The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Fifteen: But, Like, Are the Sandwiches Still Good?

Mitchell had taken some convincing in order to get him up the rock pile and into the cavern beyond it that Callum had accidentally discovered. He'd stowed his phone in his backpack, not that it mattered since they would never get a signal here anyway, but he desperately wanted to call his father to insist that he come rescue the boy. Not a boy, he had to remind himself constantly. He was thin and had hardly any muscle on him whatsoever, but he was only a year behind the so-called strapping Declan and despite his brother's incessant teasing, Mitchell was growing. Even Callum, usually in his corner, gave him a few less than encouraging jibes about his lack of bravery and the relative ease of the climb.
"If I did it, you can do it for sure," Ez even offered, self-deprecatingly
Mitchell rolled his eyes, knowing that Ez was more than capable and, given that she was the first of the three of the younger siblings up the pile, she hadn't even thought twice about it. Declan had climbed up and followed his twin, as if there was a tether between them and all that remained was Mitchell's decision.
"Fine. Fine," he said reluctantly. Ez and Declan had disappeared into the dark cavern beyond anyway and Callum was all who remained to pull him over the final peak of the pile, Ez's flashlight clutched in his hand and pointed up, illuminating the ceiling.
"There you go," Callum encouraged as he reached for Mitchell's hand as he came to the top. He grabbed hold of Mitchell's hand and changed his grip so he could pull up his younger brother. The flashlight was clutched tightly in their shared grip and Mitchell was temporarily blinded as the beam shone directly in his face.
The other side of the rock pile sloped down into the cavern at a softer angle and when Callum shone the light down, Mitchell could see the other two siblings already at the bottom and walking among piles of things, the details of which were lost in the darkness.
"You said conquistadors," Mitchell told Callum as they carefully descended the pile.
Ez yelped in pain and Callum snapped the beam over to where they'd last seen her. The light found her standing on one leg and clutching the shin of her left leg.
"Are you—" Callum began.
"Couldn't you have hung onto your flashlight? We could use a second right now," Ez cut him off. She rubbed her shin for another second and then let her leg down. "I'm fine. Just bring that over here."
Callum obliged and quickened his steps over to his sister, his youngest brother stumbling to keep up after him. Declan was at first no where to be seen, but with quick scan with the flashlight Callum found him pulling at the fabric of an old sheet covering something large and heavy.
"What's that?" Callum called to him as he found his way over to Ez.
"I don't know, Callum, you have the flashlight. I just thought I could use this as like...I dunno, a torch or something." Declan grunted between words as he was clearly working in the dark to work the sheet free.
"A torch?" Ez sounded more alarmed than amused.
Callum flashed the light over to Declan. He'd worked the sheet free and was fishing in his pocket for something.
"Deck, don't. Wait, where'd you get—"
Declan cut Callum off by producing a green Bic lighter from his pocket and flicking the striker. "It was in my room. In one of the dresser drawers."
"I think that was meant to stay there. For...candles....or..." Ez struggled to come up with a good reason to keep the lighter out of her twin's hands.
"Cigars?" Mitchell offered, not really helping.
Before anyone could stop him, Declan had pulled the cloth into a ball and let the flame lick the dirty folds. The flame took, but only slowly crept into the creases and, obviously to Declan's disappointment, did not cause a sudden eruption. The glow from the slow-burning ball of cloth was enough to keep Declan's face illuminated, but he, in a moment of clarity, decided at once that the ball was best kept on the ground.
"That could have..." Ez began.
"Actually, that was pretty smart," Callum started.
"For Declan," Mitchell finished.
Declan immediately delved into a slew of insults directed at Mitchell, but the ball burning at his feet only allowed the others to ignore him. They realized separately but quickly that Declan's mischievous experiment had actually been a great benefit and with the extra light, they could see that the cavern wasn't very large at all, but in its center was a large wooden chest that had been broken open, the pieces of its lid and sides strewn about in various angles. Two large pieces were even stuck into the soft ground and jutted upward like a wooden stalagmite.
"That's what I hit my shin on," Ez said, pointing to the broken crate.
"Bet that wood burns better than the sheet," Mitchell offered.
Together, they pulled the two pieces out of the ground and dragged them over to where Declan stood by his burning experiment. He flipped the striker of the lighter as they worked, the small flame making his face glow orange—a cautioning blinker in the dark. The ends of the wood, where they'd been submerged in the ground for decades (or centuries, possibly), were too damp, but the ends exposed to the air were dry enough that when placed over the sheet, it took less than a minute for them to catch.
"Well, that's what I was gonna do," Declan announced once the fire had caught enough that the cavern was fully illuminated and they could see each other clearly.
