“Who are you?” Celia snapped.
The face looked up quickly. It was a boy, a young monk about the same age as Oliver and Celia.
“I live here,” the boy answered. “I was supposed to watch over the monastery . . . but it caught on fire, so I hid. I hoped someone would come back eventually to get me. Are you here to get me?”
“We don’t even know who you are,” said Celia.
“I just told you,” the boy said as he stood up and brushed the dust and ash off of his bright robes. “I live here. I was supposed to be on guard, but . . . you know . . . I got distracted and the place caught on fire.”
“Another monk.” Celia looked nervously at her brother and raised her eyebrows.
“I’m Oliver,” Oliver told the boy, extending his hand. The boy shook it. Hesitantly, Celia introduced herself too.
“Have you lived here a long time?” Oliver asked.
“Almost as long as I can remember,” the boy answered. “I grew up here.”
“So you would know if there were any visitors?” Oliver was excited now, and no longer annoyed that their meditation was interrupted. “Did you ever a see a woman here? One who maybe looked like us a little bit? She, ummm, well . . . she made that film projector upstairs.”
“Dr. Navel!” The boy smiled. “Yes! We made that projector together. I love to build things. I helped her find some pieces for it because it’s not so easy to get parts down here. She taught me English too, so I really liked her. She left the projector here for me and I was happy it didn’t burn up too, though I don’t have any movies for it. You are her children! Now I recognize you from the film she showed! Oliver and Celia, of course, of course. Hi! Welcome! How are you? How was the journey here? Not too hard I hope.”
He spoke really fast, like he hadn’t talked to anyone in a long time.
The twins looked at each other, amazed.
“Where . . . ummm . . . Where did our mother go?” Celia asked. She was nervous. Of all the clues they’d chased all over the world with their father, this was the first real one they’d ever found.
“She went to seek the source of the greatest knowledge in the world,” the boy said. “Surely you knew that.”
“We . . . well,” Oliver said, while Celia just looked at her feet. Neither one wanted to admit that they’d never believed their mother was really still looking for the Lost Library of Alexandria. They thought she’d just run away from them.
“She won’t find it, though,” the boy said.
“She won’t?” Oliver said. “How do you know?”
The boy just shrugged. “Can’t say.”
“Because it’s not real?” Celia asked.
“Who can say what is real and what is not? We had ice cream here until the freezer broke. Then it melted into soup. Was it still ice cream? I ate it to find out. Then it became part of me. When was it ice cream? When was it soup? When was it me? All reality is an illusion.”
“You sound like Lama Norbu,” Oliver said. “And he turned out to be a total fake. His real name is Frank. He wasn’t a lama at all. Or a llama. He pushed us down here.”
“Oh,” the boy said sadly. “So you didn’t come here looking for me?”
“Well . . . no . . . ,” Oliver said. “Not exactly.”
The boy sighed.
“But we can take you with us, if we find a way out of here,” Celia promised.
“No,” the young monk said. “I think I should stay and watch over this place a while longer. I think I may have fixed the ice cream machine. I just need a few more weeks working on it. With ice cream, this place was pretty nice. But, if you wish to follow your mother’s path to Shangri-La, I can show you the way.”
“So Shangri-La is real?” Oliver wondered.
“Names are not important. Call it whatever you like. Find it wherever you like.” He smirked at the twins. “But to continue your journey, this is the path to take.”
Celia made a little twirling gesture with her finger next to her forehead and raised her eyebrows at her brother. He understood. That was the universal sign for “this-kid-is-a-total-nut.”
The young monk walked up to the ferocious statue of the demon king and pressed on the statue’s third eye. With a creaking sound, a doorway opened behind the statue, revealing a long dark tunnel.
“The third eye is always more useful than the other two,” the boy said, and smiled.
“More tunnels,” Oliver groaned.
“You should go quickly,” the boy said. “The fake lama has a head start, and your entire family remains in grave danger.”
