Chapter 31
Follow The Yellow Brick Road…Oh, Wait! It’s Gold!
There wasn’t another way out but the one that the stone doors just blocked.
“What do we do?” I said, trying to feel anything on the doors that would make them open back up. “There’s nothing here!”
“Calm down, Callie,” Dad said.
He didn’t even sound scared like I knew I was. I mean, we were trapped for goodness sake! We had no way out!
“There is a way out,” Dad said.
Did I say all that out loud?
Max laughed from beside me. “You did,” he said, answering me.
“Ugh!” I groaned. “But really? Is there a way out?”
I turned my flashlight toward where I could see Dad. He was farther than even the cave had gone.
“It’s opened up,” he said, flashing his light toward us. “Come on. We’ll see what else is back here.”
We hesitantly made our way toward Dad, not knowing whether or not something else was going to close, trapping us even farther in the cave.
“It looks like it was on some kind of system,” Dad said, shining his flashlight on the walls. “The stone doors here opened when the others closed.”
We walked farther, shining our lights wherever it would touch. I found Max’s hand again, just because my heart was beating ten times faster. He rubbed circles on the back of my hand with his thumb. It calmed me down, but only a little.
But that’s when something unexpected happened.
I had stepped forward before Max. Dad and Brielle were a little ways behind us, looking for anything along the walls that might have been a clue as to what to do next.
Well, I stepped right onto it.
And fell straight through.
I screamed when all I felt below me was air. I was dangling by Max’s hand, which I had somehow kept hold of. I’d dragged him down, though, and he was lying on the stone floor, trying to hold me.
“Don’t let go of me!” I yelled. “If you do, I swear I’m going to come back and haunt you!”
“You’re slipping!” he yelled back, trying to reach for me with his other hand.
Dad’s and Brielle’s faces appeared above him. Brielle looked even more scared than I felt. Max’s grip tightened on my hand, though, but I knew he wouldn’t have been able to pull me up. I was slipping faster.
While I was dangling in midair, I looked down, which I probably shouldn’t have done. But what I saw was something I wasn’t expecting. And it made me feel that much better about falling.
“Those flashlights are waterproof, right?” I called up, looking at Dad.
“Callie, what in the hell are you talking about?” Dad said, trying to hold on to Max so he didn’t start slipping. “Stop moving, would you?!”
“Drop one of the flashlights down here. I think I see something, but I’m on sure how far down it is,” I said, looking back down.
In the next second, a flashlight fell right beside me and then I heard a splash from what seemed like not too far down. I looked and saw it sinking in what looked like a pool about ten feet wide and fifteen feet deep. Something else I saw that I didn’t like.
Skulls.
Human skulls.
“Alright,” I said, my voice a little shaky.
Why in the heck did you think about doing this, Callie? Are you freakin’ crazy?
The answer: probably yes. Well, not probably. Definitely.
“Drop me,” I said, looking back up at Max.
“What?” he yelled. “I’m not dropping you!”
I rolled my eyes. “There’s water down there about ten feet down. It’s deep. I’ll be okay,” I said.
“Callie…”
“Just do it before I change my mind and realize how crazy this is!” I yelled.
Max looked at me for another long moment before I didn’t feel his hands grasping onto mine anymore. And then I was falling until I hit the surface.
The water was warmer than I expected for it to be. I just stayed still in it for a moment before I kicked my way up to the surface. When I breathed in the air, I gasped and choked.
“Callie! Are you okay?” Max called down from above, sounding frantic.
“I’m fine,” I called back up. “I’ve got to get the flashlight, so don’t freak out!”
I took another deep breath and dove down. My eyes couldn’t see clearly in the water, but it was enough for me to find the flashlight as it sat at the bottom of the pool. When I tried to reach for it, my hand hit something else. Something long and thin.
My heart hammered in my chest when I realized it was a bone. I quickly grabbed for the flashlight, which was sitting right beside it, and pushed off from the bottom and up to the surface again.
“Oh, my God!” I gasped, pushing my wet hair out of my face.
“What? What happened?” Dad called down.
I shivered in the warm water. “There are bones down there. Human bones!” I said.
Shivering once more, I kicked myself over toward what looked like a small landing between the water and the wall. When I reached it, I pulled myself up, placing the flashlight beside me.
“Can you climb back up?” Brielle asked.
I stood, grabbing the flashlight again, and shined it up the walls. There were places on the wall that looked sturdy enough for me to climb back up, but what was the point when there was no other way out from up there.
