by Nadia Aguiar
He looked again.
Three cottages. Sitting at angles to one another. Suddenly Simon’s heart began to beat faster. There was no palm tree but he looked for a stump. He saw it.
He hadn’t been past these cottages already, but he had seen them somewhere before!
He slung his backpack onto the ground and opened it quickly. He took out the ophallagraph that he was looking for, hands itching with excitement. It glowed brightly, even in the sunlight.
He held it up to the scene before him.
He broke into a big smile. The two scenes matched up.
The two men under the umbrella, standing roughly where he stood.
The three cottages, all in the same place, though in the ophallagraph the cottages had thatched roofs and freshly painted doors and windows. Flowers bloomed from the windowsills and vegetable gardens were planted high to stock the kitchens. A tall palm by the right-most hut shimmered in the sunlight. Now the buildings were just empty shells. Roofs, doors, and windows were gone. The only sign of life was a stand of cacti that encroached, hemming in the farthest cottage with vicious spikes. All that remained of the palm tree was a petrified stump.
Simon looked at the ruins triumphantly. He found the Blue Door in the ophallagraph, oriented himself, and looked up to see where it should be in real life. He looked out on to miles of flat, baked earth stretching to the horizon. There was no Blue Door in sight. Holding his breath, he narrowed his eyes and searched the horizon. He saw a low cluster of rocks resting very far away on the horizon. Could the Blue Door be there, in those rocks?
Simon’s initial excitement gave way to frustration. The rocks were so far away! He flexed his ragged toes, wincing, and gently touched the sunburn on his forehead. But there was nothing to do but start walking, so he set off toward the outcrop of rocks in the distance. He was tired, blistered, and hungry, and each step was more of an effort than it had been the day before, but he pressed gamely on. He was right to have come into the Neglected Provinces.
The Blue Door was out there and he was going to find it.
* * *
As the day wore on, the sun beat down mercilessly and Simon walked beneath the umbrella to give himself some relief. All the big animals were gone but he had seen lizards and insects from time to time, then eventually even they petered out. He longed to see a single blade of green, but instead he walked across graveyards of giant bones, picked clean by carrion birds, hearing them snap beneath his feet. They rattled horribly as a wind picked up. The canteen was bone-dry now. And that was just water—he hadn’t eaten anything in almost a full day. His mouth was parched and his lips cracked. His eyes felt like sandpaper. There was no moisture sufficient to form the tiniest puff of a cloud. His feet were swollen and grains of sand chafed the sores on his heels. Everything he knew seemed terribly far away. For a while he had been able to look back and see the tiny dot of the three ruined cottages behind him. When they finally slipped from view he felt even more alone.
He wondered how such a bare, empty place could exist in Tamarind. He half wished that the Red Coral would appear and find him. He would have felt relief to see one of their jeeps driving across the sands to pick him up, would have waved them down with all his might. He didn’t care what they did with him afterward. But even the Red Coral Project hadn’t penetrated this place.
Hunger and thirst made his mind fuzzy and he couldn’t stop the drift of his thoughts. Sometimes he hallucinated. He saw his father, sitting at his desk, turning the radio dial restlessly, his face growing sallow, his brows sternly knitted.
A memory from long ago kept returning to him: sailing on the Pamela Jane, on an evening watch with his father. His mother and sisters were in the cabin, and it was just Simon and his dad. Papi had been explaining how the sonar of dolphins and whales worked, allowing them to “see” with sound, even in complete darkness or through the sediment. Some species could even focus the sound into a blast to stun prey. Simon could hear the deliberate way his father spoke when he was explaining something, how he could make even the most difficult and complex ideas come alive. Simon had been fascinated that day, had sat there imagining great whales beneath the boat as his father spoke. The evening sun gilded the ridges of the waves, catching the metal on the Pamela Jane. A warm breeze flowed over them and below in the water ran the shadows of albacore tuna, and down far, far below these schools, the promise of a plenitude of miraculous and wondrous deep-sea animals so impossible looking that they seemed creatures only of invention. There were hundreds of days like these. Simon’s memory was like a tide pool abundant with all sorts of life; he had only to dip his hand in it to draw up some rich remembrance.
