by Dan Jolley
Lily had nailed it when she said this whole situation was weird.
And what had been lying there in the box, right underneath the Golden Gates map, but a tiny, ancient-looking crimson book that described a bonding ritual—a ritual that would “tie together the members of a circle in this world, the last world, and all worlds in between.” Its cover had the image of a curious-looking knot made of four loops.
“Don’t you see?” Brett had waved the map around, his eyes huge, standing there in Uncle Steve’s office. He pointed to a spot on the glistening silk sheet where a small square of a room was tucked among the warren of overlapping tunnels. The same quadruple-looped knot engraved on the cover of the crimson book also appeared here, sewn in intertwined threads of several colors. “It’s perfect! We find this secret room, we do this ritual thing, and that way we’ll be friends forever!”
Kaz had stood in the office doorway, keeping lookout as usual. “Are you nuts? You want us to go crawling around under the city based on that? You’ll get us all killed! Or, like, covered in poop.”
Brett had flashed a brilliant grin at Lily and Gabe, and clapped a hand on Kaz’s shoulder. “We’ll steer clear of the sewage, Kaz. Tell you what. Let’s just take a look. If we can find these secret tunnels, we’ll do the friendship ritual so Gabe knows he’ll never be alone no matter what random place his uncle moves him to. If we can’t, I’ll let it go. Pretend like it never happened. Gabe? What do you say?”
Gabe’s mouth had stretched into a massive grin. “You guys are the best. I say let’s do it.”
And so, on a crisp late-autumn night, the four of them trudged through a dank, foul-smelling sewer tunnel, traveling deeper and deeper beneath the city.
“There!” Brett practically jumped up and down, the beam of his flashlight wobbling all over a buckled brick wall in front of them. “That’s it! That’s the entrance to the secret tunnels!” He whirled on Kaz. “In your face!” Kaz took a step back, startled, so Brett softened his tone and raised a hand. “High five?”
Kaz slapped Brett’s hand warily. “Well, you definitely got us somewhere. I’m just not seeing exactly where. That’s a dead end. Right? Plus it looks like it might collapse at any second.”
Brett looked hard at the bricks. “Hmm.” He pulled out the map again, flicking his light from the wall to the map and back. “It’s . . . huh. I swear, guys, this is supposed to be it.”
“How about we take a break?” Lily played her own flashlight along the floor of the tunnel.. “It’s dry here, at least.”
Gabe took off his own knapsack and sat cross-legged on the floor of the tunnel. Kaz settled down next to him and fished a plastic bag containing a thermos and four cups out of his knapsack. “Tea, guys?”
Gabe grinned. Of course Kaz had brought tea. His mom packed him a little thermos of it to bring everywhere. Gabe had spent a lot of time with Kaz’s family, and thinking of them reminded him all over again how much he was going to miss living here. The Smiths had a whole flock of kids, so their house sounded like a Chuck E. Cheese’s. Gabe envied that. His own house was so quiet it could pass for a library. If he wasn’t lecturing at the university, Uncle Steve was holed up in his office, and the house felt so hushed that Gabe was conscious of every step taken, every cabinet door closed.
“I’ll take some,” Gabe said, holding out his hand.
“You got it.” Kaz grinned and handed him a cup, then a small squeeze bottle of maple syrup. Gabe had always loved sweetening things with maple syrup, way more than with sugar or honey. How would he ever make new friends who’d get to know him this well?
“Your maple syrup thing is weird, Gabe,” Brett muttered, reaching out to grab his own cup.
“Weird syrup to go along with a weird map and weird tunnels and weird rituals and weird secret rooms,” Lily said as she pulled the silk map closer to better see it. “We’re just a bunch of weirdos.”
Brett chuckled. Kaz and Gabe shrugged in unison.
Gabe took a bite out of a granola bar he’d been carrying in his pocket. He tried to pass it to Lily, but she didn’t notice. She was too busy staring down at the strange silk map and then around the dark passageway they were in. Her forehead was scrunched up, like it was all some big puzzle to figure out. It was kind of a puzzle, Gabe supposed. A sort of treasure hunt, even if it only led to some empty room way under the city. But watching Lily trying to piece it together, you’d think a chest of gold doubloons was waiting for them down here.
