All sounds were muffled in the close space. Together they were like gentle music—the dripping of water, Kosta K.’s rhythmic Greek speech, the occasional plash of oars in the water, and the gentle thunk . . . thunk as the boatmen pressed their oars against the rock columns to steer the boats.
“Fascinating,” Nigel said. “The gentleman explains that all of this rococo beauty is caused by the action of water dripping through the mountainside. It carries limestone from the soil, right down to this cavern. Over thousands of years, the microscopic bits of limestone collect at the ceiling, like a roof with a billion leaks. Slowly stalactites form. Then they drip to the bottom, where the remaining limestone collects once again. The limestone itself is largely white, but in different areas, the water will pick up other minerals in the soil, resulting in the blues, greens, and reds. Little by little, in this manner, stalagmites grow upward toward their brothers and sisters on the ceiling.”
“I could have told you that,” Max said.
“How do you remember which ite is which?” Alex asked.
“Stalagmite has a g for ‘ground,’” Max replied. “Stalactite has a c for ‘ceiling.’”
“Awesome, eh?” grumbled Kosta D. with a little laugh.
“You can say that again,” Max murmured.
“Awesome, eh?” Kosta D. repeated.
“Is it warm in here?” Bitsy asked from the other boat, wiping her forehead with a handkerchief.
“I find it actually rather cold,” Nigel said.
Alex leaned toward Max. “I’m worried about her. She’s going to freak at any second. We may have to go back. Do you see any . . . I don’t know . . . wet river horse shapes? Like the clue?”
“I don’t know! How can you tell?”
As the boat moved out of one vast chamber and into another one, Kosta K. began mumbling in Greek to Nigel again. The formations in this area were superfine, like rock candy crystal. They glowed with a lighter, green-blue tint.
“Some of these things look like monsters, or animals.” Alex pointed to a chaotic mass of knotted rock, jammed into a curve in the wall. “OK. That formation. What do you see?”
“Three giraffes throwing a beach ball? That’s definitely not it.” Max squinted at another formation. “How about that one?”
“I see Grumpy the Dwarf crushed by fallen bicycles.” Alex exhaled. “Who knows what Gaston saw? It’s all so subjective. Could be a rhinoceros or a swan. Maybe ‘ancient wet river horse’ is some kind of code, I wish we had more information!”
“OK, OK, let me think,” Max said.
There were rules to solving a problem. Break it down into its components. It made complex things seem simpler.
Red. Coat. Ancient. Wet. River. Horse.
Everything down here was ancient. And wet. And on a river. That narrowed it down to red coats and horses.
Which didn’t really help.
Now Nigel was lecturing from the other boat: “Our dear friend Kosta—ahhhh-choo!—is telling me that the early Greek explorers found bones down here. Occasionally they were the remains of buried human beings, but mostly—you’ll find this amusing—bones of hippopotami!”
Kosta D. let out a honking laugh, and he gave Max a tap on the shoulder. “Ippopotamos, eh?”
“Aaahhh!” Max blurted, nearly toppling the boat.
“Eh?” said Kosta D.
“No, aaahhh,” Max replied. “As in, aaahhh, maybe that’s it!”
“What’s it?” Alex said.
“Not a horse shape—horse bones.” Max turned to the other boat and called out, “Nigel, ask Kosta K. if they ever found horse bones!”
When Nigel asked Kosta K. the question in Greek, the boatman burst into laughter and looked at Max as if he were a cute but slightly annoying toddler.
He took that to be a no.
As they approached a sharp turn, Kosta K. pushed his oar against a stalagmite to change course, all the while speaking Greek to Nigel.
“Our intrepid guide has noticed you’re interested in the bones,” Nigel said. “And he thought you’d like to know that many of those bones were found in this very area just ahead!”
Nigel gestured to a chamber beyond a stone archway, which glowed with an eerie pinkish light. “Apparently this is an unusual cavern, even for the Cave of Vlihada. In the soil directly above, there is a rich source of copper. The rainwater has carried this mineral into the limestone, which gives the formations here a distinct hue.”
