This is it, Oliver thought. We’re dead. I’ll never see the TV again, or my sister or my parents. I’ll never get a television in my room or go to college or know how Agent Zero ends.
I failed, Celia thought as she fell. I couldn’t save my brother or my father, or find my mother, or get us cable. And now we’re going to die in some Tibetan pit because an evil grave robber pretending to be a monk broke the stairs.
“I’m sorry, Oliver!” she called out in the darkness. “I’m sorry that I . . . oooof!”
She landed with a hard thud, and right next to her she heard what sounded like a sack of flour hitting the ground and knew her brother had landed with an oooooof right on the backpack. Stones and dust rained down on them and Celia covered her face with her arms. They hadn’t fallen that far at all and the ground was dirt below them, softer than stone. They’d be bruised, but they were alive. Gravity just couldn’t kill the Navel Twins. Celia was so relieved she started laughing. She was lying on her back looking up at the glow from Frank Pfeffer’s flashlight.
“Are you okay?” Oliver groaned. The wind had been knocked out of him. He brushed bits of crumbled stairs off himself.
Celia didn’t answer; she just kept laughing. Oliver couldn’t help but find his sister totally incomprehensible sometimes.
“Enjoy your time together,” Frank Pfeffer yelled down at them. “You will quickly find that there is no way out of this pit. I expect you’ll starve within a few days. Too bad about saving your father. Oh, well. I highly recommend you use the time you have left to meditate. Perhaps you’ll be reborn as a llama! With two ls of course!”
He cackled hysterically and then tossed the flashlight down to them as he left. It landed with a clatter and lit up the ground around them.
The light flickered and cast an eerie glow into the alcoves that ringed the round chamber. The pit had been some kind of meditation room. There were eight alcoves and each contained the sooty ruins of broken statues. Most were burned beyond recognition, but one remained almost unharmed. It held a statue of a ferocious demon with giant fangs and six arms holding snakes and spears riding a roaring lion. The creature had a third eye in the center of his forehead, just like the skeleton twins. He looked like he was charging into battle.
“You think this is one of those ferocious protector gods?” Oliver asked nervously.
“I guess so,” Celia said. “Though his protection didn’t do us much good.”
“Maybe it’s like the lama said,” Oliver suggested. “We have to meditate and ask for his help.”
“Are you nuts? The lama wasn’t even a lama! That was Frank Pfeffer! He was probably lying about everything.”
“I know, but just because something’s made-up doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it,” Oliver said. “Think about Love at 30,000 Feet. It saved us with the witches.”
“Are you serious? You don’t even know how to meditate.” Oliver was right, but she wasn’t ready to lose this argument.
“How hard can it be?”
Celia just crossed her arms and tapped her foot, annoyed. She couldn’t think of a better idea. There really was no way out of this dark pit, and if the demon statue could help them, why not try it. She hated to give in to her brother, but she figured it was her fault they got pushed into the pit, so she owed him one.
“Okay,” she agreed. “What do we do?”
“Well, we sit cross-legged facing the statue. Whenever anyone does this on TV, they always sit up really straight and rest their hands on their knees and close their eyes. Like this.” He demonstrated. When he opened one eye to see if his sister was doing it, she was still standing with her arms folded. “Come on, you have to do it right.”
Celia sighed and assumed the position next to her brother. The statue towered over them. Oliver shifted uncomfortably on his butt. He thought about his father lying unconscious as a prisoner of the Poison Witches. He thought about how his mother had been here, maybe in this very room. How she had left a projector, as if she knew they would look for her. He thought about becoming Sir Edmund’s slave. He thought about Frank Pfeffer and how he had seemed like such a nice monk. His knees hurt from the weird position he was sitting in and he guessed that thinking about all the bad stuff going on wasn’t how this was supposed to work. He tried to clear his head, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Ducks Incorporated, a cartoon he used to love about a family of ducks who ran a giant computer company.
