The Lost Cipher Page 10

  They left the pool and dropped deeper into the hollow. Even though the sun was now high in the sky, their surroundings seemed to get gloomier with every step. The farther down the mountain they went, the higher and thicker the trees grew, darkening the forest floor. Once, when a branch snapped nearby and something large crashed through the brush, even Lucas nearly jumped out of his skin. But it was only a whitetail buck, scared up out of the stream by the boys’ noisy progress. The deer bounded off, and in seconds, only his snowy tail was visible, dancing away in the dim forest like a tiny ghost.

  Half an hour from the trout pool, they heard falling water below them, and soon they were standing at the top of a noisy waterfall that dropped twenty feet into a jumble of moss-covered boulders. Lucas suggested they skirt the drop by using a sloping ledge along one side of the ravine. Alex and George agreed. It was the only way down without heading back uphill to find another route past the fall.

  Inching their way sideways along the ledge, they used their fingers to feel for holds in the rock. Lucas led the way, concentrating on where to put his hands and feet but mostly just hoping the steep ravine would let up soon so they could make quicker progress. He reached up to grab the lip of a small ledge, testing it for a handhold, and checked behind him to see if Alex and George were making the same downward progress.

  Just then, Alex yelled, “Lucas! Stop!” His eyes were wide and fixed on the ledge Lucas was gripping.

  Lucas followed his friend’s terrified gaze and slowly leaned back enough to see the top of the ledge. An inch from his own shifting hand, camouflaged perfectly against the wet leaves and rusty pine needles, a copperhead was coiled on the rock.

  CHAPTER 19

  Lucas started to withdraw his hand, as slow as possible, but the snake was already poised to strike. It tried to slither backward but had no room to escape. It kept its head pointed straight at the fingers that had invaded its mossy bed.

  Lucas gasped. He pressed his face against the rock, thinking that hiding part of himself from the snake would calm it down. With his head turned downstream, he began to slowly ease his hand of the ledge, imaging the snake’s fangs sinking into his fingers at any moment. From behind him, Lucas heard George whisper frantically, “Alex! No!”

  Lucas turned just in time to see Alex swinging a flat rock down on the snake.

  Alex aimed for the snake’s wide head, but his blow hit mostly rock and sent a tiny splinter of stone bouncing off Lucas’s forehead.

  The stunned snake flattened itself against the ledge, a drop of blood on its neck. It pulsed with anger and frantically wriggled the tip of its tail like a rattler, a sure sign it would strike. But Alex was already raising the rock for another blow.

  “No! Leave it!” Lucas yelled, but it was too late.

  Alex brought the rock down again, and the snake struck his hand.

  Jerking away, Alex lost his balance. He tilted back from the boulder, grabbing for it, but kept falling. With one foot, he pushed away from the rock, trying to make a clean jump, but there was no safe place to land in the jumble of jagged boulders and shallow water below. Lucas heard a sickening snap when Alex landed.

  “Aaaagh! ” Alex toppled over onto a rock and grabbed at his ankle. He looked frantically up at the others on the ledge. “Where’d the snake go?” he yelled, his face twisted into a mask of pain.

  “It’s up here still, right next to my foot!” hissed George. Lucas looked down. The snake had dropped to the ledge between them and coiled up again. Its eyes were angry yellow slits, and its black tongue flicked in and out rapidly, probing the air for the predator it had just bitten. Its head was bloodied.

  George started to scurry backward, muttering a string of curse words.

  “Just freeze!” hollered Lucas. “Don’t move! It’s a copperhead. Let it calm down and it’ll leave.”

  George stopped moving, but Lucas could hear his breath coming in gasps.

  Finally, after what seemed like forever, the snake slowly uncoiled. It wriggled off the ledge and disappeared beneath the boulders, leaving spots of blood on the rock. Lucas figured it would be dead before long.

  He started working his way down the rock to his injured friend. “It’s gone,” he told Alex. “How bad are you hurt?”

