Curse of the Mummy's Uncle (8 page)

The woman flashed the smallest bit of white teeth in what might have been a smile. “I'm Dr. Sofia Lopez. And I believe you must be Nick, Carter, and Angelo.”

“How did you know our names?” Nick asked. He didn't remember seeing the woman around the camp—either when they'd arrived or at any of the meals.

“I know more than that,” she said. “You might say knowing things is my job. But what I don't know is why you're here. From what I've heard, all the excitement is at
la pirámide del sol
.” She jerked her thumb toward the other pyramid.

Nick clipped a vine and pulled it viciously from the wall. “We got caught trying to explore last night.”

“Dr. Canul was none too happy about it,” Angelo said.

Dr. Lopez nodded knowingly. “That explains it, all right. You've been exiled to the
boring
pyramid.”

“You could say that,” Nick said.

Carter stuck his needles into his yarn ball. “Are you an archaeologist?”

Nick thought it was kind of a dumb question. After all, who else would be climbing around a crumbling pyramid? But the woman shook her head. “As a matter of fact, I'm not. I'm a librarian.”

Carter leaned past the woman to look deeper into the temple. “Are you saying there are a bunch of books in here?”

“
Libros
?” the woman asked, clearly confused.

“You said you were a
librarian
,” Carter said. “This is like the most run-down library I've ever seen.”

“Ahh.” She smiled. “Not that kind of librarian. I am an expert on Mayan script.”

Angelo's eyes lit up.

“You know what these hiero-whatchamacallits mean?” Nick asked, pointing to the pictures carved into the walls.

“Hieroglyphs. From the Latin words
hieros
, meaning
‘sacred,' and
glyphe
, meaning ‘carving.'” Dr. Lopez ran a finger gently over the dirt-crusted wall, and Angelo stared at her like he was in love. “That's actually a mistake though. Early European explorers thought these carvings looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs.”

“But Mayan writing is no more related to the Egyptian hieroglyphs than English is to Japanese,” Angelo said.

“Correct.” Dr. Lopez smiled, making Angelo beam. “Mayan script is composed of five hundred and fifty logograms, which represent whole words, and a hundred and fifty syllabograms, which represent—”

“Syllables,” Angelo cut in. “I got that far in my reading. But I never made it to the actual translations.”

Nick could see the two of them going on all day like this, and his stomach was already starting to growl for lunch. “Could we, um, get to the point? If you can read this script stuff, what does it say?” He gave Angelo a meaningful look. “And how does it help us figure out whether you-know-whats were you-know-where?”

Angelo frowned.

Dr. Lopez looked from one boy to the other. It was obvious she wanted an explanation, but Nick wasn't sure he wanted to tell her anything. The last two times they'd brought up aliens, it hadn't gone very well.

Apparently Angelo felt the same way. He quickly turned the conversation back to the carvings. “What does this say? It looks like a history of the kings.”

The librarian gave Nick one last curious glance before turning to study the wall. She cleared away dirt and pulled down several vines. “Yes.” She traced her finger along a series of carvings that made no sense at all to Nick. Occasionally she would brush at the wall, trying to make something out.

“The Mayans believed in three planes: the earth; the underworld, Xibalba, below; and the heavens above. They believed that the sun and the moon were gods who left the sky every night and went to the underworld. Thus, this pyramid was for the goddess of the moon, and the other pyramid honored the god of the sun. The Mayans believed that when you die you must pass through the underworld—a place of tests and trials. Caves, tunnels, and sacred pools were believed to be entrances to Xibalba.”

“See. That's what I was telling you about,” Angelo said.

She pointed to the text Angelo had been unable to figure out. “According to this, male royalty were buried in the pyramid of the sun. The boy king, his father, and his grandfather. Female royalty were buried here.
His mother was not considered to have royal blood, because she married into the line.” She touched a picture of a woman in a fancy headdress. “But the king's father had one sibling—a sister. She was the boy's aunt and would have been royalty. If those of royal blood passed through Xibalba, they could be reborn as gods in the sky.”

Angelo leaned forward, his eyes gleaming. “They thought their kings went to the
sky
?”

