The Lost Tribes, page 23
Safe enough — for now.
Serise ran to the opposite end of the room, pressed her back against the wall and breathed through her mouth. “No more heights, okay guys?”
Everyone nodded.
“Now what?” asked Carlos. “It’s another dead-end.”
April jerked her hand away from Grace, and pointed to crystalline rocks in the floor. She pushed away debris and uncovered part of a medallion inlaid with marble, quartz and other gemstones. “Look what I found!”
Ben stared at the floor partly in relief and partly with suspicion. This medallion looked as if it had gone unused for hundreds of years. Did it even work at all?
Aris sniffed at the device as April brushed rocks and dirt from the surface. Each pad made a sound.
Horrified, Ben shoved April out of the way. “Don’t touch anything until we figure out where to go next.” All of his assumptions had been wrong up to now — so was this medallion an escape route? Or just another dead-end?
“It’s okay,” April said. “This thing is just like the one in the game but the notes sound a lot nicer.” She hummed “Ode to Joy” while she tapped out a tune on the medallion.
“April!”
“I’m not hurting anything! Look, I can play an arpeggio on this thing.”
Before Ben could stop her, April stood in the center of the medallion and continued tapping the pads with her sneakers. “See! Just like my piano lessons.” Aris weaved in and out of her legs and seemed to be urging her on.
“April! No!”
A flash of blue-white light shot into the air. In an instant, April and Aris were gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Arpeggio
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ben rushed to the medallion. “I’m going in after her.” He tapped several of the stones with his shoe. The light did not return.
“Where’s the compass?” asked Carlos.
Ben threw his pack on the ground, searched through the pockets, then touched himself all over. “Arrggh! It’s in April’s pack!”
“What’s it doing there?” yelled Serise.
“I put it there so I could hold your hand. I still don’t have any feeling in my fingers after your death grip!” Ben shook them at her to reinforce the point.
“Okay,” Carlos said. “We just have to punch in the same code. What was that song she was playing?”
“An arpeggio,” Ben said.
“Can’t you remember it?” asked Grace. “Seemed straight forward.”
Ben was exasperated. He was sick to death of patterns and clues and riddles and adventures. A few hours ago he had been tucked in his warm, safe and totally stationary bed. Now he was operating on reserve power.
He struggled to remember the sequence and thought about the irritating plinking of April’s fingers hitting the keys on the family piano. There was something Mr. Windom had tried to teach him once. “Notes of a chord played consecutively.”
That didn’t help. Ben didn’t remember any chords.
“We can turn this into a math formula,” Carlos said. “When April pushed the pads in order, nothing happened. So try touching each one so we can mark the location of each sound. Then we can try to recreate the pattern.”
Ben was skeptical, but also desperate to get to his sister back. April was all that he had left. And if his parents were still alive, they’d be expecting him to arrive with April intact. So losing her to some other dimension wasn’t an option.
He walked in a circle, touching each pad with his foot.
The notes grew progressively higher until he reached the starting point.
“The dialer’s always looked like a clock to me,” Serise said, the fear draining from her voice.
She was right. There were twelve notes and twelve symbols equally spaced around the circumference of the medallion. It did look like a clock.
“Okay,” Ben said, “then let’s assign a number to each one.” He pointed to position furthest from the cave entrance. “Let’s call that twelve o’clock. Now, does anyone remember what tones they heard when April pushed them?”
“Wasn’t the twelve,” Grace said. “It was lower than that.”
Ben tapped the next few notes.
“Stop. That’s the one.”
Ben’s foot was on three o’clock. “Okay, what’s next?”
“It sounded like a scale,” Grace said. “She moved clockwise and then counter clockwise.”
“Try skipping a note,” Carlos said.
Ben moved to five o’clock.
“That’s it!” Grace said. “Keep going. Skip again. I don’t think the next note is one step up, I remember it being higher.”
Ben stepped to seven o-clock.
