“Ew, don’t eat that,” Alex said. “Germs.”
“I have a trash bag,” Kristin said. “We shouldn’t leave anything on the mountain.”
But Max had stopped in midgrab. The fallen trail mix had gathered into a small pile—inside a large footprint. “Um, guys . . . ?” he said softly. “Maybe Brandon the Pilot was here. This is a big foot.”
Kristin knelt and picked up a plastic foil wrapper. “He takes Xanax?”
“I doubt it,” Alex said. “Xanax is for anxiety. Brandon is Mr. Cool-as-a-Cucumber.”
“And half as smart,” Max said.
Alex rolled up her bag of trail mix. As she drew back her arm to bop Max over the head with it, he grabbed his pack and began to run.
At the summit, the camel seemed to be smiling down at him. Max didn’t like to giggle, but he couldn’t help it now. It was a straight path. It looked easy enough. The trail mix had given him energy. Brandon was probably there. Maybe he had figured out the strange message.
And if he didn’t, Max would do the job.
Next stop, he thought, the center of the world.
18
NORMALLY Max liked snowstorms. But normally meant on a lawn in Ohio on a crisp winter day with the smell of hot chocolate in the kitchen.
Not on a volcano in the middle of Iceland.
For the last hundred yards they’d been tramping through two inches of fresh snow, but that had been easy. The sun was beating down, the air was cold but refreshing.
The storm was an ambush. It rushed over the summit as if answering a 911 complaint about sneaky hikers getting too close to the top. Max drew up his hood as tight as he could. He squinted against the sharp, blowing needles of ice. His body sweat had already chilled, and he shivered hard. Visibility was only a few feet, so all three were sticking very close together now.
“If you get tired of the weather in Iceland, just stick around for a minute!” Kristin cried out from behind him.
“Is that a joke?” Max called out.
“Yes!” Kristin replied.
“Then ha-ha,” Max said.
“I think I can see the camel!” Alex shouted. “We’re not too far.”
Max squinted, barely making out the shadowy shapes of the three humps and the head. He was happy, but not too happy. “A blowing storm is always worse at the top!” he shouted. “Once we get there, we better figure out what to do pretty fast!”
Alex was at his side now, grabbing his sleeve. “Have you seen Brandon’s footprints? I’m worried about him.”
“I’m worried about us,” Max replied.
“He must have gone to another part of the slope,” Kristin said.
Max began walking again, but his eyes caught a sudden tiny motion in the snow to the left, and he veered toward it. As the shape jittered in the wind, Max could make out its thin, transparent contour. “It’s a trail mix bag!”
“Must be Brandon,” Kristin said.
“Woo-hoo, he’s probably waiting at the top!” Alex said.
“He’s a slob!” Max replied. “Littering is punishable by a fine. I saw that on a sign in Reykjavík.”
But Alex ignored him, cupping her hands to her mouth and calling out Brandon’s name louder.
The trail mix bag lifted into the wind and began to swirl. This bothered Max, and he quickened his pace. Snatching the bag in midair, he stuffed it into his jacket pocket. But now he could see a set of footprints leading directly up over the jagged snow-covered rocks from that spot toward the summit. “There’s Brandon’s path!” Max called out. “I say we follow it. We have to get there before we freeze!”
Alex took off and Max scrambled behind her, with Kristin bringing up the rear. In the new snow, the rocks were superslippery. Both Max’s ankles banged against jagged rock, and he took two falls that bruised his hip and thigh. “How are you doing?” Alex shouted over her shoulder.
“I need that healing serum—ASAP!” Max replied.
The wind picked up speed. Closer to the top it sounded like the roar of a locomotive whistle. Snow was blowing into Max’s hood. He pulled the strings so tight the hood nearly cut off his vision.
Alex was on all fours practically the whole way, jumping, grabbing, falling, rolling. She scrabbled ahead of Max and Kristin into the whiteness of the blizzard.
“Slow down!” Kristin shouted. “We can’t see you!”
Alex didn’t reply.