“But how did you—”
“There is no time now.” The boy handed Oliver the flashlight and started to push the twins into the tunnel. “Good luck. And don’t forget your bag.” He gave the backpack, which now held only a wet TV Guide and some soggy cheese puffs, to Celia.
“What’s your name?” Oliver called back as the boy shoved Celia in behind Oliver and began to close the door.
“Pehar Gylapo,” he answered, and he sealed the children into the dark.
“Pehar Ghee-what?” Oliver called through the door.
“I’m sure we’ll meet again,” the boy shouted, his voice muffled by the heavy stone. Celia pushed on it, but it didn’t move. She listened and couldn’t hear a thing through it.
“He’s locked us in,” she said.
Now there was only one way for the twins to go and neither of them knew where it led.
26
WE’VE HAD QUITE ENOUGH OF TUNNELS AND BAD GUYS
“SERIOUSLY?” OLIVER SAID as he began to follow the tunnel, which sloped upward and was only wide enough to go single file and only tall enough for them to sort of stand. Even in the dim light of the flashlight, Oliver could see cobwebs and the bones of strange animals strewn about.
“Why is it always tunnels? Couldn’t, just one time, somebody say, ‘Hey, Oliver and Celia, this way, take this well-lit and nicely carpeted hallway to the comfortable waiting room where you can wait patiently for your problems to be solved while watching TV? Huh? Noooo . . . it’s always dark tunnel this and dark tunnel that. Or climb over this thing and fall down that thing.”
Celia just let her brother complain while he crept along. He was, as usual, in front and groping his way forward as the slope got steeper and steeper. Complaining was his way of staying calm. Her way to stay calm was to stay angry. And right now, she was very angry.
She was angry at her mother for leaving them, for never even sending a message and then for sending a secret weird message that they might not even have been able to decode. She was angry at their father for dragging them along and then falling into a trap, for trusting Lama Norbu and Choden Thordup and not recognizing them as fakes. She was angry at Sir Edmund and at Lama Norbu, who was really Frank Pfeffer, and at the Poison Witches, for obvious reasons. She wanted nothing more than to get out of this tunnel, get her father back, and show them all that you don’t mess with the Navel Twins. When this was over she would demand cable, but not just cable. She wanted all of the premium channels with movies and the shows that let people use curse words.
“There’s nothing about adventuring that says it has to be filled with darkness and cobwebs.” Oliver was still complaining to himself. “Agent Zero travels first-class on airplanes and always stays clean when he’s having an adventure. There’s never any bat poop. Why do we have to deal with bat poop? That’s the grossest poop there is. Except maybe lizard poop. I hope we don’t have to deal with lizard poop.”
“Oliver?” Celia interrupted.
“What?”
“Don’t you think we should focus on, you know, trying to figure out what’s going on? Like, who was that Pehar Guhwhatever kid? And where are we going? And what happens when we get there?”
“Right,” Oliver said.
“So . . . ummm . . . any ideas?”
“About what?”
“Any of it? The action-adventure stuff is your thing.”
“You lik
e Agent Zero too. I’ve seen you watch it.”
“I like Corey Brandt, who plays Agent Zero. That’s different. And I liked him better in Sunset High.”
“Can we not talk about vampires while we’re crawling in a dark tunnel, please?”
“Okay. So, if this were Agent Zero, what happens now?”
“Well, this is the impossible-escape-from-disaster part right before the big showdown with the bad guy.”
“All right, but which bad guy? We’ve got the witches and Sir Edmund and Frank Pfeffer and the guys from the airplane and even that yeti. Who do we showdown with?”
Oliver stopped and Celia bumped into him from behind again.
“Ouch, why do you always do that?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t stop like that anymore.”
“No, I mean, I don’t know who we showdown with. There aren’t usually this many bad guys.”
“Well, there aren’t usually ancient tablets and coded notes that are really film strips with Mom’s handwriting on them and fake monks with fake guns and yaks giving you messages in dreams. So maybe we shouldn’t go by what usually happens.”
