We Are Not Eaten by Yaks Read online

  “What’s a charlatan?” Oliver asked his sister.

  She didn’t answer him. She didn’t want their father to think she cared about any of this explorer nonsense. She also didn’t know and didn’t like to admit when she didn’t know something. She was three minutes and forty-two seconds older and that meant her brother had to respect her the way a younger brother should.

  “It means a faker, a liar and a fraud,” Sir Edmund said. “And though there may be a charlatan at this table, I promise that it is not me.”

  Oliver couldn’t believe that Sir Edmund had heard him. Though he was tiny and looked ridiculous with his big red mustache, he was dangerously clever and had really good hearing.

  The twins ate the rest of their dinner in silence. Their last day of fifth grade was tomorrow and once that was over, summer vacation would finally start. They looked forward to three months of doing nothing but watching television and learning as little as they could. Starting middle school in the fall would be enough of an adventure for them.

  During the school year they had to do homework and go to classes, and take “educational field trips” with their father, which usually ended up with them getting lost in ancient mazes of doom or in Oliver getting bitten by a newly discovered lizard.

  It had happened.

  Twice.

  The first time, the bite made his skin turn purple and everything smell like old bananas for a week. The second time, his skin turned green and his whole body ached, even his hair. Again, everything smelled like bananas. And Oliver hated bananas.

  Their teachers often objected to the classes they missed, but their father ignored the objections.

  “Adventure is the greatest source of education,” he always said.

  Their classmates objected, wishing they could go off with a famous explorer instead of sitting through vocabulary lessons and filling in bubbles on multiple-choice tests.

  “Wish you could go in our place,” the twins always said. Adventure, in their opinion, was more fun to watch from the sofa than to experience.

  During the school year, aside from being forced to take dangerous trips to exotic lands, they only got to watch two or three hours of TV every day, which they thought was far too little.

  Every winter they dreamed of entire summer days spent in front of their programs, and every summer their father interfered with their plans.

  They hoped this summer would be different. They were eleven now, going into the sixth grade, and wanted to take control of their destiny and their television. The dinner party was already messing up their plans.

  The conversation had finally moved on from talking about their mom. Their father was talking to an African prince about ancient pygmy myths, and Sir Edmund was lecturing everyone on his side of the table about the difficulties of hunting mythical creatures. He claimed to have captured bigfoot and sold him to the president of a Canadian mining company. All the explorers, adventurers, daredevils, globe-trekkers and businessmen at the table were fascinated.

  Oliver and Celia, as usual, were not.

  “The key with mythic creatures,” Sir Edmund explained, “is to find their weaknesses. For some it’s food. Others, like the yeti—or abominable snowman, as you might call it—love musical theater and have an almost fanatic devotion to their children.” He winked at the twins. “Still others only want to taste human flesh. Keeping such creatures in a zoo is, I must say, an expensive challenge, but one I very much enjoy. Bigfoot, the abominable snowman, the basilisk . . . my zookeepers are never bored.”

  “Zoos,” Celia sighed. She could imagine nothing more boring than watching a bunch of caged animals—mythical or not—sleeping and eating and sniffing each other. Oliver secretly wondered what you fed an abominable snowman, but he was afraid that if he asked, the answer would take hours and hours. Explorers love to talk. Celia would kill him if Oliver made the dinner take any longer than it already was. They both wanted to get the night over with and get through the last day of school.

  After another hour of chatter about venomous this and ancient that, they were finally excused from the dinner table. They rushed out of the room to get back to their apartment on the 4½th floor.

  Their father hardly noticed that the twins were leaving. He was too engrossed in a story the African prince was telling him about poisonous plants of the Ituri Forest, but Sir Edmund watched them go.

  If they had been paying any attention to him at all, they would have seen him smiling at them with cruelty in his eyes, as if he knew something terrible about their future and was enjoying the thought immensely. And truth be told, he did and he was.

  3

  WE GET NO LOVE AND NO BEARS

  “WHY DON’T YOU GO downstairs to meet Choden Thordup, the Tibetan mountain climber?” their father asked, standing behind the sofa where his children lounged in front of the TV.

  It was the day after the banquet. They had made it through the last day of school . . . somehow. Kids were bouncing off the walls, excited about summer baseball leagues and summer camps and summer vacations. They peppered Oliver and Celia with questions:

  “Where are you going this time?”

  “Will you go skydiving?”

  “Will you fight a monster?”

  “Will you meet a king?”

  All the other kids imagined that life must be so wonderfully exciting for the children of world-famous explorers.

  “We’re going to watch reality shows!ʺ Oliver answered excitedly.

  “And soap operas!” Celia practically squealed. The other kids fell into disappointed silence.

  “Weirdos,” they muttered as they walked away.

  “If I had parents like theirs, I’d never want to watch TV!ʺ

  Oliver and Celia just shrugged. They didn’t have a lot of friends. It didn’t bother them, especially not now that they’d made it home and summer had finally begun.

  But here was their father, already trying to interrupt their plans.

