Charlie Hernández & the Castle of Bones Page 6

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  There was a winding barely there path down one side of the mountain. It was pretty steep—dangerously steep, actually—but we didn’t exactly have a whole lot of options. So we followed it, sort of half stumbling, half butt-crawling our way past knots of thorny bushes and knee-high weeds, over soccer-ball-size holes in the ground, our ankles twisting and our knees buckling, until we finally—thankfully—reached the Lapa do Santo cave.… At least I was pretty sure this was it.

  We squatted behind a scrub of thorny bushes, eyes locked on the entrance of the cave as a sudden gust of wind blew through the jungle. It howled between the trees, shaking the branches and making leaves rain down.

  “Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” I said, staring up at the massive stony cliff looming over us; it looked like the wild side of some huge blood-soaked mountain.

  Violet’s eyes hadn’t left the cave’s mouth. “No, it doesn’t.” The mouth was a rocky almost-V shape carved right into the reddish-orangey limestone. It must’ve been close to thirty feet high but probably only eight or nine feet wide, with all the clusters of gray stalactites seeming to ooze from the rock like giant frozen tears. The most surprising part, I guess, was the fact that the entrance to the cave didn’t look anything like a skeleton’s mouth; in the only tale my abuela had ever told me about Lapa do Santo, it mentioned how in order to enter the cave, the priests would have to walk through La Boca de la Calavera—or, the Mouth of the Skull. That was supposedly the price that had to be paid before anyone could enter the altar room, which was where the priests performed their most sacred rituals. I also remembered something about blood running up the walls so high you could swim in it, and now that I was standing here, seeing this place for the first time—specifically those high, coppery-red limestone walls—I finally understood where those legends had come from.

  With everything I knew about the place—with everything I knew that had gone on inside—just the thought of approaching it (not to mention the thought of actually entering it) was enough to make me shiver even in the fierce jungle heat.

  “You really think Joanna’s in there?” I whispered, but it came out sounding more like a hope than what I actually thought.

  “I don’t know,” Violet said. “But if she is, that means whoever captured her is too.”

  Well, that wasn’t reassuring. More like, terrifying. “So what’s the plan?”

  “Still working on that.”

  High up in the trees, a bird began to caw loudly. Somewhere close by, another bird called back.

  They didn’t sound awfully friendly.

  “You better work faster,” I told her.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Unlike the entrance, the inside of the cave was mostly smooth limestone, which had been cut into angles and planes by natural forces (time and erosion) and other not-so-natural ones (i.e., explorers and archaeologists). Masses of grayish blobby formations dangled from the ceilings, while others ran sideways up the stony walls and reminded me of the ancient chewed-up globs of bubble gum stuck to the underside of school desks. Even though it was around six or seven in the morning Brazil time and the hot tropical sun was already up and bright, the sunlight couldn’t seem to penetrate the darkness inside the cave.

  Violet’s cell phone, with her flashlight app, helped a little, but not much.

  With our ears on high alert and our eyes scanning the shadows for any tiny movement, we crept cautiously inside, pausing every few steps just to be safe. It didn’t seem like some kind of trap (emphasis on seem) so we kept going, tiptoeing along one wall, Violet hardly making any noise at all, me trying to resist the urge to whisper, “Be vewy vewy quiet, we’re hunting for wabbits!” (I have a bad habit of saying silly things when I get nervous.)

  “So what was this place?” Violet whispered, waving her phone over the rocky walls, painting them with wedges of bluish light.

  Sidestepping one of the shallow holes in the ground where archaeologists had unearthed ancient remains, I said, “Sort of like a ritualistic burial site. It was used for, like, hundreds of years by local warlords and sorcerers and stuff.”

  I thought I heard Violet swallow, though it might’ve been me. “What kinda things did they do in here?” she whispered.

  “Body mutilation, decapitation… cannibalism—you know, all that fun stuff.”

  “So not just your friendly neighborhood cemetery then, huh?”

  “More like, part cemetery, part torture chamber.”