  Alex was sitting on a rock, sucking hard on the side of his hand and spitting. He stopped and used his good hand to cradle the one with the bite. When he looked up at the other boys, his face had gone pale, and his eyes had a lost look that made him seem very small.

  “I think it got me,” he said. “My thumb is burning!” He started to get up but screamed again and collapsed on the rock. “And my ankle is messed up.”

  Lucas crouched down and examined Alex’s hand. The thumb was red and swelling a little, but Lucas could see only one puncture mark. “I think it only got you with one fang. That’s good.”

  “Maybe, but it hurts like you know what.” Alex tried to croak out a laugh. “But at least it’ll keep my mind off my ankle.” He moved the foot a little and grimaced again. Then he folded his arms across his knee and buried his face.

  George was still frozen up on the ledge. “What are we going to do?”

  Lucas knew it was all his fault they were stuck in the middle of nowhere, and now Alex was hurt, but he was still getting sick of the younger boy’s whining.

  “I guess I gotta go for help,” he snapped at George. But he changed his tone for Alex, trying to sound optimistic. “Look, I’ll get down the creek as fast as I can and find a house.” He tried to sound confident, but he sure didn’t like the idea of continuing down the mountain alone, not with the luck they were having. “George can stay here with you.”

  “What!?” exclaimed George.

  “George, listen!” snapped Lucas again. “He’s hurt. Someone’s got to stay with him, and someone’s got to go get help. Alone.”

  Lucas hated the sound of the word, but it got the message across to George.

  “No problem. You go. I’ll stay with Alex.”

  “You can’t go fast,” said Alex through his tears. “It won’t do anybody any good if you get hurt too.”

  “But what about the snakebite?” asked George. He wasn’t going to say it, but they knew what he was asking. Would the bite kill Alex?

  Lucas saw that more of Alex’s hand already looked a little puffier. “It ain’t gonna kill him, but his hand’s gonna hurt bad.”

  “Already does,” said Alex, closing his eyes tight.

  “I know. I’ll go fast. I promise,”

  Alex struggled to smile. “Watch for snakes.”

  Not funny, thought Lucas, a sharp panic already setting in. He turned to scramble down the mountain on his own.

  Below the falls, Lucas made better progress. The image of his friend lying in pain upstream pushed him faster than he knew he should go. Follow the stream and find a house, he told himself. Don’t think of nothin’ else. Negotiating the tangle of shrubs and slick boulders demanded enough concentration that he was almost able to keep his mind off still being lost, but now alone.

  For nearly an hour, the going was slow. But then the hollow that carried the stream began to flatten a bit, and every once in a while, he even caught a glimpse of green farmland down through the trees. For the first time since they’d left the mountaintop, Lucas began to think he was leaving the worst of it and getting closer to civilization.

  As he picked his way along the bank of the small stream, Lucas remembered something his father had told him that last day before he went away. About how a man’s life was like their little creek back home—not much more than a trickle at first, but fresh and full of energy. And that the rough spots, like him having to go off and fight, were like the dangerous rapids and waterfalls downstream when the creek turned into a real river. But the rapids go by quick, he’d said, and after a while, everything smooths out like the way it’s meant to be, like
a river’s long and quiet run across the flatlands to the ocean.

  Five minutes later though, the growing roar of more falling water ahead reminded Lucas he was still smack in the middle of a rough spot.

  Soon he was standing at the top of a rock wall nearly three stories high. The stream spread out in a watery sheet that draped down the nearly vertical face, covering it in a treacherous layer of slippery green algae. Below the waterfall lay a dark pool, too deep to see the bottom.

  Lucas looked along the edges of the fall for a safe way down, but the dank shade of the hollow and the constant mist from the falling water had created a snarl of brush-covered boulders that looked impossible to navigate.

  There was no time to find a way around. Somehow he had to descend the falls.

