A Perilous Journey of Danger and Mayhem #2 Read online

  Dedication

  To my Aunt Jo Ann,

  who first introduced me to travel

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I

  1. Pick a Peck of Pepper’s Pickles . . . Please: New York City, September 12, 1883

  2. Cassandra the Guildswoman

  3. The Secret Ship

  4. Someone to Watch Over Them

  5. Scientists and Muckrakers

  6. Newsworthy News

  7. The Truth Is Out There!

  8. Trust No One

  9. No News Is Bad News

  10. Onward!

  Part II

  11. Imperfect Storm

  12. Sirens and Sea Dogs

  13. Deals and Machinations

  14. Man Overboard!

  15. The Investigators’ Guild

  16. Interrogation!

  17. “And the Culprit Is . . .”

  18. Floating Prison

  19. Tropical Getaway

  20. Tourists Trapped

  Part III

  21. Breaking the Ice

  22. Secret of the Cave

  23. Into the Light!

  24. The World Below

  25. Lake of Doom!

  26. Phantoms!

  27. Showdown at the Space Rock

  28. Never Give Up

  29. Homeward Bound

  Epilogue

  Afterword: What’s Real and What’s Not in ‘The Treacherous Seas’

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Books by Christopher Healy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  From the Journals of Alexander Graham Bell

  September 12, 1883

  Dear Diary,

  There’s nothing like the feeling of the wind in one’s beard! As I write this, I am speeding southward on my newest creation, the AquaZephyr—an oceangoing vessel unlike any other. Our destination: Antarctica! Our objective: Ambr The South Pole! And, yes, also Ambrose Rector. Apprehending that diabolical genius is the part of this mission I prefer not to dwell on. But we know that the villain is also sailing for the uncharted southern continent and we must stop him before he obtains more of the supernaturally powerful “space rocks” that fueled the strange and terrible machines he used to take over the World’s Fair last May.

  Darn you, Rector! Why must you ruin everything?

  September 15, 1883

  Dear Diary,

  How I wish I could turn back time and reverse my decision to send Rector on his first fateful expedition to the Antarctic years ago. In my defense, however, the man was just a hapless, lack-talent lab assistant back then. He managed to ruin every project he touched. He once caused an explosion that destroyed half my workshop. And all I’d asked him to do was polish a spoon!

  I had to do something before Rector ended up burning my lab to the ground. But firing the son of the Inventors’ Guild’s founder wasn’t an option. So I sent him on a long boat ride to Antarctica. How was I to know that, while he was down there, he would find a magical meteorite, be transformed into an evil genius, murder the entire crew, and then return to New York in my stolen ship to exact revenge? Seriously? Who could have seen that coming?

  September 21, 1883

  Dear Diary,

  The AquaZephyr is operating at record-breaking speeds! Eight days out and we’ve already left the Florida coast in our wake! Not too shabby for a ship constructed in a mere six weeks. I daresay that despite Rector’s two-month head start, we stand a chance of overtaking the scoundrel before he reaches Antarctica.

  My word, this Caribbean weather can change in a heartbeat. In the time it has taken me to write this, the skies have shifted from bright blue to slate gray. And the wind! I can barely hold down the page to write. Best to head belowdecks before the rain makes my ink run.

  September 21, 1883

  Dear Diary WHOMEVER FINDS THIS:

  SEND HELP! WE’VE BEEN BOARDED BY PIRATES!

  Part I

  1

  Pick a Peck of Pepper’s Pickles . . . Please

  New York City, September 12, 1883

  “BOOP! BOOP! BOOP!”

  Emmett Lee screamed and fell off his bed, accidentally tearing down the sheet that hung between his cot and Molly Pepper’s.

  “Emmmmmmmett,” Molly moaned, wrapping her pillow around her head. “What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing?” Emmett sputtered. “Robot’s the one making the noise.” Beside his bed stood a tall metallic man with a scuffed oil-barrel chest, clunky aluminum-tube arms, and a rather dapper straw hat. The automaton’s handlebar mustache spun like a pinwheel as he continued to boop. “Robot, please stop,” Emmett moaned. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I was trying to anticipate your needs,” Robot said. His trap-hinged jaw sometimes clicked as he spoke, but, as he’d been originally created to sing at parties, he had a delightful tenor voice.

