by S. S. Taylor
“Waterfall!” Pucci squawked, alighting on my shoulder. We stood there for a moment looking up at the veil of black water.
“This is where it shows the canyon on the map.” I was winded and I struggled to form the words. “If it’s there, it’s at the back of the waterfall. It’s the only place I couldn’t see.”
“There’s something scary about that waterfall,” Sukey said.
“You’re sure it’s not over the top or something?” Zander asked. But we could all see that there was no secret canyon next to or on top of the huge waterfall.
“Hey,” M.K. said, “do you remember how Dad used to say that if you couldn’t find a way over or around, you had to go through?”
“That was how he discovered the Baltese Pass,” I said. “The way through was disguised by some kind of creeping moss.”
“Baltese creeping reindeer moss,” Zander said. “It covered the entrance to the pass, but when he hacked it away with a machete…”
We all looked at each other.
“Good thing the vests are waterproof,” Zander said. “You all stay right here.” He dipped a foot in, shivered when he felt how cold it was, and then jumped in. Pucci followed. We watched them take off through the pool and disappear behind the veil of black water.
“Is he afraid of anything?” Sukey asked, admiration in her voice.
I was irritated. I’d figured out the secret to the map, but if Zander found the hidden canyon, he would get all the credit, since he’d been brave enough to leap into a waterfall.
“Where is he?” I searched the water for Zander’s blond head. “He should be more careful. If he gets into trouble, we’ll have to go save him.”
We waited a few minutes before Sukey called his name, trying not to be too loud. When there was no answer, M.K. and I started in, too.
There was something eerie about the silence that followed, and finally, after another five minutes, I said, “We’ve got to go after him. They’ll be here in a minute.”
We waded in, calling Zander’s name. The vests were waterproof and protected everything inside from the water, but our clothes were soaked within seconds and they became as heavy as if we were trying to swim in suits of armor.
The current was strong; we had to fight to stay on our feet, and as I tried to walk toward the back of the pool, behind the violent splash of water from the falls, I could feel the water swirling around me, trying to pull me under. If Zander had gone below the surface in order to see if there was an underwater entrance to the canyon, he could easily have been pulled into the center of the pool. I ducked my head under, holding my glasses with one hand and opening my eyes against the blackness of the water. I couldn’t see a thing.
“Where is he?” I called to Sukey and M.K. “I can’t see anything under there.” I was starting to panic now, imagining Zander drowned. Pucci was circling over the water. Suddenly he disappeared, too, a dark silhouette above us one minute and gone the next.
“Do you think he’s in trouble?” M.K. called.
“I don’t know.” I kept scanning the water. “I can’t find him. He isn’t here.”
“He’s a good swimmer,” M.K. said hopefully. “He once swam two miles from a capsized canoe.”
I dipped my head under again. It was so cold that my eyes ached and so dark that I couldn’t see anything.
And then we heard a faint voice—Zander’s—calling over the clamor of the waterfall.
“That’s him!” I paddled frantically, trying to follow the direction of the voice, but the waterfall swallowed any other sound and we still couldn’t see him.
“Zander,” we called. “Where are you?”
“Over here!” His voice was coming from behind the waterfall.
We waded through the water, feeling the spray of the waterfall on our faces. We waded around behind the veil of water, where the rock rose steeply out of the pool, covered with a pale green moss.
“Up here,” called Zander’s voice, and we had to tilt our heads all the way back to see him, up above us, perched in a small cave in the rock behind the waterfall. Pucci was sitting on his shoulder, and when he saw us, he squawked loudly.
“I found it!” Zander yelled down to us as we stared up at him in disbelief. “There’s a tunnel back here. Just where it shows on the map. It must lead into the secret canyon!”
Thirty
“It took me a minute to see it,” Zander said once we’d all scrambled up into the damp little cave. “At first I thought the back wall was solid. See? It’s so dark that you can’t see what’s that corner.” We looked where he was gesturing and saw that he was right. One corner of the cave was nothing but blackness, far enough back that not even the tiny bit of sunlight filtering through the waterfall reached its depths. Pucci, who seemed nervous, hopped along the floor of the cave, looking for light.
“But when I crawled back there, I couldn’t find the wall, so I started feeling around and… look.” All of a sudden, Zander was gone.
I pushed the button on my vest that turned on the solar light. M.K. did the same. The lights illuminated a huge tunnel ahead of us, stretching away deep into the rock and rising high above our heads.
Zander was standing there, grinning at us, his arms spread out to show us the tunnel.
“Could this be it, Kit?” Sukey asked. “I thought it was going to be a canyon.”
“I did, too,” I said. I started to take the map out to look at it, but before I could, we heard, through the rushing of the water, a cacophony of clanking and shouting and we all ducked back into the little cave, peeking out into the blinding sunshine to see a phalanx of IronSteeds approaching the falls. The big metal horses stopped and Leo Nackley, after a bit of waving and gesturing, used a pair of binoculars to survey the falls. We quickly ducked back into the darkness.
“They’re here. What are we going to do?” Sukey asked. For the first time since I’d met her, she actually seemed scared and I realized that all of Lazlo’s talk about BNDL must have gotten to her.
