by Ryan Calejo
Maybe half a mile later, the path narrowed to about the width of a ruler, and the trail of moonlight we’d been following vanished behind a wall of wild palms. The trees grew so tightly together here that I couldn’t see even a sliver of sky. This part of the jungle felt different somehow—more ancient, enchanted—and something told me we’d just entered sombra wood.
“There’s gotta be a way through it,” Violet said. She pushed aside some of the branches and stuck her head into the gap, looking around. After a few seconds she started gesturing at me wildly and whispered, “Charlie, check this out!”
Making sure to avoid any more of those rock-crab thingies (I’d always liked my toes—especially my big toes), I hopped up beside her and peered through the branches. At the edge of a shallow valley maybe twenty feet below us was a giant rock formation. It looked like a stone hut, but it was probably about ten times bigger than any hut I’d ever seen. A winding ribbon of silver water curved around it, disappearing into thick jungle. At first I didn’t see an entrance, but as my eyes tracked along the base of the rock, I noticed what appeared to be a small indent half hidden behind a knot of leafy bushes where the rock, the river, and the jungle all met.
“That’s gotta be it!” I whispered excitedly. “The Warlock’s Cave!”
At that point, I expected Violet to say something—you know, show some enthusiasm—but it was someone else who spoke up.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Qué está pasando, muchachos? ¿Están perdidos?”
Violet and I whirled toward the voice as a small boy stepped out from behind the trunk of one of the trees. He wore a tattered cloth tunic that looked two sizes too big for his scrawny body, and his face was streaked with mud. His fingernails were long and dirty, and his dark, uncombed hair stuck up in clumpy masses around his pointy head. The kid looked in serious need of parents. Or at least a nice bubble bath.
An evil little half grin split his lips as he looked up at us, angling his head lazily to one side. “You lost?” he asked again.
Even though I thought it was a teensy bit weird for some eight-year-old to be wandering around the jungles of Chiloé all by his lonesome (not that we weren’t doing sort of the same thing), I didn’t go that route. Instead I said, “¡Hola, amigo! We, uh… We’re looking for the Warlock’s Cave.”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “What cave, gamberros?”
“La—La Cueva de los Brujos.”
“Why a couple punks like you two wanna find a place like that?”
Did he just call us punks? “Come again, little man?”
“Um, sorry,” Violet jumped in. “What’s your name?”
He shot her a distrustful look. “Me llamo Mario. Mario Ramirez.”
“Nice to meet you, Mario. I’m Violet, and this here is Charlie. See, thing is, we’re looking for someone. A friend. We think she might’ve come through the island. That’s why we are trying to find the cave.”
“What your friend look like?”
“She’s tall. Has green eyes. Wears this big golden crown. Have you seen anyone that looks like that?”
“She got glowing eyes?”
“¡Sí, sí!” I shouted as a wave of happiness and relief swept through me. So they had brought Joanna here. “That’s her! That’s our friend!”
Mario was nodding. “She a witch, right?”
“Yes, she’s a witch!” Violet said. “So you’ve seen her?”
“Sí, la vi.… She came through with, like, a group. All wearing black hoods. She a good friend of yours, amigos?”
“Yeah, she’s a really good friend…,” I said. “Muy buena amiga.”
“You hear that, hermanos? Looks like there’s more of them.…”
Five more kids stepped out from behind the trees. They looked about Mario’s age, but their smiles were bigger, meaner. The taller one winked at Violet and said, “Qué chula.”
“More friends of the witch…,” Mario began.
“Yep, that’s us,” I said happily.
And then nearly choked when he finished with “… who killed our brujo!”
Mario eyes bugged. “Killed your who?”
He snarled at me through clenched teeth. “So happy we found you, amigo.…”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Queen Joanna wouldn’t kill anyone,” Violet said. “She’s not like that, all right? She’s one of the good guys.”
“Tell that to our brujo. Oh, wait—you can’t. Because she kill ’im! ¡Lo mató!”
I held up my hands, patting the air in an everyone-please-just-chill type move. “Listen to me. Joanna’s not the one who killed your brujo, okay? It must’ve been one of the sombras with her. They kidnapped her! They’re the bad guys. Joanna’s their prisoner!”
“Your story is changing fast, muchacho,” growled one of the other kids.
“Didn’t look like they had no prisoners to me,” murmured another.
“We’re not lying!” I said. “We’re not bad people. I mean, look at her face.… Does that look like the face of a villain? Look at those dimples.…” Violet smiled to make them even more dimply, and I said, “See what I mean?”
“Yeah, and look at his face,” Violet said, pointing at me. “Look at those honest eyes! You’ll never see eyes like that on someone who’d lie to you.”
“These are good, friendly faces!” I shouted—not even really sure why I was shouting. “Good people faces! We’re not the bad guys! You have to believe us! ”
“Oye, Mario, I can’t take listening to this no more,” said one of the other kids, frowning like he’d just downed a gallon of spoiled milk. “It’s hurting my ears, man! Can we just roast these bobos already?”
