The 39 Clues Book 7: The Viper's Nest (12 page)

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CHAPTER 17

"Are you out of your mind?"

Dan spun around. In the setting sun, he saw Nellie in silhouette. With her current hairstyle, she looked like a tiny stegosaurus mounted on a human body. "He winked," Dan said. "Meaning it's okay to do this."

"You
are
out of your mind," Nellie said. "He winked because he likes your sister. Amy is being held captive by the mad chess fiend of South Africa."

Dan looked over her shoulder. Through the window he could see the older man was chatting, fixing something on a stove, while Amy and Kurt sat playing chess. When they weren't looking at the board, they were sneaking glances at each other.

"They're perfect together," Dan said. "And he was exaggerating about this mine. These guys get all nervous about this stuff for insurance reasons."

"Do you even know what that means?" Nellie asked.

"No," Dan said. "But hey, it's been here since the eighteen-hundreds, right?"

Nellie thought a moment. Then she reached around,

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unhooked her backpack, and pulled out a flashlight. "Take this. If I hear one pebble come loose, I pull you up for safety reasons. Duck down into the shaft. Do not fall. If you find something written on the wall, I will help you write it down. If you don't, that's it. We're out of here. Got it?"

Dan grabbed the flashlight. "You are awesome."

"I know. Now hurry."

Dan ran toward the shack and darted around back. In the center of a fenced-in area was a wide hole with the top of a frayed rope ladder bolted to the rim. He gulped. "This ladder is looking a little vintage."

Nellie peered over. "Okay, Plan B. You lean over and look. That's it. I'll hold your legs. Hurry!"

"Right." For a moment Dan froze. The last time he was in a mine, in Coober Pedy, Australia, he had encountered poisonous spiders and a deadly snake. Not to mention asthma.
You're not actually going in,
he told himself.
Just dipping down a little.

Swallowing hard, Dan got on all fours at the edge of the hole. He could feel Nellie's hands gripping his ankles as he flicked on the flashlight.

The hole was wide enough for one person. The walls were slick, as if painted with shellac. The rope ladder hung down, disappearing into nothingness and swaying slowly on the current of some invisible breeze. An acrid, vaguely rotten stench wafted upward.

My fetid hidey hole in Witbank's mines ...
Churchill had written.

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"What do you see?" Nellie hissed. "Hold tight," Dan said.

The rock walls were rough and pocked, and a jagged crack ran down the opposite side. Dan thought he could spot some writing, but it was just the accumulation of gravelly dirt on a narrow ledge.

"I hear something!" Nellie said. "Make it fast!"

Nada.

Dan exhaled. It was too dark, too much pressure. "Beam me up, Scotty," he said.

The words caught in his mouth. His flashlight was angled inward now, shining on the wall just below him.

And there, carefully carved into the rock about four feet directly underneath him, were several lines of writing.
"Wait! I got it!"
Dan cried. "Lower me a little! I see something!"

Nellie inched forward. Dan sank lower into the shaft. Pebbles shook loose from the rim and rained downward into the hole --into silence. Dan never heard them reach bottom.

Dan squinted, reaching down with the flashlight to the writing on the wall. It was too hard to read.

A rubbing.
That would do the trick.

"Pull me up!" Dan said.

In a moment, Dan was over the edge of the hole. "Okay, Nellie, I need to go back down, this time with a sheet of paper and pencil. There's writing down there, and I can get it by rubbing it."

"Now I
know
you're crazy," she said.

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"Checkmate!"
Amy's voice echoed from the hut, followed by a laugh from the old man and a playful moan from Kurt.

"We have a few more minutes," Dan said. "He's going to ask for a rematch."

"How do you know?"

"
It's a guy thing!"

Nellie sighed. Rummaging around in Dan's pack, she pulled out a pencil and a notebook, ripping out a sheet. "Okay, but be quick."

Maneuvering the light, the pencil, and the paper wasn't going to be easy. "I'll need spares," he said. "In case I drop something."

