Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow (7 page)

Bringing the steel whistle to his lips, Jake blew with all the strength he could muster. It felt like his head was going to explode.

At last, the giant carnivore swung around with a heavy sweep of its tail. It pounded away with a final roar over its shoulder—then dove back into the jungle.

They waited to be sure.

Marika finally spoke. “I think she’ll head back to her nest now!”

Just in case she was wrong, Jake kept the whistle in his hand.

“Is it safe to leave?” Kady asked Marika.

The girl shrugged and stared at Jake’s hand. “A silent flute that scares away thunder lizards. You bear powerful alchemies.”

With the immediate danger over, questions flooded Jake’s mind. They jumbled together. What was this place? How were humans and dinosaurs living together? How did Jake and Kady get here?

Before he could settle on a single question to ask, Marika said, “We should go now. All the noise might attract other creatures.”

Pindor shoved forward with his spear. “Let me go first,” he said glumly. “In case there are more beasts about.”

But the boy’s look betrayed him. He would not meet Jake’s eye. After the demonstration here, Pindor plainly wanted some distance from these strangers. Suspicion pinched his face.

Pindor’s companion was not as wary. After they climbed out of the cave, Marika’s gaze locked on Jake for a moment. Sunlight flashed from her eyes with an emerald fire, revealing a mix of curiosity and amusement.

She pointed an arm up toward the neighboring cliff. “There’s a path up that way. We must get past the Broken Gate. Then we’ll be safe.”

Safe?

Jake glanced back toward the dark jungle as it resumed its squawking and buzzing chorus. Just as he suspected, no place was truly safe in this new world. A saurian bellow
echoed out of the deep jungle.

Jake shivered, suddenly remembering the darkness that had brought them here. And the words that had scratched out of the blackness between their world and this one.

Come to me…

Jake climbed the narrow trail that headed up the cliff in a series of steep switchbacks. Marika led the way. Pindor guarded their rear and urged them to move silently so they wouldn’t attract other monsters. They hiked quickly. The pace had left little time for questions.

Still, Jake managed to get a closer look at Marika’s jade necklace. It was carved with a symbol.

There was no mistaking it. It was definitely Mayan. The glyph’s name,
balam
, meant “jaguar.” The symbol even looked like the jungle cat. Marika also wore an embroidered Mayan blouse, like one Jake’s mother once brought home from Central America. Even the girl’s skin was the
same shade as his mother’s morning tea, mixed with a generous dollop of cream.

Could she truly be Maya?

And what about Pindor? Jake managed a closer look at the cut of his sandals and the bronze work of his spearhead. It was all of Roman design, possibly second century
B.C
. Even his hair, tied long in back, had bangs cut straight across the front like some caesar out of time.

Maya, Romans, and T-rexes.

What was going on?

After another two turns in the trail, the top of the cliff appeared high overhead. A narrow pass cut through two massive guard towers built out of dark stones, each ten stories high. An archway once bridged the two towers, but it had fallen away, leaving only stumped ends. The spires appeared long deserted.

“The Broken Gate,” Marika said.

As they climbed toward the pass, Jake noted the pocked and blood-dark color of the gate’s bricks.
Volcanic stone
.

Marika stopped ahead of him, so suddenly that Jake bumped into her. An eerie screech split the continual droning whir of insects. It came from the sky, sounding like a rabbit being strangled. Marika twisted around, her eyes wide with raw terror, more terror than she’d showed with T-rex.

Jake turned, too, and Pindor and Kady halted. High in
the sky, a large creature drifted on leathery wings. At first glance, Jake thought it might be a pterodactyl, another saurian hunter like the tyrannosaurus. But as he squinted, he recognized his mistake. The wings were attached to a gaunt creature that appeared to be just leather over bone. As it swept past, Jake spotted arms and legs and a bald domed head ridged by a hard crest.

Jake’s whole body shuddered, sensing the unnaturalness of this creature. Yet, at the same time, it reminded him of something—something he’d seen before.

