Enter the Core

by Peter Lerangis

  Recoiling, he glanced down at his shoes. And he caught a glimpse of something he hadn’t noticed before.

  A section of slightly frayed rope stuck out from the pile. “Kristin, did you drop this in here?” he called out.

  “No.” Kristin stepped over to him, training her flashlight beam on the bones. She reached down and pulled at the rope. It was filthy and slimy, but as she lifted it off the ground, several bones came with it. “I didn’t see this before.”

  “We weren’t looking,” Max reminded her. “We were running away.”

  Alex quickly rummaged in her pack and pulled out her winter gloves. She, Max, and Kristin yanked the rope free.

  Or ropes. Plural.

  Two of them, to be exact. Each was tied at intervals to the end knobs of the bones. The trio pulled as much of the arrangement free as they could. The ropes were parallel, tied to the ends of the bones every few inches, like a ladder.

  They laid them carefully on the ground.

  Max looked up toward the ceiling. There, along the rim of the opening, he saw a long lip of rock that looked as if it had been carved to dip upward, like the blade of a bottle opener.

  It was about the width of the bones that were attached to the rope.

  “That’s a hook, and this is a ladder,” Max said. “And bats or no bats, we have a way out.”

  25

  ALEX watched in horror as Max lifted the top “rung” of the bone-and-rope ladder. “Stand clear!” he announced.

  As he reared back to throw it upward, Alex grabbed his arm. “No way, cowboy!”

  “We need to get it over that lip,” Max protested. “That’s what Jules expects us to do.”

  “That contraption is heavy,” Alex countered. “You won’t make it. What if the bones crash and separate from the rope?”

  “Do you have a better suggestion?” Max asked.

  “Let’s use our heads,” Alex said. “Jules would expect that too. He wouldn’t give us something impossible to do. Maybe there’s some other clue. Something we can use to guide the ladder up there.”

  “But—” Max protested.

  “Alex is right,” Kristin said. “If we fail, we’re stuck. So we have to take all precautions.”

  Disappointed, Max dropped the ladder. Kristin and Alex were sifting through the bones with their feet. Most of them were the length of a human forearm or smaller.

  But Max’s eye was on a really big one that had rolled to the wall. “Guys, look at this baby,” he said.

  He lifted one end of it and propped it against the wall. It was nearly his height, but not as heavy as he expected.

  “Extraordinary,” Kristin said, snapping a photo of it with her camera. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It must be from some prehistoric mammal. A mastodon, maybe.”

  “Or a dinosaur,” Max said. “It’s not superheavy. Which means it may be hollow inside. Some of the dinos were probably cold-blooded. They developed into birds, so the bone structure had to be light.”

  “I studied paleontology in college,” Kristin said, pulling the bone from the wall until it was upright. “This has the stresses and thickness of a mammalian bone. But that doesn’t explain the lightness. How strange. You’re right, it should weigh a lot more.”

  Max knelt by the bottom of the bone, where Kristin was pivoting it away from the wall. “Can I turn it upside down?”

  As he stood, Kristin backed away and let Max hold the bone upright again. He rubbed his palm on the top of it. “This end looks pretty normal, right? It’s a joint. It’s where the bone will connect to the next bone. But the other end doesn’t look like this.”

  He spun the bone around so that the bottom was at the top. It was flat. “Looks like the bone was broken off at the joint,” Alex remarked.

  “Or maybe sawed off,” Max said. “It’s really clean. I’m not sure bones break that cleanly.”

  “They don’t,” Kristin said.

  Slanting the bone toward him, Max was able to look inside. “It’s hollow too. I mean, really hollow.”

  Now Kristin and Alex were crowding him from both sides. The bone’s walls were as thin as a sheet of plastic. “This isn’t normal,” Kristin said.

  “I think someone hollowed it out artificially at one end,” Max said.

  “Why?” Alex asked.

  Max set the bone back against the wall. Holding his breath, trying to ignore the stench, he rooted around in the smaller bones and skulls. At the bottom was another long one, which he grabbed and pulled out. It was exactly like the first—one end jointed, the other cut off and hollowed out. “OK, I’m thinking one of these fits into the other,” Max said. “But check out the joint end of the bone, the one that’s not hollowed out.”