He peeked over at his sister. Her brow was wrinkled in concentration and her lips were moving like she was praying. Oliver couldn’t believe how much she looked like the martial arts experts on the training episode of Agent Zero. How come she had a talent for meditation and he didn’t?
As he watched her lips move, he noticed the words she was muttering. They weren’t like any prayer he could imagine.
“High up in the sky . . . love’s a look in your eye . . . so climb on board . . . play a chord . . . and fall in lo-ove. Lo-ove . . . lo-ove.”
“Hey,” Oliver interrupted his sister. “You aren’t meditating! That’s the theme song to Love at 30,000 Feet!ʺ
“It’s all I can think of. Meditation is hard.”
“Yeah,” Oliver agreed.
“You’d think we’d be good at sitting still and staring.”
“Like when you made me watch the Love at 30,000 Feet marathon. We must have sat still for like fifty hours.”
“Fifty-two, and yeah, that was great.”
“That was horrible. I canʹt believe I had to endure that.”
“Oh, come on! It’s a great show and you know it. You even said that Captain Sinclair was kind of cool. And you just said it’s what saved us from the Poison Witches.”
“That’s it!” Oliver shouted.
“What? Captain Sinclair? The witches? What?”
“No! Not Captain Sinclair! Not the witches! The yak! The yak’s message! Again!”
“Why are you always shouting about yaks?”
“That yak might just be the smartest talking animal I’ve ever dreamed about.”
“You dream about a lot of talking animals?”
Oliver ignored his sister. She was always coming up with the ideas and trying to protect him, but this time, he figured it out. He knew just what to do. He felt like a Zen master. Agent Zero would have been proud.
“Listen, I know just what to do,” he said.
24
WE’RE BEING WATCHED
ON A HIGH BOULDER at the top of the waterfall stood Sir Edmund with a group of six women whose teeth were filed down to razor-sharp points and whose skin was withered and craggy like a map of the gorge itself. They called themselves the Dugmas, but the twins called them the Poison Witches.
Together, they watched the water crashing below them and saw a tall man slip out from the cave behind the wall of white water. He was alone, with a gun slung on his back. His clothes were wet and covered with what looked bat poop.
“Norbu,” the lead witch with the jeweled turquoise headband said.
“You can stop calling him that, I think,” Sir Edmund answered her. “No one is around who can hear us.” They all looked back at the form lying on the ground behind them. Dr. Navel was still and silent, his breath moving very slowly in and out as if he was just barely clinging to life. “Frank Pfeffer has done well. He seems to know where he’s going now.”
“What of the children?” the lead witch asked.
Sir Edmund just shrugged.
“If they still live, they will do all they can to find the tablets before Norb—I mean, Pfeffer. That does not worry you?” she asked.
“I should have told you ladies earlier,” Sir Edmund said, “but there are no Lost Tablets. They were destroyed long ago. I saw to it personally.”
“What?” the witch exclaimed. The others gasped. They clapped in Sir Edmund’s face, which in Tibet was not a nice thing to do. These were some unhappy witches. “How dare you lie to us?”
“Don’t be so surprised. You lie to everyone yo
u meet. I won’t have a lesson on the Golden Rule from witches who poison people around their campfire.”
“But we made a deal with you.”
“Our deal still stands. You get this explorer’s soul,” Sir Edmund said, and pointed at Dr. Navel. “In fact, you are guaranteed to get it, as the children cannot bring you something that does not exist, can they?”
“But . . .” The leader scratched her head, puzzled. While she was an excellent murderer and stealer of souls, she had never been to school or played chess or watched an episode of Agent Zero. She couldn’t think about complicated plans. She pretty much knew how to mix poisons into a small number of yak butter stew recipes. Plotting was not her strong suit.
“When Frank and his partner came to me with that piece of paper, I saw immediately that the note hid a code from the mother of those bratty kids, but I didn’t know what the rest the code really meant. I did know that Frank and his partner wanted revenge on the Navel family, and that Dr. Navel could not resist a chance to find his wife. I simply had to push him into it with my little bet, to get him to bring his kids and let them figure out what that code meant.”