The wood smoke was black and rose to fill the open air, and the soot and ash from their work was already streaked on their faces. Mitchell coughed as the smoke drifted toward him and the boards that were burning shifted as the sheet burned away.
"Right," Ez said, rolling her eyes. She was rubbing the place where she'd knocked into the wooden crate. Her bare leg was blemished with red scratches and the skin was looking a bluish.
Declan flicked the lighter a few more times, passing his hand over the flame as it went out each time. "But we wouldn't be anywhere without this." His voiced dripped with satisfaction.
"Guys, look around, would you?" Callum asked them from the far side of the cavern. His voice traveled easily and bounced off the rock walls. He still used the flashlight and was inspecting a collection of three intact wooden crates and a large barrel bound with iron bands and sealed shut with a heavy fitted lid.
"Mitchell, look at this!" he said and beckoned his younger brother to leave the fire.
Ez had eased away from the fire to inspect her own found treasure, but had to use the light from the flames and avoid casting her own shadow over her prize. The resulting dance was almost mesmerizing but Mitchell picked his way across to where Callum was, leaving Declan to decide if he was more interested in the fire or finding booty.
"This stuff has to be a couple hundred years old. Don't you think?" Callum asked him. He held up a small dagger, its blade rusted and simple hilt covered with clay and collected mineral deposits, and held it under the flashlight beam so Mitchell could see.
"Whoa," Mitchell exclaimed, taking the dagger out of Callum's hand. He scratched at some of the dirt on the hilt with his thumbnail and found hardened steel underneath the filth.
Callum bent to retrieve another piece from one of the wooden chests which, despite being undamaged like the crate they'd burned, had been removed of their lids for some time and their contents were loaded and covered with dirt and small rocks.
"Before, you said Conquistadors. Was it this?" Mitchell asked, gesturing with the knife by holding it at the tip of the blade and the end of the hilt.
Callum's eyes grew wide and he shook his head. "I mean, this, yeah. Spanish, you think?" He pointed at the old weapon that Mitchell was holding so preciously. "But no, I found this on the ground after the cave in."
He pulled a small disk from out of his jeans pocket and held it between his thumb and index finger for Mitchell to take. Mitchell almost dropped the dagger as if it were nothing when he pulled the old coin out of Callum's grasp.
"Speaking of cave-in," Ez began, "how did that happen? You just...took off all of the sudden and then Boom! Cave-in."
Mitchell was too busy with the coin and looking around on the ground for others to concern himself with his brother at the moment, but the sudden and overpowering silence from the eldest Stirling made him stop. Callum looked confused and disoriented and a word was caught on his lips.
"I...I can't explain that," he said, finally and after Ez had asked him half-a-dozen times if he was okay or still there, like she'd dropped his call on a cellphone. "One minute, I thought I heard something, remember?"
"Yeah. We remember. It was weird," Declan retorted. He was holding up another piece of cloth, but this looked to be thicker and painted or at least covered with what were likely once very vibrant colors.
"But then, I don't know. Something pulled me forward. Like I knew this was here and I had to be the one to get it open."
Callum's face was oddly blank and Mitchell awkwardly averted his eyes and flipped his gaze back to the coin. It was definitely old, and was probably Spanish, but in the low light and with only a knowledge gained from the Internet, Mitchell couldn't be sure. Callum stuttered a bit more through explaining what it felt like to have the sudden urge to run away from his siblings.
"Yeah, and break our only other flashlight," Declan called over his shoulder. The cloth, a painting or maybe a small tapestry, was so old and tattered that the edges frayed further every time Declan moved his hands. He held it above his head to catch the light better.
"I always have that urge," Mitchell said quietly to Callum. "Well, from one of you."
Callum's face broke from its severe contemplation and he smiled knowingly at Mitchell.
"And the wall just fell down for you? Like it just..." Ez had a small vase in her hands that she'd retrieved from a pile of items that had probably been dumped out of the broken crate at some point. She gestured with it in the air, indicating an explosion. She added a tumbling sound effect with her lips.
"Kind of," Callum suggested at once with a shrug. "There was this little piece of rope that was sticking out of the wall. A handle, maybe?"
"And you pulled on it. Like an idiot," Ez had pulled a small flagon from the crate's wreckage and pressed her thumb down on the handle of the lid's hinge. It was empty but she shifted it to the crook of her left arm where she still had the vase tucked.
Callum nodded. He explained that the wall had immediately crumbled outward into the cave and he'd barely managed to step out of the way of the tumbling rocks. Without thinking, he went on, he'd climbed up the side and slipped into the dark cavern.
"But how did you see anything? It was pitch-black!" Ez asked. She looked over to them, her expression mostly hidden by shadow. "Deck, add some more wood to that, would you. Do something useful."
