No Romance Chapter 18

Chapter 18, “The Rest of the Cast Turns Up”

“That’s no two-ton chicken,” Jack said, adrenaline shooting through him.
            Four people came shooting out of the jungle on the far side of the clearing. Ay, Bee, Three, and Mortimer. A rhythmic earth-pounding followed behind them, and just a second later, Jack and Annie learned what was causing it.
            A dinosaur, a flipping dinosaur, crashed through the trees where the four men had just been. And it wasn’t just any dinosaur; it was the great white shark of the dinosaurs---a tyrannosaurus rex.
            “Well I’ll be,” Jack mumbled.
            Annie just gaped, unable to speak or move.
            But now the four men, and consequently the T-Rex, were heading directly for the temple. Directly for Jack and Annie.
            “GET IN THERE!” screamed Mortimer as they were about to reach the flight of stairs, the twenty-foot high T-Rex just a few seconds behind them.
            The four men flew up the stairs, passing Jack and Annie, but Annie couldn’t move, and Jack was still trying to figure things out. The T-Rex slowed as it reached the temple, knowing it couldn’t follow them in. As the last of the Johnsons disappeared inside the entranceway, Annie finally came to her senses (in a way) and tried to go in after them. But a slab of stone slid suddenly down between Butterfly Bee and herself, cutting off the doorway and almost grinding her nose off. She jumped backwards in fright, right into Jack’s arms.
            Jack pushed her away from him and turned on the top of the steps to face the dinosaur.
            It unleashed another mighty roar that seemed to make the whole temple vibrate.

“ROOOOOAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!!!” the T-Rex roared.

This made Jack pause.

“Wait a second,” Jack said, frowning. “Do that again.”

The T-Rex looked at him for a second and then obliged. “ROOOAAAAARRRR!!!”

Jack narrowed his eyes on the dinosaur. He hardly noticed Annie clinging to him like a baby koala bear to its mother. His eyes and ears and central nervous system were directed on the green-scaled monster before him.

“One more time?”

It roared again, the same way it had just done.

“That roar,” Jack said, tapping his chin in thought, “sounds suspiciously like English.”

Just then he noticed Annie, holding onto him and his arms from behind. He waited just one second before saying, “I’m going to need your help on this, Paula.”

Her grip on his biceps loosened, and she fell away like scaffolding. “What did you say?”

“I mean, Annie. Sorry.”

Her tone got dark. “Don’t call me that again.”

“Call you what?” he said over his shoulder.

“What---I don’t---no, just forget it. Forget it. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. What are you talking about, McDowell? I mean, Jack.”

“Both those names are my name. They mean the same thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said again.

Meanwhile, the T-Rex waited patiently for them to address him.

“So what’s the problem here?” Annie said, stepping next to Jack. “What’s going on with this thing?”

“He’s not a thing. You’re not a thing, are you, Mr. Tyrannosaurus Rex?”

The bright green dinosaur continued to stare silently at them. Jack kept trying, though.

“What’s your name?”

And that was the trigger.

“I’m Ryan,” said the T-Rex somewhat bashfully. He had a relatively young human voice, perhaps of a male in his late teens or early twenties.

“Ryan, I’m Jack McDowell. Pleased to meet you.”

Jack reached forward to shake hands, but saw Ryan’s tiny little wiggling arms and drew back. He didn’t want to embarrass the poor thing by pointing out its arms. Such had been the source of ridicule for millions of years; why rub it in on this poor creature, the last of its kind?

“This thing can talk?” Annie said hysterically.

“Is it really so shocking, after Spyder and Carl Sagan?” Jack said. Then, quietly, “Speaking of Carl Sagan, where is that cat?”

“Of course I can talk,” said Ryan. “Why wouldn’t I be able to talk?”

“No reason,” Jack said, covering up for Annie like he had to do with Carl Sagan. Some people were just so prejudiced against animals, believing them to be dumb, unintelligent creatures. Jack felt embarrassed himself at Annie’s unenlightened ways. “Ryan, are you by chance related to Dr. Aperture?”

“He’s my adopted father,” said Ryan. “He raised me from an egg. After my family was kidnapped by an evil man named Golbez and taken to the moon.”
            “Oh! Of course. And...and why are you out here, all alone?”

“To kill you!” he said with an unhappy roar. “I have to eat you. I’m sorry.”