  Easing himself backward over the edge, he found a dry foothold and wedged his hand into a crack. The crack continued a good ten feet down, clear of the water. He made use of it to get nearly halfway down the face of rock. There, he was able to get both feet onto a tiny ledge and rest. He hugged the rock and peeked down over his shoulder. The rest of the descent wouldn’t be so easy.

  Lucas inched his way sideways along the ledge, searching by feel for a new handhold. He blindly explored a new crack with his hand, trying to convince himself that no snake would make a home in such a steep and waterlogged cliff, but his trembling legs weren’t so convinced. Only the need to help Alex kept him moving.

  With his face pressed against the cold, moss-covered rock, he got his fingers into the crack and then found a place for his right foot farther down. He took one hand out of the crack to shake some feeling back into it. When he did, a few more pounds of his weight shifted to the new foothold.

  The rock collapsed beneath his foot.

  Lucas yelled and clawed at the cliff with his free hand, but the lunge only dislodged his other foot. He swung out over the pool, momentarily suspended by one hand. In the half second it took to realize he was going to fall, he pushed away from the rock with his leg, aiming for the deepest part of the pool below. He screamed as he fell, pitching over sideways. He smacked the pool with the side of his face, and all the sounds of the world disappeared from his ears.

  For an instant, everything was black, and Lucas was certain he was dead. Then he felt the freezing shock of the water.

  Disoriented, he probed for the bottom of the pool with his legs but found no resistance. He reached out blindly and his hand met a thick branch covered in slime. Not knowing which way was up, he hoisted himself away from the branch, and his head broke the surface of the pool.

  He pulled himself half out of the water and flopped over onto his back. He examined the side of his face for blood or a lump but found neither. Still, the roar of rushing water in his ears sent an electric jolt of pain through his jaw and forehead, and for a moment, he thought the fall had deafened him.

  Lying next to the pool, the blurry wash of green above him slowly became a canopy of trees. He felt the wet, rounded rocks beneath him and the cold water seeping through his boots. He was just about to sit up when something pointy and hard prodded his shoulder. When he reached up to brush it away, he heard a gravelly voice, one that he remembered instantly.

  “This ain’t no public swimmin’ hole, boy.”

  Lucas turned and squinted through the pain behind his eyes.

  It was the old man. The one from the store. The one from Aaron’s story who planted copperheads in his hollow.

  The snake man.

  He was poking Lucas with the barrel of a shotgun.

  CHAPTER 20

  “I fell,” Lucas said groggily. He pulled himself up onto his elbows, keeping one eye on the gun and the other on the old man behind it.

  “Fell? From up there?” The man waved the shotgun at the top of the falls. A small, brown spider crawled across his matted, white beard, but the old man didn’t seem to notice. “You oughta be dead.”

  “Not from the top. I was climbin’ down and I slipped. I hit the water. Hard.” He fingered the side of his face again and wiggled his jaw, wincing.

  If the old man felt any sympathy for him, he didn’t show it. He kept the shotgun pointed at Lucas while he talked. “Who you with, boy? Better yet, why you trespassin’ on my property?”

  Trespassing. Lucas recalled what the clerk in the store and Aaron had told them about what the snake man did to trespassers. How some people had wandered into these woods and disappeared.

  “My friends and I got lost. We were at the camp. Camp Kawani. We got lost on a hikin’ trip.” He wasn’t going to say anything about looking for treasure. But the old man didn’t buy his story anyway.

  “Kids from that camp don’t just get lost. You a runaway?”

  “No. We just…took a little side trip. We lost the trail. We were stupid. We shoulda stayed with the group.”

  The old man finally pointed the shotgun away from Lucas, cradling it in his other arm. It was big, an old twelve-gauge pump, but it seemed weightless the way he handled it. Even with the barrel pointing the other way, Lucas didn’t feel any safer.

  “Stupid sounds about right. That camp’s been over there near twenty years, and they ain’t lost a kid yet. Not till now at least. So where’re these friends of yours?”

  “They’re upstream. Maybe a mile. No more’n two. One of ’em can’t walk. He broke his ankle or something. And a snake bit him. A copperhead.”

