Keech adjusted the rope still wrapped around his shoulder, then stepped toward the tunnel and peered inside, buying a little time to form some sort of strategy. Beyond the chamber’s torchlight, he couldn’t see anything but a perfect oval of darkness. Perhaps the shaft led to nothing but death, but deep in his gut he knew he was standing at the entrance to the House.
He figured his mother had played a crucial role alongside his father in obtaining the Key, which meant if he was going to survive the Perils, he would need a partner.
Plucking a torch from the wall, Keech turned back to the group. “What will I find when I start down this path?”
“A kind of chute,” Ignatio said. “We’ve lowered men on ropes, thinking we could scout what is down there, but the line is always cut when we pull back up. We call this area ‘the Perils,’ but I think of it as ‘the hopeless slide into an endless abyss.’” He chuckled.
Shrugging the guard’s restraining hands off her shoulders, Duck rushed over to Keech and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Please don’t go,” she moaned.
“Get her!” Ignatio ordered, and a pair of thrall soldiers scuttled to retrieve her.
Keech held up an insistent hand. “Let me at least say goodbye. Then I’ll go.”
The thralls hesitated, awaiting instruction from their master. “You have ten seconds,” Ignatio said. “After that, my thralls will shoot.”
“Oh, Keech!” Duck cried, her anguish surprising even him. She pressed herself close to his ear and whispered, “You got a plan. I can see it in your eyes. What’s the move?”
Keech returned the whisper. “If we split up, we die. We have to head into the Perils together. Work as two, succeed as one. Ready?”
Duck grabbed his hand and took a step back. “I trust you.”
Keech peered around the room. At the wall of soldiers holding their weapons at the ready. At Ignatio sneering with pleasure. At Coward frowning at his side. Finally, at Cutter, who was looking down at his own boots, unable to return Keech’s stern gaze.
Returning his eyes to Duck, Keech said, “Run.”
Together they dashed into the tunnel, Keech’s torchlight defining their path.
Behind them, a ruckus of confusion kicked up. A guard shouted, “Hey, y’all ain’t supposed to do that!”
“Follow them!” Ignatio commanded. “Make sure they both go down the chute!”
Keech and Duck ran as fast as they could, their footsteps echoing as they descended into the passage. Soon the tunnel narrowed, and Keech was forced to lead the way while Duck fell in behind him.
“It’s getting pretty steep,” Keech warned as the passage sloped downward and curved to the left. “Keep a grip on the walls!” Stretching his left arm out, he pressed his palm against the stone while his other hand gripped the torch. The sound of stomping boots echoed behind them.
“I don’t like this none,” Duck said.
“Me neither. I’m losing my footing.” Keech lowered his rump onto the stone floor. “I think we have to slide.” He gave himself a little shove and slipped forward.
He skidded down the rock chute. Duck followed close behind. The slope dipped, and they found themselves picking up speed. For one terrible moment, Keech wondered if the chute would toss them into a bottomless pit, but when the floor disappeared, he fell a short distance and crashed onto a hard floor. He landed on his haunches, rolled to the side, and saw that the tunnel had spat him from a hole in the ceiling into some kind of circular room.
A second later, Duck sailed through the opening and dropped onto her hands and knees beside him.
A sudden scraping sound grated above their heads. A streak of metal flashed inside the hole, like the swing of a broadsword. Keech pointed up. “A knife just slashed across the chute!”
Duck studied the opening. “Ignatio did say the ropes would get cut anytime they tried to lower someone.”
“Which tells me we must be on the right path. You don’t take the trouble to build a rope-cutting blade contraption into a rock tunnel for no reason. You set a fail-safe to make sure whoever comes down has to stay down.”
“At least we don’t have to worry about Ignatio’s thralls catching up to us,” Duck said.
Drawing a nervous breath, Keech pushed up to his feet and waved the torch around. A thick white dust covered the floor. Stick-like objects crackled under his boots. He cast the torch down to fetch a closer look and reeled back in horror. Heaps of human bones littered the entire surface. Skulls gazed up from the shadows, a ghastly audience of cheerless smiles and hollow expressions.