“Maybe it’s based on prime numbers,” Carlos said.
“Prime?” asked Serise.
“Divisible by the numbers one and itself,” Carlos said.
“I know what prime numbers are! It was a rhetorical question,” Serise spat.
“Try the next step,” Grace said.
Ben stepped to eight o’clock. “How about this?”
“You really are tone deaf,” Carlos said. “Even I could tell that sound was way off.”
“Okay, back to the drawing board.” Ben retraced his steps — three, five, seven. “We’ve been skipping two each time, let’s keep up with that pattern.”
“Too easy,” Carlos said. “But what do we have to lose except our lives? What if we dial the wrong code and we beam to the center of the earth?”
“We’re there already,” Grace said.
“Well, wherever I go, it better be to my sister.” Ben tried nine. No luck. Bile rose in his empty stomach. He didn’t want to end up in some weird place or worse — inside a rock. Something caught his eye. He crouched and brushed the dirt away with his hand. The Eye of Ra and the same hieroglyphic symbols from the museum. He didn’t need a translator to tell him what it meant.
“Her who? Hey, Serise. Try doing that thing with your watch.”
A light shot out of the bezel and bounced off the cave walls. The surface glowed. So did four of the twelve medallion crystals: the third, fifth, seventh and tenth positions.
“Guess that blows your prime number theory,” Ben said.
“No kidding, Detective Webster” said Carlos. “What was your first clue?”
Ben ignored him. He stepped on each glowing crystal in turn. Nothing happened.
“Palindrome,” shrieked Serise. “It’s a palindrome.”
“Good grief! Don’t start with that stuff again,” Ben said. “You see where it got us the last time. It’s an arpeggio, according to my sister before she vanished into thin air. Why don’t we just spell that?”
“No,” Carlos said. “She’s right. The arpeggio sequence was a palindrome. It sounded the same backwards as forward. Try retracing your steps.”
“Okay, but if this works, you guys better come in after me.”
“Where else are we going to go?” Carlos grimaced and pointed around the chamber.
“Okay,” Ben said. “It’s settled. Remember the sequence. We said we’d all stay together. You follow after I’m through.”
Everyone repeated the sequence: Three. Five. Seven. Ten.
“Here goes!” Ben walked to the seventh stone, stepped onto the fifth and — yelling “Kowabunga” — leaped unto the third step. He disappeared into a familiar flash of blue light.
CHAPTER FORTY
Oasis
“What pioneer ever had a chart and a lighthouse to steer by?”
Catherine Drinker Bowen
“Whoa!” Ben yelled as he slid down a mammoth sand dune. He spotted April near a pool of water. She’d had fallen asleep in the shade of a palm tree. Beyond the scruffy oasis lay an endless ocean of rolling, undulating sand.
Whoosh!
Grace slid behind him creating a trench that quickly filled in. “What a rush! I’ll take the great outdoors over that icky place we just left, anytime.”
Whoosh!
Carlos and Serise held hands as they tumbled down the dune. They reminded Ben of the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme.
“Well,” Carlos said, shaking sand out of his hair. “I guess we don’t have to worry about cliffs out here. But I’m not sure that our situation has gotten any better. Where are we anyway?”
“Beats me.” Exhausted, Ben dropped his backpack and collapsed in a heap. He was too tired to think straight. He wanted to curl up next to a sand dune and take a nap. In the morning it would all be over and he would be in his own bed surrounded by basketball posters.
“Ben!”
He slapped at the hand on his shoulder.
“Ben! Wake up.”
“Is it time for school yet?” He rolled over, reached to hug his pillow and grabbed a handful of sand.
“Ben! Wake up!” Grace said. “We’re still lost.”
“Huh?”
The fog cleared from his eyes. April was asleep, her pack serving as a pillow. Aris lapped water from the edge of the pond. His tail flicked from side to side.
“I wonder where we are,” Serise said.
“The desert obviously,” Carlos said.
