  “It’s a combo lock,” Alex said. “Under the hasp that held the key lock.”

  Max narrowed his eyes. “Wait. The chest opened after the other lock broke. Which means that lock was keeping the chest closed. So . . . what’s the point of this one?”

  He glanced up at his cousin. She seemed deep in thought. “Unless . . .” she murmured, “this one unlocks something else. Like the false floor!”

  Together they stared at the big JV. Jules Verne, obviously. Around that, the numbers went from one to twenty-six.

  “OK, that’s weird . . .” Max said. “Usually these things go from zero to fifty.”

  “Does it matter?” Alex asked.

  “I’m thinking . . .” Max drummed his fingers on the chest. “Why twenty-six? It’s a weird number.”

  “There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet . . .” Alex said.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Max said.

  “You were not.”

  “I was! I’m looking at the JV. J is the . . .” He began counting on his fingers. “Tenth letter. And V is the . . .”

  “Twenty-second!” Alex said. “So you think the JV is giving us the hint for the combo—which is ten, twenty- two?”

  Max struggled to turn the dial of the rusted lock, but it was stuck. Alex darted to the toolbox and got a can of WD-40. With a few sprays, he was able to spin it easily.

  Ten . . . twenty-two . . .

  Nada.

  Nothing happened at all.

  “Maybe dropping it out the window wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” Alex said.

  “Maybe . . .” Max murmured. “But let’s not give up yet. I mean, JV is just an abbreviation, right? Maybe it’s not those two letters, but the whole name?”

  Alex grabbed a clipboard and pen and began scribbling:

  J U L E S V E R N E

  10 21 12 5 19 22 5 18 14 5

  “Like this?” she asked.

  “Let’s try it.” Patiently Max spun out the combination 10-21-12-5-19-22-5-18-14-5.

  He and Alex stared into the chest. “No click,” Max whispered.

  “No trumpets either,” Alex remarked. “I was hoping for trumpets.”

  Max let out a sigh. “OK, here’s a Plan B: we get a big drill that goes through metal . . .”

  Before he could finish the word, there was a soft groa
n. The bottom of the chest snapped upward on a hinge. It hit the back part with a loud whack.

  Max and Alex recoiled. Then, leaning forward, they shone the flashlight into the chest.

  Max held his breath. He wasn’t expecting a pile of gold. Not from the sound of things. But a rare book would have been nice. Or valuable art.

  Not this.

  He reached down and pulled out a burlap sack. Inside was a thin booklet—three sheets of crinkly yellow paper held together by a leather coverlet, secured by string.

  “The pages are all blank,” Max said, leafing through them.

  Alex held them up to the light. “No,” she said. “There’s one word.”

  Max squinted.

  Citron.

  “It means lemon,” Alex said.

  “All that for one word?” Max asked.

  Alex dropped the booklet onto the floor in disgust. “Well, that was seventeen kinds of fun. Guess someone in our family had a sick sense of humor. Let’s take those pictures and get back to work.”

  She stepped away, pulled out her phone, and began clicking away.

  But Max didn’t move. He was smelling ammonia. He didn’t smell that often. Only when someone was trying to trick him.

  Lemon.

  He knew some facts about lemons. They could be sour or sweet. People could eat the skins of Meyer lemons, which were grown in the South and the West and named after Frank Nicholas Meyer, who originally brought them to the United States from China. Lemon juice was used for many things. It removed stains. When heated, its properties changed . . .

  Max stood up so fast he was momentarily dizzy. “I need a match,” he said.

  “A match?” Alex said. “Like, a match you strike and make fire with?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To read the rest of the message,” Max declared.

  “What message?” Alex asked.

  Max held up the little booklet. “Lemon isn’t a random word. It’s an instruction. The words were written in lemon juice. It’s an old method of invisible ink. If we gently heat these pages, we will be able to read them.”

  Alex reached into her pocket and pulled out a book of matches labeled Olympian Diner. Max gave her a look. “You smoke?”

  “None of your business,” Alex said. “I took them from the last place I worked.”

  Max lit one of the matches and held it to the sheet of paper, just far enough so the flame didn’t singe it. A message in French appeared.

  “‘Remove me from my wooden box,’” Alex translated. “‘There, at my back, your instructions await.’”

  Max narrowed his eyes. “Are you sure that’s what it says—remove him from his wooden box?”

  “Totally,” Alex replied.

  “What do you think it means?”

  “It means his coffin, Max,” Alex said, letting the note drop to the floor. “It means we’re supposed to dig up his body in France and . . . I don’t know, search his back pockets or something. And don’t tell me you think that’s cool. Just don’t. Because it’s disgusting.”

  Max picked up the note. “It doesn’t make sense, Alex. How could Jules Verne arrange to leave a note on his own corpse?”

  “Bribe the undertakers?” Alex asked.

  “Maybe he’s talking about a different kind of box, not a coffin,” Max said. “A Jules Verne jack-in-the-box.”

  Alex rolled her eyes. “Pop goes the author.”

  “Or . . . a gift box!” Max said. “With a Jules Verne action figure.”

  As his eyes swept the room, the portrait of Jules Verne seemed to be staring at him. Inviting him into a conversation. Max exhaled. He wasn’t sure an afterlife really existed, but if it did, maybe it had translators. “Dude,” he said softly, “please. Tell us what you mean.”

  Alex looked for a moment like she wanted to laugh, but she was staring at the painting too.

  Maybe she was seeing what he was seeing.

