The Explorers’ Gate

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Okay, I know who you guys are,” Blauvelt said blandly.

  Wow. His first talking statues and he wasn’t excited to see living, breathing bronze? He just thought this was the first question on a pop quiz.

  “You’re the memorial erected to honor the gallant service of the 107th Infantry during World War I. You are currently located in a wooded thicket at East 67th Street and Fifth Avenue.”

  “Actually,” said Brent trying to sound smart, “they’re here right now.”

  Blauvelt rolled his eyes.

  “But, what you may not know, Jonas,” I said, to prove I would not go down without a fight, “is that 580 soldiers from the 107th were killed in World War I.”

  “And 1,487 were wounded,” said Blauvelt, to one-up me.

  So I one-upped his one-upmanship. “Four of them received the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “I knew that, too,” said Blauvelt.

  “And whose hands sculpted mine?” Sergeant Shaw demanded, raising his rifle to his chest.

  “Karl Illava,” said Blauvelt before I could. “1896–1954.”

  Blauvelt definitely had his facts and dates down cold.

  “Is that all?” asked the soldier.

  Blauvelt sighed. “It’s enough, okay? Next question.”

  “Actually,” I piped up. “There’s more.”

  “Give it up, Van Wyckie,” sneered Brent. “Our guy’s way smarter than you.”

  “That might be true,” I said sweetly. “So, maybe he just forgot that the sculptor, Karl Illava, used his own hands as models for the soldiers’ hands?”

  Proving my point, all seven doughboys held up their hands. They looked exactly alike.

  “Is this part of the official Crown Quest?” demanded Mr. Drake. “If not, why should my clue cracker waste his brain cells on hands? This isn’t a manicure competition. …”

  Shaw marched over to Drake. “All those not directly involved in the Crown Quest are hereby ordered to evacuate.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Drake fidgeting with the pointy red cap that made him look like a well-to-do dunce. “I put this team together. I’d like to observe the competition.”

  “And I wanted to date all the pretty girls in France,” said Shaw.

  “But …”

  “MOVE OUT!” bellowed the soldier to Shaw’s left. Everything this guy said came out as a shout because his mouth had been sculpted in a wide-open circle. “YOU HEARD THE SERGEANT! EVACUATE THIS AREA! NOW!”

  Drake stood his ground.

  Rifles were raised.

  “MOVE! NOW! GO!”

  “Okay, okay!”

  Drake scurried up the staircase to his waiting limo.

  The car’s tires screeched when it sped away.

  “Now then,” said Sergeant Shaw, marching up and down in front of the six contestants, “due to the heightened significance of this evening’s event, no kabouter or magical creature may venture outside the park’s perimeter walls until after the crown is found.”

  “Fine,” said Loki.

  “Agreed,” said Willem.

  “My men will now disperse to hidden locations throughout the park. Troop? A-ten-tion!”

  The six soldiers, even the wounded ones, stood up straight and tall.

  “Dis-perse!”

  In a double-time trot, the soldiers took off in various directions.

  “One of my men will be stationed at each of the two points you must locate using the clues you will soon be provided. Four of my men will act as decoys. When you find a correct location, you will be given a new clue to guide you to the next location.”

  Garrett raised his hand.

  “Sir?” snapped the Sergeant.

  “How many locations do we have to find?”

  “This third round will involve three riddles leading to three locations.”

  “And the crown?” asked Loki. “Where, exactly, will we find the crown?”

  “At the third location. There will be no soldier stationed there as you will see the kabouter crown itself.”

  “Well, hurry up, tin man,” said bratty Brent. “Give us the first riddle, already.”

  “At ease, mister Slicktenhorst. Your team will be held back eighteen full minutes, due to your poor showing in the first two rounds.”

  “Poor showing?” said Loki. “That’s rather judgmental, don’t you think? Truth be told, we were robbed.”

  “Tell it to someone who cares.” Sergeant Shaw pulled an envelope from a cartridge case hooked to his belt. “Here then, is your first clue: ‘Near the love that’s like a red, red rose, due west of the trusted trees, down where you’d hold your nose, that’s where the second clue shall be.’”

