We Dine With Cannibals (26 page)

THEIR MOTHER DOVE
across the boat to catch her husband. She lowered him onto the seat, grabbed the wheel, and straightened the boat before they crashed into the thick mangrove roots on the banks of the river.

“Oh, I see you've rescued my lizard,” said Sir Edmund as he climbed out of the trunk. “Thank you. As to the matter at hand, I have a supply of the antidote for the poison now coursing through your father's veins. I can happily provide you with it,
after
you take me to El Dorado.”

“You don't even know that you'll find what you're after,” their mother said. “The scholars at Alexandria destroyed the entire library to keep the Council from getting it. Why do you think they would have preserved it?”

“What is ‘it'?” Celia asked, but no one answered her.

“Hold on,” said Oliver. “I thought El Dorado was the City of Gold. Not libraries.”

Sir Edmund chuckled. “The City of Gold refers to what it cost to build the place, not what it's made out of. Gold is a terrible building material. Trust me. … I once had a car made of gold. Terrible gas mileage.”

“Janice McDermott and the fake Corey Brandt are already on their way there,” said Oliver. “They could take everything before we get there.”

“Oh, I'm sure I could work out some sort of deal with my old friend Janice.” Sir Edmund sat and rested his blowgun across his lap.

“Okay,” Celia demanded, “what is ‘it'? What are we looking for? Why are explorers always so cryptic about everything?”

Their mother didn't answer; she just kept driving the boat. Sir Edmund ignored Celia's question and looked over at Patrick. “I see you have a new pet.”

Patrick screeched at him and showed his teeth.

“Whatever.” Celia crossed her arms angrily.
She didn't care what “it” was that they were looking for as long as they could all go home soon. She almost hoped Sir Edmund found it so this would be over with. The fate of the world couldn't really rest on something in an old library, right?

The boat sped on and none of them spoke. The forest formed an endless wall of green on both sides. As they drove, the color of the water grew darker. They saw the river split in two.

“Darkling waters!” Celia called out. The water on one side of the fork was darker and they followed it. As they drove through the winding river, caiman darted beneath the surface. Strange birds squawked and took flight. Their mother slowed the engine.

Straight ahead of them, they saw a giant tangle of branches and roots suspended over the middle of the river. Trees on each side of the water had grown toward each other and coiled together in the middle, supporting each other and growing up toward the sunlight. At their base, the roots created a mouth, with vines hanging down like fangs. The water flowed through it where a tongue would be.

Even Sir Edmund looked nervous as the boat passed through the mouth of the coiled trees. On
both sides of the water, slashes in the rubber trees wept with milky goo and the river made a sharp bend into a dark cove.

Claire Navel pulled the boat into the shadows and pressed it up against the shore.

“I think we've arrived,” she said.

“Let's go then,” said Sir Edmund. “Everyone out.”

“We can't just leave my husband here,” she objected. “Mosquitoes will leave nothing but skin and bones.”

“The poison in his veins will knock out any mosquito that bites him,” said Sir Edmund. “Now let's go. We've got a Lost Library to find.”

THEY CLIMBED OUT
of the boat, leaving Dr. Navel, Beverly, and Patrick the monkey behind. Beverly tried to follow them, but Oliver put her back in the boat to keep watch over their father. He took the snack cake out of his pocket and left it with her so she'd stay. She perched above it like she was guarding an egg.

“Good girl,” said Oliver.

“Don't forget who she belongs to,” said Sir Edmund. “I intend to put her back in my zoo when this is over.”

After a short but exhausting hike, they arrived at a pile of stones that was as tall as Oliver and overgrown with weeds. Just beyond it they saw another pile of stones, this one the size of a house and also overgrown with weeds. As they stepped past it, they saw the ruins, half a dozen flat-topped
pyramids, tangled in jungle vines and plants, with large boulders and collapsed walls scattered between them. There were overgrown terraces and steps.

“Remind you of anywhere?” Sir Edmund asked Oliver and Celia. The place looked just like the ruins of Machu Picchu.

“Why are there always ruins?” Celia sighed.

Sir Edmund tore some of the weeds from the stones right in front of them and smiled brightly. He saw the key, the symbol of the Mnemones, carved into the rock. They wandered around the ruins for a while, studying the old stones.

“How do we get in?” asked Oliver. “There are no doors anywhere.”

He and Celia sat on one of the crumbling piles of stones while Sir Edmund and their mother kept searching.

“We have to do something,” said Oliver, slapping at a mosquito. He was hot and tired and worried. “We can't sit here all day.”

“What can we do?” his sister replied.

“We always think of something.”

“Never on purpose.”

“Well, maybe if we tried … like explorers do.”

“Oliver, all explorers ever do is nearly kill us.”

“Okay,” said Oliver. “So what would nearly kill us?”

Celia just shrugged.

“Come on, think!” Oliver pleaded. “We've been nearly killed hundreds of times!”

“I'm tired of thinking,” said Celia. “I just unmasked an impostor of my favorite actor, flew an airplane over the Amazon, and found the Lost City of Gold! I'm done!” She stomped away from her brother.

“Celia!” he cried out. “You did it!”