Simon missed his dad.
He would have given anything to see Papi coming to find him.
There was something else that Simon’s thoughts kept returning to. He knew in his heart that he had fled home rashly. Sure, he’d had a good reason—Tamarind needed help, and obviously their parents were in some sort of trouble because of the Red Coral Project. Only he had not left just to stop the Red Coral Project, but to prove himself—to show his parents that he wasn’t a kid who needed to be kept in the dark about everything, to prove to them that he could help. He was bored with life on land and angry that his father had changed so much, and he wanted to show him that. He, Simon, the most logical of thinkers, the scientist who weighed things impartially, who had been gifted with a rational problem-solving brain, had made an emotional decision. He had been able to argue it rationally to Maya and convince her—that was what he was good at. But deep down Simon knew why he had wanted to come back to Tamarind. And now he had put his sisters in danger, too. His heart was heavy.
* * *
All afternoon the hot, dry wind whipped up sandstorms that stung Simon’s arms and legs. He had to huddle beneath the umbrella and breathe through his shirt held over his mouth. When one storm passed the dunes had moved, the landscape reshaped and reshuffled, so that everything looked alien to him all over again. And then the wind returned, tunneling over the earth and howling in his ears and blasting grains of sand into his eyes. The suspended sand made an orange haze to the horizon, so thick that Simon could no longer see if he was still heading toward the outcrop of rocks where he hoped to find the Little Blue Door.
He’d had nothing to drink since a mangy, shriveled cactus he had found that afternoon, whose juices had been sour, and he was desperately thirsty. He had tried to see if there was juice in the strange silver oranges from the oasis, but they were so hard they only bent his pocketknife when he tried to pierce them. They were heavy and he considered abandoning them but couldn’t bring himself to—it would have meant there was no reason at all to have come here. Often he had to stop walking and rest beneath the umbrella, too exhausted to take another step. But then he would force himself back to his feet to shuffle forward, the hot sand pouring into his tattered shoes.
That night the wind died down and the sand settled. Simon took the ophallagraphs out and they lit a small circle of light. He did not fear the light attracting the notice of wild creatures because he knew he was utterly alone. The last living thing he had seen was a lizard with a prehistoric ruff and little jewel eye that morning, and even that seemed like a lifetime ago. He sat before the images as if they were a fire, but their warmth was false, and he shivered as the temperature plummeted. He fell asleep, and awoke once in the night to find that the ophallagraphs had grown brighter, shooting a beacon straight up into the sky for anyone who might be out there to see, though Simon had given up hope of any other humans finding him.
He saw other pillars of unnatural light, great white beams ascending the sky in the distance. Afraid he was hallucinating, he opened the umbrella and hid beneath it and tried to sleep. Lying there, he thought he could feel vibrations emanating from deep within the earth. He closed his eyes tightly and wished for morning.
* * *
Morning. Still no water. Simon’s head pounded. Every fiber of his body felt pain.
Daylight had swallowed the strange beams of light from across the desert and Simon wondered if they had just been a dream. Thoughts roved loose in his mind. He had stopped sweating altogether. It was a bad sign, he knew. In spite of the searing heat, his body felt cold. He coughed a rattling cough—the dust had scoured his throat and his voice was almost gone. His vision was blurred and sometimes things appeared double before him. But the sandstorms were over and he found himself not too far away from a long outcrop of rocks. He stumbled to his feet and trudged on, and some time later he walked into a strange new landscape of chimney-shaped formations sticking out of the earth. They had been created long, long ago by winds and water—back when there had been water in this forsaken place—and now they stood there, forlorn remnants of some long-ago age. Simon wandered delirious among them.
And then …
Something caught his eye.
A square of blue, there in the rocks.
Yes, it was—he was sure it was …
Or were his eyes deceiving him?
