Another Pan (46 page)

John just stared at Simon, waiting for him to say what he wanted.

“You two seem to have a knack for finding the bones,” Simon finally said. “So now you’ve got a choice. Either you go inside the labyrinth and help Peter find the fifth mummy, or I destroy the book and kill him inside.”

“How do you know that would kill him?” asked Wendy.

“I don’t. Wanna try it?”

“Peter will never give you the bones,” said John.

“I’ll be waiting outside, making sure the door doesn’t close. That way, you’ll have to come out the same way you went in. I know no one will try consuming the bonedust, because I have the fourth one. Once you find the last bone, you throw all of them out. Then I’ll let the three of you out. If you try to jump out without sending me the bones, I’ll burn the book. Who knows, maybe the
underworld
will catch fire then, and we’ll all have a nice little metaphor to ponder while you die.”

“You’d go to prison,” said Wendy.

“Oh, yeah? On what charge, first-degree burning a book? Is there some kind of fairy-tale court I don’t know about?”

“I thought you said you wanted to do this properly,” said Wendy.

“I do,” said Simon. “But I don’t trust you and I don’t trust that Peter. Now, let’s go.”

“I want to stop by my locker,” said John as they followed Simon through the hallways. Now that another gate had been opened and Peter was inside, the changes they had noticed before were starting to take over Marlowe again. The floors were looking older. Walls seemed to be made of different materials. There were twists and turns where there hadn’t been any before. Insects lurked in cracks and openings.

“No time for lockers,” said Simon.

“Hey,” said John, “if we’re gonna be forced into the underworld, you think you could cut me some slack and let me bring some basic provisions?”

“Fine,” said Simon.

They stopped by John’s locker, where he picked up his gym bag. When Wendy asked what was inside, John just answered, “Adventurator survival kit.”

Wendy tried to think of a way out of this.
Peter will have a plan,
she thought, hoping they could find him quickly. As they walked to the girls’ bathroom, where Simon said he had found the book, Simon and Wendy puzzled over why Peter had chosen that location.

“Is he trying to throw Simon off?” John asked.

“No,” said Wendy. “He’s really after it. By why not the teachers’ lounge, or the principal’s office, or something like that?”

John shrugged. “Peter knows the legends better than we do.”

Since it was class time, the bathroom was empty except for two freshmen smoking through the open window. “Out,” said Simon as he plopped the
Book of Gates
on the sink. The girls crushed their cigarettes on the windowsill and ran out.

“Well, get going,” said Simon.

Wendy and John took a deep breath. Wherever they ended up, they would have to make the best of it, because they wouldn’t be able to jump back out. Not without Peter. Wendy hoped Peter had survived till now. As for the fifth mummy, they had already figured that it would be the hardest to take. But now, with Simon mixed up in all this, the search might just have become impossible.

Wendy and John appeared in a dark place, facing two huge palaces, one slightly smaller than the other. The air around them was thick, and it seemed to push down on them from all directions as they walked slowly toward the palaces. John adjusted his gym bag over his shoulder. Neither one of them spoke. Neither one pointed out the discomfort all around them, or that awful feeling of not being alone no matter where you went in the labyrinth. They focused instead on trying to puzzle together the hazy, jumbled pieces of the last legend.

They were stumbling around in the dark, keeping the castles in their sight, when a reverberating echo caused them to pull back.

“What was that?” Wendy whispered.

And then they both saw it. The smaller of the two palaces seemed to be trembling, sinking just a few inches lower into the ground.

“That has to be it,” said John as the palace gave another low groan and sank a bit farther. “That’s where Peter is.”

“How do you know?” said Wendy, hoping for any reason not to go into the sinking building. “Maybe it’s that other one. . . .”

“Just come on!” John said as he pulled her by the arm.

Inside, they found themselves at the edge of the giant hole, spiraling down into blackness. Just as another bout of shaking rattled the ancient furniture and sent them both to their bellies at the edge of the cavern, John spotted a shadow flitting away down into the deep recesses of the earth below.

“Did you see that?” he asked Wendy. She shook her head. “Someone’s climbing down into that thing.”

“I didn’t see anything,” said Wendy. “Let’s look around upstairs.”

“No way,” said John. “That was Peter, for sure. Besides, Wen, this is the
last
mummy. Do you think it’s just gonna be lying around a bedroom upstairs?”

