Tunnel of Secrets (6 page)

Zeke pointed to a dark tunnel branching off from the open, well-lit space we were standing in. I unzipped my bag, took a quick inventory, and strapped on a headlamp. Luckily, the thief hadn’t taken anything except the Admiral’s key.

“Let’s roll,” I said to Frank.

“Thanks for your help, Zeke,” Frank said.

“No worries. You boys keep an eye on your sandwiches,” he said with a wink.

“Well, that was interesting,” I said to Frank as we walked toward the mouth of the tunnel. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like Zeke and Curly before.”

“I guess you have to be at least a little strange to choose to live underground,” Frank replied.

I had an unsettled feeling as we entered the tunnel. I didn’t love the idea of going even deeper underground in pursuit of someone everyone claimed was off his rocker, and
walking into an enclosed train tunnel with barely any space between the track and the walls made me feel extra edgy. As we followed the track around a curve in the tunnel, my headlamp threw all kinds of ghostly shadows off the railroad ties in front of us.

“Is it normal to feel claustrophobic while urban exploring?” Frank asked meekly.

“Totally normal, bro,” I said. “The important thing is to stay calm and it’ll pass.”

Frank sighed in relief. “Okay, that’s good, thanks.”

“No prob— Hey, what’s that?” I asked my brother.

“What’s what?” he started to ask, but then he felt it too. The tracks had started vibrating under our feet.

“That’s weird,” he said, listening to the low
clk-clk-clk-clk-clk
that followed. “It sounds kind of like a train, but that’s not even possible. The cars down here have been out of commission for, like, a hundred years. It must be coming from the station aboveground.”

“That’s good. I’d like to avoid getting stuck in this tunnel with a train heading toward us,” I said.

“Yeah,” Frank agreed, laughing nervously.

“Um, Frank, what’s that?” I asked again, this time pointing over our shoulders at a circle of light that had appeared on the track behind us—a light that was growing larger by the second.

Frank’s eyes went wide.

“Train!” he yelled, and took off running like a rocket.

My stomach dropped.

“I thought you said it wasn’t possible,” I screamed, sprinting after him.

“Someone must have intentionally sent it down the track to run us over!” he cried.

“Unless it’s haunted,” I yelled back.

“Impossible!”

“You mean impossible like the train that’s not supposed to be chasing us or a different kind of impossible?”

Frank ignored that one. “Whoever it is, they must not want us digging any deeper. That means we’re on the right track.”

“If this is the right track, I sure don’t want to see the wrong one!” I said, trying to will my feet to go faster.

“Sorry, bad word choice!” Frank replied. The light behind us grew brighter, filling the tunnel and making our shadows dance along the tracks in front of us.

“We can’t outrun it!” I yelled.

Frank screamed something else, but the sound of the train’s wheels plowing over the track drowned it out. Then I saw it too—the wall with the lockbox Zeke had told us about—but that meant there was nowhere left to run! We were at the end of the line, boxed in with a brick wall in front of us and a train closing in from behind.

I sprinted as hard as I could for the wall, having no idea what we were going to do when we got there, but hoping it would at least give us a few more seconds to wish for a miracle.

I only had to pump my legs a couple more times before I saw that miracle. Or miracles. Two iron doors: one on either side of the tunnel. I went left and Frank went right. Mine was marked
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. And it was locked.

Frank’s didn’t have a sign. What it did have was a huge skull and crossbones spray-painted in bloodred above the words
STAY OUT—DEATH TO ALL WHO ENTER
.

I didn’t really care what it said. All I cared was whether or not it opened. And it did.

Frank threw the door open, but he hesitated before entering. Now wasn’t the time for my brother to start worrying about curses.

The light from the train was blinding, the sound deafening. We were out of time.

I dove across the tunnel, plowing into Frank and shoving us both through the door a split second before the train would have plowed into us.

It didn’t me take long to figure out why Frank had stopped, though. And it didn’t have anything to do with pirates or curses. I’d pushed us straight off the ledge into a bottomless pit!

A
SPLIT SECOND AFTER JOE
smashed into me, the train smashed into the wall. A split second after that found us free-falling into a giant abyss behind the door I had opened.