  Lucas watched the old man’s eyes when he said the last part. He wondered if the lunatic holding a gun on him had put Alex’s snake in the hollow too.

  The old man’s expression didn’t change. “I guess you and your friends managed to get yourselves in a heap of trouble.”

  The way he said it made Lucas shiver, not knowing if the old man meant the trouble they’d already had or what they had coming. Still, the old man was his only chance of getting help for Alex and George.

  “We have to go back up there and get them.”

  The man laughed. “We? What do you think, boy, I’m gonna carry your busted-up friend out of here? It’s already a hard couple miles back down to my place, and that’s just from here. Best just to get you out of here while we got some daylight. Then maybe we’ll worry about your friends.”

  Lucas’s anger started to grow. Was this old man really planning to leave Alex injured and stranded for the night?

  “What do you mean, maybe? They can’t spend the night up there. If you can’t do it, then I’ll get them down as far as this waterfall. They’re not too far. You could go back and get someone to meet us here.”

  Lucas knew he could never get Alex down to the waterfall by himself, even with George’s help. He wasn’t even sure he could climb back up the creek, as hungry and exhausted as he was. He hoped the old man would take it as a challenge, like Lucas was telling him again that he was feeble, that he needed a kid to help him out. He remembered the angry reaction he’d gotten in the store.

  The man stared back upstream, perhaps weighing whether or not to leave the other boys. Lucas had to stand his ground. His friends were counting on him to bring help. He couldn’t leave them alone at night in the wilderness, wondering if he had abandoned them.

  “Look,” he said defiantly, “I’m not going anywhere unless I get my friends out of here. Today.”

  The old man turned slowly and stared at him. He threw the shotgun back over one shoulder and twisted a tuft of white beard between his fingers, his cold eyes locked on Lucas’s. Finally, he spoke.

  “Sassed me just like that in Herschel’s store not four days ago, didn’t you.”

  Lucas wasn’t going to back down now. “Yes, sir. You were rude to my grandma.”

  The old man smiled wryly. He took the shotgun off his shoulder, cradling it, and Lucas thought he’d crossed a line. I’m dead, he thought, just like the missing treasure hunters.

  Instead the old man racked the shotgun until all
the shells were on the ground. He pocketed them and leaned the gun against a fallen tree.

  “Stay here and keep your hands off my gun.”

  Then the old man climbed up the rocks of the waterfall like he’d done it a hundred times, cursing under his breath the whole way up.

  The woods were darkening with long shadows when Lucas heard the old man returning with Alex and George. He couldn’t see them coming from the foot of the steep waterfall, but there was no mistaking Alex’s arrival. His painful moans grew loud enough to hear over the falls, and Lucas was suddenly fearful of seeing what terrible shape Alex might already be in.

  Lucas heard the old man grumble something at his two friends before he peered over the top of the falls.

  “Best climb up here, boy,” he yelled over the splashing water. “We ain’t goin’ back to my place that way. Not with this one at least.”

  Lucas pointed at the shotgun leaning next to him. “What about your gun?” he called back.

  “Leave it. I saw what you done to yourself tryin’ to climb this rock. I’d surely hate to see the same happen to my gun.”

  Lucas quickly started climbing back up the waterfall, taking the route the old man had followed. Going up wasn’t nearly as tricky, and he made steady progress, but not without catching grief for moving too slow.

  “Let’s go, boy,” the hermit hollered at him from above. “I already hauled your friend halfway down this mountain! I ain’t haulin’ you up that rock!”

  When Lucas finally made it up the falls, the sight of Alex made him wince. His friend’s hand was swollen past the wrist, and his thumb had turned almost purple. The old man had used a pair of stout sticks and some kind of vine to splint Alex’s foot, but now that his boot was off, Lucas could see that the foot was badly swollen too. Streaks of dried tears marked Alex’s dirty face. Still, he managed a weak smile when he saw Lucas.