“Okay, then,” Oliver snapped back at her. “So what doesn’t usually happen?”
“Well, we don’t usually end up wandering around in dark tunnels. We don’t usually discover ancient artifacts, and we don’t usually save the day. So, I think we should keep walking and do all three of those things.”
Oliver couldn’t argue. He turned and kept walking. They climbed up through the tunnel for hours. Sometimes it was flat and straight; other times it was almost like climbing a ladder.
But how were they supposed to save the day? Oliver wondered. Why did their mom go through all that effort to hide a clue in a projector that only Oliver and Celia would recognize? And what were they supposed to find if there were no tablets? How would they save their father from the witches? Why wasn’t he the one out here trying to rescue them?
Their father probably wouldn’t have even figured that projector out. He would have been too busy trying to read the images on the walls. Anytime there was something to read, he always picked that over watching. He didn’t think you could learn anything by watching stuff. Their mother had gone off to look for the Lost Library, so they guessed she probably felt the same way. But what if they were wrong about her? What if she wanted her kids to find her? What if she had been guiding them all along?
Celia was thinking about the picture too. She was thinking about the key on her mother’s necklace, the same as on the tunnel walls. It was also on the rings that the air marshal and the man in the shiny suit on the airplane were wearing. It was the same symbol that had been in the fake version of Love at 30,000 Feet. What was their mom trying to tell them? Why would she have the same symbol as the henchmen on the plane?
As time passed the temperature started to drop. The air got colder and colder and they started to see their breath hanging in front of them. The sweat on their skin started to freeze. They began to shiver.
“I think . . . we’re really . . . high up,” Oliver panted. “I think . . . we must . . . be near . . . the top . . . of a mountain. . . . On the inside.”
“Don’t . . . talk,” Celia said. “Too . . . tired. Can’t . . . take . . . another . . . step.”
“Good,” Oliver said. “Because we’re out of steps.”
Celia looked up and saw that they had reached the end of the tunnel. There was a door in front of them with a big metal handle. The door was painted with an image of the same crazy threeeyed demon whose statue they’d watched like a television down in the pit. Right in the center of its snarling demon face was that symbol again, their mother’s jeweled key and the Greek words they recognized by now: Mega biblion, mega kakon. Big books, big evil.
Oliver swallowed hard.
“Ready?” he asked his sister as he reached up and put his hand on the door.
“Not really,” she said.
“Shangri-La could be on the other side of this door,” said Oliver.
“So could the witches,” answered Celia.
“Mom could be on the other side of this door.”
“So could Sir Edmund.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Or Frank Pfeffer.”
“Right, but—”
“Or the yeti.”
“Okay, I get it!” Oliver said. “But we’ve still got to open it!”
Celia exhaled slowly and nodded to Oliver. He pushed the door open.
At first there was a blinding white light and a blast of cold air. Snow swirled into the tunnel and blocked their view. When the blinding whiteness cleared, the twins found themselves staring directly at the shining black horns and glowing green eyes of an enormous yak.
27
WE’VE GOT TO TRUST THE YAK
“KHRUUUMPF,” the yak grunted.
“It’s the talking yak from my dream!” Oliver shouted once he overcame his surprise.
“What’s he saying?” Celia asked.
“ ‘Khruuumpf,’ ” Oliver said.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is ‘khruuumpf’ the sound a yak makes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, ‘khruuumpf’ isn’t very helpful.”
“I think he might only talk in dreams.”
“Well, we don’t have time for you to go sleep.”
“I think we’re supposed to ride him.”
“Did he say that?”
“No.” Oliver pointed. “But he’s wearing a saddle.”
“I can’t remember,” Celia said. “Do yaks eat people?”
“I hope not,” Oliver answered.
“Khruuumpf,” said the yak.
On the yak’s back was a large saddle made of thick brightly colored carpet and leather straps. With the cold dry air blasting into the tunnel and the snow swirling around, the blanket saddle looked very inviting, even though it smelled absolutely terrible. One thing that the twins quickly learned about yaks is that they do not smell good, even the mystical green-eyed ones.
