26
WE’VE HAD QUITE ENOUGH OF TUNNELS AND BAD GUYS
035
“SERIOUSLY?” OLIVER SAID as he began to follow the tunnel, which sloped upward and was only wide enough to go single file and only tall enough for them to sort of stand. Even in the dim light of the flashlight, Oliver could see cobwebs and the bones of strange animals strewn about.
“Why is it always tunnels? Couldn’t, just one time, somebody say, ‘Hey, Oliver and Celia, this way, take this well-lit and nicely carpeted hallway to the comfortable waiting room where you can wait patiently for your problems to be solved while watching TV? Huh? Noooo . . . it’s always dark tunnel this and dark tunnel that. Or climb over this thing and fall down that thing.”
Celia just let her brother complain while he crept along. He was, as usual, in front and groping his way forward as the slope got steeper and steeper. Complaining was his way of staying calm. Her way to stay calm was to stay angry. And right now, she was very angry.
She was angry at her mother for leaving them, for never even sending a message and then for sending a secret weird message that they might not even have been able to decode. She was angry at their father for dragging them along and then falling into a trap, for trusting Lama Norbu and Choden Thordup and not recognizing them as fakes. She was angry at Sir Edmund and at Lama Norbu, who was really Frank Pfeffer, and at the Poison Witches, for obvious reasons. She wanted nothing more than to get out of this tunnel, get her father back, and show them all that you don’t mess with the Navel Twins. When this was over she would demand cable, but not just cable. She wanted all of the premium channels with movies and the shows that let people use curse words.
“There’s nothing about adventuring that says it has to be filled with darkness and cobwebs.” Oliver was still complaining to himself. “Agent Zero travels first-class on airplanes and always stays clean when he’s having an adventure. There’s never any bat poop. Why do we have to deal with bat poop? That’s the grossest poop there is. Except maybe lizard poop. I hope we don’t have to deal with lizard poop.”
“Oliver?” Celia interrupted.
“What?”
“Don’t you think we should focus on, you know, trying to figure out what’s going on? Like, who was that Pehar Guhwhatever kid? And where are we going? And what happens when we get there?”
“Right,” Oliver said.
“So . . . ummm . . . any ideas?”
“About what?”
“Any of it? The action-adventure stuff is your thing.”
“You like Agent Zero too. I’ve seen you watch it.”
“I like Corey Brandt, who plays Agent Zero. That’s different. And I liked him better in Sunset High.”
“Can we not talk about vampires while we’re crawling in a dark tunnel, please?”
“Okay. So, if this were Agent Zero, what happens now?”
“Well, this is the impossible-escape-from-disaster part right before the big showdown with the bad guy.”
“All right, but which bad guy? We’ve got the witches and Sir Edmund and Frank Pfeffer and the guys from the airplane and even that yeti. Who do we showdown with?”
Oliver stopped and Celia bumped into him from behind again.
“Ouch, why do you always do that?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t stop like that anymore.”
“No, I mean, I don’t know who we showdown with. There aren’t usually this many bad guys.”
“Well, there aren’t usually ancient tablets and coded notes that are really film strips with Mom’s handwriting on them and fake monks with fake guns and yaks giving you messages in dreams. So maybe we shouldn’t go by what usually happens.”
“Okay, then,” Oliver snapped back at her. “So what doesn’t usually happen?”
“Well, we don’t usually end up wandering around in dark tunnels. We don’t usually discover ancient artifacts, and we don’t usually save the day. So, I think we should keep walking and do all three of those things.”
Oliver couldn’t argue. He turned and kept walking. They climbed up through the tunnel for hours. Sometimes it was flat and straight; other times it was almost like climbing a ladder.
But how were they supposed to save the day? Oliver wondered. Why did their mom go through all that effort to hide a clue in a projector that only Oliver and Celia would recognize? And what were they supposed to find if there were no tablets? How would they save their father from the witches? Why wasn’t he the one out here trying to rescue them?
Their father probably wouldn’t have even figured that projector out. He would have been too busy trying to read the images on the walls. Anytime there was something to read, he always picked that over watching. He didn’t think you could learn anything by watching stuff. Their mother had gone off to look for the Lost Library, so they guessed she probably felt the same way. But what if they were wrong about her? What if she wanted her kids to find her? What if she had been guiding them all along?
Celia was thinking about the picture too. She was thinking about the key on her mother’s necklace, the same as on the tunnel walls. It was also on the rings that the air marshal and the man in the shiny suit on the airplane were wearing. It was the same symbol that had been in the fake version of Love at 30,000 Feet. What was their mom trying to tell them? Why would she have the same symbol as the henchmen on the plane?
As time passed the temperature started to drop. The air got colder and colder and they started to see their breath hanging in front of them. The sweat on their skin started to freeze. They began to shiver.
“I think . . . we’re really . . . high up,” Oliver panted. “I think . . . we must . . . be near . . . the top . . . of a mountain. . . . On the inside.”
“Don’t . . . talk,” Celia said. “Too . . . tired. Can’t . . . take . . . another . . . step.”
“Good,” Oliver said. “Because we’re out of steps.”
Celia looked up and saw that they had reached the end of the tunnel. There was a door in front of them with a big metal handle. The door was painted with an image of the same crazy threeeyed demon whose statue they’d watched like a television down in the pit. Right in the center of its snarling demon face was that symbol again, their mother’s jeweled key and the Greek words they recognized by now: Mega biblion, mega kakon. Big books, big evil.
Oliver swallowed hard.
“Ready?” he asked his sister as he reached up and put his hand on the door.
“Not really,” she said.
“Shangri-La could be on the other side of this door,” said Oliver.
“So could the witches,” answered Celia.
“Mom could be on the other side of this door.”
“So could Sir Edmund.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Or Frank Pfeffer.”
“Right, but—”
“Or the yeti.”
“Okay, I get it!” Oliver said. “But we’ve still got to open it!”
Celia exhaled slowly and nodded to Oliver. He pushed the door open.
At first there was a blinding white light and a blast of cold air. Snow swirled into the tunnel and blocked their view. When the blinding whiteness cleared, the twins found themselves staring directly at the shining black horns and glowing green eyes of an enormous yak.