  He turned the bone so they all saw the jointed end. It had been carved into a perfect, concave U shape. “A smiling valley,” Alex said.

  Max smiled. “More like a hook. I’m thinking you’re supposed to rest something inside it.”

  He lay both bones on the ground, cut end to cut end. With one hand on each bone, he jammed them together.

  With a dull snap, one slid perfectly into the other. “Bingo. Now we have a superlong pusher. We hook the ladder in and lift it up into the hole.”

  Alex’s jaw dropped. “Cousin, that is the awesomest thing you have ever done!”

  Max thought about it. “I’ll go with flying a balloon.”

  Kristin brought over the end of the bone-and-rope ladder. She inserted the topmost rung into the U-shaped joint at the top of the long pole.

  “Fits like a glove,” Max said.

  Lifting the top of the long pole off the ground, he thrust it slowly upward, watching the ladder rise. The two long bones together, plus the two ropes and the rungs made of bones, were too heavy for one person, so Alex joined him. “We’re . . . not going to . . . reach it,” Alex said.

  Kristin knelt, cupping her hands together near Alex’s boot. “Step into this.”

  Grunting with the effort, Kristin lifted Alex off the ground. Max let go of the pole to help.

  “Little more . . .” Alex said, reaching as high as she could. Now the top of the ladder was rising into the hole, and Alex slowly set it down until it fit onto the stone lip. “Got it!”

  Max pulled down. It held fast. He placed his foot on the bottom rung, which now hung about two feet off the ground. “Jules thought of everything,” he said with a confident smile, then backed away. “Who wants to go first?”

  “Heck yeah, I will,” Alex said. “But if I see bats, be ready to catch me.”

  As she grabbed the ladder and began to climb, the ropes swayed back and forth. Max and Kristin grabbed on to steady it. Alex rose steadily until her head was over the rim. “Not much phosphorescence up here,” she called down. “And it could use a little air freshener.”

  “Can you see anything?” Max called up.

  “Not much—no, wait, hang on.” Alex stepped farther up, until her torso was completely in darkness. “Whoa. What on earth is—”

  With a scream, Alex was sucked into the void. The toe of her boot caught in the ladder, and it jerked upward and out of Max’s hand.

  26

  MAX never could have predicted he would be smacked in the face by a guano-covered bone, let alone choose to grab onto it.

  But it all happened so fast. Alex’s screams from above were growing muffled. Above him the ladder was disappearing into the ceiling rung by rung. Once the ladder was gone, Max would never see his cousin again.

  Under the circumstances, there was only one choice. As he clamped his fingers around the rung and held tight, his feet left the ground.

  He was rising too.

  “Max, wait!” Kristin shouted.

  The bottom rung whooshed up beyond her head. She bent her knees and sprang upward, her hand barely closing on Max’s ankle.

  The ladder jolted with the added weight. “Sorry!” Kristin yelled.

  “Just hang on!” Max called out. As he rose into the hole, his finge
rs scraped the rim. The ladder pulled him over and onto a narrow chute. For a moment he was horizontal and then sliding downward.

  He tightened his grip and felt the rope and the bones beneath him, clattering loudly over the hard lava. The ladder gave him some protection from the rock floor, but it sounded like some insane underground roller coaster. Max tried to see Alex ahead of him, but the tunnel was pitch-black. “Alex, are you there?” he called out.

  “Yes!” her voice answered. “Look up, Max!”

  Max tried to raise his head, but he banged it against something metallic. Before he could try again, the ladder yanked him with sudden speed. The rung ripped out of his grip. He was sliding on his own now, grabbing for the rungs that slid faster beneath him.

  “Watch it, Max!” came Kristin’s voice.

  She smacked into him from behind. Now they were both careening downward. Max tried to press his hands against the walls of the chute to slow himself down, but in a moment the walls and floor vanished.