I noticed, for the first time, that all six of them had strange marks tattooed on the backs of their chubby little hands—no, burned there, it looked like.… The marks appeared to be an eye with swirly looking lines spinning out from the pupils. Brujo marks, I remembered. I’d seen these before. My abuela had taught me how to draw some.
Just then, three more kids emerged from the bushes to our right.
One of them stuck her tongue out at us. She wore a T-shirt that read: un peligro de incendio, which translates to “A fire hazard.” The other had the face of angel. He looked like the sweetest thing in the whole wide world… that is, until his lips twitched back, revealing a mouth crammed with pointy, rotten teeth.
Piranha teeth! I screamed on the inside. And that was exactly what they looked like!
Suddenly I had a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
With an evil smirk, Mario crouched down, touching the tips of his dirt-smudged fingers to the ground. Now, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen next, but it certainly wasn’t what actually did happen: In the next instant, the grass caught fire—just like that! There was this loud, hissing WHOOOSH, and before I knew it, sizzling lines were racing past us, raising fiery curtains on either side.
On instinct, I threw up my hands, shielding my face from the intense heat as the word “anchimayen” echoed through my head like I’d screamed it. And maybe I had.
Thing was, I knew all about these things! I’d heard soooo many stories from my abuelita, and to say they were well-known (and well feared) in Chiloé would be like saying a humpback whale is big. Anchimayen were basically like the sidekicks of sorcerers (or kalkus, as they were called on the island). And depending on which sorcerer they’d sworn their allegiance to, the anchimayen were either extremely kind and peace-loving or mind-bogglingly wicked, starting jungle fires and burning down any village that wouldn’t pay tribute to their kalku. There was even one tale where a group of anchimayen had superheated the core of one of the largest volcanoes on Chiloé, causing a massive eruption and nearly wiping out the entire island. Not exactly the sort of peeps you wanted to mess with. And even though I was hoping this particular gang of anchimayens happened to fall under the friendly, peace-loving category, something told me that was probably not the case.
“Those aren
’t normal kids, are they?” Violet said.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“So what should we do?”
“What we always do… RUN!”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Doing our best Speedy Gonzales impersonations, we turned and bolted into the trees. (¡Ándale, ándale! ¡Arriba, arriba!)
Only we didn’t even make it ten steps before I heard a sizzling roar, and a huge, flaming fireball screamed past us, lighting up the forest in a terrifying orange glow. Or maybe it was just me that was terrified. Either way, I was so mesmerized by the impromptu fireworks display that my foot caught on the edge of a root and I went down hard, sprawling.
“C’mon!” Violet shouted, pulling me to my feet. We ran. Behind us, the fire kids were hot on our trail—literally—flinging volleys of mini fireballs that incinerated everything in their path. One crashed into a tree in front of us, and the whole thing instantly went up in flames. Another bounced past us like a soccer ball, leaving a trail of fiery arches across the jungle floor that sort of reminded me of the big golden ones from Mickey D’s. Only, these arches would probably register just a tad bit higher on the old Kelvin scale.
It suddenly occurred to me that running through a forest with a gang of pyromaniacs after you probably wasn’t a great idea. You didn’t need to be a park ranger to know that mixing fire and wood was a giant no-no. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a ton of options.
As we slammed through a curtain of vines (me resisting the temptation to turn and, in my best Smoky the Bear voice, shout, ‘Only YOU can prevent forest fires!’), something dropped out of the branches overhead. It fell right into my hands, and I nearly shrieked. It was a cockatoo! One that looked like it had been charbroiled, deep-fried, then flambéed before being tossed into the world’s hottest pizza oven. Its bulging beady eyes gaped blankly up at me. Its charred, black feathers singed my fingers, sending up wisps of grayish smoke. For some reason I screamed, “HOLY FAJITAS!” then tossed the baked bird back over my head and started running even harder.
Somewhere behind us, one of the pyro-punks shouted, “¡CANDELA!” and I turned my head around in time to see the biggest fireball yet—it honestly looked like a meteor burning up as it entered earth’s atmosphere—come roaring past us.
It was one of the anchimayen! I realized with shock. So the legends were true—not only could they shoot fireballs, but they could apparently turn into them!
I watched the anchimayen sizzle through everything in its path, leaving a smoking, burning outline in the trunks of several trees. Show-off.
The good news was he’d missed. The bad? Another anchimayen had appeared directly in front of us, less than five feet away. This one was creeping stealthily through the woods on her tippy-toes, like we were playing a game of Hide-N-Seek instead of Find-N-Roast, and there was an evil, smoldering grin on her face, which, ironically enough, sent a cold shudder down my spine.
We’d barely had time to start running in the other direction when she yelled, “¡CANDELA!” (which, by the way, was quickly becoming one of my most hated words in the Spanish language) and came crackling toward us with completely unfair speed. She was too close. We couldn’t dodge her. In fact, she would’ve incinerated us in a blink if a thick branch with clusters of bright red flowers hadn’t come sweeping down from over our heads that very instant, slamming into her like a giant baseball bat and sending the little punk reeling.
Violet and I stopped to look at each other. Did that really just happen?
Then we both shrugged and kept running.
We dashed through the trees as quickly as our legs could carry us, but less than ten seconds later had to slam on the brakes as we came to the edge of a rocky cliff. A dead end. ¡Magnífico!
