We Sled With Dragons (3 page)

“THIS HOTEL IS
gross,” Oliver muttered. “It smells like Sir Edmund's breath.”

He sat on the edge of a small metal bed, looking around at the grimy hotel room. Strange stains spread on the tattered rug. Bugs buzzed this way and that. No wonder they were the only guests. This was not the sort of place that the Travel Channel would recommend. This was not the sort of place that the Health and Wellness Channel would recommend either.

Beverly, being a poisonous lizard, quite liked the hotel room for the exact same reasons Oliver thought it was gross. She scurried to and fro along the floor and up the walls, gobbling up beetles and flies and mosquitoes. Oliver cringed with every crunch. He found lizards very unsettling.

“We have to keep a low profile,” said Celia. “It's not like we could just check into the nicest hotel in town. We have a prisoner.”

She nodded to Ernest, who was tied up and gagged. Their parents had dumped him on the other metal bed, face down so that any complaining he did through his gag was muffled by the pillows. Dennis had decided to pace back and forth over the prisoner's back, his little chicken claws scratching Ernest mercilessly. Ernest groaned but didn't struggle. It seemed only fair that he should be a little uncomfortable after all the times he'd tried to murder Oliver and Celia.

“Anyway,” said Celia. “At least we have something to do while we wait for Mom and Dad to get back with Corey.” She ran her hand along an old television sitting on a stand. A cloud of dust billowed. She coughed.

“But there's no remote,” Oliver complained.

Oliver never remembered anything, thought Celia. She crossed the room and rummaged in her backpack, pushing aside some wetsuits, an old leather journal that had once belonged to the long-lost explorer Percy Fawcett, a brass compass with Percy Fawcett's initials on it, some empty snack cake wrappers, and a few empty cheese puff bags, until she found their big universal remote control.

It had seen better days.

There were two buttons missing, although they were buttons the twins never knew what to do with anyway. There were nuclear-orange stains around the channel changer from cheese puff dust, and a dried crust of salt from when Oliver had dropped into it an underwater cave. The remote had been through a lot with them. But it had also been blessed by a monk in Tibet, and now it could work on any TV in the world. The remote also had a few other unique abilities, but the twins didn't care so much about those right now. They just wanted to watch TV.

Celia pointed the remote at the television, closed her eyes, and pressed the power button. She waited. She opened one eye, cocked her head, and smiled!

“It worked!”

“It did?” said Oliver. The screen looked just as dark as it had before.

“Listen,” said Celia.

They listened. A quiet hum grew louder and louder; the darkness on the screen lightened to gray, then to a lighter gray, then to white and gray.

“See?” said Celia. “These old TVs just have to warm up. In the old days, people had to wait for, like, a whole minute while their TVs got started.”

“That's horrible.”

“I know,” said Celia. “Let's see if we get any channels.” She hit the channel-changer button. More static. She hit it again. Static, static, and more static.

“Bo-ring,” said Oliver.

He threw himself backward onto the bed, forgetting how gross he thought it was. He was tired and really wanted to watch TV, even if it was one of the dumb soap operas that Celia always made him watch, like
Love at 30,000 Feet.
As long as it wasn't one of those fashion shows.

“Ooh,
Celebrity Fashion Crimes
is on!” Celia squealed.

“Anything but that!” Oliver groaned.
Celebrity Fashion Crimes
was about celebrities in terrible outfits giving free makeovers to non-famous people who looked fine until the celebrities came along. “Can't we look for
Agent Zero
?”

“No,” said Celia. She'd had enough action and adventure for a while.

“How about
Bizarro Bandits
?” Oliver suggested.

“We're watching TV in a filthy hotel with a lizard, a chicken, and an evil celebrity impersonator while our parents, a professor, and a monkey try to rescue an actual celebrity from pirates,” said Celia. “Things are bizarre enough already.”

“What about
Soup Wars
?” Oliver loved cooking shows.

“It's too hot for soup,” said Celia.

“
World's Best Rodeo Clown
?”

“We're watching
Celebrity Fashion Crimes.
”

“Oh come on! Let's just look for
World's Best Rodeo Clown
!”

“
Celebrity Fashion Crimes.
That's final.”

“Ugh,” said Oliver.

“Hiss,” said Beverly.

Celia gave them both a look that silenced them. She had her mother's gift for it. Sometimes, she thought, both brothers and poisonous lizards needed to be reminded who was the boss. She was three minutes and forty-two seconds older, after all.

On TV, Madam Mumu, the pop star of all pop stars, was in a canoe with a sad-faced girl in a pretty sundress. The girl was holding a fishing line and looking glum.

“
You need carp
!” Madam Mumu shouted.
“A freshwater fish is the fashion-forward way to a fancy hat!”

“Bo-ring!” Oliver groaned.

“You'll have to stay in cooler climates so the hat doesn't start to smell,”
Madam Mumu was telling the girl.
“How do you feel about moving to the arctic archipelago of Svalbard? It's cold, but you get to see the wonder of the aurora borealis glowing in the twilight sky. Some of the ice sheets off the coast are thousands of years old. They're as thick as skyscrapers! Your outfit will really pop against that background. You'll love it!”

The girl on screen did not look like she would love it.

“Now let's get back to your campsite!”
said Madam Mumu.
“After this commercial break, we'll make a dress out of your tent! It's warm, fireproof, and almost indestructible!”

“Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring,” said Oliver.

“Stop it,” said Celia.

“Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring.”

“Shh.”

“Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring.”