I wanted to make her feel better, so I said, “Remember that they didn’t see the map that we saw. As far as they know, there’s absolutely nothing special about the waterfall. They’re just looking for us.”
“You’re right. So what do we do?” She sounded relieved.
“We get as far away from them as we can and we find the secret canyon,” Zander said. “Come on.”
Zander, M.K., and I switched our lights on again, and the four of us, Pucci riding on Zander’s shoulder, stepped into the tunnel. It was completely dark—the lights illuminated only small splashes of rock in front of our feet—and we walked for ten minutes or so before Sukey said, “I don’t see any canyon. This just looks like some kind of cavern.”
I got the map out of the inside pocket of my vest and looked at it again. “I assumed it was a canyon,” I said, embarrassed, “and Raleigh said Dad was looking for one. . . But I guess it could be an underground tunnel, or a series of underground caverns. There are a lot of those in this area. Geologically, it’s a fascinating—”
“You guess?” Sukey cut me off. “I thought you were good at reading maps.”
“He is good at reading maps,” M.K. said.
“Well, see these contour lines here?” I pointed my light at the map and showed her the thin lines marking the depth of the tunnel. “The map doesn’t show whether or not there’s a ceiling. In a sense, this is a canyon, an underground one that formed in the center of the rock.”
Sukey looked skeptical. “The legend doesn’t say anything about the treasure being in a tunnel, does it?” she asked.
“Come on,” Zander said. “It’s on Dad’s map. Whatever it is, let’s see where it goes.”
We started walking, Sukey in the middle since she didn’t have a light, Pucci hopping along anxiously, inspecting the walls.
“Did someone make this?” M.K. asked from somewhere behind me. Her voice echoed strangely in the tunnel, bouncing off the walls and along the passageway.
“I don’t th
ink so. I’d have to feel the walls, but they look smooth. It must have been formed naturally, probably by acidic water that dissolved the limestone or by an underground river.”
I stopped and touched the stone wall, snatching my hand back when I felt something wet move under my fingers.
Sukey must have felt it, too, because she gasped. “There’s something there,” she said. “Something on the wall. I just felt it move.” Standing still now, we became aware of strange noises coming from the walls of the tunnel, faint sucking, whispering sounds that echoed back and forth across the passage.
Zander swung around and shone his light on the curved wall. At first it just looked like some kind of luminescent stone, the surface a glowing green color. But when I looked closer, I saw that the entire surface of the stone was moving. “They’re slugs,” he whispered. “But…” We all crowded around to look, and sure enough, I could see that the wall was covered with giant green slugs moving slowly across the rock and making the weird sounds we’d heard. Zander took a knife out of his pack and knocked one off the wall and onto the ground. It was the size of a small banana, its moist green skin almost translucent. When Zander pointed his vest light at the slug, it twitched, shrinking as though the light bothered it.
“Yuck,” Sukey said.
But Zander wasn’t disgusted at all. “This is incredible! I think we’ve discovered a new species. I’ve heard of giant slugs in the Amazon and Fazia and Australia, but I didn’t know they could be found in the American Southwest. I think they must be photosensitive. They must live all their life cycle in this cavern. This is amazing! I need to take a specimen.” He rooted through his vest and found a small bag, but there was no way the giant slug was going to fit in it. He stared at it for a moment without saying anything, then put the bag away.
“What do they eat?” I asked.
“That’s an excellent question.” He knocked another off onto the floor and inspected the wall where it had been. “Moss,” he finally announced triumphantly. “There’s some kind of luminescent moss growing there.”
“Does he always get this excited about slugs?” Sukey asked.
“He wants to be an explorer-naturalist,” I told her. “He wants to discover a new species.”
“I just did,” Zander said. “The Zander West slug.”
Pucci went over and pecked halfheartedly at the slimy length of it.
“Too big for you, Pucci, huh?” M.K. patted his head. “Zander, what kind of animal could eat these slugs?”
“I don’t know.” In the light from my vest, Zander suddenly looked nervous. “Let’s keep going.”
Thirty-one
Now that we knew what was making the sucking sounds, it was even creepier walking through the tunnel, and I kept looking over my shoulder as we went, catching sight of the pale greenness of the slugs in the light from M.K.’s vest.
“Sukey, did you ever take any classes on isolated species?” Zander asked her.
“No,” Sukey said, “but maybe someday I’ll be studying the Zander West slug.”
I stopped walking so I could check the map again. “The tunnel takes a turn up there,” I told them. “Maybe there’s something up there.”
But it was just darkness ahead.
Maybe that was what gave me the nerve to say it. “Do you think he was telling the truth? All that stuff about Dad taking money?”
“No way,” Zander said. “Dad never would have done that.”
I wasn’t so sure. “He did seem to be worried all the time back then. Don’t you remember?”
“Zander’s right,” M.K. said. “Dad never would have done anything like that. They’re making it up.”
Sukey was silent. Finally she said, “Sometimes people do things that seem, well… wrong. On the surface. But there’s a reason for it. There’s a… well, a tradeoff. Maybe he thought there was a good reason for it.”
