Chapter Seventeen

“Otis!” Luke and Muddy yelled as they caught a glimpse of the drummer standing amidst the cover of bones under which he had hid. He wasn’t a coward. Muddy berated himself for even considering that Otis’ survival sense had kicked in. Had he been thinking straight, maybe he would’ve done the same.

The drummer stood taller than he possibly could and pin-wheeled his arms. With each mallet strike, another peal of storm assaulted their ears, and the rock wall above the entrance. The mountain in which they hid crumbled from above. Not all of it, just the outside crust, but still, it was enough to drop car-sized boulders on the predators. One by one the rocks tumbled and crushed the sirens. Many didn’t even have the time to scream. The sounds of their bodies crunching under stone sounded sickening and Muddy felt sorrow—for a moment—until he remembered they were seconds away from chowing down on the entire band like human buffalo wings.

Otis stood there, clamoring away while his drum solo literally brought down the house. When he realized he had saved his friends, he cracked one of his Otis smiles and started to say something. And then he disappeared from view.

A curtain of stones caused them to dive for cover. The avalanche managed to quiet their friend. Muddy would’ve grinned if he hadn’t realized his best friend just died in front of his eyes.

A rain of smaller boulders brought down the last sirens, but along with it a curtain of stone, which quickly built up a wall between the drummer and his buddies. They were trapped inside the cave; safe, but trapped and separated from the friend who’d just saved their butts.

No one could manage a word. Was Otis buried as well? The drumming halted just as suddenly as it began. He probably lay in a grave of rock, a way he would prefer to die but still, likely dead beneath it all and just gone.

Maybe he’d managed to scurry backwards as the avalanche happened, Muddy thought optimistically. Maybe he stood there on the beach, alive. Trapped away from us and safe for the moment, but only until the remainder of the sirens came for their revenge.

Poe wasn’t the first to cry. Corey was.

“He sacrificed himself. Why? He might have been able to bring down the house from inside, not out there with them.”

Muddy attempted to speak, but couldn’t. His friend was dead, just moments before he’d resigned himself to death.

“He didn’t have to give his life for us,” Poe whimpered. “We could’ve done something.”

“No,” Corey rebutted, “we couldn’t. It was over. Done. We were toast. We were caught off guard and he was the only one who thought to use Silver Eye’s training, just like Poe did on the ship. He saved us. He knew what the consequences might be, but we don’t know if his death is definite.”

Muddy prayed his friend was right.

“What now?” He found his voice. “Do we die in here? There’s no exit.” He still felt like a wuss and hated himself for it. In spite of the new powers he had and all this travel to find Zack, what had he accomplished? Nothing. As usual, he was the lesser brother, the weakest of the family.

“We dig,” Corey said giving an order in a gruff tone of voice.

They would dig. For what, Muddy had no idea. Maybe to find that Otis had killed all of the creatures, and that they would be able to use the boat to find another route inside the mountain.

Corey looked at his friend. He cocked an ear to the rocks.

They both heard it. Scratching. From the other side. From outside the wall of rocks.

Was it a siren still alive, trying to get to them?

“I’ll kill you!” Muddy screamed. “I swear I’ll tear each feather from your freakin’ wings and shove them down your beak.”

The digging stopped. Something coughed.

“That’s not cool at all. Not very friendly of you. Figured your diva guitar self would show eventually.” More coughing broke up the sentence.

“Holy—” Corey turned to Muddy.

“Otis?”

“Who else would it be, dorkus? Justin Bieber?”

“Hey, diva!” Corey yelled, slapping Muddy on the arm, his happiness spilling over in tears of joy. “Dig!”

Rock by rock, they worked. They pulled and dragged them all away. One by one, they removed the barrier and prayed their work wouldn’t cause another cave-in. Within a half-hour they found success. Poe screamed when she saw a bony hand reaching through the debris and they pulled the drummer through a tiny, but welcomed opening.

Soon after they pulled Otis from the rubble, Muddy realized his condition. His brittle bones were broken all over.

They lay him on the cavern floor and let him rest.

“I’m fine,” he said, coughing up dust and blood. “Really, it’s only a flesh wound.”

Poe began her song, hovering above him, a lullaby-type tune they had never heard before. Corey joined in with a vocal melody on his sax-type thing. They performed a duet in a sweet harmony, lines weaving between each other.

Suddenly, Otis’ eyes glazed over in pain. “Stop it!” It was hurting him.

But Muddy understood their intention.

She sung. Harder. He played. Louder.

