Into the Gauntlet

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  But it was slow going, heading back to the church. They tiptoed and crept around corners. Whenever they passed a window, they stopped and peeked in to make sure no one from the other Clue-hunting teams was inside watching. As it grew darker and darker, the shadows around them lengthened, seeming to hide threatening shapes.

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  Once they reached the cemetery that surrounded the church, Dan switched on the flashlight. The weak light just made the darkness around them seem thicker, more menacing. Eerie sounds echoed in the trees above them--from owls? Bats?

  It's just your imagination, Amy told herself firmly.

  They reached the side door of the church. A huge sign warned potential trespassers about the church's excellent security system. Amy stared in dismay at the heavy chains looped around the door handle.

  "Dan --even if we can get in, the police will be here before we have a chance to dig up the grave," she said.

  "We'll dig fast," Dan said stubbornly.

  He touched a link of the chain, and the whole thing began coming unwrapped. The huge links made an awful clatter rattling against one another and then crashing down.

  Finally, there was silence. The entire chain lay in a heap on the ground.

  "Why would anyone put a chain on a door without locking the ends?" Dan asked. "Why just make it look like a door is locked?"

  "Someone from another team got here first," Amy said numbly.

  They'd been so foolish--anybody could have driven back to the church faster than they'd walked. Or Isabel or Eisenhower could have crept in the minute everyone else left.

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  The full weight of their failure crushed down on Amy.

  "Somebody beat us," she moaned. "They already got the next clue and left."

  Dan pushed against the door.

  "No," he corrected his sister. "Then they would have locked the chain again. Covered their tracks."

  The door creaked open.

  "See?" Dan said. "Whoever it is --they're still here."

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  CHAPTER 15

  Amy, the coward, started babbling about how they'd have to be really, really careful now.

  "Whoever's in there had to have heard that chain fall, so they'll be on alert," she whispered. In the dim light from the flashlight, her face looked ghostly and terrified. "They're probably laying a trap for us. We should go back and get Nellie to help. Maybe Hamilton, too -- Hamilton's helped us before, he'll help us now. We'll have to make plans, set our own trap --"

  "What? And let whoever it is escape with the clue? While we're sitting around talking? No way," Dan said.

  He stepped in through the door and was instantly engulfed in darkness. A plan came to him in that one step. Amy was right about the chain being too loud. Dan might as well use that to his own advantage.

  He swung the beam of the flashlight toward the front of the church.

  "Police!" he shouted. "Freeze!"

  Nobody was there.

  Quickly, he flashed the light around the entire

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  church. He listened for panicky breaths from someone hiding in the pews. He poked his head back out the door and said to Amy, "Come on in. The coast is clear."

  "You idiot," Amy muttered. "Moron."

  But Dan noticed that she walked into the church. Dan pulled the door shut behind her.

  "You forgot 'poisonous bunch-back'd toad,' 'knotty-pated fool' and 'vile standing tuck,'" Dan said. "But at least I'm not 'pigeon-livered and lacking gall' like you."

  "More Shakespeare insults?" Amy asked.

  "Want me to go on?" Dan asked cheerfully. "I know dozens of them now."

  "No," Amy said. "I want you to be quiet so we can hear if anyone comes."

  This actually struck Dan as a good idea. He shut up, and they both tiptoed toward Shakespeare's grave. Dan held the flashlight low to the ground to light the uneven stone floor. But all sorts of dangers seemed to lurk in the darkness just beyond the flashlight beam.

  If one of the other teams isn't here digging up Shakespeare's grave, then -- who did leave that door unlocked? Dan wondered. Is this a trap?

  There was nothing he could do but keep walking toward the grave.

  "Shakespeare died in 1616," Amy whispered. "I hope no one's replaced the mortar around his tombstone since then. Four-hundred-year-old mortar

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  should be crumbly and easy to dig through. But if it's newer than that..."

  "We'll be fine," Dan whispered back.