  “She can tell you about the top of the world!” Their father’s excitement caused his little round glasses to fall off his face, but his excitement was not catching. “She’s spoken to the Great Oracle of Tibet! She survived the Poison Witches of the Tsangpo Gorge with nothing but her wits . . . and a recipe for spicy mashed potatoes!”

  “The World’s Greatest Animal Chases Three is coming on,” Oliver answered flatly.

  “Why watch reality TV when reality itself is so much more exciting?” Dr. Navel threw his hands up in the air. He sounded just like the kids at school. He sounded like the teachers too.

  “Love at 30,000 Feet is not reality television,” Celia corrected her father. “It’s about an airline crew.”

  “We’re watching Animal Chases Three!” Oliver argued.

  “Are not,” Celia answered. ”Love at 30,000 Feet. Captain Sinclair is going to confess his love for the Duchess in Business Class.”

  “A bear is going to race a hippo!”

  “Love!”

  “Bears!”

  “Love!”

  “Bears!”

  “Enough!” their father bellowed. “There are more important things in life than love and bears—I mean, than television.” He flipped a switch and the screen went dark with a disappointed hum.

  “Hey!” both children shouted in harmony. “We were watching that.”

  “Nope. Now you’re going downstairs to hear her tales of the Tsangpo Gorge, the Roof of the World and the Great Oracle of Tibet.”

  “We don’t want to hear about some fortune-teller,” Celia complained.

  “The Great Oracle of Tibet is much more than a fortune-teller, Celia. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  “But you say that every night!” objected Oliver.

  “And it’s true every night. Now, Oliver, put on your jacket and tie.”

  “But—”

  “Celia, your dress.”

  “But—”

  “No more buts or the TV goes away for the rest of your summer
vacation.” The children made their best sad puppy faces at their father.

  “Choden Thordup is one of only a handful of explorers to have ever seen the Hidden Falls and survived,” he said, smiling and trying to get his kids excited again. It didn’t work and his smile vanished. They were not interested in waterfalls. “I swear, when I was your age, if I had had half the opportunities for excitement you two have, well . . .” He shook his head sadly. “I’ll see you downstairs in ten minutes. Tonight, you will attend the Ceremony of Discovery.”

  “Dad!” both children shouted, but it was too late. Their father was out the door and heading down the stairs to the Great Hall.

  The children groaned and made their way to their rooms so they could get dressed. Their hopes for a carefree summer in front of the TV were falling apart. They would once again be subjected to tales of adventure and intrigue in distant lands.

  When they emerged from their rooms, uncomfortable in their fancy clothes, they stood frozen in the hallway, neither one wanting to be the first to move for the door. Oliver tugged at the tie around his neck. Celia yanked on the pleats of her dress.

  “I hate the Ceremony of Discovery,” Oliver lamented.

  “It’s like public television only you can’t change the channel,” Celia said.

  “Dad never lets us do what we want,” Oliver complained.

  “It’s our summer vacation. We should be able to watch whatever we want.”

  “I bet he wishes he had different kids.”

  “Kids who like adventures.”

  “Kids who want to climb mountains and get bitten by lizards.”

  “Kids who aren’t us.”

  They both stood in silence for a moment, staring at the dark TV screen, imagining what they were missing.

  “That settles it,” said Celia.

  “It does?” asked Oliver.

  “Yes, it does,” she said. “We are going to run away, so that Dad can get new kids and so we won’t have to go on any more adventures.”

  “But isn’t running away an adventure?”

  “Not if we go somewhere dull, like an orphanage or a children’s prison. Any giant, boring place that has cable.”

  “Oh,” Oliver said, because he never could win an argument with his sister and he did want cable television. “What about Dad? He’ll be all alone.”

  “The Daytime Doctor said that people need to move through the stages of grief so they can have full lives,” Celia explained.

  “I don’t want to move anywhere,” said Oliver.

  “Me neither. That’s the point.”

  “All these scientists,” complained Oliver. “They always want you to deal with your baggage too. I don’t want to pack baggage ever again.”

  “So we agree then?”

  “What? About The Daytime Doctor? I don’t really like talk shows.”

  “No! About running away so that Dad can move through the stages of grief and find children who want to handle baggage and stuff.”

  “Oh,” Oliver said again. His sister always got him to agree with her on things. She had a way of talking that was like a trap. You listened and didn’t know where it was going. It sounded normal, but then suddenly, before you knew it, you’d agreed to watch Love at 30,000 Feet or Amores Enchiladas on the Spanish Channel way up in the high numbers. Even if you ended up learning Spanish, it wasn’t worth it. Amores Enchiladas was a boring show where the women were crying all the time, if they weren’t kissing some tan sword fighter guy.

  But as usual, he agreed. Celia was three minutes and forty-two seconds older and one and five-eighths inches taller, which gave her a kind of authority.

  It was decided: They would run away somewhere dull and watch their shows and everyone would be happier. Children’s prison couldn’t be worse than the Explorers Club, could it?

  4

  WE DEBATE DEATH AND CABLE

  THE EXPLORERS CLUB is an old building filled with many mysteries, as old buildings tend to be. This old building contained countless secret doors and tunnels and places to explore, as befitted its name.

