We Are Not Eaten by Yaks

by C. Alexander London

  “No!” the monk suddenly shouted, his face changed into a mask of rage. The children jumped. His voice echoed through the chamber, as if there were an army of monks shouting “No!” over and over. Lama Norbu didn’t even look like a monk anymore. He looked younger and even taller, and angry. “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS? I HAVE NOT COME THIS FAR TO FAIL!”

  “It’s okay,” Oliver said consolingly. “It wasn’t really a Lost Tablet. There are no—”

  “Shhh,” Celia hushed her brother. Lama Norbu snapped his head toward the twins.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he shouted, and approached them angrily. “This page is real! It must be! I stole it from your mother myself!”

  “What?”

  “You stole—”

  “We followed your mother here all the way from the Gobi Desert!” Lama Norbu shouted.

  “What?” said Oliver.

  “We?” said Celia.

  “Me and Janice!” snapped Lama Norbu, who now didn’t look at all like a monk.

  “You mean you’re Frank Pfeffer, from the Pfeffer/McDermott Expedition?!” Celia cried. She felt like a fool. She had known something strange was going on with this monk from the beginning.

  “You’re not a lama at all!” Oliver shouted. He remembered the way Celia had pressed his face into the word toothpicks on that statue in the library.

  “Oh, will you shut up with this llama business! I explained that already.”

  “I mean that you aren’t a monk at all!”

  “You’ve found me out,” Lama Norbu/Frank Pfeffer admitted with a dark smile. “Oh, it feels good not to pretend anymore. I really hate acting.” He stood up taller and peeled the thin white mustache off his face. His voice changed and he seemed to transform from an old monk to a much bigger man. An explorer. “Janice and I found your mother after her dirigible crashed. We wanted to help her, but she was too stubborn.”

  “Dirigible?” Oliver mouthed at his sister.

  “Blimp,” she responded.

  “We told your mother that we would bring her home to her family in exchange for what she’d found, but she refused. She said that she was not about to turn over her discovery to ʹcommon grave robbers.’ She actually called us that. And some other not very nice things.”

  Oliver and Celia were now very worried. They had heard about grave robbers for years. They’d seen shows about them, of course. They were criminals who found ancient tombs and cemeteries and dug up bodies and stole whatever valuable things they found. On TV, it was kind of exciting and kind of creepy. But in real life, grave robbers were not exciting and were much worse than creepy. Their father had been clubbed on the head by grave robbers in Peru just a few months ago. It made his ears ring for a month. Oliver did not want to get clubbed on the head or have his ears ring. He needed his ears for hearing the TV. He liked his ears, even if Celia pulled him around by them sometimes.

  “We were very insulted,ʺ Lama Norbu/ Frank Pfeffer said. “We are certainly not grave robbers.”

  Oliver was relieved. His ears already felt safer.

  “We only robbed from grave robbers. We let them do the hard work. . . . All that digging is not for me. Who wants to go hunting in caves for toothpicks? Ugh.”

  Oliver was not relieved anymore. Someone who robbed from grave robbers was even worse than grave robbers.

  “You’re not even an explorer,” Celia said. “You’re just a thief.”

  “Don’t sound so shocked. What do you think your parents do? They are famous for robbing graves. Just because they give what they find to museums doesn’t make them any less grave robbers.”

  “Our parents are explorers,ʺ Oliver said. Celia couldn’t believe her brother was defending explorers. It was explorers who had gotten them into this mess.

  “Whatever she was, we followed your mother all the way to this cave,” Frank Pfeffer said. “If she wasn’t going to give us her discovery, we were going to take it from her. I waited for her to come out. I waited for days, but she didn’t. Weeks passed. It was so boring, sitting for so long in this gorge, watching monks come and go. So I decided to flush her out. I started a little fire.”

  “You started the fire?” Celia asked. “With our mother inside!”

  “Oh, with lots of people inside. There were over a hundred monks living here. They all left when the fire went out of control. All but your mother. She never came out. I went to look in the ashes when morning came, but I didn’t find her. I didn’t even find her body. But I found this page. I couldn’t read it. What do I know about ancient Greek? But I knew someone who did.”