“Now, now, you don’t want to kill us, do you? We’re your friends. Right, Annie?”

Annie’s “weirded-out” glare was on full display, but eventually she nodded and said, “Yes, yes we are.”

“No, you don’t want to kill us or eat us,” Jack said. “We’re the only friends you have in the world! Why would you want to kill us?”

“I have friends!” said Ryan. “And I talk to them all the time! But...they might be imaginary. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if I’m imaginary. All alone on this island. So I talk to them all the time, and they talk back, and we have some good laughs. We talk about philosophy a lot. But I feel like it always just repeats, over and over and over. And I don’t even know if I’m real until people like you come to my island, and I have to protect it from you, and you’re all real, I think. But maybe you aren’t, because I’ve never caught one of you, and what if I’m just dreaming it all up? Maybe you’re just projections of my mind like my friends are, and none of this is real. I think about this all the time. And maybe the only way I can prove I’m real is by eating you up. And that’s what I’m supposed to do, too. So I have to. I’m sorry.”

He started to miserably lumber forward, his huge jaws opening and revealing his massive, knife-like teeth.

Jack acted quickly, jumping down the stairs to near Ryan’s feet and tumbling through his legs in a forward roll. He ended up still under the tail area, so he rolled sideways between the leg and the tail. Once out from underneath the terrible lizard, Jack rose quickly to his feet and leapt backwards, just as Ryan turned his body to whap him with that twenty-foot tail.

Ryan faced Jack and started snapping at him with his enormous jaws.

“Now, now,” Jack said, hands up defensively as he backed away, “This isn’t about your existential angst, though I know what that feels like. You might wonder if you’re real, but that isn’t the reason you have to kill us, is it? No, Ryan, you’re not a killer. I know you’re not. You weren’t born that way.”

            “Of course I was born this way!” Ryan cried out in sadness. “How else could a tyrannosaurus rex eat if not by using his six-inch razor-sharp teeth?”
            “But you don’t have to eat! How many people have you eaten since you started guarding this place?”
            The mighty T-Rex stopped in its tracks. He looked thoughtful.
            “None! I’ve eaten...I’ve eaten nothing.” He pondered further. “But what does that mean?”
            “It means that you don’t have to! It means that even if you were born that way, you can still change!” Jack said. “You don’t have to be what you were born as! You can choose to be something different! You---can---choose!”
            Ryan lifted his head and roared in despair, then slumped down and fell back on his butt with a heavy THWUMP. He started weeping copious tears.

“I’m not good enough, just not good enough,” he said as tears rolled down his green scaly skin. “I’ll never be good enough.”

“For...for what?” Jack said gently, approaching the beast.

            “They’ll kill me!” Ryan wept. “They’ll kill my whole family!”
            Jack glanced at Annie, who still stood on the temple patio looking thoroughly nonplussed. He then said to Ryan, patting him tenderly on the thigh, “Ryan, you don’t have any more family. They all died out ages ago. Literal ages.”
            Ryan swallowed and looked up at Jack.
            “Ages? They’ve been gone for...ages?”
            Jack nodded. “Regrettably...yes.”
            “Even...even Uncle Joe?”
            “I’m pretty sure, yeah. I’m sorry, big buddy.”
            Just then Carl Sagan came trotting out of the bushes. It seemed that Ryan had scared him at first, but now the big cat wanted to offer his sympathies to the crying dinosaur. He rubbed against Ryan’s green-scaled leg, probably for both comforting purposes and to get a good back scratch.
            Ryan tried to reach down to pet Carl Sagan in thanks, but his arms weren’t long enough. Jack looked away, saving him from embarrassment.
            “So I guess that...I guess that means I don’t have to stay at this place any longer.” Ryan’s tears were starting to dry up. He sniffled, but unfortunately couldn’t wipe his leaky nose. “Maybe I can leave this island. Go get an education. I’ve been doing security work all my life; I barely know the alphabet from A to Zed.”
            “Maybe, just maybe, you could go look for your own kind,” Jack said. Travel the world, see what it has to offer you. I think you have a lot of potential. It would be wise not to waste it.”
            “Yeah. Yeah, maybe I will. Maybe I can make some real friends, now.”
            “You already have!” Jack said.
            “I...I have?”
            “You have us! Me, Annie here, and Carl Sagan.”
            “You? My friends? After I just tried to eat you?”
            “Sure. I understand how these things work, Ryan. And I want the best for you. I think you should go out and discover the philosophies of men and build up your brain. You do have quite a big one. And cou can write us from wherever you are in the world to let us know how you’re doing! Or at least you can dictate a letter. I think you have great things in store for you.”
            Ryan got to his feet in the only way he could: awkwardly. He couldn’t use the momentum of his upper body to pull himself up, so he had to roll over so his belly was towards the ground and find traction with his feet. It was like he had to do a pushup with only his legs. But eventually he got it. When Jack saw his eyes again they were once more moist, but this time for a different reason.
            “I’m sorry I tried to eat you. Thank you for your kindness and understanding.”
            “Just don’t try to eat anybody again, all right? And we’ll take care of the treasure here.”
            “And I’ll go find my destiny,” said Ryan the T-Rex.

