The Matchstick Castle by Keir Graff

Author:Keir Graff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2016-11-14T15:03:58+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE SEVENTH FLOOR

We ran up a staircase where the steps were so short and close together that it felt like we were tap-dancing. At the top of the stairs, a door was swinging in the wind. Cosmo opened it, and we followed him cautiously onto the seventh floor.

I didn’t feel ready to trust the hallway with my full weight, so I tested the wooden floorboards by stamping lightly with my foot. There was a long, low creak.

“Brian?” said Cosmo.

The creak kept going, getting louder and lower, like a giant was bending a pine tree between two hands.

“Yeah?” I said, which was hard to do because I was holding my breath.

Then there was a deafening CRACK, and Nora shrieked as the floor beneath us suddenly dropped a couple of inches. We froze, wondering if we were about to go crashing down to the basement.

“Please walk very lightly.”

The floor stopped moving. Barely daring to breathe, we tiptoed over to a place where it hadn’t sunk.

“This is crazy,” murmured Nora, like she was afraid that using her regular voice would make the house fall down.

The lights didn’t work, so we turned on our headlamps and flashlights. The seventh floor looked like the rest of the house, only even more random: The ceilings were all different heights, the doorways looked like trapezoids and parallelograms, and all the windows looked into other rooms instead of outside. There was a new sound, too, with lots of scurrying and clicking little feet moving up and down inside the walls.

“Are those . . . rats?” asked Nora with a shudder.

Cosmo shook his head. “Only squirrels.”

“So you’ve been up here before?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Cosmo. “Well . . . once . . . a long time ago.”

He said we should split up so we could search faster, but Nora wanted to follow Cosmo and I kind of did, too. We shined our lights where he shined his and walked so close behind him that, when he stopped, we all bumped into each other.

“We have to spread out,” he warned. “If we stand too close, we’ll be as heavy as Uncle Montague!”

We all tiptoed a few steps away from each other.

Walking as if we were on ice, we searched hall by tilting hall and room by odd-shaped room. Some of the rooms had roots coming down through the ceiling, like weeds had sprouted on the roof and then grown down into the house, but others seemed warm and dry. We found one that was piled with rusty chains and another one that was filled with old sea chests.

A swaying rope ladder hung in the middle of one hallway.

“That must lead to the boat,” said Cosmo.

“Could your uncle Kingsley be up there?” I asked.

“I guess it’s possible.”

“Your father didn’t say anything about searching above the seventh floor,” said Nora, shrinking away from the ladder.

“He also didn’t tell us not to. And since nobody else is up here, we’re the only ones who can do it—so we’d better look.”

Holding his flashlight

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