Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy Read online

  “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.

  “I know,” Marty said, laying his hand on his cousin’s forearm. “But I think it’s true anyway.”

  Chapter Three

  They walked slowly back the way they’d come like they were walking the plank. As they rounded the curve, they saw the light still ahead; it was now stationary.

  “Whatever happens, I won’t forget this vacation,” Marty said.

  Neahle squeezed his hand.

  When they were twenty feet from the light, they made out the silhouettes of two people standing at the place they had entered the tunnel. Apparently they had stuffed their torch into the sconce and were waiting.

  “Hello?” Clay called, stopping.

  “Hey!” one of the figures called back. “Welcome! Everybody always goes left… Don’t know why. You can come back; we won’t hurt you.”

  Frowning at the others, Neahle started forward. Clay grabbed her arm and held her back.

  “Who are you?” he yelled.

  “Friends. Really! Trust me. It’s a long story, though, and best told somewhere else.” This was a girl’s voice, a distinct Southern accent carrying down the passage to them.

  “Like we have a choice,” Marty grumbled. “Might as well go. What else are we going to do, stand here?”

  When the two circles of light joined, they found that the pair waiting for them was only slightly older than they. The woman, about twenty-five and slender, had dark hair pulled back into a long ponytail, a pert nose, and eyes the color of the sky they’d left behind in Beaufort. The young man, also mid-twenties, was six feet tall, stocky, with buzz cut blonde hair. He smiled at them, a wide grin that creased his brown eyes almost into oblivion.

  “Don’t know why everyone always goes left,” he said again. “Every time. I did it myself.”

  “You came through the pipe?” Neahle asked, astonished.

  “Yeah, we all did.” He nodded, then hooked a thumb at his companion. “She got in from Charleston, with her boyfriend…”

  “Ex,” the woman said quickly, a look of disgust on her face.

  “Ex-boyfriend,” the young man corrected. “Me, I’m from a farm in Ohio. Name’s Riley. This is Hannah.” He held out his hand.

  Scowling, Clay shook it. “Wait a second. Ohio? But we’re in North Carolina.”

  “Yeah, mind bender, huh?” Riley laughed. “Trust me, it’ll take awhile to get used to it. We’re from all over, never the same place twice. But you followed some ducks down a pipe or a tunnel, right?”

  Neahle’s mouth fell open. “How did you know?”

  “We’ve all followed those stupid ducks,” Hannah said with a trace of bitterness. She held out her hand and shook with the others.

  “All?” Marty repeated. “Who’s all?”

  “Everybody here. All of us who’ve come through the tunnel.” Riley said as he took the torch out of the sconce.

  “How many is that? And where’s here?”

  Hannah frowned slightly, thinking. “Probably over three hundred now. We’re not all here at one time, though. And Paris. We’re in Paris.”

  “Paris, Virginia?” Marty asked without much hope.

  Riley turned to lead them down the passage. “Paris, France. Kicker, ain’t it?” He laughed. “And trust me, that’s the most normal thing you’ll hear in the next couple of days.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Clay said for the tenth time. He had been asking questions and complaining for fifteen minutes. “How did we get to Paris? And last I checked on the travel channel, Paris was a lot more scenic than this.”

  “I don’t know how it works exactly,” Hannah said, walking beside Neahle. “We all followed those ducks, and we all ended up here. Paris has almost two hundred miles of tunnels underneath it, really old ones, and super complicated…” Riley looked over his shoulder at her and shook his head.

  “What?” Neahle asked. She felt shell-shocked and didn’t understand why they wouldn’t answer her brother’s questions.

  “We’ll let someone else explain that part,” he said, also for the tenth time. “It’s complicated. The whole thing is really complicated. Not even Abacus knows the whole story, but he’s the best one to tell you what we do know.”

  “Abacus? Who’s that?” Marty asked.

  “He’s the head honcho. He and his brother figured most of it out for themselves. When they got here they were the only ones. That was a long time ago.”

  Marty shuddered. It was unfortunate enough to be in ancient, dark, dank, moldy tunnels with torches and strangers and even stranger tales. He couldn’t image what it would have been like to arrive in the dark, with no light, no meet-and-greet, no nothing.