“Until then, I’d advise you to let your imaginary friends keep you company. They might have some smart ideas.”

“Maybe they exist but in a parallel universe,” Ryan said thoughtfully. “And this island is an intersection that parallel world. Ooh, a perpendicular universe! That is something to discuss, I say...”

And Ryan wandered off, back into the jungle, talking to either himself or his old friends. He was never seen nor heard of again.

---

“So was that all real?” Annie said after Ryan was gone.

“Who’s to say?” Jack said. “It was written down, wasn’t it?”

            His attention turned to the “ancient” stone temple. “This is a marvelous bit of engineering, don’t you think?” he said to Annie. “Miraculous. That is, if it was built by some ancient civilization.”
            “What do you mean?”
            “Well, I mean that that stone door that blocked us from entering couldn’t have been designed with anything other than 20th century technology. Hydraulics? Electric? Fission powered? Maybe we’ll never know. I bet the whole thing is filled with traps and devices and contraptions. Not to mention puzzles. And all for what?”
            “What about the glows?”
            “Hm. There might be something to that. But my point is, if it really was built by an ancient civilization, wouldn’t the gold be in there? No, I’m certain this ‘temple’ was built recently. Within the last twenty or thirty years. They just forgot to put the gold in there before making all the traps and puzzles. So they built a guardian of the treasure instead.”

“And a rope bridge across the lagoon.”

            “Yeah, that one was probably just the gods’ doing. But no---maybe that’s how Golbez gets here to retrieve more gold when he needs it. Speaking of which...”
            “But now the four of them are trapped in there!”
            “So?”
            “So are they okay?”
            “Probably. Mortimer will have a good time. If they get through it all right, it’ll deposit them somewhere else. We should go find that place.”
            “But how did they get up there in the first place?”
            “THAT is an excellent question.”
            “They came from over there.” She pointed toward the jungle a good twenty yards to the left of the shipwreck. “There might be some stairs cut into the rock.”
            “I’m seeing that image too. A huge flight of black stairs spiraling up around the side of the island. That makes sense to me. We’ll take a look later. For now, we’d better find a place to hide.”
            “What? Why?”
            “Because the rest of the cast is on their way here right now.”
            “How do you know that?”
            Jack shrugged. “Now that we’ve found it, everyone else can too. They’ll be converging on this site shortly.”
            “So what do we do?”
            “We find a place to hide and wait.”
            “Just...wait?”
            “Hey, I need this! I’ve been moving all day. AND I don’t think there’s any chance of dinner at this point, so I think I’m going to be a little grumpy.”
            “A little grumpy? You’ve been ‘a little grumpy’ all day.”
            “And you’ve been a little annoying all day. Yin and yang. One thing leads to another. Cause, not just correlation.”
            Continuing to grumble at each other, Jack and Annie searched the area for a spot both comfortable and high, that would give them a good view of the island, climbing some of the igneous crags that enclosed the treasure site. Excellently, they found a particular spot that was high enough to keep them from being seen AND see everything around them, including the lagoon (though just the far side; trees blocked their view of the nearer shore), the piles of gold, and the temple clearing. It wasn’t the cushiest crag in the world, but Jack still managed to nearly fall asleep in its bosom.
            The thing that prevented him from slipping into full unconsciousness was Annie. But she blamed the rustling bushes on the tallest crag across from them.
            “Jack, Jack, wake up,” she whispered. “Jack! Jack. Jack Jack Jack. Jack, wake the hell up!”
            That last one did it. He sat straight up, frowning irritably at Annie. She frowned right back, somewhat sarcastically. He muttered a bleeped curse in response. Unpleasant folks, those two.
            “Someone’s over there,” she said after their frowning contest had run its course.
            “Where?”
            “There. Where those bushes are rustling, on the tallest crag across from here.”
            “Just point, please. I don’t trust words anymore.”
            She pointed. There was indeed some movement, as if some figure were trying to emerge through a tangle of branches. And then the figure parted the bushes, stepping onto an outcropping of rock overlooking the the whole treasure, temple in the distant, but visible, background.
            “Ho!” cried out Hilti Holden Higgins. “Hah! I have won! You hear that Clara Higgins? I won!”

