Danger in the Jungle Temple

by Danica Davidson

  Endermen were really tall, and they had long arms and legs that swung wildy as they moved. With their tall, thin bodies and purple eyes, they were unique-looking, and they were also vicious when they turned against you. Their height helped them in fights, and so did their ability to teleport.

  “Be as quiet as you can and follow me,” Dad said in a low voice.

  We tried, but it’s not easy being quiet in the jungle. Our footsteps rustled through the bushes. Parrots were chirping in the trees and Blue was responding to them. Alex whispered harshly to Yancy, “Shush that bird!”

  Blue, who still wouldn’t say “Argh, matey!” or “Alex is a party pooper,” or anything else Yancy was trying to get him to say, did not want to stop chirping. Yancy tried bribing him with cookies, but Blue would eat and then chirp again, and stopping for Yancy to get cookies out of his backpack was slowing us down.

  “The Enderman won’t care about a bird,” Dad said. “Just keep moving.”

  “There’s another one!” Maison said, pointing.

  This Enderman was on the other side of us, just far enough away that we noticed it before it could notice us. It was digging through the bushes, as if looking for something. Little motes of purple light flashed up from its body, and they were bright in the incoming darkness.

  I looked up at the sky. It was dark gray now, almost night. I thought I might have heard zombies in the distance. This was about the time they’d start spawning.

  I made myself think about my ancestor, Steve Alexander, so I wouldn’t get scared. Back in Steve Alexander’s day, people in the Overworld didn’t even leave their homes at night because there were so many monsters outside. These days we still had to be really careful, but Steve Alexander had made it so we could at least go out at night. He’d also found the Nether and the End and even Earth . . . the first person in the Overworld to ever do so. A trek through the jungle temple at night wouldn’t be anything he couldn’t handle, I was sure of it.

  “There!” Maison said, pointing to a third Enderman. Thank goodness it hadn’t seen us yet, either. We had to be getting close—and these Endermen were clearly looking for the crystal shard too.

  I heard a growl from deep within the jungle, and it was definitely zombies. The light was fading so fast that it was getting hard to see, and Dad reached into his toolkit and pulled out a torch made of sticks and coal. Something ahead of us was even darker, so that it blotted out the sky and landscape. Was it a building?

  We pushed aside more vines and all stopped to stare in horror and wonder.

  We had uncovered the jungle temple.

  CHAPTER 4

  THAT TEMPLE IS DEFINITELY HAUNTED,” YANCY finally said. Blue let out a low whistle.

  I looked at Dad, expecting him to tell Yancy there’s no such thing as haunted buildings. But even Dad’s eyes were wide, and he murmured, “I’ve never seen a temple like this before. This has to be ten times the size of any other jungle temple.”

  We all felt small next to the temple, lost in its shadow. It was made with mossy blocks, and even though it was three stories tall like other temples, it was so massive it looked like a sleeping monster. Like it would swallow us up and never let us out. I looked to the left and to the right, and the jungle temple kept going as far as I could see in both directions. Someone had spent a lot of time building this.

  It also appeared abandoned, and so dark and lonely that it was spooky. And for some reason it felt like something terrible had happened there. As if that terrible feeling had sunk into the walls like smoke.

  “Follow me,” Dad said. “These old temples tend to be full of trapdoors and booby traps. If you’re not paying attention, you could trigger arrows that will fly straight for your face.”

  With only Dad’s torch for light, we slowly crept up the old steps. I half expected the blocks to crumble under our feet, but they held. There was no door in the jungle temple, so the entrance simply yawned open, daring us to enter.

  Once inside, we looked around cautiously. There was a long, dark hallway to the left and a long, dark hallway to the right. In front of us were steps that led down into more darkness. The mossy blocks that made up the temple made the air feel swampy and wet.

  “Here,” Dad said. He put his torch against the wall so it brightened the area around us, and pulled another torch out of his toolkit. Alex and I also pulled torches out of our toolkits.

  Then Dad pointed down the steps. “This should lead us to the hidden room.”

