Lair of the Bat Monster Read online

  “We just follow this back to Camazotz’s roost,” said Steve. “She has to come back to her roost by daybreak. And then we get Danny back.”

  “What if she has more than one roost?”

  “Then we cry a lot,” said Steve.

  This did not strike Wendell as helpful.

  They kept walking. The ground was full of mud and holes and tree roots, and Wendell kept smacking his shins into things. The iguana’s only consolation was that he was doused in bug spray.

  (He considered the slight wooziness and difficulty breathing to be a small price to pay for total insect coverage.)

  “We can’t be too far away,” said Steve, sounding much too hopeful and not nearly confident enough, as far as Wendell was concerned. “She showed up right at dusk. The roost has to be nearby.”

  Wendell was about to reply, but a leaf-covered branch slapped him in the face. He pawed bark off his tongue. “Yeech!”

  He was still trying to get the taste of tree out of his mouth when the path widened and began to look less like a newly broken trail and more like a clearing.

  “See?” cried Steve. “There!”

  “Now what do we do?” asked Wendell. The cave looked very large and very dark.

  “We look inside,” said Steve. “Then we hide and wait for Camazotz and Danny to come home.”

  Some miles away, as the false vampire bat flies, Danny was wishing very much that he was home. Waiting for Camazotz to turn its head so he could finish moving into the jungle was excruciating. It combined the very worst parts of boredom and terror. He didn’t dare move until Camazotz was distracted, and he didn’t dare take his eyes off the bat, which was just sitting there staring into the water and occasionally glancing up at him.

  Bats were fascinating-looking, and Camazotz was gigantic and monstrous and thus even more fascinating, but after half an hour, Danny was getting tired of looking at it.

  He wished he’d brought his comic book, Single-Cell Samurai. He was so busy thinking about bacteria assassins that when the strike came, Danny almost missed his chance. Camazotz had thrown its head back and was wolfing down the fish, using a wing claw to shove the wiggling morsel deeper into its mouth. The fish was halfway down before Danny’s brain reacted—Oh yeah, that’s what we were waiting for, let’s go!

  It occurred to Danny that running blindly through the jungle, while a good start, lacked something as a long-term plan.

  If he could stay in sight of the river, just inside the trees, maybe he could make his way along it. Sooner or later, he’d hit either Steve’s research station, or at least the dock where Steve had picked them up.

  The notion of walking miles through the jungle at night wasn’t exactly pleasant, but explorers did that sort of thing all the time, didn’t they? And this was Mexico, which had a population of . . . well, some really large number, anyway. Mr. Snaug had given them a test on it. Unfortunately he’d gotten a C on the test, but anyway, the point was that Mexico was a perfectly civilized country, and if he walked far enough, he’d probably come out in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

  An alarmed squeaking rose from the direction of the river. Camazotz had noticed his absence.

  Biting his lip, Danny began creeping along, trying to keep an eye on the river through the trees on his left. It wasn’t easy. Visibility in the jungle was measured in inches.

  And it was dark. Really dark. Plus, there were all these noises—noises that were probably bugs, but didn’t sound like any bugs Danny had ever heard, even at summer camp, which was out in what he had previously thought of as “the deep woods.”

  Then an even more alarming noise replaced the bugs—the sounds of crashing trees. Camazotz was coming.

  Danny rolled under a bush, put his arms over his head, and tried to become invisible.

  Luck—or something—was with him. The bat monster passed so closely by that Danny could have reached out and touched a wing—but it didn’t see him. The crashing grew fainter, and was swallowed by the jungle.

  The dragon heaved a sigh that seemed to come from the bottom of his toes. He was free.

  Lost, but free.

  He made his way back toward the river, and began walking.

  LAIR TREASURES

  Camazotz’s lair was not as interesting as Wendell had hoped.

  It was possible he’d been breathing dragon dandruff too long, but he’d secretly expected the monster to have a hoard, full of fabulous Aztec gold and crystal skulls and glittering obsidian knives.

  Instead, it had a cave. There were rocks in it. There was nothing particularly special about the rocks, although Wendell discovered, by tripping over one, that they were fabulously pointy.

  On the other hand, it also wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Apparently there was only the one bat, and it went to the bathroom somewhere else. His visions of guano beetles the size of Volkswagens were not confirmed. The floor was dry and rocky. There was a cave spider in one corner, which was large and terrifying, but at least on a scale that Wendell understood.

  “Fascinating . . .” said Steve, shining his light over the cave floor.

  “This must be it—look, she’s been shedding.”

  Wendell had a hard time getting excited over hunks of bat hair, especially with the spider glaring at him. It had a lot of legs, and almost as many eyes.

  It occurred to Wendell, not for the first time, that Steve had really odd priorities.

  “The pottery?”

  “Zapotec, I think! They must have been feeding it, giving it offerings. These are incredibly old. Wendell, this really is Camazotz!”