Like the den of the great bear in Floodwood, this place was a tomb.
“Why does there always have to be a room full of bones?” Duck asked.
“Let’s not give up hope just yet,” Keech said. The large gray stones that made up the chamber walls formed a perimeter so perfectly circular he might as well have been standing inside a well. In the exact center of the room stood a heavy granite column, a round pillar roughly a man’s height with an assortment of carvings hewn into the stone. Keech moved closer. The torchlight made strange shadows dance over the markings. He saw the chiseled shapes of various animals: a turtle, a goose, a fish, countless others.
Behind him, Duck muttered, “I think we might be in trouble.”
He swiveled back to her and found Duck examining thousands of holes that spotted the walls, a sea of dark dots covering every square foot of the enclosure. The notches looked like tiny peepholes. Duck peeled off a glove and poked a finger into one of the pockets. “I feel a sharp metal point. The walls are loaded with spikes, like spears.”
“But there are thousands of them,” Keech gasped.
“Watch your step and try not to trigger anything.”
Keech moved the torch around, hoping for any sign of an escape, but the room was sealed up, a dead end. He offered Duck a feeble grin. “We’re trapped and probably gonna die. But at least we’re together.”
Duck’s head tilted. “That was your plan, wasn’t it? Enter this place together. But why?”
Keech lifted the torch so Duck could see his face. “I wanted you by my side ’cause I think I know how to find the House of the Rabbit.”
Duck tilted her head. “How?”
“Teamwork. I have a hunch we’re supposed to work together. That was how my father found the Key, and how he returned it later. Because my mother went in with him.”
Duck’s mouth dropped open. “Erin Blackwood went into the Perils?”
“She was the Rabbit. My father called her Mah-shcheen-kah, like in the vision. It’s a word that means ‘rabbit.’ And it was her nickname.”
“How do you know she went in?”
Keech patted the place in his coat where the Ranger’s journal lived. “Doyle wrote a good bit about the events of 1833, when the Reverend ordered all the Enforcers to head into the mountain. They had taken my mother prisoner, but according to Doyle’s writings, my father set her free while the rest of the gang went off looking for the Key. Except I don’t think she left him after he untied her. I think she went into the Perils with my father. They worked as two and succeeded as one.”
“As a team, then,” Duck said. “Let’s fetch the Key.”
As they examined the room, Keech found himself returning to the peculiar column filled with animal icons. He motioned for Duck to join him. Together they walked the circumference of the mast. Holding his glove between his teeth, Keech let his fingers graze the stone carvings. Each mysterious image had been chiseled onto a granite square, and the squares covered the column from base to peak.
Duck leaned in closer to one of the carvings, a shape that resembled an eagle. “Hold the torch a bit closer?” she asked. “I reckon each image can be pressed down, like you might push a wooden peg into a hole.”
“Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe we push the right image, and a door opens.” Keech placed his hand on the eagle icon, then hesitated. “Wait a second. Let’s think about this.” He peered nervously around the chamber walls. “What if we push the wrong one and the spears pop out and skewer us?”
“I don’t know,” Duck said, “but what choice do we have?”
After a moment’s consideration, Keech cracked his knuckles. “Okay, here goes.”
He pressed the eagle. The stone icon slid into the pillar a mere inch—and stopped. A metallic clink sounded within the column, and every pinhole in the chamber ejected a deadly rod. Crying out in unison, Keech and Duck grabbed each other’s arms and braced for a terrible death. Luckily, the needlepoint shafts emerged only a few feet, leaving them a foot or two out of range. Keech peeked around, his heart hammering.
“What happened?” Duck asked.
A second click rang out, and the spikes retracted into their stone sheaths.
“They came out only halfway,” Keech said. “I think that was a warning.”
“Let’s not mess up again.” Duck kicked at the white powder and bones around her feet. “I’m guessing the folks who came here before pressed one too many wrong carvings.”
“Then, which icon do we pick?” Keech spent the next several minutes crawling around the pillar, examining every symbol. Each icon was a recognizable image. Most of the glyphs were animals, but others represented aspects of nature, such as a mountain or the sun or a tree.