“A grakyl!” Marika’s voice rang with disbelief and horror. Her gaze ripped from the skies and fixed on Jake. For the first time, he read suspicion in her open face. Then it was gone, hardening into concern. “Make for the gate! It’s our only chance!”

Marika set off as another screech split the sky.

Jake followed, but he kept watch. Overhead, the creature turned on a wing tip. Jake sensed its cold gaze upon them. With another cry, its wings tucked and it tilted into a dive. They’d been spotted.

Marika sprinted up the rocky trail toward the pass. The stone towers waited. Jake chased after her, followed at his heels by Pindor and Kady.

As they neared the towers, Jake’s skin began to prickle, as if a thousand spiders were dancing over his flesh. With each new step, the feeling grew more intense. The prickling began to burn. Confused, Jake stumbled on a loose rock.

“Mari!” Pindor called ahead.

The Mayan girl glanced back and saw Jake stumble. She reached and grabbed his wrist. The burning sensation snuffed out with her touch, though Jake still felt a strange electricity and pressure in the air.

He allowed himself to be dragged up to the Broken Gate and into the shadow of the towers. Marika hauled him another few steps, and the pressure popped away. He turned and saw Pindor had a grip on his sister’s elbow as they dove together through the gate.

The winged creature swooped down with a shriek, diving under the broken archway. Jake ducked, but the creature slammed to a halt. It writhed in midair, fixed in the archway like a living insect pinned to a board. Spatters of lightning coursed over its body. Some kind of field seemed to restrain it.

Jake fell back, getting a good look at the creature. Thrashing limbs ended in claws. Razored spurs deco
rated knee and elbow. But its face was the worst of all—not because it was monstrous with its porcine nose and fanged maw, but because it was
too
human. Jake read the intelligence in its agonized eyes. That gaze focused on him, intently, as if recognizing him.

Then with a final screeching cry, the grakyl battered back against the force that held it trapped. It twisted away from the Broken Gate, wings beating desperately. Once well enough away, it finally seemed to catch a bit of wind and flew a crooked path back into the forest.

At his side, Marika let out a long rattling sigh. Her eyes tracked the creature, making sure it had truly departed. Finally she turned away. “A grakyl,” she mumbled again. The fear in her voice was still there, but now it was threaded with elation and a trace of amazement. “I never saw one before…only drawings…from stories.”

“But what the heck
was
it?” Kady asked, pushing forward.

Marika finally seemed to notice that she still held Jake’s wrist. She pulled her fingers away.

Pindor answered Kady’s question. His voice dropped to a whisper, his eyes on the sky. “A grakyl. They’re the cursed beasts of Kalverum Rex. The Skull King. His slaves. They—”

Marika cut him off. “We should be going. The sun’s already dropping low.”

Jake rubbed his wrist where Marika had gripped him.
He remembered the pricking burn as he neared the far side of the Broken Gate. Jake sensed that if Marika hadn’t grabbed him, he might have ended the same as the creature. Unable to pass.

Had it been some form of invisible wall? A defense to keep anything from passing over the ridge? Jake studied the towers. While the stones did seem to be volcanic, no mortar glued them together. Instead they were fitted together in a complex pattern, a jigsaw puzzle made of stone. Jake also noted faint writing in bands along the tower on the left.

It wasn’t like any writing he’d ever seen.

Before he could study it further, Marika headed down the trail away from the gate.

Jake had no choice but to follow.

Past the towers, a huge valley opened. Steep cliffs surrounded the valley in a continuous circular ridge. The valley looked like a meteor crater, but Jake noted vents dotting the edges, steaming with sulfurous gases.

No, it wasn’t a meteor crater.

The valley was the cone of a massive volcano.

And it wasn’t empty.

“What is that place down there?” Kady finally asked.

Jake had the same question as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Far below, a good section of the valley floor had been cleared of trees and spread outward in a patchwork of tilled fields and orchards. The open lands all surrounded a sprawling city of stone buildings and timbered lodges.

