Charlie Hernández & the Castle of Bones

by Ryan Calejo

  La Calavera nodded, like that had impressed her. “You children are full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  “We try to be,” I said, grinning.

  She held out her hand toward me. “May I have my fingers back now?”

  There’s something you don’t hear every day. “Oh. Yeah…”

  There was a sick snapping, crackling sound as La Catrina reattached her fingers. Then she slipped all ten into the holes in the wall and turned her wrists like a key.

  At that same moment, a huge rumbling shook the chamber. The ground bucked and trembled beneath our feet, and all four of us staggered backward as the entire wall sank slowly and noisily into a wide slot in the ground.

  “Increíble,” I started to say, but my words fell away as I realized La Calavera had vanished.

  “Where’d she go?” Saci wondered out loud.

  I blinked around the dim hall. “No idea.”

  Beyond the wall was another chamber: a narrow peninsula of ground that seemed to run on forever; surrounding it on all sides, though not quite even with it, spread a vast ocean of ashy whiteness—some kind of powder, obviously.

  Violet was the first to muster her courage. “Let’s go,” she whispered, and wandered out into the wide-open chamber, walking along the crooked peninsula of cobblestone.

  After a moment, Saci and I followed, our footsteps clattering loudly on the stone, the chorus of whispering voices in my head growing louder and louder with every step.

  Their combined voices were almost painful now—a splitting headache that began in the center of my forehead and radiated outward like spreading fingers.

  Finally, we reached the end of the peninsula, where the ground fell away into the ocean of powdery white stuff, and Saci said, “Wha’s all this?”

  Violet had crouched to examine the powder. Now she looked up at me with panic clearly visible in the bottoms of her baby blues.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “What is that stuff? Flour?”

  “Try again,” she whispered, so I looked closer—and felt my chest go numb. Dios mío…

  It wasn’t flour—in fact, it wasn’t any kind of ground powder.

  They were bones. An ocean of bones…

  CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

  The first thought that went through my head was something like, What kind of freaked-out, awful place is this? The second was, And what the heck are we still doing here? There were a couple other thoughts in there too—mostly, Ugh, gross! and Run, dude, run! and What if I’m allergic to powdered bone? But that last one didn’t seem too likely.

  Although most of the bones that spread out around us as far as the eye could see were so ancient or damaged that, up close, they reminded me of baking flour, there were plenty that had more or less kept their original shapes. I could pick out shinbones and spines, fist-size skulls and rib bones that resembled empty birdcages; these jutted out of the surface of this ancient graveyard, creating almost a ripple effect. The bony white ocean seemed to stretch out forever, like an endless desert, and beyond it was only shadow.

  “Why are there so many bones here?” Violet asked.

  “This is the burial yard,” I said in a low voice. “This must be where the priests would discard the bones of the sacrificial victims. The altar must be out there somewhere… hidden in the cleft of a rock.” Or at least that was what some of the legends claimed.

  “So we just have to walk over the bones, then?”

  “I wouldn’t chance it,” Saci said, but Violet stuck her foot out over the edge anyway, testing to see if the bones would support her weight. Which they didn’t. Even the ones that looked somewhat intact crumbled under the slightest pressure.

  She backed away from the edge, saying, “They’re too old, too fragile. The whole thing is unstable. We’ll fall right through.”

  That, and who knew how deep this thing went? Which, by the way, was definitely not a question I wanted to learn the answer to. “There’s gotta be another way,” I started to say, but a sudden sharp pain in the middle of my forehead cut me off.

  It was the voices—they were chanting now, shouting in unison, and for the first time I thought I could actually understand what they were saying. And it sounded like: STEP OUT! STEP OUT! STEP OUT!

  Just like that I knew what I had to do. “That’s it…,” I breathed.

  Violet turned to look at me. “What is?”

  “We have to use a castell. They’re the pathway to the High Altar. It’s just like what the witch Zarate told me!” But that wasn’t all she’d told me. She’d also happened to mention that it had to be my feet that walked the path. Mine. It all made sense now. At least I hoped it did. Or else, in a few seconds, I would find out that I’d been dead wrong. And in the very literal sense of the phrase.

