Another Pan (23 page)

“She’s not his girlfriend,” said Wendy. “I don’t think he’s into labels.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“What does he write on his profiles?
Single? Seeking?
What?”

“I don’t know,” said Wendy. “I don’t spend that much time checking online profiles.”

The girls were boggled. One of them pulled out her handheld device to make sure she still had hers and they hadn’t teleported to the Land of Lame.

“Okaaaay,” said one of the girls. “Well, you’ve got to dish the rest on this Peter sometime.”

“Yeah, OK,” said Wendy.

“Come on, girls, let’s go somewhere . . . else.”

The girls walked away. Obviously they were finished with Wendy and weren’t inviting her to join them. As they left, John could hear them whispering about Peter, about how insane it was that he’d
almost
gone for Trendy Wendy when he could have had one or all three of them. That would have been way more
college
of him.

John hurried around a corner before Wendy could notice that he’d witnessed the scene. The halls were empty now. John would be late to class. He heard Wendy’s slow steps on the marble tiles. He leaned on the wall, waiting for the sound to recede. The mud column and the stone step were gone now. Marlowe looked pretty much normal. But that strange feeling, the weird smell, and even a few moths were still hanging around, reminding them that Marlowe was still attached to the underworld. No one noticed, of course. Once or twice, a janitor was called to find the source of the smell, or more fumigators were hired, but that’s it. John didn’t want to go to class. He didn’t hesitate very long. He knew what he wanted to do instead. Cutting class was new to him. But dreaming about being the kind of guy who cuts class, well, that was a rerun.

He was still daydreaming when he crashed into Connor Wirth, right by Connor’s locker. He dropped his gaze and tried to think of something cool to say. Ten seconds passed.
Too late
. John waved weakly and kept walking.

“Hey . . . John.” Connor’s thick voice called him back.

John turned. “Huh?” John was trying to play it cool, hoping desperately that Connor wouldn’t offer him another Wendy-inspired charity outing he couldn’t afford. Connor had an amused look on his face.

“Dropped something.” Connor held up a shiny piece of metal. It was John’s Swatch. It had a broken clasp that he hadn’t bothered to fix, so it kept falling off his wrist at inopportune moments.

John shuffled over to Connor and took the watch, doing his best to avoid eye contact.
This sucks,
thought John.
Now he’ll think I didn’t get the watch fixed because we’re poor, which we totally are not. These people need to get some perspective
.

“You should get that fixed,” Connor said as he handed the watch to John. John glanced at Connor’s six-thousand-dollar timepiece and sighed.

“Oh . . . yeah . . . well, no point,” John muttered. “I have three other ones at home . . . way better ones . . . back at my house . . . well, not
my
house. My dad’s. Actually, not his either because he sort of works for . . .” John trailed off. He was doing himself no favors.

“Cool,” said Connor. “Listen, man, I’m gonna head to class. But good luck with that.” Connor smiled and walked away.

John skulked off in the opposite direction, now completely determined to skip class.

John snuck through the hallways of Marlowe. The only noises were the muted sounds of teachers trying to speak above their class. It didn’t take him long to reach the door to the basement. Here, he paused. It was on those stairs yesterday that he had been attacked. John instinctively looked over his shoulder, down the long hall, to make sure no one was there. Then he descended the stairwell.

The basement was no longer the mad mess it had been just a few weeks ago. Thanks to him and Wendy, most of the crates had been broken down and recycled. The exhibition pieces had been cataloged and were sitting in organized rows.

John walked straight to the book. He didn’t waste time marveling at it. He didn’t sniff it or treat it like a delicate pastry. He was a lone wolf. He was Indiana Jones, exploring the hidden dangers of the labyrinth alone. No man could ever keep up with him. No woman could ever understand him. He tucked the book under his arm and ran out of the basement. He wasn’t sure where he would go, but he wanted to see something new. He wanted to explore an uncharted part of the underworld. He paced in the empty halls, hoping that the answer would come to him. When he was outside Barrie Auditorium, the future home of the Egyptian exhibit and the book, he got an idea.
I’ll know what piece of the underworld matches with Barrie before anyone else. If they want to go, I’ll have to be the guide. If some unsuspecting kid opens the gate accidentally, they’ll call the Johnny to save the day
. It didn’t cross his mind that the Egyptian names of the hours weren’t exactly the slang-of-the-moment at Marlowe.