  Garrett and Willem looked at me.

  I nodded. I knew exactly where we had to go first.

  Chapter 46

  “Team Willem?” said Shaw. “On your mark, get set …”

  He raised his rifle, and fired it into the air.

  “Go!”

  “Come on, you guys!” I said as I raced for the arches of the Arcade. I wanted the shadows of the underpass to hide our ultimate direction so Loki, Blauvelt, and Brent couldn’t just follow us.

  When we’d been swallowed up by the darkness and were dashing up the steep steps at the far end of the underpass, Willem said, “Nikki, do you know where they are holding your father?”

  “I have a pretty good idea, yeah.”

  “Well, I propose we use our eighteen-minute head-start to go rescue him!”

  “Yeah!” said Garrett.

  “I thought about that, too,” I said, leading the way down the wide promenade of the Mall. “That might be a clever use of time. But it may not be wise.”

  “How come?” asked Garrett.

  “It’s what Loki wants us to do. And he might be lying. So I say we knock out these first two locations, get the clue for the crown’s hiding place, and then, if we still have time, go get my dad. We zig when he expects us to zag.”

  “Interesting,” said Willem.

  “Smart,” added Garrett.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Uh, where are we going?” asked Garrett.

  “South. ‘Near the love that’s like a red, red rose.’ That’s from a poem by Robert Burns.”

  “That dude with the feathered pen we met last night?”

  “Exactly! Burns was Scotland’s most renowned literary figure and wrote: ‘O my love’s like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June; O my love’s like a melody that’s sweetly play’d in tune.’”

  “And they built him a statue anyway?” said Garrett.

  “Yeah.”

  We were halfway down the Mall.

  “What about that next bit?” asked Willem, his stubby legs scissoring back and forth. “‘Due west of the trusted trees?’”

  “Well, at the southern end of the Mall, near the Burns statue, if you look down at the pavers, you’ll see names inscribed in the blocks, donors who contributed to the Central Park Tree Trust! Get it? They ‘trusted’ trees. And, in the same area, there’s a mosaic of a compass rose.”

  “And due west?” asked Garrett. “Where does the compass’s W tip point?”

  “To a storm drain!”

  “A sewer grate!” exclaimed Willem. “‘Down where you’d hold your nose!’ Amazing! What would we do without you, Nikki?”

  “Lose,” said Garrett. “Miserably.”

  “Well, don’t forget—they’ve got Jonas Blauvelt. He’s probably already figured it out, too.” We reached the compass mosaic. I pointed to the drain.

  There was a shimmering gold star sitting on top of it.

  The instant Garrett grabbed it, somebody above us shouted, “Well done, boy-o!”

  The three of us looked up. One of the doughboys, the man with his head wrapped with bandages, was sitting up in an elm tree. “Kindly replace the gold star, in case the other team also nuts out the first riddle. So—are you folks ready for your next clue?”

  “We are
!” said Willem.

  “Very well: Go to where the Lake is frozen in July.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “No rhyme?” said Garrett.

  “Not this time,” said the soldier.

  Willem fidgeted with his beard. “How can the Lake be frozen in July? It’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said.

  “Uh,” said Garrett, “I think I have to go with Willem on this one, Nikki. I have never, ever seen the Lake frozen in the middle of the summer.”

  “I know,” I said with a smile. “But the answer isn’t the real lake! We need to go to the Loeb Boathouse café.”

  We also needed to hurry.

  By my watch, we had spent eight minutes of our eighteen-minute head start. To move faster, Garrett, who was superhumanly strong, piggybacked Willem, whose legs were kabouterly short.

  “This way!” I led them up a winding path back toward the Lake and the Boathouse. Down in the distance, I could see silhouettes of Sergeant Shaw and our three challengers, still waiting at Bethesda Terrace for their starting gun.

  We raced under the canopied entrance to the Boathouse restaurant.

  “The frozen lake is out back.”

