章節 5: Chapter 5: I Pick a Dead Man's Pocket
Actually, it would be more accurate to say Gus found us. Xander had us crawling forward on our hands and knees to stay under the level of a suspiciously-long phallus carved on the wall, so we completely missed what was directly over our heads.
“Xander. Friend. Good friend Xander,” mumbled an eerie voice from above.
We craned our necks to find Hole-In-Head-Guy (that’d be Gus) impaled on an odd contraption that consisted of a few boards latched together with a bunch of nasty-looking spikes sticking out the front and back. Near as I could tell, the trap worked like a pendulum, swinging down from above when triggered, skewering the dolt who’d set it off, then picking him up and embedding the spikes, now sticking through the target, into the ceiling. After a few centuries, someone would naturally trigger it again and the thing would swing back the other way, impaling the next victim in the ceiling while the original shish-ka-bob’s remains would slide off to the ground.
Skewer. Rinse. Repeat.
There was no way anyone could get hit with this thing and not die. Unless, like Gus, they were already dead. In which case, it appeared, they just hung around impaled on the ceiling. Which had to be really boring.
Seeing Gus playing the part of pincushion brought a smile to Xander’s face. “I was right! Was it the phallus?”
“Down, Xander. Please. Down.”
“Do I wave my hand in front of the phallus?” Asked Xander. “Or do I lean on something?”
“Step on the trigger. Free me. Free me, Xander.”
“Trigger?” Xander shone his flashlight in front of him and saw a very obvious trigger stone three feet in front of us. “I am seriously losing my touch,” he said as he stood up.
“Down, Xander. I want down. Get me down.”
“Tell you what, Gus,” offered Xander. “I’ll get you down. But first, you tell me how you found this place.”
Gus quickly looked away with his one eye, a metal spike conveniently sticking cleanly through the hole in his head where his other one would have been. “Got lucky.”
“Oh, Gus. Gus. Gus, Gus, Gus. You knew where to find the gateway. That should have been impossible. Not even I know where to find the gateways. That information has been lost through the ages for a reason.”
“Got lucky.”
“Right. OK. Well, it’s been fun talking to you. Enjoy your stay.” He only had to take a single step before Gus fell for the bluff.
“Map! I have a map! Look at my map!” He strained his pinned arms, trying to get one of them to pull something out of his pocket. It was actually pretty funny to watch.
Xander shined the light on Gus’s pocket and we saw the yellowed edge of a folded page sticking out. “I knew I’d brought you here for a reason, Zack. Come on, I’ll give you a boost.” He stuck his flashlight in his teeth, clasped his hands together at his waist, and with a shudder of horror, I realized what he wanted me to do. So did Gus.
“No! My map! Not your map! Thief! My map!” cried one very upset corpse.
I was equally disturbed. “You want me to pick his pocket?”
“Yes. Ready?”
Ready? Ready to steal from a dead guy? With the dead guy looking at me and calling me names? I looked from Xander to Gus apprehensively.
“Whenever you’re good, Zack,” said Xander.
Awkwardly, I placed my hands on his shoulders and lifted one foot into his grasp. Leaning into him, I carefully straightened my knee until I was standing up. I moved one hand from his shoulder to the top of his head and reached the other up towards Gus, wary of the pointy spikes now about six inches from my head.
“Stop! My map! My map!” Gus was doing his best to be difficult, trying to squirm his pelvis higher and stay out of my reach.
My fingertips brushed the edge of the paper. “You’re not getting any lighter!” hollered Xander, obviously straining. I reached down into some inner-Zen place, willed my arms to grow an inch longer, and stretched up just enough to nab a good clutch of paper right as Xander lost it and we both tumbled to the ground.
“Did you get it?” Xader asked from somewhere underneath me.
I rolled off of him and opened my clenched fist triumphantly. His eyes lit up.
“Well done. Well done,” He said. “I expect that to be incredibly important at some point.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A map,” said Xander.
If it was a map, it was unlike any map I’d ever seen. It was more like a series of numbers with lines connecting a bunch of squiggles and a couple of fancy drawings of sea monsters, like they have on old pirate maps in the movies.
“OK? Map of what?” I asked.
“No clue. However, I assure you that maps picked out of the pockets of dead people are always remarkably valuable.” He carefully folded it into a little square and tucked it into his pouch, then stood and gestured further down the passage. “Shall we continue?”
“My map! Xander! Free me! Get me down! My map!”
“What about him?” I asked, pointing up but not bothering to look.
Xander shrugged. “He’s not going anywhere.” With that, he shined his flashlight ahead of him, hopped over the obvious trigger stone, and headed on down the corridor.
“No! Xander! Don’t leave me!” Gus was throwing a hissy fit, which I suppose could be understood, what with him impaled on spikes and stuck hanging on the ceiling and all. But, I mean, he’s dead. So I didn’t really feel all that bad. I followed Xander down the passage.
“Boy! Wait! Let me down!” Gus called after me as I deftly leaped over the trigger stone and hurried after Xander. As we rounded the corner, he threw one last Hail Mary my way. “Don’t touch it, Boy! Not for you!”
His final plea echoed off the stones all around us before fading into the stifling stillness of the tomb.
We walked on in ominous silence.
Then Gus cried out again, totally ruining the spooky mood his last plea had created. “I pay you! Fifty dollars! Seventy-five! Give you my watch!”
“The watch is a fake,” muttered Xander. “Stay to the left here, I’m pretty sure that stone falls on you if you walk under it.”
I dutifully obeyed, sashaying past the accused booby trap. “What did he mean about touching something?”
“Who knows?” he answered. “The dead are always so dramatic.”
He stopped. Suddenly. So suddenly that I bumped into him, causing him to stumble forward a step through the solid wall of cobwebs hanging in front of him that had caused him to stop suddenly in the first place. With no idea what lay beyond the cobwebs, Xander imagined the worst and immediately flailed his arms in a futile attempt to keep himself from crashing through the webs. This accomplished little other than to ensure that an infinite number of individual strands of webbing wrapped themselves around his hands and fingers and made their way into his hair, up his nostrils, down his throat, and into his eyes and ears.
After he spent a good thirty seconds spitting and snorting and clawing at his face to clear it of cobwebs, Xander turned on me, fuming. I immediately went into damage control mode. “You really need to let me know before you just stop like that.”
He stared at me, ready to yell, but not exactly sure how to word his complaint. Instead, his hands double clutched the air in front of him as he regained his composure. “Right. Right. My fault. Got it.”
I looked past him into the cavern ahead, my eyes widening in wonder.
“Is that what we’re looking for?” I asked.
He turned his head, then stiffened, all thought of berating my clumsiness gone from his mind.
We were at the threshold of a moderately-sized, circular room. In the center, up a set of four concentric stone circles, was a small pedestal. Atop the pedestal was the object I was pointing at and about which I was hoping to be mistaken.
When Xander had more or less said we were in the Tomb of the Random Object, I’d assumed we’d find some sort of man-made, mechanical Thing waiting for us in the treasure room, or whatever this was. I didn’t know what the Thing did, but I assumed it was either a weapon of unfathomable potential, a talisman of unspeakable evil, or, well... something gold.
It wasn’t made of gold. It wasn’t encrusted with jewels. It certainly wasn’t made out of metal and it didn’t even look man-made. If I had to pick a word to describe it, I’d have to choose slimy.
It was a slimy lump on a stone pedestal.
Ew.
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