Charlie Hernández & the Castle of Bones

by Ryan Calejo

  “What a beautiful pasarro.…” Saci’s voice had dropped to an awed whisper as he stared up at the glowing bird with wide, googly eyes. “What you think it’s made from?” he asked, reaching out slowly to touch it.

  Violet smacked him on the back of his head. “It’s made out of bird, you idiot. Now keep your hands to yourself!”

  “C’mon,” I started to say. Let’s get out of here was how I meant to finish. But before I could, the jangle of swords and armor echoed from the tunnel behind us.

  Saci’s head snapped around. “Mukis.”

  “¡Corran!” I shouted. Then, thinking it might be a good time for another quick lesson—seeing as we were probably about to die anyway—I turned to V and said, “That means ‘run’!” And we all took off for the bridge as an entire battalion of gold-plated soldiers came rumbling out of the same tunnel we’d just come tumbling out of ourselves. There had to be close to three hundred of them, all fit, bearded, angry little dudes waving swords and flaming torches over their heads. Their golden breastplates gleamed like jewels in the torchlight.

  “I’m curious,” Violet shouted as we ran for dear life, “what makes those alicanto eggs so valuable?”

  “The bird, duh!” Saci shouted back.

  “But all it does is eat gold!”

  “Ah, but you should see what it poops!” he said, grinning at us.

  We’d just made it halfway across the bridge when another couple of mukis—huge ones, both a little taller than us, with broad barrel chests and arms so muscular their biceps looked like they had biceps!—appeared at the other end of the bridge.

  “We’re trapped!” Saci yelled. And for once, he wasn’t lying.

  I was pretty sure things were about as bad as they could get. Then I glanced back again and realized that a few of the soldiers were using their torches to light the ropes at their end of the bridge on fire.

  When I saw that, that’s when I knew things were about as bad as they could get.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  GRAB ON TO THE BRIDGE!” I shouted, dropping flat on my belly, wrapping my arms and legs around the planks. Not exactly MacGyver-level, I know, but it was the only thing I could think of to do. Maybe the only thing there was to do.

  Within seconds the superheated ropes began to bubble and melt. Golden droplets ran down the sides of the bridge posts like raindrops, and suddenly the ropes came loose, and we fell into the chasm, all four of us screaming our heads off. (Well, except of course for the alicanto, who was, in fact, squawking its head off.) We swung through the chilly darkness and slammed into the cliff face on the other side. The impact nearly shook me off, but I managed to hold on—barely. Hunks of broken board tumbled past on my left while on my right the two super-size mukis, who had both lost their grip on the bridge, plunged, shrieking, into the abyss.

  I caught the glint of their golden breastplates as they dropped away, and then they were gone, swallowed up in darkness.

  Somewhere above me, I could hear Violet screaming as she clung to a plank. Below me, similar panicky shouts were coming from Saci and the alicanto as they did the same. I had just opened my mouth to yell We gotta climb! when the mukis did something that, basically, said it for me: They started shooting arrows at us.

  The sleek golden projectiles whistled through the air, screaming down around us and embedding themselves into the cliff face.

  The four of us began to climb like our lives depended on it, but not two seconds later one of the two ropes still holding the bridge up suddenly snapped, and we sagged another twenty or so feet down into the chasm—dangling by a thread now. Literally.

  “THIS THING’S ABOUT TO GO!” I shouted.

  Violet looked around desperately. “Grab the arrows!” she yelled down at us.

  There was no time to argue. I dove for the pair half buried in the rock to my left just as the bridge suddenly collapsed on my right.

  As my hands closed around the shafts and my full weight bore down, their sturdy metallic bodies groaned and bent, but they didn’t snap or come free. Thank you, muki craftsmanship! Even better, the arrows were jutting out all over the cliff face, which meant we’d have plenty of handholds all the way up. Still, the climb up was probably the most exhausting thing I’d ever done, and by the time I reached the top and pulled myself over the edge—with a little help from Violet, who had beaten me by a few seconds—I was as done as a turkey on Thanksgiving.

