Artifacts (12 page)

She smiled. “I’m ready.”

“You, Tank, Skylights, and I will go through the front entrance and we’ll take your lead from there.”

Korie walked to the entrance and then disappeared, a lot like she did in the forest. Skylights and I were right behind her and Tank stayed within an arm’s length of us.

Stepping through the entrance, it was nearly three feet thick and the vines were constantly shifting and moving. The edges of the opening bowed out toward us as we passed by and the tips of the thorns extending as far as they could, brushing across our skin and our clothing, trying to snag some part of
something
and drag us in.

“Be careful,” Skylights warned us, pulling Tank back from the edge of a thorn that was about to embed itself. “You may be too big to be dragged in, but we aren’t sure if the tips are poisonous or not.”

“Poisonous!” I yelled. “You wait until we’re
inside
the Blackthorn to tell us the tips of the thorns may be poisonous?”

“Could I have gotten you in here otherwise?” Skylights asked.

“Not a chance. I would have been with Mouth up in his Command Tree House.”

“Come on,” Korie said, making a right hand turn into the entrance. “Stay in the middle of the path and away from the walls and you’ll be fine.”

Korie moved quickly down the path, Tank staying right behind her. She made a left turn and then a right and we found ourselves at our first crossroads.

“Left seems to be the way that would take us farther into the maze,” I said. “But right may give us the chance to go around the edge and, hopefully, find more opportunities.”

“I don’t think it would drive us into its center so quickly,” Korie said. “This has to be a trick. Making us think that left will be the most direct way to the house.”

Skylights was quiet.

“Go whichever way you think is best,” Tank said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Korie ran right and Tank and I followed her. As the path curved one way and then the other, we passed several crossroads, taking the right turn first, then the left, and then alternating as we went. There was a long straightaway and as we ran to the end and took the turn … Skylights was standing in front of us.

“But how did you …” I asked.

“I stayed here as you ran and waited for you to return,” Skylights said.

“Why didn’t you …” Korie asked.

“This is where we found ourselves the very first day,” Skylights said, smiling at how easily Korie and I had found ourselves caught in an unending loop “You needed to feel the frustration for yourselves. In order to make better choices later.”

Korie stepped up to the wall but stayed just beyond the reach of the thorns. “High-tech mazes respond to the actions of the guests,” she said, seemingly looking for any sign of weakness

“But this isn’t a high-tech maze,” I reminded her.

She nodded. “But a maze made from magic, protecting such a valuable artifact from the grabby hands of trespassers, should have a sensor recognizing the pureness of our intentions.”

“That’s stupid,” I could hear Mouth yelling from the other side of the hedge. “You’re stuck just like us and now you have to turn around.”

“Hey,” Tank yelled back. “You keep talking and I’ll drag you right through these vines.”

Through the wall, I could hear the thunder of footsteps running away from us until they finally disappeared.

“We’d better turn around and go the other way,” Skylights said. “We did get a little farther when we took the turn to the left …”

Skylights words tailed off as a rumble at the base of the wall drowned him out.

We watched intently as the large, dense, thorn-laden thickets slowly disentangled themselves until they were long stalks rising into the sky. Suddenly, they raced to the ground as if being pulled from the underside and slipped back through tiny openings in the earth.

Skylights was speechless.

The passageway in front of us was clear, allowing us to continue through.

Korie smiled at him as Tank and I cracked up. “Never underestimate the power of pure intentions?”

“Or a girl who knows she’s right,” I added.

Tank cracked up again.

“Please go ahead,” Skylights said, his voice quiet with a touch of humbleness.

We continued through the maze, keeping an eye out for any new challenges created by the sorceress.

I could feel we were getting closer. We were given a few more choices in the maze, which we seemed to have made correctly. Turning the corner to what I hoped would be one more straightaway leading us to the exit, we saw the house through the opening in the maze.

“We did it,” I whispered, not wanting to say it too loud in case it disappeared.

“I wasn’t sure we’d ever see the day we could walk through to the house,” Skylights said.

“Let’s get going,” Tank said. “Then we can go up to the fourth floor and see where Mouth and the others are. I can’t wait to see their faces.”

