The Clockwork Ghost

by Laura Ruby

  “Yeah, one that we missed,” said Theo.

  “Till now,” Jaime said.

  They wrapped the leather around the upper part of Jaime’s arm, then his bedpost, then Theo’s leg, then Tess’s. They tried some scraps of wood that Jaime’s grandmother had stacked in the guest room closet. But with each thing they tried, the letters remained a jumble of letters.

  “She’s got some more stuff back here,” Jaime said, digging around. Then he yelped and pulled his hand back. A silverfish skittered out of the pile and across the floor, scuttling under the bed.

  “UGH,” Jaime said. “I hate those things.”

  “Me too,” said Tess. “They eat book bindings.”

  “And dandruff,” Theo added.

  Jaime made a gagging noise. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Those things are everywhere,” Theo said.

  “Let’s get out of here anyway,” Jaime said.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Somewhere where I can dream of a world free of dandruff-eating fish-bugs.”

  Theo thought the design of the bugs was rather elegant, and admired how quickly they moved, but also thought that mentioning this to Jaime right now might not be the best idea. Tess suggested they get some pizza for lunch, a much better idea. The three of them left the building and went to the pizza place on the corner, where they devoured a whole pie and two calzones by themselves. Then they took the train back to Aunt Esther’s place in Queens. Which probably had way more silverfish than Jaime’s building, another thing Theo didn’t mention.

  When they got off the train in Queens, the sun was hot and bright in the sky, covering everything in a kind of golden haze. Kids were playing in the parks and parking lots; parents and teenagers chatted and laughed on stoops. The fire department had opened a hydrant, and a group of little boys ran screaming through the spray. A man in an exo suit clomped down the sidewalk, but stopped to help another man carry a couch into an apartment building. The exos were huge and clumsy, and it was difficult to maneuver in them, but Theo knew that one day, someone would develop a suit just as light as clothes, or maybe lighter. One day, people might have exos installed just under the skin, so that that they could lift ten times more and run ten times faster. Faster, even, than a silverfish.

  Since none of them wanted to rot inside on a day like this, they sat at Aunt Esther’s small patio in the backyard. Jaime took Ono out of his pocket and set him in the middle of the table. Lance brought them a tray of cookies and milk, and for a little while, they all pretended that nobody’s pets were missing and there was no puzzle to solve. Theo wasn’t sure what he wanted out of the puzzle anymore. It wasn’t to save his home; his home was here now. And though he still felt a little thrill every time they worked out a clue, he also felt a little chill. He had seen how dangerous, how destructive the Cipher could be. Who knows what else it had up its sleeve?

  At this thought, Theo jammed a whole cookie in his mouth. He was thinking like Tess.

  “Theo, maybe take human bites?” said Tess.

  “What?”

  “You weren’t listening, were you?”

  “I was listening.”

  “What was I saying, then?”

  “These cookies could use a touch of salt,” said Theo.

  “I did not say that.”

  “No, I’m saying that. These cookies could use a touch of salt.”

  “Don’t tell the suit of armor that,” Jaime said.

  “You’ve been watching those baking shows again, haven’t you?” Tess said, pointing at him with a shard of cookie.

  “They’re informative,” Theo said.

  “As I was saying,” Tess apparently continued, “Aunt Esther has a bunch of foam cylinders in the attic. All different sizes. We could try those.”

  “Good idea. Let’s do that after we finish the cookies,” Jaime said.

  “If we keep eating them, Lance will just keep baking them,” said Theo.

  “And this is a problem for you?” Jaime said. He turned in the direction of the kitchen window. “THANK YOU, LANCE. THESE COOKIES ARE PERFECT—THEY DON’T NEED SALT OR ANYTHING.”

  “Funny,” said Theo. It was. Also funny, when Jaime wrapped the leather strap around Ono’s middle, and Ono kept trying to back out of it, like Nine when Tess would put a hat on her.

  So all of them were surprised when Ono suddenly grew about a foot wider—Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap!—and then his regular size again. The leather puddled around his feet. He tried to step over it, tripped, and fell.

