Secrets of Stone and Sea, page 5
Grandma nodded. “Lots of rituals involve blood.”
“And special locations,” Mom added. “Is that Point a place of power, maybe even considered sacred?”
Kai and Peter glanced at each other. “It’s supposed to be haunted,” Kai said.
Dad leaned over the table. “Walk us through what you did. Exactly what you did.”
So Kai and Peter explained everything. How they played Frisbee and how Kai got hit. What Todd said about the lighthouse. How they got hot dogs and went to the Point. Embarrassed, Kai mentioned how Peter wiped his sweaty face on the hot dog and how Kai sneezed blood on it, and how they tossed it into the ocean.
At this, their dad hissed. “An offering,” he said.
Kai shook his head. “It was just a gross hot dog,” he said. “Who’d want that?”
“A gross hot dog covered with your blood and sweat,” Dad said. “Blood and salt have power in a lot of folklore.”
“Besides,” Grandma added. “You’d be surprised what passes as an offering. In ancient Greece, the people would offer bones and fat, the leftovers of the animals they ate.” She smiled. “It makes sense if Poseidon is who you summoned. I suppose a hot dog is basically the unwanted parts of a pig.”
Kai decided he would never eat a hot dog again.
“And bread, like a hot dog bun, is also a common ritual element,” Mom added.
Was that all that happened? Surely people got cuts and tossed food in the ocean. What made their “ritual” different?
“So we went to a place of power and made an offering that included blood,” Peter said. “But don’t rituals need, like, words? A spoken spell, or something?”
Peter had a point. They may have made an offering, but they hadn’t recited some magic words.
“What did you say? Repeat everything,” Mom said.
As Peter struggled to remember and recite what he and Kai had been saying at the Point, Kai scanned back over the day. He stuck on the little girls jumping rope. One poor sailor dressed in red, brought some pork and brought some bread. They weren’t wearing red, but that could mean the blood. Pork and bread? The hot dog. But did the girls mention any kind of summoning words? He couldn’t remember.
“Grandma, have you ever heard of a jump rope rhyme that talks about a sailor dressed in red?” Kai asked.
Grandma stopped interrogating Peter. “A little. We used to jump to it when I was a girl. I think I can remember it:
“One poor sailor dressed in red,” she said, tapping her foot.
“Brought some pork and brought some bread.
Fell asleep out on the stone,
When he woke up, not alone.
Made a new friend, and then,
Had to do it over again!”
Dad leaned back. “That does sound like our ritual. But it’s not complete. It does remind me of … something.” He turned to Grandma. “Isn’t there an old chantey from Seaspire? Something about the ocean rising?”
She nodded and started to sing, and Dad joined in:
Rise, the ocean rise,
Rise and greet the shore.
With red and bread, he feeds on the dead,
And meets you at the door.
“I always thought that song was nonsense,” Dad said. “I mean, isn’t there a verse about the sailor coming to the point with ‘his own sorry self by his side’? How could that even be possible?”
Kai sat up. “His own self? You mean, like an identical twin?”
As Dad and Grandma fell silent, Kai watched the pattern form. It was coming together. Somehow, he and Peter, being twins, had fulfilled part of the ritual’s requirements. They’d used blood and salt and bread and meat and made an offering to some sea creature. But was that all it took? How would the creature know what they wanted?
“Rise, ocean,” Peter said suddenly. Kai looked at him, and Peter said, “That song. It tells the ocean to rise. I told you to get up, Kai. I used your name.”
Kai felt numb. “My name means ‘ocean.’” He ran his tongue over his chipped tooth. “It was an accident. We didn’t mean to raise that thing.”
Peter was scowling. “Why twins?” he asked. “Why was that part of the ritual?”
Shrugs all around. No one knew.
Dad had more pressing questions. “Why’s it attacking? You did nothing to it. If anything, you helped it.”
Kai felt chilled. “I don’t know.”
Why was it attacking them? It had seemed calm, even disoriented, when it first arrived, but it became angry so quickly. Kai had no idea why it was causing rainstorms and Saint Elmo’s fire and graves to float out of the ground.