Though she was supposedly only five minutes older than Brett, Gabe thought Lily was about a century more mature than her twin. Not that she was bossy or boring or anything like that, but where Brett was a loud jokester, Lily was responsible and considerate. Brett was the type to be so busy chattering and goofing off that he’d walk right off a cliff if Lily wasn’t always right behind him, watching out for him.
Brett let out a loud belch that echoed down the hall. Kaz jumped in surprise at the noise, then broke into a spasm of giggles.
Gabe grinned and shook his head. Sometimes it was hard to believe that Brett and Lily were siblings, much less twins. But when he turned back to Lily, delight had lit up her smile. Suddenly, the resemblance between the Hernandezes was impossible to miss.
“Lily?” Gabe asked. “What’s up?”
She knocked back her tea, stood, and went to the buckled brick wall. The beam of her flashlight danced up and down along one section. “Guys! Look at this!”
Everyone jumped up to join her. “See?” She pointed. “We were looking at it from the wrong angle. It’s like an optical illusion.”
Gabe narrowed his eyes. “What’re you talking about? That’s just a gap in the bricks.”
Without explaining further, Lily stuck her whole arm into what Gabe had mistaken for a slender crevice. “It’s totally a doorway! And there’s empty space behind it! I could tell there was something not quite right about how the shadows were falling.”
“Yes!” Brett crowed. “Way to go, Lil! You found it!”
“That looks like earthquake damage, guys.” Kaz sounded anxious and skeptical, as usual. “This is San Francisco. There’ve been, like, a billion.”
Gabe examined the opening. “No, look. This was deliberate. See? Somebody wanted to hide this doorway.”
Kaz huffed. “Okay, then, next question: What kind of maniac builds a secret doorway in the wall of a sewer?”
Lily made a scornful sound, sort of like pffft, and before anyone could do anything about it, she wriggled through the gap. Brett whooped and squirmed through after her. Kaz heaved a great, long-suffering sigh. “Creepy friendship ritual it is.”
But Gabe saw a gleam in his friend’s eye. Old, secret doorways? This was too good. Even Kaz the Skeptic was hooked.
Gabe pushed and pulled his way through the narrow opening after Kaz. He and his friends were standing in a tunnel that was, without question, way older than the sewers they’d been walking through. The floor, walls, and ceiling had all been carved from huge blocks of stone. The corridor stretched away into complete, utter darkness.
A chill ran up Gabe’s spine, but Brett forged ahead. “Let’s go!”
Gabe followed his friends, idly wondering if they should be leaving a trail of bread crumbs or something. He imagined getting lost in these narrow, dank tunnels, and shuddered.
Then Gabe noticed a dark heap in the tunnel ahead of them. “Hey, Brett—what’s that up there?”
Brett aimed his light at the thing lying on the floor of the tunnel. It looked like a bunch of brown sticks. And maybe . . . what was that? An overturned bowl?
Gabe’s stomach clenched as he realized what he was looking at. “Uh . . . guys? Those are bones.”
Lily squinted at them. “What, like a dog died down here?”
Gabe shook his head. “Not a dog. See that skull? Those are human.”
Kaz jumped about three feet in the air. “A skeleton!” Everyone else hung back, but Kaz advanced on it, his voice getting higher and shriller the cl
oser he got. “A human skeleton! A real human skeleton! Guys, this is a real dead human person skeleton!”
Gabe heard Lily’s inhaler whoosh somewhere in the dark. Gabe was about to ask her if she was okay, but before he could, he heard her comforting Kaz. “It’s okay. Kaz, calm down.”
Kaz turned to the rest of them. His eyes were as big as silver dollars in the beam of the flashlights. “But . . . but . . . but that makes this a crime scene! Doesn’t it? We have to tell the police! Right?”
Brett walked over and crouched down, examining the bones. “Dude, this guy’s been dead for a long time. I don’t think someone’s waiting for him at home. We can tell the police when we get aboveground, but let’s keep going, okay?” He straightened up and faced them. “Okay?”