“How about you climb down?” I asked. “There might be something down here, a way to get out.”
After a few minutes of debate, I finally won. It took them longer to climb down, mostly because I was the one who got the pleasure of free falling into the water. But once we were all on the stone landing, we were able to look around some more.
“There’s nothing,” Dad said, flashing the beam of light everywhere around the circular room.
“Nothing above the surface,” I said, shining my flashlight down at the water.
Below, I could see something glittering on the bottom of the pool.
“I’m going down again,” I said, stepping back up to the edge of the water.
“What? No!” Max said, and tried to pull me back.
I looked at him and then flashed the light back down. Whatever was down there glittered again. And this time, he saw it.
“What…?”
“Exactly,” I said.
Before they could hold me back, I dove back into the water and swam to the bottom where the glittering something lay on the pool’s floor. I reached for it, but couldn’t distinguish just what it was. Only that it was round. It was probably another coin.
Right before I swam back up, though, I looked around underwater as best I could. To my right, though, I could see something dark. It kind of looked like it could be a passageway, but I didn’t have enough air to check it out.
After I swam back up, Max helped me back up onto the stone landing as I handed the coin to Dad.
“It’s Aztec,” he said, holding it in his hand and examining it with the flashlight.
“There something else down there,” I said, pushing my hair back from my face. “It looked like there was a passageway or something. I want to check it out.”
“No,” Max said, shaking his head from beside me. “If you did, something could happen and you wouldn’t be able to come back up. You’re not doing it.”
“But can you hold your breath for almost two minutes?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
Max just looked at me like he was trying to find something else to say.
“Exactly, so I’m going,” I said.
“Callie, if you’re not back in three minutes, we’re coming after you,” Dad said.
I shook my head, getting back in the water yet again. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “But okay.”
I took a few deep breaths, preparing for the dive. My eyes stayed on Max’s and he nodded. With one final breath, I went under.
I swam down to the place where I saw the passageway as fast as I could. I didn’t want to run out of air before I got anywhere. When I got to it, I shinned the flashlight through and saw it was longer than I thought from what I could see. I didn’t know if I was going to make it to whatever was on the other side, but I was going to try.
Kicking as hard as I could, I swam through it. After about a minute of being under the water, I could feel my lungs starting to burn as my oxygen was used up. A few air bubbles escaped past my lips, but I couldn’t stop. I needed to get to the other side.
And before I knew it, the narrow passageway widened into a pool just as deep as the other one. I swam up, finally letting the air out of my lungs, before I broke the surface of the water and gasped for air.
“I did it,” I said to myself, marveling in it.
I pulled the flashlight out of the water and shined it into the room where I was now in.
Only it wasn’t just a room.
It was a huge cavern.
My flashlight couldn’t reach far enough to see just what was there, so I swam to the side of the pool and pulled myself up out of the water.
I walked until the surface below my feet smoothed out. I looked down to see that it was made of stone blocks, like someone had intentionally built it that way. But then I came to a set of stairs and I looked forward.
As far as I could see, all I could saw was gold. Gold and different color jewels, most of them the size of my fist. There were huge gold Aztec relics standing on one side of the cavernous room, chests overflowing with coins that looked to be either Aztec or Spanish, jewels in piles beside them.
There was the sound of rushing water and I looked to the right to see a cave opening with what seemed like a waterfall flowing right over the entrance. So all of this was out in the open, only no one took the time to explore and find it.
I thought my heart was going to beat right out of my chest.
And it didn’t help when my name was suddenly echoed through it.
“Callie!” I heard Max yell, along with the sound of water splashing off someone as they got out of the pool.
“I’m over here,” I said, but my voice sounded a little strange.
I could hear him, Dad, and Brielle running then. But when they reached me, they stopped.
“Oh, my God,” Brielle breathed when they all caught sight of what had taken my breath away.
The sun must have been covered up by the clouds outside the cave because it was considerably lighter then. The sun reflected light off of the water and into the cavern, shining it off of the gold and jewels that littered the floor.
And with that, we walked down the stone steps, looking at everything we passed.
It was more than just gold and jewels. There were scrolls, hundreds of them, written in a language that none of us knew. There were even more statues made of stone that I’d never even seen in my life.
“We’ve found it,” Dad said, looking amazed when we finally found each other again after trying to look through everything. There was just too much to see all at once.
I couldn’t contain my excitement anymore as I jumped at Max, wrapping my arms and legs around him in a hug.
“We found it!”
***Yay! They found the treasure!
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Gah! I'm gonna cry...no...don't do it! :'(
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