We Dine With Cannibals (4 page)

“NEXT TIME,”
Oliver told his sister, “you're going first.” He held his flashlight in his teeth like a pirate holding a dagger so he could use both hands to pull himself through the narrow opening in the doorway.

“Whatever,” Celia said.

“I een in,” Oliver said through the flashlight, which could have meant “I mean it” or “I'm eating.” It was very hard to understand him with a flashlight in his mouth. He wasn't moving, though. Just staring at her.

“All right. Next time I'll go first,” Celia finally agreed. Oliver could be really annoying when he pouted. Younger brothers were a pain, especially if they didn't think they were younger.

Oliver nodded and slipped into the tunnel. He
wished he were home with the television. He wished he were safe on the couch. Heck, he thought, he'd even be okay with doing his summer reading!

The president of the Explorers Club, Professor Rasmali-Greenberg, had given Oliver and Celia each a book to bring with them to South America for their summer reading. The books were written by their parents, but Oliver and Celia hadn't even taken them out of their backpack. They'd been staying in luxury hotels. How could they be expected to read books when they had 218 channels to watch? Right now, Oliver would trade anything for a nice place to sit and read without any bats or tunnels or dark abodes. Beverly jumped off his back and scurried past him into the dark.

Oliver knew a thing or two about the Incas who had built this place because he had seen Corey Brandt in the made-for-TV movie
Sleepwalker 2: Inca's Revenge
, and what he knew was not comforting. And it wasn't just the human sacrifices.

There was a lot of garroting in that movie.

Garrote
was a vocabulary word Oliver wished he
didn't
know. The garrote was a metal collar with a crank handle for tightening that Spanish soldiers used to strangle their enemies. Spanish soldiers were the first Europeans to discover the
empire of the Incas in Peru. The soldiers were mostly uneducated brutes who had crossed the ocean looking for fame and fortune. They were called the
conquistadors
, which means “conquerors.” The natives of South America were not happy to find themselves “discovered” by these conquerors.

The conquistadors conquered the Inca empire, garroted the emperor, and became the new rulers. They took all of the gold and silver that they could find and melted it down and shipped it off to the king of Spain. They liked all the Incan treasures, but they were not impressed with the oracles and the native religions, so they tore down the shrines, destroyed all the records, and renamed all the places. They didn't want to merely conquer the Incas. They wanted to destroy their culture completely.

But some things survived; stories told in whispers, secret places that the conquistadors could never find. Machu Picchu was one of those places. And this chamber, the secret home of the priests, was a place no one had seen since the last priest fled into the jungle hundreds of years ago.

When Celia finally squeezed through the door
and stood beside Oliver, it was a relief. He didn't like being alone with all that history.

Celia scanned the tunnel with her flashlight. “No creepy skeletons so far,” she said as she nudged Oliver forward.

“There's always creepy skeletons,” he answered her. “Didn't you see
Sleepwalker 2
?”

“There were no creepy skeletons in
Sleepwalker 2
. You're remembering it wrong.”

“Am not,” Oliver objected. “There were creepy skeletons all over that cursed temple they discovered. They'd been garroted.”

“I never forget a Corey Brandt movie,” Celia answered.

“Fine,” Oliver said. His sister
was
obsessed with Corey Brandt. Maybe she did remember the movie better than Oliver. “If there's no creepy skeletons, that's good then, right? Maybe this won't be so bad.”

“Not exactly,” Celia sighed. “There were mummies. Lots and lots of mummies.”

Oliver's heart sank. Now he remembered. The cursed temple in
Sleepwalker 2
was lousy with mummies. After he'd seen it, he couldn't look at a roll of toilet paper for over a month.

If you are keeping a list of the things Oliver hated, you might want to put mummies above bats and lizards and tunnels and the garrote. He
really
hated mummies. Celia felt the same way, perhaps even more so.

Even with Corey Brandt in the movie, there was nothing cute about mummies.

THEY HAD TO CLIMB
over broken stones and fallen pillars as they made their way down the hall. They stumbled and tripped over sheets of solid gold that had fallen off the walls. As they walked, their feet kept crunching on the dead bugs on the floor. They held their flashlights in front of them like magic wands. Celia heard a noise behind her and spun on her heel. She couldn't see anything.

Oliver would have asked what was wrong, but at that moment he couldn't speak. His face was suddenly covered in cotton candy.

At least it felt like cotton candy.

It wasn't cotton candy.

Celia froze where she stood and looked right at Oliver.

“Don't move,” she said.