  “And you thought we needed to be startled out of a deep sleep?” Emmett asked.

  “I thought you needed to be awakened,” said Robot.

  Molly squinted at the clock on the wall and, giving up, slipped on her eyeglasses. “Oh, bother beans! It’s seven twenty!”

  “That is what I was going to say,” said Robot. “Except for the ‘bother beans’ part. Should I start saying ‘bother beans’?”

  Emmett double-checked the clock. “The shop’s supposed to be open already! And we’re going to be late for school! Okay. Okay. Don’t panic. We can figure this out. The walk to school takes, what, a half hour?”

  Molly leapt from her bed. “Robot, lights!”

  Robot began igniting the gas lamps that sat atop teetering piles of books, while Molly shook her mother, who lay snoring on yet another cot only two feet away. “Mother!”

  “Was somebody booping?” Cassandra mumbled.

  “The booper was I, Mrs. Pepper,” said Robot.

  Molly ripped the blanket from her mother and shouted, “We were supposed to be up an hour and twenty minutes ago! We’re late for everything!”

  “Oh, yes, I almost forgot! We’re late!” Cassandra bounced from her bed onto her tool-strewn workbench (for the bedroom was also the Peppers’ workshop) and ran across the tabletop to a counter stacked with pots, mugs, and cans (for the workshop was also the Peppers’ kitchen). Cassandra often took this route to avoid tripping over the half-built inventions littering the floor of the cramped little room. There were plenty of benefits to living with a brilliant inventor like Cassandra Pepper, but uncluttered living space was not one of them.

  Cassandra hopped down and flipped the toggle on her Brew-Master 1900, which instantly began spouting steam.

  “I’m still doing the math, but I don’t think we have time for coffee,” Emmett said from behind the sheet that Robot helpfully held up for him while he changed into school clothes.

  “There’s always time for coffee,” said Cassandra.

  “Well, let’s see,” said Emmett, misbuttoning his shirt. “If we leave right now and take Bleecker Street to—no, at this hour, we should probably go up West Third, unless—”

  “Robot, can we make it to school on time?” Molly asked, squeezing into her ankle-length black dress.

  “Your average walk to school takes eighteen minutes,” said Robot. “You should arrive for the morning bell if you leave within the next eleven minutes, thirty seconds.”

  “See, plenty of time for a hearty breakfast,” Cassandra said cheerily as she dropped a full loaf of rye into the Mega-Slicifier. With
a grinding noise, the device began shooting thin squares of bread onto the table like a riverboat gambler dealing cards.

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand, though, Mother.” Molly climbed over an open crate of nails while weaving her dark hair into a long braid. “What happened to the clock you built? The alarm didn’t go off.”

  “That’s because I didn’t set it,” Cassandra said, passing a hot mug of coffee to her daughter.

  “You, um, you did this on purpose?” Emmett said. He fell over in a frantic attempt to pull his pants up. “Can I ask why?”

  “Molly said mornings were boring, always the same old routine,” Cassandra explained. “So I decided to spice things up!”

  “Congratulations, you’ve succeeded,” Molly replied as she fed bread slices through the Toastinator with one hand and buttoned her dress with the other. While she didn’t want to say so in front of Emmett, she was genuinely enjoying the frenzy. It wasn’t that she wanted to return to the terror and chaos of last May, when Ambrose Rector and his henchmen, the Green Onion Boys, were constantly trying to kill them, but she had been longing for a little chaos to be thrown back into their lives. Emmett, however . . . Well, Molly was pretty sure that, after years of living on the streets, hiding from Jäger Society goons who wanted to deport him back to his birth country of China, Emmett was fond of finally having a “same old routine.” Moments like these, Molly hoped her friend wasn’t regretting his decision to stay with the Peppers.