  Scrambling around to a cluster of picnic tables set up on an outdoor plaza, we came to a sculpture: a four-foot tall, rectangular column of charcoal-colored stone, maybe two feet wide on each side, topped off by an impressionistic rendering of a very turbulent lake being navigated by two doll-sized rowers facing each other in a tiny boat.

  “Aha!” said Willem. “A lake that remains frozen even in July because it is sculpted out of solid rock!”

  “Look!” said Garrett. “There’s another gold star!” It was taped to the side of the pedestal.

  “WELL DONE!” yelled the soldier with the O of a mouth as he stepped out from the shadows.

  “May we have our final clue, please?” I asked.

  “We’re kind of in a hurry,” added Garrett.

  “Indeed,” said Willem.

  “RIGHT. ‘PAST WHERE PENNIES BECOME ARCTIC FOXES, WHERE SCHOLARS ENTER YOU MUST EXIT AND FIND THE STREET THAT SMELLS OF A BARN THOUGH THE LARGEST HORSES BE FORGED OF BRONZE. FROM GEORGIA HE RIDES WHO DIED SIX DAYS AFTER HE WAS BORN. YOU WILL FIND THE KABOUTER CROWN WHERE RUNNING SHOES WALK IN GLORY, GLORY HALLELUJAH.’”

  Garrett’s jaw dropped. “Huh?”

  Willem looked totally confused, not to mention somewhat dazed.

  “Thanks,” I said to the soldier.

  Because I knew exactly where the crown was hidden.

  Chapter 47

  “Let’s go, you guys!”

  “Where to?” asked Garrett, hauling Willem on his back like a knapsack, ready to run.

  “Well,” I said, glancing at my watch, “we still have about a minute left to our head start.”

  “We should go locate your father!” said Willem.

  “Yeah,” added Garrett. “Blauvelt won’t be able to solve the riddles any faster than you did. Plus, Brent won’t be able to carry Loki on his back because, A: Brent is a weakling, and B: Loki’s so slimy he’d slide off.”

  Willem nodded. “We should retain a minute or two advantage over our rivals! Where is your father?”

  “North. Near the Runners’ Gate—well, technically, it’s called the Engineers’ Gate.”

  “How the heck did you figure that out?” asked Garrett.

  “From that first thing Loki said, about the statue that moves during the day.”

  “That would seem impossible,” said Willem. “Our excess life force only permeates the statuary after the sun has set.”

  “This statue doesn’t move on its own. People move it. Every year.”

  Willem’s brow wrinkled with confusion.

  “It’s the statue of Fred Lebow up near the Reservoir—the guy who started the New York City Marathon. He’s posed to look like he’s timing the runners sprinting across the finish line of a big race. Most of the year, he stands on a black block in a clump of bushes near the Reservoir. But, every November, they haul his statue down to a spot close to the marathon finish line.”

  “He moves by day,” mumbled Willem.

  “Exactly. It’s a pretty obvious answer once, you know, you know it.”

  Suddenly, we heard a rifle shot.

  I checked my watch.

  “That was Loki’s starting gun! We need bicycles!”

  I pointed to a small trailer.

  “They rent bikes over there. If we could find three.”

  “They all appear to be securely chained,” said Willem.

  Garrett dashed through the trees. “I see something. You two can ride in the back. I’ll peddle.”

  Now I was confused. “What?”

  “It’s a pedicab!” Garrett hopped onto the driver’s seat of a three-wheeled vehicle. It was bright yellow and looked like a rickshaw with a bicycle up front. Tourists hire pedicabs to haul them around the park.

  Willem and I climbed into the two-seater chariot. Garrett started pumping pedals. We zoomed down a gentle slope, zipped out of the parking lot, and eased onto the East Drive.

  Then came Cat Hill.

  Six city blocks of steeply angled incline named after the statue of our panther friend, Still Hunt, whose statue was perched near the top of the hill on a rocky cliff.

  We were slowing down.

  We were also going to lose.

  No matter how valiantly Garrett struggled, we weren’t going to make it north fast enough. Loki would win the crown, become king, drain my mother, and execute my dad!