Below us, maybe seventy or eighty feet straight down, spread a wide oval-shaped lake, its surface rippling and shimmering in the moonlight.
“We’re trapped!” I shouted, looking desperately around.
“Not exactly.” Violet peered down over the edge of the cliff. “The average dive of an Acapulco cliff diver is about ninety feet. Which is probably only fifteen or so feet less than what we’re looking at here.” When I only stared, she said, “What? I wrote a piece on cliff diving for the cliff diving festival in Key Biscayne. You didn’t read it?”
“No,” I said, and was surprised my nose didn’t grow out an inch or two, Pinocchio-style. Truth was, I read all of the articles she wrote for our school’s newspaper—even the ones that railed against trans fats and sugary desserts, which just so happen to be two of my favorite things in the whole wide world. “But those are professional divers!”
“Well, most of them are.”
“Yeah, the ones that are still ALIVE!” Behind us, I could hear the sizzling snap of the leaves and branches catching fire: the anchimayen closing in on us.
El que no arriesga, no gana, I thought. It was one of my abuela’s favorite sayings. It basically meant “If you don’t take risks, you can’t win.” And in our case you could’ve tweaked it to, “If you don’t take a risk, you probably won’t live.”
Still… “There wouldn’t happen to be a Door Number Two, would there?” I asked V.
“Door Number Two: We get flamed by a bunch of fire-slinging, superfreaks.”
“Now that I think about it, cliff diving does have a certain appeal.… Any tips?”
“Yeah, don’t die.” Right then, just as her fingers closed around mine, the gang of preteen pyros appeared at the edge of the trees.
“Wait!” I shouted, getting an idea—a crazy one, but one that just might work.
The shimmering orange glow of their fiery little hands lit up the jungle, as did the equally but much more eerie glow radiating out of their cunning, vicious little faces.
Mario winked at me, his crew yelled, “¡CANDELA!” and tongues of orange flame exploded out around them as they flew toward us. I waited until they were screaming through the air again, waited until they were too far along to slow down or even think about changing direction—and then I made my move.
“Now!” I shouted, and Violet and I leapt off the edge of the cliff, feetfirst.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
There was a wild, terrifying moment of fear, of falling, of the wind rushing up from below us, swirling through our hair—of me screaming, “COOOOOWAABUNGAAAAA!”—and then we hit the water. Hard. Bubbles fizzed around us. We plunged straight down, our feet actually touching the rocky bottom of the lake. Still holding on to each other’s hands, V and I kicked up and broke the surface of the water, both of us panting hard. Violet’s wavy blond hair was plastered to her face, and she was smiling so big you’d think we were a pair of adrenaline junkies on some wild South American vacation, not a couple of kids running for our lives.
The lake was cold—I’m talking Okeechobee in winter cold—but that was a total relief after all that heat and running for our lives. The best part, though, was what I saw when I blinked the silty water out of my eyes and looked around: Bobbing up and down in the water like hairy-headed buoys, coughing up puffs of white-hot steam and wiping their eyes, were all nine of the fire kids.
Gotcha! I thought as Violet grabbed the nearest one and dunked his head back underwater. Then she punched another square on the nose with legit kung-fu quickness. I’d always thought Violet would be good at karate (I mean, what wasn’t she good at?) and I was right. The anchimayen’s head snapped back like a Pez dispenser, and he went under with a loud blurrrp!
I turned to Mario, who was floating in the water to my left. “Not so much fun when it’s a fair fight, huh?”
I put my fists up, Popeye-style, preparing to sock him one. But the little punk surprised me by smiling back. “Who said it was a fair fight?”
Suddenly his eyes began to glow. Ribbons of steam rose off his shoulders in waves. Then the pyro-punk went all supernova, exploding into a blazing ball of red-gold fire. I thought things were looking pretty bad at this point, but it wasn’t until the rest of his buddies (in
cluding the one V had punched) all did their very own interpretations of the human torch that I realized just how bad things actually were.
I felt the water around me change temperature. It went from very, very cold to very, very hot. Then the water level began to drop—and fast, as if some thirsty giant was sucking up the lake water through an enormous invisible straw.
Within seconds—not minutes, seconds—we were standing in the middle of a huge muddy pit. All around us, confused fish flailed and flapped their gills. I could see an array of colorful seashells poking out of the mud between my feet. A tiny crustacean scuttled over one of Violet’s shoes, but she was in too much shock to notice.
For a long moment my still-stunned brain refused to process what had just happened. Those punks had somehow managed to evaporate an entire lake in a matter of seconds. A lake. In seconds. It was insane!
“Okay, now that was awesome!” I had to admit.
Mario smiled at me. His eyes were black fire, flecked by specks of bright yellow, and their stare was more than a little freaky. “Gracias, amigo.”
“Charlie, I think it’s time to do that thing we do again,” Violet said, giving me a nudge.
“Yep!” And we scrambled out of the pit formerly known as a lake, dashing into the trees that ringed it. Our hope was simple: Lose them in the trees or maybe find a place to hide. Unfortunately, exactly five seconds later, we found ourselves trapped.