21
WE KNOW HE’S NO LAMA
OLIVER AND CELIA SCRAMBLED out of the water at the bottom of the great waterfall. Their clothes were dirty, dripping and torn, and every inch of them was soaked. Oliver took off the wet backpack and set it on the rocks with a plop. They watched as three rainbows faded into the foam.
“We’re alive!” Oliver shouted and jumped up and down.
“What?” Celia shouted. The roar of the waterfall made talking almost impossible.
Oliver just smiled and hugged his sister. A line of butterflies fluttered overhead, dancing and swirling in the air.
The twins had seen waterfalls on television before, but this was something else entirely.
“Wow,” Oliver said.
“Wow,” Celia said.
The water crashed down hundreds of feet into the pool in front of them. The mist and water and shimmering remains of the rainbows were beautiful. Celia couldn’t help feeling bad that their father wasn’t around to see it. He would have loved a sight like this. And she couldn’t help but wonder if her mother had really been here. This was the kind of place that explorers loved to discover. Neither one of them could think of a TV show to compare this to. They were dumbstruck.
Lama Norbu sat on the bank of the river, exhausted, with his feet dangling in the water. The twins were so busy admiring the butterfly parade and trying to think of something they’d seen on TV that was as amazing as this waterfall that they didn’t see him fiddling with the wet phone in his lap, banging on it and cursing under his breath. He eventually gave up trying to get it to work and tossed it into the river. Frank Pfeffer did not care about littering. He sighed and stood.
“We’ve arrived,” he declared, and pointed at the waterfall, as if the twins might not have noticed. “The ruined monastery is just behind this screen of water. We’ll have to climb up the rocks over there to get to it.”
The twins were tired of climbing, because it always ended up with a lot of falling, but they were so close to their goal, they didn’t complain. They just turned and started on their way up, scrambling and sliding over wet boulders.
They slipped behind the thunderous wall of falling water and found themselves in a large cavern. Sunlight passing through the waterfall made it look like glowing marble, rather than tons and tons of crashing water.
“Why would someone want to build a monastery down here?” Celia asked.
“It’s kind of a cool place,” Oliver said. “I bet Secrets of the Underworld would love to do an episode here.”
“I never want to watch that show again,” Celia said. “I’ve had enough reality for a while.”
“Reality TV is different,” Oliver objected. “It’s not as wet as real reality.”
Celia just shrugged. She couldn’t understand boys sometimes.
The cave itself wasn’t just rock and moss, like a normal cave. It had once been built into something. There were doorways that led into other passages. Some of the doorways were filled with broken doors hanging off their frames, others just had piles of rock and ash where wooden doors used to be. The walls were charred too, like someone had tried to burn down the inside of the mountain, and soot covered up elaborate murals painted on the walls.
Oliver and Celia were able to make out strange images of men sitting on clouds, and tigers leaping over hills and rivers, but the images were all broken and burned. There was a stairwell at the back of the cave that descended into the shadows and there was a statue in front of the stairs that looked like someone had tried to break it.
“This place is creepy,” Celia said, and Oliver did not disagree. He shivered.
The statue in front of them was of twin skeletons. Their mouths were open and filled with long, razor-sharp fangs. They were dancing and holding strange objects in their claws. They each had an extra eye in the middle of their foreheads and they each wore a crown of tiny skulls. Everywhere Celia stepped in the cave, she felt as if the skeletons were watching her through their third eyes. The eyes seemed to glow.
“The Chitipati,” Lama Norbu explained. “Guardians of the charnel grounds.”
“What’s a charnel ground?” Oliver asked.
“The place where the bodies of the dead are burned.”
Both twins looked back at the statues and shuddered.
“Not cool,” Oliver said.
“This was the monastery of the Ferocious Protectors,” Lama Norbu said. “Here they prayed to the warrior-god Dorjee Drakden. These skeleton twins are meant to protect the righteous against thieves. If ever there were a place to hide the Lost Tablets of Alexandria, this would be it. We must try to decipher what your mother told us,” Lama Norbu said.
He pulled the page out from his robes. It was soaking wet and the ink had blurred. A few runny demon faces from the sketch were still visible, an arm or two, but little else.
“No!” the monk suddenly shouted, his face changed into a mask of rage. The children jumped. His voice echoed through the chamber, as if there were an army of monks shouting “No!” over and over. Lama Norbu didn’t even look like a monk anymore. He looked younger and even taller, and angry. “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS? I HAVE NOT COME THIS FAR TO FAIL!”
“It’s okay,” Oliver said consolingly. “It wasn’t really a Lost Tablet. There are no—”
“Shhh,” Celia hushed her brother. Lama Norbu snapped his head toward the twins.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he shouted, and approached them angrily. “This page is real! It must be! I stole it from your mother myself!”