Dr. Lopez nodded. “If they passed certain tests. The carvings in this temple are interesting. If I'm reading them right, they seem to be talking about an item of power that belonged to the king. The item,” she said, pointing to another picture that looked like a chest, “was being held for the king by his aunt and uncle. I think it was to help him get past the death gods, One Death and Seven Death.”

She pulled away more vines. “Hmmm. This is a little worn away. I'll have to bring back my equipment and see if I can clear it up. But I think the item was somehow associated with the ten demons of death.”

Nick felt a cold chill run over his body. All this talk of demons and death was freaking him out. Especially in this small, foul-smelling building. But Angelo walked deeper inside, eyes wide, like he'd just been given a free
pass to Disneyland. He stopped beside a crumbling slab. “Is this another altar?”

The librarian nodded. “As you can see, it's quite heavily damaged. The entire temple is in bad shape. It's one of the reasons the archaeologists have spent most of their time exploring the other pyramid instead of this one. I'd take you inside, but I'm afraid you'd find it rather boring.”

Carter looked up from his nearly finished serape. “Are you saying we can go in?”

Dr. Lopez waved a cloud of mosquitoes from her face. “There's not much to see. But it would get us away from the bugs.”

“Show me the way,” Angelo said, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

The librarian smiled. “You're practically standing on it.” She herded the boys back from the altar and knelt on the one completely clear section of floor. The floor was covered with a series of carvings that seemed to represent the day and night skies. “The trigger is
muy ingenioso
. You place one hand on the moon, one hand on the sun, push down on both, and . . .”

There was an audible
click
, and the altar moved ever so slightly. Dr. Lopez stood up and pushed the altar. It turned with a low rumble, revealing a dark staircase.
Cool, musty air rose from the opening.

“Awesome,” Carter said. “Are there any coffins or treasure?”

Dr. Lopez waved a hand. “See for yourself.”

“I wish I'd brought my swabs,” Angelo said.

“Your what?” The librarian frowned.

Angelo blinked. “I mean, my um, flashlight.”

“You won't need it.” Dr. Lopez walked down the stairs, her body slowly disappearing as she moved farther into the entrance. “As you can see, the people who built the pyramid thought of everything.” Her voice echoed from below.

Angelo hurried down the stairs behind her. “You guys have to see this,” he called up.

Carter tucked his knitting under one arm and started down the steps. “You coming?”

Nick rubbed his hands on his dusty jeans. “Maybe I'll just wait out here.”

“Afraid a mummy will grab you?” Carter grinned. “The great thing about mummies is they're really slow. You could
walk
away from them and still not get caught. Unless they have motorcycles. I saw this one movie where these mummies were all riding Harleys. Every once in a while one of them would get his bandages caught in the—”

“Fine,” Nick interrupted. “I'll come down if you promise to stop talking.”

“
Excuse me
,” Carter said, disappearing into the dark entrance. “Some people
like
a good mummy movie.”

“Some people know the difference between a
good
mummy movie and a
bad
one.” Nick took one last look around the temple and headed down the stairs.

The first thing he noticed when he reached the bottom of the staircase was that although they were underground, the tunnel was nearly as light as the temple. “Torches?” he asked, looking around.

“Better,” Angelo said. He pointed to a series of polished metal dishes that looked sort of like brass. “They made mirrors to reflect the sun from the entrance.”

“Not quite,” Dr. Lopez said. “Both of the pyramids of Aktun are built to mark the summer solstice—the longest day of the year—and the winter solstice—the shortest day of the year.”

She tapped the closest mirror to the entrance. “I've been polishing these mirrors and studying how they align on different dates. My guess is that at a certain point during the winter solstice, the moon reflects through the temple roof, down the stairs, and off one mirror to another all the way to the bottom of this pyramid. Tomorrow night is the winter solstice, and I was
hoping to check it.” The librarian sighed. “Unfortunately that isn't going to happen.”

“Why not?” Nick asked, interested in spite of his nervousness.

“Look for yourself.” Dr. Lopez pointed down the tunnel.

The boys turned to see that the sloping hallway ended abruptly after less than a dozen feet.

