We Dine With Cannibals

by C. Alexander London

  “I know,” their mother said. “But they are the only ones who can.”

  “It’s just a library, Claire. A really old library!”

  “It’s what the library contains that is so important,” she said. “I can’t explain it all to you now, but trust me. The fate of the entire world is at stake.”

  “Oh, come on!” Oliver shouted at the TV. “We have to save the world now?”

  Beverly shushed him again.

  “We left them with that actor,” a man said, entering the room. It was Professor Rasmali-Greenberg, wearing a tweed suit and a purple bow tie with orange ducks on it. “He’s the Adventuring Celebrity, so they should be fine.”

  “Celebrity Adventurist,” their father corrected him. At least he paid attention. “And he’s only a child himself.”

  “He looked older in person,” the professor said.

  “The twins will know what to do.” Their mother looked briefly toward them, as if she could see through this tiny TV screen, as if she knew they were watching. Celia thought she saw their mother smile.

  Suddenly, a new voice entered the scene.

  “I think I’d like you to tell me where they are,” it said.

  It was Sir Edmund, standing in the doorway to the living room.

  “And Professor,” he said, “I do not appreciate how you have treated me. I think I shall be resigning from the Explorers Club on account of this betrayal.”

  “How did you get out of the closet?” Claire Navel demanded.

  “Oh, some of my friends arrived.” Sir Edmund smiled as the mayor of Benjamin Constant and a group of burly loggers entered the room, all of them armed with clubs and rifles. Behind them stood Principal Deaver, smiling cruelly and holding Beverly at the end of a purple satin leash.

  “Oh, dear me,” said Beverly in their dream. “How embarrassing!”

  “I should very much like to know the whereabouts of your children,” Principal Deaver said. “I’m concerned for their safety. And for yours.”

  Just then, the image filled with static and the scene was gone.

  “What happened?” Celia asked, shooting to her feet. “What’s going on? Was that real?”

  The shaman held the khipu in the air and spoke. The monkey screeched. This time, Beverly translated with her thick British accent while the llama girl sat with her eyes closed and listened.

  “The Sweet Sea forks into darkling waters,” the lizard said.

  “Darkling?” Oliver whispered at Celia. She just shrugged.

  “Ahem!” Beverly coughed. “It’s rude to interrupt. I may be just a dream, but I have feelings.”

  “Moody lizard,” Oliver muttered.

  “Darkling waters,” Beverly continued. “Beyond the serpent’s tongue and through weeping trees, where doubt itself bends toward a shadow, there the knight should boldly ride, if he seeks for El Dorado.”

  The image on the TV changed from static to a ruined city in the jungle, overgrown with vines and trees, but the screen zoomed in on a wall at the base of the building, where a tiny glimmer of gold caught the sunlight. It was a golden key engraved on the wall.

  The twins knew the symbol immediately: the Mnemones.

  Then the image turned back to the strange living room, where Sir Edmund’s thugs were tying up Oliver and Celia’s parents and the professor. The screen changed once more to a water tower with the smiling face of Velma Sue, of Velma Sue’s snack cakes, on it. The screen went to static.

  The shaman stopped chanting. Beverly scurried away. The apartment itself seemed to melt from the walls inward, leaving the twins lying in hammocks in the longhouse in the village of the Cozinheiros. A pool of quicksand formed below the TV and it began to sink. As the last flicker of static vanished into the quicksand, Oliver and Celia woke up.

  It was daylight.

  “What …” Oliver rubbed his head. “What was that?”

  “You have had a vision,” the llama girl said. “You have seen the truth.”

  “We saw our mother and father,” said Celia.

  Oliver looked at the khipu. “Does this thing really say all that stuff about darkling waters and shadows of doubt and stuff? Is that the way to El Dorado?”

  “Sort of,” the llama girl explained. The shaman gently took the khipu from Celia and counted out knots on his fingers. “This is the Inca’s Itinerary. It describes all the places along the way to the City of Gold that the Inca traveled in the past. As their civilization was destroyed, the last Inca rulers hid in the jungles. My ancestors. We were taken in by the Cozinheiros. We were given shelter, and they agreed to guard our secret places. El Dorado—which means ‘the gilded one’—was such a place.”