  “Oh no,” he said.

  “Oh yes!” said Jaime.

  “Ono can be our scytale,” Theo said.

  Jaime set Ono upright. “Do you want to be our scytale?”

  “Oh no?” said Ono.

  “Just do what you did before. We’re going to wrap this around you, and when we tell you, get a little wider. But just a little. Not all at once. You get me?” said Jaime.

  “Land of Kings,” Ono said. He stood still as Jaime wound the leather strip around him once again. But this time, he grew only a block at a time.

  Theo laid his cheek on the table in order to read the characters. “A little more,” Theo said.

  Snap!

  “More,” said Theo.

  Snap!

  “More.”

  Snap! Snap!

  “That’s it,” said Theo. “There it is.”

  Jaime picked up the little robot and held it on its back. Now the characters on the leather strip were aligned horizontally:

  Elder brother hides the clue in the Smallpox Hospital red on blue.

  “The Smallpox Hospital, red on blue.” Tess said. “What smallpox hospital? And what’s red on blue? And which brother? Are we talking about Theodore Morningstarr? And why are they getting so rhyme-y all of a sudden?”

  Theo pulled on his lip, let go. “There was a smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island, but I think they moved it in the 1850s.”

  “They moved the whole building?” said Jaime.

  “Well,” said Theo.

  They looked it up on Jaime’s phone. “‘One of the city’s few landmarked ruins,’” Tess read, “‘the hospital is often referred to as “the Renwick Ruin,” one that could be imagined as the setting for a nineteenth-century Gothic novel.’”

  The ruin in the picture did look like something out of the nineteenth century. Like someone dropped an old European castle on an island in New York.

  “‘The ruin is currently undergoing a five-million-dollar restoration.’” Tess said.

  “I don’t see anything in there about brothers,” Jaime said. “Do you?

  “Did Theodore have anything to do with building or funding that hospital? Did he have smallpox?”

  “No, no,” said Tess, stabbing at the screen, “this doesn’t work. This particular hospital opened in 1856. That’s too late to have anything to do with the Morningstarrs.”

  “Maybe there’s another smallpox hospital somewhere?” said Jaime. He took the phone from Tess, typed quickly with both thumbs. “It looks like there’s a smallpox hospital on North Brother Island. North meaning ‘above’ or ‘elder’?”

  Tess unwound the leather strip from Ono. “That could be it!”

  “Oh no,” said Ono.

  “You’re right about that,” Jaime said. “We can’t get to North Brother Island.”

  “Why not? Isn’t there a ferry or something?”

  “No,” said Jaime.

  “A water taxi.”

  “No.”

  “We could rent a boat, if we could get someone to do it for us. Though that’s going to cost a fortune. I have some money I saved up. Not sure it will be enough.”

  “No.”

  “No?” Tess said. “What do you mean, no?”

  “There are no ferries. No water taxis. No boats. No nothing. It’s been abandoned for a hundred years. It’s a bird sanctuary now.” Jaime held up the phone, so Theo and Tess could see. “It says right here on the website. Vi
sitors are forbidden.”

  “Where are visitors forbidden?”

  They all turned to see Aunt Esther standing in the yard, waiting for an answer.

  As it turned out, Aunt Esther didn’t believe that people should be forbidden to visit public lands anywhere on God’s green earth, if those visitors were responsible, cleaned up after themselves, didn’t break anything or take advantage of anyone.

  Which was how they ended up in a small solarboat speeding toward North Brother Island, a cool spray dampening their hair and skin. Aunt Esther was wearing wading boots and had packed her fishing rod and tackle.

  “I didn’t know you had a boat,” said Tess.

  “Oh, this isn’t mine. I’m just borrowing this from a friend. She won’t mind.”

  Despite the splash of the water and the rush of the wind, Aunt Esther barely had to raise her voice, the solar engine was so quiet.

  “One does miss the open ocean, though. I haven’t been out on the ocean since I was the captain of the Mrs. Cheng. There’s nothing like tuna fishing to get one’s blood up. But we must make do with what we have. There are plenty of fish by North Brother Island.”