  Maybe twenty yards in, the cave opened up, widening to about the size of a baseball diamond but also seeming to dead-end. I didn’t see anything that would make me think someone had recently been here. Guess no one was home, after all.…

  Digging into her pocket, Violet brought out a mini Maglite flashlight and handed it to me. “As Cap McCaw would say, ‘Time to spread out and see what turns up, my dear.’ ”

  I had to do a double take. “You’ve had that the whole time?”

  “Yeah, but it’s super low on battery; only use it when you need to.”

  “It’s pitch-black in here…,” I pointed out. “I’m gonna need to a lot.”

  While Violet slowly picked her way over to the far wall, ducking under a low-hanging section of ceiling, I snapped on the flashlight and wagged the beam around, squinting. The harsh white glow stung my eyes a little but did a heck of a lot better job of illuminating this place than Violet’s phone. And now I could see that this was definitely where the cave dead-ended; I couldn’t pick out any passageways in the walls—no corridors leading deeper in.

  As I followed the curve of the wall, tracking the flashlight beam along its craggy base, I heard Violet say, “Very funny, Charlie.”

  I glanced back; she was maybe ten yards down the cave. “What?”

  Shaking her head, she turned—and then froze, staring at me. “Wait. How’d you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Tug on my backpack from way over there…”

  “I didn’t tug on anything,” I said, and she gave me a Yeah, right sort of smile.

  “Course you didn’t.… It was probably the ghost of a decapitated warlord, right?” She paused, sniffing lightly at the air. “And what the heck is that smell…?”

  I didn’t have the slightest clue what she was talking about—and didn’t smell anything, either—so I went back to inspecting the walls, and a couple of seconds later I felt the tiniest of tugs on my backpack. I grinned in the dark. “Yeah, very funny, V… I like the way you set it up, talking about ghosts and stuff, but I’m not a Shaggy Rogers. You can’t get me that e—”

  I broke off, catching a whiff of something just awful in the still, stale air. Man, it smelled like something had died in here, then been eaten by something else, and then that something else had died too! I’d barely gotten my shirt over my nose when I heard Violet yell, “Charlie, come look at this!”

  I turned, saw she was still about ten yards down the cave, squinting at the wall. And I felt my face screw up. “Wait. How did you—”

  “Charlie, get over here!”

  Holding my breath, I rushed over, trying not to trip over the shallow holes.

  “Tell me you see that…,” she said, holding her phone out, illuminating a large, sort of oval shape on the rock wall.

  Thing was, at first, I didn’t. All I saw was wall and light and a tiny fat worm wriggling its way out of a crack in the rock. But then my eyes began to adjust and there it was: a life-size skeleton head, seeming to grin at us right out of the rock! “Looks like a… calavera… but it doesn’t seem like anyone—”

  “Carved it? No. I don’t think anyone did.… It’s just—”

  “There.”

  And like a flash, I remembered that legend about Lapa do Santo again, how it claimed that to enter it—to truly enter the cave—you had to walk through the mouth of the skull. “That’s it,” I breathed.

  “What’s it?”

  “That’s our way in.”

  Violet’s brow
furrowed in confusion. “We are in, Charlie… aren’t we?”

  “Maybe not.” I crouched down, pressed the heel of my hand against the center of the skull’s open, grinning mouth.

  For a split second nothing happened—

  Then, with a faint grinding sound that was barely audible over the steady wham-wham-wham of my heart, the rectangle of the stony mouth slid smoothly back into the wall and disappeared.

  Violet’s wide, shocked eyes found my wider and even more shocked ones. For a moment neither one of us said anything. Neither of us even blinked. But once we’d finally accepted what had just happened, we craned our necks to peer into the slot… and immediately the ground began to tremble under our feet.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I had time to think, ¡DIOS MÍO! AN EARTHQUAKE! (which, for a kid from Miami, is just about the scariest kind of natural disaster, because we never experience those) before a deep, jagged crack tore across the ground like a fault line. Violet and I stumbled backward, nearly tripping over each other as a huge rocky triangle rose out of that crack, shedding clumps of dirt and blocking our way out. Our only way out.