Oliver had just walked face-first into a large spiderweb and woken up the large spider that lived there. The spider did not appear to appreciate the abrupt end to her nap. She dropped from the shadows and landed directly on top of Oliver's head. He could feel her legs moving around through his hair. He felt sick to his stomach.

“
What is taking you two so long?
” Sir Edmund's voice crackled over the speaker. “
What have you found? Are you alive down there? Over? Over!
”

Celia ignored Sir Edmund and focused on her brother. She had to think clearly now. She had to remember everything she knew about spiders.

Her brother was the one who watched nature shows. She preferred soap operas and dramas. Anything with a good story and plenty of romance. How would that help her now?

“Celia,” Oliver whispered through the strands of web covering his face. He stood stiff as a board.

“Yeah?” Celia whispered back.

“Is there a spider on my head?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Is it a big one or a little one?”

“I don't know. Big compared to what?”

“I guess compared to my head!”

“Yes, it's a big one.”

Oliver gulped. “What's it doing?”

“It's moving around, like it's dancing,” Celia explained.

Oliver turned pale, and not just because he hated dancing. The South American wandering spider was known to dance back and forth just before it attacked. He'd learned that on
Insect Files: Along Came a Spider
. He'd also learned that the South American wandering spider was the most venomous spider in the world.

“Beverly,” Oliver whispered. “Where are you? You still hungry, girl? A little dessert after your bat? There's a yummy spider on my head. …”

Oliver couldn't believe he was actually
trying
to get the most poisonous lizard in the world to jump on his head, even if it was so it would eat the most poisonous spider in the world. This was not how he imagined his day would go when he woke up that morning.

Beverly, however, did not jump on his head. She had just eaten a bat and half a snack cake and she
was scurrying around in the dark, crunching on beetle shells like they were popcorn. She was as happy as a
Heloderma horridum
could be. She had no desire to fight the poisonous spider on top of Oliver's head.

“Just stay calm,” Celia told her brother. “I'll think of something.”

Celia thought about her favorite soap operas.
Amores Enchiladas
was no help.
Love at 30,000 Feet
wasn't either. Why would there be spiders on a show about an airplane? Captain Sinclair once had an affair with a woman called the Black Widow, which was a kind of spider. She tried to poison his doughnut. That wasn't really helpful. What did
The Celebrity Adventurist
have to say about this?

Don't let go of the rope,
she thought.

That was not helpful. She remembered an interview with Corey Brandt on
Celebrity Access Tonight.
He grew up in Idaho. He liked to swim. His astrological sign was Capricorn.

She pictured him sitting with the interviewer, slouched in his chair, a wisp of brown hair falling across his forehead. The freckle under his eye looking like a little teardrop. “I'm a normal guy,
you know? I don't have a personal shopper. I don't hang out with supermodels. I'm afraid of heights.”

How was that supposed to help her? Why couldn't celebrities say useful things in interviews? She didn't know what to do.

She
did
know that she hated standing in the dark thinking about TV shows that couldn't help her. She
did
know that this was a terribly dangerous place for two eleven-year-olds to be, and that if it weren't for their father's dumb bet with Sir Edmund or their mother's disappearance or the Lost Library of Alexandria, they wouldn't be there at all.

She thought about what her parents would do in this situation.

They would want to study the spider and think about why it behaved the way it did, and wonder what they could learn from it about
biodiversity
, which was just an explorer's way of saying “weird stuff in nature.” She decided to do the opposite of what her parents would do.

Celia took a deep breath and then snatched the giant spider with her bare hands. In one swift motion, she tossed it to the floor and stomped it under her foot into a squishy mess.

“Ah!” Oliver screamed.

“It's gone!” Celia screamed back.

“Why did you do that?”

“Someone had to do something!”

“But that was the most poisonous spider in the world.”

“Well, I didn't know that!”

“They're very rare!”

“Well, it could have killed you!”

“It could have killed you!”

“Well, it didn't.”

“Sometimes you need to stop and think more,” Oliver told his sister. She could be very impatient.

“Are you still alive?”

“Yeah.”

“Then stop complaining and come on.”

“There's some good news,” Oliver added.

“What's that?”

“We've found the janitor's closet.”

“The what?”

Oliver pointed his flashlight ahead of him. The hall opened up into a grand chamber and the far wall was covered with what looked like hundreds of colorful mops.

“We've found mops,” Celia said into the walkie-talkie. “A room full of ancient mops. Over.”

“
It's a miracle!
” Sir Edmund's voice boomed through the speaker. “
Go in, get a closer look!
”

“Is he going to want us to clean down here?” Oliver asked nervously. “I hate cleaning.”