We Dine With Cannibals Read online

What Oliver and Celia did know about Sir Edmund was that he was not to be trusted. He was rich and powerful and full of tricks.

  Aside from being rich and powerful and full of tricks, he was, just like the twins’ parents, a member of the Explorers Club, the most esteemed society of adventurers, explorers, daredevils, and globe trekkers in the world. The headquarters are in New York City, but the club has members on every continent, in every jungle outpost, and in every deep-sea trench. They’ve even had members walk on the moon.

  Their father, Dr. Ogden Navel, was not only a member of the Explorers Club, he was the celebrated Explorer-in-Residence, which is why they lived in an apartment on the 4½th floor.

  Their mother, Dr. Claire Navel, was also an Explorer-in-Residence at the Explorers Club, but she had not been “in-residence” for over three years. She’d gone to search for the Lost Library of Alexandria, which she believed had never been lost at all. She thought it had just been put away for safekeeping and forgotten for a few thousand years, like that cuckoo clock that belonged to your great-uncle Klaus in Bavaria that must be somewhere in the house, even if you can’t remember where in time for the yard sale.

  “Creation is persistent,” Oliver and Celia’s mother always said. “Nothing just vanishes without a trace.”

  Then she went off and vanished without a trace.

  From that day on, it was just Oliver and Celia and their father in their apartment at the Explorers Club. And it could get lonely. Oliver and Celia were the only children allowed in the building, except for the occasional boy prince from Saudi Arabia or a visiting child-goddess from Kathmandu. They couldn’t even invite their friends over.

  Not that it mattered. They didn’t have any friends. Their father was always taking them out of school to go on adventures around the world, to discover ancient ruins or isolated pygmy tribes or to search for their mother. All the kids at their last school thought they were weird or crazy or just plain liars.

  Oliver and Celia wished they were lying.

  They wished they were lying about the cursed birthday presents they got from Zanzibar or the fried scorpion cheesecakes they ate in Cambodia. Or the lizard bites. They also wished they were lying about how their mother had disappeared.

  But they weren’t.

  Everyone thought that she had been lost, just like the library she’d gone looking for. It happened to explorers all the time. The history of exploration was a history of people getting lost. Sometimes they got lost looking for treasures or exotic animals and sometimes they were looking for lost places, like cities or libraries. Sometimes they were just looking for their car keys. The world was a big place and it was easy to get lost.

  But earlier that summer Oliver and Celia’s mother had suddenly shown up again.

  She had lured them to a monastery in Tibet, high in the Himalayas. Sir Edmund had been trying to find her himself and had taken the twins prisoner to get to her. It was their mother who rescued them.

  When she rescued them, she told Oliver and Celia that she was part of an ancient secret society. She told them that they were part of it too and that it was their destiny to discover the Lost Library. She told them they had to find it before Sir Edmund, or there would be terrible consequences. They even heard a prophecy from an oracle.

  All that is known will be unknown and what was lost will be found.

  Their mother couldn’t explain it. Then she vanished again.

  If they were part of this secret society and if they did manage to find the Lost Library of Alexandria, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in history, and they would be two of the greatest explorers in history. However, as we noted earlier, Oliver and Celia Navel did not want to be explorers. They did not want to go anywhere or discover anything.

  They just wanted to watch TV.

  Instead of being lowered into a crumbling chimney in ancient mountain ruins in the middle of the night with a poisonous lizard on his back, Oliver would have preferred to spend the entire summer in front of the television watching Celebrity Whisk Warriors or Agent Zero or The Celebrity Adventurist, where teen heartthrob Corey Brandt wandered into the wilderness with nothing but a knife and a handheld camera to see if he could survive. Oliver liked it. Adventure was fun when it was somebody else’s.

  Celia, whose hands were burning with the strain of the rope, felt the same way as Oliver, though she would have rather watched her favorite soap operas, like Love at 30,000 Feet or the Spanish channel’s Amores Enchiladas. She also liked the talent shows, like Dancing with My Impersonator, although she stopped watching it when the Corey Brandt impersonator got kicked off for being too old and too tall and too not Corey Brandt. Oliver was glad. He hated dancing.

  Celia was Corey Brandt’s biggest fan, ever since Sunset High, where he starred as a dreamy high school vampire who had trouble in algebra class. She didn’t like his haircut in Agent Zero, but she loved The Celebrity Adventurist because she got to see Corey Brandt defying danger and pursing his lips dramatically.

  If they survived the rest of the summer as Sir Edmund’s servants, their father had promised they could get cable television. While survival itself would be enough motivation for most reasonable people, Oliver and Celia needed the hope of hundreds of channels, video on demand, and high-definition broadcasting to keep them going.