  “CHARLIE!” Violet shrieked; she was pointing at something behind me, and I whirled around to see gallons of some sort of red, syrupy liquid (blood… it had to be BLOOD!) spilling out of the gap where the skull’s mouth used to be.

  But the blood wasn’t just pouring from the skull’s mouth; no, it looked like the walls were bleeding too! Streaks of dark reddish liquid were running down the limestone like sticky sweat. As I watched, too frightened to blink, think, or even puke (it was super gross!), the blood began to pool on the ground, flowing rapidly along the base of the walls. And the smell…? Man, it was like sticking your head in a bag full of moldy pennies!

  Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I spotted the glassy oval eyes of scaly reptiles peeking out of the bloody pools—seripentes!

  “Snakes! I hate snakes!” I shouted.

  V gripped my arm. “Take a chill pill there, Indy! They don’t look poisonous to me.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Haven’t you heard the snake rhyme? ‘Red touches yellow, you’re a dead fellow. Red touches black, you’re all right, Jack.’ ”

  “My dad’s an animal geneticist—the snake rhyme is on our fridge! But—news flash—it only applies to snake species found in NORTH AMERICA!”

  “Oh.” Violet didn’t seem too happy to learn that. “Okay, well, anyway, there’s not a whole lot of them swimming around here, so unless the blood starts to rise or something else crazy happens I don’t think we’re in any serious danger.”

  And, as if on cue (because, why not, right?) the blood started to rise.…

  I glared at her. “You had to say that, didn’t you?”

  Terrified, holding on to each other, V and I scrambled away from the wall, retreating to the center of the cave with the blood already lapping at our sneakers. It was rising fast… rising like the tide!

  And it’s going to keep on rising! I thought with a flash of horror. Rising and rising until we’re drowning in it—drowning in blood!

  But no sooner had that terrible thought crossed my mind than the flow of blood began to slow—first the rush of it spewing from the skeleton face’s mouth slowed to a trickle; then the droplets streaking down the walls seemed to run dry.

  The ground began to rumble under our feet again, and there was a wet, sucking, slurping sound like water swirling down a half-clogged drain.

  “WHAT’S HAPPENING?” Violet yelled.

  “NO IDEA! BUT IT DOESN’T SOUND HEALTHY!” I glanced down to see streams of tiny bubbles drifting up through the bloody pools at our feet.

  Then, just as quickly as they had begun to rise, the pools of blood receded into rows of small circular openings that had appeared in the ground.

  And when they had completely drained away, we got another huge surprise: Not only had the stony triangle that was blocking our way out sunk back into the ground, but there was now a large half-moon-shaped hole—some sort of passageway—descending into the cave floor directly in front of the still-grinning face of the calavera. Through the gloom, I could see the top of an ancient spiral staircase twisting down into darkness, the narrow stony steps leading—where…?

  Honestly, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.

  “Guess you were right…” Violet clutched my arm tightly as she leaned forward to peer into the passageway, her blue eyes shining in the pale glow of her phone. “Lapa do Santo, here we come.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  As we started slowly down the steps, our footsteps echoing quietly off the smooth stones, Violet lowered the brightness setting on her phone almost all the way down, which I thought was a pretty smart move, because we didn’t know who—or what—might be lurking at the bottom of wherever these steps led, and we certainly didn’t want them—or it—to see us coming. The only problem was that now I could barely see my feet and, only occasionally, the next step down.

  When we finally reached the bottom (which felt like an eternity, though in actuality it only took a minute or two), we both froze, and all I could think was, “Whoa.”

