Charlie Hernández & the Castle of Bones

by Ryan Calejo

  And almost before she was finished talking, I already knew what it meant: “Chiloé.”

  “What?”

  “That’s it.… That’s what Joanna was trying to tell us.”

  Violet looked confused. “What’s a Chiloé?”

  “It’s not a what. It’s a where. A tiny island off the coast of Chile. Its name means  ‘the place of seagulls.’ ” And it just so happened to be one of the most mythologically rich places in the entire world. My abuela had lived there for a couple of years, and from everything she had told me about it, she’d loved it.

  A small smile had begun to pull on the corners of Violet’s lips, but before she could say anything, a powerful gust of wind swept through the chamber. A split second later, I heard this great swooshing roar and looked up in time to see a vapory whirlwind explode out of an opening in the ceiling. It touched down less than fifteen yards away, swirling dirt and bits of broken pottery before snatching up one of the taller monkey statues and flinging it against a pillar to our right. The ceramic orangutan burst on impact, shattering into a thousand dusty fragments, which clinked softly—almost musically—to the ground.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had started up, the whirlwind evaporated, and everything was eerily quiet again… eerily still.

  “The heck was that?” I breathed.

  “Up there!” Violet shouted, pointing at the ceiling. Squinting, I tried to figure out what she was showing me while she said, “Whoever built this place designed it with a pretty ingenious ventilation system. See those bigger openings in the ceiling? Not the ones letting light in—the others?”

  I did. They were large and square shaped, cut sideways into the high arched ceiling. “You’re saying that’s a ventilation system?”

  “Obviously old-school. But I’m pretty sure, yeah.” She got that much out and not another word before a second whirlwind exploded out of one of the ceiling vents, this one slamming down so close it nearly sucked us off our feet. Rocks and razor-edged hunks of ceramic whizzed past our heads, and as we hunkered down beside the altar, shielding our faces, I shouted, “REALLY STARTING TO HATE THAT VENTILATION SYSTEM!”

  Aboveground, maybe eighty or ninety feet straight up, I could hear the wind howling and shrieking through the trees. Madre, it was loud! Sounded pretty close to hurricane-strength winds to me—and I should know, having grown up in Miami. That’s probably what’s causing the whirlwinds, I thought.

  “I think it’s time we make like space shuttles!” Violet shouted, and we took off for the stairs, both of us running flat out as more and more whirlwinds began snaking down out of the vents. They gusted and roared, flinging up walls of dirt that stung our skin and got in our eyes, blinding us.

  Halfway to the stairs, I heard a huge swooshing, swirling sound and snapped my head up just as the mother of all whirlwinds descended from above. It crashed down directly in our path with all the force of an atomic bomb.

  Violet just barely managed to avoid it, springing to her left. I, on the other hand, hadn’t done seven straight years of cheerleading and gymnastics.…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  What happened next was simple physics. I was slurped straight up into the air, screaming, flailing my arms wildly, which, just for the record, didn’t a) help me fly or b) make me look any cooler as I spun and flipped and basically somersaulted my brains out. The world became a whirling, howling funnel of wind and dirt and flying monkey statues. I shrieked as a powerful gust swung me outward, boomeranging me around in a wide, looping circle while somewhere way down below me, I could hear Violet shouting, “CHAAARRRLIEEE!”

  In the span of just three, maybe four heartbeats, the whirlwind had lifted me so high off the ground that I was now looking down on pretty much the entire altar room. Distantly, I wondered how many people had survived being sucked up into a whirlwind. I wondered if breaking every bone in your body at the same time hurt as badly as I imagined it would. I wondered which would feel better: landing flat on my back or taking a bounce on my belly, then started to wonder why I was thinking about it in the first place, when I heard Violet shout, “YINGS!”

  Yings? What in the world was she talking about? It made absolutely no sense—like, cero—but Violet kept at it, shouting the word over and over at the top of her lungs while madly flapping her arms at her sides like an insane ch—

  Finally, it hit me: Not yings, but wings!

