“Where did you find one to fit Carl?” I asked him.
“Ace Hardware. They have everything.”
Diesel put his headlamp on and attached a Maglite to the waistband of his jeans. He coiled a long length of rope over his shoulder and grabbed a can of fluorescent yellow spray paint.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Stay close.”
Stay close was advice I didn’t need. As it was, I couldn’t get close enough. The only one more unhappy than me to be in the dark, dank tunnel was Carl. He was clinging to me with his monkey fingers curled into my shirt in a death grip.
In some ways, it had been better to blindly follow Diesel in the dark last time. I hadn’t seen the spiders hanging from webs above our heads or the dirt sifting down from rotting support beams. When we came to a fork in the tunnel system, Diesel looked for the letter chipped into the stone marker, and he spray painted the walls at the entrance to the tunnel we were about to exit, to make sure we’d make no mistake on the way out.
We came to the small chamber with the domed ceiling. No sunlight filtering through this time. The sun had set. Diesel moved through the room and took us into more tunnels.
If I looked around Diesel, I could see something reflecting light at the end of the current tunnel. Quartz crystals, I thought. We’d finally reached the large domed room where we’d found Hatchet. The room where the stone and the tablet had resided.
I stepped into the room and felt a sense of relief. It was still claustrophobic, but at least I wasn’t moving through narrow dirt tunnels.
Carl looked around and slowly climbed down. He stood for a moment, testing the dirt-and-stone floor.
“Eeh,” he said.
We’d emerged from the tunnel marked W, now spray painted yellow. There were five tunnel entrances opening into the room. We knew from Hatchet that the N tunnel had been booby-trapped.
Diesel went to the N tunnel and peered into the dark hole with his Maglite.
“What do you see?” I asked him.
“Nothing. No tablet on the ground that I can see. I’d say it’s around a twenty-foot drop.”
The floor of the domed room was littered with small brown rocks the same size and shape as the Luxuria Stone. Mixed with the small brown rocks were chunks of crystal like the ones embedded in the walls and ceiling. I picked up a couple of the prettier crystal chunks and put them in my sweatshirt pocket.
“She said she fell multiple times,” I told Diesel.
“Let’s hope she lost the tablet on the first fall.”
I went to the hole and looked in. “You might be able to drop down and only break one or two bones, but you have no way of getting out, other than wandering around for a couple days.”
“I’m not going down. That’s the genius of my plan. Carl’s going down.”
Carl’s eyes went wide open. “Eeeep!”
“I brought rope,” Diesel said, slipping the coil of rope off his shoulder. “I figure we tie the rope to Carl’s harness, and we lower him down. When he finds the tablet, we bring him back up.”
Carl was shaking his head no so hard I was afraid his eyes would pop out and roll around on the ground.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Diesel said to Carl. “I’l
l have a good grip on you. It could even be fun. You’ll get to see a new tunnel.”
Carl gave Diesel the finger.
Diesel tied the rope to the back of Carl’s harness, picked Carl up by it, and bobbed Carl up and down like a yo-yo.
“Good to go,” Diesel said.
“He looks worried.”
Diesel hung him over the hole. “Nothing to worry about. What could go wrong?”