“That's it?” Carter asked, walking to the dead end. “What a rip-off. What did they do, forget to pay their workers?”

“I wish I knew,” Dr. Lopez said. “That's what I've been trying to figure out since I got here. Dr. Canul thinks this was simply a place to store items used during ceremonies in the temple. Maybe he's right.”

Angelo studied the wall at the end of the tunnel. “There's something carved here.”

The librarian nodded. “Good eye. I didn't spot it myself right away. The writing is faint. It's not as easy to make out as some of the temple writings. But from what I can tell, there seem to be two possible translations. The first is simply ‘This is the start.'”

“The start of what?” Angelo asked. “It should say, ‘This is the end.'”

Carter laughed. “That's awesome. It's like a Mayan
knock-knock joke. Knock knock. Who's there? No one. This isn't even a door.”

Nick shook his head. “I'm pretty sure the Mayans weren't into knock-knock jokes.”

Dr. Lopez raised her hands. “Maybe it
is
a joke. I've searched every inch of this passage and there is no way to get past that wall.”

“What's the other translation?” Nick asked.

“
Death is the start
,” Dr. Lopez said in a soft voice that didn't sound at all like her.

Nick turned around. “‘Death is the start'? What does that even mean?”

The librarian gaped at him, eyes wide. “How did you know that?”

“Know what?” Nick asked.

“It's taken me over a week to figure out that translation. And even then I wasn't sure. How did you translate that?”

“I didn't translate anything. You told me what it said.” Nick realized Carter and Angelo were staring at him. “You guys heard Dr. Lopez? I asked her what the second translation was, and she said, ‘Death is the start.'”

Both his friends shook their heads.

“
Death is the start. And the time is close at hand
,”
said the same voice that had spoken before. Only this time, Nick could see Dr. Lopez's lips weren't moving. Suddenly the room seemed too tight around him. The cold air felt like a finger running down his back, and he couldn't breathe. “I have to get out of here now,” he gasped.

“Are you going to tell us what happened back there?” Angelo asked.

The three boys were in the meal tent, huddled together at a table over lunch. Despite his friends' questions and the librarian's curiosity, he'd refused to talk about what he'd heard inside the pyramid. All he'd wanted to do was get out of there and back to camp.

Nick took a bite of his refried beans and stared at his plate. “I told you. Nothing happened.”

Angelo folded his arms. “How did you know what the carvings said?”

“It made sense. Think about it. Like a dead end. This is the beginning. Death is the beginning.”

“You're saying you
guessed
?” Carter asked around a mouthful of tortilla.

“Sure.” Nick knew neither of his friends was buying his story. He wouldn't have in their place. But he wasn't about to tell them he was hearing voices again.

Fortunately, he didn't have to answer any more of their questions, because at that moment his mom and dad walked into the tent.

“How was your morning?” Mom asked, getting in line for lunch. “Your dad and I have been having a ball. We got to handle items that haven't been touched by human hands for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.”

Nick scowled. “Glad to see you missed me.”

Mom stopped with a food tray in her hands. “What's that supposed to mean?”

Nick only grunted, but Carter gave him a funny look.

Dad took off his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm as though he'd just returned from hiking through the jungle. He took a plate and sat at the table beside the boys. “It was like being Indiana Jones. Can you imagine how it feels to hold in your hands treasures most men only dream of?”

“No,” Nick said grumpily. “I can't. I spent the day
cutting bushes. I felt more like Gardener Bob than Indiana Jones.”

“It's your own fault,” Mom said, brushing off a bench before taking a seat. “If you hadn't snuck out last night, you could be sorting artifacts too.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Nick said. He was done with his lunch, but the last thing he wanted to do was climb back up the pyramid and chop more vines.

He noticed Angelo looking outside the tent and realized his friend was staring at one of the industrial generators outside. He leaned close enough to whisper, “You aren't thinking of plugging into that, are you?”

“I need to check the DNA before Dr. Canul realizes I have it,” Angelo whispered back.

“How are you going to use their electricity without them noticing?”

Angelo smiled. “I have a plan.”

