by Ryan Calejo
“Feels like we’re moving at a slight incline,” Violet said, struggling to sit up.
I squinted into the dark. “I can’t see a thing. . . .”
“Me neither.” She gripped the sides of the cart and gave them a firm shake. “At least this thing feels pretty sturdy. Safe.”
The wheels on the cart rattled and groaned as we began to pick up speed.
“I think we have very different definitions of the word ‘safe,’ ” I said.
“How about we try to stay positive here, Charlie?”
“I am positive. Positive this was a really, really bad idea.”
And as if to make my point, the cart took a sharp corner, picking up even more speed—and we suddenly dropped into nothingness.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I’d like to say that I bravely stared down certain death without so much as a blink or a squeak of fear. But the truth was that when the mine cart made that first awful plunge, leaving my stomach floating somewhere above us, the first thing I did was squeeze my eyes shut so hard I felt it all the way down to my toes. Then Violet and I threw our arms around each other and began to kick and scream like a couple of terrified newborns as the cart twisted and turned and abruptly shot back up again. Hot air rolled over us in a vapory wave. My insides shriveled like pork rinds. Still gaining speed, we rocketed through a narrow section of tunnel, and the world became a blur of shapes and shadows. I was pretty sure Violet was trying to tell me something, but I could barely make out her voice over the rattling thunder of the cart on the tracks.
“We have to do something!” I yelled as I hunkered down as best I could.
Violet glared at me. “Yes, the lever!” she shouted, pointing back over my head. “Pull it already!”
I turned. Saw a skinny metal bar poking out over the rear of the cart.
“On it.” I struggled to my knees, fighting the g-forces while the cart rattled and jumped.
“Hurry, Charlie!”
Leaning hard against the back of the mine cart—well, more like being sucked into it—I wrapped my fingers around the rusted hunk of metal—and pulled. My arms shook, the skin on my palms burned, but the bar didn’t give. Not even an inch.
“It’s not budging!” I shouted, glancing back at Violet. “Help me!”
Struggling over to me on her hands and knees like a baby learning to crawl, she gripped the bar with both hands. “On three,” she said. “One . . . two . . . THREE!”
We pulled. The shaft bent. Gears shuddered and strained. And then—
SNAP!
We were holding the rusty old bar in our hands.
For a moment we looked at each other in disbelief. Then, in perfect unison: “AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”
The cart hurtled forward, wheels screaming, sparks shooting up in a wide spray as we thundered furiously along the tracks. A hard left, and I slammed into Violet. A sharp right, and a mass of stalactites zoomed by close enough to stir my hair. Close enough for me to actually smell the minerals.
“What’s your plan B?” I shrieked as we veered through another tight passageway.
“The lever was my plan B. And my plan A and C and D, too!”
There was a rusty screech of springs, and we flew into another hard left. The tracks rumbled. The cart vibrated and bucked like a massage chair gone bonkers. I felt my lunch rise into my throat and clapped both hands over my mouth to avoid giving Violet a face full of our school’s gluten-free mac and cheese as we plunged into another drop, this one so steep I literally felt myself float for a full second.
When we hit the bottom, the cart lunged right, and I smacked my head on the sidewall with a thump. A galaxy of bright lights burst across my eyes. The world spun. I opened my mouth to shout something like, We have to do something! But Violet was already on it: She had a coil of thick rope in one hand and our half of the broken brake lever in the other.
“Where’d you find the rope?” I shouted.
“I was sitting on it!”
I watched her fasten one end to the brake lever. Then she tied the other end to the rear of the cart and looked up at me.
“The plan is, I toss this bar behind us, it catches in the tracks, and if the rope is strong enough, it should slow us down. You know, like an anchor.”
“That’s brilliant!”
Violet shouted, “We’ll see,” then tossed her makeshift anchor onto the tracks. It hit the ground with a flash of sparks, dragging behind us for several yards. Bouncing once, twice, three times—
And then miraculously catching on the rails!
“It worked!” I shouted triumphantly. “It actually worked!”