Max sat bolt upright so sharply the boat teetered.
Red. The room was red.
“Max . . .” Alex said.
Kosta K. muttered something in Greek to Nigel, who shrugged.
But Max’s eyes were focused on the walls of this new, high-arching chamber. The color was subtle, closer to pink really. The walls were a complex construction of ancient twisted limestone, but behind them were small, shadowy holes in the cavern wall.
Max had his eye on a dog-sized opening in the wall just at the edge of the light. A yellow rope was drawn across the opening, along with a sign with very small print. He squinted. Half of it was in Greek, the other half in English, but the English part was coming into focus:
SPELEOLOGICAL SITE. PLEASE KEEP OUT!
“I need you to make a distraction,” Max said to Alex. “Now.”
Alex spun around. “What?”
“Ssssh.” The other boat wasn’t too far ahead of them, but Kosta K. was droning on and on. No one seemed to be hearing Max and Alex’s conversation. Max hooked his arm under the strap of his backpack. He looked for the hole against the cavern’s opposite wall, but it had disappeared behind the formations. “Alex, do you remember what Nigel said when we first got down here?”
“No. It was Greek!”
“Sto potamós!”
“I can’t believe you remember that.”
“Potamós is the Greek word for ‘river.’”
Alex cocked her head. “Right . . . and river is one of the words in the clue.”
“Exactly! OK, so I was thinking, earlier today when Nigel was trying to accelerate up the mountain, he called his car a horse. Only the word he used for horse was the Ancient Greek one, ippos.” Max leaned closer to his cousin. “Put those two words together, Alex.”
“Potamós-ippos?”
“Ippopotamos!” Max said. “Stick on the h for good measure. Hippopotamus comes from the Greek word for ‘river horse.’ So you plug that into the clue. ‘The red coat of the ancient wet river horse’ really means ‘the red coat of the ancient wet hippopotamus’!”
Alex’s eyes were as bright as lamps. “Max, any animal that’s ancient is dead. And a dead animal is a skeleton. And a skeleton is bones. So we’re looking for hippo bones with some kind of . . . red coat.”
Max nodded. “If the bones exist down here, in this room, they would be coated with red from the copper.”
“We approach what is known as the Great Gate . . .” As Nigel’s voice echoed in the silence, Bitsy daubed her forehead with a handkerchief.
“They can’t see me do this,” Max said. “Distract them!”
“OK, OK!” Alex said. “I’m thinking.”
Max began slipping on the backpack. Alex stood, her eye on Bitsy, as Nigel droned on: “ . . . so called because it appears that these two massive columns were constructed specifically to mark the—”
“Claustrophobia!” Alex blurted out.
Bitsy’s body went stiff.
Nigel fell silent. “My dear?”
“Wow, this ceiling is low . . . and I feel claustrophobia!” Alex said. “Do you feel claustrophobia?”
“Ohhhhh . . .” Bitsy moaned. She was reaching for the sides of the boat, her hands shaking. “I have to go back!”
“Ti?” Kosta K. said.
“I’m sorry,” Bitsy said. “I can’t do this. I’ll go back by myself. In the water. It’s shallow. I’ll be fine. You guys go ahead.”
“Bitsy, dear, you can’t walk back,” Nigel said.
As Bitsy
tried to step over the side of the boat, Kosta K. took her by the arm. Bitsy threw off the boatman’s hand. “You leave me alone, or I’ll have you in an international court by Tuesday!”
Now Kosta D. was frantically poling the boat toward Kosta K.’s. Max shot a look at Alex. She winked back.
And Max, with the pack on his back, slipped into the waist-high water.
17
MAX was fine until the shadows.
The water itself was warmer than he’d expected. The floor was slippery but made of solid rock, and the limestone content made it impossible for fish to live there. These were facts. So it made absolutely no sense to see monsters and disembodied arms and black holes large enough for a human.