Each note was somehow healing him. Musical surgery. Did they know that they were doing it? How would they know? Yet as he stared at the duo, he knew that they did know.

An hour later, the drummer slept, his bruises visibly fading.

Muddy hugged Poe. Before he had a chance to ask the question, she spoke. “You weren’t the only one who Silver Eye gave secrets to. He figured this song might come in handy. We’re lucky Otis wasn’t in worse condition.”

Muddy just grinned and wondered if every guy always knew the exact moment he fell in love with someone.

Otis awoke soon afterwards, joking and asking why the heck they hadn’t found the way out of this hole yet.

“There has to be a way. The slaves who worked for the Tritons weren’t dumb,” Lyra said. “They wouldn’t have sacrificed themselves for something they hated with all their being. There must be a way inside.”

“What’s that?” Poe asked, feeling along the wall with Luke. They stood against the far side, digging their fingers into a carving. It contained no words or pictographs that they could see. Then again, Poe didn’t normally operate under the land of the sighted. Muddy never knew what to expect from her. First, she’d healed Otis, and now this.

“There’s something here. Maybe it’s nothing.”

Lyra jumped up. “Nothing here is not nothing. It’s something. It is.”

But how would they solve it? What could they do?

The music. It had always saved them and might one more time.

Corey shrugged. Sometimes, the answer existed in a jam. Sometimes the best songs, the ones that changed people’s lives, began with no apparent purpose.

“Should we?”

Otis picked up his drum and knocked off a rim shot. “Like, you had to ask?”

Corey, Muddy, Poe and Otis began the jam in E, their favorite, and played without purpose, just pouring themselves into every note, hoping for something.

Each note lived, just like it did in the River. It lived. It grew. Then it took on a life of its own and found its purpose with the secret in the wall.

“I told you there was a way!” Lyra hugged her brother, and then Muddy.

Poe smiled, winking at him. “People usually do find a way to get what they want.”

Dust broke all around them as the wall belched. They’d found the way of escape, an entry that opened into the bowels of the mountain. Strangely, no one celebrated, probably because they realized that their luck had to run out sometime. It had been a long time since they’d lost a member of their group and that scared Muddy more than the task ahead.

* * * *

The scrawling on the wall before them was minimal at best. Muddy expected a code in some strange language. Everything he read was code to him anyway with his dyslexia. How he thought he would solve this problem was beyond him. Every class, every day, he had to fight just to keep up with the others. Even Poe whizzed through books in Braille when the school could afford them. What did he have? He had a father whom many worshipped as a writer; he was simply the stupid son. Even musically, he held a distant second place finish in his family.

“What does it say?” He turned to Lyra and Luke, hoping they could decipher what he couldn’t. After all, this was their world, not his.

Otis had pushed his way to the front, eager to try his hand at deciphering the secrets Muddy couldn’t. His bruises and cuts were already healing to the point they were nearly invisible. Maybe Poe’s song kept working on him. It was either that or his own drumming had affected his body chemistry. They had learned about how the body was affected by vibrations and music in class, but back then, Muddy never thought it could actually heal or save a life.

“I can’t see squat. Just scribbling, that’s all. It doesn’t even look like a language to me,” he said. His parents spoke several languages, learned from their travels and a vast background of studies. Some of it had to trickle down to their son. If he didn’t recognize it, maybe it was just rambling symbols.

Lyra rubbed her hands over it where the barrier had come down. She cleared away debris and found more room to move. Most of the dust had settled and an oval opening stood before them. The band stepped inside and examined their surroundings. Upon the wall on their left were etchings that none could decipher. On either side, lights now illuminated the hall, not with fire from the tiki torches expected in every cheesy cave movie, but rather with splotches of blinding white material within the walls themselves.

“Guys, maybe this isn’t our last day alive after all,” Muddy said. He viewed the various shapes on wall and believed he knew what to do.

“Caves hold some interesting secrets, don’t you think?” Luke smiled. “It’s just simple minerals that the slaves used to find their way during the construction. You’d probably find it in your caves back home.” He wiped the greasy surface with his hand, which now glowed almost as bright as the markings on the wall.

Muddy examined the indentations of people and creatures and objects in many formations. So many options, he thought, so many odd carvings all around him. There could be only one choice, the choice presented to him in the River dreams. He pressed his fingers into a carving on the cave wall that resembled a guitar and the world came down around them.

Behind them, a wall crashed to the cavern floor. The walls to the front and sides fell away into dust, leaving them blinded for the moment, choking at the foul-smelling substance. The cavern behind them was gone.

“What did you do?” Otis screamed. “We’re going to die, I know it.”

