Enter the Core

by Peter Lerangis

  But Max was noticing that the wall itself was completely free of any markings, inside or outside the three-foot square.

  “Weird,” Alex said. “Why would someone carve a square into a wall and put nothing in it?”

  “A painting with invisible ink?” Brandon suggested.

  Kristin was feeling around the edge of the square. “Nothing hidden in these crevices . . .”

  Max stood close to the wall. “OK, we already found one really old-time mechanical contraption. We had to dig our fingers into the Vegvísir and turn it. Maybe we have to do the same with this.”

  “You can’t turn a square embedded in a wall!” Brandon said with a snicker. “There’s no place for it to go.” To demonstrate, he dug his fingers into the top crevice and pulled down. “See?”

  Pebbles dribbled out from the other crevices, showering the stone floor with a small cloud of dust.

  “I see that there’s something behind this.” Alex hip-checked Brandon to the side and dug her fingers into the left crevice. “OK, when you feel deep inside the crack, you can work your fingers under the square. It’s loose. I think it’s some kind of plate, with something behind it. I want you all to pull outward. Max, you help me pull on this side. Brandon and Kristin, you pull on the right side. And do not position yourself directly in front of it, because this thing is heavy and it will fall.”

  Brandon’s brow furrowed. “If we step aside we won’t get the right torque—”

  “No mansplaining—just do it!” Alex said. “On three!”

  They scrambled into place. Max felt inside the crevice. He felt under the edge of the square, jamming the pads of his fingers so that they pulled outward, into the chamber. It felt awkward.

  “One . . . two . . . three!” Alex cried out.

  As they pulled, more rock dribbled out from the edges of the square.

  “One more time!” Max said. “One . . . two . . . three!”

  Max gritted his teeth. His fingertips felt wet. He realized they were bleeding. But the square was moving again.

  And then it completely dislodged.

  All four of them jumped away from the wall as the square crashed to the cave floor. Max rolled away in a shower of rock.

  He sprang to his feet. The square was in pieces about three or four inches thick. It looked like someone had carefully carved the whole thing out of the wall and then plugged it back in.

  “Max . . . ?” Alex was saying. “Look.”

  He trained his flashlight on the wall behind the fallen square insert. A message stared back at them, carved across the top:

  “Carte,” Kristin said. “That’s what it says.”

  Alex nodded. “It means ‘map.’”

  “It’s like our Holy Grail,” Kristin said. “It’s our route to the center of the Earth. So to speak.”

  But Max was not cheering. He stepped closer to look at an intricate carved series of lines at the top.

  About halfway down, the wall was a beat-up mess of destroyed rock. It wasn’t a map. It was about one-third a map. The rest was rubble.

  “I think,” Max squeaked, “we pulled too hard.”

  “Brandon’s influence,” Alex said with a sigh. She looked toward Brandon, but all she saw was Kristin. “Um . . . Brandon?”

  Kristin spun around. There was nothing behind her on the platform except the right-hand part of the fork. “Is this a joke?” she called out. “Because if it is, it’s not funny!”

  Max spun his flashlight around. There was no place to hide on the round landing, and Brandon was nowhere to be seen.

  He moved toward the right-hand part of the fork and shone his flashlight into the dark tunnel. “Are you here?” he shouted. “You need to come back. On the wall we exposed? There’s part of a map. It says we’re supposed to go left!”

  After a few moments of silence, Alex came up behind Max and shouted Brandon’s name again. It echoed distantly with no answer.

  “I don’t think he’s pranking,” Alex said. “When he fell back from the wall, he must have slid in here.”

  As Max stepped into the tunnel, he felt a cool, wet breeze. “That’s weird.”

  “What’s weird?” Kristin asked.

  “I feel wind,” Max replied. “And moisture. Maybe there’s some underground river.”

  The tunnel was six or seven feet wide. Max could see how Brandon could have slid in. But it was no more than three feet high and sloped sharply downward. “If he went in, there’s nothing stopping him,” Max said softly.