  They were at the gravestone now. Dan bent down and moved the bouquet of flowers once again. His fingers brushed the secret carved words that had shown up on the grave rubbing --vague, random-seeming lines in the stone. It wasn't surprising that they could have gone undetected for almost four hundred years.

  Amy bit her lip.

  "Don't break the stone or anything," she said. "Amy, it's a stone," Dan said. "How would 1 break it?"

  "Superpowers?" Amy said. For her, that was a really, really good attempt at a joke.

  Not that it was actually funny.

  Dan moved his hand to feel along the crack between Shakespeare's gravestone and the one beside it. He touched the mortar in the crack--and then jerked his hand back.

  "Amy!" he whispered. "That's not mortar! It's fake!"

  "What?" Amy said.

  Dan pulled her hand toward the fake mortar so she could feel it, too.

  "It's just --rubber?" she asked. "Made to look like crumbly mortar?"

  Dan began pulling on the rubbery fake mortar. It came up in one long strip.

  "Careful," Amy said. "One of the other clue-hunting

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  teams might have put it there to cover their tracks. It might be set to explode--"

  "Or someone's making this really easy for us," Dan said. He pointed to a set of hinges that had been hidden under the fake mortar. He used the nail file like a lever. One side of the stone began to creak upward, moving under its own power now.

  Dan shone the flashlight beam down into the grave.

  He was braced for some horrifying decaying skeleton. But all he could see was a coffin.

  Something gleamed on top of the coffin: an irregularly shaped metal pole. Words ran around the pole, circling it again and again and again. Dan rolled the pole to the side and realized that there were only five words, repeating over and over: Madrigal Stronghold * Cahill Ancestral Home * Madrigal Stronghold * Cahill Ancestral Home ...

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  "It's telling us where to go next!" Dan whispered. "The Madrigal stronghold," Amy said. "Of course."

  The Clue hunt had taken them to strongholds for all the other branches: for the Lucians in Paris; the Janus in Venice; the Ekats in Egypt; and the Tomas in South Africa. It made so much sense that they'd have to go to the Madrigals' headquarters, too.

  '"Cahill Ancestral Home' -- think that means where Gideon and Olivia Cahill lived?" Dan asked.

  "Yeah --the last place the Cahill family was all together," Amy said sadly. "Of course the Madrigals would build their headquarters there."

  Dan rolled the pole again, scanning the words looping down its side.

  "Okay, great," he said. "All very symbolic. Like poetry. Whatever. But where is this Madrigal stronghold-ancestral home? They forgot to write down directions!"

  Amy took the flashlight from Dan's hand and aimed it toward a crack in the coffin lid Dan hadn't noticed before. Then she took the nail file Dan had put down on the floor and she pried at the crack. No, she was pulling something out of the crack:

  A ribbon.

  "I think there are two parts to this," she said. They laid the fragile ribbon out on the floor and peered at it:

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  [Proofreader's note: There are letters and symbols on a tangled ribbon.]

  "And I thought Shakespeare's spelling was bad before," Dan muttered.

  "See any patterns?" Amy asked. "Any anagrams or-"

  "In that mess? You've got to kidding," Dan said, then groaned. "Couldn't we
have a nice, easy numbers clue? Thanks a lot, Shakespeare."

  "No, thank you, Dan and Amy," a voice said behind them.

  Both kids whirled around. It wasn't someone from one of the other teams. It was the old man who'd volunteered at the church, the one who'd given Dan permission to do the grave rubbing.

  "We can explain everything," Dan said quickly. He hoped Amy would be able to, anyway.

  The old man lifted his hands in a forgiving gesture.

  "No, no, I know the explanations already," he said. "I'm just so grateful to the two of you for ..." He stopped and looked around, bafflement spreading over his face. "Where are the others?"

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  "Others?" Amy repeated stupidly.

  The old man was gazing far down the aisle. Even in the dim light, Dan could see the blood draining from the man's face. The man began backing away.