  “Get over here and eat, Emmett!” Molly called, sliding aside some loose screws to make space at the worktable (which was also the dining table).

  “I really just want to get to school.” Emmett, fastening his brown tweed vest, stumbled over a partially constructed Multi-Broom PowerSweeper. “It took an escort from government agents to get me into that school in the first place. I’d rather not risk it.”

  “I understand, Emmett, but you’ll be fine as long as we abide by the contract,” Cassandra said as she launched dollops of butter onto the toast with her Pat-a-Pult. “In the meantime, you children are twelve years old—I can’t send you out without a proper morning meal.” She cracked three eggs into the coffee maker and held a bowl by its spout to catch the coffee-speckled yellow mush that spewed forth.

  Molly wasted no time digging into her bowl of slop. “This is surprisingly un-awful,” she said. She flipped open a folded copy of yesterday’s New York Sun. Emmett gave her a sideways look. “Just because we’re late doesn’t mean I can’t be informed,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m only scanning.”

  She took off her glasses, slid them surreptitiously under a napkin, and began reading.

  President Calls Off Search for South Pole

  In the sixty years since a Russian vessel first spotted the mysterious “Seventh Continent of Antarctica,” many intrepid souls have set out in search of the fabled South Pole—which scientists believe to lie deep at the heart of Antarctica’s forbidding, snowcapped landscape. But most are thwarted by the miles-thick ice shelf that surrounds the continent and turn back before even reaching shore. Those who manage to make landfall fare worse. Many expeditions do not return at all.

  Tragically, this appears to be the fate of the research vessel Slush Puppy, America’s most recent attempt at victory in the race to the Pole. The wreckage of the ship washed onto an Argentine beach last week. All crew members are presumed dead.

  The fate of the Slush Puppy signals the end of our Age of Antarctic Exploration, as President Chester A. Arthur today signed an executive order forbidding further attempts to locate the fabled Pole. “Too many fine American lives have been lost,” Arthur said. “It’s not going to happen. We might as well try reaching the moon!” The president then turned his attention to the new set of bronze mustache combs presented to him by the king of (continued on p. 5)

  “Hey, Molly,” Emmett said, wiping his mouth. “I know you like to recap the news for me on the walk to school, but we’re probably going to be running today, so—”

  “That’s okay! Nothing interesting, anyway.” Molly quickly refolded the paper. There was no need to share what she’d just read with a boy whose father died on a failed mission to Antarctica. It was Ambrose Rector who was responsible for Captain Wendell Lee’s death too—though not in the way that Emmett or Cassandra thought he was. They believed that Rector had outright murdered Captain Lee along with the rest of the crew of the Frost Cleaver, but Molly alone knew otherwise. Rector had revealed to her that he’d actually marooned Emmett’s father in Antarctica, leaving the poor man to slowly die of starvation and frostbite. It was, honestly, a much more gruesome death, which was why she’d never told Emmett about it. She struggled over that choice daily, but always came to the same conclusion: Why fill Emmett’s head with images of his father suffering a lonely, painful demise? Emmett’s feelings about his long-gone father were complicated enough as it was. It was better to spare him. She hated Rector for burdening her with this secret—among a million other reasons.

  Molly shivered. There hadn’t been a day since the attack on the World’s Fair that Ambrose Rector hadn’t wormed his way into her head. It didn’t matter that the villain had been spotted fleeing New York Harbor in the Frost Cleaver months ago; she knew he’d return eventually. And with more of his deadly “Ambrosium.”

  Bam! Bam!

  Molly jumped. “Robot, is that you?”

  Robot tilted his head. “That is not me. I am me.”

  “No, the knocking,” Molly said.

  Somebody was pounding on the front door, beyond the tall folding screen that separated the Peppers’ living quarters from the actual pickle shop.

  “We have a customer!” Cassandra announced.

  “I’ll get it!” Molly said.

  “But—school!” Emmett sputtered.

  Molly ducked under the table and squeezed around the screen.