  It felt like every step might trigger some kind of weapon. Dad tested each block with his foot before he let us follow him. The steps down to the basement went on and on until, finally, we reached a small room at the bottom. I was expecting two more long hallways, but this tiny room was obviously walled off from the rest of the temple basement. I wondered what was on the other side of those walls.

  Dad led us to a set of three levers on the wall next to the stairs. “If you move the levers in the correct pattern, it will open a trapdoor leading to a hidden room on the floor above.”

  “Can’t you just smash through the wall to the room behind it?” Alex asked eagerly. She looked ready to do some smashing.

  “Technically, yes,” Dad said.

  “Stevie, can I borrow your swor—” Alex began. I knew she wanted my diamond sword because it was better than her arrows at breaking through walls.

  “No,” Dad said sharply. “That villager was exaggerating about a ghost, but he’s right that this isn’t like a normal jungle temple. Let’s do everything the way we’re supposed to, and we’ll be less likely to trip any traps. Now . . .”

  He studied the three levers. “In the past, every time I’ve seen levers on this side of a temple stairway they’ve all been set to the same pattern: right, left, left, right.” As we watched, Dad moved the levers in that pattern. Nothing happened that I could see.

  “Now we find the trapdoor,” he said.

  We slowly made our way back up the stairs. The trapdoor, Dad said, would be right next to the top of the stairs. However, when we got there, the floor looked the same as ever.

  “Strange,” Dad said, stroking his beard. “I want you kids to go back downstairs and try different patterns on the lever. I’ll stay here and call to you if anything opens.”

  “Will you be okay on your own here?” Destiny asked.

  “Yes, but you five stick together, no matter what,” Dad said.

  “Uncle Steve can handle anything,” Alex told Destiny, who still looked a little worried. Then Alex said to Dad, “If the patterns don’t work, can we smash—”

  “Go,” Dad said.

  We went. Back down into the darkness on our own.

  Alex tried different patterns on the levers, getting more and more impatient. After each pattern, we called up to Dad to ask if it worked. And after each pattern, he said no. I tried to do the math in my head about how many possible patterns we could try, and that made my brain hurt.

  “This is stupid,” Alex muttered after our seventeenth try. “Maybe the temple is so old that these levers are broken. What if they never work?”

  That’s when we heard Dad’s bellow.

  CHAPTER 5

  DAD!” I CRIED. WITHOUT EVEN THINKING ABOUT traps, I turned and ran up the steps as fast as I could. Dad wouldn’t make a sound like that unless something was really bad! The Endermen might have snuck up on him!

  Everyone else was running, too, right at my heels. But when we reached the top of the stairs, all we saw was . . . nothing .

  The two hallways still stretched into the darkness. And the torch we had left on the wall was still there, crackling with fire. But Dad was gone.

  “Maybe the trapdoor opened and he fell in,” Alex said. “He must be trapped in that room!”

  I didn’t think Dad would be dumb enough to fall through a trapdoor he’d been expecting, but I didn’t know what else it could be.

  “Try that pattern again!” I told Alex. “We’ll stay here and see!” Dad had said we shouldn
’t separate, but this was an emergency. If he had fallen through the floor and the trapdoor had closed back up by the time we got up here, it would probably open and close quickly the next time we did the pattern too—and we had to see what happened.

  Alex dashed downstairs. A few moments later, I heard her shout, “Okay, I did it!”

  Maison, Destiny, Yancy, Blue, and I stared at the floor, then at one another. No trapdoor had opened up.

  “Are you sure it’s the right pattern?” I asked. We’d done so many patterns they were starting to blur together in my head.

  “Yes!” Alex called. “Let me try again. Okay, how about now?”

  “No!” I called back, my heart pounding. What if the trapdoor would only open once? What if we couldn’t get to Dad down there?

  “Forget this, then!” Alex shouted. “I’m smashing through these levers!”

  Despite what Dad had said, I was ready to try Alex’s way. Anything to find him!

  As we ran back downstairs, I could hear the smashing sounds as Alex took out the wall. Even arrows could break through walls if we needed them to.

