Enter the Core

by Peter Lerangis

  Together they tumbled downward in a tangle of arms, legs, and rope.

  They came to a stop in total blackness. Max unwrapped himself and stood. “Sorry!”

  “Next time,” Alex replied, “you go first.”

  Now Max could see a flicker of light, but it was coming from a distance of maybe fifteen feet. “Nice of you to visit,” Kristin’s voice called out. “Wish we could celebrate, but we have an emergency.”

  Max scrambled toward her, with Alex close behind. As they neared, Kristin shone her flashlight toward the ground near her feet.

  Lying flat on his back, eyes closed and mouth hanging open, was Brandon.

  20

  MAX wasn’t about to provide mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t know how. He’d done it with Alex in Greenland, but that was because he’d had to. Her heart had definitely stopped beating. Brandon’s chest, at the moment, was moving up and down. So the fact was, he didn’t need it.

  Still, that didn’t stop Alex.

  As she leaned over the pilot and lowered her lips, Max turned away. “I can’t watch this.”

  Ignoring him, Kristin ran to Alex’s side.

  This seemed like a good opportunity to explore, so Max trained his flashlight on the surrounding walls. They were just as smooth and dark as the walls above. He slowly rotated. When he reached 180 degrees, he saw Kristin and Alex both leaning over Brandon. He was moving, which was a good sign, so Max kept spinning, slowly, the rest of the way around. This chamber wasn’t round like the one above. To the right, at about three-quarters of the way around, the wall extended out into a tunnel that was wide but not very deep.

  Max fixed the beam and walked closer. At the end of the corridor, the wall was decorated with carvings.

  A sudden moan made him spin around. Brandon was sitting up, coughing. “Whoa . . . they booby-trapped this place!” he sputtered.

  “Max, come back!” Alex shouted. “He’s alive!”

  “I know, his chest was moving,” Max said.

  “Just come help out, Max!” Alex shot back. “Brandon took a bad fall!”

  Max approached, training his flashlight on the pilot. Brandon’s reddish-blond hair looked dark and matted like a wet dog. Kristin was swabbing his head with a white cloth that stank of medicine. “It’s a pretty nice scrape,” she said. “Best keep it covered.”

  Max remembered seeing a bandanna in his pack, so he pulled it out and handed it to Kristin. “I won’t be needing this. You can wrap his head with it.”

  “There we go,” Alex said. “Max, that’s so sweet.”

  “It won’t be after he wears it,” Max replied.

  “Thanks, little buddy,” Brandon said. “I don’t know how I got here. I went to the camel head and did what the message said. Nothing happened, so I figured I’d walk to the next lava plug—”

  “And you walked into the smiling valley,” Alex said. “Which is exactly where Jules Verne wanted us to go.”

  “That’s how we got here too,” Kristin said.

  Alex smiled. “And now we’re together and alive for the start of the adventure!”

  “Wait,” Brandon said. “We nearly died. You’re thinking of going on?”

  “We have to!” Max said. “Guys, there’s a message on the wall, down that corridor behind us. In futhark, I think.”

  Kristin stood. “Show me.”

  “Wait—” Brandon protested. “Futhark?”

  “I’ll explain the way this works, Brandon,” Alex said, as Kristin scooted away. “Verne leaves these clues. Remember, he explored this volcano and came back alive. So he’s instructing us how to do the same thing.”

  “And a gazillion years have passed between then and now,” Brandon pointed out. “Rocks shift, paths change. What if there are crevasses and molten lava and poisonous snakes . . .”

  “Are you chickening out?” Max asked.

  “No! I mean yes! I mean . . .” Brandon took a deep breath. “I fly. I skydive, I do scuba rescues and I have EMT training. But look at what’s happened since we got here. Already you guys have had to rescue me twice. I don’t have what you have—Jules Verne DNA. And I don’t spelunk. All I want to do is fly planes and travel the world.”

  Max looked up. “Your only other choice right now is sitting on your butt because the trapdoor is shut.”

  “Max, Alex!” Kristin cried out from behind them. “It is futhark. Come. I’m transcribing for you!”

