The Shadow Mask

by Lin Oliver

  I didn’t like this — the air was beginning to feel close and stifling. I realized I had reached the lowest level of the cave. There were no more tunnels branching off from this chamber. At the far end, there was another giant stone disc.

  I stood and looked around this room that had once been the living room of another civilization. Why was it here? Who had built it? Had its inhabitants been evil tohs or Doh Tenangan’s slaves or alien Boskops? Was I really in the Land of the Dead?

  As I looked at the giant stone disc that guarded the final leg of my journey, I knew that behind that barrier, I’d find the truth.

  I couldn’t imagine how much the stone disc weighed, but there was no way I would be able to budge it with just my arms. I set my backpack and flashlight down and pushed with my whole body into it, but it didn’t move. I leaned my back against it and pushed until my muscles trembled and stung.

  “Come on you worthless rock, move!” I cried, and smacked it with my fist. “Get out of my way!”

  I growled, put my head down, and charged, lunging at it with my shoulder. My feet slid back against the wall, and I anchored them — bloody and bandaged as they were — trying to lift myself off the ground with my knees bent, ready to fly open like a spring. I screamed with all my power, in pain, in anger, in fear. With rage — no stone was going to stop me. I pushed and screamed until my world shook. I felt the rock budge and heard it creak on the floor and slide a few inches until it wobbled. Then, with a slow-motion eeriness, it tipped over and slammed onto the rocky ground with a crack so booming it vibrated my skull.

  Dust from the rock floor rose into the ray of light from my flashlight. A dark chamber awaited me. I grabbed my flashlight and went in.

  The room smelled of an ancient decay, musty and stale. My thin beam of light bounced around, illuminating snatches of rock walls and the ceilings. It was another chamber, much smaller than the one before it, and it was a dead end.

  As I shined my light toward the floor, I saw a thin curving form as wide as a stick, with a yellowish hue and a jagged edge. I moved the beam along it, until I realized it was emerging from a rib cage. The rib cage connected to a shattered skull. A skeleton! I waved the flashlight around and saw that skeletons covered the entire chamber in a complex lattice of bones three feet high. A shattered femur here, a mangled hand there, a fragment of a skull with its hollow eye cavity staring at me. They were human bones.

  It didn’t take an archeologist to know that I had stumbled onto a huge find, an amazing site that would require years of tedious digging, sorting, and cataloging, and that I should leave it exactly as it was to let the professionals do their work. But I had to know more. Stepping carefully through the web of bones, I inched my way to the complete skull nearest to me and examined it carefully.

  It was a human skull, certainly, but it was strange. For one thing, it seemed way too small. And its shape was weird, too. It had really wide teeth and a brow that was thick and ridged. Its forehead was nearly nonexistent. It was human, but not. It seemed old, very old. Primitive. Were these the subhumans of the chief’s story? I kept trying to find a place for these skulls in my brain, a name to call them. But they were completely unknown, and that was terrifying.

  I tiptoed toward another skull with half its forehead shattered, but as I bent to pick it up, I stepped on a sharp edge and fell back on the bones, dropping my flashlight. It landed in a shattered rib cage, and the beam of light shined to a point high up the far wall. As I followed its beam to a spot near the cave ceiling, I noticed dozens of little specks of light, glittering red and green and blue.

  I picked up the flashlight and shined it directly onto them. There, staring down at me from high up the cave wall, was the lost half of the conjoined-twin mask. It was solidly lodged into a crevice in the rocks.

  The mask watched over this room from upside down. Even so, I recognized it instantly. It matched Crane’s in almost every way. It had the same alexandrite teeth that reflected rainbow-colored rays of light. The same glowing wood and batlike ears. The same golden eyes and diamond pupils.

  I fell back against the bones and started to laugh — uncontrollable laughter, ringing off the walls.

  “I found it!” I screamed, and clapped my hands. “Hollis, I found it! You hear me, Hollis, I did it. I really did it. I’m going to bring them home, you’ll see. You’ll see!”