  Yes! Of course! All I had to do was sprout a pair and—

  Then, just like that, the whirlwind—well, quit.

  There were no more gusting winds. There wasn’t even a slight breeze.

  The air had become so still that for a moment I thought I could hear the tiny, crunching sound of roots as they expanded into the ceiling above me.

  An instant later, gravity decided to pitch in and make my life just a wee bit more difficult. I started to fall. Fast. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the giant ladderlike thingy; it was super close, less than three feet away, and I reached for it like my life depended on it—which it obviously did—twisting, stretching, straining—but I couldn’t get my body around in time. My fingertips grazed one of the upper bars, missing by only inches, and then time seemed to pause just like it did for Wile E. Coyote every time he found himself running off a cliff. Pausing just long enough for me to understand it was now all over. (Cue exaggerated cartoon gulp.)

  A spilt second before I crashed back down to earth—a crash that would have no doubt ended me—I felt a sudden, vicious yank on my lower back and my momentum abruptly changed directions: I’d gotten caught on the ladder somehow and was no longer falling but swinging… once… twice… three complete revolutions, like a gymnast on a set of parallel bars, before finally slamming to the ground. The breath exploded out of me in a painful gasp—“Uh!”—as I landed hard on my side. Although nowhere near as hard as I could have.

  “CHARLIE!” Violet shouted as she rushed over to me. “CHARLIE, ARE YOU OKAY? CAN YOU MOVE?” I wasn’t so sure, so I tried nodding and watched as relief flooded into her eyes. “Oh, thank God…,” she breathed, wrapping her arms around me. If I hadn’t just plummeted seven stories through the air, I might’ve blushed.

  “I… but—how?” I saw a slithery, squirmy, wriggly movement to my left, had time to think, ¡SERPIENTE! and then realized it wasn’t a snake at all.… It was me!

  I’d manifested a tail!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Violet spotted it a second later. At first she had no clue what she was looking at, but then she shrieked, clapped both hands over her mouth, and started to laugh uncontrollably. “That’s craaazzzyyy! Did you… do that on purpose?”

  “Yeah, totally,” I lied. “All I was thinking was wings or tail. Those were my top two.” The truth, of course, would’ve sounded a lot less cool. I mean, what was I supposed to say? No, my body just knows how badly I suck at morphing and in the interest of self-preservation decided to save my heinie—literally.

  My guess was that I must’ve manifested it a few moments before or right as I was falling past the giant ladder thingy, and as I’d reached out with my hands and legs, which hadn’t quite been long enough to grab hold of the ladder, I must’ve also (unknowingly) reached out with my tail, which, fortunately for the rest of me, had been.

  Feeling dazed—and more than a little amazed—I stared up at my newest and most flexible appendage, watching it swing back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Covered in coarse black fur, the thing was close to five feet long and thick as a garden hose, with a fluff of pinkish hair at the tip where it sort of curled back on itself like a question mark.

  “Kinda cute, actually,” V said, giving it a light poke.

  “Hey, grow your own,” I said with a smirk, and saw her grin before her eyes drifted up, moving past me—and she gasped.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  She was shaking her head now, her eyes jacked wide in fear. “It’s another one of those… those things.”


  “What things?” Propping myself up on my elbow, I glanced back and thought, ¡Madre mía! What I had assumed was some sort of giant escape-ladder thing was actually another one of those bone castles—another castell!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  This one was even taller than the first, easily over forty feet high, and constructed of nothing but bones. No carcasses—just pure white bones. And not cow bones, either, but the bones of smaller animals—goats, maybe. I saw thighbones, backbones, neck bones, and everything in between, each one fitted carefully together with the ones around it. Most had been picked clean, but ribbons of flesh and hair still clung to a few. It was without a doubt the most gruesome thing I’d ever seen… ever. Even worse than the one in Portugal somehow.