  Unlike the messy rear half of the Peppers’ pickle store, the front half, where customers entered, had not a mote of dust on the floor, nor crumb on the countertop. Not a single drop of brine meandered down the side of a jar. Keeping the shop neat, however, wasn’t difficult when there were generally no pickle purchasers to wait on.

  Molly threw up the sashes and squinted as sunlight burst in, revealing the morning buzz of Thompson Street outside. Jasper Bloom, a stocky, stubble-cheeked young man in gray coveralls, waved at Molly as she unlocked the door. Jasper was a friend—and the Peppers’ only regular customer, which was why she felt bad about the unenthusiastic nod she greeted him with that morning.

  “And a howdy-do to you too, Molly Pepper,” Jasper said, tipping his cap. “I must say I was not expecting to see your charming self here at this hour. Not that I’m displeased, mind you. Although you do have what appears to be muddy eggs on your face. Anyhows, I’m surprised because I was under the impression that you and Emmett left for your daily jaunt to school at seven. Then again, I was also under the impression that this store opened at seven, and yet there I was at 7:27, standing pickle-less in the sun. And doing far too much door knocking. Do you know what all that knocking does to a man’s knuckles, Molly Pepper? It chafes them. I got chafed knuckles now. That sorta thing never used to happen to me when I was an ashman. I’ve gone soft, Molly Pepper. Soft like a puppy’s floppy ear. Do you know what Balthazar Birdhouse would say about these soft, chafed knuckles of mine? No, you don’t—’cause you still never met the man. And that’s a good thing. So, why is it you’re not at school? You’re not sick, are you? ’Cause if you’re sick, I’m not sure you should be handling my pickles.”

  “We’re running late!” Molly blurted, grateful to get a word in before Jasper rattled on for another twenty minutes. “So take your daily pickle and go. No offense.” She plucked a fat garlic dill from a jar and handed it to him in a piece of wax paper.

  “Hmmph, ‘no offense,’” Jasper echoed. “Do you know what I think whenever Balthazar Birdhouse says ‘no offense’? That was a trick question—Balthazar Birdhouse never says ‘n
o offense.’ He just offends you and takes full credit for it. Emmett Lee! You’re here too?”

  “Yes, Jasper.” Emmett had come running from behind the screen with his and Molly’s schoolbags. “And if we don’t leave in the next four minutes, we’re going to miss the bell.”

  “I made them late on purpose,” Cassandra said, poking her head out while she got dressed behind the screen. “To make morning more fun.”

  “Okay, Jasper, pay up so we can get going.” Molly held out her hand.

  “Well, you see, Molly Pepper, that brings up another question,” Jasper said, dropping a nickel into her palm. Molly braced herself. He was going to ask for a job. Every day, he would come in, buy a pickle, and ask for a job. “As you know, I used to be an ashman—probably the best in New York City, if I’m being honest. You might hear differently from Balthazar Birdhouse, but seriously, which of us are you gonna trust? Anyhows, I was relieved of that job after I missed several days of work helping some certain children deal with a certain diabolical madman, and I am now among the unemployed. Although I did keep the uniform—please don’t tell anyone.”

  “Jasper, we’ve told you we can’t afford to pay another worker,” Molly said.

  “Come back tomorrow, Mr. Bloom,” Cassandra said, stepping into the front shop area. Her button-down black dress was askew, but her hair had been pinned up into an almost-neat bun. “Here, Molly, you nearly left without your spectacles again.”

  Jasper perked up. “Tomorrow it is!”

  “Nothing’s going to be different tomorrow,” Molly grumbled as her mother slipped the round wireframes onto her face. “Except maybe I’ll do a better job of misplacing these glasses.”

  “What makes you so certain nothing will change, Molls?” Cassandra grinned coyly.

  Molly narrowed her eyes. “Is there something you’re trying to tell us, Mother?”

  “To hurry off to school?” Emmett tried, nodding hopefully. “That’s what you’re telling us, right? To go to school now?”

  “Oh, I can’t hold it back any longer: Everything is going to change!” Cassandra gleefully exclaimed. “Today is the day the Guild votes!”