  Violet was shaking her head. “Charlie, I don’t see any castells.…”

  “Not yet you don’t,” I said, and with my heart now beating in my chest like un tambor, I did either the stupidest or bravest thing I’d done in a while: I closed my eyes, sucked in a deep, steadying breath, then stepped slowly—yes, very slowly indeed—out onto the ocean of bones, hoping it wouldn’t be the last step I ever took.

  For a split second I saw a terrible vision of me floundering around in there. Arms flailing, head turned up to take one last gasping breath before I disappeared below the surface. Basically drowning in the stuff. But that wasn’t what happened. Not even close.

  Instead, a heartbeat later, as my foot crunched down on bone, it somehow found solid bone—and even more surprising, the bones held! I let out a shaky breath, smiling back at Violet—and that was when something really strange happened: The ocean of bones began to vibrate as if the world’s largest amp, buried deep beneath them, had suddenly been turned on. A fine layer of bone dust rose high into the air, a shimmering white cloud in the semi-dark. Then the bones that were still intact began to interlock with each other, clicking together like puzzle pieces and forming a solid bony base beneath my foot, and directly above and in front of it. I risked another step. More bones joined the party. They flew out of the dusty ocean as if drawn by giant invisible magnets, combining with the base and rising up, up, up until they formed a towering castell that stretched toward the ceiling of the chamber, becoming lost in shadow. It happened so fast that for a second I had to wonder if it had really happened at all.

  “Okay, now dat was freaky,” Saci said.

  CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

  Standing there, staring up at this winding, seemingly never-ending stairway of bones, I had to keep pinching myself because part of my brain kept trying to deny the existence of what I was very clearly seeing. Sure, it hadn’t been here a few seconds ago, but now it was. Incredibly.

  The castell itself kind of reminded me of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, partly because it looked about as wide around and partly because it had that whole stepladder effect going on. There might’ve been as many as eight or nine hundred steps going almost straight up, though there was no way to know for sure because I couldn’t see the top of this thing.

  Violet nudged me on the arm, whispered, “C’mon…,” and the three of us started up the wide, makeshift staircase with the old bones that made up said staircase creaking and crunching under our sneakered feet. On the outside I was trying to play it all cool, strutting up the steps like, Climbing a set of giant bony stairs? Please, I go grave-robbing every Tuesday.… But on the inside I was screaming, Please don’t break, please don’t break, PLEASE DON’T BREAK!

  When we finally reached the top, the voices in my head (which had quieted a bit since I’d stepped out onto the bones) went completely silent, and we found ourselves standing in some huge, dimly lit, underground cavern. Except the word “huge” didn’t quite cut it, because this place was mind-bogglingly massive, about the size of a soccer stadium, with skull-paved floors and walls like jigsaw puzzles of longer, paler bones. The walls went twisting up to impossible heights, easily over nine hundred feet tall, and I could see niches and windows (and
even things that looked sort of like balconies) overlooking the main space. There were halls on the other side of those walls, I realized. I could see some through the niches. And through several of the windows I could just make out the faint greenish glow of torchlight… no, bruja light.

  “Da High Altar…,” Saci murmured, looking nervously around.

  Although most of the chamber sat in semi-darkness, there was enough light for me to see that he was exactly right: Rising out of a platform directly in front of us was a great stone altar. It looked just like the one we’d seen back in Lapa do Santo, only this one was at least twice as big and even more terrifying, because the rows of teeth that jutted out along its edge were bigger than any teeth I’d ever seen, each one probably as long as my arm. The room pulsed with magia—hummed with it. I could feel it creeping out of the floors between the cobbled bones like mist, urging me forward with invisible fingers, pushing me deeper, toward the altar.

  As we approached the center of the room, movement to my left caught my eye. A figure stepped out of the shadows, her eyes like glowing emeralds.