  They had already spent weeks with this mustachioed little man, traveling around South America, mostly visiting libraries and talking to old scholars about obscure subjects, like botany—the study of plants—and pogonology—the study of beards. Their boredom was indescribable and they still didn’t know what he was looking for. And now there was only a week left until they’d have to start the sixth grade.

  They did not want to start the sixth grade.

  They did not want to climb into the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu.

  They did not want to risk their lives for Sir Edmund because their father had lost a bet or get involved in another deadly adventure because their missing mother thought they were destined to discover the Lost Library of Alexandria. They did not want to get bitten by any lizards.

  But as a great philosopher once said, “You can’t always get what you want.”

  The hissing lizard on Oliver’s back was about to make sure of that.

  3

  WE ARE BUGGED

  BEVERLY’S HISS WAS as loud as a train whistle. For a second, Oliver thought he’d gone deaf. He felt Beverly’s lizard breath on his neck and he froze. His sister must have heard the hiss too, because she stopped lowering him.

  He didn’t know how close he was to the ground, but he hung in the dark and squeezed his eyes shut. Sightless and soundless, he waited for the end to come. Any second, Beverly could slam her fangs into the back of his neck and that’d be it for Oliver Navel. He’d never see twelve years old. He’d never see sixth grade. He’d never see The Celebrity Adventurist holiday special. He wasn’t ready to die.

  “Okay, girl, calm down,” he whispered. “Everything’s fine. You don’t need to get all hissy and bitey. Just stay calm.”

  “Hiss,” Beverly answered.

  “Are you okay?” Celia called down the tower. Okay, okay, okay, okay, her voice echoed around Oliver.

  “I, um …,” Oliver shouted back up. Um … um … um, his own voice echoed.

  “Hiss,” Beverly hissed. Hiss, hiss, hiss.

  Oliver felt the lizard’s body tense and felt her head tilt back. She was about to strike.

  “Oh no.” Oliver gulped and squeezed his eyes shut tight again. He had always feared he’d meet his end from a lizard bite. “Do your worst, lady lizard,” he whimpered, which he decided were pretty good last words, even if he only whimpered them. Heroes on television always had good last words.

  Beverly’s mouth opened wide. Her head shot forward like lightning and her jaws snapped shut with a sickening crunch.

  “Ah!” Oliver yelled and tried to pull his neck away. He felt a flapping around his face and heard a loud screech. When he opened his eyes
he discovered, much to his surprise, that he did not have a giant lizard attached to his neck. He hadn’t been bitten. He turned his head and looked at Beverly clutching a vampire bat in her jaws. She blinked at him. The bat had been a millisecond away from biting Oliver in the face. As we know, Oliver hated bats.

  “Are you okay?” Celia shouted down again, frightened for her brother’s life.

  “Yeah,” Oliver called back up to her. “Just lower me faster, please!” He let out a breath and watched as Beverly gulped the vampire bat down her throat. “That’s really gross,” he told the lizard. “But thanks for catching it.”

  He could feel the lizard chewing next to his ear, which I will not describe. Some sounds are better left to the imagination.

  At the top of tower, Celia started lowering the rope again. She wondered why her brother had screamed. He probably thought he saw something in the dark and got frightened. He really was such a wuss.

  Oliver finally reached the ground. The moonlight pierced the dark in one single shaft of silver. He couldn’t see much beyond it, which was fine by him. He’d hate to see a thousand more vampire bats hanging around. Beverly flicked her tongue at Oliver’s neck. She probably wouldn’t mind more vampire bats. Oliver, however, had work to do.

  He tugged three times on the rope around his waist. His sister up above responded with three more tugs to show she had gotten the message. It was her turn to come down.

  While he waited, Oliver pulled out his Velma Sue’s snack cake and shared it with the lizard. He hoped his sister would be down soon.

  Celia wondered for a moment how she would get down. She looped Oliver’s rope around a rock behind her to act as a safety line and then looped her end through her legs to make a harness. She tugged it a few times to make sure it was sturdy and let out a slow breath. Corey Brandt always made this sort of thing look easy on television. In real life, rappelling down a dark chute in the middle of a jungle was not easy at all.

  She put on her backpack and stood facing away from the dark hole. The moon slipped behind a cloud, like it was too frightened to watch. Celia’s mother had climbed Mount Everest when she was seventeen years old. At eleven, Celia didn’t even like to climb off the couch.

  “I’m going down,” she said into the walkie-talkie. “Over.”

  “Get on with it!” Sir Edmund snapped back, and she could see him jumping up and down with annoyance.

  “Do you mean—?”

  “Get on with it!” Sir Edmund’s voice crackled. “Over!”