But the why didn’t matter. “It’s attacking us,” Kai said. “That’s what matters. And we need to make it stop.”
“At this rate, it’s just going to get worse.” Sophie’s arms were tucked against her chest. She stared past the computer screen.
With a jolt, Kai remembered. It was going to get worse. “That thing said he’d flood the land when the moon lent him her strength.” The moon. Didn’t it create tides? Again, a pattern was emerging. “When’s the next full moon?”
“In one week,” Grandma said. She squeezed her sword cane.
Peter slumped in his chair. “We brought back a sea monster, and in one week the world will flood. Because of us.”
Kai felt like he’d been pounded in the stomach by a tidal wave.
Mom’s image flickered, and the laptop let out an electronic shriek. “Sorry,” she said, her voice crackling. “The storm is getting worse. I have to get off tonight. Kai, Peter, it’s going to be okay. I’ll do some research, and we’ll figure it out. It’s going to be o—”
Mom vanished.
The kitchen was quiet except for the return of the pounding rain. Then Dad turned and ran out the door.
Did he just do that? Kai looked at Peter, and then back at the door. “Come on,” he said to Peter, grabbing his arm. When Peter resisted, Kai added, “We can’t let him be alone out there!”
Groaning, Peter followed Kai into the storm.
The gentle rain had once again turned into a downpour the boys had to blink out of their eyes. Kai splashed through the flooded street, searching for his dad and hoping he wouldn’t see a corpse boating down in a floating coffin.
“There!” Peter yelled. Dad was sloshing toward the beach.
“Oh no!” Still towing Peter, Kai charged after their dad. “Dad! Stop!”
Their dad couldn’t hear them. The rain drummed and thunder rolled as he ran onto the beach and to the edge of the gnawing waves. “Hey!” Kai heard him yell. “You! The sentient embodiment of the Sea or whatever you are! Come out if you’re really there.”
The sea roared like a tiger. Waves leaped higher, forming the shape of the creature. One, like a tentacle, surged across the sand, knocking Dad off-balance.
Kai raced toward his father and grabbed his arm. Peter did the same. Another wave came, and this time, in the roar, Kai heard, “You can’t stop me.”
Another wave washed out the sand under Kai’s feet, knocking him into the surf. Peter yelled as another white, foaming wave tumbled him to the ground. They were caught in a current as strong as chains, being dragged toward the raging ocean.
Toward a monster.
Dad acted quickly. Dropping to his knees, he grabbed their arms and hauled them out from the creature’s control. Kai groaned. The ocean’s pull was as strong as iron.
But Dad won. He towed Kai and Peter away as waves continued to lash the shore, trying to capture them in its tides again. He didn’t stop until they were back on the street.
“I’m sorry,” Dad gasped. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Kai said. His legs had been scraped raw by the sand. So had Peter’s.
“No, it’s not.” Dad, shaking, hugged both boys and pulled them up. “You could have been dragged out to sea. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have … let’s go home, where it’s safe. Now.”
Dad steered Kai and Peter back through the flood toward Grandma’s house. Kai threw a glance over his shoulder at the ocean. Its surges roared with anger, baring white-capped waves like teeth. Home might be safe now, but Kai knew that, for him and Peter, no place would be safe.
And at the next full moon, nowhere on land would be, for anyone.
CHAPTER 7
STORM TRACKING
PETER
The next morning, Sophie was waiting at the breakfast table wearing her pink work shirt. A dirty dish, her laptop, and an open textbook sat next to her. “Raise any more monsters last night?” she teased as Peter trudged past on his way to the cupboard.
“Yep, and they caught me and ate me. Now I’m a ghost. Can’t you tell?”
Peter hadn’t slept well. All night, his dreams had been filled with slimy undersea creatures and waves flooding through the streets of Seaspire. They may as well have been more monsters raised from the deep. And he wasn’t in the mood to banter with Sophie, especially not when he still felt guilty.
“It’s going to be all right,” Sophie said. “Of course it will.” She returned to outlining her chemistry lesson, but only typed a few lines before slamming the laptop shut.