Muddy’s brain scattered in confusion, thinking his friend might be right. He’d simply dug his fingers into what looked like the one thing that had made him happy all these years and nearly crushed them as a result.

Lyra and Luke rushed forward when they could see again. “We’re trapped, all right, but there are more messages.”

“Great,” Muddy replied. “Let me try again and land the killing blow.” But he felt more confident than he sounded.

“There’s gotta be a way,” Poe said, echoing her words from before. “The booby trap wasn’t designed to kill. It’s a test. It’s got to be.”

“Muddy,” Corey stepped in, “you’ve got to find us a way out of here. Silver Eye trusted you with the River. He knew you were the one with the skills.”

Right, Muddy thought. He knew how to kill them all, how to lead them all to their demise. If Silver Eye wanted company, wherever he was, he was likely about to get some.

As he allowed himself another weak moment to brood, Poe walked up to each wall and hummed to herself. Not in song, but in thought. As she did so, she made sure to press each finger lightly over the symbols on the walls, avoiding a repeat of the disaster Muddy brought upon them.

She walked back and forth, touching this wall and that one.

What was she doing?

“When the wall fell, that wasn’t all that happened,” she said, as though reading his thoughts. “We also sunk several feet into the mountain as well.”

“Great,” he said. “Now, I’ve really buried us.”

“Will you please shut up?” Corey snapped. “Enough of the Sad Sack stuff. Like you’re the cause of all of our problems here. Really.”

Otis piped in, “Sorry for yelling at you but seriously, this downbeat stuff, really not attractive, man.”

“That would explain a lot,” added Corey, focusing on the wall. “I thought it was just a tremor. It wasn’t. The room essentially fell. That’s why the cavern disappeared. It’s still there, it’s just above us. I have no clue how far down we are.”

He walked to the far wall and pressed his fingers to the smooth, dark surface. It felt cool, hard and unforgiving, especially because it could easily tumble in on them. His fingers searched out another few feet and found an edge. Then he discovered another few feet of black coolness. Another edge. He kept going. Each section of the wall was partitioned by an edge of some sort but he didn’t press hard. 1. 2. 3. 4. He counted as he circled the band and they greeted his actions with odd expressions.

“What are you doing?” Lyra finally asked.

“Sh-h-h…” he replied. “Come here and follow me with your fingers. Run them along the edges and tell me what you feel.”

Without questioning, she did, trailing behind him as her fingers rubbed against the dark surface. As they completed the circle, she stopped then reversed course and rubbed with her other hand, walking counter-clockwise this time.

“It’s this one,” she said.

“What about it,” Muddy challenged her.

“It’s warm. I don’t know how or why, but it is,” she said. “It must be the way.”

The others felt the wall for themselves and agreed with her assumption.

Poe cocked her head at Corey. “How did you know?”

He shrugged. “I’m amazed I felt anything with these calloused fingers, but I did. There are twelve different sections, just like there are to the western scale, from C to C and all the sharps and flats within it. All seemed the same and I thought it was my imagination, but Lyra felt it, too. One of them was warm. That’s got to be a sign, right?”

Poe’s eyes lit up. “That means something’s behind it, a path, maybe.”

“Hopefully, not one that’s on fire,” Corey said. “That would explain the cool to warm factor.”

“Geek,” Poe said, punching him in the arm.

They agreed, even Luke, who hung back a little.

“Now what, genius?” Otis readied his sticks. “Should I bang something?”

“No!” said the group in unison. Due to the cave-ins they’d already faced, they didn’t dare risk another.

“Lighten up, folks. Just kidding,” he said, grinning ear to ear. “Someone’s got to kill the tension.”

“So how do we get through?” Poe asked then answered her own question by placing both hands on the wall. “Twelve steps. It’s got to be a specific note.”

Otis jumped up and down. “I never forget what a woman tells me, even if she’s a beast. An actual beast this time. Remember what they sang to us? The ones who had a ‘crush’ on us?” Muddy groaned at the joke, cringing at the image. “That’s right. They told us the key of this place, how to find entry.”

Corey looked at his friend as though he’d been hit too hard by those falling rocks. “Dude, what are you talking about?

“She said, ‘The key of earth.’ Remember now?”

“And what key is that? I only recall the keys of fire, air and water.”

The drummer smiled his sarcastic half-smile. “Good one, but the key of earth, ground, the lifeblood of most rock and blues songs. Which is it?”

Poe blinked. “Duh. And I’ve been hearing it since the walls collapsed before. Stand back. I think I’ve got this one.”