  Celia smiled. She really enjoyed annoying the little man. Then she peered backward into the dark hole and let out a long breath. The first step was always the hardest. She leaned back slowly and sat down into her harness, hanging over the edge. One foot at a time, she began to walk down the inside of the wall, letting the rope out through her hands as she went. As she got more comfortable, she started to bounce away from the wall, soaring a few feet down through the air before landing on her feet again.

  If one absolutely had to go into a dark pit in some ancient ruins, she thought, rappelling wasn’t the worst way to do it. In under a minute, she was on the floor next to her brother.

  “That was fast,” said Oliver. “It looked a lot more fun than how I got down.”

  “It was okay,” said Celia. She didn’t want Oliver to think she’d had fun. He was always going on about injustice. “You’ve got snack cake on your face,” she said, and then pulled out the walkie-talkie. “We’re in,” she said. “Over.”

  Oliver wiped his mouth.

  Both children looked grimly up at the hole high above them. The rope hanging down was their only way out. It was sort of nice to get away from Sir Edmund for a few minutes, but they were kind of trapped in this hole now.

  They turned on their flashlights.

  “Tell me what you see,” Sir Edmund’s voice crackled through the heavy silence.

  “You didn’t say over. Over,” said Oliver.

  “Enough of that nonsense,” Sir Edmund shouted through the speaker. “When I am done speaking you will know it.”

  “What are we looking for? Over,” Celia asked.

  “Don’t worry about that,” his voice crackled again. “Just tell me what you see.”

  They scanned their flashlights around the chamber.

  “The floor is covered in little black kernels, like popcorn. Over,” said Celia.

  “That is six hundred years of bug carcasses and dung.” Sir Edmund laughed into the walkie-talkie.

  “Wait—we’re stepping on, like, dead bug bodies and um …” Oliver whimpered. He hated bugs.

  “Dung.” Sir Edmund laughed. “Beetle poop. It seems they gave the maid the last few hundred years off.”

  “That’s disgusting!” said Celia, who had never swept up after herself. Someone always took care of cleaning and that sort of thing, though she wasn’t sure who. Probably her father. Oliver had never given it much thought either. He didn’t ask too many questions as long as he had clean underpants.

  “Let’s get this over with quickly,” Oliver said.

  He swept his flashlight along the walls of the room. They were covered in gold, with turquoise lines running through them like veins. The twins had never seen so much gold in their lives. They wondered if Sir Edmund planned to steal it.

  At the far end of the chamber was a giant golden door. The door was decorated with a turquoise face made from thousands of tiny stones. Its teeth looked like the mountains around Machu Picchu, and images of dolphins and other sea creatures poured from its mouth. One of the doors had fallen a little open, just enough for an eleven-year-old to slip through. Oliver tried to tug it open wider, but it wouldn’t move. He shined his flashlight through and his heart sank. The door led to a long tunnel.

  Oliver really hated tunnels.

  He looked back at Celia and she nodded at him.

  “Oh no!” Oliver objected. “Why do I have to go first again? This is an injustice! I should sue! I should call Judge Baxter! I should—”

  “There’s a tunnel,” Celia said into the walkie-talkie. “We can’t see where it leads. Over.”

  “Don’t be such cowards,” Sir Edmund snapped. It was easy for him to be brave. He was safe aboveground with the llamas and the llama girl. “Think of all the stories you’ll be able to tell your little friends at school.”

  School. Sixth grade. Now Celia was filled with dread too.

  “We don’t have any friends,” said Oliver.

  “What’s down there? Over,” Celia asked Sir Edmund. They waited in silence for his reply.

  “You’re entering the abode of the last Inca priests.”

  “Abode?” Oliver asked his sister. She knew all the vocab words.

  “Home,” she quickly replied.

  “How do you remember all this stuff?”

  “Wally Worm’s Word World,” she said. “From when we were little. If you’d paid attention, you wouldn’t have to ask all the time.”

  “I never liked that show. I hate puppets.”

  “What’s wrong with puppets?”

  “Who would want to learn vocabulary from a giant talking worm?”

  “So you don’t hate puppets. You hate worms.”

  “Whatever. I hate both.”

  “Well, there won’t be any puppets in that abode,” she said.

  “Didn’t the Incas perform human sacrifices?” Oliver gulped. He’d seen a movie where the priests tied people onto a stone altar and sacrificed them to their gods.

  For a moment, Celia felt bad about making Oliver go first.

  “Try not to step on any skeletons when you go through,” said Sir Edmund. “You never know what curses they might have left behind.”

  Celia didn’t feel that bad about making her brother go first anymore.

  4

  WE HAVE SOME HISTORY

  “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 t
o 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.