Inside the auditorium, John wasted no time looking around. He was just relieved that it was, once again, deserted. No one ever went into the auditorium unless there was a required event going on. It was the most deserted place in Marlowe — plus it was always stifling hot, since the air-conditioning was always off in the cavernous room to keep costs down. He had no desire to linger. He said the words, and he watched the message appear. It wasn’t anything to dwell on. When he saw the Eye of Ra appearing above a door leading offstage, John’s confidence waned for an instant. Then he remembered that smirk. The smirk that Peter had had when he looked danger in the face. The smirk he’d had when he’d come and saved John’s life.
Geez,
thought John,
did he have to save my life?
It was so humiliating.

John didn’t want to think about it. He closed his eyes and rushed through the door. He knew he had passed through to the underworld when a hot wind met him like a punch. Sand scraped at his face. John opened his eyes. It might have been the first time he was grateful he wore glasses that looked like lab goggles. In front of him spread a desert so vast that it looked like an ocean. The dunes were undulating in the wind like golden waves. Gone was the pillared clutter of the ruins. Gone were the green hedges twisting and turning away from the fire pond. The sunless sky poured some kind of burning light, like a lamp; the sands shone back in an eerie way that left John feeling cold. John stood and wondered. Then he laughed to himself, thinking of the giant sandbags attached to the pulleys backstage. The auditorium was the only place in Marlowe with sand.

This was exactly what he wanted. He wanted to be a hero, traveling by foot through a barren desert. The cinematography would be stunning. His grizzled face would be so renegade. This beat advanced biology class by about a googolplex.

John tried to step into his new role, but his feet wouldn’t move. He looked down. The sands had shifted around him. He had sunk in to around his knees. John panicked.

“Help! Help!” he yelled. The sound died in the lifeless plain. John tried to lift his feet out, but each time he lifted one, he had to shift his weight to the other, causing it to sink deeper. He grabbed one leg and tried to yank. No use. He was breathing heavily. Maybe it was an asthma attack. This sucked. He was going to die during advanced biology class. How could someone who had read so many comic books, played so many desert levels, surfed so many websites on survival scenarios, be
this
terrible at the actual experience?

But wait, that was it! John remembered reading an Adventurators comic where the Dust Devil ambushed the hero, Brody Dudecool, in an abandoned putt-putt course. The villain used the powers he’d gotten from a magic ant farm to flood the golf course with sap sand. For a while Brody tried to use his hyper-strength to get out of the quicksand, but it didn’t work because his muscle mass was too hyper-dense. Then he tried to use the windmill in the golf course to create a makeshift hovercraft, but the Dust Devil jammed up the engine with a sand missile. Just when it looked like the end for Brody Dudecool, the hero came through with the right idea. Though it went against all his awesomely valiant instincts, Brody Dudecool gave up. He went limp and lay face-first in the sand. The Dust Devil thought he had won. Soon the world would be his. But to his surprise, Brody Dudecool hadn’t actually given up. No, he had let his body go limp so that he could slowly raise his legs out of the sand without putting pressure on any one part of his body. It was über-brilliant. His punch to the Dust Devil’s face sent a tornado to the moon. Binky Lacelass was saved from the hydraulic jaws of the putt-putt clown.

As he performed the dead man’s float from his waist up, slowly leveling out his legs, John was dreaming about a kiss like the one Brody got. He didn’t know how long it took to free himself. All he knew was that he’d have to find a way to explain the crimson sunburn blistering the back of his neck as he was finally able to escape the sand. As he struggled to stand, making sure to keep his feet moving, John realized that he was dizzy with dehydration. All he wanted now was to get back to Marlowe, find a water fountain, and stumble to biology class.

John surveyed the scene. It was desert unending. If he squinted, he thought maybe he could make out an oasis in the distance. Tiny palm trees and the slightest hint of blue water waved in the distance, probably a mirage. His adventurous spirit wasn’t in the mood anymore. The strange, closed-off feeling that was ever present in the labyrinth was starting to affect him. It was as though this underworld had a way of physically sucking out a person’s enthusiasm. He felt gloomy and hopeless. John looked in every direction for the Eye of Ra, hanging in the air where the portal would be, but he couldn’t find it.