Simon began to stumble weakly down the steep rocks of a gulley and back up the other side to where a small blue door was built into the side of a great column of rock. He reached the door and fell against it—it wasn’t a mirage. It was solid and real. The mysterious Little Blue Door in the middle of nowhere—he had found it! He could be close now—very close—to solving a big part of the mystery.
Strength he didn’t know he had left flooded him. He tried to turn the handle eagerly but found it locked.
He knocked and waited hopefully, but when there was no response—not even the shuffle of footsteps or the murmur of a voice from within—he pounded it weakly with the heel of his hand. Nothing. He felt all the way around it carefully to see if there was a hidden catch, but his hands met nothing. With a growing sinking feeling, he threw his shoulder into it. If all else failed, perhaps brute strength would work. But the door failed to budge.
“Hello!” he shouted as loudly as he could. “Hello!” But his throat was so dry that he could do little more than bleat hoarsely. His voice echoed off the desert walls and gorges and came back to him, hollow and alone.
Simon grabbed on to the handle with both hands and braced his foot against the wall and, mustering all his remaining strength, yanked it. The door flew open and Simon tumbled back. Dazed, he leaned on one elbow and looked up. The door had opened not into a room, but on to solid rock. There was nothing behind it, only stone. Dizzy, he laid his head on the earth. He had come so far for this—for nothing—a false door that opened on to the rock in a forgotten place in the middle of nowhere. If his body hadn’t been so parched he would have wept.
The adventure had gone too far. I’m sorry, Mami, Papi, he thought. Maya, Penny, Granny Pearl. He closed his eyes but the world still spun in the dark. He wanted nothing more in that moment but for it to stop.
* * *
At first he confused the echoing under the earth with the thunder of his pulse pounding in his ears. But then a deep rumbling began, coming from the rock behind the Blue Door. As he tried to sit up he heard the grinding crunch of heavy stone, and the last thing he remembered was being blasted by a blaze of dazzling, unnatural light.
Chapter Fourteen
The Mole Monks • An Ancient Library • Triptych
Simon opened his eyes to find that the brightness of the sun had been snuffed out and a strange new radiance was pouring over him. Dimly he remembered seeing a rock being rolled back from the Blue Door, and the sensation of being lifted and carried.
“Shh, he’s waking up,” said a voice floating somewhere above his head. The voice sounded as if it were trapped in a bubble bumping gently back and forth between the walls.
“It was the Little Blue Door!” Simon mumbled, struggling to sit up. “I went the right way.” He leaned back on one elbow, feeling some satisfaction through the fog of hunger and weariness.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw three men looking down at him with nervous concern. They weren’t ordinary people, he realized at once. Their eyes were very large, their ears small and nubby, and brown robes hid their pale skin. Fine, downy whiskers grew on their ageless faces, even on their cheeks and foreheads, giving them a faint silvery sheen. Simon realized that whatever he had said was the wrong thing. The men’s concern had deepened to worry. One looked downright frightened.
“See—he was looking for us,” hissed the nervous-looking one. He appeared unpredictable, like a cornered dog. “We should put him back out, before he wakes up more.”
“He’s here now,” said another of the men calmly. He had a broad, kind face. “I won’t send him back out to die. Let’s wait a while. We may learn something from him.”
“It’s a bad idea, Eusebio,” said the nervous one through clenched teeth. “I’m telling you … he’s with them, I know he is—”
“That’s enough,” said the broad-faced man. “He’s only young. And he’s here now.”
There was murmuring back and forth for a moment. Simon struggled to speak. He knew it was very important to tell them why he was there, but his mouth wouldn’t obey him and he couldn’t find the words. He was too exhausted. Then the broad-faced man said, “Oh, all right, Nicodemus, just for now…” Simon saw a rag being lowered to his face. He fought as he felt his nose and mouth being covered, but sweetish fumes burned his throat and suddenly he felt all his energy draining away and he was powerless to stop himself from sinking back into darkness.