“But he was an Explorer,” Zander said, as though that was the end of it. “I think they were lying about him to get us to tell them something.”
I wasn’t so sure. I just kept thinking about the way Dad had looked before he’d left for Fazia. Something had been bothering him and for the first time I let myself consider the possibility that he’d been doing something illegal.
We walked along for another thirty minutes or so. The tunnel changed as we went, expanding up and billowing out so that we were now in a large system of caverns. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness a bit so that I could see better with the help of the lights. There were only a few of the giant slugs here and there on the walls and the air had a new dampness.
“What’s that noise?” M.K. asked.
We all stopped walking and listened and, sure enough, we heard the sound of rushing water. Pucci cocked his head, listening.
“What is it?” Zander asked Pucci, who hunched his shoulders in a little shrug. “Hmm. There must be a waterfall or something up ahead.”
“Underground?” Sukey asked. “How can there be a waterfall underground?”
“There are underground rivers,” I said. “In fact, when spelunkers die, it’s sometimes because underground rivers flood. In an instant they can… But I’m sure that’s not what this is.”
But as we came around the turn in the tunnel, I could see that I’d been wrong.
The rushing sound became louder and louder and suddenly we had the feeling that we were right on top of it. We stopped, and when we pointed our lights down at the ground, we saw a wide expanse of swirling, moving blackness.
It was a river, an underground river, and when we looked across the breadth of it, we could see that the caverns we’d been following continued on the other side, winding along beside it into the underground darkness. I checked Dad’s map, hoping it might show us a different route, but it confirmed what I saw in front of me.
“That’s where we need to go,” I told the others, pointing across the water.
There were only two choices: we could somehow get across the raging underground river, or we could turn around and go back the way we’d come.
Thirty-two
“The River Styx,” I whispered.
“What?” They all turned to look at me.
“It looks how I always imagined the River Styx would look.”
“Isn’t that the river that takes you to hell?” Sukey asked.
“Yeah.”
“That is not a helpful comparison, Kit,” Zander told me. “Who’s going in with me?”
“I’ll try it.” M.K. stepped into the river.
“I hope there aren’t any piranhas or crabs in there or anything,” I said nervously. In the dim glow of my vest light, M.K. turned around and gave me a mean look.
“I’m just saying.” I shrugged. “It’s dark. We can’t really see anything.”
“Shut up, Kit.” Zander stepped into the water, too. “Come on, M.K., how deep is it?”
“I can’t—” One second she was standing there and the next she had disappeared beneath the surface of the water. Pucci called out, “M.K.! M.K.!” and Zander reached down and came up with her, then lost his own footing. Sukey and I had to reach down into the cold water and haul them back up onto the rock by the side of the river.
They sat there shivering in the dark. “It was slippery and the current’s really strong,” Zander said. “And it’s pretty deep. There’s no way we could all get across.” He shivered. “Wow, that water was cold. You okay, M.K.?”
She tried to nod, but her teeth were chattering so hard she just sort of vibrated. Sukey took off her flight jacket and put it around M.K.’s shoulders.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. “Do you want my vest?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, but I could tell she was trying not to shiver. I took off my vest and put it over her shoulders.
“What are we going to do?” We all sat there for a moment, staring across the river. The light on my vest flickered and Sukey handed it back to me. A minute later, it died.
“The solar batteries
,” I said. “They’ve run out.”
“Quick,” M.K. told Zander, “shut yours off. We’ll use mine and save yours, whatever’s left of it.”
He did as she said. Now that we had only the light from her vest, the cavern was darker than ever. We sat there for a long time, not sure what to do.
“I’m hungry,” M.K. said finally.
“We all are.” My stomach gave an involuntary growl and I looked halfheartedly through the pockets of my vest on M.K.’s shoulders, hoping for a candy bar, but finding nothing. The food we’d bought at the top of the canyon was still in Sukey’s pack in the cave. Dad had provided us with all the utilities we might ever need, and now we had all the water we could ever drink, but at that moment, I would have killed for a chocolate bar.
“We need to get warmed up and we need to eat something,” I said. “Otherwise we’re not going to be able to go any further, much less get back to Drowned Man’s Canyon. And we’re not going to be able to do those things down here.”
“You think we should just give up?” Zander turned to look at me. “Go back and turn ourselves in to Foley? Give the Nackleys the map so they can find the treasure?”
“No, but I don’t know how we’re going to… There’s no way across that river. And there’s no food or firewood in these caverns.”
“But why would your father send you all the way into this cavern if there was no way across?” Sukey asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”
There were lots of explanations. Maybe it hadn’t been much of a river when Dad was here making the map. Maybe he hadn’t intended for us to come here at all. But I didn’t want Sukey to think I was scared so I said, “You’re right. There must be a way across the river, a tunnel under, or stairs in the wall, something like that. Everyone, look carefully.”
We did our best, but we couldn’t really split up and look with only one light, so the four of us just kind of stumbled around on the side of the river and finally gave up. We sat down on the cold rock. “I better switch off my light,” M.K. said. “Save it.”