Upon impact, the train exploded above us, spewing fire into the darkness and illuminating the vast cavern beneath us with an eerie glow. Giant stalactites like jagged teeth hung from the ceiling, and equally jagged rock formations and unstable boulders waited below. It would have been one of the coolest places I’d ever seen if I hadn’t been witnessing it while plummeting through the air.

We weren’t airborne long before we slammed onto a steep, rocky slope. There was just enough incline to break our
fall, but not enough to stop us from tumbling the rest of the way down.

I clambered to get a handhold, finally grabbing on to a crag in the rock. Joe was about to slide right past me when I snagged his gear bag. One of the bag’s handles tore free and the bag went flying, but it slowed him down enough to grab on as well.

“Whoa, dude,” my brother said with a gasp, clinging to the rock beside me.

“I think I’ve had enough fun for one day,” I moaned, trying to dodge the stones that had been dislodged by the exploding train and were rolling down the slope after us. “We’d better try to make our way to the bottom before the whole roof comes crashing down.”

Joe surveyed the slope below. “There are plenty of natural handholds in the rock to keep us from sliding all the way down. Shouldn’t be too bad as long as we go slowly.”

As I watched Joe begin his descent, I heard a loud groaning noise coming from above.

“So you know what I said about going slowly?” Joe asked, looking up the slope past me.

“Yeah?”

“Well, new plan.”

I followed his eyes up the slope, where a massive boulder was teetering from its perch. My stomach turned to ice as it began tumbling toward us.

“Slide!” he yelled.

He didn’t
have to tell me twice. I let go of the rock I was clinging to, and gravity and inertia took care of the rest. We shot down the slope like a couple of kids on a big, bumpy slide.

The boulder came careening down after us, smashing into the place we had been just a moment before and sending a landslide of smaller stones raining down on us. I could hear the boulder picking up speed, crashing into the rocky slope with enormous thuds that shook the whole cavern as it rolled closer, racing us to the bottom.

What we hadn’t realized was that the slope didn’t go all the way to the bottom. The end of it had crumbled away, leaving a vertical drop between us and the cavern floor!

My brother and I screamed as we fell off the edge.

The boulder, on the other hand, kept right on going, sailing over our heads close enough that I could feel it mess up my hair.

Joe and I crashed to the ground a few feet below, where we saw the boulder knock over giant stalagmites left and right like they were bowling pins before smashing right through the cavern wall.

“Oof,” Joe said.

“Ungh,” I replied.

“Are we still alive?” Joe asked.

“I think so,” I muttered.

“What now?” Joe asked, picking up his gear bag from its landing spot nearby and dusting off his headlamp, which had also fallen off but was thankfully still working.

I
craned my neck to look way, way up at the hole we’d fallen through. The flames from the train wreck had died to a flicker, making it look like a little yellow sun high up in the sky. The distance was enough to give me vertigo. If that slope hadn’t been there to break our fall, we never would have survived the drop.

“Well, there’s no way we’re going back the way we came, that’s for sure,” I said.

“At least not without a couple jet packs,” Joe said.

“So I guess we keep going. Lead the way, Cyclops,” I told Joe, whose headlamp made him look like he had one big eyeball in the middle of his forehead.

Joe kicked aside a hunk of shattered rock as we followed the path of the boulder. “Man, those stalactites didn’t stand a chance.”

“Actually, the columns of calcium salt deposits that rise from the ground are technically called stalagmites,” I corrected. “The ones hanging from the ceiling like icicles are stalactites.”

Joe stopped suddenly. “Did you hear that?”

“What?” I asked, looking around nervously.

“The sound of my eyes rolling,” he said.

“Ha-ha. You’ll thank me when you take geology,” I said.

Joe shone his light through the gaping hole the boulder had left in the cavern wall. “That’s weird. It’s like some kind of chamber.”

“It looks like it was excavated by hand,” I said, stepping inside
and running my hand over the wall. It was smoother than the naturally occurring rock on the other side.

Joe did a sweep of the room with his headlamp. The light filtered through the dust, landing on a splash of red. We climbed over a pile of rocks to get a closer look.