  “Joanna!” I shouted. Instantly, joy flooded my body, and I felt numb all over. I almost couldn’t believe it… seriously. After all we’d gone through, after all the fighting and close calls and clues, here she was. Finally. And she seemed to be in her right mind. “Oh my gosh… You have nooooo idea how glad we are to see you!” Understatement of my life.

  “Charlie, stay back,” she warned.

  “It’s okay. We know everything!”

  “We’re here to help you,” Violet explained.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I started to say—and then realized Joanna’s hands were bound, tied tightly with ropes the color of fresh vines. “Jo—what’s going on…?”

  Two pinpricks of harsh blue light shone out of the darkness behind her. They glowed steadily, growing larger and brighter until another figure emerged from the shadows: a man, old and hunchbacked, carrying a large bag—no, a man-purse.

  “Mr. Ovaprim?” Violet breathed, shocked. “What are you doing here?”

  But the old man didn’t answer; instead he hooked his fingers into the sides of his mouth and, in one grotesque, stomach-churning move, began to peel his face back like he was tearing open the neck of a T-shirt. His skin stretched and squeaked as he forced it up and over his head and then down his neck—it tore a little when he shrugged his shoulders through the narrow opening, and then it slipped smoothly down his body to pool at his feet like a heavy coat. Without his skin, Mr. Ovaprim didn’t look old anymore—he didn’t even look human! His head was shaped like a deer’s, but without ears or antlers, narrowing to a wide, lipless mouth choked with fangs. His body was a mass of ropy, sinewy muscle, which flexed and rippled with his every movement; his real skin must’ve been semitranslucent, somehow giving off a poisonous bluish glow, and there wasn’t an ounce of fat anywhere on his entire body. As we watched, he stepped easily out of the mass of skin, gathered it up in his clawed hands, then stuffed it into his giant purse.

  For almost a full minute I couldn’t breathe. I was so stunned by everything. I felt paralyzed. In fact, I had to work my jaw for probably half that minute before my mouth could finally form words. And even then they pretty much only stated the obvious. “You—you’re a vampire.…”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

  But he wasn’t just your garden-variety bloodsucker, either. His skin suit and the harsh blue light radiating from his entire body practically shouted his vampire type, and that, my friends, was an asema. A race of ancient Surinamese bloodsuckers, the oldest and most vicious of all vampires.

  I closed my eyes, feeling suddenly dizzy. And epically stupid. Man, how could I have not seen this coming…? All the signs had been right there. Staring me straight in my face. His ridiculously huge man-purse. His sagging, flabby skin that always made it look like he was wearing a flesh mask or skin suit. That eerie blue light we kept seeing whenever he was around. The way he’d compulsively picked up the rice I’d accidentally-on-purpose spilled on the train—which, by the way, was an obsessive behavior asemas were well known for.

  Pssh. And I hadn’t even gotten to the cherry on top of it all.…

  “The clog,” I said, meeting the vampire’s poisonous blue gaze. “That was yours.… You lost it chasing after Ronny, the cow herder whose cows you vamp’d in Portugal.”

  The asema gave me a slow smug nod, but I didn’t need it to know I was right. See, history might not have been my best subject (it was actually way down at the bottom of my best subjects list, along with math and home ec), but I’d paid enough attention in Mr. Henry’s third period to know that Suriname was once a Dutch colony. Had been from back in the mid-1600s to pretty recently. So it was really no surprise that an ancient Surinamese bloodsucker would probably have a soft spot for classic Dutch footwear.

  I squeezed my hands into fists.

  There had been clues of an asema everywhere. Right from the jump!

  If only I’d tried using just a bit of my gray matter.…

  “V, you were right,” I said. “That thing’s from Suriname. Just like you thought on the train!”

  “Suriname?” Violet made a confused face. Then something seemed to click behind her eyes, and she must’ve realized the Suriname-Dutch connection because she said, “No…”

  The vampire’s fangs gleamed wickedly in the torchlight as it smiled at us. A vicious sort of smile. If looks could kill, we’d already have our headstones carved.…

  “He’s the one who’s been working with Joanna,” I said, my voice hardly more than a whisper. “Slaughtering all those animals and building those… those awful castells.”