A mild outrage on his face, Declan protested at first, but, given that he couldn't, by then, read anything on the cloth he'd chosen to examine over anything else, relented and piled a few more pieces of broken crate on the dying fire.
"I dropped the flashlight after," Callum admitted. He'd gone back to picking things out of the crates since the light was becoming brighter, but Mitchell could see the embarrassment in his eyes.
Ez growled and grumbled something about her three useless brothers, but her actual words were too quiet to be of any real insult.
"I tried to climb back up and down to come find you guys, but as soon as I reached the top again, the flashlight slipped out of my hand. I was kind of just waiting there in the dark until you guys came to find me."
Mitchell pictured his brother, the oldest and the most adept of all of them, the smartest, trapped and waiting. It made him smile.
"In the dark," Callum said with a shudder, "I could hear the howling more clearly."
"Howling?" Mitchell asked.
"It's a good thing we haven't eaten yet, because I would have thrown up or crapped my pants if you hadn't come along when you did."
"Speaking of Callum crapping his pants," Declan said as he walked across the cavern toward them, "look at this. You tell me that's not something."
He held the cloth tapestry by its two long sides as he walked by the fire and over to the three crates and barrel Callum and Mitchell were inspecting. Ez shuffled over from her broken pile and the four of them stood together to look at what Declan had. They decided at once that it was a painting, but on the back and sides there was a fine script in Spanish that was so faint (and even missing some sections due to the fraying of the canvas). Declan gestured for Ez to come closer so she could try to decipher it.
"This looks like real gold. Gold leaf, or whatever. Is that possible?" Callum said as he ran his fingers over the painted image on the front of the canvas. Declan pulled it away from Callum's fingertips and flipped it over for Ez.
"Careful!" she cried as more of the edge frayed in Declan's clumsy grasp. She pried his fingers from the edge and took the painting in her own hands, stretching the canvas tighter to read the script. "It's so small! Cursive. Spanish. Like real Spanish."
"Real Spanish? Like there's a fake Spani—. Oh. I see what you mean," Declan said sheepishly.
"King Louis IX. No, wait, the statue of King Louis IX," Ez read. "Or is it...something about either a curse or something bad."
"The painting is of the King? The King of Mexico?" Declan asked.
"No, dummy. The King of France. Mexico...doesn't have a monarchy?" Ez let out an annoyed breath as she struggled to read the rest of the script.
"What's a monarchy?"
"Kings. Queens. Princesses. Dukes. All that." She was distracted and normally would have taken the time to make fun of her idiot twin, but she was really concentrating. "And the painting, I gather, is of a statue of the King. And the statue...there's some kind of warning, here, about it. Like it's cursed. Or that it's a presagio. Like a good curse that's also bad. I don't know all of these words and they're really hard to read, guys. That's what I can get from the context."
Declan tried to retake the painting and read for himself what the words said, but not only would Ez not relinquish the painting, there was no chance he would be more suited to translate.
"Okay, so it says here that the statue was kept in the city center, but it wandered off so many times that the townsfolk stopped trying to keep it secured."
"Wandered off?" Mitchell asked. "Like someone took it?"
"No, that's not what I gather," Ez said with a shake of her head. "It literally wandered off and would appear back at this particular spot each time. Some people thought the Devil was involved, and others thought it was a sign from God. Each...hang on, I can't...I have no idea what this part says." She pointed to the script where it disappeared into the frayed edge on the right side. "But this side says...A su regreso, la estatua estaría...can't read it, can't read it...ah. Se creía que incluso las joyas de la corona de la estatua se volvían más grandes y hermosas con cada devolución." She looked up at her brothers with raised eyebrows and an expression of excited surprise. "Oh! I mean, the statue...when it returned, everyone thought that it was more beautiful each time it came back. Even the jewels in the crown were thought to be bigger and prettier than before."
Each of the boys nodded their heads in understanding (once Ez had actually remembered to translate the script into English), and, with not much else they could glean from the text, Ez flipped the painting over carefully so they could see the details of the artist's work. The oil in the pain was cracked and had flaked off in many places, but it was possible that gold leaf had been used for the King's depiction.
"Hang on," Ez said as she flipped the painting over again. "De bronce, yep." She flipped the painting over once more and ran her fingertips over the ridges of the paint. "It's supposed to be a bronze statue, but maybe it was painted in the same way. Gilded?"
Someone among them had a grumbling stomach and took the quiet moment in the conversation to complain.
"Declan, was that your stomach?" Ez accused.
He did not look ashamed but did look slightly confused. "Whoa. Do you realize we haven't eaten since this morning?"
