23
WE ARE TRAPPED
FALLING INTO THE DARK is very different from falling out of an airplane or falling into a gorge or falling over a waterfall. If people reviewed falling the way they reviewed movies, they might say that falling out of an airplane was “equal parts thrilling and terrifying, four stars!” and that falling into a gorge was “dangerous and unpleasant, three and a half stars” and that falling over a waterfall was “the wettest thing you’ll ever do, two stars. Not recommended for children or people with heart conditions.”
Falling into the dark surrounded by crumbled stone stairs, however, is completely different, as the twins quickly discovered. Two thumbs down. No stars. It’s just bad.
As soon as the stairs broke apart, the twins felt themselves lurch into the air and fall away from the glow of Frank Pfeffer’s flashlight and his devilish smile. They didn’t know if they were falling a hundred feet down onto a bed of spikes, or sixteen feet onto a feather mattress. They couldn’t see the floor.
This is it, Oliver thought. We’re dead. I’ll never see the TV again, or my sister or my parents. I’ll never get a television in my room or go to college or know how Agent Zero ends.
I failed, Celia thought as she fell. I couldn’t save my brother or my father, or find my mother, or get us cable. And now we’re going to die in some Tibetan pit because an evil grave robber pretending to be a monk broke the stairs.
“I’m sorry, Oliver!” she called out in the darkness. “I’m sorry that I . . . oooof!”
She landed with a hard thud, and right next to her she heard what sounded like a sack of flour hitting the ground and knew her brother had landed with an oooooof right on the backpack. Stones and dust rained down on them and Celia covered her face with her arms. They hadn’t fallen that far at all and the ground was dirt below them, softer than stone. They’d be bruised, but they were alive. Gravity just couldn’t kill the Navel Twins. Celia was so relieved she started laughing. She was lying on her back looking up at the glow from Frank Pfeffer’s flashlight.
“Are you okay?” Oliver groaned. The wind had been knocked out of him. He brushed bits of crumbled stairs off himself.
Celia didn’t answer; she just kept laughing. Oliver couldn’t help but find his sister totally incomprehensible sometimes.
“Enjoy your time together,” Frank Pfeffer yelled down at them. “You will quickly find that there is no way out of this pit. I expect you’ll starve within a few days. Too bad about saving your father. Oh, well. I highly recommend you use the time you have left to meditate. Perhaps you’ll be reborn as a llama! With two ls of course!”
He cackled hysterically and then tossed the flashlight down to them as he left. It landed with a clatter and lit up the ground around them.
The light flickered and cast an eerie glow into the alcoves that ringed the round chamber. The pit had been some kind of meditation room. There were eight alcoves and each contained the sooty ruins of broken statues. Most were burned beyond recognition, but one remained almost unharmed. It held a statue of a ferocious demon with giant fangs and six arms holding snakes and spears riding a roaring lion. The creature had a third eye in the center of his forehead, just like the skeleton twins. He looked like he was charging into battle.
“You think this is one of those ferocious protector gods?” Oliver asked nervously.
“I guess so,” Celia said. “Though his protection didn’t do us much good.”
“Maybe it’s like the lama said,” Oliver suggested. “We have to meditate and ask for his help.”
“Are you nuts? The lama wasn’t even a lama! That was Frank Pfeffer! He was probably lying about everything.”
“I know, but just because something’s made-up doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it,” Oliver said. “Think about Love at 30,000 Feet. It saved us with the witches.”
“Are you serious? You don’t even know how to meditate.” Oliver was right, but she wasn’t ready to lose this argument.
“How hard can it be?”
Celia just crossed her arms and tapped her foot, annoyed. She couldn’t think of a better idea. There really was no way out of this dark pit, and if the demon statue could help them, why not try it. She hated to give in to her brother, but she figured it was her fault they got pushed into the pit, so she owed him one.
“Okay,” she agreed. “What do we do?”
“Well, we sit cross-legged facing the statue. Whenever anyone does this on TV, they always sit up really straight and rest their hands on their knees and close their eyes. Like this.” He demonstrated. When he opened one eye to see if his sister was doing it, she was still standing with her arms folded. “Come on, you have to do it right.”
Celia sighed and assumed the position next to her brother. The statue towered over them. Oliver shifted uncomfortably on his butt. He thought about his father lying unconscious as a prisoner of the Poison Witches. He thought about how his mother had been here, maybe in this very room. How she had left a projector, as if she knew they would look for her. He thought about becoming Sir Edmund’s slave. He thought about Frank Pfeffer and how he had seemed like such a nice monk. His knees hurt from the weird position he was sitting in and he guessed that thinking about all the bad stuff going on wasn’t how this was supposed to work. He tried to clear his head, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Ducks Incorporated, a cartoon he used to love about a family of ducks who ran a giant computer company.
He peeked over at his sister. Her brow was wrinkled in concentration and her lips were moving like she was praying. Oliver couldn’t believe how much she looked like the martial arts experts on the training episode of Agent Zero. How come she had a talent for meditation and he didn’t?
As he watched her lips move, he noticed the words she was muttering. They weren’t like any prayer he could imagine.
“High up in the sky . . . love’s a look in your eye . . . so climb on board . . . play a chord . . . and fall in lo-ove. Lo-ove . . . lo-ove.”
“Hey,” Oliver interrupted his sister. “You aren’t meditating! That’s the theme song to Love at 30,000 Feet!ʺ
“It’s all I can think of. Meditation is hard.”
“Yeah,” Oliver agreed.
“You’d think we’d be good at sitting still and staring.”
“Like when you made me watch the Love at 30,000 Feet marathon. We must have sat still for like fifty hours.”
“Fifty-two, and yeah, that was great.”
“That was horrible. I canʹt believe I had to endure that.”
“Oh, come on! It’s a great show and you know it. You even said that Captain Sinclair was kind of cool. And you just said it’s what saved us from the Poison Witches.”
“That’s it!” Oliver shouted.
“What? Captain Sinclair? The witches? What?”
“No! Not Captain Sinclair! Not the witches! The yak! The yak’s message! Again!”
“Why are you always shouting about yaks?”
“That yak might just be the smartest talking animal I’ve ever dreamed about.”
“You dream about a lot of talking animals?”
Oliver ignored his sister. She was always coming up with the ideas and trying to protect him, but this time, he figured it out. He knew just what to do. He felt like a Zen master. Agent Zero would have been proud.
“Listen, I know just what to do,” he said.