Max shouted her name. He picked up speed. He ignored the penetrating pain all over his body. Wetness was seeping through his gloves now, and his fingers were numb. Alex was nowhere to be seen. “Fish!” he shouted. “Fish fish fishy fish!”
“What?” Kristin shouted.
“I said fish!” Max replied.
It was the last thing he wanted to smell. Fear was the worst smell in the world. As he picked up the pace, he thought he would pass out. His lungs heaved like a cheap accordion. He’d felt like this before, when he’d gone running with his dad at the gym track. All those big people with serious faces looked like they wanted to run into him. Like they wanted to steal him away from Dad. Fear plus running equaled hyperventilation. That was a fact. Exhale, his dad had advised him. Exhale and let the inhalation take care of itself.
Max blew the air from his lungs and peered upward. A gray form was emerging from the snow—the “head” of the camel. It seemed to be moving toward him as he climbed, but Max knew that was an optical illusion too. “Alex!” he called out again.
“Dear Lord, now I’ve lost two of them,” Kristin murmured, racing past Max. Her sure, swift strides climbed the remaining rock embankments that led to the camel head. When she reached the rock, she disappeared around the other side.
Max closed ground as quickly as he could. Up close, the rock really did seem to come to life. It curved forward like a bent neck. At the top was a shape so much like a camel that Max could swear it had been carved—a jutting snout, split by a horizontal crack that looked like an impish smile. Two crags in the rock looked like lopsided eyes, and two other crags resembled nostrils.
Kristin peered out from behind the camel rock, signaling Max to hurry. “Found her!” she cried out.
As Max hoisted himself over one last outcropping, a blast of wind knocked him backward. He managed to hold on with one hand until Kristin ran over and grabbed his wrist. Her skin was bright red from the freezing wind. “We have to stop meeting like this!” she said.
Max knew that was supposed to be a joke. Joking was good. It chased away the fish. “Snow problem!” he said. “Where’s Alex?”
Before the words left his mouth, he felt himself being yanked up over the last rock outcropping. Kristin helped him to his feet and linked arms with him, leaning into the wind. Together they headed behind the camel rock.
Alex was there, crouched against the snow, a scarf covering her face. She was staring at the ground, facing away from the “head.”
Max followed her glance. They were at the top of a small hill. It dipped downward, then rose again. On top of the next hill was the next lava plug, the first “hump.”
The snow was deep up here. So, in spite of the wind, a trail of footsteps was still visible. It led from exactly where they were standing down the side of the small hill.
Halfway there, the steps ended.
“He just . . .” Alex swallowed hard. “Disappeared.”
Max stood there, mentally cycling through all the possibilities of what might have happened to Brandon:
He had fallen asleep and died under the snow . . .
He had been taken away by a rescue helicopter . . .
He was playing a prank and was about to jump out of hiding . . .
But there was no sign of a body, no sound of rotors, and no Brandon jumping out of a snow bank yelling “boo!” Alex was next to him, screaming Brandon’s name as loud as she could.
He began following the footprints, but Alex grabbed him by the arm. “Something happened to him.”
“That’s pretty obvious,” Max said.
Alex held him tighter. “Whatever it is, I don’t want it to happen to you. Think before you do anything. Put yourself in Brandon’s shoes. I am trying very hard to imagine what he would have done when he got up here.”
Kristin was by their side, shielding her face from the snow with an arm. “He knew what the message said. He wouldn’t have stood here waiting. He would have tried to solve the mystery.”
“‘Pick the nose and take shelter in the smiling valley . . .’” Max recited. “The camel has a nose,” he continued. “What’s a smiling valley?”
“I sang this song in chorus once,” Alex said. “It’s called ‘Shenandoah.’ One of the lines is ‘I long to see your smiling valley.’ Our director told us it was because all valleys looked like smiles.”
“So why not just say valley?” Max said.
“Because Jules Verne wasn’t as logical as you?” Alex shot back. “He liked complicating things? He liked that song? I don’t know, Max. Whatever. Look at where Brandon’s footsteps ended—that’s a valley!”
“And the camel does look like it has a nose,” Kristin added.