  “I got through!” Alex called. “But he’s not here! There’s just a chest in this room and—”

  And then Alex let out a horrified scream.

  CHAPTER 6

  “A LEX!” I CRIED AS MY FEET HIT THE FLOOR AT the bottom of the stairs. The wall with the levers was destroyed, revealing a small room beyond it with a chest.

  Dad wasn’t there.

  Alex wasn’t there.

  They had both disappeared without a trace.

  “Wh-what happened?” I cried.

  Maison put her hands on what was left of the wall and looked into the room. “Do you think . . . she fell through a trapdoor in there too?”

  “It’s haunted,” Yancy said bluntly.

  “No, it can’t be haunted,” Destiny said. “Steve must have fallen into this room, then fell through another trapdoor. Then Alex got in and fell through the same trapdoor. That has to be it.”

  “Then how come we heard Alex fall through the second trapdoor, but we only heard Steve make a noise once?” Yancy asked. “Shouldn’t we have heard him fall through two trapdoors?”

  “Well, the wall was busted when Alex fell,” Destiny said. “So we could hear her better.”

  “That must be it,” Maison said. “They’re still in the temple and we’ve just gotten separated. But they’re okay. They have to be.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I’d never heard Alex scream before. Alex loved danger and risking her neck. She’d probably already fallen through her share of trapdoors while she was out exploring. It would take more than a haunted jungle to make her scream like that.

  We’d done exactly what Dad had told us not to do: we had separated. And now Alex was gone. We’d lost our two best fighters in just a few minutes.

  “It’s okay, Stevie,” Maison said, turning back to me and putting her hand on my shoulder. “They both still have their weapons. I’m sure they’re fine.”

  I wanted to believe that, but I just couldn’t. I remembered what the villager had said: “If you enter that jungle temple, you’ll never come out.”

  “Dad!” I called as loudly as I could. “Alex! Where are you?”

  The answer was silence. My heart was pounding like a piston.

  “Let’s get the chest,” Maison said. “If it has the shard . . .”

  She slowly crawled over the ledge and into the room, tapping each block with her foot until she got to the chest. She popped open the chest and . ..

  All it held was paper.

  Maison dug to the bottom, just in case the shard was hidden underneath. Nothing. I’d never heard of a treasure chest that kept paper in it, and I tried to see what the writing was. Most of the paper was so old it was crumbling, and the darkness in the temple didn’t help. Then Maison lifted one of the papers toward our torchlight and I saw something that caught all of our attention.

  It was a fancy S and A curled together: the symbol of Steve Alexander.

  CHAPTER 7

  STEVE ALEXANDER HAD ALWAYS LEFT THAT SYMBOL near clues about the Ender Dragon or the crystal shards!

  “What does it say?” I cried.

  Maison picked up the chest and returned to us on the other side of the ledge. We all bent over it, holding the torch just close enough to see the papers without lighting them on fire.

  Yancy picked up a sheet of paper and it fell apart in his hands. “Hmm, this isn’t working,” he said.

  “Yeah, but maybe these papers have a clue to where the crystal shard is,” Maison said. “Since it’s not in the chest.”

  “You also touched most of the floor in there,” Yancy said. “And it didn’t trigger any trapdoors.”

  “I didn’t touch all of the floor,” Maison pointed out, still fishing through the papers and trying to find something we could read.

  Yancy looked at Maison skeptically for a second, then reached into his backpack and pulled out a few items. He threw the items into the room, hitting all of the remaining blocks on the floor. Nothing happened. If weight was supposed to trigger them to open up, then being hit by objects should trigger them, too, I thought.

  Slowly and without a word, Yancy crawled over the ledge and into the little room. He picked up the items he’d thrown, studying the ground around him. I knew he was investigating.

  “Be careful,” Destiny scolded lightly. “You don’t want to trigger the trapdoor.”

  “There is no trapdoor,” Yancy said. Just to prove his point, he started jumping on all the floor spaces, as though daring them to open up. None of them did. The bouncing annoyed Blue, though, and the little parrot flew off Yancy’s shoulder and hovered in the air.