  “Gilded?” Oliver asked.

  “Covered in gold,” Celia said.

  “How—oh, right. The Worm.”

  “If you cover it in gold, then it’s gilded, so I’m told,” the llama girl said. “Anyway, our ancestors had hidden something very important in that place and the conquistadors would stop at nothing to get it. We spread all kinds of false stories about the city so no one would ever know what was really there, but it seems that some explorers have figured it out.”

  “Is it the Lost Library of Alexandria? Is that where it was hidden?” Celia said.

  The llama girl nodded. “Our shamans are the only ones who know how to read these strings to find it, and that is why your mother wanted you to come here.”

  “So we could learn how to read these strings?” said Oliver.

  “So we could show you, yes,” the girl explained. The shaman spoke and she translated again. “Each knot is a distance. The colors are different places and directions. You read it with your fingers and your eyes, just like you would read the world.” The old man counted knots on the string and pointed to the different places in the forest beyond.

  “So what about our parents?” Celia asked. “What did we see there?”

  “You saw another path,” the girl translated. “You saw what you needed to see so that you may choose your destiny.”

  “Our destiny involves a living room filled with Velma Sue’s snack cakes?”

  “It appears so,” the llama girl said. “We can take you to this place. We can help you rescue your parents, if that is what you choose.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” said Corey Brandt, suddenly standing in the doorway to the longhouse.

  “What? Corey? Where have you been?” asked Celia.

  “We’re going to find this ‘gilded one,’” he said. “We’re going to El Dorado.”

  “We have to save our mom and dad,” said Oliver.

  “You do what you want,” he said, and reached into the pocket of his pants to remove a small pistol. “But I’m going to discover the Lost Library and sell it to the highest bidder.”

  “Corey,” Celia cried. “What are you doing?”

  “Corey, Corey, Corey,” he sighed. “And they said I wasn’t convincing …”

  “Who said … what?” Oliver murmured.

  The horrible realization hit Celia like a dodgeball to the face.

  “You are missing a freckle,” she shouted. “You’re not Corey Brandt!” She had noticed the missing freckle but convinced herself it didn’t matter. She had noticed that he looked older and taller in real life, but she had convinced herself that the camera made people look shorter.

  It didn’t.

  Movie stars were always shorter in real life. She knew that. She wanted so badly to believe that Corey Brandt would want to travel the world with them, would want to be their friend, that she ignored all the signs. This guy had never even watched Corey’s shows.

  “You’re the guy who was kicked off Dancing with My Impersonator!” she said.

  The impersonator smiled at her. “Unfairly kicked off,” he said. “I’m the perfect Corey Brandt impersonator. I do mall appearances and birthday parties and no one ever complained … until that stupid TV show.”

  “You’re not perfect,” said Oliver. “The
real Corey Brandt can do his own stunts. And you almost got eaten by ants! You don’t know how to ride a motorcycle. And you’re too tall and too old. You’re nothing like Corey Brandt!”

  “I am not too old,” the impersonator sneered. “I am only twenty-six.”

  “What have you done with the real Corey Brandt?”

  “You’d have to ask my partner that one. She did the dirty work there.”

  “She?” said Celia. “You don’t work for Sir Edmund?”

  “Janice,” groaned Oliver as he realized. “You’re in cahoots with Janice McDermott!”

  “Really now, Oliver, who says cahoots?” said the fake Corey Brandt.

  “That’s who was on the phone!” Celia shook her head. “I knew it. I knew Corey Brandt didn’t have a personal shopper! He said so on Celebrity Access Tonight.” She smacked herself in the forehead. All that pointless Corey Brandt trivia she knew could have saved them, if only she hadn’t been so starstruck.

  “I told him to study the details,” a woman said as she stepped from the shadows, climbing over sleeping tribesmen and pointing her rifle at the twins, the llama girl, and the shaman.

