Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow (5 page)

Thunder rumbled. Jake turned and looked to the south. The front edge of the storm rolled into view.

Would it hold off long enough?

In a hidden corner of the museum courtyard, Jake leaned against a giant stone head from Easter Island. The statue’s heavy brow and sharp nose had been carved from black basalt. Jake matched its stern expression as he spied on the audience.

Dressed in tuxedos and party dresses, the guests carried glasses of champagne. A waiter with a silver tray passed among them with caviar on toast points. One woman sported a diamond tiara on a tall pile of white hair. Was she royalty?

Off to one side, Kady basked within a television camera’s spotlight. A reporter held a furry microphone toward her nose.

“So tell the viewers of BBC One,” the reporter asked, “are you excited to visit the exhibit?”

“Oh, certainly,” Kady answered, and turned slightly. Jake knew she was trying to highlight her best side, or at
least that was the side she’d decided this morning was her best for television.

His sister continued her interview with much waving of her hands. She made sure she bounced on her toes a bit to get just the right flounce from her well-groomed curls.

Jake crossed his arms. Morgan Drummond’s revelation about the true purpose of their attendance here still irked him.
Just to sell more tickets
. He unfolded his arms and tugged at the safari vest. He was tempted to rip it off and storm out of here. But then what? And he still had to consider his sister. Kady clearly wasn’t going anywhere.

Jake turned in the opposite direction. Beyond the crowd, he spotted a thick red ribbon across the top of a stairway that led to the second level. A man in a top hat held an oversized set of scissors that looked like garden shears.

“The museum curator,” Morgan Drummond said at Jake’s elbow, startling him. The large man had crept up behind him. “It won’t be much longer. It’ll be over before you know it.”

Though the words were whispered, they sounded vaguely like a threat. Maybe because they were accompanied by another rumble of thunder.

Jake shrugged and moved out of Drummond’s shadow. He stared up toward the sky again. The moon was almost completely in front of the sun. Even with his goggles, the sun’s corona around the edge of the moon blazed and made his eyes ache.

Jake blinked and turned as a bell chimed, starting the official event.
Finally!
He felt his heart thump harder. All eyes were drawn forward as the museum curator held up an arm to silence the murmur in the crowd.

The camera lights, shining on Kady, were suddenly extinguished. She sagged as if she were a plant shut out from the sun.

“Here we go,” Drummond said.

The curator lifted his scissors. “If we could have the Ransom children up here with me!” he called out. “It is only appropriate that they be here for this auspicious occasion. In honor of their parents, Drs. Richard and Penelope Ransom.”

Morgan Drummond pulled Jake out of hiding and into the limelight. They collected Kady on the way to the stairs.

A smattering of applause encouraged them up the steps.

The curator continued, “I’m sure everyone knows the story of the Ransoms, how they discovered the Mountain of Bones, one of the most remote and inhospitable Mayan archaeological sites. Surmounting all manner of obstacles—from man-eating jaguars to malaria-bearing mosquitoes—they explored a magnificent tomb full of relics priceless to history and to our understanding of the ancient Maya. The British Museum, along with the generous and philanthropic support of Bledsworth Sundries and Industries”—the curator nodded to Drummond as he
climbed the stairs with Jake and Kady—“are proud to present in public for the first time the
MAYAN TREASURES OF THE NEW WORLD
!”

Another burst of thunder followed his pronouncement.

As Jake and Kady reached the top of the stairs, the curator pointed to the skies and yelled, “Behold!”

All the lights were turned off in the courtyard.

Jake gaped upward. It was happening!

The moon moved an imperceptible amount and fully covered the sun. The eclipse had gone total. The sun’s corona shot dazzling rays around the darkened moon, as if a black sun blazed in the heavens.

Jake held his breath in wonder.

Under the glow of the eclipse, the room dimmed to an eerie twilight. The courtyard’s marble surfaces took on a silvery sheen, as if the floors and walls glowed with an inner light.

The curator spoke into the darkness. “The Maya themselves predicted this eclipse through their ancient astronomical studies and calculations. We chose this celestial moment to open the exhibit.” He turned with his giant shears. “Mr. Ransom, would you like to help me?”

A spotlight flared and flooded the top of the steps.

Jake tore his gaze from the skies and down to the red ribbon. He knew the hallway to his parents’ treasures lay
beyond this thin ribbon. He nodded, anxious to move on. “Let’s do it.”

The curator grinned and held up a hand, signaling Jake to wait stiffly as cameras flashed below. Kady stood with her arms crossed tightly across her chest. Jake knew he would pay later for stealing her attention now.

Like he had any choice.

Jake grasped one half of the scissors and together with the curator cut the ribbon with one swift snap.

As the shears closed and the ribbon fell away, a blinding crackle of lightning shattered across the sky. Thunder immediately boomed. The roof overhead rattled with the close impact. The audience was struck into a frightened silence—then patters of soft laughter followed.

The curator winked at Jake. “Well, we couldn’t have timed that any better, could we, lad?” He took the shears and straightened.

Jake turned to stare up at the sky. Storm clouds rolled over the view of the eclipse and blotted it out. A deeper twilight swallowed the courtyard.

The curator lifted an arm toward the audience. “Everyone stay where you are. We’ll get the lights back up in the courtyard in a moment. While we wait, maybe it’s best we let the Ransom children enter the exhibit first, to have a private moment among the treasures that their parents discovered.”

Murmured
Ah
s and
How touching
s flowed up from the
audience, along with some soft clapping.

One voice, though, rose above the others, full of scorn. “
The treasures their parents discovered?
Bah! More like
stole
!” The last word cracked across the courtyard like a rifle shot.

Stunned silence followed.