Jack and Annie looked at each other. Who Hilti was addressing was not quite clear. Not until about ten seconds later when a woman dressed in the exact khaki outfit Hilti wore emerged on a similar outcropping near his.

            “Well dammit all, Hilti but it looks that way,” she said in a New Zealand accent, hands on her hips and a little pout on her face. But that soon melted away into carefree laughter. “Yes, you win, you got here first. But we made it! We found the last collection! And you have to admit it was close. Ten seconds!”
            “What an ending to our final treasure run,” Hilti said as they both started making their way down. “Clara, I think you know how I want to celebrate.”
            “All right, you happy turkey. You win. Let’s go make little Sophocles.”
            “I say we take it to the temple over yonder.”
            “Ooh, there’s an ancient temple to go with it! This will be one to remember.”
            “Let’s have some fun in there, Clara Higgins.”
            “I love you, Hilti Higgins.”
            At the ground together again they took not a second’s notice of the huge cache of gold around them, but embraced, kissed, then took each other’s hands before running in the direction of the temple.
            If Jack had been watching Annie’s face during this, he would have seen a conflict. Half of her wanted to say, “That is so romantic!” and the other half was just silently generating ideas, plans for when she finally took Jack McDowell for her own.
            But none of these were voiced, and Jack had his own issues to deal with so he remained aloof. He was remembering all the girls he had encountered in his adventures---the damsels in distress, the femme fatales---and trying to think if any of them had ever gave him any kind of happiness. The kind that’s fun, exciting, sure---the thrill of new romance, a new girl giving herself to him, the biological satisfaction of conquering another female, winning their hearts and their bodies. But that never lasted. The gods always took them away too quickly, either by death or because the story ended. New things in his life never continued with him. He lived a life of episodic anecdotes, the only overarching theme being the increased callousness of his character, as he grew angrier and angrier about what the gods had done to him, what they were doing to him, what they would continue to do to him. Lasting happiness was not in the plan. He had accepted that some time ago, had tried to adjust his worldview to match that permanent paradigm. He had given up on happiness. Anger drove him now. Thoughts and ambitions of rebellion.

But it only made him unhappier. The girls he was given by the gods were probably the gods’ attempt at mercy. A damp washcloth to dampen the tongue while flames consumed the rest of him. A fleeting pleasure to make him keep on going, like being fueled entirely by caffeine, rather than food. He had energy, sure, but he was...still hungry.

Those girls in his adventures probably never would have worked out anyway. It wasn’t that the girls were especially shallow (though some of them were). On the contrary, he wasn’t the kind of character that had a lot of substance underneath, and how could a girl fall truly and sincerely in love with a one-dimensional human being? Which made him question his own potentialities. Could he, a one-track character, fall in love? Could he ever find true romance?

The gods had never let him off the leash. Never given him a moment that wasn’t dominated by plot and compulsion. As a result, he didn’t know what could be. He only knew what was. And he had to do his best with that.

But these other characters, these people passing through his life. Sometimes they seemed more real than he felt himself to be. His whole life was this adventuresome nonsense. But he only saw these secondary and tertiary characters in brief moments of their lives. Did they just not exist when they weren’t in the script? Or did they go off and have normal lives where he couldn’t see them?

