NIGEL had had his share of bad ideas in his life. Hiking the Peña de Bernal was right up there with leaping over a fire during a performance of Petrushka, in flammable tights. “Darling Bitsy, slow down,” he whispered. “It’s awfully hot, and I’m awfully old.”
“We’re almost there,” Bitsy said. “I see the chapel.”
“Would you scurry ahead and say a prayer for my knees?” With each footstep, Nigel felt every pebble like a tiny knife point through his soles. He had wrapped a handkerchief around his head, but by now it felt like he’d soaked it in warm soup.
Bitsy had crested a ridge and had turned to Nigel, her finger to her mouth. “Sssshhh.”
“You would deprive me of the pleasure of groaning?” Nigel whispered. As he stepped into a small clearing behind Bitsy, he saw the cause for her concern. Two men were asleep on webbed chairs in front of the chapel entrance.
The building, like everything else about Peña de Bernal, was a disappointment to Nigel. It was squat and square, made of old, mismatched stones that had shifted with time. Bitsy was walking silently by the men toward the back of the chapel. Nigel tried to tiptoe quietly, but the rocks were like snare drums beneath his feet.
Still, the men snored obliviously as he and Bitsy neared a metal cyclone fence. It encircled a small area that seemed at first glance to be a patch of snow. As Nigel moved closer he could make out tiny, perfect white spheres. He couldn’t help but giggle. It looked like some nefarious trap for wayward balls on a golf course. “Surely we can take a few,” he whispered.
Bitsy stood before a sign with an angry-looking message in several languages, the English stating Ecological Preservation Site: Keep Out! Grabbing onto the fence, she dug in her feet and began to climb.
In a moment she was over the top, dropping to the ground below.
Nigel swallowed hard. “My girl, you do not expect me to do that.”
“I’ll pick a few and stuff them into the vials,” Bitsy whispered. “If those guys wake up, you bat your eyelashes and look fetching.”
“I beg your pard—”
Wahh . . . Wahh . . . Wahh . . .
As an alarm rang out, Nigel screamed and whirled around.
The chapel’s old wooden door was opening. Three uniformed officers ran out, holsters flapping ominously on their belts. The two sleeping men were wide awake now. One of them was talking in very urgent-sounding Spanish into a handheld microphone, while the other had somehow unearthed a large and very professional-looking video camera.
“Good Lord, it’s a cactus sting operation,” Nigel murmured. He thrust his hands in the air and shouted, “I am a British citizen! I demand to see the ambassador!”
“Nigel, that makes no sense!” Bitsy yelled from behind him. “Come with me!”
The men were arguing. The fellow with the camera shouted instructions to the officials, who looked to Nigel as if they would prefer to eat him for lunch. Spinning around, he saw Bitsy running to the rear of the cactus patch, where she climbed the fence and dropped to the other side.
Nigel edged along the outside of the fence. There wasn’t much room. It had been built nearly to the perimeter of the ledge, and the drop-off was sheer. Bitsy was around the back, standing stock still, looking down.
As Nigel reached her side, he gasped. They were at the top of a curved stone chute, which led at a very steep angle and a very great distance to another ledge below, about the circumference of a rather large tutu. “This is doable,” Bitsy said. “We’ll use the chute.”
“Doable?” Nigel said. “Absolutely not! It is easily four stories down. And what you call a chute appears to be a torture mechanism from the Spanish Inquisition.”
“It’s either that or a Mexican jail,” Bitsy said. “I’ll go first.”
To Nigel’s horror, she swung her legs around and slid. He screamed, fully expecting the girl to bounce off the ledge and tumble to an untimely death. But she landed with a thud and immediately gazed upward. “Come on!”
Now the authorities were edging their way around the fence, followed by the cameraman. Their shoes were heavy and wide, and Nigel could tell by their cloddish movements that they clearly had not had ballet training.
Shaking, he sat on the ledge and tossed the men a kiss. “Catch us if you can, fellows!”
With a shriek, he slid down the chute and landed in a heap beside the girl. A scream ripped upward from his toes. His legs felt as if they’d been put through a trash compactor, and he was quite certain he’d shed most of his backside by about halfway down.
But the girl was silent, staring down over the ledge of this clearing.
There were no chutes here. It was a sheer drop to the bottom and no other way to get there.
“No . . .” she said. “This can’t be happening.”
“But it is,” Nigel said, “and you and I have just made the biggest mistakes of our lives.” Panicked, he raised his face to the landing above. There, the uniformed men were shouting to them all at once.
“What are they saying?” Bitsy asked. “I thought you knew Spanish.”
“They’re too far away,” Nigel said. “I’m assuming it is ‘You are dead’!”
But the men had fallen oddly silent. One by one, they were turning toward the sky.
A round white disk emerged overhead like a giant errant soccer ball. As Nigel watched in utter bafflement, it grew and swung out over the top of the mountain, trailing a square brown basket beneath it. “Elizabeth,” Nigel said. “Tell me about those cacti. Does proximity to them have some sort of hallucinatory effect?”
“What on earth . . . ?” Bitsy murmured.
A face was peering out over the edge of the basket now.
Two faces.
Nigel began cackling. “Great Scott, I am dreaming that Max and his cousin are up there . . . above us . . .”
As he turned to Bitsy, he felt a rap on his head. He shrieked, nearly falling off the ledge.
“Nigel,” Bitsy said, standing unsteadily. “It is them. Turn around.”
Nigel stood. Two thick ropes dangled just beyond Nigel’s shoulder. He followed them upward with his eyes to a massive hot-air balloon swinging high above them. Both Max and Alex were leaning over the basket, gesturing to Nigel as if his life depended on it.
Which, he realized, it did.
“Hurry!” Alex’s voice carried downward on a gust of wind.
The old man did not need any further urging. As he grabbed the rope, Bitsy looped the very bottom of it around both thighs, forming a kind of harness. Then she tugged twice on the rope.
Nigel began to rise. He gripped the rope tightly, swinging left and right like an acrobat, the wind buffeting his ears.
“Stop screaming!” Max shouted from above him.
“Am I screaming?” Nigel screamed.
“You’re not as heavy when you’re quiet!”
Nigel was mum as the two children hoisted him into the basket. Trembling, he turned and helped them lift Bitsy. As the girl swung below them, her legs akimbo, the balloon moved away from the mountain. Nigel could see the authorities near the chapel, staring up like open-mouthed zombies. “Ta-ta, you cheeky amateurs!” he cried out.
“Nigel, did you get the cacti?” Alex said, gritting her teeth against Bitsy’s weight.
“She did, the blessed girl,” Nigel said. “We are four for five.”
“Hallelujah,” Max said.
Bitsy’s fingers clutched the edge of the basket, and all three hauled her in. She fell to the floor with a gasp, her face deep red. “Did that just happen? Tell me I am not in a hot-air balloon like Around the World in 80 Days.”
“Just the movie, not the book,” Max said. He grabbed tight to the steering bar and pointed the balloon back the way they’d come. “Next stop, somewhere near the airport. Call Brandon, Alex. Tell him to fuel up, because we are heading toward the bottom of the world.”