We Dine With Cannibals (2 page)

Try as hard as he could, Oliver couldn't unlearn all those knots, so he was certain that his knot wouldn't break. However, his pants were not made for descending into ancient ruins. The belt loops were straining against his weight. He knew that his sister, high above, was straining too.

Oliver wasn't afraid of falling, though. He'd done a lot of falling off of things in his life. Earlier that summer, high in the mountains of Tibet, he had fallen out of an airplane, off a cliff, over a waterfall, and into an underground pit. How bad could a six-hundred-year-old chimney be? He was, however, afraid of a much slower and more painful end. He was afraid of upsetting the large
Heloderma horridum
hanging on to his back.

For those of you who are not herpetologists,
which is what an explorer might call a lizard scientist, a
Heloderma horridum
is a poisonous lizard found in Mexico and Guatemala that is roughly the size of a small dog. It is covered in greenish-brown bumpy scales, which give it its name.
Heloderma horridum
is Latin for “horrible armor,” though the lizard is known in English as the beaded lizard. “Horrible armor” is a much more fitting name, however, for a lizard with such a grim expression and such a painful bite.

The one on Oliver's back was named Beverly. She wore a purple collar with a silver tag and liked eating Velma Sue's snack cakes. At least she and Oliver agreed on that. He patted his pocket to make sure he still had the snack cake he'd brought down with him—chocolate cake with bright red strawberry cream filling. Just in case he got hungry during the descent.

Beverly's claws were digging into his back and her head was resting on his neck. She kept flicking her tongue to remind him she was there. As if he could forget. If she bit Oliver with her venomous fangs, his face would swell, his nerves would twitch, and his whole body would be paralyzed.
Then he'd throw up his insides. He'd looked it up on the Internet. He really wished he hadn't. Too much information could be a really terrible thing.

Oliver, like most sensible eleven-year-olds, hated being bitten by poisonous lizards. It had happened to him before.

Twice.

He doesn't like to talk about it.

Five minutes earlier, he hadn't been nearly as worried about getting bitten by a lizard. He had been standing on the edge of the chimney with his sister and Beverly.

“Why should I have to go down there?” he had objected. He spit down into it to see if he could hear the
splat
when it hit the bottom. He couldn't. That took away all the fun of spitting off of things.

“Because I'm older,” Celia explained.

“But we're twins!”

Celia sighed. She gazed out over the dark ruins. They were on the far edge of what was once a great stone city, separated from the rest of the ruins by a deep ravine. Whoever had built this strange chimney didn't want to make it easy for anyone to get to it. No wonder it hadn't been discovered in
all the time that had passed since explorers first found Machu Picchu in 1911.

“Technically,” she corrected her brother at last, “I
am
older. Three minutes and forty-two seconds older.”

Oliver wasn't very good at details, especially the really important ones, like who was actually older. Celia believed that being three minutes and forty-two seconds older gave her some authority over Oliver in important decisions, such as what to watch on television and who should be lowered first down dark chimneys into ancient ruins at midnight. Oliver rarely agreed with her on either of those things.

“I can't go down there,” he said. “I have the lizard.”

“You can take her down with you. She'll scare away the bats.”

“You think there's bats down there?”

“Don't be a sissy.”

“Easy for you to say. You never go first.” Oliver began tying the end of the rope onto his belt. “This is an injustice,” he said while he tied. He could never win arguments with his sister, so he thought he'd save time by tying the rope while
they were still arguing. He'd lose in the end anyway. He just tied his figure-eight knot and imagined he was tying his sister up with it. “I know my rights. I've seen more episodes of
Judge Baxter
than you have.”

“Judge Baxter's a pet judge. He's on the Animal Network.”

“It's still a courtroom. He's still a judge.”

“He's a dog!”

“Dogs know what injustice is.”

“Do not!”

“Do too!”

“Do not!”

“Do too!”

“
Are we ready yet? We don't have all night!
” a voice crackled over the walkie-talkie that Celia was holding.

Both of their heads shot up. Oliver and Celia looked across the ravine to a stone terrace in the main part of the city. There was a little man standing on it, surrounded by three large llamas. The man was the same height as Oliver and Celia, though he looked tiny next to the bored-looking llamas. He had an extravagant red mustache and a sour expression on his face, just like the lizard on
Oliver's back. In fact, the lizard belonged to this man. The llamas were rented.

The girl who owned the llamas sat on the stone steps of a temple a few yards away with her head in her hands, staring out at the jungle below. She hadn't said a word since she and her llamas had been hired. That was what the little man wanted. He'd hired the girl because her llamas were cheap, she knew the way to Machu Picchu, and she was mute. She couldn't say a word. The little man didn't want strangers talking about his business.

Like Celia and Oliver, the little man was dressed all in black, but his black outfit had a vest and a jacket and a black fedora. He would have been invisible in the moonlight if it weren't for his big red mustache and his bright red ascot. Even in the high Andes Mountains, the little man dressed to impress. The llama girl wore a colorful alpaca hat with long earflaps to keep her warm.

The twins stared across the chasm that separated them.

“
Well?
” the little man's voice crackled over the speaker again.

“You didn't say ‘over.' We didn't know if you were done,” Celia said. “Over.”

They didn't need to listen through the speaker to hear the little man cursing. It echoed off the ruins and mountain peaks. We won't repeat the words he used here. Not all of them were in English, but their meaning was clear enough. The little man spoke into the walkie-talkie again.