But in the shadows, he did.
“My fears are not the boss of me,” Max said to the water.
Talking to water itself didn’t make sense, which made Max smile. Smiling was a great way to stop feeling fear. He wished he could tell Bitsy that. He felt bad for her. She was still screaming. Maybe Alex should have thought of a better distraction. Claustrophobia was a bad thing. He knew that, because he was fighting it every step of the way himself.
The hole in the wall. Look at the hole, he told himself. He could see it now, lit by the cavern lamp. He stepped slowly along the slippery rock floor and reached out to the wall for support, but the wall felt like it had been constructed of dead lizards.
To get to the hole he would have to pass into the light briefly, and he might be visible to the boats. But once he crawled inside, he’d be out of sight again.
“Max?” echoed a voice. “Blast it, lad, where did you go?”
Nigel.
He turned but couldn’t see the boats. They were still in the chamber where Max had left them. But it was only a matter of time before they returned.
Max waded into the light. He could read the sign clearly now:
SPELEOLOGICAL SITE. PLEASE KEEP OUT!
Speleological meant ‘having to do with the study of caves.’ You didn’t see that word too often. Learning weird words was great, because you could store them up and remember them later. And remembering stuff was another method to keep away fear. But the sign also said “Keep Out,” which meant keep out, so the two things canceled each other out.
The hole had a ledge, maybe four feet high. Max hoisted himself up and looked inside. He could see nothing in the pitch-black. He pulled out his phone, which had gotten a little wet.
It was on, which was a good sign, so he activated the flashlight feature and shone it into the hole. It was bright enough. It would work fine.
The hole went deep into the wall. But the light didn’t reach far enough to show where the tunnel ended. Still, Max figured, if this was a site, that meant there was something important inside, somewhere. And if it was true that the speleologists had found hippo bones here in this part of the cave, this would be the most likely place.
“Honestly, where is that boy?”
Nigel’s voice seemed superclose.
“Max?” Bitsy called out.
“Wait, I think I saw him back where we were!” Alex said. “Maybe we should turn around and go back to the other chamber!”
Max grimaced. Alex was trying to cover for him. But she was never going to win a Golden Globe acting award.
Quickly, silently, he slid the backpack into the hole. He knew he wasn’t supposed to enter, but then he thought about Evelyn and that was enough. He crawled in, but he was only able to stay on his knees for a few feet before the ceiling sloped downward. He had to flatten out, but the slimy surface made it pretty easy to slide along. He was thankful for that, even though the surface was gross. Sweaty feet were gross too, and he was smelling them, which was not a good sign at all. He knew he could only take a few moments of feeling smothered like this before he freaked out like Bitsy. And the last thing the team needed was twin freak-outs.
“Here, hippo hippo hippo,” Max said, which was kind of funny but kind of not. There were lots of not-funny parts. Like what if his hunch was just wrong? What if this was not the bone site, and the tunnel led nowhere? What if the old sign was a relic from the sixties? As he crawled along, he could feel the limestone dripping on him. What would happen if he got stuck? Would the drips harden all over his body, pinning him helplessly between stalactites and stalagmites? Would ads of the future promise a look at the Famous Petrified Boy from Savile, Ohio?
“Stop thinking,” Max said to himself. “Stop stop stop stop stop . . .”
At the fifth stop his phone slipped out of his hand. As he picked it up, the light swung left and right. And he caught a glimpse of something that glinted back.
Something metallic. About twenty yards ahead.
He took a deep breath, which didn’t feel as refreshing as he wanted it to. The air was too thin. He edged himself along, using his elbows and knees. Soon the walls of the tunnel flared out, making it easier to move, until he lifted himself back into a crawl.
He stopped when he reached a ledge.
Swinging his legs around, he was able to draw himself into a sitting position. He shone the phone downward carefully, slowly.
