We Are Not Eaten by Yaks (21 page)

Celia made a little twirling gesture with her finger next to her forehead and raised her eyebrows at her brother. He understood. That was the universal sign for “this-kid-is-a-total-nut.”

The young monk walked up to the ferocious statue of the demon king and pressed on the statue's third eye. With a creaking sound, a doorway opened behind the statue, revealing a long dark tunnel.

“The third eye is always more useful than the other two,” the boy said, and smiled.

“More tunnels,” Oliver groaned.

“You should go quickly,” the boy said. “The fake lama has a head start, and your entire family remains in grave danger.”

“But how did you—”

“There is no time now.” The boy handed Oliver the flashlight and started to push the twins into the tunnel. “Good luck. And don't forget your bag.” He gave the backpack, which now held only a wet
TV Guide
and some soggy cheese puffs, to Celia.

“What's your name?” Oliver called back as the boy shoved Celia in behind Oliver and began to close the door.

“Pehar Gylapo,” he answered, and he sealed the children into the dark.

“Pehar Ghee-what?” Oliver called through the door.

“I'm sure we'll meet again,” the boy shouted, his voice muffled by the heavy stone. Celia pushed on it, but it didn't move. She listened and couldn't hear a thing through it.

“He's locked us in,” she said.

Now there was only one way for the twins to go and neither of them knew where it led.

“
SERIOUSLY?
”
OLIVER SAID
as he began to follow the tunnel, which sloped upward and was only wide enough to go single file and only tall enough for them to sort of stand. Even in the dim light of the flashlight, Oliver could see cobwebs and the bones of strange animals strewn about.

“Why is it always tunnels? Couldn't, just one time, somebody say, ‘Hey, Oliver and Celia, this way, take this well-lit and nicely carpeted hallway to the comfortable waiting room where you can wait patiently for your problems to be solved while watching TV? Huh? Noooo . . . it's always dark tunnel this and dark tunnel that. Or climb over this thing and fall down that thing.”

Celia just let her brother complain while he crept along. He was, as usual, in front and groping his way forward as the slope got steeper and steeper. Complaining was his way of staying calm. Her way to stay calm was to stay angry. And right now, she was very angry.

She was angry at her mother for leaving them, for never even sending a message and then for sending a secret weird message that they might not even have been able to decode. She was angry at their father for dragging them along and then falling into a trap, for trusting Lama Norbu and Choden Thordup and not recognizing them as fakes. She was angry at Sir Edmund and at Lama Norbu, who was really Frank Pfeffer, and at the Poison Witches, for obvious reasons. She wanted nothing more than to get out of this tunnel, get her father back, and show them all that you don't mess with the Navel Twins. When this was over she would demand cable, but not
just
cable. She wanted all of the premium channels with movies and the shows that let people use curse words.

“There's nothing about adventuring that says it has to be filled with darkness and cobwebs.” Oliver was still complaining to himself. “Agent Zero travels first-class on airplanes and always stays clean when he's having an adventure. There's never any bat poop. Why do we have to deal with bat poop? That's the grossest poop there is. Except maybe lizard poop. I hope we don't have to deal with lizard poop.”

“Oliver?” Celia interrupted.

“What?”

“Don't you think we should focus on, you know, trying to figure out what's going on? Like, who was that Pehar Guhwhatever kid? And where are we going? And what happens when we get there?”

“Right,” Oliver said.

“So . . . ummm . . . any ideas?”

“About what?”

“Any of it? The action-adventure stuff is your thing.”

“You like
Agent Zero
too. I've seen you watch it.”

“I like Corey Brandt, who
plays
Agent Zero. That's different. And I liked him better in
Sunset High
.”

“Can we not talk about vampires while we're crawling in a dark tunnel, please?”

“Okay. So, if this were
Agent Zero,
what happens now?”

“Well, this is the impossible-escape-from-disaster part right before the big showdown with the bad guy.”

“All right, but which bad guy? We've got the witches and Sir Edmund and Frank Pfeffer and the guys from the airplane and even that yeti. Who do we showdown with?”

Oliver stopped and Celia bumped into him from behind again.

“Ouch, why do you always do that?” she said.

“I don't know.”

“Well, don't stop like that anymore.”

“No, I mean, I don't know who we showdown with. There aren't usually this many bad guys.”

“Well, there aren't usually ancient tablets and coded notes that are really film strips with Mom's handwriting on them and fake monks with fake guns and yaks giving you messages in dreams. So maybe we shouldn't go by what
usually
happens.”

“Okay, then,” Oliver snapped back at her. “So what doesn't
usually
happen?”

“Well, we don't
usually
end up wandering around in dark tunnels. We don't
usually
discover ancient artifacts, and we don't
usually
save the day. So, I think we should keep walking and do all three of those things.”

Oliver couldn't argue. He turned and kept walking. They climbed up through the tunnel for hours. Sometimes it was flat and straight; other times it was almost like climbing a ladder.

