The Forbidden Expedition

by Alex Bell

  They were in one of these rocky chasms when Ethan suddenly stopped and said, “Does anyone else have the feeling that we’re being followed?”

  The others paused, gazing back at the empty path behind them.

  “You’re imagining it,” Shay finally said. “It’s the mountain playing tricks on you.”

  Ethan frowned. “I thought I heard footsteps behind us a moment ago. And felt eyes on the back of my neck. Magicians are extremely sensitive to eyes on the back of the neck, you know. We can sense when we’re being watched.”

  “It might be bats, rats, or cats,” Beanie said. “Witch Mountain is bound to be crawling with those.”

  “Perhaps,” Ethan said doubtfully.

  They continued on their way, and almost at once Stella knew what Ethan meant. She could sense it too—a prickly feeling right on the back of her neck. Several times she glanced sharply behind her, but the path was always completely empty.

  “Would you two stop doing that?” Shay said. “This is going to be a very long journey if we’re all jumping at shadows every moment.”

  They turned around a corner in the path just then and found themselves face-to-face with a cave entrance—two cave entrances, in fact, side by side.

  Beanie groaned. “Caves are never good,” he said. “There are so many ways you can perish in a cave.” And to everyone’s dismay, he started counting them off on his fingers. “Ravaged by bats, drowned in rock pools, crushed by a rockslide, suffocated by moths, eaten by hairy-leg spiders, sliced in half by—”

  “Beanie, stop it,” Stella said. “No one wants to hear these things.”

  “There’s no other path,” Shay said. “And no way around.” He glanced at the others and said, “If we want to continue, then we’re going to have to go through one of these caves.”

  Ethan sighed. “A pitch-black cave in Witch Mountain,” he said. “I’m sure it will be fine. Absolutely fine.”

  Stella dug out the map from her bag, and they all gathered around it. The map did indeed show two caves. One of them was marked as the CAVE OF HYPNOTIZING WHITE CATS. The other was marked as UNKNOWN.

  “Hypnotizing white cats don’t sound good,” Shay said, chewing his lower lip. “I mean, I like cats normally, but these will be witches’ cats, won’t they?”

  “Witches’ cats can be extremely dangerous,” Beanie agreed. “You’ve got hypnotizing cats, levitating cats, eye-clawing cats, fury-spitting cats.” He frowned and added, “There were reports that Captain Unwin Marjory Banks decided to buy a hypnotizing white cat when he retired to the Karzak Jungle. One day he didn’t get up to feed the cat its breakfast, so it hypnotized him into walking straight into the piranha-infested river outside.”

  “Why would anyone want a hypnotizing cat as a pet in the first place?” Ethan demanded. “Seems like a terrible idea.”

  “Too much tiger punch, perhaps?” Beanie suggested. “He was a Jungle Cat explorer, after all.”

  “Well, let’s go with this other cave,” Shay said, pointing at the unnamed one. “For all we know, there might not be anything dangerous in that one at all, whereas we know the other one is going to be tricky for a fact.”

  “Koa seems to prefer it, though,” Stella said.

  They all looked to see that Shay’s shadow wolf was, indeed, standing right outside the Cave of Hypnotizing White Cats, gazing back at them hopefully and wagging her tail.

  “Oh, Koa loves cats,” Shay said. “She can probably smell them in there and doesn’t realize that they’re hypnotizing ones. I say we go through the other cave. It hasn’t been explored yet anyway, so we ought to go that way to help complete the map.”

  There was no arguing with that. They were explorers, after all, so when faced with a choice of this kind, they should always choose the unknown. Stella took the pixie lamp from her bag and gently prodded the fire pixie awake. The pixie uncurled from the floor of her lantern, shook out her fiery long hair, and immediately began flitting to and fro, emitting a bright golden light. Stella whispered her thanks, lifting the lantern up high, and the four explorers and the camel stepped into the mouth of the cave, Koa padding after them reluctantly.

  The fire-pixie lamp blazed bright enough to illuminate a good portion of their surroundings, and they saw that the cave was huge, reaching high up into the rocks and stretching away from them into the darkness. Frozen stalactites and icicles reached down from the ceiling, and blue rock pools gleamed below. The place smelled of cold water and frosty dampness.