“This is your plan?” Nick asked as the three boys stood outside the supply tent where all the camp's equipment was stored. “You're just going to walk in there and ask for an extension cord? You might as well walk straight up to Dr. Canul and say, ‘Hey, I'm going to test my DNA samples now.'”

Angelo looked around to make sure none of the
archaeologists were watching. “Just keep an eye out.”

Nick knew that Angelo was anxious to prove there had been aliens in the pyramids. But he also knew they were already in trouble for sneaking out the night before. One more slipup and they'd probably get sent home and Nick would be grounded for the rest of his life. “Couldn't you wait to test the swabs until we get back to civilization?”

“If I wait until we're gone to find out that I didn't get any samples of alien DNA, it'll be too late to look for more. Once we have proof of the aliens, we can confront Dr. Canul and force him to tell us the truth. Then my mom and dad will have to let me keep studying monsters and aliens.”

“Yeah, I see confronting Dr. Canul going
really
well.” Carter snorted. He and Angelo stared at each other. Carter hated it when Angelo acted like he knew everything, and meanwhile Angelo wouldn't listen to reason when he thought he was on the verge of a big discovery.

“Fine,” Nick said. “But make it quick.”

Angelo took one last look around, brushed as much of the dirt off his pants and shirt as he could, and approached the man just inside the tent. “
¡Hola!
”

The man looked up from the tools he was cleaning.

Angelo pointed to something inside the tent.
“
Necesito un cable de extension.
”

The man raised his hands and said something back in Spanish. Nick didn't bother trying to understand the conversation. He eased up to the side of the tent and peeked around the corner, feeling like the driver at a bank robbery. He was sure that any minute someone in authority would show up and ask why they weren't on the pyramid cutting bushes.

“You know what I don't get?” Carter said, making Nick jump.

“Geez, don't do that,” Nick yelped. “You scared the snot out of me.”

Carter didn't seem overly concerned. His knitting needles clicked together with a machinelike consistency. “What I don't get is why Dr. Canul invited us here in the first place.”

“Huh?”

“Well, clearly he's not happy we're here. I mean, did you hear him last night at dinner? It's like we were a bunch of tourists trampling all over his precious pyramid.”

Nick thought about that for a second. “Technically, we kind of are. I mean, Angelo knows a lot about pyramids and stuff, but we're not archaeologists. For us, this is a vacation. For them, it's their job.”

“Right. So why invite us in the first place? If this place is so sacred that no outsiders have ever been allowed on the site, why let two parents and a bunch of kids stick their noses in everything?”

Nick stared at his friend. It was easy to take Carter for granted. Usually he was cracking jokes or begging for food. And with all his knitting, Nick had assumed Carter wasn't even listening to what was going on around him. Then he came up with something like this. “That's a great question. Why
did
he let us come? I mean, all he had to do was tell the people booking the vacation this was a closed site. It's kind of weird.”

Carter raised an eyebrow. “
Very
weird.”

Nick looked out at the camp, and another thought occurred to him. “You know what else is weird? That we're the only tourists here. What kind of archaeology group opens their site up to people on vacation but invites only one family?”

“I got it,” Angelo said, hurrying from the supply tent. For a minute, Nick thought Angelo was saying he had an answer to Carter's question. Then he saw the bright orange cord looped around his friend's arm. “Now we just have to plug it into a generator, run it back to our tent, and prove aliens exist.”

Although Nick had his doubts, it was actually a lot
easier than he expected. Angelo walked up to one of the camp's generators like he knew what he was doing. He studied the connections for a moment, then plugged in the end of the cord and unreeled it back to their tent. Although several men walked by, none of them so much as glanced in the boys' direction.

Once they were safely out of sight in the tent, Nick felt a little less stressed. “I'm surprised the archaeologists didn't check for DNA themselves,” he said as Angelo plugged in the tester and began making adjustments.

Angelo put one of the swabs he'd taken last night into a test tube and shook it. He inserted the tube into the machine, pushed a button, and grabbed another swab. “They probably did. If I'm right, they've known for years that aliens built the pyramids. They've just been hiding it from the rest of the world.”