Peter grabbed a box of frosted cornflakes and wandered to the bowl cupboard.
“Sweetie, don’t bother,” Grandma said. She was by the stove, loading eggs into the copper shield-plate. A stack of bacon was already beside it. “Cereal won’t be enough, not for the big day you have ahead of you.”
“Big day?” It was Kai, swooping into the kitchen. “Hey, those smell great!”
As Kai scooped a pile of eggs and bacon, Peter frowned at his grandmother.
She limped over to the table, leaving her cane at the counter. “You’ll need to stop that sea creature before he floods Seaspire,” she said. “Well, the storm has passed, so today’s the best time to start.”
“Start?” Sophie tapped the closed laptop. “You mean, today? Right now?”
“No better time,” Grandma said. “The signs seem to be clear. Why wait?”
Dad came into the kitchen. When he saw the heaping shield, he groaned. “Mom, why?”
“The real question, as always, is why not? The shield works beautifully as a platter.” Grandma waved something that might have been a spatula, but, with her, you never could tell. “Kai, honey, get your brother and father something to eat.”
Kai rolled his eyes, but loaded up a couple of more plates. “You don’t want to start now?” he asked Sophie.
Sophie tilted her head. “I don’t know. I just think we’re rushing into this. Why not hang back and look at our options?”
“Such as?” Dad asked.
Sophie squirmed. “I’m just saying there’s a lot we don’t know. How are we supposed to stop this thing? If it really is some all-powerful sea entity there’s no way we have a chance.” She ran a finger along the side of her plate. In a quieter voice, she said, “Maybe we should just get out of town while we still can.”
“Sophie has a point,” Peter said.
Kai glared at Peter. “There’s got to be some clue we can follow. I mean, I can read any language, including Atlantean. Why would I get that power if we were all doomed to drown?”
“Maybe it was just a side effect,” Sophie muttered, and then stood to take her plate to the sink.
Peter didn’t know. In fact, there was so much they didn’t know. How could they get started, like Grandma wanted to, when they didn’t even have enough info to make a plan?
“Look,” he piped up. “Maybe all we can do is leave the coast. I mean, there’s a lot of land. I’m sure this creature can’t flood it all.”
Kai scowled at him. “So you want people to drown?”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” Peter stopped and strung together his thoughts. “I’m just saying that we have no direction. We don’t know why the creature was so angry at us, just that it was and it attacked our town.”
Peter’s arms felt heavy. It had been made abundantly clear that he and Kai were responsible for all this trouble, by raising the monster. And now that Kai could read Atlantean, it was also clear that they were still involved, no matter what Peter thought about the subject. No doubt his family blamed them for taking a nice family vacation and turning it into a nightmare.
But his family wasn’t looking at him with blame. Even Kai had gone thoughtful. “I wonder where the storm went,” he said. “It hit us, because the Sea was mad at us, sure, but it also hit Mom on the North Sea. Where Atlantis used to be.”
“Maybe the storm is hitting places that were important to it,” Grandma said.
Peter caught on. “Do you think it attacked anywhere else?”
“Let’s find out.”
Silently, Sophie opened her laptop and pulled up local weather reports. It didn’t take long to discover that when the storm that struck Seaspire had lulled, it traveled down the coast and hit another location, raging with violence that made the rainfall in Seaspire look tame.
Peter looked at the location. “What’s Dogtown?”
“Dogtown?” Kai looked at his dad. “Is the sheriff a German shepherd?”
“No, but he’s great at sniffing out crime,” Dad responded.
“Boys, please.” Grandma snatched up Sophie’s laptop and after a few moments, turned it to face the boys.
Peter looked at the screen. He saw old photos of huge boulders with phrases like KINDNESS and BE ON TIME carved into their sides, but also newer pictures, from the local news, of trees cracked and toppled, covered with what looked like seaweed.
Their new friend had been there, all right.
“Doesn’t look like any dogs I’ve ever seen,” Kai said.