With a look of exasperation, Nellie tore off more sheets and found two other pencils. Dan stuffed them into his pants pocket and held on to the originals.

Clasping the flashlight in his mouth, he said, "Chhochhay, chech go!"

Dan stretched out on his stomach at the hole's edge. He felt a shudder and heard the sound of pebbles slipping down the wall beneath him. He moved left, until he gripped what felt like solid rock.

"Chhere!" Dan said, inching over the edge.

"Just a minute, dude, you have something sticky in your pack," Nellie said. "I'm getting it off my--"

Suddenly, the ground beneath Dan fell in an explosion of black soil. He felt himself drop abruptly. And then he was hurtling down into the darkness, his mouth open in a silent scream.

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* * *

"GOTCHA!"

"YAAAAGH!"
Dan thought his left leg was going to be pulled out from its socket. He was hanging by it, with Nellie's hand clasped around his ankle.

His arms flailed. Pen and paper fell. The flashlight flung away, casting a wild, brief light show around him.

"I'm pulling you up!" Nellie called.

Dan instinctively pressed his hands against the wall, looking for a root, something to support him, just in case.

The wall was solid here, filled with tiny cracks.

No. Not cracks.

Carvings.

"I got it!" Dan said. "I got the message!"

"You're heavy!" Nellie complained.

"One minute, Nellie! Just one minute!"

Quickly, he pulled the spare paper and pen from his pocket. He placed the paper over it and began to trace.

When he was pretty sure he was finished, he folded the paper and tucked it back into his pocket.
"Okay-- now!"

"Arrgghhhh...
"Nellie pulled. Dan felt himself begin to rise. Slowly.

He felt a jolt. Soil poured down around him, catching in his hair, sliding into his upside-down pants. "Pull harder!" he yelled. "It's collapsing!"

"I'm pulling as hard as I can!"

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Now Dan could hear a commotion. Other voices -- Amy's, Kurt's, the old man's.

He felt himself rising steadily. He tried to grab on to the wall but it was slipping out beneath his fingers wherever he touched it, sliding down in cascades of soil.

"Yeeee-ahhh!"
came Kurt's voice --and Dan was rising over the top, coughing.

"Hhhhhhh ... hhhhhh ..."
His breaths were contracted wheezes, papery-sounding in the night.

"Bring him inside!" the old man's voice said.

Asthma.
Sometimes, in emergencies, adrenaline kicked in and prevented the symptoms. The way it had happened in Seoul. But asthma was unpredictable. And now he felt as if someone had put a cloth over his nose and mouth.

He felt himself being carried inside and set down on a sofa. "Chew on this," Kurt said, handing him a tubelike, cactus-ish object, broken to release a white liquid.

It tasted bland and oozy. Dan gagged at first but forced himself to swallow. Amy sat by his side until he was breathing easy again.

And
then
she freaked.

"How could you have done that?" she said, then glared at Nellie. "And you --you're supposed to take care of us, not encourage Dan's stupid ideas!"

"But--" Dan sputtered.

Amy wasn't letting him have a word.
"Don't you get it? We're all we have, Dan! Just you and me!"

"
I -- I found Churchill's message!" he said.

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"You
what?"
Kurt said.

"You
what?"
Amy repeated.

Dan reached into his back pocket and took out the rubbing. "It was on the wall of the mine shaft!"

"Ex
-mine shaft," Kurt said. "A big sinkhole of rocks and soil now."

"A sinkhole!" Amy echoed.

Kurt lifted a powerful flashlight from a window ledge and shone it out over a section of sunken earth.

"I -- I would have been buried in that?" Dan said.

"Don't think about that, my friend," Kurt said. "Let's have a look."

Dan glanced at his sister. "Aren't you going to repeat what your new boyfriend said?" Before she could react, he spread out his wall rubbing on the table:

AM LOST,

TIRED, GONE IN,

DRIVEN NOUGHT.

WE HIT

A SHARK

- O CONFUSED LETTERS

FLEE, LOVER, FROM THESE LINES!