  “You’ve been here before?” Tess said.

  “Many times,” said Aunt Esther. “The island has quite a history.”

  Jaime took off his glasses to wipe away the water droplets. “What kind of history?”

  “The Dutch India Company claimed North and South Brother Islands in the 1600s, though they didn’t have a right to claim anything, as you know. The islands were called De Gesellen then. ‘The Companions.’ A friendly name, though this hasn’t always been a friendly place. Mary Mallon was confined here for the last twenty years of her life.”

  “Mary Mallon?” Tess said.

  “You might know her as Typhoid Mary. First documented asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. She worked as a cook. Sickened many people when she unwittingly passed the disease on to them. But she never got sick herself, and she refused to believe she was infected. So she kept moving from place to place, making people ill, until she was quarantined here.”

  The two islands—the companions—came into sharper view. Theo was good at being alone, liked being alone, but he couldn’t imagine being trapped on a tiny island for twenty years with only doctors and nurses and birds for company.

  “And that’s not the only tragedy,” said Aunt Esther. “In 1905, over one thousand people died when a steamship caught fire near the shore. They say that their ghosts haunt the island.”

  Tess’s eyes went dark and wide as Underway tunnels. Aunt Esther laughed, her gray hair gleaming silver in the afternoon light.

  “Oh, the ghosts aren’t scary. They’re just sad.”

  “I’d be angry,” said Tess.

  Aunt Esther regarded her. “Yes, I rather think you would.”

  Tess blinked, because of the spray or because she didn’t know how to take Aunt Esther’s comment. But with North Brother Island getting closer and closer, Tess stopped asking questions. The island was lush and green with trees and bushes, with just a few smokestacks or towers peeking through the top of the nearly impenetrable canopy. Remnants of what must have been a dock stuck like wooden teeth from the water.

  Aunt Esther slowly maneuvered the boat toward the shore, where some small part of the dock still looked intact.

  “Are you going to let us off on the dock?” Theo said.

  “What dock? Oh! That? That won’t bear your weight. We have to wreck ourselves on the beach. Well, not really. Mostly. A minor little shipwreck, that’s all.”

  Tess tried to say something, but that something turned into a strangled yelp as Aunt Esther jammed the nose of the boat onto the scruffy sand. The boat bobbed and groaned in the water. Theo held on so that he wasn’t pitched over the side. It wasn’t deep, but something about the island was creeping him out already, and they hadn’t even begun their search.

  “I’ll let you off here. You have”—Aunt Esther checked her wristwatch—“two hours to explore while I do a little fishing. Then, I expect you back at this very place. Don’t be late! If we get caught, we’ll be arrested!” She said this with gusto, as if she’d been waiting for the right opportunity to be arrested and this was it.

  Theo, Tess, and Jamie carefully climbed out of the boat and onto the sand, sloshing water all over their sneakers. Theo grabbed the pack that Esther had given them, filled with snacks, water, bug spray, a compass, and a rudimentary map of the island she’d printed off the web.

  “Thanks, Aunt Esther,” Theo said. “We really appreciate it.”

  “Of course!” Aunt Esther said. “Take lots of pictures, don’t bother the nesting herons, don’t eat any berries, and don’t sit in any poison ivy. I did that once when I was doing field work for the museum. Awful. Give us a push, please!”

  The three of them pushed the boat back into deeper water. Aunt Esther saluted, and turned the boat around. She followed the curve of the island and soon disappeared.

  “Do you think she meant she ate berries or sat in poison ivy, or both?” said Tess, once she was out of earshot.

  “Hard to know with Aunt Esther,” said Theo.

  Jaime consulted his phone. “Your aunt named her tuna boat after the most successful female pirate in history. Cheng I Sao ran a whole fleet of pirate ships and had a code of conduct for her pirates. They weren’t allowed to abuse female prisoners. If they did, they would have their heads chopped off.”

  “That sounds like someone Aunt Esther would like,” Tess said.