  “My wooden box . . .” Max murmured.

  Alex nodded. “The frame!”

  “Yes.”

  “Max, we need to take that painting apart!”

  Max was already reaching for the portrait. Alex managed to find a screwdriver, and as he set the painting on the floor she began separating the backing.

  As crazy as it sounded, Max could swear Jules Verne was grinning.

  10

  THE LOST TREASURES

  A MEMOIR

  By Jules Verne

  —PART ONE—

  (Translated from the French by the Amazing Alexandra Verne,

  from a pamphlet found in a framed portrait of the author)

  Dear reader, if you have found this, I am profoundly grateful. For it means, I trust, that the world still exists. That the aims of my nemesis have not borne fruit.

  I write this in a pen using ink based in iron, in the hopes that it will last and not fade. This writing unburdens my soul of secrets so dark that they will not be heard, let alone believed, in my time. For the truth must be heard by ears that are ready to receive it. This time, I believe, shall come soon. But for now I fear I shall take these secrets to my grave.

  Read on. Take heed. If you do, you will prevent a destruction so deep and complete as to end life as we know it.

  I will not fault you, dear reader, for scoffing at these words. You know Jules Verne as a teller of fanciful tales and fantastical stories. If you have not read them, then you know someone who has. But here is what you do not know: these works are not fiction. Yes, some names have been changed. But every detail, every scrap of dialogue, has been transcribed from life.

  And here, for the first time, I present the truth without the filters of style and novelistic technique. Here I guide you to follow my path. If you do, you will soon find riches unimaginable by the greatest of kings. But this will not be the final aim. Because by following the journey to the end, you will earn the gratitude of every soul on earth. Those riches, may it go without saying, will do no good on an empty planet.

  I call my memoir The Lost Treasures. O how I wish I could leave all of it here, for you to devour in its entirety. But my enemy is wise to my aims. I must tell the story in sections. This, then, is merely an introduction.

  A blueprint.

  You will find the pieces of the greater whole. Each will lead you farther in your journey. Which was my journey.

  You must not be faint of heart or weak of body. You must possess the cunning of a wolf, the strength of an ox, the intelligence of a scholar.

  Only with these will you find the hidden fortune.

  The gains were ill-gotten, the plunder of my nemesis. They are in a place his followers will never discover. You will need funding to continue the journey.

  You shall embark from the land of Bartholdi’s lady and begin the portion of the voyage as traced out by Srem Sel Suos Seueil Ellim Tgniv. Upon reaching the great unruined chamber at the prime locations of the fifteenth, third, and second to the Pole Star and eleventh, seventeenth, and fourteenth to the sunrise, be guided by the camptodactyl of the king.

  Godspeed and good reading.

  J. Verne

  Paris, France

  July 1904

  11

  “FORTUNE?” Max read the word from Alex’s laptop screen on the kitchen table.

  Until the moment he read that word, he had been annoyed at Alex. She’d pulled him away from working on his drone, and now it was nearly bedtime.

  But fortune . . . well, that changed everything.

  “I just wanna be rich . . .” She was dancing across the kitchen, singing way off-key. “We did it, Max!”

  Max could see her turning toward him with a gigantic grin. He knew what that meant. “Don’t hug me,” he said. “Are you sure about this?”

  “I checked every word,” Alex said. “I mean, everything except the nonsense stuff at the end—”

  “I don’t mean is it accurate,” Max said. “I mean, is it true?”

  Alex stopped dancing. “Of course it
is!”

  “You said he wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea before submarines were invented,” Max said. “If submarines didn’t exist, he couldn’t have really taken a trip on one.”

  “Well . . .” Alex flung up her arms. “Maybe he secretly had access to one that no one knew about.”

  “If he lived through Journey to the Center of the Earth,” Max continued, “he’d be burned to a crisp.”

  “Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the center center,” Alex said. “Maybe it was just deep. You know, artistic license.”

  Max sat. “I used to think all the Dear America books were true. They were fake diaries written by novelists pretending to be real people. Who were made-up.”

  “Wait. You think he didn’t write this?” Alex sat back down and began toggling through webpage tabs. “Here’s a sample of his handwriting . . . matches the note exactly. It’s him, Max. He’s communicating to us through the centuries! Why would Jules Verne send people on a wild goose chase? This guy was an adventurer, a traveler, a banker. He had a thick gray beard. He was Mr. Turn-of-the-Century Serious French Guy. He’s the dude who hates pranks.”

  Max could not get his eyes off the word fortune. So far the most expensive thing they’d listed was the chest, and they hadn’t even sold that. They’d probably make enough for a few small bills, but that was about it.

  “Think about this, Max,” Alex said. “What if it’s all true, and instead of following the path, we just sit home? Will we regret it? We could be passing up the possibility of saving your parents’ house and getting your mom the best health care money can buy!”

  Max nodded. He scanned the translation again. “I’m okay until the stuff at the end.”

  “I looked up camptodactyl,” Alex said. “It has something to do with bones. The part at the end that looks like nonsense words—that’s probably some other language. First things first. He’s sending us a clue about where to start the journey: ‘the land of Bartholdi’s lady.’”

  “That name sounds familiar to me,” Max said.

  “Some friend of his, I’m guessing—but who? And where did she live?”

  “How do you know it was a friend of his?”

  Alex shrugged. “He doesn’t say Bartholdi Johnson or Bartholdi Schwartz. So they were clearly on a first-name basis.”