  “I think it would be wisest if we tied the rope to your foot,” Kristin suggested.

  She had the knot tight before Max could reply. He was glad. It made him feel more secure as he crawled inside, examining the walls with his flashlight.

  He pressed against the walls with his free hand and both feet, for traction. About ten feet in, there was a sharp left turn. Max took it and then stopped short. The stone floor ended abruptly, falling away into . . . nothing.

  As he let out a gasp, Alex shouted, “What happened?”

  “Hold the rope tight!” Max called back. He flattened himself onto his belly and inched forward, peering over the edge of the abyss. His flashlight searched around in a wide circle, but the beam dissipated into nothingness. From below came the distant rush of water.

  No one could have survived a fall of that distance.

  “Is Brandon OK?” Kristin called out.

  Max swallowed deeply and replied, “I don’t think so.”

  23

  HUGGING was Max’s least favorite human activity, just below crying. But right now Alex was doing activity number two because she was sad. And he was doing activity number one because he knew it would make her feel better.

  Sometimes you had to.

  Max was sad too. He could not shake the smell of skunk. And Kristin was sitting against the wall with her knees pulled up around her face. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I should have forced him to stay behind. We could have waited behind the rock door and opened it for you when you got back.”

  “Maybe he’s OK . . .” Alex said. “You heard water, right, Max?”

  Max nodded. “Really far down, though. So if it was deep, he might have done a big belly flop and survived. But if was shallow, he probably cracked his skull open and died instantly.”

  Kristin grimaced. “I . . . I will choose optimism.”

  “It’s about all we can do,” Alex replied, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “Brandon can be crude, but he’s a wonderful pilot and a sweet man. And we owe him. He saved our lives by landing on the water. And he was the one who led us here.”

  “Let’s see if we can find him,” Max said, standing up. “Or his corpse, before it rots.”

  “Max!” Alex snapped.

  “Sorry.” Max stood. He flicked on his light and walked toward the carving on the wall.

  “The top part of this map is pretty clear,” Max said. “It’s the bottom that’s messed up. Worn away over the years. So . . . we definitely take the left part of the fork. Looks like it leads to another room. From there it gets . . . um, a little complicated.”

  “Obliterated is the word,” Kristin said. “This isn’t going to do us much good.”

  Max stood back, aiming his phone camera and snapping an image.

  “I think we need a rubbing too, in case the phone runs out of juice,” Kristin said, fishing around in her backpack.

  As she pulled out a big white sheet of paper and a thick charcoal pencil from her pack, Max looked over toward Alex. She was still staring wordlessly down the right-hand tunnel. “Hey,” Max said softly, “can you help us?”

  Alex turned to Max with a blank, red-eyed stare. He wanted to cheer her up, but he wasn’t sure how. It looked like something inside her had died.

  As Max pressed the top left corner of the paper tight against the wall, Alex held the upper right. With great care, Kristin traced the map’s upper section until she had a decent image. She rolled up the paper and stuffed it into he
r pack. Her eyes moistened as she looked at Alex. “We’ll find him,” she said.

  Alex nodded.

  “Go slow,” Max said. “Every path we’ve been on is slippery.”

  Taking the lead, Max shone his flashlight into the left-hand tunnel. It angled downward too, but it wasn’t round or square. It was shaped more like two parentheses joined at the top—maybe eight feet tall but no floor, really. Max had to plant each step on the V shape formed at the bottom. His ankles bowed outward with the effort. It helped to steady himself against the wall with his free hand.

  The path meandered downward in an irregular zigzag pattern. At times it inclined upward for long, long stretches, and Max feared they would never go any deeper, just cross from one end of Iceland to the other. Other times it switched back so it seemed they were returning to where they’d started. Max lost track of time, listening for the sound of water, hoping they would get to the place where Brandon had landed.

  Sweat was soon dripping from his brow and stinging his eyes. They were on a level section now. The seam in the rock had widened so they actually had some solid, flat stone to stand on. Just ahead of them, the tunnel branched off into a kind of oval-shaped chamber. “Can we take a break in there?” Kristin asked.