  Celia and Oliver had discovered the network of secret tunnels by accident. They had once lost the fancy universal remote control that worked on any device made in the last ten years, if you could just figure out which button to press. They looked for it under cushions and on top of cabinets and eventually behind a small bookcase. They did not find the remote control. They found a tunnel, and that tunnel led someplace else. They weren’t sure where because neither of them wanted to explore it. They kept looking for the remote, which Oliver had left in his sock drawer for reasons he could not remember.

  So there the tunnel sat, unexplored by the incurious children until the moment they decided to run away. As much as they hated the idea of using the tunnel, they couldn’t exactly stroll out through the front door of the club with all the explorers around. They had to be sneaky.

  Celia grabbed the small canvas backpack that her mother had given her a few years ago.

  “We’ll need supplies,” she explained as she tossed a bag of cheese puffs into it. Oliver grabbed the remote control. He never could figure out what all the buttons did, but he would have plenty of time in prison or the orphanage to try to figure it out. It might even make him popular with the other inmates. He’d be the guy who could control the TV from anywhere. He liked the idea. If he were a superhero, he’d be the Channel Changer. Celia threw in a TV Guide, because she liked to know what was on all the time. She also made them each throw in their pajamas.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Ready,” said Oliver.

  “Okay, then. Here we go.”

  They sighed with longing for the episodes of Love at 30,000 Feet and The World’s Greatest Animal Chases Three they were missing, and took one more look around the apartment.

  They saw the Cabinet of Count Vladomir, a medieval torture box that their parents discovered in the ruins of a French castle on their first date. They used it for hanging coats. It was next to the refrigerator. Count Vladomir would not have been pleased.

  They saw their father’s collection of antique pipes from around the world and their mother’s drawings of exotic birds. Oliver hesitated when he saw the storyboard from the movie Escape from the Mummy King, hanging behind the couch. It was a set of illustrations that movie directors use to tell their story before they start filming it. The storyboard looked like a page from a comic book. Escape from the Mummy King was based on a story their mother had written in National Geographic magazine. She got the director to give the drawing to Oliver and Celia after the movie finished filming. It was one of their most prized possessions. Oliver thought about bringing it.

  “Come on,” Celia said, and shoved her brother into the tunnel ahead of her, leaving the storyboard and their miserably exciting lives behind. She insisted on carrying the backpack. Oliver had a way of losing whatever was handed to him. She shut the entrance behind them.

  The tunnel was dark and the direction unknown. There was a weird symbol carved on the wall every few feet. It was like an old key and it had odd letters below it in some strange language. Explorers loved weird symbols and strange languages, the weirder and stranger the better. This one looked familiar to Celia for some reason, but she couldn’t figure out why. Not that it mattered. Soon they wouldn’t have to think about explorers ever again.

  They crawled for what seemed like hours, each one of them silently imagining the television shows they were missing at that exact moment and wondering if they had made the right decision. Their father would be down at the ceremony wondering where they were. They hadn’t even left a note. Somewhere in the distance, a rat scurried. Oliver nearly screamed. He hated rats. Every time his sister’s hand brushed his ankle, he thought it was a rat.

  “Watch it!”

  “Move faster! Don’t be such a sissy.”

  “Don’t be such a jerk.” He stopped and she slammed into him.

  “Ouch!” they both said.

  They cont
inued on in silence, angry already, and regretting their decision to run away. But neither of them wanted to back down first. And they certainly couldn’t just go back. That would mean sitting through the Ceremony of Discovery, and maybe losing their television privileges because they were late, and even worse, probably getting dragged on some exotic trip that their father thought would inspire them. Fiji, or maybe Antarctica.

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Just trust me,” said Celia. “And keep crawling.”

  Oliver had his doubts, but his sister was confident and her confidence made him feel better. She had that female intuition their father talked about. “Women just know things, son,” he would say. “Trust them and you will go far in life.”

  Oliver thought about his mother. How good could her intuition be if she was still lost looking for the Lost Library of Alexandria? But what if she wasn’t lost at all? What if she had left because she didn’t like her boring children and wanted to go on her own adventures without them? Did she regret leaving them? Would she come back now that the twins were gone? Maybe running away really was for the best.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a thud on his head.

  ʺOuch,ʺ he said, and stopped. His sister smacked into him again.

  “Ouch,” she said too. “Why’d you stop?”

  “Wall.”

  “Is it a dead end?”

  “I can’t see. It’s too dark.”

  “Can you push on it?”

  “I didn’t try.”

  “Well, try!”

  Oliver tried and the wall moved. It swung open into a dim room. They crawled out of the opening and closed it behind them as they brushed layers and layers of dust off themselves. They were so dusty, they looked like ghosts.

  They were in the club’s library. The library was a big room with high ceilings and stained glass windows. Bookshelves went up as high as they could see and wooden ladders with brass fittings crisscrossed the shelves so that people could reach all the books. Their mother had always told them that it was nothing compared to the Lost Library of Alexandria.