But half a second later, the rope pulled taut and then snapped like a shoelace.
My heart instantly plummeted to my toes. “I don’t suppose you have a plan E?”
Violet’s gaze drifted past me. “No time,” she said.
And now I saw what she meant: Twenty yards up ahead, just over a hump of rocky earth, the tracks fell away into empty space.
I barely had time to whisper, “Dios mío,” before the cart came to a sudden screeching stop and tipped forward, launching us out over the pitch-dark chasm.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I’d never plummeted to my death before—obviously—but I was pretty sure about three things. One, we’d fall for a while, screaming and flailing and hoping for something soft and squishy to break our fall. Two, there wouldn’t be anything soft or squishy to break our fall. And three, when we finally did stop, that would be the end of the road for us. Like, forever. (That’s the one I was most sure about, in fact.) So you can imagine my surprise when we hit the ground less than a second later, landing face-first on the dusty cavern floor, and neither one of us went splat! I suddenly realized two more things—facts, this time. One, we weren’t going to die (not right this second, anyway). And two—which was important, because it was the whole reason for number one—we hadn’t been launched out over a gaping pit . . . just a really, really dark area of the cave.
Somewhere to my left, I heard a low, grumbling moan and turned my aching neck to see Violet pushing unsteadily to her knees.
“You okay?” she asked. In the darkness, I could just barely make out her face: Her cheeks and nose were coated in a thick layer of brownish dirt, making it look like she’d taken a big ol’ cinnamon pancake to the face. I almost burst out laughing, but then realized I probably didn’t look any different.
I sat up, dusting myself off. My neck ached. My knees were throbbing. But, hey, at least I could still move them. “Could’ve been worse . . .”
“You can say that again.”
Looking around, I saw we were sitting in the middle of a huge, semicircular cave surrounded by masses of dripping stalactite columns. Ahead of us was the opening to a narrow tunnel, carved right into the rock. It glowed with pale, flickering light. For a second I thought it was moonlight, but that would’ve been impossible—we were too far down.
“Looks like there’s only one way out,” I said, pointing.
Violet blew a strand of hair out of her face and nodded. “C’mon.”
• • •
Just like in the entrance, the tunnel walls were hung with torches. These, however, burned with a strange green flame that was almost black. Violet guessed the combustible ends must’ve been dipped in boric acid. That, she said, or there had to be high levels of copper sulfate in the air. Violet was in Pre-AP Chemistry, so I didn’t argue. Either way, the greenish fire was awesome (if not a little freaky). But even more awesome—at least to me—were the walls themselves. Carved with beautiful geometric patterns of triangles, zigzags, circles, and squares, they looked like something straight out of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico. In fact, the stepped-fret design that ran along the base in thick vertical bands looked exactly like one of the display pieces that had been on the cover of the brochure my mom had brought back from her trip to the Mitla ruins site in southern Mexico (aka the Place of the Dead) last year.
Mes
merized, I ran my hand along the intricate carvings. “Magnífico, huh . . . ?” I reached up to trace my thumb along one of the triangles, then quickly yanked my hand away as a gnarly black tarantula came scuttling out of a hole in the middle of it.
“Looks like you found another friend,” Violet said with a grin. “I’ve already seen a bunch. The entire place is crawling with them. . . .”
“In that case, let’s keep moving.”
Every few yards, the tunnel curved and split off in different directions. Violet always chose middle, and I just followed, because she looked like she knew where she was going. (And because I’d never been any good at multiple-choice tests.)
About thirty yards in, we began to hear a weird tink, tink, tink sound.
“Sounds like dripping,” Violet said. She walked out ahead of me and peered into a soccer-ball-size hole in the wall. A moment later, she whirled around, her eyes huge as a startled deer’s. “Charlie, get over here!” she whisper-shouted.
I hurried over. “What is it?”
“Look into the hole!” she said, stepping back.
“Huh?”
“Just do it!” she hissed.
So I did—and felt my eyes bug. Whoa . . .