  “I don’t like the look of those,” Ethan said, gesturing toward the icicles and stalactites above them. “They look like hanging swords that could pierce you right through if they were to fall off.”

  “Captain Leroy Livingstone Pritchard,” Beanie said promptly. “Impaled by a falling stalactite in the bat caves of Eastern Vampira. It was so huge and sharp that it drove right through his pith helmet and straight into his brain.”

  “Thank you, Beanie,” Ethan said with a sigh. “Very helpful.”

  “You’re welcome,” Beanie said, looking pleased.

  The four explorers moved cautiously forward. The sense of being watched was stronger than ever, and Stella felt like there were hundreds of unseen eyes peering at them out of the darkness, just beyond the light from the lantern. There was no snow inside the cave, and their boots crunched over frozen pebbles. After a little while, Ethan tapped Stella on the shoulder, and when she glanced at him, he jerked his head back toward the path behind them. Stella could hear it too—the unmistakable crunch of footsteps. It was almost lost under the sound of their own, and Stella supposed the faint sound could just be an echo. But it could also be someone, or something, following them.

  They continued down the path, which soon reached a vast stony bridge. Savage-looking stalagmites reached up from the chasm below, interspersed with blue rock pools. Every now and then a big, fat bubble would rise to the surface of a pool and pop in a suspicious manner, as if there were some large creature breathing beneath the surface.

  “I guess we’ll have to cross,” Stella said. “The bridge looks solid enough, at least.”

  Still, there were no handrails, and the explorers stepped carefully onto the damp stone. They made their way step by careful step.

  At first Stella thought it was the flickering, shifting light of the pixie lamp that made it seem as if there were dark shapes gliding above them, but more and more she felt like she could see something moving up there, out of the corner of her eye. She tried lifting the pixie lantern a little higher and squinting upward, but the ceiling was too far away for her to see, and she could only make out shadows of movement.

  “I think there’s something up there,” she said eventually.

  “Bats, probably,” Beanie said. “There are ninety-three types of bat in the known world, ninety-one of which will attack humans if they’re provoked—”

  “Fortunately, we’re not provoking anyone,” Ethan said. He had Nigel’s reins in his hand and gave a bit of a tug to keep the reluctant camel moving. Stella expected him to spit in response, but strangely, the camel seemed to have taken rather a shine to Ethan and leaned its head down to nibble at his hair in an affectionate manner.

  “Get off!” Ethan batted him away. “Ew! Camel breath stinks! It’s a good thing I snatched some of those bath bubbles from Weenus’s Trading Post. I’m not going to walk around smelling like camel breath the entire time.”

  “You stole from him?” Beanie exclaimed, looking upset. “Stealing’s wrong. And Munch was very nice to us.”

  Ethan waved his concern away. “He was cheating us for all we were worth.”

  The explorers were about halfway across when suddenly the rock pools below began to bubble, as if the water were boiling. The four children glanced down at the rock pools, and instinct told them that this was not a good development. All the fur on Koa’s back was standing on end. And as if any further proof were needed, the jungle fairies suddenly woke up and immediately started doing their chant of doo
m.

  Stella turned and saw Mustafah banging away at his drums on Nigel’s back, while Hermina, Harriet, and Humphrey showed off their handstands and backflips. The camel’s ears twitched in irritation, and he shook himself in an attempt to dislodge the fairies, but they were staying firmly put.

  “Guys,” Stella said, “I think we should—”

  Before she could finish, one of the rock pools below them seemed to explode in a great sea of sparkling white spray and freezing foam. A six-foot-long shark burst from the water—mouth open, monstrous teeth gleaming. But rather than flopping onto the rocks and beaching itself there, like a normal shark would have done, this one soared right up into the air as if it were water. Its sleek gray body seemed to ripple with muscle as it swam through the air up toward the bridge, snapping its teeth at them on its way past their heads. The explorers all ducked in alarm and then looked up only to be met with a terrifying sight.