He was at the top of five steps, cut into the stone walls of the chamber. They led down to a roughly round area, big enough to maybe fit his house’s living room but not much else. The walls were tiered with circular ledges all the way around, like some kind of small stadium. Strewn about on the floor below were hammers, chisels, brushes, and a bunch of strange curved tools Max had never seen before.
And on the ledges, collected into neat little piles, were bones.
Max stood, inching closer to a pile to his right. The bones seemed pretty small, but they were definitely tinted red. Under them was a handwritten card that said γάτα, which did not look like hippopotamus.
He widened his circle of light and saw another pile, much bigger, laid out on the very top tier. The air was already feeling clammy and warm. “Please be a hippo,” he said.
This pile’s ID card was jammed under the pile. Max grabbed it and pulled. Some bones slipped and fell off the tier. Max instinctively reached out to catch them, just as something round and large rolled toward him, stopping on the ledge.
A human skull.
Max choked back a scream. He could see the place from where the skull had fallen now—the bones were actually the skeleton of a short person laid out head to toe. The skull’s jaw only contained about half its teeth.
It looked like it was laughing.
“Sweaty feet . . . sweaty feet . . .” He backed away. Deep breaths. He had to take deep breaths or he would fly away to nothingness, disappear from the earth. It was a scientific site, he reminded himself. Scientific sites were not scary. They were about collecting knowledge. He would be fine. His back smacked against the opposite ledge. Another pile of bones clattered to the floor. Great. He was going to destroy everything. Max, the Great Disrupter of Greek Science.
Something square and light-colored fell to the floor, and Max shone his light on it.
A card. He squinted at the writing:
ιπποπόταµος
He stooped to lift it. Max couldn’t read Greek, but English letters were influenced by Greek. Fact. The shape and pattern of these letters . . . well, they seemed pretty clear. Except π. But that was pi. He knew that from math. The word was hippopotamus.
Moving the phone to the right, he looked at the bones directly above the spot from where the card had fallen.
They were thick and stubby. And deeply coated with red.
“Thank you . . .” he murmured. “In hippo language.”
Max grabbed one. It was the size of a knuckle.
OK, he had the artifact he needed. But this wasn’t only about the artifacts. It was about the water too. From what he figured, they would need both. He opened his pack and rummaged through the vials Nigel had given him. Three of them were big enough to fit the bones. He dropped one into each. Then he dipped each vial into the water at the bottom of the cave and sealed the top
s tight.
“Sorry, hippo spirit,” he whispered, “but it’s for a good cause.”
As he zipped the pack shut, its weight felt reassuring. He hooked it on and smiled.
Score one for the team.
He began spinning around in a little dance. He couldn’t help it. But when he stopped, the room had gone pitch-dark. He needed to refresh the phone’s light.
He touched the screen and nothing happened. Then he pressed the Power button. Nada.
His phone was dead.
18
MAX looked around in a panic. He opened his eyes as wide as they could go. “Alex? Ale-e-e-ex?”
Nothing. Not even an echo.
Max felt around for the wall. If he followed its contours, he would get to the tunnel. Fact. He’d been through the tunnel, and he already knew what was in it, which was an absence of anything. So there was nothing to fear. Fact fact fact. There was comfort in facts.
A droplet bounced off his nose, and he flinched. That flinch sent his phone flying. He heard it clatter to the ground.
Hold yourself together. Find it.
OK. The sound of the clatter would tell him where it fell. To the left, and close by. He got on his hands and knees. Slowly. Because he knew there were tools on the ground. He’d seen them, and some of them had looked sharp.
More facts: It was dark. Darkness sucked, but darkness was the absence of light. It wasn’t the addition of anything. And things did not just appear out of nothing. Things like raptors or screaming heads or slithering rat-snake hybrids covered in snot.
Stop. Thinking.
Max crawled along the floor. His fingers brushed against handles and blades, but the smooth, slim shape of his phone was easy enough to discern. He grabbed it, shoved it into his pocket, and stood.