  “Twist my arm,” Max said.

  But as he entered the room and dropped his pack, he smelled mercaptan again. Anxiety. Big time. “Guys,” he said, “I’m nervous. What if we’re wrong about this whole route?”

  Kristin’s and Alex’s faces were beaded with sweat, and they were breathing hard. “We . . . have no choice . . .” Alex said. “It was . . . this path or . . . Brandon’s.”

  “Still . . .” Max said. “Something’s telling me this is a mistake. I smell gas. I think we’re going around in circles.”

  Kristin locked eyes with Max. “Anxiety and claustrophobia are normal for underground explorers,” she said, holding up a squarish metallic device. “I’ve been consulting a compass and depth measurements. We have descended about a thousand meters. That is nearly a half mile, a substantial depth. We are not spinning our wheels.” She smiled. “Besides, my uncle gave you the Vegvísir, and that means we can never be lost.”

  Max fingered the talisman around his neck. Holding it out, he examined the shapes. The nasty smell was dissipating, and he felt calmer. Not that he believed in magical properties. He didn’t. It was not scientific. But the design itself was comforting, like the blueprint of a cool maze you could run through and solve. He loved the beauty and complexity. The most truly magical thing about it was how Uncle Gunther had put the shape together from the vague lines they’d seen at the bottom of the Braille note.

  Lines.

  Not runes. Not talismans. Lines.

  There were other lines under the text of Jules Verne’s message. They were under the Vegvísir. Max tried to picture them in his mind.

  And as he did, they seemed weirdly familiar. He needed to see them again.

  As he reached into his pocket for his phone, Alex touched his arm. “Max . . .” she said. “Your talisman? I’m seeing it.”

  “Where?” Max said, scrolling to find the Braille message.

  “Around your neck,” Alex said. “I’m seeing it—and you. But I shouldn’t be. No one is shining a flashlight. Why is this?”

  Max looked up. Kristin held out her flashlight to show him it was turned off.

  His flashlight was off too, and so was Alex’s. Yet both of his friends were faintly visible, as if they had wandered into a room on a cloudy afternoon with the shades down.

  “What the—?” His eyes passed over Kristin’s and Alex’s shoulders to the walls beyond. They were glowing a faint brownish green. But it wasn’t a steady light. It moved and winked and pulsed softly, traveling from crag to crag like a mist, as if a billion tiny fireflies were flitting just over the surface.

  “Where is it coming from?” Alex said, glancing up to the ceiling. “Do you see some kind of fissure?”

  Above them, the roof’s ceiling seemed to be hung with a netting of moss and thick cobwebs. No skylight there.

  “Whoa, that’s weird,” Kristin said. “It’s like a sagging tent top, only made of cobwebs.”

  “I think the light is coming from the stone,” Max said. “It’s making its own.”

  Kristin rubbed her hand along the wall. When she turned her palm inward, her fingers glowed too. “Ha!” she exclaimed. “This is awesome! Nitrogen-based bioluminescence . . . Jules Verne wrote about this. Since his time, it’s been detected—but not like this!”

  Tracing his finger along the wall, Max wiped off moss and made a smiley face. It wasn’t until he turned full circle that the breath caught in his throat.

  Alex and Kristin were staring at the other end of the chamber. There, where he would have expected the path to continue, was a small opening not any bigger than a basketball. “This is crazy,” Alex murmured. “Verne couldn’t have made it through that.”

  Max pulled moved closer, pulling out his flashlight. Before he could flick it on, he felt something catch on his foot.

  He looked down just as a taut filament snapped in two.

  “Max!” Alex shouted.

  A clattering echoed from above. Kristin and Alex were gaping at the ceiling. As Max craned his neck upward, the thick, tentlike netting of cobwebs split wide open.

  First a white object dropped to the ground. A bone.

  Then a grinning white face burst through.

  As Alex let out a piercing shriek, Max dove to the ground. He covered his head as a cascade of bones and skulls rained on top of him.