“What?”
“You stole—”
“We followed your mother here all the way from the Gobi Desert!” Lama Norbu shouted.
“What?” said Oliver.
“We?” said Celia.
“Me and Janice!” snapped Lama Norbu, who now didn’t look at all like a monk.
“You mean you’re Frank Pfeffer, from the Pfeffer/McDermott Expedition?!” Celia cried. She felt like a fool. She had known something strange was going on with this monk from the beginning.
“You’re not a lama at all!” Oliver shouted. He remembered the way Celia had pressed his face into the word toothpicks on that statue in the library.
“Oh, will you shut up with this llama business! I explained that already.”
“I mean that you aren’t a monk at all!”
“You’ve found me out,” Lama Norbu/Frank Pfeffer admitted with a dark smile. “Oh, it feels good not to pretend anymore. I really hate acting.” He stood up taller and peeled the thin white mustache off his face. His voice changed and he seemed to transform from an old monk to a much bigger man. An explorer. “Janice and I found your mother after her dirigible crashed. We wanted to help her, but she was too stubborn.”
“Dirigible?” Oliver mouthed at his sister.
“Blimp,” she responded.
“We told your mother that we would bring her home to her family in exchange for what she’d found, but she refused. She said that she was not about to turn over her discovery to ʹcommon grave robbers.’ She actually called us that. And some other not very nice things.”
Oliver and Celia were now very worried. They had heard about grave robbers for years. They’d seen shows about them, of course. They were criminals who found ancient tombs and cemeteries and dug up bodies and stole whatever valuable things they found. On TV, it was kind of exciting and kind of creepy. But in real life, grave robbers were not exciting and were much worse than creepy. Their father had been clubbed on the head by grave robbers in Peru just a few months ago. It made his ears ring for a month. Oliver did not want to get clubbed on the head or have his ears ring. He needed his ears for hearing the TV. He liked his ears, even if Celia pulled him around by them sometimes.
“We were very insulted,ʺ Lama Norbu/ Frank Pfeffer said. “We are certainly not grave robbers.”
Oliver was relieved. His ears already felt safer.
“We only robbed from grave robbers. We let them do the hard work. . . . All that digging is not for me. Who wants to go hunting in caves for toothpicks? Ugh.”
Oliver was not relieved anymore. Someone who robbed from grave robbers was even worse than grave robbers.
“You’re not even an explorer,” Celia said. “You’re just a thief.”
“Don’t sound so shocked. What do you think your parents do? They are famous for robbing graves. Just because they give what they find to museums doesn’t make them any less grave robbers.”
“Our parents are explorers,ʺ Oliver said. Celia couldn’t believe her brother was defending explorers. It was explorers who had gotten them into this mess.
“Whatever she was, we followed your mother all the way to this cave,” Frank Pfeffer said. “If she wasn’t going to give us her discovery, we were going to take it from her. I waited for her to come out. I waited for days, but she didn’t. Weeks passed. It was so boring, sitting for so long in this gorge, watching monks come and go. So I decided to flush her out. I started a little fire.”
“You started the fire?” Celia asked. “With our mother inside!”
“Oh, with lots of people inside. There were over a hundred monks living here. They all left when the fire went out of control. All but your mother. She never came out. I went to look in the ashes when morning came, but I didn’t find her. I didn’t even find her body. But I found this page. I couldn’t read it. What do I know about ancient Greek? But I knew someone who did.”
“Dad!” Celia said.
“That’s right. We knew your father would see this note your mother wrote and work tirelessly to track her down. And if we followed, we’d be led right to the tablets! So Janice went to the Ceremony of Discovery disguised as Choden Thordup.”
“I knew something was wrong with her!” Celia shouted. “Neither of you are really from Tibet! There’s no such person as Lama Norbu or Choden Thordup.”
“What about the yak?” Oliver asked. “The one she named Stephen?”
“For someone who watches so much television,” Frank Pfeffer sneered, “you aren’t very good at recognizing make-believe.” He laughed. “We just told your father what he needed to hear. We made a deal with Sir Edmund to sell him the tablets when we found them. You two were supposed to be poisoned so your father would work for us. But instead, those witches poisoned him, and now I’m stuck with you: Oliver and Celia the couch potatoes!ʺ
“We aren’t couch potatoes!” Oliver shouted.
“We are audiovisual enthusiasts,ʺ Celia said. She’d seen those words in an advertisement for flat-screen TVs. She didn’t know exactly what they meant, but it sure sounded better than couch potatoes. “And you’re a charlatan,ʺ she added, because if there was ever a time to call someone a faker, a liar and a fraud, it was right at this moment.