Gabe stared into the dark, gaping eyes of the skull. That was a person. He swallowed hard. “Okay.”
Lily nodded, and then finally Kaz did, too.
This is some field trip.
Gabe gave the bones a wide berth as he walked past them.
After a minute or two Brett broke the silence. “I heard these tunnels were used to get corpses out of Chinatown during a plague outbreak,” Brett said. “Maybe that’s where the skeleton came from. Pretty cool, huh?”
Kaz made a brief choking sound. “Not so cool for the dead guy, man.”
“Seriously, Brett,” Lily said. “Show some respect. Remember that was somebody’s mom or dad . . . or brother.”
Brett speared Lily with a frosty glance. “And you need to remember you’re my sister, not my mother.”
Gabe hung at the back of the line and didn’t say anything. He tried to tread lightly whenever the twins started talking about family stuff. Their older brother, Charlie, had died in a boating accident the summer before. Gabe knew Brett blamed himself, even though nobody else did. Gabe could hardly imagine what it’d be like to have a sibling in the first place, much less how horrible it’d be to lose one.
The tunnel went through a number of twists and turns, and for a while even dropped down into a cramped little passageway they had to crawl through. Finally the tunnel opened up again, and they stepped out into a huge, circular chamber, too broad for their flashlight beams to reach the opposite wall.
Brett let out a low whistle as he walked slowly toward the center of the room, light swinging this way and that. Behind him, barely louder than a whisper, Lily asked, “What is this place?”
Though he spoke at a normal volume, Brett’s voice boomed and rolled all around them as he said, “What is it? It’s perfect, that’s what it is! This is the secret room!”
Gabe slowly took it all in. The floor had been divided into four quadrants. Someone had carved huge, ornate glyphs into all four sections. One of them had no stone laid over it, exposing bare, packed earth. On the opposite side of the chamber, water—from an underground spring?—flowed in an arc-shaped trough from one opening in the wall to another. A huge, empty metal bowl on a three-legged stand rested on its side off to Gabe’s left. He’d seen drawings of something similar in one of Uncle Steve’s books. That’s a brazier. You pile red-hot coals in it. From his right, a cold breeze came and went like the breath of a wheezing giant.
Gabe swung his light up and spotted a big, square opening in the ceiling. Air vent. That drew his eyes along a supporting stone archway. There were four of them, and they met in the center of the chamber, directly above a huge stone slab that had been broken into several pieces. Small holes had been drilled into the slab’s corners, and rust stains marred the stone around them. Gabe shivered. He had the same question as Lily: What is this place?
But still . . .
Gabe glanced around at his friends.
Whatever it was, this place felt . . . right. The chills down his back became a thrill of excitement.
Gabe hopped up and sat on one of the larger pieces of the broken slab. “C’mon, guys.” He patted the slab. “Let’s do this!”
Kaz came over to him. “This is Brett’s show,” he said softly. “What’s got you so excited all of a sudden?”
Gabe shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean . . . if we’re doing a friendship ritual, I don’t think we’re going to find a better place than this.”
He felt even surer of his words with each second he spent looking around the chamber. Almost all of the ridiculous occult mumbo jumbo Uncle Steve studied involved the four elements. Earth, air, fire, and water. And wasn’t that exactly what this room must represent? The bare earth, the running stream in the trough, the brazier meant to be filled with burning coals, the fresh-air vent in the ceiling. Gabe’s grin got bigger. “Come on, Brett! Break out the stuff already!”
Brett and Lily clambered up onto the stone. Kaz followed, shaking his head but not saying anything. Once they’d arranged themselves in a rough circle, Brett pulled out a small penknife and a tiny glass with Wild Horse Saloon engraved on the side.
Gabe raised an eyebrow. “Wild Horse Saloon? Really?”
Brett put the glass on a more or less level spot between them. “The book didn’t say what kind of receptacle. It just said ‘small receptacle.’ Slow your roll.” Lily elbowed Brett in the ribs, but he ignored her as he opened the penknife. “Pure silver,” he said. “Our granddad got this for his retirement, so this’ll be our little secret, okay? Now, we ready?”