  But the part that had me really freaking out was that this was now the second castell we’d seen. The second in as many days! Why did these things keep popping up? I mean, I knew they had something to do with dark magic, but it couldn’t just be a coincidence that Joanna had been kidnapped the same day she’d taken us to see the first of these abominations; and now she’d left us a clue right near another. What was the connection?

  The castell’s shadow hung over me like a poisonous, dark cloud. Suddenly I felt an overwhelming urge to get away from this thing—to get out of here.

  “Let’s go,” I told Violet. “Vamos.”

  * * *

  It felt like we walked through the dense Brazilian jungle east of Lapa do Santo for days, though it was probably only an hour or two before we saw the first rooftop of a small town. A rusty sign nailed to a scraggly old tree growing wild along the roadside read PEDRA PEQUENA—0.8 KM.

  The town itself was old but well maintained, with several multilevel buildings and nicely paved streets. The buildings had red Portuguese-style roofs, adobe brick, and glazed tile decorating the doorways and balconies. To our left was a row of stalls with vendors selling a colorful array of fresh fruits. On the front of one was a large plastic sign that said TREM/TREN/TRAIN and had a little arrow pointing up the street to our left. Below the words was a picture of a futuristically styled train station and baggage loading area. Looked pretty cool, actually. But as it turned out, the station was anything but. When a business’s name seemed to translate into “the pearl of luxury travel and leisure,” you’d expect to find a teensy bit more than a dusty open-air platform with a single dusty old wooden bench and a tiny (and, yes, also dusty) ticket office at the far end. But that’s all there was to the place. Inside the office an older dude in a rickety rocking chair was staring blankly at the crossword section of a newspaper. His eyelids were drooping at half-mast, and the ground-down stub of a pencil dangling precariously from his left ear didn’t make it seem like he had any plans to complete the puzzle. There was a map with routes and ticket prices taped up on the inside of the plexiglass window. Violet studied it for a second, then banged on the glass, startling the ticket officer out of a deep, slumbering sleep.

  “Two tickets, please,” she said, “Five o’clock to Santiago, Chile.” According to the map, it was the closest stop they had to Chiloé; we were going to have to hop in a taxi or on a bus and take that down to Puerto Montt, where we could then ferry over to Chiloé.

  The ticket dude nodded like he’d understood. He drowsily tapped a few keys on some ancient-looking keyboard, and the printer on the desk in front of him spat out two large red-and-white tickets. “Trinta e nove reais para o par,” he said, pointing at the little silver tray that scooped under the window.

  I felt around for my tail and realized it was gone. Too bad. Maybe I could’ve shown it to the guy, pretended it was a magic trick, and got us a couple of free tickets.

  Violet slung her backpack around so she could get into it. “At the current exchange rate that should be approximately ten dollars and fifty cents,” she said, and when I just stared at her, she gave a small shrug. “What? My parents’ shop has a currency-exchange machine.… I play with it sometimes.” She rummaged through her bag, paused, rummaged some more, dug a little deeper, then paused again. Her blue eyes, suddenly huge and full of worry, rose to meet mine.

  “It’s just junk,” she said finally.

  “Well, I mean, it’s paper, right? Paper money. But it’s not junk. It’s backed by the government or whatever.…”

  “No, I’m talking about my backpack—it’s literally full of junk!” A mini avalanche of dirt and rocks came tumbling out as she emptied her bag onto the ground. “My clothes, my passport, the golden egg, our money—it’s all gone!”

  “WHAT?”

  “Check your bag!”

  Whipping it around, I unzipped the big pocket—and nearly passed out. Rice. My backpack was loaded with probably close to ten pounds of uncooked white rice! “What the—”

  “It’s all gone!” Violet shouted again, panic making her voice thin. “Everything!”

  “But… how? I mean, HOW?”

  She paused for a moment, thinking, before her gaze suddenly lasered in on mine. “In the cave! Remember how I thought you were messing around with my bag? And—and you thought I was messing around with yours?”