  It was Janice McDermott, back for revenge.

  She looked different than she had the last time they saw her, when she was disguised as a Tibetan mountain climber at the Explorers Club. Now she wore camouflage and had a big backpack on her back with pickaxes and chisels and a belt of bullets around her waist—all the tools of the grave robber’s trade. Her hair was short and black.

  “You’ll never get away with this,” said Celia. “The world will search for the real Corey Brandt.”

  “And they’ll find him,” said the impersonator. “I’ll be him.”

  “And I’ll have found the Lost Library and avenged Frank Pfeffer’s untimely demise,” added Janice. “A happy ending for everyone … except the Navels. And the real Corey Brandt.” She shrugged. “As lovely as it is to see you both again, I think your friends are waking up, and I don’t want to end up eaten like poor Frank.”

  “They’re not really—,” Oliver started, but Celia shushed him.

  The fake Corey Brandt snatched the khipu from the shaman’s hands and he and Janice McDermott slipped out of the longhouse. The villagers were just starting to emerge from their own strange dreams. Even the llama girl tugging at them and the shaman shaking his rattle couldn’t rouse them faster.

  Oliver and Celia ran outside.

  Just before Janice and her partner vanished into the jungle, the Corey Brandt impersonator looked back at them with a wink and smile.

  Celia was as unimpressed as the game show judges.

  31

  WE TAKE A PATH

  “SO WHAT DO WE do now?” asked Oliver. “Do we chase them?”

  “They have guns,” said Celia.

  “They took the thingy,” said Oliver.

  “Khipu,” said Celia.

  “I know,” said Oliver.

  “Your vision showed you two paths,” said the llama girl. “The City of Gold and your parents. Your parents are in danger, as is the City of Gold. You must decide which is more important: your parents or the quest for—”

  “Our parents,” the twins said before she’d even finished speaking.

  “We want to go rescue our parents,” said Celia. “We don’t care about El Dorado or the Lost Library. That’s Mom’s thing.”

  “But in your vision, your mother said the fate of the world was at stake.”

  “She can be kind of dramatic,” said Oliver. “She’s an explorer. And anyway, if someone needs to save the world, it’s better our parents than us. We’re more, like, indoor kids.”

  “We’ll need your help,” said Celia. “We can’t fight our principal and Sir Edmund alone.”

  “All right,” the llama girl said. “We will take you to this place with the snack cakes and the plaid furniture. We will help you rescue your parents.”

  “Is it a long hike there?” Oliver asked. He was pretty tired after a day of hiking, dodging, running, climbing, and then a night of weird visions.

  “Don’t worry,” said the llama girl. “We’ll take our plane.”

  “Your plane?” Celia exclaimed. “You have an airplane?”

  The llama girl shrugged. “It’s not exactly our plane,” she said.

  It was a short hike to reach the seaplane. It was tied to a tree at the river’s edge, hidden from view by layers of moss and leaves and vines. A giant whisk and chef’s hat were painted on the side.

  “This is the plane from Celebrity Whisk Warriors,” Oliver said.

  “That’s right,” the llama girl answered. “People leave all kinds of things behind when they are running for their lives.”

  “Why did you chase them off? They could have made your tribe famous.”

  “They never asked our permission to come here,” the llama girl said matter-of-factly. “Not everyone wants to be on reality TV.”

  Oliver and Celia couldn’t imagine that, but these days, the unimaginable had started to seem pretty normal. Their mother had abducted their father with a poison dart, and they had just had a vision of their parents discussing their fate in a quaint suburban living room in the middle of the jungle, so why couldn’t there also be people who didn’t want to be on TV? Anything was possible.

  “Do you know how to fly it?” Oliver asked.

  “We’ve never needed to,” said the llama girl.

  Oliver looked over at his sister.

  She looked him right in the eye. “No,” she said.

  “Oh, come on!”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “How different could it be?”

  It was the llama girl’s turn to be confused. “What? How different could what be? What are you talking about?”

  “Celia knows how to fly a plane,” Oliver told her.