  “Except for the whole pirating part,” Theo said. “She doesn’t approve of stealing.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to steal anything, then,” said Jaime. He sealed his phone in a waterproof bag and put it in his pocket next to Ono, who beeped irritably. Then they turned to face the woods. From the pack, Theo pulled out the map. The map marked the general location of several buildings on the island, but it didn’t say which building was which.

  Jaime pointed at one of the structures. “Let’s start with this one.”

  “Why that one?” Theo asked.

  “We have to start somewhere.”

  It was as good a choice as any.

  Stepping into the dense thicket of trees was like stepping into another country. Outside the forest, it was hot and dry and bright; inside, it was cool and damp and dim. Moss covered the bases of the trees; mushrooms fanned themselves against rotted logs. Branches and leaves cracked underfoot.

  “This is amazing!” said Theo.

  He had taken only a few dozen steps when he felt the ground give way, dropping him into the darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Jaime

  Theo was there, and then he wasn’t.

  “Theo?” Jaime said. “Theo!”

  A thin voice seemed to warble up from the center of the earth. “Help! I’m down here!”

  Jaime and Tess dropped to the ground. In the middle of a pile of leaves and vines, there was a dark hole—some kind of utility shaft or sewer—that dropped straight down into the dirt, all the way into the bedrock, for all Jaime knew. Theo was hanging from the strap of the backpack, which had luckily gotten caught on a jagged pipe jutting from the edge. Unluckily, the strap was in the process of tearing. It made a small but terrifying shhhhhhh sound as it ripped.

  Tess and Jaime plunged their hands into the shaft and caught Theo’s arm. They managed to haul him out just before the strap on the backpack tore.

  “Thanks,” said Theo, panting into the dirt. “That was close.”

  “Yeah,” Tess said, panting just as hard.

  “Everybody watch where they’re walking,” Jaime said. “This whole place could be riddled with these open sewers.”

  They dusted themselves off and kept walking, this time pushing the leaves and branches aside to make sure their feet would land on solid ground. They didn’t have to walk for long when the ruins of the first building appeared like something out of a fairy tale. Or a horror movie. The building
was brick and stone, but it was half-swallowed up by the thick green forest. Ivy climbed over the bricks, branches burst from the windows. The front door was long gone, and the house stood open like the mouth of a sleeping beast.

  Who was hungrier, the house or the woods?

  “Wow,” said Jaime.

  “It’s cool, isn’t it?” said Theo.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Jaime said.

  Tess flicked her braid from her shoulder so it flowed down her back. “I wonder what it is. Was. I mean, who lived here?”

  “Ghosts,” said Jaime.

  “Let’s take a look,” Theo said. He marched toward the house as if he hadn’t just fallen down a shaft and nearly died.

  “You have no sense of self-preservation, you know that? Haven’t you ever watched a scary movie?” Jaime shouted at his back, but Theo was already at the front door.

  “He does have a sense of self-preservation,” Tess said. “But it doesn’t always kick in when he’s curious.”

  “Great,” said Jaime. “I hope there aren’t any bears in that building.”

  “I think Aunt Esther would have told us if there were bears on the island,” said Tess. She imitated Aunt Esther’s no-nonsense tone. “And remember not to pet the bears! I tried once when I was a tour guide at Yosemite and the darn bear bit my arm off!”

  “And that’s how I got this metal hand!” Jaime added.

  Tess laughed. It was a high, pure sound that echoed through the dense trees. A flock of birds hidden in the leaves shot up and broke through to the sky. Tess slapped a hand over her mouth.

  “I hope those weren’t the herons that Aunt Esther was talking about,” Jaime said, and Tess laughed again, the sound muffled against her fingers.

  They followed Theo into the house. As soon as they entered, Jaime could easily imagine ghosts lurking in every corner. Sad ones, angry ones, all kinds of ghosts. There were books and papers all over the floor of the front hall. Dust motes danced in the musty air. A crumbling spiral staircase led to . . . well, Jaime had no idea where the stairs led to and he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.

  Theo, who had walked ahead, called back to them. “Come here. Take a look at this.”