  "This isn't what I thought," he said. "I thought... I thought..."

  He faded back into the shadows.

  Dan stood up and stared off toward the spot where the man had been looking. Years ago, one time when they were between au pairs, Dan had gone through a phase where he'd watched a lot of horror movies -- the kind shown on cable TV in the middle of the night. The kind any kid Dan's age with actual, living parents was never allowed to watch. The kind where there was always some angry mob of villagers showing up with pitchforks and torches, ready to kill someone.

  Dan felt like he was watching that same kind of angry mob, down at the opposite end of the aisle.

  The other Clue-hunting teams had arrived.

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  CHAPTER 16

  For Amy, it was like seeing all her least favorite Shakespeare villains come to life. With their faces shadowed, Mary-Todd, Reagan, and Madison Holt reminded her of the three witches from Macbeth. Alistair was like mad King Lear, who punished the child who loved him best. Hamilton was like Brutus from Julius Caesar, the supposed friend who joined in the murder plot. Jonah was like the two-faced Richard III, who pretended to be a good guy but killed off one relative after another. Sinead was like ...

  Amy remembered this wasn't English class. She didn't have time to come up with analogies for everyone.

  Did she and Dan have time to save their own lives?

  Amy threw the flashlight down on the floor, so the beam of light pointed out toward the other teams. She and Dan were in total darkness.

  "Amy, Dan -- we don't want to hurt you," Alistair called.

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  "Of course not," Amy yelled back. "Did you want to hurt our parents seven years ago?"

  Shouting that made her voice shake. And it made her ears ring, so she couldn't hear what, if anything, Alistair said in reply.

  No time to think about that, Amy told herself. No time to feel, just... plan.

  Amy bent down and picked up the delicate ribbon from the floor. The end of the ribbon was already coming unraveled.

  "Dan!" she whispered. "Did you get a good look at this? Enough to memorize the letters?"

  "I think so," he whispered back. "I'm pretty sure."

  "Sure enough that it's okay if I destroy it?" Amy asked.

  Dan glanced at the ribbon quickly. "Go ahead," he whispered.

  Amy put one end of the ribbon under the vase holding the bouquet of flowers. She grabbed the metal pole from the coffin top and handed it to Dan.

  "Swing it at them if you have to," she told him grimly.

  Then she picked up the flashlight and directed the beam of light toward the end of the ribbon she still held in her hand.

  "This is the next lead," she called out to her relatives. "If you get up here in time, maybe you can stop me from unraveling all of it!"

  She pulled on the ribbon end that wasn't under

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  the vase. It obligingly separated out into individual threads. She kept her end of the unraveling ribbon firmly between her fingers. Then she dropped the flashlight and grabbed Dan's hand. "Run!" she yelled at him.

  * * *

  Dan was halfway down the side aisle of the church before he figured out what Amy was trying to do. He knew she was unraveling the ribbon, leaving a trail of thread behind them as they ran. But why?

  Oh, yeah, he thought. She's trying to get everyone to run up to the front of the church to save what's left of the ribbon, instead of chasing us. She's buying us time to get away.

  Was it working?

  Dan and Amy reached the door without Dan having to swing the metal pole even once.

  All right, Amy! Dan thought. He almost regretted calling her pigeon-livered.

  "Let's hide in the cemetery," Dan hissed to her.

  "No -- keep running," Amy whispered. "We've got to get back to Nellie. We've got to get out of Stratford."

  Dan couldn't see how that would work. Sure, the other Clue hunters hadn't caught them yet. But any of the Holts could run faster than Dan and Amy. Probably Ian and Jonah and the Starlings could, too. If this turned into a flat-out race, Dan and Amy would lose.

  They sprinted through the cemetery and burst out the gate to the street outside. Dan could already

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  hear footsteps behind them, getting closer and closer.