  I rolled over next to her and stared blankly up at the dark, crusty ceiling of the cave, wheezing, every single fiber of my being crying out in absolute pain. But, hey, at least I was still alive enough to hurt, right?

  Saci pulled himself over the edge a moment later, a half dozen or so golden boards stuffed down his jersey clanking back and forth. Surprisingly, the guy looked as fresh as a daisy, not even breathing hard. Guess he was used to this, though. In his line of “work,” someone was probably always after him. “DON’T JESS LIE THERE!” he yelled, hopping past us. “DIS NO PLACE FOR NAPPY TIME! GO, GO! RAPIDO!”

  We scrambled after him and soon found ourselves sprinting across some kind of land bridge, running through a glittering purple tunnel about as wide and high as a soccer stadium, with the alicanto leading the way, looking like a golden-brown light bulb scuttling around on a pair of chicken legs.

  “We did it!” Saci cried, waving one of his golden planks triumphantly over his head. “We actually gonna get out of dis place alive!”

  He held up a hand for a high five, and I laughed, about to give him one, when I heard a sound that sent the needle on my Uh-Oh Meter spinning in crazy circles: a deep, reverberating, earthshaking rumble, seemingly rising up through the ground itself.

  Then, from way down below in the pitch-dark blackness came another sound—a great gasping, sucking sound that seemed to snatch every last bit of warmth out of the air—and that was when something dark and gelatinous and absolutely massive surged out of the chasm! It slammed into the underside of the bridge with a deafening crack, crashing straight through the thick, calcified rock maybe ten yards ahead of us and gobbling up a huge section of it in its enormous, toothless maw.

  My heart stopped as I watched the thing stretch to its full height above us—and when I say full height I mean incredible height, impossible height, eye-bulging, mind-bogglingly ridiculous height. It looked like a cross between an earthworm and a skyscraper. The word “Minhocão” flashed through my mind, but in that moment, in my terror, only some distant part of my brain registered that that was exactly what this thing was—a Minhocão: a species of gigantic (and supposedly) amphibian earthworms native to South America. According to some old legend, one of these things had swallowed an entire city—the lost Incan city of Paititi!

  Before any of us could react, before any one of us could even scream, another earthworm exploded out of the pitch-dark chasm. Its massive mouth opened wide, opened directly below us, giving us an up-close-and-personal look down the rough, dark tunnel of a throat as it smashed through the bridge beneath our feet, gulping down everything in its path—including us.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  Getting swallowed alive by a Minhocão was one of those “once-in-a-lifetime experiences.” There really aren’t any words to describe the utter skin-crawling horror of being gobbled up by a segmented worm the size of a cruise ship. But if you’ve ever ridden a water slide where the water and slide are both made out of the driest, dustiest, grainiest earth on the planet, then you’d have a pretty good idea what it was like. We tumbled down a sandy, pitch-black tunnel, sand stinging our eyes and faces, and landed in a great fluffy pile of—you guessed it—more sand. In the bright glow of the alicanto’s feathers, I got a good look at the thing’s guts and it honestly reminded me of the inside of a giant sandcastle. Sandy floors, sandy walls, sloping sandy ceilings. I half expected to see a couple of little kids with plastic beach buckets running around building little castles of their own. Anyway, the bad news was that we now found ourselves sitting squarely in the digestiv
e track of some ginormous, earth-gobbling invertebrate. The good news? We hadn’t quite been digested yet.…

  “Dat wasn’t too bad,” Saci said as the creature’s insides started to rumble. A gush of sand cascaded down from overhead, pouring over him like a waterfall. Saci didn’t even try to avoid it. Just let it flow over him. Then he shook himself off. “At least we survived the worst part,” he said, sounding rather happy about it.

  And, naturally, we started to sink. Which meant that we hadn’t, in fact, survived the worst part.