Celia turned up the volume to drown out her brother.

For those readers who do not yet know Celia and Oliver very well, you may wonder how they can focus so much on television under their current circumstances. You see, while some children might have been filled with anxiety about guarding a prisoner while their parents staged the daring rescue of a celebrity from a pirate stronghold in the desert outside Djibouti, Oliver and Celia were not so easily impressed.

Danger was nothing new to them—they'd been facing danger since before they could walk. Distant lands were about as interesting for these two as folding socks. And they were certainly used to their parents running off on one foolish quest or another.

Their mother had run off when they were eight years old to search for the Lost Library of Alexandria. After three years without a word from her, she had suddenly reappeared on a mountaintop in Tibet. She told the twins that she loved them and missed them—all that normal mother stuff—and then she told them that she was part of an ancient secret society called the Mnemones, the scribes of the Lost Library of Alexandria back before it became lost. The
M
in Mnemones is silent, just like the
D
in Djibouti.

Being an explorer, we should note, involves lots of silent letters and secret societies.

Their mother also told Oliver and Celia that they were the last of the Mnemones and that they had to find the Lost Library of Alexandria before Sir Edmund did or the whole world was doomed. Then she disappeared again without so much as a bedtime story.

She showed up a few months after that in the Amazon, and then again on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean, always talking about her secret society and the fate of the world and Oliver and Celia's destiny.

Of course, every time she showed up, the twins' lives were in danger. It was unclear whether she showed up to protect them or if she brought the danger with her.

Either way, because of her quest for the Lost Library, Celia and Oliver had battled monstrous yetis in Tibet, biting fire ants in the Amazon, giant squid on the Pacific Ocean, and faced witches, warriors, goons, and grave robbers. They'd ridden a yak, escaped crumbling ruins and an erupting volcano, and watched their favorite actor get kidnapped by pirates. They'd also been thrown out of an airplane.

That one, their mother confessed, had been her fault.

At least on TV the adventures came with special effects and the story was neatly tied up after half an hour. Even better, the twins didn't have to go anywhere or do anything to have TV adventures. Excitement, they had long ago decided, was more exciting when it was happening to someone else.

“You know when Mom and Dad get back they'll want us to go with them on another adventure, right?” Oliver said, staring up at the ceiling.

Celia didn't answer. She knew her brother was right, and she hated when that happened.

“They'll want us to go looking for Atlantis,” he continued. “That's where Mom thinks the Lost Library is hidden.”

“That
is
where it is hidden,” Celia told her brother. She'd found Percy Fawcett's journal that said so.

“We'll have to beat Sir Edmund there,” Oliver added.

“Of course, when in Svalbard, you must watch out for walruses,” Madam Mumu continued to lecture the girl on TV. “Polar bears are obviously best avoided, but an angry walrus can be equally dangerous. They are a status-driven species, so it is important to establish a dominant posture.”

“We could . . . you know.” Oliver hesitated. He worried that his sister was going to yell at him for what he was about to suggest. She was pretty good at establishing a dominant posture and she always got the final say on what they watched on TV or who went first into ancient ruins. “We could help them,” he said. “Mom and Dad are pretty hopeless without us.”

Celia sat on the edge of the bed and stared straight at the TV. Of course they could help their parents, she thought. In spite of themselves, they'd become pretty good adventurers.

Oliver pulled the old leather journal from the bag and flipped through it. There was a lot of faded writing and drawings from the old explorer's travels. Some pages were filled from edge to edge with tiny words, others had sketches of the fabled city of Atlantis, with a large temple in the center and rings of walls and moats stretching out from it like ripples in a pond. A statue of Poseidon, Greek god of the sea, stood at the entrance to its vast gates.

Other pages had odd symbols and crazy drawings of monsters like yetis and giant squid, unicorns and dragons. There was, for some reason, a whole page with a picture of a buck-toothed squirrel arguing with an old bearded man. The explorer who kept this journal must have gone crazy when he vanished in the jungle. What sort of adult would draw a picture of a man arguing with a squirrel?

The back page of the journal was filled with pictures of a tree. Not different trees. Just one big tree—the same tree—over and over again.

“C-r-a-z-y,” Oliver muttered. He got bored and threw the journal back into the bag. “I mean, if we helped Mom and Dad, we wouldn't have to go back to sixth grade yet,” he finally said. “And we do have that remote control. It could help.”

Celia studied the remote in her hands. It wasn't just a universal remote control. It also had the ability to access the complete catalog of the Lost Library of Alexandria from any TV anywhere in the world.

I know what you're thinking.

Big deal, right? It's just a library catalog.

Well, no one actually knows everything the Lost Library contained in its collections. It was destroyed two thousand years ago in a terrible fire, and all its contents were believed lost. Except they were not lost. They were rescued from destruction and hidden away, maps of forgotten civilizations—like Atlantis—along with scrolls of ancient wisdom and power, magic and intrigue, accounting records and instruction manuals.

Those last two don't sound so exciting, but the accounting records document all the wealth of the ancient world, and the instruction manuals might just show how to raise the lost city of Atlantis. For that reason, the rich and powerful have long sought to find and control the library. And for that same reason, the Mnemones have been trying to find it first.

“And anyway, the sooner we help Mom and Dad find Atlantis and get to the Lost Library, the sooner we can all go home,” Oliver added.

“Fine,” Celia said. “We'll help Mom and Dad. But just this one time,” she added. “Then we get to go home and watch TV and never have another adventure again. Agreed?”