Serise clucked her tongue and threw sand at him. “Even I can see that! But which desert? We need to find some food and shelter and set up camp. What time is it anyway?”
“Don’t you have a watch?” Ben asked, still slurring his words.
“Yes. But you guys kept having me set it back to midnight.”
Ben chuckled. “I still can’t get over it. You can design computer programs in your head but you can’t operate a watch.”
Serise glared at him.
Carlos yawned. “It’s six.”
“In the morning?” asked Ben.
The sun was setting into the horizon. That couldn’t be right. They had left Sunnyslope early in the morning. It was late afternoon here. Where was here?
“Egypt?” he asked. “That would put us on the other side of the world. It would be hours later than California if we traveled east.”
“That transport beam could have taken us anywhere,” Grace said.
“Even to another planet,” Serise added.
“Nope.” Carlos yawned, then pointed at the sky. “We’re still on Earth. Look at the moon.”
Ben looked up at the familiar crater filled face in the sky and was relieved. The man in the moon with his two eyes and wide mouth exclaiming “Oh,” stared down on him.
“I still think this is a group hallucination and we’re in the sweat lodge,” Ben said. “It’s hot enough to be the sweat lodge.”
“I wonder if that water is safe.” Carlos said, pointing to the pond.
“Let’s see if Aris survives,” Ben said.
Aris stopped purring and growled in their direction.
“Well at least I’ve got provisions in my backpack.” Ben produced a thermos, unscrewed the top and stared in disbelief. It contained green liquid with yellow swirls and something new. Bright red flecks. Pomegranate flecks. It was …
“NO! Awww man, why now?”
Serise craned her neck to see. “What’s the matter?”
Ben didn’t answer. He poured a drop at his feet. Its identity was unmistakable. It oozed out of the thermos and bounced once before splattering on the sand. “That’s what’s the matter. And I think it’s alive.”
“That can’t be all that’s in there,” Carlos said, his face full of pity.
The others pulled containers from their own packs. April produced a vegetarian sandwich, her own thermos of glob and treats for Aris.
Ben growled. “Mom put in snacks and some camping gear. Looks like enough food for a day or so. Anyone up for a macrobiotic tofu burger?” He reached into the bottom of the backpack, tore out a section of canvas and produced a super-sized chocolate bar.
“Awesome! Where’d you get that?” asked Carlos.
“I glued a secret compartment in the bag last year. That way, I could count on something decent to eat whenever I got hungry.” Ben took a bite and spat it out. “Eeew, this doesn’t taste right. I think its old. But that doesn’t make sense. I just put it in here a few days ago.”
The brown wrapper said Hershey’s but there was no Hershey imprint on the bar.
Carlos broke off a chunk, bit it and laughed. “Unsweetened carob. Looks like your mother knew about your secret and pulled the old switcheroo.”
Serise displayed a sandwich, a plastic container with oatmeal cookies, and a thermos. A change of clothes and some toiletries had been stuffed into the bottom of the bag. Far be it for Serise to travel without lip-gloss and beauty supplies. She opened her thermos. “It’s a cranberry smoothie. My favorite.”
Carlos produced camping gear, a change of clothes, and an army camouflage rain slicker. He opened a Ziploc container and found his mother’s famous tamales and a couple of bottles of chocolate Yoo-Hoos. “Want to share?”
“Oh, yes! Thanks!” Ben dumped his mother’s vitamin drink on a small, scraggly bush and rinsed his thermos before filling it with pond water. Aris stared at the last of the green glob as it soaked into the sand. Clearly a bad batch if even the cat wouldn’t drink it.
Grace pulled out an insulated container of sushi rolls and mango punch. An extra pair of glasses was tucked in her Bugs Bunny case.
Something moved in Ben’s peripheral vision. The bush that had been bare when they first arrived now held a lush red flower. It opened before his eyes to reveal hundreds of orange stamen and black pistils. Soon more buds popped out, covering the plant. One by one they opened into giant blooms.