  “Not quite,” the asema replied rather casually, and now he didn’t sound at all like the old Mr. Ovaprim. The vampire’s voice was… weird. Impossibly deep yet velvety smooth, tinged with an odd Spanish accent. “While it is true that I have been the one constructing the castells, I have not, as you put it, been working with your beloved and pathetic queen. ¿No hay comunión entre la luz y la oscuridad o no has oído esto?”

  No fellowship between light and darkness? What did he mean? That Joanna was all good? That she hadn’t played a part in any of this? “I… I don’t understand.”

  The asema’s face twisted in a mocking grin. “Are you really so dense, pequeñito? You were fooled. ¡Engañado! All this time you believed you were following your queen’s clues you have been, in actuality, following mine I was the one who left the alicanto egg in the Provencia for you to discover; I planted your queen’s scarf in Lapa do Santo; I left her crown in the Warlock’s Cave in Chiloé; and it was I who spelled her butterfly so that it would lead you to la bruja Zarate—the final step of your preparation.”

  “Preparation for what?” I asked without thinking.

  “For sacrifice,” answered another voice—and now the witch Zarate herself stepped out from behind the vampire, her beautiful black-and-blue peacock waddling neatly at her side.

  “You—you’re on their side…?” I asked dazedly, but la bruja stayed silent.

  “You have been unwittingly walking the path of the sacrifice,” said the asema, letting out a hollow, haunting laugh. “Every place I led you, every place you saw a castell, was one of the secret locations where your beloved queen buried one of the four cursed coffins. You see, it was your queen who captured the necromancer nearly eight hundred years ago to the day, and it was your queen who thought it would be wise—in an effort to avoid him resurrecting himself a third time—to chop up his corpse, divide it among four coffins, and then scatter said coffins all over the world so as to never again be found. And to seal his fate forever—or so she thought—she bound each coffin with ancient elemental magia—four coffins, four bonds: wind, water, fire, and earth—ensuring that the necromancer would not be able to resurrect himself until those bonds had been broken and the breaker of those bonds offered as a sacrifice.” If possible, the asema’s grin widened even more; it reminded me of a shark. “Per
haps your queen thought it would be appropriate to make the bonds elemental, seeing as it was a Morphling—a girl a little older than you—who helped her capture the necromancer all those years ago and since only a Morphling would be capable of breaking all four. A Morphling. Just. Like. You.”

  Which explained why they needed me. Probably even why they had sent La Cuca to try to take me out and steal my powers—so they could break the bonds themselves. Things just kept getting better and better, didn’t they? Whatever. This wasn’t going to go down like that bloodsucking leech had planned. Not if I had anything to say about it. “Well, it sounds to me like you wasted a whole buncha time,” I said. “ ’Cause I’m definitely not gonna let you offer me as a sacrifice, and I’m not gonna break any of those bonds for you either.”

  “But don’t you understand, pequeñito? You already have.… Think back to Lapa do Santo, where you were tried by wind; to Chile, where you were tried by water; to Chiloé, by fire; and finally, to El Dorado, where you were tried by earth. At each castell, each secret burial site, you were tried and tested by an element, and by surviving it, you proved yourself a worthy sacrifice and broke the elemental bond placed on the coffin by your queen. Now all that is left is to sacrifice you upon that altar and El Hijo de la Tumba will rise once again.” While the vamp was still yapping away, three more figures melted out of the shadows: two of the anchimayen kids, Mario and Santi, along with El Nguruvilu, that fox-serpent creature we’d seen back in Chiloé. Perched on Santi’s shoulder was the dark-haired chonchón I’d talked to in the Sorcerer’s Cave. It winked at me with a bulging bloodshot eye.

  “Hold up,” Violet said, sounding shocked, angry. “You guys were in on this too?”

  Mario grinned. His bright eyes smoldered like lit fuses. “Perdona, chula, but we bad to the bone!” Then he and Santi burst out laughing, bumping fists, and glanced back over their shoulders. “Oh, and we brought some friends…,” Mario said.