            Did the world exist outside of his own mind?
            Maybe that was a little too much right now. But it pained him nonetheless. He wanted a world, a life, outside of his mind, outside the pages of a book.
            He glanced over to where the Higginses were running. The door of the temple had reponed, only mildly surprising him. He assumed it would open up again periodically, perhaps when the first ones to enter had passed into another room, or solved the first puzzle. Just as the Higgenses dashed in, the stone slab slid down, once more closing off the temple.
            He turned to Annie. His first inclination was to mark her as “unsatisfying,” but he knew there were some hidden things underneath that drove her. He just had to wait for the right moment to bring them out.
            “Told you,” he ended up saying.
            She looked at him weirdly.
            “About people finding it after we have,” he said.
            “Who’s next then?” Annie said after taking a deep breath. She seemed to be cooling down from something.
            “I---”
            A flock of birds suddenly took flight out of the trees on the far side of the temple clearing. The open-vested, tattooed figure of Vanasmas emerged from the trees, holding some kind of small technological device in his hand. He was staring at it intently, so much so that he didn’t realize he had come out from beneath the canopy. When he finally did, and looked up at the temple he was a mere fifty feet away from, he nearly dropped the device. In fact he did drop it, but with the impeccable skills of a spirit-synched Johnson, he caught it before it hit the ground. We say “caught it” but it really turned into more of a juggling routine, accidentally smacking it away from him before reaching out madly to catch it again, where it hit his fingers before they could grasp it and finally getting himself underneath it where he caught it close to his heaving, bare, tattooed chest and clutched it tightly. Though Jack and Annie were not aware of it, we can tell the reader that he whispered a silent thank-you to Burro Bill, the Donkey of Donkeys, for helping him to hold onto the very expensive device. Then he again turned to the temple.
            He stood there a while, taking in the whole sight. Then he ran to it, up to the top of the stairs where he slowed and began gently examining the glowing plinths. He hovered around the green one the longest, gripping the edges of the plinth and staring deep into the carved symbol on top of it, the symbol that Jack had not been able to see, as Ryan the talking tyrannosaurus rex had become a bothersome distraction, and had afterwards forgotten about.
            Vanasmas then went to the stone door and started feeling his hands all over it, probably looking for a way to make it open. Jack laughed silently, knowing it wouldn’t open for a good amount of time, as Higginses were probably going to be in that first chamber for a while.
            After giving it up as a bad job, Vanasmas went back to his device. It seemed to be leading him somewhere, because he kept walking, bent over as if he were following a map. Jack started to remember what was going on when Vanasmas caught sight of the gold through a gap in the trees and crags. Once more he did the juggling routine with the device, and once more he caught it, this time using his right bicep. He whispered thanks to Burro Bill, the Donkey of Donkeys, then fled towards the piles of gold. Jack realized also during this time that there was a passage from the gold to the temple that had been hidden from him before, a passage much easier to traverse than the winding, twisting passage through the black rock. His mind also took note that the black rock island wasn’t really an island, surrounded only mostly by the turquoise lagoon, not completely. Vanasmas had gotten here somehow. So there must be a back way that had just never been found before tonight.
            And while it was indeed approaching “tonight,” the sun seemed to be taking an eternity to set. Maybe it was waiting for something, just like Jack and Annie.
            In any case, Vanasmas found the gold.
            But...
            But he didn’t seem to take that much interest in it. The device in his hand enthralled him much more. This confirmed Jack’s thoughts as to Vanasmas’s motivations.

“See?” he whispered to Annie. “Vanasmas doesn’t care about the gold. He wants the sacred artifacts.”

            “What sacred artifacts?”
            “The glows that we saw. The plinths. But damb it, I forgot to check that last one...”
            Jack took WAY too long thinking about this. He was as immersed in this line of thinking as much as Vanasmas had been immersed in the device before noticing the temple. And, like that situation, Jack was not focusing on the correct thing. So we had to make the device start beeping to get his attention. (It doesn’t usually make noise.)
            The beeping took Vanasmas off guard as much as Jack.
            “What the...?” he said, holding it away from himself in surprise.
            In this moment Jack snapped to, and realized that Vanasmas had been coming straight for him and Annie. He was practically at the base of their crag when the geepeus device made its chirps.

Jack ducked down, pushing down Annie’s head along with him. He thrust his hand into his jacket pocket. It came out holding the tiny Mobile Mouse unit. He lobbed it into the statue collection like a grenade. Jack heard it bounce around the rocky area and eventually clatter to a stop. He peeked his head up to see where it had landed.

Vanasmas, because of the waning light, hadn’t seen where it had come from, but he quickly found it with the geepeus device in his hand: right at the feet of the animal trainer statue. Vanasmas bent down slowly to pick it up, and rose even more slowly, his eyes following the tip of the statue’s golden whip all the way to the trainer’s hand. His eyes then rose to the face, and then finally to the brown safari hat atop its head.