  24

  HE expected the pain. But not the squeaking and chittering.

  Max rolled away onto a pile of bones. Above him, black shadows skittered across the chamber in the faint light. Tiny pairs of eyes winked into sight and disappeared, and little teeth flashed dully.

  “I hate bats!” Alex screamed. “I hate hate hate them!”

  Max cowered, feeling the rush of wings just touching the top of his hair. Above him the cloud thinned out and disappeared up into darkness, like smoke into a chimney.

  As he listened to their tiny screeches grow fainter, he glanced up at Alex.

  She looked like she was about to get sick. “That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” she said, staggering over to Max’s side.

  “Are you going to throw up on me?” Max said.

  “If I did, it couldn’t be worse than being beaned with a million bones,” Alex said. “Are you OK?”

  “I smell ammonia. That usually happens when someone is trying to trick me. Which actually just happened.” Max gestured toward the tiny opening. “The trap was set off by a trip wire. I didn’t see it.”

  “OK, but I smell ammonia too,” Alex said. “That’s bat poop. It really stinks.”

  The bones, scattered on the ground, were dim shapes in the phosphorescent light. But even in the dimness he could tell they were stained with black guano.

  His eyes watering with the acrid smell, he leaped up to move away. Kristin and Alex were both wrapping their bandannas around their faces. “This is awful,” Kristin said through a coughing jag. “Why did they do this?”

  “Well, bats eat just like we do,” Max explained. “But mostly mice, I think. So as the meat passes through the digestive system—”

  “Not why did the bats poop!” Kristin retorted. “Why did Jules Verne set this trap?”

  “There’s got to be a reason, or we are stuck here with nothing to do but go back.” Alex paced the floor, as far from the guano-stained bones as she could get. “Let’s think about this. I’m Jules Verne. I’m heading down to what I think is the center of the Earth. I probably have a team. I get there and head back—and along the way I leave clues. For some reason I didn’t succeed in my mission and someday I want a descendant to finish the job . . .”

  Max’s brain was churning. “Right! But maybe I would be scared that the wrong person would stumble into my mission. Some random person from Ice
land would wander down here and go, ‘Oh, look, clues!’ And maybe that person would be a good clue solver. Because Icelandic people are smart. So Verne figures he’ll make it harder than just secret messages and square plugs and futhark. He’ll use a booby trap!”

  “Makes sense to me,” Alex said.

  “You two are the weirdest people I have ever met.” Kristin sighed, looking up into the void. “But it does make some kind of twisted sense.”

  “Of course it does.” Max shone his flashlight upward—to the space that was opened by the collapsed ceiling. “Because that is our only pathway out of here.”

  Even in the faint light, Max could see Alex’s eyes grow as wide as baseballs. “You expect us to climb up into a . . . a bat cave?”

  “Bruce Wayne did it all the time,” Max said.

  “That’s not funny,” Alex shot back. “That is so not funny!”

  “I don’t hear the bats, do you?” Kristin said, her ear cocked toward the ceiling.

  In the silence, tiny hisses and whistling noises swirled in the darkness over their heads. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do!” Alex said.

  Kristin shook her head. “That’s pressurized air, squeezing through cracks in the rock. Bats don’t like company, especially human, and they can fit into small spaces. I’m betting they’ve made it through all kinds of crevices, and we won’t see them again.”

  “What happened to my brave, daring cousin?” Max asked.

  “Fine,” Alex said, looking upward. “OK. But how are we going to get up there?”

  Kristin switched on her flashlight and shone it straight up. The hole was easily wide enough to fit a person, but it was tough to see what was beyond it.

  Alex reached into her pack and took out a length of climbing rope. She tied the end into a noose and tossed it upward into the hole. “Let’s see if it catches on anything.”

  The rope fell back to the ground once . . . twice . . . three times. Max moved backward, shining his flashlight upward to get a different angle. His foot clattered against the edge of the bone pile, kicking the bones aside.