  “Woo-hoo!” Max cried.

  Alex put her hand around Brandon’s head and examined his wound. “It’s already stopped bleeding. Come on, pick up your stuff and come with us.”

  Brandon stood shakily, looking down at a couple of slips of paper and a dollar bill. “That’s not my stuff.”

  “Whose is it?” Alex asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Max said, leaning in to pick it up. “We’re responsible for taking out what we bring—”

  His voice caught in his throat. In his hand was a Snickers wrapper, a receipt from Beantown Nuts from Logan Airport, and a crumpled dollar bill.

  But the only thing Max was really seeing was a scrawled message on the back of the bill.

  MT Savile, OH www.TraceMyMoney.com.

  “What’s wrong, Max?” Alex said.

  He looked up, and the chamber felt like the bottom of the ocean.

  “Bitsy. Niemand,” Max said. “They’re already here. In case you had any doubts.”

  21

  ALEX took the dollar bill from his hand. “How can you tell?”

  “Now that we have so much money, I’ve been marking the bills,” Max said. “To see where they travel. I use this app called TraceMyMoney. You copy the bill’s serial number, your location, and the date into the app’s database. Then you write ‘TraceMyMoney’ on the bill, so other app users will know. When another user finds it, they record when and where. I have a twenty-dollar bill that I marked on a Wednesday, and by Saturday someone changed it for foreign currency in the Dubai Airport. A five-dollar bill was used in Bangs, Texas—”

  “I don’t understand,” Brandon said. “It sounds like you dropped this here.”

  “It’s my money, yeah,” Max said. “I always write my initials and location on the bill. But my pocket was picked by a woman outside Bilgewater State Prison. It was Spencer Niemand in disguise. They’d locked down the prison, but there he was, walking away with all my money. And this is some of it. Which means he dropped it. Which means he must have fallen through the way we did. Which means he knew about the camel nose and the smiling valley.”

  Alex nodded. “The only question is, how far ahead of us are they?”

  “And what do they intend to do with the serum?” Kristin asked.

  “In Verne’s note, he said he wanted to propagate it,” Max said. “Make it grow.”

  Alex nodded. “Something involving a large body of saltwater.”

  “Which Verne’s character, Professor Liedenbrock, finds at the center of the Earth,” Kristin added.

  “So that must be it, just like we thought,” Alex said. “Niemand plans to mass produce the serum.”

  “Or maybe already did it,” Brandon suggested.

  Max held his nose against a sudden foul stench. “Fish.”

  “Max?” Alex reached to him, but he recoiled.

  “Fish fish fish fish . . .” he said through his pinched nostrils.

  Alex was trying to grab his shoulders, but he didn’t want to feel her hands. Or smell her breath. Brandon was saying something, but he had a smirk on his face.

  He backed away from the smell. He felt like it was melting the skin on his face. His eyes darted left and right. He could see Kristin reaching toward him and Alex holding her back.

  His legs were moving now, as if they had a will of their own. They were taking him down the corridor, to the wall. The runes seemed to be dancing before his eyes. There was a Vegvísir symbol above them, carved deeply into the rock, and it looked like it was throbbing. He wanted
the motion to stop. All of it. He reached out and rubbed his hands on the wall, trying to erase the runes. “Go away!” he screamed.

  Alex was telling him to stop, but he couldn’t.

  Brandon grabbed him by the shoulders, but Max turned and kicked him.

  He could hear Kristin’s voice, but it sounded like she was in an echo chamber, calling “Fire!”

  Fire?

  As Max spun around, he felt as if he would explode. He wasn’t thinking straight about much, but he knew fire consumed oxygen.

  Deep breaths. When you’re spinning out of control, recognize it is happening. And take deep breaths. Because you need to think even more clearly than usual. His therapist, Ilyssa, said this to him a lot. And now he was spinning. He could recognize it.

  He inhaled slowly. Alex was staring at him, waiting, holding Brandon back. And Kristin was not saying “Fire!” In his panic, he hadn’t heard her right.

  “Higher!” she shouted, pointing at the wall.