Staring back at us from behind a thick curtain of cobwebs were the hollow eyes of a partially mummified human corpse.

A corpse that just happened to be wearing the same kind of hooded red robe as the creep that had attacked us in the library. The robe hung in tatters over the dried flesh clinging to the mummy’s skeleton.

“It looks like this guy shops for clothes at the same place as our ghoul.” Joe shuddered. “As if dead bodies aren’t freaky enough.”

“Well, I guess we don’t have to wonder about how he died,” I said, pointing to the jewel-studded dagger sticking out of the mummy’s back.

Joe winced. “Ouch. I wonder who he is.”

“It’s hard to even tell how old the body is,” I said, trying to examine it without getting too close. “With this type of mummification, it could be fifty years old or two hundred and fifty. Or even older than that. The same conditions that allow the stalactites and stalagmites to form probably helped preserve him. Just the right mixture of minerals and moisture can suspend parts of the decomposition process. It’s hard to tell more without doing a full forensic postmortem. You’ve got a pocketknife in your gear bag, right?”

Joe looked at me like I was crazy. “Leave the poor guy alone! He’s already been stabbed once!”

“I’m not going to cut him open. I just want something I can use to lift back the robe without touching him.”

Joe handed me a Swiss Army knife, and I unfolded the blade. As I reach forward to try to lift back the mummy’s robe, I noticed something strange about the way its left hand was pressed to its mouth. It looked like the person had died trying to swallow something. But what really caught my eye were its mummified fingers. The mummy’s left hand had only three of them. It was missing the pinkie and ring fingers.

Just like the Admiral.

“Joe,” I said, “I think we just solved Bayport’s oldest missing persons case.”

Y
OU MEAN THE DEAD GUY
is the Admiral?!” I asked my brother.

Frank nodded, looking every bit as surprised as I felt.

“You mean like the-guy-in-the-statue-that-fell-through-a-giant-hole-in-the-ground-this-morning Admiral?” I asked again, trying to process it.

“That’s the one,” Frank said. “I’m pretty sure we just solved Bayport’s coldest case. All the pieces fit. The rumors. The robe from the drawing in the book. The fact that he only has three fingers on his left hand.”

I double-checked the mummy’s fingers. Yup. Three. Just like the Admiral.

“I
think we finally know what happened to Admiral James T. Bryant,” Frank said.

“Not that it does him much good now,” I said. “Or us, either, for that matter. We still don’t know why he was down here or who killed him or, more importantly, what any of this has to do with the sinkhole or Layla.”

Frank was stumped too. “Let’s see if we can find anything on the Admiral’s body that might give us more of a clue.”

He carefully slid the Swiss Army blade under the collar of the Admiral’s robe to pull it back. The problem was, the robe wasn’t the only thing that pulled back. So did the Admiral’s flesh!

An awful “MAAAAAH!” escaped from the Admiral’s body, along with the two-hundred-year-old air that had been trapped inside, making it sound like he was groaning. We leaped back, Frank thrusting the blade in front of him like he was ready for a mummy attack.

Thankfully, the Admiral stayed where he was. His torso had split open like a dried-out turkey, though, so we could see all the way to his spine.

Frank laughed nervously and lowered the knife. “I guess his flesh stuck to the robe during the mummification process. It doesn’t look like much of his soft tissue or organs were preserved, though.”

I nervously rubbed my own stomach, feeling especially grateful that I still had one. And that’s when I saw it. There
was something lying at the bottom of the hollow cavity where the Admiral’s stomach used to be.

“Hey, give me that,” I said to Frank, grabbing the knife and opening the pliers. “I can’t believe I’m about to do this.”

I carefully reached inside the Admiral’s corpse and lifted the object out with the pliers.

It was badly tarnished and corroded, but there was no doubt. It was an exact small-scale replica of the big bronze skeleton key that had been stolen from my bag.

I held it up for Frank.

“Whoa! It’s a regular-size version of the key to the city that the Admiral has in the statue,” he said. “He must have swallowed it before he died to keep whoever killed him from getting it.”