  “Well, either it’s incredibly long-lived, or it’s one of a breeding population,” mused Steve. “We might be able to find others . . . I could probably get a grant . . .” He stepped forward, toward where the back of the cave vanished into darkness. “This is obviously a cave they’ve been using for centuries—I wonder if there are bones down below? A complete skeleton would be very useful—or there might even be more bats—”

  “We don’t need more giant bats right now!” snapped Wendell.

  “Oh, right, right. Don’t really have the equipment for caving anyway.... Well, let’s see.” Steve played the light over the walls. The cave spider retreated sulkily into a crevice, and Steve’s gaze sharpened.

  “Hmm. . . . Well, I couldn’t fit in there. You might be able to . . . looks like it opens up a bit . . .” Steve pushed the flashlight into the crack and played it around. “Ah, looks like it joins the outside. Probably was part of the main entrance, and then a rock fell.”

  “I’m not going in there,” said Wendell. “And shouldn’t we be hiding outside anyway?”

  “Right, right.” Steve gave a last longing look at the cave. “I can always come back . . .”

  They scrambled back down the hillside, looking for hiding places, while the moon sank coldly overhead.

  Danny was lost.

  He was also soggy and unhappy and he’d stepped into some kind of mud and lost one of his boots. This was not the sort of adventure he preferred. Ideally he liked adventures that had moderate peril, only minor injury, and ended quickly, not ones that dragged on and on and squelched underfoot. And ideally, Wendell would be along too. Adventures weren’t nearly as much fun if there was no one to be suitably impressed by your dragony bravery.

  So when a massive scaly head dropped from a tree directly in front of him, he staggered back a step, shocked, and then broke into a broad grin of delight.

  “Um. . . .” It was a boa constrictor. It looked a little like Ms. Brown the English teacher, only much bigger. It might even be an anaconda.

  “HISSSSS!”

  It occurred to Danny that the anaconda did not look helpful. In fact, it looked angry about something.

  And come to think of it, it wasn’t wearing clothes . . . Ms. Brown always wore a tube sweater and big dangly necklaces. And she never hissed. She would have considered hissing to be terribly bad grammar. If she caught you passing notes, she might demand that
you “read it to the whole classsss,” but that was as far as she went.

  “Um . . . Do you speak English?”

  The anaconda struck.

  Danny yelped and dropped flat, and the giant snake passed overhead and slammed into a tree trunk.

  Maybe it wasn’t a person after all. Maybe it was a primitive animal snake.

  The snake whipped around, looking downright furious, with scuffed scales across its nose.

  As he scrambled toward the river, trying to get away, Danny’s only clear thought—and it wasn’t very—was that he was glad Ms. Brown wasn’t here to see this.

  Danny had never been so glad to see the underside of a giant bat monster in his life.

  The snake, clearly overmatched, whipped into the undergrowth like a traumatized shoelace and was gone. Camazotz picked Danny up in a claw and held him up to eye level.

  Camazotz gave him a thorough sniffing, and Danny thought he would be sucked into its giant nostrils. Luckily, the bat seemed satisfied after several sniffs, let out a happy chitter, and gave Danny another sloppy lick across the face. Danny groaned.

  Oh well, better that it be happy than angry with him for trying to escape. Danny decided that escaping into the jungle wasn’t such a good idea. There were monsters out there other than Camazotz. The bat monster didn’t seem inclined to eat him—yet—and maybe it would return to Steve’s bat cave, or at least someplace Danny recognized.

  Camazotz shifted Danny to its other claw and looked up at the sky. It chattered again, sounding almost thoughtful, and then began making its way up the river, back the way they had come.

  WAITING AND WAITING

  “I itch,” said Wendell.

  “So do I,” said Steve. “There’s not much we can do about it.”

  Wendell sighed.

  The two of them were hiding in some large bushes at the base of the rocky hill where Camazotz roosted, and it was desperately uncomfortable. The bushes had long, arrowhead-shaped leaves with pointy ends that jabbed into you no matter how you shifted or wiggled. The stems had a fine fuzz that looked soft and turned out to be prickly, and if they hadn’t been sitting in Wendell’s cloud of bug spray, they would probably have been eaten alive by the locals.

  Wendell could see some of the bugs lurking around the edges. They looked like ants, but they were bigger than any ant he’d ever seen, and they were clacking their mandibles in a distinctly unfriendly fashion.

  “It shouldn’t be much longer now,” said Steve hopefully. “It’s starting to get light out.”

  The feathered dragon was right. The sky was now murky gray instead of black, and there was a weak, bruised-looking light on the eastern horizon.

  Wendell opened his mouth to say something, and closed it again. He’d heard something. A thumping? The footfall of a distant monster?

  It came again, and again, and then he was sure. Steve caught his eye and nodded frantically, putting a claw over his snout to signal they should be silent.

  So they waited, hardly breathing, while the crashing came nearer, until it was almost on top of them. Wendell forgot all about the itching and the prickly bush as Camazotz burst from the tree line and began climbing up the hill.

  Steve craned his neck. So did Wendell. Did it have—was that, in its back claws—yes!

  Wendell hit Steve’s arm excitedly. Steve nodded vigorously.

  It was Danny.