  “You had to say that, didn’t you?” I grumbled, and the alicanto squawked like it agreed with me. Meanwhile, I could feel my feet being sucked down. Worse, the more I struggled, the faster I sank. Saci tried to hop out, almost made it, then started to sink faster than anyone.

  “Intestinal quicksand!” Violet screamed, yanking uselessly on her legs. She was sinking slower than I was but not by much.

  I tilted my head. “Is that even a thing?”

  V shrugged. “At the moment, it seems like the logical answer would be yes, don’t you think?”

  I wouldn’t know—the logical part of my brain had already shut down, thanks to my rising panic, and the frantic side of my brain was racing in a totally different direction, trying to come up with a plan to get us out of here. Problem was, how did you fight your way out of a hungry pit of quicksand inside an even hungrier monster also made out of sand when everything in that monster was made out of the same stupid, silty sand and there wasn’t anything you could grab on to or sling a rope around to pull yourself out with? I began to sink faster, the sand climbing past my knees, then my hips, and up to my belly button. I couldn’t believe we were going to die like this—suffocated to death in a quicksand pit in the stomach of a spineless, brainless, oversize lumbricina! It was so sad. And gross. And on so many different levels.…

  Behind me, Saci was flapping his arms like a wounded pigeon and yelling, “I feel like I sinking in a quicksand pit of despair!”

  “Uh, what’s he doing?” I asked Violet.

  “I think he’s trying to make a metaphor.”

  “But you can’t make a metaphor by literally describing what’s happening to you.…”

  “You explain it to him,” V said.

  Saci suddenly gripped my shoulders, his eyes huge, fingers digging painfully into my skin. “Bro, we sinking like skunks!” he cried. “And we gonna die like dem, too!”

  “Except skunks wouldn’t die like this,” I said without thinking. “They’re burrowers. They’d just burrow their way—”

  That was as far as I got before I knew what I had to do. Closing my eyes, I concentrated, letting everything else fade to a blur. I could hear Violet shouting my name, could hear Saci yelling at the bird, telling it to fly him out of here, could feel myself sinking deeper into the sand, the pressure pushing against my chest and back, squeezing the air from my lungs. But I blocked it all out. I pictured claws, long and pointed, pictured them as my own hands, imagined them extending from my fingertips, searched for the animal trapped inside me, groping for it like a light switch in a dark room. The sand rose up around the base of my throat, and the image of the skunk, the image of those curved, razor claws began to flicker, being choked out of my mind by a rising wave of panic.

  I can’t breathe, I realized. And just when I opened my mouth to scream—it happened.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  That familiar icy tingle down my spine. The animal inside me was waking up—had woken up. “Both of you, grab on to the bird,” I said, my eyes still closed, feeling my hands shrinking, my fingers widening to accommodate claws. “Do it now!”

  I heard Violet say, “Charlie, what?”

  “Just grab on to the alicanto and hold your breath. I’m gonna dig us out!” I began to struggle to make myself singk faster. And as the sand rose up and over my head, swallowing me completely, I felt for the nearest wall, sank my claws into it, and began to dig.

  At first it was slow and tough, my back and arms burning with the effort; apparently the oldest layers of dirt in this thing’s body, the layers closest to his gut, had hardened over the decades or centuries—or maybe even millennia. But the deeper I dug, the softer the dirt became, and soon tunneling was as easy as walking or swimming or even breathing.

  Around me the Minhocão began to shudder and shake like a building on the verge of collapse, and then I was through; I moved out of the way to let the fast-flowing river of sand escape until I felt the alicanto (along with Violet and Saci) come sliding past me, and then I grabbed on myself. The alicanto, realizing it was now free, began to flap its giant feathery wings. It caught a gust of air sweeping from below, and we suddenly shot upward, surging toward the pinprick of light way up in the distance.

  Violet and Saci were too terrified to do much more than scream, but I couldn’t help looking down to make sure the Minhocão wasn’t coming after us again. It wasn’t. But what I saw down there, what I saw rising out of the blackness, scared me more than any earthworm—

  Another castell!