  “Dad!” Celia said.

  “That’s right. We knew your father would see this note your mother wrote and work tirelessly to track her down. And if we followed, we’d be led right to the tablets! So Janice went to the Ceremony of Discovery disguised as Choden Thordup.”

  “I knew something was wrong with her!” Celia shouted. “Neither of you are really from Tibet! There’s no such person as Lama Norbu or Choden Thordup.”

  “What about the yak?” Oliver asked. “The one she named Stephen?”

  “For someone who watches so much television,” Frank Pfeffer sneered, “you aren’t very good at recognizing make-believe.” He laughed. “We just told your father what he needed to hear. We made a deal with Sir Edmund to sell him the tablets when we found them. You two were supposed to be poisoned so your father would work for us. But instead, those witches poisoned him, and now I’m stuck with you: Oliver and Celia the couch potatoes!ʺ

  “We aren’t couch potatoes!” Oliver shouted.

  “We are audiovisual enthusiasts,ʺ Celia said. She’d seen those words in an advertisement for flat-screen TVs. She didn’t know exactly what they meant, but it sure sounded better than couch potatoes. “And you’re a charlatan,ʺ she added, because if there was ever a time to call someone a faker, a liar and a fraud, it was right at this moment.

  22

  WE’RE SHOWN SOME SHAMANS

  ʺWELL,WHATEVER I AM,ʺ Frank Pfeffer snapped at Celia, “it is now up to you to help me. I will not return empty-handed.”

  “Why would we help you?” Oliver demanded. “You lied to us and you tried to set fire to our mother. You’re working with Sir Edmund.”

  “You will help me because I am the only one who knows how to save your father from the Poison Witches and you’re running out of time. If the witches don’t kill him, Sir Edmund certainly will. I am your only hope.”

  Oliver’s shoulders slumped. For two people who didn’t like to leave the couch, he and Celia sure had a lot of enemies all of a sudden.

  “Well, you’re the explorer,” Celia said. “How are we supposed to help you?”

  “I have no earthly idea, but I believe that with the right motivation, young people can accomplish anything. And I would think your fatherʹs life is motivation enough. So start looking.”

  “What are we even looking for if there are no tablets?” Oliver wondered.

  “The way to Shangri-La, then,” Frank Pfeffer said. “Find that for me.”

  “We’ll need the paper,” answered Oliver. “It’s the only clue we have.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’ll see.” Frank shrugged as he handed them the wet document. Oliver threw the backpack onto his back and held the paper in front of him as they started to wander. The runny sketches looked just like the burnt images on the walls of the cave.

  “Mom drew this right here,” Oliver said, comparing a runny image on the paper with a burnt image on the ceiling.

  Frank Pfeffer leaned against the wall and picked at his teeth with a little jade toothpick he pulled out of his pocket.

  “So what do we do?” Oliver whispered.

  “I might have an idea,” Celia said.

  “Hey!” Frank Pfeffer shouted. “Less chatting and more searching.”

  They wandered up and down the length of the chamber, peering through the dark doorways. Every room held a different strange and feroc
ious statue. Fanged monks sitting cross-legged on giant flowers; horned demons with many arms and many legs devouring human bodies; strange beasts surrounded by puddles of melted wax from what were once candles. The place creeped Celia out. It made Oliver think of all the scary movies he’d ever seen.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” he warned Celia.

  “What?”

  “When girls run off alone in horror movies, bad things happen.”

  “Just keep looking, Oliver. I can take care of myself,” she answered, but she did stay closer to her brother. It was better to be safe than sorry, she thought.

  As they peered into another dark room, Oliver leaned on the charred door frame. It cracked with a loud noise and he tumbled over into the room.

  That’s when the ceiling started screeching.

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  Thousands of bats swooped down and swirled around them. Celia swatted and swung to keep them out of her hair as they darted to and fro. She dove down to the floor next to her brother. By the thousands the bats rushed toward the roaring water at the front of the cave. In the distance, they heard Frank Pfeffer scream.