  He shot out into a vast underground cave. Its floor was pebbly and flat, and as he landed, he executed a perfect somersault. Kristin thudded to the ground beside him.

  “Are you guys OK?”

  Alex’s voice.

  Max sat up. His eyes adjusted to an even brighter greenish light than the one they’d seen above. Alex was leaning over him. Her right cheek was scraped and bloody, pebbles had lodged in her hair, her winter coat was gashed down the left side, and every inch of her was stained with black. “I—I’ve never done that before,” Max said.

  “Slid down a chute?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Max said. “A somersault. I try to do them in gym class. Everybody laughs at me.”

  “I . . . should have done one too,” Kristin said through a grimace. “I landed on my coccyx.”

  “Your what?” Alex asked.

  “The bone at the bottom of your spine and just above your butt,” Max answered. “Lots of nerve endings there.”

  “You’re both covered in black,” Alex said.

  “Coal,” Kristin said. “Which indicates organic matter, compressed carcasses of dead prehistoric animals. It also indicates that we are pretty far down into the Earth.”

  “We got here alive because of that.” Alex pointed back to the chute.

  A metal handle in the shape of an upside-down T was dangling from the top. Like a miniature ski lift.

  Max moved closer. “It’s on a track that runs down the ceiling of the chute! That’s why you asked me to look up.”

  “The handle was way up at the top of the chute when I climbed through the ceiling,” Alex said. “But I didn’t see the track or the chute. I could barely see anything. The dumb thing I did was grab that handle without knowing what it was. The smart thing was that I didn’t let go. It controlled the speed of my descent. Otherwise we’d all have been sliding down at a zillion miles an hour.”

  “So the whole point of it was to guide you down here safely!” Kristin said.

  Max moved closer to examine the mechanism. “This has Jules Verne written all over it.”

  “I think so,” Alex said. “He knew we’d be climbing through that hole into darkness. He also knew the chute was narrow and steep. A recipe for disaster. So he installed a track.”

  Kristin walked to the chute opening. Just below the bottom ledge, a horizontal groove had been carved into the rock, running about six feet wide. She crouched, shining her flashlight into it. “Come look at this.”

  Max ran to peer inside. Kristin’s beam shone on the handle of a hidden wooden lever that extended directly into the dark. Max grabbed it and pulled it to the right. “Nothing,” he said.

  But when he yanked it to the left, he heard a metallic clanking noise. The T-handle shook and began moving back up the track. Max kept pumping the lever all the way to the left, pulling it back, and then pumping it again.

  “Amazing,” Kristin said. “It’s a ratcheted mechanism against a flywheel buried into the rock!”

  “A what?” Alex said.

  “Inside the rock is a set of pulleys,” Kristin explained. “They must be connected to a cable that conveys the T-handle up and down the track. Constructing this in Jules Verne’s time would have been a scientific marvel.”

  Max smiled. “He hung with people who made submarines. What do you expect?”

  Alex was looking around the room nervously. There were several holes in the wall and three possible tunnels. “This place is giving me the creeps. Do you smell anything funky?”

  Max let go of the mechanism. The T-bar dangled overhead, a few feet along the track, but a barely audible thumping of the inner gears continued. “I smell pee,” he said, “and I’m not angry.”

  “I smell it too,” Kristin said.

  Alex cupped her hand to her mouth. “Brandon?”

  “Wait, you think Brandon peed here?” Max said.

  “I don’t know!” Alex said. “But he’s down here somewhere, Max, and our number one mission is to find him.”

  “Ssshhh, guys, come here!” Kristin whispered. She was standing against the wall, her flashlight trained on the ground. “Look at this. The ground is covered with coal dust, so it shows us who’s been here. Or what.”

  Max and Alex ran to her side. Her flashlight beam was illuminating a dirt floor carpeted with black dust. A few inches inside the wall was a set of three-toed footprints.

  Max leaned down, holding his outstretched fingers just inches above the print. “That’s like one and a half times as big as my hand.”

  “You didn’t tell us animals lived down here!” Alex asked.

  “They don’t,” Kristin said. “Especially animals this size.”