“What?” she snapped, and turned back toward her brother, except she couldn't move. She was sinking. She was sinking in a pool of quicksand. “Oh, this is just great.”

She crossed her arms and scowled. She would have tapped her foot, but she couldn't move it. She blew some hair out of her face. She stopped sinking.

“Panic!” Oliver shouted. Sir Edmund and their mother came running over. Celia was up to her ankles in the pool of quicksand. She glared at her brother. “Quicksand is only dangerous if you panic,” Oliver explained. “Remember?”

Celia remembered. They saw this on
The Celebrity Adventurist
.

“What was Corey Brandt's First Rule of Adventuring?”

“I don't know,” said Celia. “There were so many different ones.”

“Don't panic!” Oliver said. “If you fall into quicksand, be sure to stay calm and still and you won't sink. The only way to sink into the quicksand is to panic.”

“So you want me to sink?”

“Yes!” Oliver ran over to a tree and grabbed a vine and handed it to his sister. “Tie this around your waist. If this doesn't work, we can pull you out again.”

“Oliver?” his mother asked. “What are you thinking?”

“I bet this quicksand is like a trapdoor,” he told her. “Just like in our vision. The TV sank.”

“Celia?” their mother asked.

“I think he's right.” Celia sighed. “For once.”

Their mother looked at both her children and nodded. Sir Edmund grumbled.

“This is why I hate going first,” said Celia, and she started flailing around like Madam Mumu on
Dancing with My Impersonator.
She sank quickly to her waist, then to her shoulders. “Here we go,” she said, and shimmied one more time as much as she could in the thick slurry of sand.

She sank to her neck and then her chin. She took a deep breath and vanished below the surface. The vine kept sinking. It pulled and stretched. It strained. All was still.

Sir Edmund, Oliver, and Claire Navel watched the pit of quicksand and waited. Oliver and his mother held their breath.

“We have to pull her up,” Oliver's mother said at last, grabbing the vine.

“Hold on!” Oliver stopped her. “Just another second.”

“I know you and your sister argue sometimes,” she told him. “But this is no way to get back at her!”

“It's not that,” said Oliver. He pointed at the vine. It moved once. Twice. Three times. “That's the signal. She's safe!”

Just like in the old temple at Machu Picchu, Celia had sent the signal for the rest of them to come down. After some convincing, Sir Edmund went first. He climbed into the quicksand, grabbed
on to the vine, and squirmed and flailed and danced his way underneath.

“If you tell anyone about my dancing,” he said just before his face went under, “I'll—” He sank before he could finish his sentence. After they felt him tug three times, Oliver climbed into the quicksand. It seeped over his feet and locked around his ankles like a pair of wet socks.

“Mom,” he said as he started to wiggle to make himself sink faster. “If we find the library, will you come home?”

She bent down. “I will always come home,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead.

And then Oliver sank under the sand.

For a moment it was terrifying. The sand let in no light. All was dark and hot and wet. The pressure of the sludge pressed on his nose and mouth and eyes. It was like lying on the couch under too many blankets in the middle of summer. He worried he'd get stuck. He worried he would drown. He started to squirm and to panic for real.

And then it was over. He was hanging on the vine, soaked, a few feet above a stone floor, looking up at a dripping pool of sand from underneath.

He let go and dropped to the ground. Celia and
Sir Edmund were next to him. There was a dim flickering light coming from the other end of a long hallway. The walls were engraved with the symbol of the Mnemones. Oliver reached up and tugged the vine three times.

They watched their mother's feet appear from above, kicking and whirling in the air. Then her waist came into view and then the rest of her slid down, holding the vine until she was on the floor, as wet as the rest of them.

“Well, that was something you don't do every day.” Claire Navel smiled. “Shall we?”

Oliver and Celia followed the two explorers down the hallway, running their hands across the smooth stone on the walls. They turned the corner and bumped right into their mother's back. She had stopped in her tracks and was staring upward.

They were on a balcony in a giant room with round walls that rose high above them and sank far below. The walls were covered in shelves, and each one was labeled in a strange language.

“Quechua,” said their mother. “The language of the Inca. The Spanish outlawed it, but it survived. It's still spoken today.”

Sir Edmund just snorted. He didn't care about linguistics.

Bridges and ramps cut across the space, connecting the shelves to each other, and large arched doorways opened into other chambers that looked just like the one they were in.

Stone stairways swirled along the walls, connecting the upper and lower shelves. Far below them was a pool of water that reflected the room back up at itself, creating an illusion that the space went down forever. The effect was dizzying.

Hundreds of fireflies flitted in the open air, flashing their lights. They were the only source of the light in the room. They cast an uneven, unending glow.

“So …,” Oliver said. “Is this the Lost Library?”

Although a writer might want to describe the space as “awe-inspiring in its vastness, infinite in its aspirations, the greatest feat of human ideas and engineering,” Celia provided the most astute answer of the moment.

“Duh,” she said.

“So where did all the stuff go?”

All the shelves in the vast space were empty.

“Someone got here before us,” Sir Edmund gasped. “They took everything.”

“Not everything,” said Oliver, pointing.