After a second of recognition, Vanasmas turned his head furiously around the treasure site, his teeth clenched and mouth seething wordlessly. He knew Jack was near. Or at the very least, had been there already.

He quickly gained his composure and stomped out of the statue collection and through and around the piles of coins. Jack and Annie lost sight of him as he ventured through the trees in the direction of the snapped rope bridge.

“He was tracking us the whole time,” Jack said quietly, angry at himself for reasons he did not bother to think out. “That’s how he found us here. He followed us on the GPS.”

“Well, why don’t we just confront him now? He has no weapon

            “And say what to him? No, Annie, that confrontation would be too awkward. We have to figure out what he wants before we try to stop him from getting it.”
            “How do we know what he wants is bad? Didn’t you say earlier that he actually did have some right to the treasure?”
            “It’s not what he wants, but how he goes about getting it. He’s been trying to kill and manipulate me---and us---this whole time. He’s a villain, Annie. He’s my villain.”
            Annie was about to say something more when Vanasmas reappeared, and Jack had to shush her. They watched as he strolled rapidly through the magnificent riches of his people, hardly giving it a second glance. Then back into the middle of the temple clearing where he stopped, checking that the door was still closed. Then finally back into the jungle.
            “Where is he going?” Annie said when he had disappeared.
            “Who knows? Back to the Johnsons, maybe? Or maybe even he doesn’t know. Not yet. Maybe he’s just going to camp out nearby and wait for the temple to reopen. I hope the Higginses have a wonderful, vibrant relationship, so he’s kept out of there a long time.”
            “What?” Annie said, confused.
            “Never mind,” he said, realizing he hadn’t voiced his theory on how the temple worked to her.

---

            It was finally getting darker. This made it easier to sleep, but more importantly, it made it easier to see the bright light that suddenly appeared at the base of the cliffside on the far side of the lagoon.
            “I’m not going to say anything,” I said, “because I know that if I say ‘look!’ you’re going to say ‘What’s that?’ and I don’t have an answer, so what would be the point of all that. So may I simply ask that you observe as I observe, and try to figure out what that light is silently, and if you have an idea, tell me. Okay?”
            But Annie wasn’t really paying attention. Her focus had been drawn to the bright light at the the base of the cliffside on the far side of the lagoon. Much like how she had been upon first seeing the jewelry and piles of gold.
            “Look!” she said quietly, pointing. “What is that?”
            I sighed and closed my eyes before saying, “I don’t know.”
            “It’s moving across the water.”
            “So it’s probably a boat.”
            “But who’s in it? And where did they come from?”
            I had my suspicions but was too tired to bandy them about. I let Annie’s words hang in the air as the boat motored across the lagoon. The brightness of the light at its front disguised the boat’s occupants, but I thought I could make out two distinct figures before it disappeared behind the island trees.
            “Now what? Do we go find them?”
            “Maybe later, but---”
            “And kill them?”
            “Um...wait, what?”
            I did a double take at Annie. She still had her eyes set on the lagoon. I don’t think she knew what she was saying. I let it slide.
            “No, we’re not going to kill anybody. We’ll wait for them to come up here.”
            And soon enough we heard voices and footsteps. They came from the direction of the shipwreck, which unfortunately wasn’t visible to us at this angle, but we waited just a few seconds longer before they entered the temple clearing, and hence our vision. They came from the same corner of the clearing Mortimer and the three Johnsons had emerged from. If we ever wanted to find a way down to the lagoon level, that was it.
            The two figures approached the temple in much more an expectant fashion than Vanasmas had. The bigger of the two went ahead, and we could hear their voices.

“It’s closed.”

            “Dammit, you old rabbit. That means somebody’s in there. Somebody else has found my treasure. How am I ever going to build my damned Bowie Facility now?”

The temple door was indeed still closed. The Higginses had yet to solve the first puzzle. I wondered if they would by dawn.

The two men started towards the gap in the crags that led to the statues and coins.

“Let’s make sure everything else is in order. Can’t have somebody going off with my monkey statues!  Where would I find my inspiration otherwise? Can you tell me that, Blake? What would I be inspired by without being able to imagine a hundred golden monkeys doing it first on a typewriter?”

“Well, I like the trees and the birds and the clouds, myself, Golbez sir.”

