House of Secrets (19 page)

“This is from the Walkers! Walk-ers, remember? We’re your friends!” She kept saying the nicest things to him—and then she froze. “Uh-oh. Guys? You might want to see this.”

They all crowded around the window. Fat Jagger wasn’t eating anymore. He was making a huge fist in front of his face. His immense knuckles cracked in succession. He stared dead ahead—

At another colossus striding through the forest. Coming right for them.

“D
o you think he wants our colossus’s food?” Eleanor asked.

“I think he wants his
head
,” said Brendan.

The new colossus didn’t have the kind face that Fat Jagger did. He looked like an all-out bruiser, with a bald, acne-spotted skull, sharp red eyebrows, and a goatee like the devil’s tail. His face was twisted in a furious scowl, and he was snorting, sounding like a wild boar filtered through concert speakers. He used one hand to push the trees aside, while the other bounced a huge boulder in his palm. And he was even bigger than Fat Jagger.

“He’s like a colossus on steroids,” Brendan said.

“Maybe it’ll be okay,” Cordelia said. “Maybe they’ll just talk.”

“Talk? Look at his face! He’s madder than Uncle Pete after two six-packs!”

Eleanor called out the window to the advancing giant, “Mr. Colossus! We don’t mean you any harm! We’re the Walkers! Walk-ers!”

The bald colossus didn’t react—but Fat Jagger looked up.

“Fat Jagger!” Eleanor yelled.

“A touch rude, don’t you think?” asked Will.

“What?”

“The fat bit.”

“Oh, right,” said Eleanor. “Jagger! Sorry about calling you fat. You’re not really fat; you’re just a little . . . husky. That means ‘muscular’ at Target. But you can hear us, right? So listen, this other colossus guy—”

“Let me try,” Brendan said, pushing Eleanor out of the way. “Jagger! This bald dude who needs a Clearasil shampoo? He looks like he wants to mess you up, and we’re kind of in the middle of it, so before you start whaling on each other, could you put us down?”

“Rrrrr?”
Fat Jagger said. There was just enough intelligence in his eyes to register frustration and fear.

“It’s no use,” Brendan said. “I think he’s got a learning disability.”

“You just don’t know how to talk to him!” Eleanor shouted, shoving her brother. “Jagger! If you put the house down, I promise that next time we see each other, I’ll give you
more
food . . .
cooked
food . . .
better, tastier
food! Please?!”

Fat Jagger raised an eyebrow.

“Please?!”
Eleanor pleaded. Jagger nodded . . . and began to lower the house! The Walkers and Will felt themselves descending as if in the world’s largest elevator.

“He’s doing it! He likes me!” Eleanor said, but then her eyes went wide as she saw a huge blur race toward Fat Jagger’s head.

“Jagger! Duck! The mean giant is throwing the boulder!”

Fat Jagger turned in time to see a boulder speeding toward him like a major-league fastball. He kicked his massive skull to the side. It almost looked like a dance move, and Eleanor cheered, but although the boulder missed his face, it hit him in the shoulder, producing a thunderous meaty snap.

With a roar, Fat Jagger grabbed his new injury—and then Eleanor’s view went screwy. All of a sudden instead of peering outside she was looking up at the ceiling as she skidded across the floor. It took her a second to realize that Kristoff House was
turning around in midair . . .
because Fat Jagger had dropped it.

The house fell with sickening speed. Eleanor’s stomach rocketed into her neck as she grabbed the bed. Brendan hugged the Hello Kitty sleeping bag. Cordelia put her head between her knees in the airplane crash position. Will protectively wrapped his arms around her.

And then, suddenly, the house stopped.

It sat smoothly just above the tree canopy. No crash. Only Fat Jagger’s immense eye in the window.

“You caught us!”
Eleanor yelled. She turned to the others. “He caught us with his other hand! He saved us, even though he was hurt!”

“Thank you!” Cordelia said, standing up with Will and Brendan. In response Fat Jagger winked. The folds of his eyelids were so huge that they made a wet click. He gave a wide, sweet smile. His rotting, crooked teeth were the color of moldy candy corn.

“Awww. He’s kinda cute,” Eleanor said.

The others looked at her with incredulous expressions.

“In a smelly Muppet kinda way,” explained Eleanor.

Brendan grinned and approached Fat Jagger to ask him to put them all the way down, but he stopped as a curious shadow (it almost looked like the peaks of giant knuckles) fell across the colossus’s head. Jagger’s smile disappeared. Brendan said “Guys! Look out—”

But he didn’t have time to explain. The bald colossus was punching Fat Jagger. His immense fist knocked Jagger’s head back with the force of a TNT blast. And like any good punch, it didn’t stop at the point of contact. It followed through . . . right into Kristoff House.

The bedroom wall buckled but held as the fist hit it. Plaster rained down. The window shattered. Brendan bounced across the room like a rag doll—and suddenly the house was spinning back into the air!

“Bren!” Cordelia screamed. She tried to go to him, but she might as well have been going to the moon. The room—the floor—all of Kristoff House had become a pop fly. Within its walls, up and down didn’t mean much anymore. Cordelia could only watch her brother’s body crumple into a corner and hope he was still alive . . . but then she wondered, as the house entered the slow embrace of free fall:
What’s the point? He won’t be for much longer!