Carter laughed. “Why would they do that? If people knew aliens built the pyramids, they would all pay big bucks to come and see them.”

“He has a point,” Nick said. “I'll bet the pyramids would be, like, bigger than Disneyland.”

Now it was Angelo's turn to laugh. “Why does our government keep the alien spacecraft in that mysterious military base called Area 51 a secret? Why do my parents insist there's no such thing as Bigfoot or the
Loch Ness Monster? Because if we all admitted monsters were real, people would freak out. There'd be panic. No one would be able to sleep at night knowing they might be beamed up at any minute.”

Nick could believe that. If his parents knew that he, Angelo, and Carter had met zombies, creatures sewn together from spare body parts, and their own evil doppelgängers, they wouldn't let them out of the house until they were thirty. “You think they're throwing away the evidence then?”

“Nope,” Angelo said, putting another tube in the tester. “The whole reason governments keep places like Area 51 is to try to figure out how the aliens' technology worked. None of the countries talk about what they're doing, because they're all competing to build their own flying saucer first.”

He pushed a couple of more buttons and watched something on the screen. “Plus, you saw how proud Dr. Canul was of being a direct descendant of the people who built the pyramids. Can you imagine his reaction if he had to admit the Mayans didn't build them at all? The same thing goes for the Egyptians, the Chinese. Every country that's been taking credit for building the pyramids would have to admit they had nothing to do with it.”

Angelo put the last swab into a tube, stuck it in the
machine, and shut the cover. The tester began to whir softly and the screen filled with moving lines.

“Well?” Carter said, putting down his knitting. “What does it say? Were the pyramids made by aliens?”

Angelo studied the screen. “The full testing process could take a day or two. But we should know in a few minutes if there is any nonhuman DNA.”

“Can I ask you something?” Carter said, and Nick realized after a moment that Carter was talking to him, not Angelo.

Nick shrugged. “Sure. But if it's about knitting, I'm clueless.”

“I don't want to be nosy or anything. And you can tell me to mind my own business. But what's up with you and your mom?”

“What are you talking about?” Nick asked.

“You seem kind of weird around her lately.”

“I don't know. It just sucks that she and my dad get to do cool stuff while we have to pick weeds.” He hoped that would satisfy Carter and he would go back to his knitting, but Carter didn't accept his answer.

“No. You've been mad at her almost since the trip started. Is it because she taught me to knit? I can stop if it's bugging you.”

One again, Nick was amazed by how much Carter
noticed when he didn't seem to be paying attention. He glanced toward Angelo, who was adjusting something on the tester. Had he noticed too?

Carter shook his head. “He's so gaga about the alien stuff, he wouldn't notice a venomous snake until it bit him on the butt. So spit it out. What's wrong?”

Nick sighed. “Have you ever wondered if your parents wished they'd never had you?”

“Dude, I don't have to
wonder
.” Carter laughed. “Every time I leave a mess on the table or stink up the bathroom, my mom goes, ‘Tell me why I had you again?'”

Nick tried to smile, but the words hit a little too close to home. Clearly Carter's mom was joking. But what if Nick's mom
really
felt that way? “I keep thinking about how my mom speaks Spanish and I never knew it. And she seems to be having such a great time here. I forget that she had a whole other life before I came along and changed all that. It's not like we have all that much in common either. I like video games, anime, and monsters. She hates all those. And I never thought to ask about what she likes.”

He looked down at his hands, realized they were clenched into fists, and finger by finger forced them to uncurl. “I don't mind that she taught you to knit. In fact,
it's pretty cool. But what if she wanted to teach me how to knit, or speak Spanish, or whatever else she's into, and I just never paid attention? Maybe she wishes she could take it all back and never have me in the first place. So she could keep living the life she had.”

Carter stared at him. “Dude, you can't really think your mom doesn't love you.”

“Of course she loves me,” Nick said. “She has to. But what if she doesn't
like
me?”

The DNA tester beeped and Angelo pulled a strip of paper out of the box.

“Well?” Carter asked. “Did you find hair from E.T.'s missing toupee?”

Angelo slumped and ran his hand over his face. “No. Nothing.”