“Wait,” Korie said, grabbing Tank’s arm. “It still doesn’t feel right. After all the work it took to get here, something about it still seems too easy.”

“But it’s right there,” Skylights said, “begging us to go through.”

“That’s the point,” Korie said, waving him off. “We need something to throw.”

“If Mouth was still here, we could throw him,” Tank said.

I laughed. “It would throw him back.”

Korie scratched the ground for a rock. Finally, Tank knelt down and dug it out for her.

“It’s a good-sized rock,” he said, tossing it in his hand.

“Throw it through the opening,” Korie said.

Tank shot me a look and tossed me the rock. “You’re up, Ace.”

I rubbed it in my hands while looking at the opening. Taking a firm hold, I started my famous sixth-grade Little League stretch. Pausing to check both of the invisible runners on first and third, I kicked my leg high and threw a fastball toward the center of the opening.

The rock sliced through the air, humming in its mid-fifty-mile-per-hour flight. The moment it crossed the line where the maze framed the opening, the wall reappeared and stopped the rock in midair. In seconds, large, gnarled, twisted branches of the dense Blackthorn crawled out from a thousand different places, swarming over the rock and swallowing it up under layer upon layer of branches.

“That could have been you,” Tank said.

“How would that have been me?” I asked. “You were the one Korie stopped from going.”

“Yeah,” Tank said, “but your Spidey senses would have picked up on the danger before it happened and pushed me out of the way …”

“Wait! What?” I looked at him like he was crazy. “Pushed you out of the way?”

“Well, tried to push me out of the way,” Tank conceded. “But then you would’ve bounced off, falling through the opening and winding up all wrapped up like that rock.”

I laughed. “You’re as bad as Mouth.”

“Come on,” Korie said. “I wonder if the others had any luck.”

“Touch, Grifter, and the Grumpkins have been in the maze far too many times to find the right pattern,” Skylights said. “Maybe we should have sent Mouth or Crunch with them to give them a new set of eyes.”

I tried to hide the smile coming across my face at the thought of Crunch or Mouth being able to help anybody. “Mouth and Crunch have abilities that only Mouth and Crunch can appreciate. If they’d been with us, there would have only been one of two possible outcomes as we traveled through the maze. Either we would have given up and gone home, frustrated by how crazy the two of them were or …”

Korie finished my sentence. “Or Tank would have thrown both of them into the Blackthorn so we could continue to go through the maze in peace.”

“I’d have definitely thrown them into the Blackthorn,” Tank said. “I might do that anyway, even if they aren’t—”

I jumped up and slapped my hand over Tank’s mouth to quiet him. I could feel the mixture of rage and confusion building inside him so I motioned to the edge of the far wall of Blackthorn while holding on for dear life. Turning his head, we caught glimpses of Hook, Smee, Butt-Kiss, and Jerkin moving steadily down the path on the other side.

“How did they get in here?” Korie peeked out around my shoulder.

“I don’t know,” I said, letting Tank go. “But this can’t be good.”

“That’s the side Grifter, Touch, and the Grumpkin went in,” Tank said.

“Oh, gosh.” I panicked. “I hope they’re okay.”

“Who’s okay?” Skylights asked, not quite sure what we were talking about.

“Grifter, Touch, and the Grumpkin,” I whispered.

Skylights had the oddest look on his face. “Why wouldn’t they be okay and why on earth are you whispering?”

“Hook,” I said, pointing to the villains I could see through the branches of Blackthorn, “and Butt-Kiss. They wouldn’t have passed them in the maze without harming them.”

Skylights looked where I was pointing. “That
is
Grifter, Touch, and the Grumpkin.”

“No,” Tank said. “It’s Hook!”

Skylights laughed. “It’s the maze. Just one more of the tricks it offers as we get close to solving it. We must be
very
close.”

“I don’t think …”

“Boys!” Skylights shouted while still keeping his eyes on us.

“I don’t know where you are, but we’re ahead of you,” Grifter shouted, his voice slipping and slithering through the gnarled, clustered Blackthorn thickets until it reached us.

“See,” Skylights said. “We need to go.”