“So you don’t even know what you are searching for?” the witches asked, shocked.
“Oh, it isn’t obvious? I am searching for the children’s mother. I believe she copied the tablets before I was able to destroy them. I must have that copy. That catalog is the most important clue to finding the Lost Library. The Council must be the only ones who possess it.”
One of the witches hissed and the rest clapped again. They didn’t like Sir Edmund very much. Not many people did.
“I had thought it would be easier to find this woman, of course. I hadn’t expected the Navels to be thrown off the plane or that Pfeffer might try to change our deal, but all is well again. I will find her and I will get what I want.”
“And what about what we want?”
“Apologies,” Sir Edmund said, though it was obvious he wasn’t really apologizing. “Come with me after Frank Pfeffer, and when I have what I want, you can have Frank’s soul too. How does that sound? Two explorers for the price of one.”
“And the children?”
“No.” Sir Edmund smirked. “I will keep the children. I have something else in mind for them. Their work is far from over.”
The leader held up her finger to Sir Edmund, demanding silence. She turned and huddled with the other witches and they murmured to each other like a football team planning a play. They talked for a very long time, while Sir Edmund kept checking his watch, which had a symbol of a scroll in chains on it, and looking down at the tiny form of Frank Pfeffer climbing the walls of the canyon. At last, the witches turned around again.
“We have consulted,” the leader said gravely.
“And . . . ,” Sir Edmund prompted. She puffed up her chest and looked as though she was about to make an important pronouncement.
“Sure,” she said at last.
Sir Edmund shook his head. “All right, so we follow wherever he goes and you do as I say until we get there.”
“Agreed,” the leader said. “But . . . there is a problem.”
“Oh, what now!?” Sir Edmund threw his tiny arms in the air in exasperation.
“We are forbidden to leave this valley. Ever since the protector-spirit banished the unruly gods in ancient times, we have been confined to this valley.”
“Ha!” Sir Edmund scoffed. ʺThat’s your worry? Dorjee Drakden is my prisoner now. I have locked up his oracle. We talked just the other day. He won’t interfere with you.”
“You make many assumptions, Sir Edmund.” The leader’s face grew grave and serious as she spoke. “Dorjee Drakden will never submit to someone like you. We have known him since the dawn of time. He went by a different name then. They called him Pehar Gylapo, and he was the most feared and dangerous of all the gods. He has only ever bowed to the pure of heart, those who do not seek power.”
“Huh,” Sir Edmund snorted. “Don’t seek power? I don’t know anyone like that. Now, if we have deal, let’s go.”
One witch grabbed the unconscious Dr. Navel and tossed him over her shoulder like a rag doll. The group began their climb behind Frank Pfeffer, who had no idea what dangers were following him.
25
WE’VE GOT A UNIVERSAL REMOTE AND WE KNOW HOW TO USE IT
OLIVER EXPLAINED TO his sister that the yak in his dream on the airplane had said You must remember enduring Love if you want to avoid a terrible fate. He thought he had used up the yak’s prediction back with the Poison Witches.
“When the yak said love,ʺ Oliver told Celia, “he meant Love at 30,000 Feet, how I endured that marathon. That’s why I got the message instead of you. You wouldn’t have thought of it as anything you had to endure. You loved that marathon.”
“It’s a great show.”
“Okay, whatever. Just listen. I figured once I realized how the predication could save us back with the witches, that was it. Prophecies are sort of one-time things, right? The hero hears a mysterious message and then realizes what it means just in time to save the day and that’s it.”
“So now you’re the hero?” Celia scoffed. “I’m the one who realized what the note really said and I’m the one that pulled us back onto the wire over the gorge.”
“We’re both the heroes, okay? We’re both stuck, right? The point is that this prophecy from the yak wasn’t, you know, disposable. I always thought it was dumb when a hero—sorry, heroes—got some supernatural message and could only use it once.”