* * *
When Simon woke again he realized he had been moved. He blinked, getting his bearings. First, he was alive. Second, he was lying on a rough blanket in some type of glowing subterranean chamber. Mud had been daubed on the round walls to dim the brightness of the rock. He became aware of throbbing in his feet. Moving only his eyes—if anyone was there he didn’t want them to know he was awake yet—he looked down to see they had been salved and bandaged. Past his feet, a round doorway opened onto a long tunnel. A bluish glow came from his right, and Simon turned his head slightly to see the broad-faced man sitting at a table several feet away. The glowing was coming from something he was looking at on the table. The other two men weren’t there. To Simon’s dismay, he saw the man lift the ophallagraph of the Pamela Jane and hold it up to study. They had gone through his backpack while he slept! Simon tried to take a deep breath, but he wheezed and the man looked over and saw that he was awake.
“Here,” he said, bringing him a clay mug of water.
Simon sat up. After the first sip, he began to guzzle it.
“Not too much at once,” said the man, taking the mug away. “We don’t know how long you’ve been dehydrated. You can have a little more in a minute.”
The water had revived Simon and as he began to feel less groggy, fear set in. He had no idea where he was.
“You’ve been asleep for a whole surface day,” said the man. “Not that we really know night and day down here.”
“Where am I?” Simon croaked.
“On the other side of the Blue Door,” said the man, handing the water back to Simon. “My name is Eusebio,” he went on. “We wouldn’t usually be so inhospitable, but you see, the Outsiders are nearby and we thought that you must have wandered off from their group. I apologize about the chormetten that put you to sleep. My brother Nicodemus doesn’t believe in taking any chances.”
“I’m not with the other Outsiders,” said Simon, clearing his throat. He drank slowly.
“We’ve realized that,” said Eusebio. “There are portholes—air vents, really—that open here and there in the desert floor. They’re our eyes and ears down here. And yesterday we became aware that someone was lost in the Provinces. We were trying to figure out what to do about you when, to our surprise, you came straight to us.”
Simon recalled the massive towers of light he had seen in the distance the previous night and realized he must have been seeing the glow of ophalla through the vents.
“I thought there was nothing out there,” he said. “I thought I was
alone.”
“That’s only how it looked,” said Eusebio, smiling. “We planned to carry you through the tunnels and release you somewhere closer to civilization, but then we saw these—” He nodded at the glowing ophallagraphs. “Please pardon us for going through your things; you realize we had to.”
Just then one of the other men Simon had seen earlier appeared in the doorway.
“Frascuelo, our visitor is awake,” said Eusebio. “Would you get some food for him?” It was the second man, not the nervous one, but the one with the long face. He nodded to Simon and hurried off.
Simon realized he hadn’t introduced himself. “I’m Simon,” he said. “Simon Nelson.” The fog in his head was clearing and he looked around. “What is this place?” he asked. “Why are you here?”
“We belong to an ancient Order, the Underground Monks,” said Eusebio. “Tamarinders call us Mole Monks. Any that still remember us, that is.”
Underground Monks? Simon took another sip of water, wondering if he was still dreaming. Frascuelo returned with a bowl of soup, which he gave to Simon, then left. Simon devoured it hungrily. It was made of boiled cactus and herbs and he felt his strength returning.
“As for what this place is,” Eusebio went on, “it’s an underground library for the ancient books of Tamarind. Long ago, during a period of turmoil, our ancestors went deep into the earth to preserve a record of Tamarind’s history, her myths and lore. An order of us has lived here ever since. We make sure the records are safe and the story of Tamarind survives. You can think of us as librarians.”
Eusebio looked both plump and wizened, with exceptionally large eyes in a surprisingly shriveled face.
“How long have you been here?” Simon asked.
“I was born above and I came to study here in the archives when I was twenty,” said Eusebio. “That was ninety years ago. Frascuelo is one hundred and five. Nicodemus is one hundred. Mole Monks live to be older than most because we live surrounded by ophalla.” He tapped the ice white wall.