The sudden fear struck him that maybe a janitor had shut the door in the basement, sealing him in this desert until he could remember the name of the hour — or until the Dark Lady found him. John whipped around, splashing sand, frantic, when he caught sight of the eye. It was directly above him, about ten feet up.

Oh no,
thought John. The sands must have shifted while he was freeing himself. The eye was ten feet up, so the bottom of the door must have been just barely above his head. But it didn’t matter. There was no way he could jump to catch the ledge in the soft sand.

OK, think, think. What would a boy genius do?
John took a look around to find something, anything, that he could use. Still nothing but sand. John was afraid to shift around too much, but when he moved his foot over a little, he thought he felt something solid. John precariously bent over and dug near his foot. His hand touched something. It felt like a baseball bat. He pulled it out, slowly, so as little sand would shift as possible.

As soon as the item came into view, John recoiled and dropped it. It was a piece of a skeleton. A human arm. It was shattered at both ends, but he knew it was a forearm. (He
was
the best student in advanced biology.) The desert sand had grated any shredded flesh from it, bleaching it a whitish gray. Some tattered wrapping flapped around it in the wind.
Must be some poor jerk who tried to navigate the desert without Adventurator training
.

Well, don’t look a gift bone in the mouth, I guess,
thought John. He picked up the bone again. It would make a decent grappling hook. He took off his hoodie and tied one sleeve to the bone. While he did this, he estimated that he lost about three more inches of height from the sand. He had to work quickly. Squinting to make out the charcoal eye above him, he swung the bone through the lowest point of the door, which he could just barely reach with his fingers. It slid uninterrupted and disappeared through the bottom of the door. But just as quickly it came back down to him. He needed the bone to catch onto something on the other side.

This wasn’t good. He tried again, this time holding it farther up the sleeve to give a large swing. Just as he let the bone fly, he lunged as high as he dared on the shifting sands. The bone flew upward and went sailing through the middle part of the door. At the height of its arc, it disappeared and kept its momentum. “Yes!” shouted John when he felt the bone catch. Now to reel it in. Slowly, John began pulling his hoodie back, hoping it would stay connected to whatever was holding it. “Come on, come on,” he muttered. To his disappointment, the hoodie kept coming, appearing out of the space in the air, until he could see the edge of the bone. John grunted and pulled the bone back, letting it fall to the sand.

He couldn’t let disappointment get to him. He knew that the longer he waited, the more his probability of success plummeted. John coiled the hoodie again and gave a few small swings. Then, with his best lunge, he launched the bone. It flew farther and disappeared much farther up the sleeve. Almost immediately, John could feel that it had hooked onto something big. He gave it a tug. It was solid. He put half of his weight on it. It held.

John looked in the distance at the oasis one last time. He saw a dust devil coming toward him, swirling sand like a miniature tornado.
Not this time, foul villain
. John grabbed as high as he could on the hoodie and began to climb. Coach K would have been dumbfounded to see Little Darling climbing a rope. It helped that it was a life-and-death scenario, without the girls watching.

John struggled up to the invisible door frame, using the floor as leverage as soon as he could reach it with his forearms. He grabbed the ledge and pulled himself up. When his head broke the plane, he saw the bone jammed among a pile of props behind the stage. His arms were throbbing. He couldn’t breathe. Sand was glued all over his sweaty body. But finally, he managed to pull himself out. With the last of his strength, he reached up and shut the door. A few seconds later, he rolled over to make sure that the eye had disappeared.

John lay in the heat of the auditorium, panting, relishing the idea of water. He began to laugh, which turned into a cough. He’d almost died a horrible death. How awesome was that? No one could take that away from him now. He had been to the underworld and survived. Now when he walked through the halls, invisible, or felt the scorn of some remedial like Marla, he could always remember the badassery it took to survive the labyrinth. At the thought, John began to shake uncontrollably. Maybe it was fear, or the aftershock of all that adrenaline, but John was pretty sure his sweat was drying and he was getting the chills — even in the heat.