Duck found a canine-shaped carving. “I think this is supposed to be a wolf.”
A twinge of excitement buzzed over Keech’s skin. “Maybe that’s the one.” Keech reached for the icon—and hesitated. “But what if we’re wrong?”
“There has to be a way to know for sure,” Duck said.
Peering up and down at the dozens of icons on the mast, Keech asked, “Shouldn’t the room offer us some kind of clue?”
From the opposite side of the pillar, Duck gasped. “Keech, I think I might’ve found it! It ain’t the wolf.”
Rushing to the other side, Keech found his friend on her knees in the white dust, her fingers tracing a stone icon near the base of the mast. He stooped with the torch. What he saw flooded him with relief. “Of course! What else could it be?”
They were looking at the granite carving of a rabbit. The critter had been chiseled to appear in a brisk run, its long ears nestled back like a pair of folded wings.
Duck said, “Low to the ground. Quick on its feet. Bolts at the first sign of trouble.”
A wonderful but curious sensation of admiration replaced Keech’s shock. All at once he knew his parents had indeed once stood in this very chamber and struggled with the same decisions that he and Duck now faced. He knew that his mother had discovered the icon of the rabbit and that his father had nicknamed her Mah-shcheen-kah as a tribute to her courage and intelligence. He knew that Erin Blackwood had saved both of their lives.
Duck placed her hand on the rabbit. “Should I?”
“Have at it.”
Duck pushed on the icon. A raucous click echoed from within the pillar and the entire chamber shifted on some invisible axle, rotating widdershins a few rattling feet.
“It’s working!”
A heavy scraping noise filled the space, and the floor of the room shuddered as the chamber grated to a halt. Waving the torch around, Keech examined the walls, but as far as he could tell, nothing had changed. There was no open doorway. The heartswell of good feelings dropped away. “There’s still no way out.”
The chamber rotated again, this time clockwise, grinding back to the position where it had first rested.
Duck looked exhausted. “The danged thing reset.”
Keech yanked off his bowler hat in frustration. “The answer couldn’t be that easy, of course. If all we had to do was push the rabbit, then anyone could get through the Perils.” A delightful thought occurred to him. “Wait just a second. Remember my father’s clue?”
Duck seemed to pluck the thought right out of his head. “Teamwork. That’s the answer! We have to press more than one icon. Maybe on opposite sides of the column. A person alone can’t do it, but together we can make it work.” Squatting beside the rabbit carving, Duck pointed. “You stand on the opposite side while I try the rabbit again. Tell me what you see.”
“Ready when you are,” he said.
Keech heard the metallic click as Duck pressed the rabbit. Once again the room rotated counterclockwise. As the chamber shifted, the image of a thundercloud on Keech’s side of the pillar extended out an inch farther than all the others. “The cloud poked out!” he shouted, but then the icon snapped back into its regular position before he could touch it. Excitedly, Keech realized that if he hadn’t been standing on the opposite side from Duck, he would’ve missed which icon had moved. “I think these images come in a sequence, and the cloud is next. Should I press it?”
Duck’s voice called back, “Have at it!”
Keech pushed the cloud into the column. The room rotated counterclockwise again, traveling a few feet farther this time. “I think it’s working!”
From the other side of the mast, Duck said, “The turtle icon just popped out, then back again.”
“Push it!”
Together, they traded off pushing the indicated carvings. With each click, the room shifted a few feet more, till Keech said, “I don’t see one to press.”
“Keech!” Duck gestured to a slender opening in the wall. “I see a way! We best get out before the room resets!”
The two dashed for the opening and slipped into a narrow tunnel. A few seconds after they exited, the heavy grating noise returned, and the passage rattled back to its original position. The opening disappeared, leaving a thick wall of smooth stone.
Duck panted for breath. “Did we do it? Did we beat the Perils?”
“We got past one room, at least. Look.” Keech pointed down the new tunnel. The torchlight penetrated a few feet down the shaft, revealing the edge of a sheer cliff. Beyond, there was only darkness. “The path disappears. There’s nowhere to go.”