  “Do you know what kind?” Max asked.

  Kristin shook her head. “A kind that does not exist in any reference book that I know. Let us pray that it’s friendly.”

  Kristin’s flashlight followed the prints along the wall, past the first tunnel and into the second.

  “I say we make our first left!” Alex said.

  Kristin looked at Max. “I say we ask Vegvísir.”

  Max smiled. “It’s an inanimate thing,” he explained. “It can’t help us.”

  “Then why are you fingering it so nervously?” Kristin asked.

  Max hadn’t noticed he’d been holding his talisman. He was about to unclutch it, but he didn’t.

  He couldn’t help noticing that Vegvísir was heating up in his hand.

  It sort of made sense. Body heat did that sort of thing. But it sort of didn’t. Because it was pulsing, ever so slightly. And a pulse was coming from the other side of the room too.

  From something on the opposite wall.

  Max moved closer. It was a blemish in the stone, a roundish shape just to the right of the entrance to the second tunnel, into which the animal’s footsteps had disappeared. “Bandanna, please?” he said.

  As Kirsten handed Max her bandanna, he walked toward the shape. It was grimed over with coal, and he began wiping it until a clear pattern emerged—a totally symmetrical shape made of some kind of steel that had been embedded in the stone.

  Kristin gasped. She reached out to touch the shape. “What is it?” Alex asked.

  “It is a different talisman,” Kristin said.

  “Maybe we need to turn this one like a clock also,” Max said.

  “It does not appear to be embedded in a disk, so I don’t think it’s a dial,” Kristin said, running her fingers along the raised iron lines. “May I examine? I do not have your solving skills, but I think I can be useful.”

  Max and Alex nodded as Kristin felt along the lines of the talisman, pinching, grabbing, shaking. Finally she grabbed the circle in the center and pulled. The design moved a fraction of an inch, releasing a small cloud of coal dust.

  “Hmmm . . .” With a loud grunt, she yanked harder. Outward.

  This time the entire shape came loose in a small dust explosion. As she held it up, she smiled. “Ægishjálmr,” she said softly.

  �
��Gesundheit,” Max replied.

  Kristin smiled and shook her head. “Ægishjálmr is known as the helm of awe. One of the most powerful protectors against harm. It looks like it was housed very loosely in the rock, so it could be easily released.”

  “Cool,” Max said. “I didn’t see that.”

  “What does it do?” Alex asked.

  “If you carry it with you,” Kristin said, “it will instill fear into any enemy.”

  Max took it from her. “Does it also have powers of communication?”

  Kristin and Alex stared at him curiously.

  “Because I know this sounds weird, but I think the two talismans called to each other,” Max said.

  “Say what?” Alex said.

  He stared at the two shapes. The Vegvísir shape around his neck was crazy and creative and asymmetrical. In a way, the design was everything Max was not. Maybe that was its real power. It was helping him get through the maze by giving him what he didn’t have. By completing him.

  Ægishjálmr was a different kind of shape. Each spoke was exactly identical. Steady and predictable, the same no matter how you looked at it. “This one,” Max said, holding it out to Alex, “has your name written all over it.”

  “What do you mean?” Alex asked.

  “I can’t really explain it,” Max said. “But may it help you the way Vegvísir helps me.”

  “Ohhhh-kay,” Alex said. She tucked the talisman into her jacket pocket. Then, with a deep breath, she turned toward the entrance. “Whoa.”

  “Whoa what?” Kristin asked.

  Alex turned toward Max. “I don’t believe in magic. But this is so strange. I feel like I can do this. I feel like the Cowardly Lion after he gets his heart.”

  “The talismans,” Kristin said softly, “are very powerful.”

  “Lead the way, Lion,” Max said.

  “Rrrrrufff,” Alex growled, as she stepped in first.

  27

  “JOHN Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt . . .” sang Alex in a loud, way-out-of-tune voice.

  They’d been walking a long time. Silence had become too boring. Everyone was sweating and stir-crazy. So Alex had begun to sing. She’d said it was a song she learned in camp. It was about the twelfth tune she’d sung.