Gabe looked around at everyone. If this means never losing you guys as friends, you better believe I’m ready, even if it is just pretend. He held out his thumb. “Everybody still cool with the elements we picked? Nobody wants to switch?”
“You sure you don’t wanna trade, Brett?” Lily asked.
Considering how he’d seen his older brother drown, it had been a big surprise to everyone when Brett told them he wanted to invoke water.
“Nah,” Brett said. “Someone’s gotta be water, lame as it is. Just hold still, Mr. Human Torch.” Brett nicked Gabe’s thumb with the penknife, deeply enough to make three or four drops of blood come to the surface of the skin. Gabe let them fall into the glass. Lily held out her hand, and Kaz slowly followed her lead. Seconds later their blood mingled with Gabe’s. Brett didn’t hesitate when his turn came. Once he added his own blood to the glass, he opened the little crimson book and read aloud.
“In honor of the four elements, we commend ourselves to thee. I name myself Water.”
Lily closed her eyes. “I name myself Air.”
Kaz gave Brett and Lily a look that said We’re really doing this, huh? He sighed. “I name myself Earth.”
Gabe swallowed hard. “I name myself Fire.”
Brett looked at the book again. “Let this joined circle never be torn asunder. Let it endure in this world, the last world, and all the worlds between.”
A fresh burst of air howled in through the ceiling vent, making the water in the trough froth for a second. Kaz gasped and put his hands down on the rock beneath them as if he’d felt it move. Gabe wasn’t paying much attention to any of that, because all of a sudden his thumb hurt really bad. More than just hurt—it burned.
But the wind from the vent died out almost as soon as it had begun, and the pain in Gabe’s thumb eased. He looked around at his friends, grateful that they’d agreed to bond with each other, even if it was just in a silly, mumbo jumbo kind of way.
“Well?” Kaz peered at Gabe. “Feel any different?”
Gabe grinned and lightly punched Kaz in the shoulder. “Nope. I still feel like a guy with the three best friends in the world.”
“Okay.” Brett jumped down off the stone. “Enough with the Hallmark moment! I’m starving! Let’s find some . . . Is it breakfast time yet? I want some waffles.”
Lily followed her brother. “You and your stomach.”
“A man’s gotta eat,” Brett said, patting his flat belly. He put his arm around Gabe’s shoulders. “Come on. Let’s find some grub.”
Gabe smiled and joked and laughed with his friends as they made their way out of the chamber. But no words spoken or rituals undertaken could change the fa
ct that his time with Brett, Lily, and Kaz was almost over, and it dragged on his heart like a lead weight.
2
Trudging down the sidewalk alone, Gabe felt sadder and more isolated than ever. His friends had already left, Kaz returning to his big, loud, chaotic, wonderful family, and the Hernandez twins to their grandmother, who was watching them while their parents were out of town. Abuelita, they called her. Gabe could practically hear the plump, white-haired older lady playfully chiding Brett and Lily about not speaking Spanish any better than they did, at the same time plying them with cookies and brownies and flan.
Uncle Steve knew how to cook, sort of, but everything he put in front of Gabe was unrelentingly healthy, and definitely didn’t taste like love.
Gabe arrived at the steep front steps that led up to their row house. All the lights were on despite it being—he checked his watch—a quarter to one in the morning. That meant Uncle Steve was awake, alert, and definitely aware that Gabe was out way past his bedtime.
He tried to open and close the door as quietly as possible, but Uncle Steve had the hearing of a German shepherd. No sooner had the latch clicked back into place than the sound of his uncle’s uneven footsteps thumped toward him from the kitchen.
Gabe swallowed hard and did his best to prepare for the inevitable onslaught. Only then did the sight in front of him finally register. Uncle Steve had been busy: the hallway that ran the length of the house’s bottom floor was lined on both sides with tightly sealed cardboard boxes. Each of them had been labeled in his uncle’s sharp, tidy block handwriting, as if a giant typewriter had thunked words onto the cardboard. LIVING ROOM, one pile read. KITCHEN, the one behind it was labeled. It was happening right in front of him: his whole life uprooted again, his uncle ready to drag him away from everything he’d come to love in San Francisco and drop him in Philadelphia.