He took the backpack off and rummaged around in it. The TV Guide was soaked and what was left of the cheese puffs was squished into a weird orange mush, but he pulled out the fancy remote control.
“It’s just like having a different remote for the TV and the DVD player and the stereo and you can never figure out which one goes with which thing. If you had one remote like this that worked for everything, that’d be better, right? It’s the same with the yak.”
“But you can never figure out what all the buttons do. How does that help with the yak?”
“If anyone could solve the riddle every time, what would be the point of sending a mysterious message? But I think I figured it out. The yak was talking about this moment too! He wanted me to remember that Love at 30,000 Feet marathon so we would know that the witches were showing us a fake show, but also because we sat still and quiet for fifty hours—”
“Fifty-two.”
“Fifty-two hours. If we can do that, we can meditate. We just have to pretend we’re watching television.”
“We’re at the bottom of a pit in a ruined shrine to a demon king, while a fake monk is looking for ancient tablets that our lost mother says don’t exist, while our father is in a soul-stealing death coma. How are we supposed to pretend we’re watching television? If I saw that on TV, I wouldn’t believe it!”
“Just imagine that statue there is the TV, like a really dull public TV documentary, and, you know, watch it.”
Celia sighed, but she decided to humor her brother. What choice did she have?
“I get to hold the remote, then,” she said.
“But it’s all wet. It’s probably broken.”
“Still. I get to hold it.”
“But you always get to hold it,” Oliver argued. “And there’s not even a real TV!ʺ
“If we’re going to do your silly meditation plan, then I need to hold it so it’s like normal,” she explained. “When we watched the Love at 30,000 Feet marathon, I had the remote.”
Oliver couldn’t argue with her logic, so he handed over the remote, and the twins returned to their cross-legged positions.
As the light flickered on the floor behind them, the twins stared at the statue of the ferocious protector-spirit. At first, their minds were racing over their troubles again, over boring public television documentaries they’d seen in the past, over their grim future if they lost their father, if they became Sir Edmund’s slaves, if they started middle sch
ool without cable TV.
“How can I tell if I’m meditating?” Celia whispered.
“I don’t know,” Oliver replied. “Sometimes, on TV, people hum.”
“They hum?”
“They hum when they’re meditating.”
“What do they hum?”
“I don’t know.”
“I could hum the Love at 30,000 Feet song again.”
“Anything but that!”
“Hey, you said yourself it was part of the yak’s message.”
“Okay, hum it.” Oliver sighed. His sister was right. If the yak said it, it might be a good idea to obey. So far, the yak with the green eyes had known more about the dangers they faced than their father had.
“Hmmm Ummmm m mmm mmmmy . . . mmm’s m mmm m mmmmyy,” Celia hummed. “Hm mmmm um . . . hmmm mmm mmm mmm . . . hum mmm mm hum-mmmm. Hum . . . mmmm.”
Oliver listened and looked at the statue. His mind wandered to the green-eyed yak. Celia was focused on the tune of the song, on turning the words into hums, on how the opening credits went.
But then, as they let the sound of the waterfall in the distance take over, their minds started to clear. They stared with blank faces at the way the shadow of the statue in front of them danced on the wall, the way the darkness around the statue grew darker the more you stared at the brightly lit parts. They sat in the dark with their mouths slightly open, their eyes somehow wide and half closed at the same time, and their limbs hanging limp by their sides, unaware of the world around them, just like they were in the late hours of Saturday morning cartoons.
Oliver didn’t notice that Celia had stopped humming. Celia didn’t even notice that she had stopped humming. They were approaching a state their parents called couch-potato-zombie brain, but the monks of the monastery might have called it Samadhi—the perfect state of meditation.
It didn’t help when a figure stepped from the shadows behind them and tripped over the flashlight in the middle of floor.
“Ouch!” a voice shouted. Oliver and Celia snapped out of their trance and spun to see a pile of maroon and yellow cloth, with a tiny shaved head poking out of it, facedown on the floor. “That hurt,” the voice said.
We Are Not Eaten by Yaks Page 13
