Bab 4: Chapter 4: The Ancient Tomb Two Blocks From My House
I landed in a small tunnel, stood up, and bashed my head on the ceiling. Back on my hands and knees, I rubbed the throbbing lump-to-be as dirt rained down on me.
“What are you doing?” Yelled Xander from further up the tunnel. “I told you to go home!” He carried a flashlight and was hunched over (the tunnel being four feet high at most), his body twisted around in order to face me.
“Did you know my father?” I asked.
“What? What? How could I possibly... maybe. Why'd you follow me down here? You shouldn't be here!”
“Tell me about my father and I'll climb back out. I just need to-”
“How are you planning on climbing out?”
I stretched my neck back to gesture at the hole in the ceiling, only to find no such hole, just rock, dirt, and the bottom of a couple of root systems. Whatever that glowing blue hole was that I’d just jumped through to get down here apparently only worked one way. “Hey! How do I get out of here!” I screamed.
“No clue. No clue. It’s my first time in this particular tomb,” he said, sighing and untwisting his body to make his way forward. “You'll have to come with me. I think it opens up here in a bit. At least I hope so. This is murder on my back.”
I looked up once more at the completely solid ceiling of earth above me, but without Xander’s flashlight I couldn’t see a thing. I was starting to rethink my hasty, in-the-moment decision to follow a strange man down into the earth to gain information about my long-dead father. Would I ever get back to the surface? And would my bat and glove still be there when I did, or would someone come along and snag them? The smart thing to do would have been to say my goodbyes back up top and walk home. For one thing, my Mom and my Larry were probably going to start wondering where I was, especially after they called Gary to see if I went home with him and he told them I’d walked home through the woods. They’d totally freak.
Scrunched down, I waddled forward like a duck after the glow of Xander’s flashlight until the cavern opened up enough for me to stand. In front of me, Xander was busy dusting off his jacket but I wasn’t paying attention to that because I was more interested in gawking at the ornately-carved stone obelisks standing on either side of a dark, gaping tomb.
“Whoa,” I said in one of my many overt displays of intellectual brilliance. Xander followed my stare to the tomb entrance in front of us. “Right. Right. Tomb time. You ready?”
“Wait. My father. How do you even know who I am?”
He dropped his gaze and mumbled something to himself, then looked up. “OK. OK. Your father. I knew him. Briefly. We... worked together. Briefly. You look a lot like him. When you told me your name... I remembered he had a little boy named Zack. It all sort of came rushing back.”
“And a little girl,” I mumbled absently, trying to digest this shock to the system. “Mom was pregnant when he died.”
He took a deep breath. “I didn't know that. There's not much I can tell you about him, really. It was a long time ago.”
“But he...” I raised my fingers gingerly to my nose.
“Smelled dead people? Yes. Yes. I think so. As far as I know. Probably.”
He let me internalize everything for a bit, before growing impatient. “Not to be a jerk, but the fate of the world and all.”
I looked up and he was pointing to the entrance of the tomb. I stared as far into the darkness as I could. Which was not very far. “It’s dark.”
“Dark. True. Good point.” He dug into his fanny pack for a moment, pulled out a second flashlight, and tossed it to me. I fumbled for a moment before getting a good grip on it - kind of embarrassing for me seeing as how I snared smoking line drives off my shoe tops on a regular basis. “Better?” he asked.
I clicked the button and a surprisingly bright, focused beam of light shone on the wall. “Better,” I agreed.
I flashed the light around the chamber to get my bearings, taking a moment to shine it back the way we came. For an instant, I thought something scurry out of the light behind us, but since that would have been impossible, I realized just how nervous this little adventure was making me. I swallowed down my fear, put all thoughts of my father behind me, and concentrated on listening to Xander, staying alive, and getting above ground.
“OK. Zack. Things you need to know.” Xander paced in front of the tomb. “This is a tomb. But not just any tomb.”
“Right. Most tombs aren’t hidden under the middle of suburbia.”
He looked at me a moment, then chuckled. “Right. Right. Funny. OK. What I’m trying to say is there will be traps in this tomb.”
“Booby traps?”
“I’ve never really liked that term. But yes. Fine. Booby traps. Traps meant to keep you out. Keep us out. Actually, meant to kill us if we try to get in. But we have to go in. We have to stop Gus.”
I aimed my light down the throat of the tomb. All I could see was stone, dust, and cobwebs that had very recently been swatted out of the way by a man with a hole in his head. “If Gus went in there, won’t the booby traps kill him?”
“He’s already dead.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Just stay behind me,” said Xander.
The stone floor sloped downward as we walked between walls decorated with carvings of grinning faces and birds with huge pelvic regions. Periodically, a hunk of wood rested in a sconce on the wall, as if waiting for someone to come along with a Zippo and light it up. Xander led the way, occasionally pointing out different stones in the floor that I should avoid stepping on unless I was ‘feeling lucky.’ There were cobwebs everywhere. I mean everywhere. Floor, walls, ceiling, the works. The only place web-free was directly in front of our faces, mainly because someone (Gus) had just marched through here with all the subtlety of a blind buffalo in heat.
