Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy (2 page)

They got to the far right side where they could see all of the reeds. There were no ducks. Glancing at Neahle and Marty, Clay scowled.

“Maybe they’re on the other side,” he said, and started walking again, not waiting for an answer. He didn’t care about the ducks but knew his sister would worry him to death until she found them.

He kept walking until they were on the far side of the dune. To their right was Shackleford Slough, and a mile or so away, Shackleford Banks. The water was criss-crossed with the foamy wakes of pleasure boats; a thirty-foot trawler was anchored halfway between the two islands. To the left were the pond and the reeds and nothing else. No ducks. No birds of any kind.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Marty said.

“No,” Clay said. “I’m sure we just missed them flying away. Or they’ve got nests down in those reeds and we just can’t see them.”

“Hey, look!” Neahle said, pointing to a spot about thirty feet below their feet. “There’s another drainage tunnel like the one that goes to Taylor’s Creek. I’ll bet the ducks went up in there and we missed it.”

Strangely relieved, Clay nodded. “That makes sense. It’s probably the only shade around here.”

“Let’s go see!” she said, starting down the hill towards the pond.

“Wait! Why do we need to see?” Clay yelled to her, but Marty had already started to follow, and Neahle didn’t turn back. “Crap,” he muttered as he followed after them.

They had to wade in the pond to get to the mouth of the drain pipe; the bottom was soft muck that oozed into their shoes. Like the one on the other side of the island, this tunnel was about three feet wide and made of corrugated aluminum. Rusty metal struts held it level before it disappeared under the dune. In the glare of the sun, the interior of the tunnel looked pitch dark, and they couldn’t see more than a couple of feet inside.

“I don’t see them,” Clay said. “And I don’t care anymore.” The whole search for the ducks was putting him in a bad mood.

“Let’s go in,” Neahle said, clambering up onto the lip of the pipe.

“Do you have a flashlight?” Marty asked.

“No, but it’ll be lighter inside than you think. There’s plenty of light from the opening, and the pipe comes out of the dune on the other side, just like on the creek side, so there will be light there. Once our eyes adjust, I’ll bet we can see clear through. Even if we don’t find the ducks, it’ll be pretty cool.” Her eyes were crinkled at the edges with excitement.

“What if there are… things… in there?” Marty asked.

“Like what?” Neahle asked. “The horses are too big. The only other things on the island are foxes, raccoons, snakes, birds, and they’ll be more scared of us than we are of them.”

“Snakes?” Marty said, turning pale. He hated snakes.

“Not poisonous ones,” she assured him.

“Great,” he said. He hated
all
snakes, and people always said animals were more scared of us than we are of them. Just before the get attacked.

“For heaven’s sake,” Clay broke in, disgusted. “Let’s just do it and get it over with.”

“Why are you so cranky all the sudden?” Neahle asked, eyebrows raised.

“I don’t care about the stupid ducks!” He looked at her face and at the excitement now receding because of his reaction. Giving himself a mental head slap, he made amends. “But I guess it’s an adventure, and we’ll have a shortcut out to the Slough, which is pretty cool. You want me to go first?”

Smiling again, Neahle shook her head. “Nope, I got it. Y’all follow me!” Turning, she started off on her hands and knees.

Chapter Two

C
rawling down the pipe quickly
became painful on Neahle’s knees, and her eyes didn’t seem to adjust as quickly as she’d expected. She could hear the boys following behind her, Marty first, then Clay, both muttering under their breath. She smiled. Marty didn’t do a lot of outdoors stuff back home, that was obvious, and she took a perverse pleasure in dragging him along with them. To be honest, she enjoyed his company, too—he was sharp witted and funny, in an annoying sort of way. Her brother would be grinning by the time they exited the tunnel on the other side.

“I thought you said we’d be able to see,” Marty complained, his voice echoing on the metal sides of the pipe. “I can’t see squat.”

“It’s not like we’re going to get lost,” Neahle said.

“At least you’ll run into the nest of snakes first,” Marty said. “Just send them ahead, not behind, please.”

Neahle laughed and kept crawling forward. She didn’t know how far they’d come, but the dune wasn’t terribly wide and she thought they should be able to see the round eye of light from the Slough-side by now. At least they hadn’t run into any creatures—as much as she’d teased Marty about the snakes, she was more worried about spiders.

“Shouldn’t we be seeing the end by now?” Clay called from the rear.

“I was thinking that, too,” Marty said.

“I dunno,” Neahle said over her shoulder. “But it’s been going straight, so we’ll come out eventually.”

“Great…” she heard Marty grumble.

After another few minutes, she thought she could detect a circle of dim light ahead. “I think I see the end!” she called back. “There must be a screen over it or something; that’s why we couldn’t see it before.”

“I hope we can get out,” Clay said. “I guess we can always turn around and go back.”

“Probably some kind of filter,” Marty said. He was just happy that they weren’t lost. Although he wasn’t sure how they could get lost in a straight length of pipe.

Frowning, Neahle kept crawling forward, wincing as her bruised knees tried to find the smooth places between the corrugated ridges. The light didn’t seem right, even for a screen. And having a filter didn’t make sense, unless there was one on both ends; the pipe would just clog up with debris. Conscious of the guys behind her, she kept moving.

When she was ten feet from the end, she stopped. The light coming from the end was extremely dim. Marty didn’t realize she’d stopped until he ran into her.

“What’s wrong?” Marty asked.

“This isn’t right…” Neahle said softly. “That’s not the outside. I can see a wall.”