“Yaaaaarrr,” the yak said, which could have been a happy noise or could have been gas.
“We have to trust the yak.” Oliver held his nose and climbed on, then hoisted his sister up.
The yak turned and began walking away from the small entrance to the tunnel and up the rocky slopes of the mountain. Celia grabbed one of the blankets and wrapped it around Oliver. Then she wrapped another around herself. Sitting on the yak was surprisingly comfortable and the yak moved along the icy and rocky ground much more easily than the twins could have on foot.
“I hope he knows where he’s going,” Celia said.
“He hasn’t been wrong so far,” Oliver answered as he patted the yak’s thick brown fur.
“Hey Oliver,” Celia said, her voice sounding relaxed for the first time in two days. “Look at that.”
Oliver turned and saw a distant mountain with a line of ants marching around it. When he looked closer, he saw that they weren’t ants, but people who looked tiny next to the giant mountain, hundreds of people walking single file. Some of them held flags and banners; some of them held tall poles with spinning prayer wheels at the top. Some of them held nothing but packs on their backs, and every few steps, they would kneel on the ground and then bend down and touch their foreheads to the cold earth. A few people even stretched out like they were lying down for a nap. Then they stood up again, took a few more steps and lay down again. When the wind changed directions they could hear the crowd murmuring and chanting, though they couldn’t make out any words.
Oliver looked in the other direction and saw a vast icy plain stretching into jagged mountain peaks under a bright blue sky. As they continued up, they could see behind them and down toward the gorge, a shock of tropical green below the brown and white of the high plains. Both of the twins felt light-headed from the altitude, but the yak climbed onward, upward, for hours and
hours.
“Khruuumpf.”
“Did the yak say something?” Celia asked.
“No,” Oliver said sadly. “That was my stomach. I’m starving.”
Celia just grunted. She was hungry too. They hadn’t eaten since breakfast with Lama Norbu, back when he was Lama Norbu. She hoped that wherever they were going, they had some not-poisoned food. Cheeseburgers would be nice, chicken soup would be fine. Maybe some hot chocolate. She hoped it wouldn’t be something slimy.
The sun was setting and the sky turned a glistening shade of orange and yellow and red over the snowcapped mountains. The ice shimmered in the last light of the day, and the cold seemed to thicken around the twins.
“It’s getting really c-c-c-cold,” Oliver said through chattering teeth.
“I hope we g-ge-get where we’re going s—ss—sss—soon,” Celia agreed.
Within seconds it was dark, a terrifying, howling-wind, ice-cold dark. The yak didn’t seem to mind and just kept climbing, stepping up onto rocks and scurrying up the steep slope at impossible angles. The children wrapped their blankets tighter around themselves and held on tighter to each other.
There is a kind of tiredness that only an unlucky few ever know. It’s the tiredness of ultralong-distance drivers and of deep-undercover-special-forces soldiers, and of students who forgot to study for their history test until the night before. Celia and Oliver felt that kind of tiredness. Even though they were cold, and frightened, and the yak smelled worse than a turkey sandwich left all year at the bottom of a locker, they both fell into a deep sleep.
Oliver dreamed of his mother giving them a slide show of the years she had been missing, using the strange skeleton projector. Celia dreamed that her father was riding a yak into the Himalayan Mountains toward Shangri-La to save her from the Poison Witches while she slept peacefully in a hut with satellite TV.
With a shock, the children awoke to the sound of a gong, a really big gong. When they uncovered their faces, they saw that they were stopped inside the courtyard of a monastery, surrounded by young monks who were all dressed just like the little boy they met in the cave. There were children of different ages and sizes, but all of them had shaved heads and wore maroon and yellow robes. Some were playing around, chasing each other or making faces, but most were standing in a circle around the yak, clapping. The sun was high and bright overhead. The yak was chewing comfortably on some grass that a group of young monks were feeding it.
We Are Not Eaten by Yaks Page 14