  “Maybe we should turn around,” I said.

  But then I heard the jangle of a dog collar and a familiar bark.

  “Balto!” I shouted.

  The sled dog bolted up to the front of the bike.

  “Grab the reins!”

  “Got ’em!” said Garret, clutching the thick leather strands trailing off Balto’s harness. “Hang on, guys! We’re about to go for a sleigh ride in a pedicab!”

  Garrett whistled once and Balto took off, yanking us up Cat Hill in no time at all because he was a sled dog doing what he loved to do more than anything in the world: racing north on another rescue mission!

  With Balto at the lead and Garrett pumping the pedals as hard as he could, we breezed up the East Drive in record time.

  We passed the Great Lawn on our left, the Metropolitan Museum of Art on our right, crossed over the 86th Street transverse road, and entered the longest straightaway in the park as we dashed northward alongside the Reservoir.

  I could hear and see the geyser of water jetting up into the air off to the west. Dieter was undoubtedly still on duty, draining my mother’s lake as thoroughly and efficiently as he could.

  “The statue of Fred Lebow is about halfway up this stretch,” I shouted to Garrett. “Turn into the bridle path up there!”

  “Got it!”

  “Here!”

  Balto bolted left and the pedicab tilted sideways as we rumbled off the paved roadway and skidded to a stop.

  “There’s the statue,” I said, bounding out of the back seat.

  “Now where?” said Garrett, panting even harder than Balto.

  I heard an eagle screech.

  “Duck!” I shouted, shoving Willem to the ground because the most gruesome statue in the whole park had come to life: the two birds from a hideous monument called Eagles and Prey, a bronze sculpture at the north end of the Mall that, for whatever reason, depicts two humongous eagles killing a trapped goat.

  This is why Loki wanted us to come up here to rescue my dad.

  He wanted to turn us into goat-flavored eagle chow.

  “Grab some rocks!” Garrett shouted.

  Willem plucked up a tiny pebble and, using his ant-like strength, side-armed it at one of the eagles. The stone sizzled through the air and clipped off a few feathers.

  Meanwhile, remembering how David whooped Goliath, I grabbed some spiky balls off the ground (the nutty fruit
of some nearby sweet gum trees) and ripped a leather strap off Balto’s harness so I could turn it into a slingshot.

  “Willem? Garrett?” I shouted, twirling my strap even faster to build up momentum, “Aim for the biggest one’s left wing! I’ll take out the right. On three!”

  I figured, if we timed our shots, clipped the wings with a double whammy, we could stun the eagles into forgetting how to fly.

  “One, two, three!”

  Our missiles hit in perfect sync. The first eagle crashed to the ground in a heap of ruffled feathers.

  “Reload!” I shouted, cradling more spiky balls in my sling.

  “On three!” said Willem, tossing a stone the size of a cinderblock up and down as if it were a peanut.

  “One, two, three!” shouted Garrett.

  The three of us simultaneously launched our second shots. Big Bird number two crash-landed on top of his bronze brother.

  Fangs flared and snarling, Balto held the two stunned birds at bay.

  I think both eagles were so terrified they pooped in their tail feathers.

  Chapter 48

  “This way!”

  I dashed back to the statue of Fred LeBow.

  “Okay—what were Loki’s other clues?” I asked rhetorically.

  “Your father’s prison,” said Willem, “is ‘situated between a sit-down and a leg-up.’”

  I turned to my left and saw two picnic tables with attached benches. “The sit-down!”

  “Way to go!” said Garrett. “But what’s a leg-up?”

  “There!” I said, pointing to a set of marble steps just north of the picnic table. “This is the bridle path. And that’s an old-fashioned two-step block for mounting a horse!”

  “A leg-up!” said Garrett.

  “Exactly! Okay, between the sit-down and the leg-up …”

  “Is a big concrete cube.” Garrett pointed to a cement blockhouse maybe six feet tall, wide, and deep.

  “It’s either an electrical transformer box,” I said, “or the entrance to an underground prison cell!”

  We examined the steel panel mounted on the front.