“Did you say a wall?” Clay said from behind, confused.

“Yeah… Hang on.”

Crawling slowly, Neahle tried to make sense of what she was seeing. She stopped two feet from the mouth of the pipe and stared, confused. In front of her was a rough, light-colored stone wall, but no screen. There was a dancing orange light, which made her think of a fireplace. The air coming from outside the pipe seemed stale and damp, but in a musty way, not from sea air.

Sitting on her rear, she turned back and ran into Marty. “I told you to wait!” she hissed.

“Yeah, right, like that was gonna happen,” he said.

She could see both of the boys in the dim light. They were leaning over, trying to look around her, confusion on their faces.

“Did we turn into the dune somehow?” Clay asked, scowling.

“And run into a fire? I don’t think so. We didn’t turn, anyway. The pipe went straight.” Marty said.

“What do we do?” Neahle asked. “Go back?”

Marty craned his neck around her. “I don’t see why. We can always go back; the pipe’s not going anywhere.”

As he was speaking, they heard a soft sound and small scufflings. Leaning forward, Neahle laughed. “It’s the ducks! They came down here after all!”

“Why in the world would they come so far?” Marty wondered.

“Maybe there’s some killer duck food here. It could be some kind of feeding station for the Rachel Carson Preserve. Maybe they’ve trained them to come here, so they’ll come in a hurricane,” Clay said.

“That makes sense,” Neahle said. “The light could be some kind of solar or wind powered lamp. We might as well check it out.”

She scooted forward on her bottom, dangled her feet over the edge and dropped down three feet to the ground. Looking down, she was surprised to see that the floor was rock, not sand. Marty and Clay followed close behind her, looking around.

“This doesn’t look like the inside of a sand dune…” Clay said, toeing the rock. “This is solid.”

Marty scowled. “I don’t know what the inside of a sand dune looks like, but I don’t think it’s this.” He reached out and knocked on the rough wall. “That’s not sandstone. That’s rock.”

“And that’s not solar,” Neahle said, pointing to a flickering torch stuck into an iron sconce on the wall.

Simultaneously they all turned around, looking back to the pipe. It wasn’t there.

“Um…” Marty began. “That seems like a problem.”

Clay was knocking on the wall, trying to locate a hollow place that would indicate the pipe entrance. “It was right here! We didn’t move!”

“Guys!” Neahle whispered urgently. Marty kept mumbling to himself, and Clay kept rapping the solid wall. “Guys!” she said, louder. Both boys looked at her; she pointed to their right. A light was bobbing far down the passage, coming their way.

“I don’t think that’s the ducks,” Marty said.

“Ya think?” Clay replied angrily.

“What do we do?” Neahle asked, her face looking ghostly in the flickering light.

To their left, the passage was inky black beyond the reach of the torch. To the right, the light was moving closer. Clay grabbed the torch out of the sconce and pointed it to their left.

“This way!” he said, jogging forward down the hall. The roof was arched, obviously chiseled out by hand. The ground was smooth down the center from foot traffic while rough and uneven on the edges. Four feet wide, they were able to walk side by side with Neahle in the middle, holding both boys’ hands. Clay held the torch aloft, illuminating a ten-foot circle around them as they pressed on.

“No!” Neahle moaned as they rounded a curve. The way in front of them ended with a blank wall. She glanced behind them, but she couldn’t see beyond the curve.

“What now?” Marty asked in a shaky voice. “And where the heck
are
we?”

“We didn’t go by any other passageways,” Clay said, turning back the way they’d come and thrusting the torch in front of him. “The only thing to do is go back.”

“But there are people out there!” Neahle said.

“How do we know they’re bad people? If it’s a feeding station, it might be game wardens or something. Maybe they store the medicine for the horses down here.” Clay kept his eyes on the curve but didn’t walk forward.

“This isn’t a feed station, Clay!” Marty said. “The pipe is
gone
. Disappeared. Kaput. We didn’t wander into some hurricane hole!”

“Okay, what did we wander into, then?” Clay countered.

“I… I don’t know,” Marty stammered. “But it’s not Carrot Island. Even if the pipe hadn’t just disappeared, Carrot Island isn’t on a big bed of rock like this. It’s a barrier island. Barrier islands shift. They erode. That’s why they put the stupid pipe there to begin with! If it was all on a bed of rock they wouldn’t have bothered.”

“You said the pond could be a sink hole. That would only happen with rock, right?” Neahle asked.

“Maybe some kinds of rock,” Marty said, “The sink holes in Florida happen because the rock is really porous. This isn’t porous; there aren’t any holes. This is hard as a… well, as a rock.”

“There must be some kind of covering on the pipe,” Clay insisted. “That’s the only thing that makes sense!”

“The pipe is
gone,
man.”

“Maybe there’s some kind of secret door that hides the pipe…” Clay said.

“It’s not hidden; there’s no door! We would have heard it. Heck, we’d have felt it—we were standing right next to the pipe. It’s
gone.
Which means we’re not in the dune, we’re not on the island… Can’t you tell from the smell? There’s no salt air, no sand. This is damp solid rock, and it smells old and mildewy.” Marty slapped the wall to prove his point.

“He’s right, Clay,” Neahle said softly. “I don’t think this is the island.”

“That’s not possible! Narnia wasn’t real! People in real life don’t end up somewhere else when they crawl through a pipe in the middle of the day!” Clay’s face was red in the torchlight; beads of sweat had popped out on his forehead. The hand holding the torch was shaking.