Max turned. He looked at the rock’s odd shape—the thick neck and curved head, the snout, the strange droopy ear, the crags that looked like eyes and nostrils. As he walked closer, he realized the head began at least ten feet above the snowy ground. “Can someone give me a boost?”
Alex lifted his left leg and Kristin his right. As Max rose to within reach of the nose, he could swear the camel was staring at him. “Hey, sorry about this. I’m Max. Mind if I stick a finger up your nostril?”
He wasn’t expecting to hear an answer, but asking permission just seemed like the right thing to do. Max pulled the glove off his right hand. The cold numbed his fingertips. In one quick motion he reached upward and jammed his finger into the nostril crag.
He felt something inside give. Just a fraction of an inch, like a loose section of rock. He flinched, expecting something to fall out of the hole, but nothing did. “I think I impacted a booger,” Max said.
“Charming,” Kristin said.
Silently Kristin and Alex let him down. All three of them looked back over the sloping area between the head and the hump. “Well, we picked the nose, so now I guess we take shelter in the smiling valley. Who goes first?”
“We go together,” Alex said, linking arms with them both.
As her scarf fell away from her face, her lips were blue and trembling. Max held tight. The snow had turned Brandon’s footsteps into subtle indentations, barely visible. They followed them carefully until they reached the bottom of the slope.
There they came to a stop.
“Now what?” Kristin said.
“Now n-n-nothing,” Alex said, her body shaking violently. “This is creeping me out. This is an epic fail, Max. I don’t know what went wrong, but Jules Verne did not want us standing at the top of a volcano. The only thing that can happen is a thousand-mile-an-hour wind that can blow you clear to Norway. Which is probably what happened to Brandon.”
She let go of Max’s arm and wriggled away, turning to face down the big slope to the bottom. “Where are you going?” Kristin called out.
“To look for Brandon,” she replied.
“Alex, we can’t just give up!” Max shouted.
“Come with me!” she pleaded. “Both of you. Because we need to rethink this whole thi—”
Before she could finish the word, Alex vanished from sight.
And Max could feel the earth rumbling beneath his feet.
19
MAX was falling.
He could hear Kristin screaming in his ears. Her arm smashed against his head, and his body went horizontal in midair. He was tumbling now, until his shoulder made contact with something hard. As Kristin landed on top of him, he let out a scream.
“Sorry!” Kristin shouted. “Are you OK?”
For a moment Max couldn’t move. He breathed hard and looked around. In the dull light that filtered from above, he could make out a hard rock floor and a wall that curved into blackness.
He felt an arm behind his head and turned to see his cousin staring down at him. She had a gash above her left eye. “You got hurt,” he said.
“It’s only a flesh wound,” she said.
Max smiled. “That’s my line.”
A deep mechanical throb echoed through the chamber, and Max sat up sharply. Above them, an enormous rock slab hung downward from the ceiling on a hinge. “By Leif Eriksson’s ghost,” Kristin said. “That thing is a trapdoor.”
Slowly it was moving. Two thick metal rods were bolted to its underside, each one attached on the other end to a kind of pump. The pump wheezed and roared, with a painful metallic scraping sound that echoed in the chamber.
Max was OK with most sounds, but not scraping rock. “That’s too loud!” he screamed.
As he put his fingers to his ears, Alex and Kristin reached into their packs, took out flashlights, and shone them upward as the rods pushed the rock upward. With a deep scraping noise that jarred Max’s teeth, the rock settled back into place. A small storm of dirt and pebbles rained downward, and they all dropped to their stomachs.
Kristin was the first to stand. “What . . . in Odin’s name . . . just happened?”
“The nostril . . .” Max grunted, pain jolting through his shoulder as he stood. “It was some kind of button. It triggered the door . . .”
“Door to what?” Alex said. “Where are we? Brandon? Are you down here?”
Now Kristin was shining her flashlight around, slowly. The walls were rough, casting shadows that seemed to move. These walls surrounded the platform where they all stood, which was roughly round and maybe twenty feet in diameter.