“Whoa!” Carlos said. “What’s going on?”
Ben brushed his finger against a flower. The petals were soft, like silk. “No wonder April and I are so tall. I’ve been dumping mom’s drink on her rose bushes. I wonder what would have happened to me if I had kept drinking it all this time?”
“Me too.” April struggled to sit up. “I’ve been feeding mine to Aris when mom wasn’t looking.”
“For how long?”
“Since last month. I saw you dump yours in the greenhouse. That’s when I got the idea. The taste was so awful I just couldn’t choke it down without barfing. But Aris loves it.”
Aris let out a quiet growl and curled up in April’s lap and purred.
Carlos yawned and pointed to his watch. “Hey guys. It’s about six o’clock in the morning California time. I reset my watch. If you’re right and we’re in Egypt it’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I suggest we skip the botanical bonding and get some shut eye. It may take a while to get where we are going.”
Ben dug a trench in the sand dune and collapsed. April crawled over and put her head in his lap. Ben rubbed her back the way his mother did when she was a baby. April was out in seconds. She looked like a harmless angel when she slept and glowed in the waning sunlight. And then he caught himself. Good grief! What’s the matter with me? He was hugging his sister like … like he loved her or something. Now he knew he’d traveled to an alternate universe.
Aris yawned and went to sleep. Ben grinned, pulled the collar from his backpack and slipped it around the cat’s neck. He adjusted the clasp to allow two fingers to slip inside — enough to keep the cat from choking, but not enough slack to allow Aris to get it off.
Aha! Finally got you evil one. Now all I need is a leash!
A dull ache throbbed in his legs. His pants had ripped when he slid down the steps beneath the sarcophagus. He’d been so preoccupied, he hadn’t felt the pain until now. April let out a sigh and scratched her own legs. Ben pulled up his pant leg to survey the damage. The bruises faded before his eyes, the scratches had closed. He removed his bandages and examined his hand. The places where he had scraped the skin away while trying to open the entrance to the garage tunnel were also healed. The glob? He had spilled some on his hand. Was it absorbed through the skin?
Carlos tossed him a Mylar pouch. “Here. Sun’s going down. It’s going to get cold. Press that button to make the microfilaments heat up.”
“This what Scouts use?” asked Ben.
“No. My dad gave them to me. Guess it’s what spies use.”
The wafer-thin mylar unfolded to the size of a twin-size blanket — enough to cover Ben and April. Within seconds it warmed to a comfortable temperature.
“Thanks, Inspector Gadget.”
“Don’t mention it.” Carlos tossed a packet to Grace and Serise, before unfolding a third for himself.
Ben’s mind worked sluggishly. They needed to find shelter. He pulled the compass out of April’s pack, played with the controls and frowned. No further instructions about Safe Harbor. The compass showed a medallion and dialing instructions. They had already done that part. The compass spun wildly. It acted like they were already there. What kind of ship was going to pick them up in the middle of nowhere?
Tiny lights blinked on the global chart. He didn’t care what they meant. He was so tired … just wanted to rest … a few hours and he would get up … just … two hours …
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Darkness
“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
Ben woke with a start. It was cold and dark. Something nipped his hand.
“Stop it, Aris!”
Aris’s orange eyes glowed at him in the dark … on his right side. Something scuttled away to the left.
“Arggh!”
“What’s going on?” asked Carlos, wiping the sleep from his eyes.
“Something’s out here with us.”
“Probably a snake.”
“It wasn’t a snake. They make hissing sounds and slither away. This thing ran away.”
“Okay. It was a sand viper. Or a scorpion. Or your imagination. Whatever it is, if you leave it alone, it won’t bother you.” Within minutes Carlos was snoring again.
“Was it bigger than a sand box?” asked Grace, her words soft and slurring. “Go back to sleep. This may not be Safe Harbor but safe enough for me. I’m going back to sleep.”