  “Now is our chance to get away!” Celia said. “Run to the stairs at the back of the cave.”

  Both children bolted upright and ran in the opposite direction from the bats, ducking low and swatting in front of them to keep the way clear. They kept getting hit in the face by low-flying bats.

  “Ahhh!” Oliver yelled. “I hate bats!”

  “I thought you hated lizards!” Celia shouted back.

  “Can’t I hate both?”

  They made their way to the back stairs and just as they were about to rush down into the darkness to escape, Celia stopped and grabbed her brother by the ear, yanking him backwards.

  “Ouch,” he yelled. “Why’d you do that?”

  “It’s a projector!” Celia shouted.

  “What?”

  Celia pointed at the statue of the skeleton twins that stood between them and the entrance to the cave. They were looking at its back. From behind they could see what looked like a switch on the back of each statue. They could see that the third eyes didn’t just seem to glow . . . they did glow. There were little crystals in the backs of the skeleton’s heads that shined with light.

  “Movie night!” Celia said.

  “What are you two doing?” Frank Pfeffer yelled. He was swatting and ducking to avoid the bats, trying to get closer to the twins.

  Oliver and Celia didn’t answer. They stepped to the back of the statue and looked at the switches and at each other.

  “Mom always said that movie projectors were like shamans, showing us stories and distant worlds.”

  “Maybe that’s what she meant in the note,” Celia said. “She wrote that note so that only we could understand it! She wanted us to find this projector. That’s our shaman! Movie night and shamans’ eyes! Maybe that will show us the way to Shangri-La!”

  Celia flipped the switch on the back of one of the statues and light shot from its third eye into the back of the white waterfall. The waterfall was just like a giant screen. The statue was like an old film projector. The whole place looked like it was set up just for them, their own movie theater at the bottom of the world.

  “Mom,” Oliver whispered, amazed, and Celia just nodded.

  “What if . . .,” Oliver said, and reached up with the wet piece of paper and slid it into a slot carved out of one of the statue heads. At first they saw a giant image of a runny ink blob projected on the back of the waterfall. Oliver flipped the switch on the back of the other statue and its third eye also lit up. Suddenly, a picture snapped into focus on the back of the falls. It was a picture of the Navel family sitting on their couch together, years before their mom had gone. Both kids gasped and Frank Pfeffer stared at the image, awestruck. The last of the bats flew right out through the picture.

  “How . . .” was all Frank Pfeffer said.

  Oliver pulled the paper out of the slot and looked at it. It looked like a wet piece of parchment, but when he put it back in the slot and the light from the skeleton’s crystal eye passed through it, the image appeared again.

  “This was the clue Mom left,” Celia said. “She left it for you and me, not for Dad.”

  “But look, that picture’s not right,” Oliver said. In the image they were all sitting on the couch smiling, but hanging on the wall where their storyboard from Escape from the Mummy King was framed, there was a painting instead. It was a painting of a monastery on a mountain. It looked almost like the flags were flapping in the breeze. Their mother also had on a piece of jewelry the kids had never seen her wearing before, a necklace with an image of a key on it. The same weird symbol they’d seen over and over again.

  “The Monastery of the Demon Fortress of the Oracle King,” Frank Pfeffer gasped. He was looking at the picture on the wall and not paying any attention to their mother’s necklace. “Of course! The greatest scribes in all of Tibet live there in total isolation. That would be the perfect place for the tablets to be hidden! That could be Shangri-La itself! Thank you, children.”

  Frank Pfeffer smiled cruelly and came toward the kids, who stepped back, slipping a little on the floor of the cave. It was hard to walk backward and they kept stumbling and catching each other. The floor was uneven and wet and covered in bat poop. If you have never walked backward through wet bat poop, you should know that it’s not easy. I don’t recommend it without special shoes. Oliver and Celia did not have special shoes. Just sneakers. They nearly fell over altogether.