Her beam stopped at the far side of the platform’s circle, where the wall bowed outward and the floor angled down into darkness. “It’s a ramp to the underworld . . .” Max murmured.
Alex smacked him in the elbow. “Don’t say underworld. That means death.”
“Ow,” Max said. “You didn’t complain in Greece when they said the Cave of Vlihada was the entrance to the underworld.”
“Ohhhhhh . . .”
The deep, distant moan stopped the conversation cold. It was coming from the direction of the downward-sloping ramp.
Max jumped. “It’s Bigfoot,” he said.
“There’s no Bigfoot here,” Kristin said, stepping closer. “We call it the yeti.”
“It’s not Bigfoot or the yeti—it’s Brandon!” Alex shouted. “Bra-a-ndon!”
Kristin led the way across the flat circle. The top of the ramp was marked by three sturdy rock formations that thrust upward from the rock like stalagmites. Her flashlight followed the ramp down into darkness. The stone floor was marked with rough horizontal stripes. “That’s not natural,” she said. “Someone carved that.”
Max nodded. He had seen photos of just this kind of thing. “They did this in ancient Greece,” he said, “to prevent slipping on stone ramps, where they led animals to ritual slaughter.”
“Stop that!” Alex shouted, peering out over the ramp. “Hey! Hello?”
Her call echoed, unanswered.
“There’s only one way to find out what’s down there.” Kristin tested the surface of the ramp with her boots. “Carved lines or not, it’s pretty slipperyyyyyyyy—”
The ramp echoed with her shout as her arms flailed and she slid out of sight into the blackness.
Max’s breath caught in his throat. He felt Alex gripping his hand. “I d-d-don’t like this,” she murmured.
Max quickly unhooked his pack and pulled out his own flashlight, shining it downward. “Kristin?”
A moment later her voice piped up: “I’m OK! But I don’t recommend doing what I just did.”
Alex was rummaging around in her backpack. She pulled out the end of a thick coil of rope. “We’re coming right down!” she called.
“We are?” Max said.
“Dude. You’re not the only smart one. I think you have some rope too. C
an you give it to me?” Alex asked. As Max reached into his pack, Alex tied the end of her rope around one of the stalagmites and pulled it tight. Then she took Max’s rope and knotted it to the other end of hers. Leaning over the ramp, she tossed the long part of the rope downward. “Geronimo!”
A moment later Kristin’s voice echoed upward: “Yeow! That hit me in the face!”
“Guess it’s long enough,” Alex said.
She turned her back to the bottom. Facing Max and clutching tight to the rope, she took a couple of steps backward onto the slope and began to lean back until she was perpendicular to the slanted stone floor. Then she began walking upright and backward down the ramp. “You could slide if you want,” she said. “But rappelling is more elegant.”
As she descended, step by step, the rope held tight to the rock. Max took a deep gulp and grabbed on to it. His arms shook as he turned his back to the ramp. He took a couple of tentative steps backward, but his foot slipped. He leaned forward and gripped the rope tight, but that just made him slip more.
“Lean backward!” Alex cried upward. “You need to be perpendicular. It’s counterintuitive, I know. It doesn’t feel safe. But it’s much more stable. You get used to it immediately!”
Perpendicular. The stone floor was angled downward, so he would have to angle too. “I can’t!” he shouted.
“What do you mean, can’t?” Alex shouted back.
“I smell fish!”
“Just do it! Plant your feet, let the rope slip from your hand as you lean back.”
Max planted his feet. He stood, leaning forward. Leaning forward was natural, backward was not. He let the rope slide in his palm, forcing himself to lean back. But that made him feel completely off-balance. Which gave him a stench of spoiled flounder. So he pulled himself forward again, and his feet gave out from under him.
With a scream, he fell to the rock and slid downward on his stomach. “What are you doing?” Alex shouted.
“You said I could slide!” Max replied.
“Not if I’m rappelling behind you!”
Max was picking up speed. He held on to the rope but now it was hurting his hand. As he loosened his grip, his feet made contact with Alex. He knew it was Alex even though she let out a curse he had never heard her say before.
Enter the Core Page 9