The man continued, “What about the rumors that the Ransoms are still alive in South America! That they staged their vanishing so they could abscond with the most valuable of the treasures!”

Jake’s heart climbed to his throat. His cheeks burned with anger.

“Hear, hear,” said the curator. “We’ll have none of these foul aspersions—”

He was cut off with a bellow. “Richard and Penelope Ransom are nothing more than right common thieves, I tell you!”

Lights flickered back on in the courtyard.

Jake took off his eclipse goggles and picked out the man in the crowd. It was the toadish reporter from outside, the one who had been eating a doughnut.

Jake took a step forward, ready to leap down and make the man take back his words—but a large palm stopped him and pushed him up onto the second-floor landing.

Morgan Drummond gently shoved Kady after him. “No need for you to hear this ugliness. Go on into the exhibit.”

Behind him, the curator called for security. The exhibit’s guards ran past Jake and Kady and pounded down the stairs.

Still, he raved on.
“Thieves! Charlatans! Blood is on the Ransoms’ hands!”

Each utterance was a knife to Jake’s heart.

Drummond gave him a push. “Go. I’ll join you in a bit.”

Kady glanced at him. Her eyes were wide, stunned, scared. “Jake…”

He had to get her away. “Let’s get going.”

They hurried into the room across the landing. Jake stumbled along, half blind with anger. He was well into the exhibit before his brain finally registered the wonders around him.

He stopped. Kady did, too.

“It’s Mom and Dad,” Kady said.

They had both halted in front of a giant poster. It was the same as the picture Jake had in his notebook. Their parents smiled goofily into the camera, dressed in muddy khakis and bearing aloft a block with Mayan carvings on it.

Behind him, shouts still echoed from the courtyard.

More lies about his folks.

Jake stared up into the faces, blown up to life size. It was too much. He turned away. A particularly loud bellow reached him.

“Murderers and thieves!”

At that moment, Jake remembered something: how the toadish man had nodded to Morgan Drummond as
they had entered the museum.

It was as if the two had known each other.

The nod.

Like it had been some planned signal.

Jake remembered Drummond’s earlier revelation. Could this outburst be just another way to whip up more publicity for the show, to create some controversy around the exhibit, to sell more tickets?

Or was it something more sinister?

For another three minutes, Jake wandered through the exhibit, lost in his thoughts. Kady also circled the room. She kept her arms hugged tightly around her chest, as if fearful of touching anything. They moved through the room in separate orbits, like two planets that dared not cross paths.

As Jake walked in the room, his worries began to fade. Wonder cooled the heated pounding of his heart. All around he spotted artifacts and relics as sketched or described in his parents’ books, like the double-headed snake from the brochure. In person, the strange serpent was even more dazzling, brightly lit under halogen lights. The snake’s eyes were rubies. The scales were carved with great detail into the gold. The fangs were made of slivers of ivory or perhaps bone.

Jake reached into his vest and pulled out his father’s field logbook and his mother’s leather-bound sketchbook. He had wanted both books with him when he visited the
museum. He opened his father’s log and read the entry for the double-headed snake.

Clearly from the intricate curling of the serpent into a figure eight, the relic must represent the Mayan belief in the eternal nature of the cosmos. From the craftsmanship, the work must represent the high Classic period. I can only imagine…

Jake read onward, hearing his father’s voice in his head as he continued through the exhibit, stopping in front of each object. As he wandered, each piece brought him closer to his parents. Had his mother polished the silver jaguar over there? Had his father counted the number of circles, like tree rings, that made up the Mayan calendar wheel?

Jake remembered lessons taught to him as a young boy…by his mother, by his father. And not just about archaeology. He remembered his mother teaching him how to tie his shoelaces.

The rabbit dives into the lace hole and pops back out….

He found his feet slowing. Though he was thousands of miles away from Ravensgate Manor, Jake felt a closeness, an intimacy here, like he had discovered a long-lost room in his home.

“How long do you think we have to stay in here?” Kady finally asked with her usual ring of exaggerated impatience.

Jake turned to the door. The commotion had died down out in the courtyard, but voices still murmured, too low to make out words. Thunder still rumbled. Unlike his sister, Jake was in no hurry to leave. A twinge of possessiveness fired through him. He didn’t want anyone else in here. It would be like someone trespassing into his heart. In fact, he barely tolerated his sister’s presence.

He needed to see the exhibit’s centerpiece.

Free of any glass case, it rested open on a pedestal: a two-foot-tall pyramid made of solid gold. It climbed in nine steps to a flat summit, where a dragon with outstretched wings crouched atop it. The dragon had been carved from a large chunk of jade. Its eyes, two fiery opals,
seemed to stare straight into Jake’s heart.

“Kukulkan,” he mumbled, naming the feathered dragon god of the Maya.

Jake recognized this object, too. According to his father’s field log, the priceless relic had been found atop the lid of a limestone sarcophagus. Jake tucked away his father’s logbook and opened his mother’s sketchbook. Flipping through the sketches, he searched for the match to the pyramid.

From halfway across the room, Kady finally spotted what he held in his hands. She stalked over to him. “Jake! What are you doing with that here?”

She hadn’t known he had brought their parents’ books to London.

No one did.

Ignoring his sister, Jake found the right page. He compared the sketch of the pyramid to the original. He studied his mother’s precise pencil drawings, the eraser marks, the corrections, the tiny notes scrawled in the margins. They were pieces of his mother. And here was her inspiration.

Jake’s sight blurred with tears, and his hands shook.

Before he could drop the book, Kady snatched it out of his hands. “Why did you bring it here?” she scolded. “You could have lost it or had it stolen.”

“Like you would have cared.” He moved closer to the pyramid.