“He’s not going to be all that hard to find, is he?” I asked as we progressed deeper into the tomb.
“No. True. I don’t think Gus expects us to be down here. Don’t touch that log,” said Xander, pointing to a harmless-looking, moss-covered log that was decidedly out of place in this dusty, web-coated tomb. “Well he doesn’t expect you at all, since you’re not, at least you weren’t... But he also doesn’t expect me, because he was able to shake me off in the mall.”
“The mall?”
“Yes. The mall. Right. Not my finest moment. Duck under the level of that one’s nose, would you? Right. Well done. The point is, he knew I wasn’t going to get here in time to see him go under. He’ll be sloppy.” He stopped at a three-pronged fork in the corridor. “We can use that to our advantage.” He shined his light on a mass of webs completely sealing off the first two branches of the corridor, and then on the broken strings of web hanging limply over the entrance to the third, which also happened to have a big, evil mouth carved all the way around it.
Xander led the way through the broken webbing and down the gaping maw of death. We walked on in a silence broken only by Xander’s periodic warnings of impending doom if I stepped on this stone or failed to straddle that bottomless chasm. Between you and me, I think he was making most of this up as he went, but since I was still alive, I wasn’t arguing. Moving ever downward, the air gradually became colder, the sound of random bugs skittering in the darkness ahead of us became more frequent, and the overall creep factor steadily rose. “So who’s buried here?” I finally asked.
“Not who. What,” Xander grunted back at me without breaking stride.
“What? Like a monster?” I asked in a slightly higher-pitched voice, a host of science fiction mash-up creatures running through my head.
“Like an object.”
“An object?” The images of half-elephant/half-cobra abominations were replaced with an image of a toaster oven. “Then it’s not really a tomb, is it?”
He stopped and turned to me. “What would you call it? A linen closet?”
“Well... no...” I stammered.
“Hmmph,” he grunted. Then he turned back and continued down the corridor. “Pull on this wall sconce as you walk past so the acid doesn’t fall on you.”
What kind of tomb didn’t have a mummy of some kind waiting at the end, I thought as I dutifully yanked the well-worn wall sconce. Wasn’t that the whole point of a tomb? It’s not like folks went around digging massive underground complexes to honor their fallen shovel.
We turned a corner and I immediately gave a very manly and mature scream. In the corridor ahead of us, a large boulder had rolled out of a nook in one side of the wall and smashed into the other side of the wall. That’s not why I screamed. I screamed because when it did this, it apparently crushed someone against the second wall, and the guy’s skull was grinning up at us from the floor.
Xander bent down to get a closer look. Most of the flesh had deteriorated so that the body of the poor, unfortunate pancake consisted mainly of bones, with a little bit of sinew thrown in for good measure. The guy’s polyester shirt remained intact however, complete with a pocket patch proudly stating that this collection of human detritus had once been named Raoul.
“This happened quite some time ago,” said Xander.
“OK?”
He stood up, pleased. “Nice trap. The path of the boulder was aimed a little past the trigger stone. And look at how smooth the surface of the rock is, that's some quality craftsmanship.”
“If you say so.”
“And the way the boulder began hidden behind the bend. Ingenious. Poor Raoul didn't see it coming until it was too late. I probably would have missed it, too.” He cheerfully squeezed himself past the boulder then turned to help me, only to find me rooted to the spot, staring at the skull. “Zack?”
See, right about now it hit me that, well, this might actually be dangerous. Something about finding a skull lying on the ground really drives the whole mortal peril thing home. I didn’t want to die. I had baseball games to play, teenage rebellion to undergo, Zoe Francis to make out with. What was I doing risking all that down here in some tomb that rolled bone-crushing boulders on top of you?
Xander recognized my inner turmoil and brought out a kinder, gentler Xander Moon. “Zack,” he said. I looked up, finally making eye contact. “Zack. Don’t worry. That’s not going to happen to us. I promise you.”
“How do you know?”
He smiled a big, twinkly smile and reached his hand back around the boulder to me. “Because this is what I do. I’m good at it.”
I looked into his eyes and believed him. He was so sure. So confident. It rubbed off. I even ignored the fact that he’d just admitted that he would have missed the whole boulder booby trap thing. Instead, I grabbed his hand and let him pull me past the obstruction.
We proceeded along the corridor, now even more careful and paranoid than before, stepping carefully to avoid booby traps around every curve - massive blades whizzing through the air to decapitate us, venomous snake-filled pits under every step, needle-sharp spears ready to pop up and skewer us through our butts. At least that’s what I assumed all these traps I was tap dancing to avoid were. For all I knew, the tomb had done the best it could with the boulder and all it had left were some ancient whoopee cushions.
Then we found Gus.
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