“
Will you please get down that shaft so we can begin, before I lose my temper and ship you both off to Siberia?
” he said. “
Over
.”

“I don't like Peru,” Oliver said as he leaned forward, testing the rope. “Too many llamas.” He was hanging over the edge of the chimney now. His sister began to lower him hand over hand. Oliver was still talking to her over his shoulder, his face pointing down toward the unknown.

“I don't like llamas. Too many letters. Why should they have two
l
's?
Lama
with one
l
isn't much better … although
that
kind of lama tried to kill us in Tibet. I don't think I like llamas or lamas. At least lamas don't smell as bad as llamas. But still, I think the extra letters are confusing and not even …”

Oliver was still muttering to himself even after Celia could no longer see him. Soon she couldn't even hear him, but she could still feel him moving
around at the end of the rope. She leaned back and held on tight. She'd made him go first and now Oliver's life was in her hands.

It was true that earlier that summer a man claiming to be a Tibetan lama had tried to kill them. He was really nothing more than a grave robber named Frank. He was eaten by a yeti. His partner, Janice, who had pretended to be a mountain climber, was still at large. That made Celia nervous. She didn't like having a grave robber bent on revenge wandering around at large. Although Janice the grave-robber-at-large was the least of her worries right now.

She had just heard a hissing sound from down in the chimney.

The hissing could have been bats, she thought. That would really make Oliver unhappy. But the sound could have been Beverly too. That would be much worse.

Like all
Heloderma horridum,
Beverly hissed when she was about to bite.

THE NAVEL TWINS,
as we noted, were not sneaking into ancient ruins in South America in the middle of the night with a poisonous lizard because they wanted to.

They were there because their father had lost a bet with the little man wearing the fedora and the ascot, and explorers take bets very seriously. Because their father had lost the bet, the Navel twins belonged to the little man for the rest of summer vacation. They actually belonged to him for every vacation until they turned eighteen. Their father had made a very bad bet indeed.

The little man's name was Edmund S. Titheltorpe-Schmidt III, but he insisted that everyone call him Sir Edmund, which everyone was
happy to do because “Titheltorpe-Schmidt the Third” was not easy to say.

Try it.

You'll be grateful he's called Sir Edmund, even if no one really believed that he earned the title of “Sir,” which you can only get by being knighted, which means that you've done something noble and virtuous. And that you're British. Sir Edmund was neither noble nor virtuous. And he was not British. In fact, no one knew where he was from. Namibia? Uzbekistan? Dayton, Ohio?

What Oliver and Celia did know about Sir Edmund was that he was not to be trusted. He was rich and powerful and full of tricks.

Aside from being rich and powerful and full of tricks, he was, just like the twins' parents, a member of the Explorers Club, the most esteemed society of adventurers, explorers, daredevils, and globe trekkers in the world. The headquarters are in New York City, but the club has members on every continent, in every jungle outpost, and in every deep-sea trench. They've even had members walk on the moon.

Their father, Dr. Ogden Navel, was not only a member of the Explorers Club, he was the celebrated
Explorer-in-Residence, which is why they lived in an apartment on the 4½th floor.

Their mother, Dr. Claire Navel, was also an Explorer-in-Residence at the Explorers Club, but she had not been “in-residence” for over three years. She'd gone to search for the Lost Library of Alexandria, which she believed had never been lost at all. She thought it had just been put away for safekeeping and forgotten for a few thousand years, like that cuckoo clock that belonged to your great-uncle Klaus in Bavaria that must be
somewhere
in the house, even if you can't remember where in time for the yard sale.

“Creation is persistent,” Oliver and Celia's mother always said. “Nothing just vanishes without a trace.”

Then she went off and vanished without a trace.

From that day on, it was just Oliver and Celia and their father in their apartment at the Explorers Club. And it could get lonely. Oliver and Celia were the only children allowed in the building, except for the occasional boy prince from Saudi Arabia or a visiting child-goddess from Kathmandu. They couldn't even invite their friends over.

Not that it mattered. They didn't have any friends. Their father was always taking them out of school to go on adventures around the world, to discover ancient ruins or isolated pygmy tribes or to search for their mother. All the kids at their last school thought they were weird or crazy or just plain liars.

Oliver and Celia wished they
were
lying.

They wished they were lying about the cursed birthday presents they got from Zanzibar or the fried scorpion cheesecakes they ate in Cambodia. Or the lizard bites. They also wished they were lying about how their mother had disappeared.

But they weren't.

Everyone thought that she had been lost, just like the library she'd gone looking for. It happened to explorers all the time. The history of exploration was a history of people getting lost. Sometimes they got lost looking for treasures or exotic animals and sometimes they were looking for lost places, like cities or libraries. Sometimes they were just looking for their car keys. The world was a big place and it was easy to get lost.

But earlier that summer Oliver and Celia's mother had suddenly shown up again.

She had lured them to a monastery in Tibet, high in the Himalayas. Sir Edmund had been trying to find her himself and had taken the twins prisoner to get to her. It was their mother who rescued them.

When she rescued them, she told Oliver and Celia that she was part of an ancient secret society. She told them that they were part of it too and that it was
their
destiny to discover the Lost Library. She told them they had to find it before Sir Edmund, or there would be terrible consequences. They even heard a prophecy from an oracle.

All that is known will be unknown and what was lost will be found.