  “Yeah, and then you tried to play it off—”

  “I DIDN’T TRY TO PLAY ANYTHING OFF!” she exploded. Her fingers tightened on my arms hard enough to make me flinch. “Don’t you get it…? WE WERE ROBBED!”

  “But—by who? We were the only ones in there!” I shouted.

  “I know. But there’s no other explanation. There’s no way some whirlwind could have emptied our bags, filled them with dirt and rice, of all things, then zipped them back up! And where did all that rice even come from?” I opened my mouth to argue (I mean, us getting robbed in a cave when we’d clearly been the only ones in there just wasn’t possible), but she did have a point. “Charlie, explain it to him,” Violet said, jerking a thumb toward the ticket booth and the dude inside it. “Tell him we were robbed. Tell him we need those tickets!”

  “Right. Um, señor, necesitamos esos boletos. Alguien robó nuestro dinero.”

  The guy gave me a sort of squinty-eyed look of confusion. “O qué?”

  “Necesitamos los tickets! No tenemos dinero. No money.”

  “Señor, ¡por favor!” Violet said pleadingly. “We need to get to Chile!”

  The guy stared at us for a long moment. “Onde estão o seus pais?”

  V looked at me. “What’d he say?”

  “I think he’s asking about our parents.”

  “Chile,” she said, turning back to the window. “Our parents are in Chile!”

  But Mr. Ticket Dude wasn’t listening. Instead he’d already picked up his phone and was dialing a number. “Eu estou chamando a polícia.…”

  Violet’s eyes bugged. “Did he just say ‘police’?”

  “No, no polícia!” I shouted at him. “Tickets, por favor. Los tickets!”

  Only it was too little, too late—he had already gotten through to dispatch and was speaking rapid-fire Portuguese into the receiver. Yep, definitely not good.

  “We gotta go,” V said. “We don’t have passports. The police will take us straight to the American embassy, and they’ll put us on the first plane back home!”

  So we did the only thing there was to do. We ran. Pebbles crunched under our sneakers as we hopped off the platform and raced along the humps of gravelly ground that flanked the train tracks.

  I heard the ticket dude shouting something in Portuguese—probably something like, They’re runners! And then we were gone, disappearing into the forest of tall, spindly shrubs that grew wild along the south side of the tracks.

  “Get down!” Violet hissed, pulling me into a crouch next to her.

  I was panting but managed: “So what are we gonna do, huh? We’re stranded!”

  “We’re getting on that train, Charlie.”

  “But… we don’t have tickets!”

  “So?” Violet’s lips broke into one of her trademark dazzling grins, and suddenly I had a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomac
h.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  An instant later a high-pitched whistling sound split the air, and less than ten feet away the tracks began to hum.

  “You’re planning on sneaking onto that train, aren’t you?” I said accusingly. And when she only grinned at me: “V, we can’t do this! We’re not little kids anymore. We could get in really big trouble! Plus, like just yesterday my mom was telling me that I was growing up now, that I needed to start thinking and acting more responsibly. And I’m pretty sure this is exactly the kinda stuff she was warning me about!”

  “Well, try not to grow up too fast, Charlie.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ll miss all the fun parts.” Still grinning at me, she said, “Now get ready to start running.”

  “What? Why?”

  “See that pole with the little metal flags hanging from it?”

  I did—there was a green flag and a red flag. “Uh-huh. So?”

  “Well, if someone had bought a ticket at this station, the ticket guy would’ve hit a button, and the red flag would be sticking out to let the engineer know he needs to stop here. But since no one’s bought one, the engineer’s going to see green and roll right past. The train’s only going to slow down a little.”

  There were so many things I wanted to say, but the first words out of my mouth were: “How do you know so much about trains, huh?”

  Violet ignored me, so my next ones were: “V, I am NOT gonna go chasing after a speeding locomotive, do you hear me?”

  She glanced back to me, said, “Would you do it for a Scooby snack?” Her grin was getting even bigger now, laughing at me behind those dazzling baby blues.

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “I hope that wasn’t you taking some sly dig at the fact that I recently grew a tail.…”