But how were they supposed to save the day? Oliver wondered. Why did their mom go through all that effort to hide a clue in a projector that only Oliver and Celia would recognize? And what were they supposed to find if there were no tablets? How would they save their father from the witches? Why wasn't he the one out here trying to rescue them?

Their father probably wouldn't have even figured that projector out. He would have been too busy trying to read the images on the walls. Anytime there was something to read, he always picked that over watching. He didn't think you could learn anything by watching stuff. Their mother had gone off to look for the Lost Library, so they guessed she probably felt the same way. But what if they were wrong about her? What if she wanted her kids to find her? What if she had been guiding them all along?

Celia was thinking about the picture too. She was thinking about the key on her mother's necklace, the same as on the tunnel walls. It was also on the rings that the air marshal and the man in the shiny suit on the airplane were wearing. It was the same symbol that had been in the fake version of
Love at 30,000 Feet.
What was their mom trying to tell them? Why would she have the same symbol as the henchmen on the plane?

As time passed the temperature started to drop. The air got colder and colder and they started to see their breath hanging in front of them. The sweat on their skin started to freeze. They began to shiver.

“I think . . . we're really . . . high up,” Oliver panted. “I think . . . we must . . . be near . . . the top . . . of a mountain. . . . On the inside.”

“Don't . . . talk,” Celia said. “Too . . . tired. Can't . . . take . . . another . . . step.”

“Good,” Oliver said. “Because we're out of steps.”

Celia looked up and saw that they had reached the end of the tunnel. There was a door in front of them with a big metal handle. The door was painted with an image of the same crazy threeeyed demon whose statue they'd watched like a television down in the pit. Right in the center of its snarling demon face was that symbol again, their mother's jeweled key and the Greek words they recognized by now:
Mega biblion, mega kakon
. Big books, big evil.

Oliver swallowed hard.

“Ready?” he asked his sister as he reached up and put his hand on the door.

“Not really,” she said.

“Shangri-La could be on the other side of this door,” said Oliver.

“So could the witches,” answered Celia.

“Mom could be on the other side of this door.”

“So could Sir Edmund.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Or Frank Pfeffer.”

“Right, but—”

“Or the yeti.”

“Okay, I get it!” Oliver said. “But we've still got to open it!”

Celia exhaled slowly and nodded to Oliver. He pushed the door open.

At first there was a blinding white light and a blast of cold air. Snow swirled into the tunnel and blocked their view. When the blinding whiteness cleared, the twins found themselves staring directly at the shining black horns and glowing green eyes of an enormous yak.

“KHRUUUMPF,”
the yak grunted.

“It's the talking yak from my dream!” Oliver shouted once he overcame his surprise.

“What's he saying?” Celia asked.

“ ‘Khruuumpf,' ” Oliver said.

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know.”

“Is ‘khruuumpf' the sound a yak makes?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, ‘khruuumpf' isn't very helpful.”

“I think he might only talk in dreams.”

“Well, we don't have time for you to go sleep.”

“I think we're supposed to ride him.”

“Did he say that?”

“No.” Oliver pointed. “But he's wearing a saddle.”

“I can't remember,” Celia said. “Do yaks eat people?”

“I hope not,” Oliver answered.

“Khruuumpf,” said the yak.

On the yak's back was a large saddle made of thick brightly colored carpet and leather straps. With the cold dry air blasting into the tunnel and the snow swirling around, the blanket saddle looked very inviting, even though it smelled absolutely terrible. One thing that the twins quickly learned about yaks is that they do not smell good, even the mystical green-eyed ones.

“Yaaaaarrr,” the yak said, which could have been a happy noise or could have been gas.

“We have to trust the yak.” Oliver held his nose and climbed on, then hoisted his sister up.

The yak turned and began walking away from the small entrance to the tunnel and up the rocky slopes of the mountain. Celia grabbed one of the blankets and wrapped it around Oliver. Then she wrapped another around herself. Sitting on the yak was surprisingly comfortable and the yak moved along the icy and rocky ground much more easily than the twins could have on foot.

“I hope he knows where he's going,” Celia said.

“He hasn't been wrong so far,” Oliver answered as he patted the yak's thick brown fur.

“Hey Oliver,” Celia said, her voice sounding relaxed for the first time in two days. “Look at that.”

Oliver turned and saw a distant mountain with a line of ants marching around it. When he looked closer, he saw that they weren't ants, but people who looked tiny next to the giant mountain, hundreds of people walking single file. Some of them held flags and banners; some of them held tall poles with spinning prayer wheels at the top. Some of them held nothing but packs on their backs, and every few steps, they would kneel on the ground and then bend down and touch their foreheads to the cold earth. A few people even stretched out like they were lying down for a nap. Then they stood up again, took a few more steps and lay down again. When the wind changed directions they could hear the crowd murmuring and chanting, though they couldn't make out any words.