"Will —" Chester tried to interrupt once again, then allowed him to continue.
"I don't know what we're going to do, or what's going to happen to us… we might never… we might die…"
"Just forget it," Chester said softly as Will's voice fell to a whisper. "Neither of us knew it would turn out like this, and besides" — Will saw a broad grin ease itself into place on his friend's face — "it really can't get any worse, can it?" Chester punched Will playfully on the shoulder, unknowingly hitting the precise spot that had been so horribly injured by the stalker dog in the Eternal City.
"Thanks, Chester," Will gasped, clenching his teeth to stop himself from crying out form the fresh wave of pain.
"Hurry up!" Cal's shouts came again. "I've found a way through here. Come on!"
"What's he ranting about?" Chester asked.
Will tried to pull himself together. "He's always doing this, running off," he said, rolling his eyes.
"Oh, really? Remind you of anyone?" Chester said, arching an eyebrow.
Slightly abashed, Will nodded. "Yeah… a little." He managed to return Chester's smile.
They caught up with Cal, who was positively vibrating with excitement, babbling something about a light.
"Told you! Look down there!" He was jumping up and down, pointing to a large passage that led away from the train tunnel. Will peered down it and saw a soft blue glow, flickering as if it was quite some distance away.
"Keep up with me," Cal ordered and, without waiting for either Will or Chester to react, raced off at a furious pace.
Will tried to shout after him, but Cal didn't stop.
"Who does he think he is?" Chester said, looking at Will, who just shrugged as they both followed Cal's lead. "Can't believe I'm being told what to do by a pesky midget," Chester complained under his breath.
The temperature suddenly seemed to soar, making them pant. The air was so searingly dry and arid that their sweat was whisked off their skin the moment it appeared.
"Man, it is sweltering down here. It's like Spain or something," Chester complained, undoing several shirt buttons and scratching his chest.
"Well, if you believe the geologists, the temperature should rise one degree for every seventy feet you get closer to the earth's core," Will said.
"What does that mean?" Chester asked.
"It means we should be toast by now."
As Will and Chester followed Cal, wondering what exactly they were getting themselves into now, the light grew in intensity. It seemed to pulse, sometimes bathing the jagged walls around them, and then gradually diminishing so that there was only a bluish haze ahead.
They caught up with Cal just as he reached the end of the passage. A large space opened up before them.
A single flame, about six feet high, sprouted from the central point in the space. With a loud hissing, the flame grew, the blue plume elongating until it had quadrupled in height, spearing up and licking into a circular opening in the roof above it. The heat from the flame was too much to bear, and they were forced to back away and cover their faces with their arms.
"What is it?" Will asked, but neither Cal nor Chester answered, all three boys bewitched by its sheer beauty. For at the base of the flame, as it emerged from the blackened rock, it was almost transparent, but it transformed through a spectrum of colors, into shimmering yellows and reds, to a staggering range of greens, until it became the deepest magenta at its apex. But the overall light, the summation of these colors, was the blue that it cast around them, and which had led them here. They stood together, their eyes reflecting the iridescent display, until the hissing subsided and the flame shrank back down again.
As if they had all snapped out of a spell at the same instant, they turned to see what lay around them. They could make out a number of shadowy openings in the walls of the chamber.
Will and Chester made for the nearest of these. As they cautiously entered it, the light from the orbs in their hands mingled with the blue of the residual flame to reveal man-sized bundles leaning against the walls, two or three deep in places.
Wrapped in dusty cloth, each was bound several times around its girth with some type of twine. A few of the bundles appeared to be more recent than others, encased in a less soiled and stained cloth. But the older ones were so dirty as to be almost indistinguishable from the rock behind them. Closely followed by Chester, Will went over to one of these and held up his light to it. Strips of material had rotted and fallen away, allowing the boys to see what was inside.
"Ohmygosh," Chester said, so quickly it sounded like a single word.
Desiccated skin was drawn tightly across a skeletal face, which stared back at them from its empty eye sockets. Here and there the dull ivory of clean bone poked through the cracks in the dark skin. As Will moved his light, they could see other parts of the skeleton: Ribs protruded through the fabric, and a spiderlike hand rested against a hip covered with skin as tightly stretched as a piece of ancient parchment.
"I suppose these must be dead Coprolites," Will mumbled as he and Chester followed the wall around, surveying the other bundles.
"Oh. My. God," Chester repeated, slowly this time. "There are hundreds of them."
"This has to be some sort of burial ground," Will spoke in a subdued voice, as if showing these amassed bodies respect. "Just like the American Indians. They left their dead on wooden platforms, on mountainsides, rather than bury them."
"So, if this is some type of holy place, shouldn't we get the heck out of here? We don't want to upset these people, the Cupcakes or whatever they're called," Chester said urgently.
"Coprolites," Will corrected him.
"Coprolites." Chester pronounced the word carefully. "Right."
"And another thing," Will said.
"What?" Chester asked, turning to him.
"The name Coprolites," Will continued, barely suppressing a grin. "That's just what the Colonists call them. If you ever meet a Coprolite, don't use that name, OK?"
"Why?"
"It's not very flattering. It's dinosaur droppings. It means fossilized dinosaur poo." Will smirked as he walked a little farther along the wall of mummified bodies, until his attention was caught by one whose shroud had all but disintegrated.
He played his light on the corpse, passing the beam slowly down it length to its feet and then back up to its head again. Although the body was taller than either Will or Chester, it was so shrunken that it looked very small, and nothing at all like the cadaver of a fully grown adult. It had a thick golden bracelet around its bony wrist, in which were inset chunky rectangular gemstones of red, green, dark blue, and a few with no color at all. Their matte surfaces glinted dully, like old cough drops.
"I bet that's gold, and I reckon those stones could be rubies, emeralds, and sapphires… and even diamonds," Will said with bated breath. "Isn't this just incredible?"
"Yeah," Chester replied, without conviction.
"I must take a picture of this."
"Can't we just get out of here?" Chester urged as Will shrugged off his rucksack and extricated his camera from it. Then Chester noticed Will was extending a hand toward the braceleted wrist.
"Just what do you think you're doing, Will"
"I need to move this slightly," Will said, "for a better shot."
"Will!"
But Will wasn't listening. He had taken hold of the bracelet between his thumb and forefinger and was gently rotating it.
"Don't, Will! Will, c'mon! You know you shouldn't…"
The whole body quaked and then simply collapsed to the floor, throwing up a plume of dust.
"Oops!" Will said.