  We were now standing in an enormous, dome-shaped chamber. Pinpricks of sunlight were slanting down through dozens of small openings in the ceiling, throwing long, skinny triangles over sections of the chamber while leaving others in almost total darkness. But there was more than enough light for me to see the theme of the place… and the theme was monkeys. They were everywhere, twining up the soaring stone pillars, carved into the rock walls, shaped into stony statues and clay figurines that stood in the niches and alcoves. All the little hairy little monkey faces appeared to sneer or scowl, fangs sticking out of their wide, angry mouths, their eyes slitted menacingly like, Whatcha doing down here, muchachos? Apparently the interior decorator had a thing for primates.

  “So… this place isn’t the least bit creepy,” I whispered, and my voice seemed to echo forever between the pillars.

  In the center of the vast space was a huge stone altar—an elaborately carved sort of tablelike thingy that looked like it had been chiseled out of a single enormous hunk of gray-black rock. Great pointed horns curved up and over each of the four corners; along the sides, teeth… actual teeth (probably from a puma or a jaguar judging by the length of the fangs) jutted out like razor wire, just looking for a bit of skin to snag or tear.

  “Okay, now that’s terrifying,” Violet said.

  Our sneakers crunched over the rocky floor (at least I hoped they were rocks) as we made our way toward it.

  “This must be the altar of sacrifice,” I whispered, my eyes tracing the intricate zigzag designs along the edges of the stone top.

  Turning her phone back on, Violet crouched to examine the dusty floor around the altar, then started around to the other side like she was following a set of tracks. But before I could ask if she actually was, I felt something at my back—a presence. And a familiar one too. A cold chill ran through my entire body as I turned, slowly. Looming over me, almost completely hidden in darkness, was some kind of ginormous structure. It was pyramid shaped, wide as a house, and looked like some huge ladder with a primitive form of scaffolding supporting it—a jumble of joints and braces and cross sections.

  As I stared up at it, my head began to swim, and for a moment I thought I could hear voices, a whole mess of them chatting noisily somewhere close by. They seemed to be coming from everywhere, all directions at once.

  “V, do you hear—” I started to say, but before I could finish, somewhere behind me, she shrieked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  My heart jumped into my throat, and I spun around, my feet nearly sliding out from underneath me on the sandy ground. “What’s wrong?” I shouted.

  Scrambling around the altar, I skidded to a stop right where she stood staring down at a familiar black-and-gold scarf that lay crumpled—almost hidden—behind a clay pot with, you guessed it, the profile of a snarling,
hairy-faced monkey. “That’s Joanna’s scarf!” I shouted as it hit me. The one she’d used to set that big oak tree on fire before the gang of minairons could squash us with it. And the realization made me so incredibly, unbelievably, impossibly happy, I almost broke into the “Macarena” dance right in the middle of this big ol’ creepy place.

  Violet, meanwhile, was nodding her head up and down like a sugar addict who’s just been asked if they’d like another scoop of double chocolate chip ice cream.

  “So the minairon was right!” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But… I don’t get it,” I said as my eyes flicked over the altar, which looked relatively clean and, thank God, definitely not recently used. “Why would they bring her to a place like this, a place of sacrifice, if they weren’t planning on, well, sacrificing her…?”

  V considered that for a sec. “That’s a really good question.…” She bent down to pick up the scarf—and that’s when the most incredible thing happened: The moment her fingertips came in contact with the edge of the silky, shimmering fabric, the scarf seemed to come to life, first slipping out from between her thumb and index finger, then floating up into the air like a feather caught in a strong breeze. We both watched in stunned silence as the scarf began to twist and wring itself before suddenly igniting in a blaze of unnatural greenish fire, bathing the entire room in dazzling light. In that instant—just those few seconds as the threads burned and began to sizzle away—the scarf seemed to form the image of land… of a hunk of land floating in the middle of the sea… an island… and birds. Seagulls! Then, with the whoosh of an extinguishing fire, it burned up into ashy nothingness. Whoa, did that really just happen?

  For what felt like a very long time Violet and I just stood there, speechless. And when one of us finally did speak, it was Violet: “It’s a clue!” she shouted, whirling to face me. “Joanna must’ve left it behind for us! Like a bread crumb!”