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  This one was made out of huge gray bones, the bones of something ancient and prehistoric. It rose out of the dark pit like a skyscraper of death, glistening palely in the shine of the alicanto’s feathers. I frowned, a panicky feeling rising up in my stomach as I realized two things. First, one of the necromancer’s coffins had been buried down there. Second, Joanna had beaten us here by a while. How else would she have had time to build something so absolutely enormous?

  And how had she managed to even build that thing way down in that pit…?

  I stared at it—too long. Voices began to echo through my mind, whispers and groans, shrieks and moans. The world around me started to tilt. I felt myself falling. Instinctively my hands shot out, trying to grab on to something—anything—but my fingers closed on nothing but empty air. I had time to think, Ayúdame—help! (but not quite enough to shout it). Then I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder. It yanked, and suddenly the world was right again.

  “Don’ let go!” Saci shouted. And he didn’t need to tell me twice.

  I wrapped both arms around his waist and held on tight as the alicanto gave a shrieking, high-pitched cry and arrowed us out of the Purple Caves.

  As we burst into a world of blazing yellow sunshine, I heard Saci yell, “Sim, sim!” Then: “Ay, no! No, no, no! ”

  And we hit the ground with a bone-shattering jolt; the alicanto sprawled out, squawking; and Violet, Saci, and I went flying.

  I went end over end once… twice… then crashed into a clump of thorny bushes. It wasn’t a soft landing, but the bushes probably saved me from a few broken ribs.

  Wincing, I crawled out, yanking at a handful of tiny barbs as I pushed unsteadily to my feet.

  To my left, Saci was lying on his back on the grass, sort of half smiling, looking like he was seeing stars, watching them do the samba or something. His overalls were all rumpled and dirt streaked, but apart from that he seemed okay. He tried to sit up, couldn’t quite manage, muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Sufferin’ succotash,” and then sprawled back out.

  Violet and I looked at each other. “Did he just say what I thought he said?” I whispered.

  “Sounded like it.”

  “Do they even have Looney Toons in Brazil…?”

  V shrugged. “I’d hope so.”

  I thought about that for a sec. “Yeah, me too… For the children’s sake, you know?”

  Violet, grinning at me now, said, “Yeah, Charlie, for the children’s sake.”

  A moment later, Saci staggered awkwardly up and looked over at us. “You know, a witch once tol’ me, ‘Saci, you a true son of Brazil. Brazil love you! She herself gon’ keep you alive till the end of time. She never gon’ let you die.’ And dis witch the no-nonsense type. She no lie. So you two unnerstand the risk I taking for you, eh?”

  Yep, he’d definitely hit his head. Probably pretty hard, too. “You wouldn’t happ
en to know how to treat a concussion, would ya?” I said, turning to look at Violet, who was now staring back at the cave with a troubled look on her face. I frowned. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  “We’re going to have to go back down there,” she said. “That’s what.”

  “Back down where? Back into El Dorado? Why? I mean, why?”

  “Because we didn’t find Joanna or her clue. And that’s where she would’ve hidden it.”

  “You CRAZY?” Saci screamed. “We can’t go back in there! We never make it out alive! Not two times!”

  “He’s right, V. There’s no way…”

  “Now, dat’s the truth! Listen to Charlie, okay? Yes, he got terrible taste in necklaces, but in this case he know wass up.”

  “Wait, wait. Just—chill for a second!” Violet said, raising her hands. “It doesn’t make sense.…” She started pacing purposefully around, which I knew meant she was onto something. “Joanna’s brilliant, right? And she’s cunning. I mean, she’s led us this far, hasn’t she?”

  “What’s you point?”

  “My point is that she wouldn’t have hidden the clue somewhere we couldn’t find it. She would’ve put it someplace obvious.”

  “But El Dorado is huge,” I said. “It would take forever and a day to search it.” That is, in the highly unlikely event we didn’t get boiled first.