  The air above them was suddenly filled with sharks. Stella was sure they must have been the shapes she’d noticed earlier, only now they’d come lower and glided menacingly between the stalactites, staring down at the explorers with cold, dead eyes. There must have been twenty of them at least. Some were huge, others were slightly smaller—but they all had rows of gleaming, razor-sharp teeth, and they were all heading their way.

  “—run!” Stella gasped.

  The four of them scrambled back to their feet and sprinted the rest of the way across the bridge as more sharks came bursting out of the rock pools below. The camel’s hooves kicked up showers of stone as Nigel bleated indignantly, and the jungle fairies kept up their fee-fi-fo-fo chant. The sharks came at them all at once, from both above and below, moving with a terrifying speed as they charged through the air.

  Even though they were all racing, the breath burning in their lungs, they couldn’t go fast enough. One of the larger sharks was almost upon them—teeth gnashing, tail thrashing, mere inches from taking a giant bite out of poor Nigel’s behind—when Ethan twisted and threw magic back over his shoulder. The spell hit the shark full in the face, and it instantly turned into a wonky squish-squish frog, hopping along the bridge and looking bemused. It was hard to tell whether Nigel stamped on the frog accidentally or deliberately, but either way Ethan was clearly right about them being practically indestructible—it was flattened into the ground one moment, then popping back into frog shape and hopping off to the nearest rock pool the next.

  The spell bought the explorers the time they needed to reach the end of the bridge, but to everyone’s dismay, the cave didn’t continue as they’d expected it to. Instead, the bridge led to a dead end—nothing but a sheer rock face reaching up to the spiked ceiling. The chasm was too deep to jump down, even if it hadn’t been full of shark-infested rock pools and fatally sharp stalagmites. The only escape was to go back the way they’d come—over the bridge—and that was now impossible. The entire structure was crowded with sharks, their huge bodies rippling first one way and then the other as they glided back and forth.

  Shay had his boomerang in his hand but seemed reluctant to throw it. Stella guessed it was because a boomerang hit to the nose was probably more likely to enrage a shark even further than do any real damage to it. “Can you turn them all into frogs?” the wolf whisperer asked, looking at Ethan.

  “As long as they come one at a time,” the magician replied. “And not too quickly.”

  “I can freeze some of them,” Stella said, already reaching for her tiara and placing it on her white hair.

  The moment she spoke, a shape darted at them from the side, and Stella threw up her arm, freezing the shark solid. It hung in the air for a moment before falling to the ground, splintering into pieces on the rock below. Stella couldn’t help feeling bad, as it wasn’t really the shark’s fault it wanted to eat them, it was just its natural sharkish nature. But as more sharks followed and she froze a second and then a third, she felt her guilt slipping away as an icy feeling ran down her back and the tiara did its job of chilling her heart.

  Koa stood before them on the bridge, snarling and growling at the sharks, but she wasn’t as effective a distraction with them as she’d been with the guards back at the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club. The sharks seemed to be able to sense that she had no physical substance and simply glided straight through her on their way to the explorers.

  Beside her, Stella was aware of Ethan turning two more sharks into frogs, one after the other. Unfortunately, with potentially catastrophic timing, Gideon chose that moment to wriggle free from Shay’s pocket. He landed with an ungainly splat on the bridge and immediately hopped off toward the other frogs. Perhaps he had been a frog for too long and mistook the others for his own kind. Whatever the reason, there were soon three wonky squish-squish frogs on the bridge, and they all looked identical, which was not good news at all. Beanie lunged at the frogs and stuffed them in his own pocket, sneezing violently, while Ethan and Stella battled with the incoming sharks. But there were so many of them and they were coming too quickly now, diving at them one after another.

  “It’s no good,” Stella gasped. “There are too many!”

  She pressed herself right back up against the wall seconds before a particularly long shark snapped at the space where she had been. The explorers looked around desperately for a means of escape, but they were trapped and it really seemed as if this was it. They were going to be swallowed up by magic sharks before they’d been on Witch Mountain for five minutes.

  But then a clear voice rang out across the cave. “Stay right where you are!”