  Frank Pfeffer reached up to the skeleton statue and snatched the paper from its slot and shoved it into his pocket. He looked down on the twins.

  “What happens now?” Celia demanded.

  “You watch enough television,” he said. “You must be experts at figuring out what happens next. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “You’re going to leave us here,” Oliver said.

  “Exactly.”

  “And then you’re going to the Demon Fortress of Whatever for yourself,” Celia continued. “And you’ll let the Poison Witches take our father.”

  “You are exactly right.” Frank Pfeffer laughed. “Television has not rotted your brains completely, it seems.”

  “Except you forgot something,” Celia said. “Just when things seem really bad at the end of an episode, there is always a twist. And we have a twist for you.”

  “We do?” Oliver wondered.

  “We do,” Celia said, and charged like a football player at Frank Pfeffer’s waist.

  “Ahhhh,” he shouted as her shoulders slammed into him and he stepped back to brace himself. His foot landed right in a pile of bat poop, which you now know is very slippery. Frank Pfeffer was not wearing special bat-poop hiking shoes either, and he fell over backward and slid. Celia shot up from on top of him and ran toward her brother.

  “Ahhhh,” Frank Pfeffer screamed as he crashed into the waterfall at the cave’s entrance.

  “Go to the stairs!” she yelled, and Oliver reached back, grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the dark stairs at the back of the cave.

  ʺThat . . . was . . . your . . . big plan?” Oliver huffed, taking two steps down at time and using the wall as a guide in the pitch black. “To push him?”

  “To push him into bat poop,” Celia corrected. “I didn’t say it was a good plan. But I didn’t hear any ideas from you, Agent Zero.”

  “I was thinking. That’s what secret agents do. They don’t just push people.”

  “We escaped, didn’t we?”

  “You call this escaping?” Oliver said as he stopped and his sister bumped into him from behind. They didn’t know how far they had gone down or how far they had left to go. They were surrounded by darkness.

  “I don’t think he’s coming after us,” Celia said. “I think we made it—”

  “Shhhh!” Oliver cut her off. “Whenever someone says that, something terrible happens!”

  “Stop being stupid.”
<
br />   “You didn’t believe me about the wire, and look what happened!”

  “Yeah, but this is different. I mean, he’s not chasing us. So that’s good.”

  Just as Celia said that, a flashlight popped on next to them, revealing Frank Pfeffer standing right above, inches away, soaking wet and bruised and slimy with bat poop. Shadows danced ghoulishly across his cruel smile. A painting of a three-eyed demon glowed on the wall next to him.

  “Oh, no,” Celia said.

  “Told ya,” said Oliver.

  “Of course, bat poop and waterfalls won’t stop me.” He laughed. “And now . . . a push for a push.”

  And with that, he raised his hand and froze just before hitting Celia. He smirked, extended his index finger, and pushed on the third eye in the painting on the wall next to him. It sunk into the wall with a creak. The stairs shook a little and bits of dust and rock fell. There was a moment of silence and Frank Pfeffer wrinkled his brow. Suddenly, with a loud crack, the stairs below Oliver and Celia crumbled. Frank laughed as they plummeted into the darkness.

  23

  WE ARE TRAPPED

  FALLING INTO THE DARK is very different from falling out of an airplane or falling into a gorge or falling over a waterfall. If people reviewed falling the way they reviewed movies, they might say that falling out of an airplane was “equal parts thrilling and terrifying, four stars!” and that falling into a gorge was “dangerous and unpleasant, three and a half stars” and that falling over a waterfall was “the wettest thing you’ll ever do, two stars. Not recommended for children or people with heart conditions.”

  Falling into the dark surrounded by crumbled stone stairs, however, is completely different, as the twins quickly discovered. Two thumbs down. No stars. It’s just bad.

  As soon as the stairs broke apart, the twins felt themselves lurch into the air and fall away from the glow of Frank Pfeffer’s flashlight and his devilish smile. They didn’t know if they were falling a hundred feet down onto a bed of spikes, or sixteen feet onto a feather mattress. They couldn’t see the floor.