Below us, about five or six hundred feet straight down, was a hollowed-out cavern the size of the Grand Canyon. A vast network of platforms and bridges spanned it, crisscrossing like the web of a crazy spider. On the platforms, hundreds of tiny little men in miners’ uniforms swung hammers, worked crosscut saws, and fit hinges to rectangular wooden boxes twice their size.
Some of the men were brawny with long white beards and no necks. Others had hairy, reddish faces and feet so big they waddled when they walked. The brawny ones hacked away at minerals embedded in the cave walls, while the hairy-faced ones collected the fragments into buckets and then passed the buckets along a complicated system of pulleys to other hairy-faced dudes, who stood over giant bubbling cauldrons, forging the minerals into what looked like carpenter nails. As I watched, one of the dwarfs—a brawny, bearded one—placed his hairy-knuckled hand on the wall of the cave, and thick yellow veins suddenly appeared in the stone, spreading out from around his tiny palm like the crooked branches of some enormous tree. At first I didn’t understand what I’d just witnessed. But then it clicked: The little guy had somehow managed to turn plain old rock into gold ore just by touching it! I counted nine separate bands, each one as thick as a giraffe’s neck and at least twice as long.
“Santo cielo,” I breathed. “Those things must be mukis!”
Violet, squeezing in next to me, whispered, “What are they called?”
“Mukis. They’re like . . . like, cave dwarfs. I heard stories about them when I was little. They help miners sometimes—make pacts with them. They supposedly live in mines all over Central America.”
“So, they’re, like, good guys?”
“Not always. They also sometimes kill miners and cause cave-ins.” I blinked. Then I rubbed my eyes, hardly believing what I was seeing. “But . . .”
Violet was shaking her head. “But what?”
“I thought those were just myths my grandmother used to tell me . . . stories to scare little kids from wandering into mines alone. How can they actually exist?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised what actually exists,” said a familiar voice at our backs.
I whirled around.
And what I saw made me doubt my own sanity.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was the groundskeeper . . . only he wasn’t really a groundskeeper. In fact, he wasn’t even human! In the dim green glow of the torchlight, he looked like nothing more than a shovel-wielding skeleton. His nose was gone; his eyes were two black holes. Through the sheer fabric of his jumpsuit (which he now wore unbuttoned), I could see his pointy shoulder blades, the hollow birdcage of his ribs, every bump and curve of his bony spine. And even though my brain refused to believe what it was seeing, I still knew exactly what he was, what it was—a calaca. Yet another creature my abuela had told me stories about!
I vividly remembered the stories, too—tales of walking, talking skeletons. Sometimes they were friendly, jovial spirits who would, on special occasions, sneak out of the underworld to celebrate with the living—like on the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Other times they were grim reapers sent to fetch those whose time on earth was up.
But those were just stories! a panicky voice in my head shouted. And yet there was one right in front of me, standing literally less than two feet away, its bony fleshless face gleaming bright white in the flickering torchlight.
“Hola, muchachos,” the calaca said as it stepped forward.
“AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!” Violet and I threw our arms around each other. We started to backpedal and bumped painfully against the rocky wall of the cave.
We’re trapped! I realized, and my legs instantly turned to jelly.
“Charlie, please tell me you are seeing this . . . ,” Violet said, her grip tightening on my arm until it hurt.
“If you mean the walking skeleton—er, calaca—then it’s a definite yes!”
“Ah, muy bien,” the skeleton dude said, sounding impressed. “I see you know your Hispanic mythology. That’s very good. It shows you have a curious mind, and that’s important for a boy your age. Unfortunately, I still have to kill you now that you’ve trespassed into my home. . . .” And he raised the shovel, preparing to whack us.