  Max turned. He exhaled hard, trying to blow away the acrid, fishy smell. And he forced his eyes to travel upward, to the top of the carving.

  To the Vegvísir.

  It was not carved into the wall, really. More like out of it. Someone had gouged a big round circle into the rock, leaving the shape of the talisman jutting out.

  “Max, we can do this,” Alex said. “I really believe we can. Are you with us?”

  Max nodded. “I’m breathing deeply.”

  “That’s the same shape as the talisman, right?” Alex said. “The one Kristin’s uncle gave you?”

  “Vegvísir,” Kristin said. “Yes.”

  “OK, cool, because there’s a connection to the futhark message. I’m going to read you the translation, OK?” Alex began reciting: “‘To use the talisman to your advantage, one must advance from three to six.’ Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Three to six . . .” Max said.

  “It makes sense to me!” Brandon blurted. “Look at the ends of those lines on the right side. They look like three-pronged rakes. They’re shaped like threes!”

  “They’re pointing the wrong direction,” Max murmured. “They’re more like uppercase Es. It’s got to be something else.”

  “Three to six could be a time,” Kristin said. “Like three minutes to six.”

  Max thought about that for a moment. But it didn’t make sense. The hint was to advance from three to six.

  Which could mean three o’clock to six o’clock.

  Those were times, but they were also positions. That was a fact. On circular sundials and old analog clockfaces, three was on the right. Twelve was on top, six on bottom, nine on the left. All the other numbers filled in between.

  Max had no clue what the shapes meant, but he knew exactly what to do. In his mind, he imagined the Vegvísir as a kind of old-timey clock, as if it had numbers printed on it:

  One part of the Vegvísir was in the three position. To move it to six, you had to imagine it as a turning wheel. You could push the three part down to the six position.

  He dug his fingers in and tried to yank it down, but it wouldn’t move. “Help . . . me . . .” he said through gritted teeth. “All we need to do it push it ninety degrees downward . . .”

  Now Brandon’s arm was reaching over Max’s shoulder. His beefy fingers interlaced with Max’s. Together they pressed. The shape turned about a quarter inch, exactly like a wheel. Debris crumbled from the wall.

  “It’s like a latch!” Brandon said. “A big disk in the wall. Come on. Harder!”

  Now Kristin and Alex dug their fingers in too. “Heave . . . ho!” Alex yelled.

  With a deep rumbling sound, the disk turned again, slowly. It took four more tries before the entire shape had been turned one quarter of the way around. Ninety degrees.

  The “three” had clicked firmly into the “six” slot.

  Max, Alex, Kristin, and Brandon stood back. “Now what?” Brandon said.

  The chamber was quiet again. Max was beginning to sweat. It seemed like an hour had gone by before Kristin finally broke the silence with a sigh. “It is a nothing hot dog,” she said.

  “Burger,” Alex corrected her. “A nothing burger.”

  With a growl, Max smacked the wall. Then kicked it. “That feels better,” he said.

  Brandon laughed. “I like your thinking, little dude.” He leaped in the air and gave the wall a big, thudding martial arts kick.

  “Yeoow . . .” he yelled, hopping on his good foot.

  “Um, it’s made of rock,” Alex said. “Like your head.”

  But before anyone could speak again, the room began to shake. Everyone looked at Kristin. “Is that an earthquake?” Max asked.

  “My bad,” Brandon said.

  As if in answer, the wall began to move inward.

  22

  THE sound of hardened lava scraping against hardened lava was like a fleet of cars being put through a meat grinder.

  The wall was swinging inward like a massive stone door, inch by inch. Max covered his ears and staggered backward. Alex was shouting something to him, but he couldn’t hear her.

  When it finally stopped, the wall was tucked into an inner wall, revealing a square of total blackness. In the sudden silence, Max could hear everyone’s panicked breaths.

  “If Niemand really is here,” Alex finally said, “after that racket he knows we are too.”