  Stella looked up in time to see a figure dressed in boots, a tattered cloak, and a wide-brimmed hat crouched at the top of a rocky outcrop. Just as a shark passed by below, the person leapt from the rock straight onto the shark’s back. The creature bucked and thrashed in an attempt to throw him off, but the rider had spurs on his boots and pressed these into the shark’s side while leaning down low over its back, grabbing its fins, and pointing them in the direction of the explorers. When they drew level, the figure leapt from the shark, cloak flying out behind him, and threw a bottle of bright red liquid on the ground at his feet. The moment it smashed, the sharks all tumbled from the air—some to fall back into the rock pools with a splash, while others fell, thrashing angrily, among the stalagmites.

  “Not a moment to lose,” the newcomer said, and Stella was astonished to see that the rider was female, no older than Stella, with dark brown skin, a cheerful smile, and large brown eyes.

  “Who are you—” Ethan began.

  “The red bottle has a gravity spell in it, but it won’t last long,” the girl said, cutting him off. “Those sharks are about to come bursting back up out of the rock pools, and they’ll be mad as all hell when they do. There’ll be a witch hole around here someplace. They’ve got to get in to feed the sharks somehow. Aha! Here it is, by gum!”

  She’d dragged a boulder away from the wall, and to their astonishment, a gaping hole led down into the rock behind it, stretching away like a slide into the darkness.

  “But who are you?” Ethan demanded. “Where does that hole go? How do we know this isn’t some kind of death trap?”

  The girl glanced back at them. “Oh. Haven’t you heard of me? I’m Cadi Sarah Salt, witch hunter extraordinaire.” She paused for a moment, then added, “Or, at least, witch hunter in training.” She pointed at the hole behind her. “And this is your one and only chance of escape.”

  At that moment, with a roar of awful fury, fifty sharks burst from the rock pools below. Whatever effect the red liquid had had was now clearly gone—the sharks soared straight up into the air, teeth gnashing in hungry anticipation as they made straight for the explorers. Cadi turned back around, gripped the brim of her hat, gave them a wide grin, and said, “Best come with me if you want to live.”

  And with that she leapt feetfirst into the hole, leaving the others to scramble after her, dragging the camel behind them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  NIGE
L WAS MOST PUT out about the witch hole. It slid straight down into the rock for quite a long way, and the problem was that camels just weren’t designed for slides.

  “Twelve Desert Jackal explorers have been killed by accidental camel crushing in the last ten years!” Beanie squeaked as they all did their best to avoid Nigel’s flailing hooves.

  The statistic didn’t comfort anyone very much, but fortunately they soon came flying out the end of the tunnel, whereupon they landed in a gigantic pumpkin patch. The pumpkins broke apart under the impact, orange pieces flying everywhere.

  “How do witches manage to crawl up that thing?” Ethan groaned, flat on his back in the middle of the patch.

  “Witches slide up rather than down,” Cadi said as she stood up and dusted herself off. “They’re tricky like that.”

  With a rather ungainly sprawling of long legs and hooves and humps, Nigel managed to get himself back on his feet and immediately began spitting at everyone in general outrage. Quick as a whip, Cadi pulled off her hat and used it as a shield against the camel spit. A great tumble of brown dreadlocks went cascading down her back as soon as they were free.

  “Gosh, your camel is a bit on the haughty side, isn’t it?”

  “I think most camels are quite haughty,” Stella said, picking herself up and brushing pieces of pumpkin from her explorer’s cloak. She checked her pockets to make sure Buster was still there and then said, “Felix says they can be quite conceited, too. Well, wasn’t that fun? I’ve never slid down a witch hole before. Or seen a flying shark, for that matter …”

  She trailed off as she became aware that Cadi Sarah Salt was staring at her.

  “What is it?” Stella asked nervously. She hoped Cadi was just staring the way most people did when they saw her white hair and skin for the first time—or perhaps it was because she had a piece of pumpkin sticking out of her ear, or something like that—but after Gideon’s reaction to her on the dirigible, she was worried it was more likely to be because she’d been recognized as an ice princess. Even witch hunters read the papers, after all.