WLSC -29.086341 / 31.32817

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Dan stared at it in silence, reading it over and over. "WLSC ..." Kurt said.

"Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill!" Amy added.

"You guys make a great team," Dan remarked. Once again, Amy blushed.

The old man was beaming. "Will you look at that! We didn't even know he'd been hiding in
that
shaft!"

"Well, some of us did," Kurt murmured. "But... what does the writing mean? It's completely daft. Like the ravings of a madman."

"Word," Nellie agreed. "The dude was shut up for weeks in a mine shaft. Who wouldn't go a little postal?"

Kurt burst out laughing. "'We hit a shark'?"

Churchill going postal. Madman. Daft ravings.

Dan did the only thing that made sense.

"Yeah, you're right," he said, holding up the sheet. "Total nonsense. Let's forget any of us ever saw it."

As Amy and Nellie stared, open-mouthed, he ripped the secret message into small pieces.

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CHAPTER 18

Amy couldn't believe it.

Something had happened between her and Kurt. She couldn't really explain it. Yes, they'd played chess. But there had been more to it than that. Like her senses had all been suddenly plugged in.

For the first time in weeks, she had been able to think about something other than the hunt.

Then, just like that, she had to go.

There was barely time for a good-bye.

"Good luck," Kurt had told her.

But all she felt was the bad luck of the moment.

And then there was Dan's destruction of Churchill's message.

"How could you do that?" she asked as Nellie sped them away from the Witbank mine ... and Kurt.

Her brother looked at her in disbelief. "Come on, Amy. You didn't think that just because I ripped it up--"

"I know, I know, you memorized it!" Amy said. "It's the Dan Cahill Mental Gymnastics Show. But that's not the point! How could you have taken that incredibly

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stupid risk in the mine? You could have died! Again!"

"I found what no one else has found in a hundred years," Dan said, "so maybe you say, like, thanks?"

"He also tricked those two guys into thinking the paper meant nothing," Nellie said.

"You're just as bad as he is!" Amy shot back.

Dan held up a finger. "Winston Churchill once said, 'In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.'"

"How do you know that?" Amy asked.

"It's right there, on the page your book is open to," Dan said, pointing to the biography on the car seat. "Churchill was all about hidden messages. He worked with spies. I locked this baby in my head, dude."

On the other blank page Nellie had given him he wrote out what he had found in the mine:

AM LOST,

TIRED, GONE IN,

DRIVEN NOUGHT.

WE HIT

A SHARK

- O CONFUSED LETTERS

FLEE, LOVER, FROM THESE LINES!

WLSC -29.086341 / 31.32817

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"Churchill wasn't crazy," Dan said. "And he wasn't drunk. I'm betting this all means something."

Amy stared at the words. '"We hit a shark'?"

"I'm buying the nutcase scenario," Nellie said.

"Okay, okay, it sounds a little weird, but let's think," Dan said. "Isn't that what you do when you're attacked by a shark--hit it on its snout?"

"Churchill just escaped from prison, right?" Nellie said. "So maybe it's some English expression for victory. Like, 'Ho-ho, we really hit a shark there, didn't we, old chap?' Very Kabra, don't you think?"

"Dan?" Amy said. "Remember that code we had to solve on Uncle Alistair's estate, to open the hatch in his backyard? Where the hint was actually a play on words? What if this thing is actually two parts --the top part is the code, and the bottom part is the instructions for decoding it?"

"Hmm ..." Dan looked at the last few lines of the message. "So, 'O confused letters' would be part of the instructions."

"Yup, and 'confused' could be a code for 'scrambled.' Scrambled letters means an anagram," Amy said. "And 'flee' -- that means the same thing as 'leave' in Uncle Alistair's puzzle. You have to take something away, like a letter or word ..."

"Lover!" Dan said. "That's it. He doesn't mean a real lover. He means the word l-o-v-e-r! And 'from these lines' --five letters, five lines!--wait, I think I know..."