Manhunt by Kate Messner

Author:Kate Messner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Ils furent ce que nous sommes,

Poussière, jouet du vent;

Fragiles comme des hommes.

Faibles comme le néant!

Henry remembered the translation.

They were what we are …

Alive, once. But now their bones were in heaps, and nobody even knew their names.

Henry looked at José, who was staring at the stone inscription. The wall of bones had even stopped Anna in her tracks. She was kneeling, staring into the eye sockets of a yellowed skull, and for once, she didn’t have anything to say.

Something dripped on the back of Henry’s neck, and he looked up. The ceiling was full of stubby, slimy-looking stalactites like the ones he’d seen on his class field trip to Howe Caverns in second grade. Henry wiped his neck with his hand. He didn’t even want to think about what was in this water. “Come on, you guys. Let’s get out of here.”

“Yeah …” Anna said, finally breaking eye contact with the skull. She stood up, brushed off her knees and blinked a few times, fast. Henry could tell she was trying to get her brave back, but that wasn’t easy down here. “We need to watch for the crossbones. Remember the photo on that lady’s website?” Anna held up her pointer fingers, crossed like an X.

José nodded. “ ‘The spot marked with imperfect X.’ ” And they started down the hallway of bones.

At first, Henry looked all over for the imperfect X. But it felt like the walls were getting closer, pressing against his chest. He took a deep breath — just keep walking — and stared straight ahead at the back of José’s messy hair. But even though he tried not to look at the bones, it felt as if the bones were looking at him.

A light-colored stone cross stood out from one of the walls, shored up by bones on every side. Whoever arranged them had made patterns. A wall of leg bones, all stacked tight, with a border of skulls along the bottom and more arranged in an arch over the cross.

Henry swallowed hard. Every one of those skulls belonged to a person who used to be alive. Someone with stories and a life and a family. Maybe a baby sister like his.

José kept folding and unfolding his brochure, holding on as if it were a life raft to keep him from sinking in the heaps of bones.

“Let’s go.” Henry tried to make his voice sound brave, but he really wanted to get out of there. How long could these tunnels go on?

They started walking again. Every time they turned a corner, Henry hoped for a staircase back to the street. But the path never even sloped up. Every narrow hallway led to another room of awful architecture. There were pillars of bones and columns of bones and pedestals of bones. Henry looked down at the floor and took a deep breath. It felt like there wasn’t enough oxygen down here … as if the skulls were sucking it all up.

“You guys, look!” Anna called from behind him, and Henry turned around.

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