  The giant bat climbed up the hillside toward the cave. At the mouth, it paused, its back to them, and then folded its wings up carefully. It seemed to become a great deal smaller—the size of a semi-truck, rather than a house—and climbed into the hole.

  “Now what?” whispered Wendell.

  “Danny’s inside the cave,” Steve whispered back. “We just wait until she falls asleep, and then we can go get him.”

  They waited. The sun got higher and the ants got more restless and the bush seemed to get even more prickly, although that might have been Wendell’s imagination.

  “Now?”

  “Not yet.”

  It was boring. It was really boring. Wendell poked at one of the ants with a twig and the ant grabbed the end in its jaws and sheared it in half. The iguana stifled a yelp.

  “Good thing about the bug spray, huh?” muttered Steve.

  They waited some more.

  “Now?”

  “Not yet.”

  At last, when Wendell thought he couldn’t wait another minute, Steve stood up and said, “Now. Stay quiet.”

  They made their way up the hillside as sneakily as possible. This was difficult while wearing large rubber boots, and even more difficult for Wendell, who was not one of nature’s naturally sneaky people. If there was a dry twig anywhere in a five-mile radius, Wendell could be relied upon to step on it, and then probably fall over and shriek.

  Whenever they looked up at the cave, all they could see was the furred back of Camazotz.

  “She must roost lying down,” murmured Steve. “Of course, she doesn’t fly, so there’s no reason to hang upside down if she doesn’t have to . . . and there can’t be many caves big enough to hang upside down in. Still, I would have thought . . .”

  “Never mind that,” said Wendell, “how are we going to get past her?”

  Steve’s tail twitched. “I’m . . . not sure.”

  They reached the mouth of the cave, and stared at each other in helpless dismay.

  Camazotz’s back filled the entire entrance. It had clearly lain down with its back in the mouth of the cave, and unless they actually climbed over it, there was no way in.

  “Well,” said Steve, “that’s not entirely true. There’s still a way in . . .”

  Wendell followed his gaze to the mouth of the spider-infested crevice. “Oh, no.”

  “You’d have to go alone,” said Steve. “But you can get Danny and you can both squeeze out. I’ll give you a flashlight.”

  “There are spiders in there!”

  “Danny’s in there,” said Steve with ruthless logic.

  Wendell stuffed a hand in his mouth and bit it in terror.

  “You can do it,” said Steve. “You have to do it.”

  Wendell knew, in his heart of hearts, that he was a coward. And he was okay with that. Danny needed somebody to say “If we do that, we’re going to die,” and occasionally he even listened. They were best friends. They had a system. Danny was fearless and Wendell was terrified, and it worked out between them.

  But at the moment, what his best friend needed wasn’t a coward. It was somebody to take the flashlight and say: “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  There was nobody else in the world he would have done it for. (Well, maybe his mom, but his mom wasn’t in the habit of getting stuck in the lairs of bat monsters.) Wendell took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and reached for Steve’s flashlight.

  A CRY FOR HELP

  Danny was sitting in the dark, being bored.

  There was a faint glimmering of light around the edges of Camazotz’s fur, but not enough to allow Danny to see much of the cave, except that it got very deep and dark at the back. He kept tripping over roundish things that clattered like crockery, and there didn’t seem to be any way to escape.

  He would have considered going into the darkness at the back of the cave, but the memory of the crawling beetle floor of Steve’s cave was still fresh in his mind.

  Meanwhile, Camazotz was snoring like a locomotive. The snores echoed through the cave and made it hard for Danny to hear himself think.

  The dragon had just about decided that the only thing left to do was find a warm patch of giant bat to lean on and try to get some sleep when the light seemed to get brighter, and he heard a familiar voice go “Hssst!”

  The iguana’s face stared at him over a flashlight beam. “Get me out of here! It’s too small and I think I’m stuck and there’s all these spiders and the bug spray isn’t working and one of them is looking at me and there’s something with lots of legs on my tail and I want out!”

  Wende
ll came free like a foot out of a crusty sneaker—slowly, and with grimy streaks. Danny was so happy to see his friend that he could have hugged him, but Wendell was too busy dancing around and flailing at imaginary spiders on his head. Danny helped him yank off the last of the cobwebs.

  “Oh no!” Wendell shuddered. “I’m not going back through that hole. That was worse than going to the dentist. The dentist doesn’t have spiders.”

  “Then how else are we going to get out?”

  Wendell turned the flashlight toward the back of the cave. “Maybe the cave comes out somewhere near the bottom of the hill.”

  Danny looked back at the crevice. It did look pretty tight . . .

  Camazotz snuffled in its sleep. That was enough. Flashlight at the ready, Wendell and Danny hurried deeper into the cave.

  It was dark.

  It was not quite as dark as the bottom of the ocean, but it was darker than a storm sewer, and much darker than a closet, or the bathroom when you needed a drink of water late at night.

  They spent a few minutes recounting what had happened—Danny was surprised to learn that Camazotz was probably a girl, and (bleck!) thought she was his mom, and Wendell was suitably horrified by Danny’s encounter with the anaconda. But their voices seemed squeezed out under the weight of the dark.