  “Wait, I can read this!” Maison said excitedly, waving one of the papers. “It says, ‘We cord . . . cord . . . ’ I don’t know how to pronounce this word.”

  Yancy stepped back over and read the paper. “‘We cordially invite you to a feast in the jungle temple, where we celebrate the victories of Steve Alexander and J—’”

  “J?” I said.

  “Yeah, it just cuts off there,” Yancy said. “Who’s J? It looks like the start of a name.”

  Everyone was looking at me because I was the only one who had been in the Overworld their whole life. The truth was, though, I had no idea who J was! I only knew of Steve Alexander fighting battles on his own.

  “Maybe his wife?” I guessed. “Or his son? No, wait, I think he named his son Steve . . .”

  “Was there someone Steve Alexander teamed up with in his adventures?” Yancy asked. “Jeremy, Jordan, Jasmine? If I had Wi-Fi, I could Google a list of J names.”

  “There was Maya, but that doesn’t start with a J,” I said. Maya was the Earth woman Steve Alexander had found. She’d helped him hide all of the crystal shards.

  “What does ‘cordial’ mean?” I asked. I’d heard the word before. Was it another clue?

  “It just sounds like a typical invitation,” Yancy said. “It means people are being invited in a kind way. But isn’t that all invitations to parties? The real question is, who’s J?”

  Everyone was looking at me as if they expected me to know what to do next. With Dad and Alex gone, I was the only one left who had any real knowledge of the Overworld.

  But I’ve never been in a jungle temple! I wanted to tell them. I thought back on everything Dad had taught me about jungle temples from his trips to them in the past, but this temple already seemed so different from the temples he’d told me about—it was bigger, and the levers worked different. Who knew what else would be odd in this place?

  I looked at the S and A symbols and thought about Steve Alexander. During our last fight against the Endermen, I had thought I was hearing Steve Alexander’s voice, giving me confidence. At the same time I had kept hearing the Ender Dragon’s voice, and she had been mocking me and trying to bring me over to her side. She was still in the End, but she had ways of getting into my head.

  I kne
w that, with as scary as this temple was, and with us all being alone now, it would be easy to give in to fear. I had to be strong like Steve Alexander. I had to.

  “I think we need to search the whole temple,” I said. “Even if it is haunted. For my dad and Alex, the crystal shard, and whatever else we can learn here.”

  I just hoped I was doing the right thing.

  CHAPTER 8

  WE WENT UP THE STAIRS. I TOOK ANOTHER look at where Dad should have been standing, just in case he had somehow reappeared. But the place where he had been standing was as empty as ever.

  “The torch moved,” Yancy said suddenly.

  We all looked at where the torch hung on the wall. Dad had put it to the right of the entrance. Now it was on the left.

  “Stevie’s dad must have moved it,” Destiny said.

  “But . . . why?” Yancy said. “Why fuss with the torch when more important things are going on? I’m telling you, even if this place isn’t haunted, one thing is obvious: we’re not alone here.”

  Blue let out a low, spooky whistle. Everyone looked down the dark hallway, as if we expected to see someone—or something—creeping out of the blackness.

  “Come on, let’s look around so we can get out of here!” Destiny said, and started taking purposeful steps down one of the hallways.

  “Destiny, no!” Maison cried, lunging forward. But she was too late—Destiny stepped on one of the blocks, and arrows shot out of the wall, heading straight toward her. Maison managed to grab her in time, knocking both of them to the floor. The arrows hit the other wall, quivering as they stuck in the blocks.

  “Are you all right?” I said, hurrying over to them.

  Destiny looked embarrassed and startled at the same time. Maison just looked relieved. Fortunately, neither of them were hurt.

  “Slight change to Stevie’s plan to look for clues,” Yancy said. “Let’s explore this place until we find Steve, Alex, and the crystal shard. Then let’s get out of here. Whatever clues we find on the way, great. But I’m not staying here any longer than I have to.”