He was already lowering his body into the hole, using his feet to feel around for flat patches of solid ground. “It’s not that bad,” he said, already a few feet in. “It’s like a cone! We can climb all the way down if we just crawl around the sides, like a marble in one of those science funnels.”

“That’s comforting,” said Wendy, thinking of how the marble always came bouncing to the bottom. She took a careful step into the hole, lowering her body while holding on to the edge with both hands. John was right: it wasn’t that steep, and the lower they climbed, the narrower the hole became. Still, the hole was as big as a house, and crawling around it was exhausting work. They crawled on their hands and knees along trenches that had been dug into the sides, swirling in smaller and smaller circles into the dark hollow places underfoot.

As they climbed, Wendy thought about Peter. Why had he left them like that, without a word of explanation? Why had he taken the book and started the last search on his own? Didn’t he want to share this with her? Didn’t he
just
say that she was his girlfriend? Wasn’t he the one who once had asked her if she would share the bonedust with him, if she would go along with his big adventure and be his oldest friend in fifty or a hundred years? Wendy hadn’t known how to answer then. But since then, things had changed. Her relationship with Connor was over. She and Peter were together. And lately, she found herself thinking about his offer more and more, until he was the only thing that occupied her mind. And when was the last time she had let something like
that
happen?

As they climbed, John whispered all his theories to Wendy. The way he rambled on, totally engrossed with the possibilities, reminded her of their dad. Wendy continued to climb down, trying hard to see John in the dark, when she heard the sound of crumbling rock. John’s feet caught a softer, steeper section of the wall and he gasped, then he yelled out as he lost his footing and fell immediately out of sight.

“Oh, my God!” Wendy screamed into the void. “John!” She tried to lie flat on her stomach, but there was barely enough space. She clung tighter with her arms and legs as she tried to look down.

After some grunting and shuffling, John’s voice shouted back, “It’s not that far, Sis. Just jump.”

Wendy breathed out, then positioned herself so that her feet pointed downward and she was facing the rocky wall, clutching at it with both hands. She closed her eyes, let go of the rung of earth in her hands, and dropped into the bottom of the gulf, the part where the funnel came to an end. The air felt like it was pushing down on her head with the force of all the soil that had once filled this hole. She felt sick with dread.

It was pitch dark, and Wendy could hardly see her own hand. “Hey, Wendy,” said a voice to her right, and Wendy whipped around, because the voice was not John’s.

“Peter,” she said. “What are you doing? Why’d you run off like that?”

“Because,” said Peter, his voice warm and unconcerned, “I didn’t want you to hurt yourself trying to help me. I wanted to get it over with.”

Wendy didn’t want to ask anything more, because this was exactly the answer she had hoped for. Of all the dozens of reasons she had created in her mind, this was the only one that even came close to being acceptable. Sure, it had its weak spots, but Wendy had decided already that if Peter gave this answer, she wouldn’t dig any deeper. Peter reached for Wendy’s arms and pulled her closer. But John made a gagging sound and Peter let go.

The words began to flood out of her, and she told Peter all about what Simon had done, as if Peter could save them all — if only he knew. “Simon forced us in here,” she said. “He’s going to burn the book if we don’t give him all the bonedust.”

Peter didn’t look concerned. “Let’s get past this first. We can deal with Simon later. I need to get the fourth one from him, anyway.” He reached into his pocket and took out a lighter. “I think we’ve found our friend Seti.”

He flicked the lighter, and suddenly the circular space around them was awash in yellow light. It didn’t take much to illuminate the bottom of the cone. The empty space around them was the size of a small room or a large closet, so they could easily walk around and explore. Looking up, John saw how huge the mouth of the hole had been and secretly congratulated himself for making it all the way down. Then he looked down and noticed something else in the room . . . the thing that had rested in this cavern for all eternity.

By the glow of Peter’s lighter, they could see that this was no ordinary room, but a tomb, a resting place not for one person but for hundreds. All around them, sarcophagi were arranged neatly in circular rows. They were stacked behind one another, so that the trio stood at the very center. It was obvious now that the room wasn’t the size of a closet at all. It was much bigger. In fact, if the rows of sarcophagi were removed, the space might be as big as the Darlings’ living room.