  "Turn left!" Dan whispered to Amy. "Everyone would expect us to turn right, so we've got to fool them!"

  Amy cast a quick glance over her shoulder.

  "But if anyone's close enough to see--"

  A car down the street suddenly turned on its headlights, pinning Amy and Dan in the bright beams.

  "Oh, no --get out of the light!" Amy yelled.

  A figure stepped out of the car.

  "Amy! Dan! Over here!"

  It was Nellie.

  * * *

  The old man sat beside the open grave, his face buried in his hands.

  Fifteen generations.

  That was how long his family had been working at Holy Trinity Church. His father, his grandmother, his great-grandmother, his great-great-grandfather ... all the way back to the 1600s. All of them had watched over Shakespeare's grave and watched over his Madrigal secrets.

  As Cahill accomplishments went, it wasn't much. Their tiny offshoot branch of Madrigals had produced no Shakespeares of their own. But the old man's family, generation after generation, had been loyal and hardworking and true. They took their pride in that.

  Every five years they would replace a decaying old

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  ribbon with a newer one, after meticulously copying down a string of letters. Once or twice they had made strategic decisions to modernize, updating even what was printed on the ribbon.

  But mostly, for fifteen generations, they had waited.

  The old man had been so sure that this would be the night everyone was waiting for.

  He picked up a wisp of thread still lingering by the grave.

  Ruin, he thought. All our hopes in ruin.

  But his family had had their hopes dashed before. They had learned the value of backup plans. He went to the church gift shop and reached under the desk to pull out a very precise length of satin ribbon. Then he went to a secret hiding place of his own and retrieved a computer disk containing one file: a photo of an old ribbon, the one that had been destroyed. He had a tedious job ahead of him, but by morning, Shakespeare's grave would once again contain part of a lead toward the most important of all the 39 Clues. Recovering or reproducing the metal pole would take only a little longer.

  A shadow fell across the old man's shoulder.

  "I'll take that," a voice said behind him.

  And then a hand reached out to grab the computer disk.

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  CHAPTER 17

  Nellie squealed the tires as she rounded the corner.

  "Left! Left! Drive on the left side!" Dan yelled at her.

  "Oh, right," Nellie said. She swerved back into her lane, barely missing a parked car.

  "How'd you know where to find us?" Amy asked.

  "I've been hanging around you two goobers practically twenty-four/seven for
more than a month," Nellie said. "I can tell when you're trying to keep a secret. You had 'We're planning to sneak back into the church' written all over your faces."

  Amy slumped in her seat.

  "Everybody knew we were planning to sneak back into the church," she muttered. "They were just pretending not to."

  "As Shakespeare himself would say, 'All the world's a stage,'" Nellie said. She peered into her rearview mirror. "Wow. I have to hand it to Hamilton. He's practically keeping up."

  Amy whirled around in her seat. Hamilton was running behind their car, only four or five lengths

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  back. If Nellie had to stop for a red light or a stop sign, he'd catch them.

  "Should I wait for him?" Nellie asked, slowing slightly.

  Amy saw another hulking figure striding alongside Hamilton.

  "No! His dad's with him!" she shrieked.

  Nellie whipped around another corner.

  "So," she said. "You got a destination in mind or do you just want me to keep going with the evasive driving?"

  "Back to the hotel to pick up our stuff," Amy said. "And then-"

  "Been there, done that," Nellie said.

  She took a hand off the steering wheel to point at the backseat and floor. For the first time, Amy noticed that Saladin's cat carrier and Nellie's bag were right beside her.

  "As soon as I got away from Alistair, I packed up and checked out," Nellie said. "Then I headed toward the church. I thought my timing was pretty good, didn't you?" Nellie sounded amazingly casual given that she was practically driving a slalom course around cars parked on either side of the narrow street. "Oh, this is crazy! Eisenhower's waving at us like he thinks we're going to stop!"

  "Get on the highway," Amy said.

  "Toward ... ?" Nellie asked.