“Dogtown is on Cape Ann, Massachusetts,” Grandma said. “And it’s not a town for dogs, Kai, for crying out loud. It’s an old, abandoned settlement.”
“So no one was hurt in the storm if it’s abandoned,” Peter said as Kai muttered something about “just trying to be funny.”
Dad pushed his eggs around his plate, and Peter’s stomach twisted. He imagined Dad falling into the water. What if the creature had wanted to carry Dad out to sea? What if Dad had been lost, because of Peter and Kai?
“We’re sorry,” he said. “We didn’t mean to start all of this.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Dad said. “You or Kai. If anyone knew that you could raise an ancient sea god by throwing a hot dog into the water by the Spire, they didn’t tell anyone. You couldn’t have known.”
Grandma nodded. “And you didn’t start this, boys. The Atlanteans did when they sealed the Sea up at the Point. You won’t have to end it alone. We’ll be with you. Starting with Dogtown.” Grandma shook her head at the news images of the storm-wrecked Dogtown. “It’s a shame you’ll see it in this state. It’s an interesting piece of local history. Apparently the town was thought to be a haven for witches.”
Kai looked up. “Witches?”
“No such thing,” Sophie said.
“Would have said the same thing about sea monsters yesterday, but here we are,” Dad said.
Interesting, Peter thought, that a place with a strange history would be attacked by the monster, specifically. What was hiding there?
“Well, either way, Dogtown was abandoned,” Grandma added.
Kai grabbed the laptop and did a quick search. “Apparently, decades later, a guy named Roger Babson had these boulders carved with moral statements.”
“Maybe he sensed something spooky about that place,” Peter said.
“And now spooky things are happening there again,” Kai added. “If that creature is creating the storms, then maybe there’s something at Dogtown it really doesn’t like.”
“Or does like.” Grandma sat down with her own heaping plate. “Which is why we need our strength if we’re going to visit Dogtown today and get some answers.”
What?
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Peter said. They had no plan. They’d already set this mess in motion without even realizing it. What if this time, one of them got hurt worse?
“I second that,” Dad said. “The boys already survived one encounter with that thing. We can’t drag them into another. I’ll go, alone. You all stay here.”
Kai raised his arms. “We’re involved! That thing knows what we look like. Besides, what if there’s an inscription written in Atlantean? Or in any other language. Unless one of you got a crash course overnight, you’ll need me.”
As Dad searched for a way to counter Kai’s logic, Sophie jumped in. “Well, count me out.”
Peter stared. It was unlike Sophie to stay home when something big was happening.
Kai noticed, too. “Why?”
Sophie leaned against the wall, her gaze slipping to the floor. “I have too much to do,” she mumbled. “And you won’t need me. Not if you’re all going.”
“But we’d want you there.”
Sophie paled. “I just can’t do it today. You know, with the tutoring and the job and everything.”
Kai scowled. “And that’s more important than saving the world?”
Sophie raised her hands. “No, it’s just—you don’t know that you’ll find anything. Someone should stay home. Hold down the fort, right?”
Something was up with Sophie. But Peter couldn’t tell what, exactly.
“Fine,” Kai said. “But we’re taking your drone.”
“What?” Sophie’s drone was one of her most precious possessions. It had a camera and everything.
“We could use eyes in the sky,” Dad said, sounding tired. “We’ll need it, Sophie.” After Sophie, just as weary, agreed, Dad continued, “Okay, Kai, you boys are coming. But at my word, we leave. Got it?”
Grandma stood up, rubbing her hands. “I’d better get the Damascus dagger. It won’t want to stay home for this.”
“Mom, your leg. And won’t the Cleanup Committee need you?”
“My leg is strong enough for this, and the girls can manage the park without me,” Grandma said. Her face softened into somberness. “Seaspire needs this more.”
“I don’t mind staying home with Sophie,” Peter said as Grandma hurried out of the room. After all, he couldn’t read Atlantean, and the sea creature didn’t seem to notice a difference between him and Kai. There was no point in his going to Dogtown, and if he stayed home, he couldn’t make a mistake and accidentally cause more harm.