  The mask was at least ten feet off the ground, watching over the bones as if it really were Doh Tenangan, guardian of the Land of the Dead. I gazed at it and wondered how I could get it down. There were a few ledges and craggy holds where I might be able to climb and get within arms’ reach of it.

  “Now you’re mine, god of death. I own you,” I proclaimed to the silence.

  And when I would hold it in my hands, maybe I wouldn’t let it go. Maybe I would tell Crane that I hadn’t found it, and keep it for myself, then sell it for millions. After all, he’d stolen the other half from Dad. It had belonged to my dad, and now this one would belong to me.

  I’d have more than enough money to launch my own mission and find Mom and Dad, wherever they might be … even if they were beyond the grave. I had a gift, and I could use my gift to build a real Spiricom device, not like that phony one on the record. And if Trevor didn’t want to help me build it, I’d do it myself, even if it took years. If I ran out of money, I could use my power to find other precious artifacts … and sell them.

  I pushed a heap of the bones into a pile against the wall, put my Maglite in my pants pocket and the Sikh kirpan in my belt. Balancing on the pile, I climbed toward the mask, holding on to jagged pieces of rock. With one foot and one hand wedged into a thin seam in the rock, the other foot dangling seven feet above the ground, I leaned toward the mask and tried to grab it. It was just out of my reach.

  I slipped the kirpan from my belt, thinking I could pry the mask loose with the edge of the blade. I reached out with the dagger, but the mask was fixed solidly to its spot. It seemed to be jammed into a natural fissure in the rock layer. If I could drive the blade into the sliver between the mask and the rock wall, perhaps I could jimmy it out. I held the dagger with my chin pressed against my chest and put the flashlight in my mouth. This was going to be an awkward procedure, trying to jimmy the mask out while suspended in the air.

  I started in, using the beautiful Sikh kirpan as a crow-bar. My jaw was tight from holding the flashlight, and I was already feeling my leg begin to cramp up. Only a little tip of the blade had worked its way behind the mask so I jammed it in farther, making throaty grunting sounds. As I drove more of the knife in, I leaned farther over the cave floor, my left arm shaking, my calf seizing up in spasms.

  Come out already, you stupid jungle mask, I thought. I came halfway around the world for you. Left my kid brother out there alone, roaming the Land of the Dead, who knows where. I pushed away Trevor and Jeremy, my two best friends, and even the new friend I’d made, just for you. Because you called me here. You wanted me to find you. I’m going to hold you in my hands.

  I tightened my grip on the hilt of the dagger and pried hard, but the mask felt like it was never going to come loose. I was filled with rage, realizing all I had given up just to come to this moment of frustration and failure. I needed to focus. Hadn’t Singh told me it’s all in the Mind?

  I took several deep trembling breaths and rolled all my hate and rage into one convulsive spasm, screaming so hard my throat burned. Pivoting with everything I had, I felt the mask pop out, the dagger fly from my hand, and my feet slip from their hold. I was falling to the floor. I heard the blade and the flashlight hit the ground. With magnetic force, my hands grasped the mask as it tumbled through the darkness, and I held on with a dead man’s grip.

  I fell into an instant trance. The world melted away and I felt myself falling, falling through the center of the world, sinking away into nothing. Swallowed whole into a blackness that was infinitely deep. The darkness without shadow. The drums blared around me. I recognized them from that night i
n Crane’s office. Pulsing, the metal clangs echoed through the darkness, the souls of the dead toiling away for all eternity as they hammered their walls and built their tunnels. I felt the drumming worm its way inside me, burning away all of my memories, all sense of who I had once been until I was no longer a person, and I knew a silence worse than eternal toil. I wasn’t even an animal. There was no I … I was nothing.

  I opened my eyes just as I saw the dark floor approaching. I let go of the mask and broke my fall with my hand, feeling it bend backward as I crashed down on top of it until I heard a nauseating pop. A wave of sparks flared in my eyes — but this was no sound-bending trance, this was the real world again, and this was pain. A searing white-hot pain.