From the distance, there seemed no rhyme or reason to the place’s layout. To one side rose what appeared to be a medieval castle. But beyond that, carved into the far ridge, were tiers of cliff-dwelling homes, similar to ones Jake had visited in the deserts of New Mexico. And was that an Egyptian obelisk rising out of a town square? It looked like a miniature Washington Monument but was topped by a scarab beetle, the ancient Egyptian symbol for the rising sun.

It made no sense.

“Calypsos,” Marika said proudly. “Our home.”

She began to head down the gentler slope on a narrow road of crushed gravel.

“Hold on,” Jake said, struggling to find words to voice the sheer volume of his confusion. “How…Where…?”

Pindor headed after Marika. “You’ll get your answers in Calypsos.” His words almost sounded like a threat.

“Wait,” Jake continued, needing something, anything.
“You’re Roman, aren’t you?”

The boy straightened his toga. “Of course. Are you calling my heritage into doubt?”

“No, no…” In a hurry, Jake turned to the girl. “And Marika, you’re Maya, yes?”

A nod. “Going back fifteen generations to the first of my tribe to arrive here. Pindor traces his family to sixteen. But other Lost Tribes have been here longer. Much longer.”

She headed down again.

Jake stared after her.

Lost Tribes?

He studied Calypsos again. Could that grass-roofed structure be a Viking longhouse? And what about that pile of homes raised on stilts? It looked African. But he wasn’t sure. Either way, it seemed all of history had been gathered down below, ancient peoples from every age and land.

But how…and why?

Jake itched for a closer look.

Unlike his sister.

Kady still hung back. Her eyes were narrow with worry and suspicion. “Maybe we shouldn’t go too far.” She glanced back to the stone towers. “If there’s a way out of this Jurassic Park wannabe, maybe we should stay close to where we landed.”

Jake barely heard her. One last structure drew his gaze. It lay beyond the strange town and rose on the right from the wild region of the valley, surrounded by forest. In fact,
most of it remained hidden within the jungle. That was why Jake hadn’t spotted the structure right away.

“We need to find some way back home,” Kady continued.

Jake lifted his arm and pointed to the half-hidden structure. “How’s that for a place to start looking?”

Kady studied where he pointed.

Only the top two tiers of the pyramid rose above the jungle, enough for Jake to see the massive sculpture on top. It was a stone dragon, lit with fire by the glancing rays of the sun. The dragon crouched there, its neck stretched high, its wings unfurled wide, as if readying to take flight. Its shape was a match to the one atop the gold pyramid at the museum, the same one sketched in his mother’s book and described in his father’s log.

Jake’s hand drifted to his khaki vest. His palm rested over the books in the inner pocket. There was no mistaking the structure out there.

It was the
same
pyramid.

Only full size!

Amazement kept Jake rooted in place.

“Are you coming or not?” Marika called back anxiously.

Jake glanced to Kady. He needed her to understand. His fingers tightened over the hidden books. If the small pyramid back at the museum had somehow transported them here, surely the larger one out in the valley could hold the key to a way back home. But more than that, Jake
pictured his mother and father working inside the tomb in Mexico, discovering the smaller gold pyramid in the first place.

Had they suspected the truth? Had they died to keep its secret?

More than a way home, the pyramid might offer an answer to that bigger mystery in Jake’s life—in both their lives.

What had truly happened to their parents?

A new noise intruded: a creak of wheels and a rattling jangle, along with the clip-clop of something large. Pindor scooted ahead to scout the bend in the road.

The noises grew louder. Jake could make out a few mumbled voices. Below, Pindor lifted his spear in a sign of greeting, then backed to the side to allow room.

Two creatures clopped into view, tethered and drawing a two-wheeled chariot. Jake swallowed in disbelief. The gray-green creatures that pulled the chariot were the size of draft horses—but they weren’t horses. Each looked to weigh a half ton, trundling on four legs.