  “But you said it was Paris,” Neahle said. “Why doesn’t everyone just call their parents or go to the embassy and go home?”

  Riley laughed. “Yeah, that would be an excellent plan if we were in our Paris. But we’re not.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not our Paris? How many Parises are there?” Clay demanded.

  “Seven years ago, I’d’a said one…” Hannah said.

  “Wait, seven years? You’ve been here for seven years?” Clay asked.

  “Yep,” Hannah sighed. “Seven years. I got here when I was eighteen. Everybody here was between fifteen and nineteen when they came. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” Neahle whispered.

  “Ditto,” Marty said.

  “Nineteen. Just barely.” Clay said. “My birthday is next month.”

  “See? That’s how it goes. Not sure why. Landon knows, I guess, but he won’t be sharing, I’m sure.” Hannah shook her head, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Landon?” Marty asked.

  “Another long story,” Riley said. “It’s complicated.”

  They walked the next half hour in silence, unwilling to ask any more questions for which “it’s complicated” was the answer. And they were all mulling over the crazy idea that they were in Paris, France, only not their Paris, France, with people who said they’d followed ducks to another world or dimension years before. They would write these two strangers off as crazy except that here they were, walking down a convoluted succession of tunnels, striding through open rooms with graffiti-painted walls, scooting around reservoirs full of dark water, being led by those strangers who were carrying torches and who seemed to know exactly where they were going.

  “You think this is some kind of prank? Maybe a reality TV thing?” Clay asked his cousin quietly.

  Marty shook his head. He sure as heck didn’t know how they’d gotten here, but he knew that wherever “here” was, they were actually there. “It’s not a stage set; not even the best movie set looks like this. And look at these tunnels. No way they’ve been manufactured for TV. The stuff in here is old, man. Not made to look old; it’s seriously freaking old.”

  As they were talking, they turned into a large room and Neahle’s hand flew to her mouth.

  “Oh my gosh!” she whispered. “Those can’t be real…”

  On all sides, the walls were lined with bones. Starting from the floor and going all the way to the ceiling, the bones were stacked in a pattern: three layers of femur bones, lying end out; a layer of skulls; nine layers of tibia bones, again lying end out; a layer of skulls; nine layers of femurs; a row of skulls; and four layers o
f tibia, bumping the ceiling. The walls went on as far as they could see in the torchlight.

  “Yep,” said Riley, holding the torch close to the wall on his right. “They’re real. Back in the eighteenth century they cleaned out a cemetery up top. I guess they ran out of space. This was a quarry then. They just dumped all the bones in. Sometime later, someone did this. I guess they thought it was art. All the rest of the bones are just piled up behind there.”

  “That’s seriously messed up,” Marty said.

  “Ossements du Cimetiere des Ynnocents, Deposes en Avril 1786,” Hannah said in French. “The bones from the Cemetery of the Innocents, deposited in April 1786. There’s an inscription down there on the wall. You’ll see it eventually, it’s on the way to a lot of other tunnels.”

  “But there aren’t any recent bones in here, right?” Neahle asked, keeping her arms crossed over her chest. Clay put his arm around her shoulders, walking with her, his eyes roving over the bone walls. There were thousands, hundreds of thousands, of bones stacked up.

  “Not that we know of,” Hannah confirmed. “We’re almost there.”

  “There where? And is ‘there’ close to this bone field?” Neahle shuddered and looked down at the ground, keeping her eyes averted from the gruesome geometric pattern.

  “You get used to it. It’s the least of our problems, trust me,” Riley said, torch aloft once again as they hurried down the tunnel.

  After five minutes of brisk walking, they’d left the bones behind. They had passed many side tunnels, some with clean smelling air wafting from them, and some that smelled dank, musty, and dead.

  “Is Paris really up there?” Clay asked.

  Riley shrugged. “About two hundred feet over our heads.”

  “Two hundred…” muttered Marty, suddenly feeling the weight of all the stone and dirt and buildings above him. “Are there ever any cave-ins?”