  I was in complete darkness — the flashlight had shattered. The pain in my hand and wrist was immense, so sharp I couldn’t even breathe. I tried to hold my hand in front of my face to see the damage. But I had no sight, just pain and blackness and the sounds of my screaming.

  I felt tears streaming down my cheeks.

  “Help me!” I cried. “Please someone help me!”

  But there was no one to hear me but Doh Tenangan, the silent mask of death.

  I lay on my back and cried my eyes out. All I felt was pain and confusion and fear. Maybe if I kept crying someone from up above would hear me and help. Or maybe one of the Boskops would materialize. No, even in my pain I knew there were no immortal Boskops beneath the earth … only bones.

  I concentrated on the pain and tried to use it to call out to Mr. Singh, so he’d bilocate down here and rescue me. But he didn’t hear me; there was no one on the receiving end. I yelled for help until my throat was on fire. No one up there would ever hear me. In that complete darkness, I hardly believed there was a world up there. I hardly even believed I was real.

  I was absolutely alone.

  When the pain became a step below excruciating, I got to my knees and groveled around the bone-filled floor for my possessions, holding my injured arm motionless against my chest. I found my flashlight, but it was worthless. The glass had shattered, and the batteries had popped out. I found the kirpan and the mask and put them in my backpack, along with the remnants of my flashlight.

  Hearing nothing but my trembling breathing, I groped my way out of the bone room. Every time I even grazed my hand along the wall, the pain was so intense that I would shriek and hear my gravelly voice come echoing back to me. My hand was throbbing. It felt as if it were the size of my head. At least two of my fingers were broken, maybe more. I’d done real damage.

  I found my way to the room with the fire pits, then squeezed through the small arching tunnel, hugging the wall, until I entered one of the hub rooms. I leaned back against one of the smooth walls and held my wrist close to my chest. I could find no trace of my gravel trail, and I knew I’d never get out of this underground maze. I couldn’t even see. It was all so unreal.

  How did I get here? My thoughts raced to that morning when Hollis came bursting into my room, and the terrible news story that had started everything. The split between Hollis and me, that fifty-cent piece from Crane, the emergence of a darker form of my sound-bending power. I felt a surge of anger — at Crane, at my parents, at Mr. Dickerson and those punk kids at school, at everyone trying to push me around. It had all overwhelmed me until I found a shred of hope in the note I channeled from the Belgian diplomat. And from that moment, I became driven. So driven that I’d signed a shady deal with Crane, traveled halfway across the world to find the mask … and that had led me here, to this moment — to pain, to darkness, to isolation.

  I’d been certain that finding this mask would make everything better, but now that I had it in my possession, I felt nothing but emptiness. I’d lost everything to hold it. I’d signed away my life to Crane, to someone who stole and bribed and did anything to get what he wanted. I’d put my faith in Mr. Singh, hoping he could guide me through the mysteries, but he was a complete fraud. Nothing that reincarnation of crazy Marie had whispered was true. What was real? Who had I become?

  I was the person who’d signed that shady midnight deal with Crane, the signature on that blank page next to my blood. Just to chase after nothing. I was like that Belgian diplomat Bertrand Veirhelst, hollow as a drum. I’d brought a blank journal to Borneo, so when I re-created my dad’s trip down the Kayan River, I could record every thought I had, just like him. But I’d been so busy reading crazy Marie’s book of lies that I hadn’t written a single word. I was a big nothing.

  I touched my backpack and felt the mask inside my bag, and I couldn’t help laughing. I’d searched so hard for that stupid thing, when I’d hardly even looked for that blue Audograph disc from my dad with my naming ceremony on it. That unbelievably special record that opened my ears and told me who I really was, I’d just glanced around my room for it like it was a missing dollar bill. It was special beyond meaning. There was only one record like it, the only one in the entire universe.

  Two days before, I’d made a real connection with a real friend. With this amazingly sweet person, this lonely, weird girl, and together we’d watched the stars and had the whole universe to ourselves. I’d met someone who really saw me, who I could be completely myself with. Someone who I even told about that figure of light, my true sound-bender self. The figure who appeared in that dark dream and told me:

  In the darkness there is more than enough light, but it is hidden deep within Mother Night.