W
henever Cordelia saw movies and television reenactments where dying people’s lives flashed before their eyes, she wondered,
Is it really that easy?
Life was long and complicated—even hers, already—and remembering it in sequence seemed like a serious task. Instead she yelled for her sister.
“Nell!”

“C’mon!”
Eleanor said, running toward Cordelia as blue sky streaked past the windows.
“We’re getting in the closet
—
hurry!”

Cordelia saw that Will had dragged Brendan into the master-bedroom closet and grabbed all the pillows, sleeping bags, and comforters. Now the enclosed space was like a cocoon. She lurched in with Eleanor, slamming the door—just as Kristoff House hit the tree canopy.

It sounded like a crashing wave: a
ksssshhh
of displaced mass as the house reduced the crown of one of the forest’s mighty trees to a falling collection of splinters. Cordelia bounced against the hastily padded walls of the closet, letting out muffled screams, until bark squealed against siding and the house came to a stop. She found herself clutching a handful of hangers.

“I say, we’ve landed,” said Will, inching open the door.

The bedroom looked like it had been shaken inside a snow globe: the
RW
trunk was upside down; the bedside tables were totally busted; the mattress was peeking out the broken window.
If I’d been out there,
Cordelia thought,
I’d have been impaled.

“We appear to be resting on a very large limb,” said Will, seeing the cross-hatching of branches outside the windows.

“I always wanted a tree house,” said Cordelia morbidly.

Wood cracked and strained below them. The floor tilted to the side. “I don’t expect you’ll have one much longer,” said Will.

They all held their breath as the branch they were sitting on groaned and bent, snapping in many tiny places. Every time it seemed to settle and bear the weight of the house, another piece of furniture somewhere slid aside with a thunk, causing the house to pitch over more, causing the wood to rupture more. . . .

“We have to go!” said Cordelia. “Bren! Are you awake?”

“Ugggggh . . . ”
Brendan was bruised and groggy. He looked like he should have cartoon stars circling his face.

“Brendan! Wake up! You’re late for school!”
Eleanor screamed in his ear, and all of a sudden he was alert.

“Hey!” He turned to Eleanor. “Not fair. Where are we?”

“In a tree,” Cordelia said. “We’ve got to climb down ’cause the branches won’t hold—”

“A
tree
?” Brendan poked his head into the bedroom. He saw the leaves outside and realized what a ticking-time-bomb situation he was in.
It’s gonna fall and smash! And I’ll end up trapped in the rubble like a victim from one of those horrible 8.0-magnitude earthquakes.
His mouth started running. “Oh man—I gotta get outta here!”

“Not so fast, Bren—calm down—”

But he bolted from the closet.
Get to the window. Get outside. Outside you’ll be safe.
He tripped, fell, and rolled over the debris-filled floor. He landed with the accumulating broken furniture at the opposite wall. He had a second to look at the others and realize his mistake as his weight added to the pile—

And the branch under Kristoff House snapped.

The home and its inhabitants dropped.

This free fall wasn’t so free—it was more like being in the center of a roaring avalanche. Kristoff House crashed through limbs and scattered branches on its way down, shearing off one entire side of the mighty tree.

“I love you guys!” Brendan called unexpectedly. Eleanor hugged Cordelia. Cordelia closed her eyes. Will kept his chin up. They all braced for impact in their small bewildered ways—

And then Kristoff House hit the ground.

And kept going.

Cordelia couldn’t figure it out—was she in some kind of afterlife? Hitting the earth should have turned off the power button, but she could still see a now-brownish blur outside the canted windows and hear a rolling, crunching rumble. It felt like they were sliding down a hill. Brendan whooped, “The barrels!”

“What?”
Will asked.

Cordelia got it: “The earthquake barrels! There’s dozens of them strapped to the foundation, and we’re rolling on them!”

Indeed, if they had been outside Kristoff House, they would have seen an awesome sight: a three-story landmarked Victorian home literally barreling down a steep, rugged incline like an out-of-control trolley car, devastating everything in its path. Ferns, logs, anthills, some of the barrels themselves, and various shell-shocked rodents were sent flying. Inside the home, it was like being on a sleigh ride, and as with so many things that the Walkers and Will had experienced in the past forty-eight hours, it would have been amazingly fun if not for the element of death.

“Go, Denver Kristoff!” Brendan yelled, clambering back into the closet.

“What are you on about?” asked Will.

“Kristoff designed this place to float away on barrels if there was a really bad earthquake, and now we’re rolling down a hill on those barrels!”

“Into
what
?” Will asked.

“Uh-oh,” Brendan said. “We didn’t get a look at what was on the other side of the house, did we, Will?”

The rocky slope came to an end—and Kristoff House flew off it, soaring into open air.

The Walkers and Will knew what to do. They were scared, of course—but at this point they were beyond scared. They all shut the door to the padded closet. Cordelia heard the barrels; they were whistling. She grabbed her siblings’ hands. Eleanor and Brendan grabbed Will’s.

“Whatever happens, I hope it’s quick!” yelled Eleanor bravely. “This up-and-down stuff is driving me cra—”

With a deafening, shuddering slap, the house hit the ocean.