We Are Not Eaten by Yaks: An Accidental Adventure

THE EXPLORERS CLUB is an old building filled with many mysteries, as old buildings tend to be. This old building contained countless secret doors and tunnels and places to explore, as befitted its name.

Celia and Oliver had discovered the network of secret tunnels by accident. They had once lost the fancy universal remote control that worked on any device made in the last ten years, if you could just figure out which button to press. They looked for it under cushions and on top of cabinets and eventually behind a small bookcase. They did not find the remote control. They found a tunnel, and that tunnel led someplace else. They weren’t sure where because neither of them wanted to explore it. They kept looking for the remote, which Oliver had left in his sock drawer for reasons he could not remember.

So there the tunnel sat, unexplored by the incurious children until the moment they decided to run away. As much as they hated the idea of using the tunnel, they couldn’t exactly stroll out through the front door of the club with all the explorers around. They had to be sneaky.

“We’ll need supplies,” she explained as she tossed a bag of cheese puffs into it. Oliver grabbed the remote control. He never could figure out what all the buttons did, but he would have plenty of time in prison or the orphanage to try to figure it out. It might even make him popular with the other inmates. He’d be the guy who could control the TV from anywhere. He liked the idea. If he were a superhero, he’d be the Channel Changer. Celia threw in a TV Guide, because she liked to know what was on all the time. She also made them each throw in their pajamas.

They sighed with longing for the episodes of Love at 30,000 Feet and The World’s Greatest Animal Chases Three they were missing, and took one more look around the apartment.

They saw the Cabinet of Count Vladomir, a medieval torture box that their parents discovered in the ruins of a French castle on their first date. They used it for hanging coats. It was next to the refrigerator. Count Vladomir would not have been pleased.

They saw their father’s collection of antique pipes from around the world and their mother’s drawings of exotic birds. Oliver hesitated when he saw the storyboard from the movie Escape from the Mummy King, hanging behind the couch. It was a set of illustrations that movie directors use to tell their story before they start filming it. The storyboard looked like a page from a comic book. Escape from the Mummy King was based on a story their mother had written in National Geographic magazine. She got the director to give the drawing to Oliver and Celia after the movie finished filming. It was one of their most prized possessions. Oliver thought about bringing it.

“Come on,” Celia said, and shoved her brother into the tunnel ahead of her, leaving the storyboard and their miserably exciting lives behind. She insisted on carrying the backpack. Oliver had a way of losing whatever was handed to him. She shut the entrance behind them.

The tunnel was dark and the direction unknown. There was a weird symbol carved on the wall every few feet. It was like an old key and it had odd letters below it in some strange language. Explorers loved weird symbols and strange languages, the weirder and stranger the better. This one looked familiar to Celia for some reason, but she couldn’t figure out why. Not that it mattered. Soon they wouldn’t have to think about explorers ever again.

They crawled for what seemed like hours, each one of them silently imagining the television shows they were missing at that exact moment and wondering if they had made the right decision. Their father would be down at the ceremony wondering where they were. They hadn’t even left a note. Somewhere in the distance, a rat scurried. Oliver nearly screamed. He hated rats. Every time his sister’s hand brushed his ankle, he thought it was a rat.

They continued on in silence, angry already, and regretting their decision to run away. But neither of them wanted to back down first. And they certainly couldn’t just go back. That would mean sitting through the Ceremony of Discovery, and maybe losing their television privileges because they were late, and even worse, probably getting dragged on some exotic trip that their father thought would inspire them. Fiji, or maybe Antarctica.

Oliver had his doubts, but his sister was confident and her confidence made him feel better. She had that female intuition their father talked about. “Women just know things, son,” he would say. “Trust them and you will go far in life.”

Oliver thought about his mother. How good could her intuition be if she was still lost looking for the Lost Library of Alexandria? But what if she wasn’t lost at all? What if she had left because she didn’t like her boring children and wanted to go on her own adventures without them? Did she regret leaving them? Would she come back now that the twins were gone? Maybe running away really was for the best.

Oliver tried and the wall moved. It swung open into a dim room. They crawled out of the opening and closed it behind them as they brushed layers and layers of dust off themselves. They were so dusty, they looked like ghosts.

They were in the club’s library. The library was a big room with high ceilings and stained glass windows. Bookshelves went up as high as they could see and wooden ladders with brass fittings crisscrossed the shelves so that people could reach all the books. Their mother had always told them that it was nothing compared to the Lost Library of Alexandria.

“There were grand halls that could hold thousands of volumes, lecture halls and quiet nooks to study in. The greatest thinkers in the world discussed philosophy and science at every turn. They measured the world with their minds, decoded the stars. They discovered unknown species and they recorded great and terrible prophecies. They collected everything, from treasure and magic to unusual hats. The catalog alone filled a thousand tablets in a room the size of a circus tent!”

Their mother had a way of making libraries sound important and exciting. She even made library catalogs sound important and exciting. A giant room filled with thousands of tablets sounded a lot more interesting than a list of books.

There was nothing exciting about the Explorers Club library. There were old leather chairs where the explorers liked to smoke cigars, and crusty old books with names like Endurance! and A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling. There was an old card catalog that listed all the books, which no one but the librarian knew how to use. A fire burned in the fireplace. The librarian often threw sage into the fire to fill the room with a more pleasing smell, and to chase away bad spirits. There wasn’t any sage in the fireplace now, though. The librarian had gone off to the ceremony downstairs.

Both children turned to each other, wondering the same thing at the same time, when the doors burst open. They ducked quickly behind a large marble statue that stood by the wall. It was tall and thin and made out of a bright green jade. It looked like a giant toothpick.

Celia pressed Oliver against the statue with her whole body, trying to get as flat as possible. His face was smushed against a large brass plaque that read IN MEMORY OF FRANK PFEFFER & JANICE MCDERMOTT, THE GREAT DISCOVERERS OF THE JADE TOOTHPICKS. YOU STILL OWE US MONEY. COME BACK SOON.

The statue was built in honor of the final tragic Pfeffer/McDermott expedition. Frank Pfeffer and Janice McDermott, discoverers of the Jade Toothpicks, went to China to look for Oliver and Celia’s mother a year ago and never returned. No one ever heard from them again. Explorers had a way of disappearing.

“Explorers,” Celia snapped, with a roll of her eyes. “Now, hush or they’ll hear us.” Ducked behind the monument, the twins couldn’t see who had come into the library, but they could hear.

The children recognized the second voice. They would know it anywhere. It was Sir Edmund. Celia peeked out, but all she could see was the back of a chair and Sir Edmund’s feet dangling down. They didn’t even reach the floor. She couldn’t see the woman.

“He will not!” Sir Edmund shouted, then regained control of himself. “Don’t worry. You do your part and we cannot fail. When he is no longer useful to us, he will be destroyed.”

“Whatever you say,” the woman responded. “We won’t harm them . . . permanently. I can’t imagine why you would want to look after them. Children are such a bother.”

“If I give them cable, they’ll not cause any trouble,” Sir Edmund said. “I hate the television, but it does keep their mouths shut. And I believe they will one day be useful to me.”

“The Navel family will be taken care of. I want to hear no more about it. Now we must be going before anyone notices our absence. And remember to do your part.”

“Hmmmm.” They both considered the situation. On the one hand, there was a plot afoot against their father. On the other hand—cable! But their father would be “destroyed.” The twins both knew what that meant. Out of the picture. Toast. Dead.

“Maybe if we save Dad’s life, he’ll get us cable,” Oliver suggested as they made their way, still covered in dust, to the Great Hall, where the Ceremony of Discovery was in full swing.