  As the words echoed over and over in my mind I longed to relive that night under the stars. I laid down on my back, closed my eyes, and imagined she were right next to me. The stars glittered on my inner eyelids, vivid and alive. And I knew then that my real guide was that figure of light — he was the light in the darkness. I promised myself that once I got back to Brooklyn, if I got back to Brooklyn, I would tear through Crane’s warehouse until I found that blue disc. If it wasn’t in the warehouse, then I’d search everywhere for it. I’d never stop searching for it.

  I could see the light now. The universe was so real in my imagination that when I opened my eyes, starlike pinpricks floated above me, like a tiny patch of night sky out of the corner of my eye.

  I sat upright and looked again. It wasn’t imaginary. There really was an opening in the surface of the ceiling, and through it, I could see a small square of faint starlight. I got up and stood directly underneath it.

  I could touch it. It was a thin shaft that stretched all the way up to the surface, and I smelled the air wafting down. It was a ventilation shaft. It stretched fifty feet up, and from underneath it, I had a window to the night sky.

  Even in the Land of the Dead, I could still see the stars.

  I held my hand under the shaft to check the damage, and to my surprise, it cast a faint shadow on the cave floor. I fished out my flashlight, hoping that I could see well enough now to put it back together, but when I opened my bag, the ray of starlight fell on the mask. I took it out. Its alexandrite teeth changed from red to green to blue to indigo with the slightest movement. The colors sparkled and lit the cave. All it took was just the tiniest sliver of starlight to illuminate the world again.

  Unafraid, I touched the mask, letting my fingers fall on the jeweled teeth. Immediately, I was whisked away to the space. But it wasn’t the same trance I’d had while I fell. Somehow, miraculously, I felt at peace. I heard the tide and felt myself drifting. Everything was okay. I heard the drums again, but not the pulsing drums of terror. I heard the sounds in a new light. The sounds came soft and steady, each beat bringing with it the sound of chimes and a splash of alexandrite color, reds and blues and indigoes as vivid as the stars I saw that night with Diana. Each drum would sound, followed by another one, and they would echo and reverberate. But there was a melody in it, like blacksmiths beating on different metals, or like hammers striking rock walls in a cave. And I could almost swear that what I heard was a type of language, communication.

  A terrible shooting pain in my wrist pulled me from my trance — the mask ha
d grazed my broken hand. I screamed but I was okay. It was just pain. It meant that I was alive, that I could feel. I’d let myself be led down here because I’d been so afraid of the pain. I would have done anything to drive that pain away, the knowledge that our parents were gone. But I knew that I could handle it now. Hollis and I would deal with it together.

  I no longer believed anything Mr. Singh had told me, but if there were ever a time when normal communication was blocked and I could send a psychic message, this was it. I sent one to Diana. The message was simple: thank you.

  My vision was beginning to adjust. I could see shapes in the starlight.

  As I gazed through the ventilation shaft at the patch of stars, I could see just the slightest little halo of the moon’s light. Then, I heard a rumbling overhead, the vibrations of people walking on the surface near me.

  And then I heard the unmistakable voices of Dr. Reed and Diana.

  “Mom, I think Leo’s around here,” Diana said softly. “He is! I can feel it.”

  They’d come!

  Keep it down, Diana,” Dr. Reed said. “Crane’s people are all over here.”

  I called up sharply through the ventilation shaft. “Diana. Hey, Diana. Dr. Reed. Hey. Can you hear me?”

  But they didn’t hear me, and from their overhead rumblings, I knew they were about to pass by. I took out my Sikh blade and banged it against the inside of the shaft.

  Bing … Bing … Bing … Bing …

  It made a sound similar to the hammering sounds I’d heard in my sound-bending trance. Maybe what I had heard was those people communicating, using the sound of their swinging hammers to talk to one another across the underground city? Maybe, but I needed to communicate now. I wished I knew some Morse code.