  Max stood, training his flashlight into the darkness. Beyond the entrance was a narrow tunnel into the rock that went straight for a few yards and then curved away out of sight. As Max stepped closer, he heard a scraping sound. It was coming from above, from Vegvísir. The dial circle was moving counterclockwise, back from the six position toward the three. “Guys, the dial is going backward,” he said. “I think it’s a timer.”

  “Like, a timer to get through the door?” Brandon said. “Like, it’s going to move back?”

  The wall answered by moving slowly toward them.

  “That’s a yes!” Alex said. “Let’s go!”

  “What?” Kristin shot back. “No! We can’t! We don’t know anything about that tunnel—like where it goes, or if it goes nowhere. And we have no way to get back. It’s insane!”

  “These two, Max and Alex—they do insane,” Brandon said.

  “Our great-great-great-grandfather hasn’t let us down yet, with any of his clues,” Max said. “Spencer Niemand and his daughter are down there, and if we leave now, we will all regret it.”

  Alex was the first through, and Max followed. Behind them, he could hear the wall scraping shut another few inches. He did not look back. “Are Kristin and Brandon with us?” Alex shouted over her shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” Max replied, training his flashlight on the ground. “Just keep going. And watch your step.”

  The tunnel was slanted downward, uneven and low. Max placed each step carefully to avoid slipping. Soon Alex was bent into a crouch. “I am so happy to have this hair!” she shouted over her shoulder. “I can feel where the ceiling is.”

  “I can’t!” Max banged his head against a low-jutting rock. His boots hit a slippery patch and went out from under him. With a cry, he fell on his back. His flashlight clattered to the stone floor. As he slid, his feet tangled with Alex’s. Together, screaming, they tumbled in the darkness.

  Max felt his back smack against another wall. Then it smacked again when Alex banged into him. “Get . . . off me,” Max grunted.

  “Sorry, cuz!” Alex sprang away. “Did I hurt you?”

  “It’s not you,” Max said, lifting up his rear end to extract his flashlight. “I landed on this.”

  He flicked it on. They were sitting on a level stone landing, a break in the slanting tunnel. They’d been stopped by a wall, about ten feet across. On either side of the wall were separate, smaller tunnels that also angled downward.

  “We’re in a fork,” Alex said, brushing herself off. “A few feet to the right or left, and we’d have kept going.”

 
; Max nodded. He swung the flashlight from one path to the other, but the beam wasn’t strong enough to penetrate to the end of either tunnel. “How do we know which one to take?”

  “Eeny meeny miny mo?” Alex said.

  “Can you give me a signal when you’re telling a joke, like shutting your mouth halfway through?” Max was shining his beam on the wall now, which was overgrown with a kind of brownish-green moss. As he swept some of it aside, the wall seemed to shake. “Wait, another moving wall?”

  At the sound of a distant squeal, Max spun around, back toward the tunnel he and Alex had just come through. A voice sang out: “Just hear those sleigh bells jingle-ing, ring-ting-tingle-ing too . . .”

  He shone his flashlight upward, back to where they’d come from. Brandon and Kristin emerged sled-style, both sitting, with Kristin in front and Brandon hugging her from behind.

  “Keep them away from the tunnels!” Max shouted. He and Alex jumped away, each standing at the mouth of one of the tunnels. With a loud swooosh, Brandon and Kristin swept across the small platform and tumbled into the mossy wall. Brandon was laughing hysterically.

  Kristin sprang to her feet. “You find this funny? We could have died!”

  “Sorry, just trying to be cheerful,” Brandon said.

  “Glad you’re here,” Alex said. “I thought you weren’t coming with us.”

  “We thought so too,” Brandon said. “For about a nanosecond. Until we realized we didn’t want to leave you guys alone.”

  “Thanks,” Alex said.

  Brandon shrugged modestly. “That’s just the kind of people we are.”

  “OK, we need to figure out what to do next,” Max said, turning his flashlight back toward the wall. “We’re at a fork with no instructions. I’m hoping there’s something behind this moss. Help me out.”

  “All for one and one for all,” Brandon said. As Max began brushing away the moss, the others joined in. The moss came loose easily, but so did a lot of stone. It flaked off in four narrow crevices that formed the outline of a square about three feet long on each side.