  “I do not,” Celia objected. “I’ve just watched Love at 30,000 Feet a lot of times.”

  “You have every episode memorized.”

  “So?”

  “So you’ve seen Captain Sinclair take off a hundred times. You even know the episode where he gets knocked out by the bird flu while his copilot is in a Norwegian prison and the Duchess in Business Class has to fly the plane. And she can’t read! If she can fly a plane, you can fly a plane!”

  “Yeah, but it’s not the same … that’s a 747! This is a seaplane.”

  “Do you want to save Mom and Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to get our family back together?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to get out of this jungle and get cable?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you’re gonna have to try.”

  Celia considered her options. No one else knew how to fly a plane and she wasn’t about to let Oliver try. On the shows he liked, every plane crashed. There was even a show called Plane Crash! that he never missed.

  “Fine,” she said. “But no backseat flying.”

  Before they could board the plane, the shaman pulled a small gourd from a pouch around his neck and dipped his finger in it. It was covered in dark black ink. He painted dots on Celia’s forehead and a series of stripes on Oliver’s face.

  “Now you are ready,” the llama girl explained. “You go into battle with us.”

  They boarded the plane with half a dozen of the warriors.

  Celia was in the pilot’s seat and the llama girl sat next to her to be the navigator. Oliver found himself squeezed in between the warriors in the back. Their large arms squished him into himself. Their spears and blowguns and bows and arrows were piled every which way. They all sat perfectly still and quiet.

  If Oliver didn’t know that they were deadly jungle hunters, he would have thought they were nervous about flying.

  They were.

  Outside the plane, the shaman chanted blessings. Celia pulled on knobs and levers. She flipped switches that made the plane groan and beep. She found a starter and hit it and the propeller on the nos
e of the plane churned to life, breaking free of vines and moss as it spun faster and faster.

  “Engines. Check,” Celia said, because that’s what Captain Sinclair said on the show. She was going to do everything she could just like TV and hope they would have a happy ending. Flying a plane full of tribal warriors to a ruined suburb in the jungle where she would rescue her parents from her principal was not the way she had expected to spend the first week of sixth grade. She let out a slow breath.

  “Here we go,” she said. “The captain has turned on the ‘fasten seat belts’ sign. Prepare for takeoff.”

  She steered the plane to the center of the river and pulled back on the throttle. The acceleration pressed Oliver against his seat and pressed the warriors against Oliver. The plane lifted off the river.

  If they survived this flight and saved their parents, Celia thought, they’d better get cable television.

  32

  WE’VE GOT A GAMBIT

  IN THE BEDROOM of the house in the jungle, Claire and Ogden Navel were having a long-awaited reunion. They were tied back-to-back on two dining room chairs and locked in the closet. It was dark and sticky, but they were happy to be together again.

  “I forgot how much more I enjoy danger when you’re around,” Dr. Navel told his wife.

  “That’s good,” she said, “because there is plenty of it.”

  “I am still a bit mad at you for kidnapping me and putting our children’s lives in danger.”

  “There’s no how-to manual for parenting, Oggie. I’m doing the best I can.”

  “I know … I know …” Dr. Navel was quiet for a moment. “So what is this place anyway?”

  “This is Velma Sue’s Snack Cakeville,” she said, as if that explained anything.

  “Oh,” said Dr. Navel. He had no idea what Velma Sue’s Snack Cakeville was, but he hated to admit that to his wife.

  For those of us who are not embarrassed by what we don’t know, I’m happy to elaborate on the subject of Velma Sue’s Snack Cakeville, based on my extensive research into the history of the snack cake industry.

  Snack Cakeville is a town in the heart of the Amazon rain forest built by Minnesota baker, housewife, and industrialist Velma Sue Harrison. In the early twentieth century, Velma Sue invented her delicious snack cakes by discovering a secret ingredient that gave them an extra-special taste and bounce—all-natural rubber. Rubber trees grew wild in the Amazon rain forest and Velma Sue believed she could make a lot of money if she built a snack cake factory right in the Amazon where the rubber grew.