“You always have, Blake. I get too much of that. I need something more, though. But who has time to imagine new things when the old things previously imagined are about to be realized? And speaking of imagination...it’s all still here. Good. They left this all here and fell into my trap, whoever they are. Now is the time to spring it.”

They talked as they toured the treasure site, wandering around and in between the statues and coins.

“So what’s going to happen, Golbez sir?”

“Hmm. Fiery destruction, I should think. Yes, I think so. I think. That’s what I’m around for, Blake. Thinking. Makes me valuable. You, meanwhile, have some tremendous fists. That you do. But I wonder, Blake---can I trust you?”

“Probably not, Golbez sir. Like you say, I’m not the thinker of the group. I like to daydream.”

“What do you like to daydream about, Blake?”

“Butterflies, mostly. I’d like to be one, someday.”

“You’re probably right then. I can’t trust you. But gosh darnit, Blake, I have to tell someone. And I’ve been able to trust you with the knowledge of this treasure and the two secret passages to it for years. Although no one really uses the minecart track over by the Cardaccians anymore, since I had it redesigned according to the platformers’ directions. They helped me out with this temple trap, too. Years and years ago.”

“The platformers, Golbez sir?”

“I don’t know who they are, but they whisper to me, sometimes. Spirits of some kind. Maybe gods. Maybe...well, quidquid. I’m sorry, what were we talking about before? No, I take it back, I’m not sorry. But I don’t remember what we were talking about. I got my minecart thrown off the track. Or I lost my train of thought. Or something. Answer me, Blake! You old rabbit!”

“You were speaking of trust, Golbez sir. That you trusted me all these years. Since we met at that convention.”

“Ah, yes! You and North and the bad doctor...yes. You’ve stayed loyal to me all these years. Paula has proven her loyalty, too. On some kind of secret mission, she said. Left me a note on my bedside table. Very kind of her, though she never told me what it was. But Vanasmas...As a matter of fact, it was because I had felt the influence of the platformers over the eyars that I understood who Vanasmas was when we caught him. And they are why I believed him. I still know he’s right about me, and about how spiritual I am. I know what he was saying wasn’t flattery; it was all true. But I think he was distracting me with truths as he enacted a lie. Blake, I’m starting to think I wasn’t hibernating at all these past couple of days. I think I may have been poisoned. And I think it was Vanasmas who did it. He still might be around here; he might even be the one inside the temple. I think he was scamming me. And I say that somewhat humiliated, so if you breathe even a single laugh, you’re walking all the way home. No underground river ride for you. So be happy that I trust you, Blake. Vanasmas has proven to be an enemy to us all. He and the Johnson tribe. But even if he was scamming me all this time, I don’t know how he would have found this place except for that new character who’s come to town, the hero.”

“Your son?”

“Yes, that’s who it was. My son. Little Jackie. He was the rogue that entered the picture, shattering our pleasant peaceables. Of course, I don’t blame the lad. He’s only doing what he’s supposed to. And you know what? Because of his example, I’m going to start my life anew. Wipe off all this gold, all these precious things, start with a blank slate. Liquidate my army, get rid of my resources and maybe start a new life as an honest man somewhere. All because of his example. And because I don’t want anyone else to have this treasure, so it’s all going to be destroyed, thanks to a safeguard I installed here with the help of Dr. Aperture.”

“Will you be keeping your staff, Golbez sir?”

“Of course! You and North and the bad doctor, like I said. You all have the key words and passcodes to my entire organization! I do trust you, Blake, even if you do want to be a butterfly someday. I never gave any of that to Vanasmas, so he won’t be able to stop what I’m about to do. I do hope Paula will agree to come along. Blake, where would you like to go?”

“Marlow, I think. Maybe Switzerland or Venice.”

“All sound like very romantic places.”

“Yes, romantic.”

A peaceful nighttime silence filled the air. Something like an owl hooted, but that was most assuredly no owl. I didn’t care to think what it was.

“Well, we’d best be getting home, Blake. Train’s coming tomorrow. We need to ready some things, mobilize some troops...”

            Their voices faded as they walked back into the jungle from whence they had come, like a letter with no postage or maybe a magician’s bunny.

Did I just say ‘bunny’?

I shivered. I know I’ve said I’m “not afraid of anything,” but, well, sometimes children’s books can do a lot of damage to children...

“Annie,” I said. She snapped to attention. “We need to follow them. See where they go.”

She nodded and we went.