In a panic, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the map and all my loose change. It seemed ridiculous, I know; I mean, how are you supposed to fight a shovel-wielding maniac skeleton with an old map and a couple of quarters? But I had a plan. See, I remembered my abuela telling me a tale of a shrewd teenage drifter, an orphan named Juancho Ramirez, who’d cheated death, which in his fable had been personified by a calaca. According to the tale, Juancho had learned at a young age that calacas were traders by nature, so he spent his life collecting little trinkets he thought he could use to bargain for his life when one eventually came for him. In my abuela’s story, Juancho successfully traded his way to become the oldest living man in Mexico’s history. I just hoped that part of the story was as real as the rest of it seemed to be.
“¡Un intercambio!” I shouted, holding out a pair of quarters in my shaking hands. “Two shiny new quarters in exchange for our lives!”
Violet looked at me like I’d lost it (not that I could blame her; I probably would’ve looked at me that way too), but my ridiculous plan actually worked! Or at least it seemed to, because the calaca’s shovel froze in midair. His dark, empty gaze narrowed on my hand, and he whispered, “Niño, where did you come by such a thing . . . ?” I realized he wasn’t looking at the quarters; he was looking at my map.
When his bony fingers stretched toward it, I pulled it back an inch, just out of his reach. “It was in a locket that belonged to my mother,” I said.
The calaca went dead silent (no pun intended) for several moments. Then a long, pale finger snapped out in my direction. “Listen here, muchacho, I will make a trade with you. But not for those worthless coins. For that map. You hand it over, and I’ll spare your lives. ¿Cómo suena eso?” He looked between us. “¿Sí? Sounds good?”
“Only if you agree to answer a few questions as well,” Violet said, surprising me. It was incredible; the girl was obviously terrified—I mean, I could literally hear her heart trying to beat its way out of her chest—but she’d somehow managed to keep her wits about her.
“Deal,” the calaca agreed, holding one misshapen hand out toward me.
And did I think this undead skeleton could be trusted? Heck no! But I didn’t really see another way out of our current situation. Fortunately, as soon as I handed over the map, Mr. Tall, White, and Bony dropped the shovel.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
“Madre mía,” the calaca murmured. His voice shook with both awe and fear. “I cannot believe any of these still exist. . . .” He raised the map reverently before him,
as if holding a sacred object. “I thought the last had been destroyed in the great fire of Oaxaca.”
“Is that map, like, special or something?” I asked without thinking.
“No!” the skeleton suddenly snapped. “It’s FORBIDDEN!” For a terrifying second, I thought he was going to pick up the shovel again and go all Whac-A-Mole on our heads—but he didn’t. Instead, he turned his attention back to the map and began to speak slowly, quietly, as if talking to himself. “Once ninety-nine existed, each the hand-sketched work of the most ancient among us, La Calavera Catrina herself. As the head of our order, she took it upon herself to map out the way to the world between worlds so as to create a reliable record for our kin. But soon these maps found their way outside our circle, and those who should not have been able to navigate the deep places of the earth now could. Estos mapas have caused us a great deal of trouble—a great deal—which is why in the six hundredth year La Sociedad ordered their immediate collection and destruction. I—I had no idea any had survived. . . .”
The calaca trailed off for a moment, lost in memories. Then he seemed to blink out of it as he lifted his hollow eyes to mine. “Pues, a bargain’s a bargain,” he said, his nimble fingers quickly slipping the map into his shirt pocket. “What are your questions . . . ?”
“First thing,” Violet said. “What. The heck. Are you?”
The skeleton’s glossy white jaw curved up to grin at her as he stooped to pick up his shovel. “Ask your little boyfriend. He seems to know.”
“But I—I don’t get it. . . . You didn’t look anything like this when we ran into you up in the cemetery. . . .”
He looked at Violet like she was missing a couple of screws. “Claro que no. It’s the torchlight; it reveals my true form. As do the headlights on cars, for some reason. Though this second one I cannot explain. . . .”
“But you’re not real!” I blurted out. “You’re just a Central American myth!” I wasn’t sure why I was yelling it; I guess I just figured if I said it loud enough maybe the universe would wake up, realize I was right, and fix itself—in other words, send this crazy skeleton dude back to where he belonged: the pages of a Hispanic fairy tale!