Once we realized it was once again a “ghost” set up by the maze, we began to relax a little.

“Don’t even think of slapping your hand over my mouth again.” Tank laughed.

Even though he was laughing, I knew he really meant it.

After continuing through the maze, we found ourselves at a dead end that I thought we’d been at before.

“I’m afraid we’re going in circles,” I said, looking ahead at the wall and then behind us.

“No, actually we’re going in squares,” Tank corrected me. “None of these twists and turns we’ve been through has even the slightest arc to them.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Everybody’s a comedian.”

Korie was quiet again. That usually meant she noticed something nobody else had. My life was full of Korie noticing something nobody else had.

“Okay, what doesn’t feel right about this?” I asked.

“Wait, what?” Korie said.

I shot her a look. “You’re never quiet. It only happens when you’re thinking, and something about this dead end has you thinking. So spill it.”

“We definitely haven’t been at this dead end before,” she said. “Every time we ran into a dead end, I scratched a mark into the dirt near the base of the wall. The mark’s not here.”

“I feel a lot better about that now,” I said. “It would have been awful if we were walking in circles …” I could hear Tank about to jump in. “… I mean squares.”

“This Blackthorn isn’t moving like the others,” Korie said, putting her hand up to the wall. “The others are continually moving in and out of the other branches, tying them up and pulling them tighter together to reinforce the strength of the wall. These branches, however, are slipping and sliding in front of each other. They never actually touch.”

Korie moved her hand closer to the branches, waiting for them to bow out to her and for the thorns to turn directly toward her … but it never happened.

“Wait, let me do that,” I said, stepping next to Korie.

“Be careful,” Skylights said.

“I don’t think I have to this time,” I said.

Reaching out for the branches, my hand slipped through. “I think we just beat the maze.”

Taking a step forward, and closing my eyes, I walked through.

Relieved I didn’t die, I opened my eyes and the house was directly in front of me. I was never so happy to see four-stories of an old, run-down ramshackle house as I was at that moment.

Turning around, I reached through the wall and pulled Korie through.

She squealed on the way through and then laughed out loud as she popped out.

I looked at her. “When did you start squealing?”

“About the same time I started walking through Blackthorn walls,” she said quickly. “And we’re never to speak about that again.”

With Korie gone, Tank and Skylights came through and had big, broad smiles as they stood on the grass, the warm sun on their faces and the wind in their hair.

“That was
awesome
!” Tank said.

“We must be the only ones in the world who were ever able to defeat it,” Skylights gushed.

“Hey, what took you so long?” Mouth cried.

Mouth, Crunch, and the Grumpkin were sitting on the steps leading up to the porch.

“But how did you … ”

“Talent, ingenuity, and ability,” Mouth said quickly. “Gifts that get better and stronger with age. If I’m this good at thirteen, just imagine how good I’ll be when I’m, like, a hundred.”

I waved him off. “No really, how did you …”

“Grumpkin,” Crunch said. “We were sitting at one of the thousand dead ends and Mouth was crying—”

Tank cracked up. “Mouth was crying.”

“Mouth was crying,” Crunch continued, “and Grumpkin was trying to do something funny to take his mind off of it. He started digging these rocks out of the ground and throwing them at the wall. The rocks he dug up got bigger and bigger and the wall started sagging as it swallowed them up. It got to a point where we could see the house. Grumpkin then picked Mouth and threw him over the Blackthorn and sent me flying over the wall behind him.”

“But how did the Grumpkin get over?” Korie asked.

Crunch cracked up. “Those Grumpkins can
jump!
He flew over that wall in one leap and he had to have cleared it by, like, three feet.”

I looked over to Skylights and he nodded.

“Any sign of Hook or the others?” Korie asked.

Mouth, Crunch, and the Grumpkin shook their heads. As Mouth and Crunch slowed to a stop, the Grumpkin kept shaking his.

“Why didn’t you go in the house?” Tank asked.

“Mouth was scared—”

Tank cracked up again. “Mouth was scared.”

“Mouth was scared,” Crunch continued, “and we heard you coming. I knew it wouldn’t take Korie long to figure it out, so we just sat here and waited.”