"Oh my God, what time is it?" Ez exclaimed suddenly, forgetting her grip on the painting as she remembered that they weren't just casually meant to linger in the dark cave for the rest of their lives.
Mitchell had started to dig for his phone in his backpack as soon as Declan's stomach had rumbled. He'd completely forgotten about food in all of the commotion since Callum had bolted down the cave tunnel. The ham and cheese sandwiches were wrapped in the paper towels their mother had purchased at the shop and one of them had come apart in his bag, leaving his phone greasy and smeared with streaks of mayo and cheese.
"It's only two. Two...two thirty," he announced.
"Yeah, but Mom and Dad are probably out there looking for us," Declan said. "And give me one of those. I'm hungry."
"We know," Mitchell and Ez said together.
Still, Mitchell fished out the broken sandwich and tried to give the pieces to Declan.
"Nuh-uh. That one's yours," Declan said. He reached for and snatched Mitchell's bag out of his hands and dug into its depths to retrieve one of the sandwiches from the bottom. The one he found was a little squished, but he bit into it at once, even taking with is bite a small piece of the towel.
"If you choke, we're leaving your body here. And I won't feel once shred of sadness over you," Ez warned. She handed the painting to Callum and gestured for the bag and pulled her own squished but still wrapped sandwich out before she handed the bag back to Mitchell. "Sorry."
Mitchell gave into being the youngest and pulled the tattered remains of the third sandwich and pieced them back together. He pulled the last sandwich and offered it to Callum, but he waved it off.
"You can't be not hungry," Declan said with a mouthful. Two-thirds of his sandwich was already gone.
"This doesn't make sense," Callum said, ignoring Declan. "This painting is old, but not that old. See this down here? That says 1889. Aurelio."
Callum pronounced the artist's name based on the signature made in red in the bottom right corner. Ez crinkled her nose at Callum's over exaggerated accent, but chewed on her mouthful of ham and cheese with a new level of sincere thought.
"But those coins are really old. No dates, but...Mitchell?"
Mitchell fished a string from his backpack's inside from his mouth, having found it immeshed in the slice of mayo covered cheese. He swallowed his bite. "Probably Spanish Conquistadors. But definitely older than 1800s. More like 1600s. Maybe."
"Doubloons," Declan declared.
"Right," Callum sailed right through, "so if those were even possibly left here by the Spanish...and that's from right around the turn of the century..."
"The painting was made in 1889. Doesn't mean it's been here since then."
"Exactly!" Callum cried. "There's treasure here from different years, different time periods altogether."
"That vase I was looking at wasn't even Spanish. And that pitcher-thing? I think Dad has some of those in his man-cave. Beer steins. Still old, but not like ancient."
Ez had left the treasures she'd found sitting at the base of the crates where Callum and Mitchell had found their dagger. The four of them had organically drifted closer to the fire as the light was dying once more, but they each stopped to take in the full scope of the cavern they'd discovered.
"It's like a catch-all. Like people just store things here. Stuff they've stolen?" Mitchell flitted his eyes back and forth from the crates to the fire to the entrance with the cave-in and back to his siblings. "But they never came back for them?"
"Or something stopped them," Ez offered.
"Maybe they just died," Declan said. He reached to take the painting back from Callum, but his brother stopped him and pointed to Declan's greasy fingers. Declan rolled his eyes and wiped his hands on his pant legs and when that wasn't enough according to Callum, took the tail of his t-shirt and thoroughly wiped the mayo and ham grease from his fingers. He held his hands up for Callum to see and aggressively pulled the painting from his hands. A piece of the oil paint flaked off and fell away.
"Watch it!" Callum cried as he attempted to take it back.
"Look," Declan said as he smacked Callum's hand away. He stretched the painting flat in front of him. "Don't you think his eyes are creepy?"
Ez looked at the painting, then at Declan, back to the painting, then at Declan again. "You're scared of a painting of a statue of a King from the thirteenth century?"
"Look at his eyes, Ez. They like follow you. Maybe it's cursed."
"The statue is what they say is cursed, dummy. If anything, you should be afraid of the little statue walking up behind you."
Instinctively, Declan turned around to look behind him. The fire glowed with a few licks of flame remaining on the charred wood. But no statue. Declan clicked his tongue and turned back to his siblings. Callum had taken Mitchell's bag from him and fished out the last sandwich and was about to take his first bite. Declan licked his lips but Callum laughed him off and took a giant bite, consuming half of the sandwich.
"Let's keep looking. We have time," Mitchell said when he had finished the last bite of his lint-covered meal.
"Excuse me, who are you, and what have you done with my brother?" Ez exclaimed and brushed her shoulder against his playfully. "Won't Dad be worried? Don't we need to get back?"
Mitchell gazed over her shoulder at the crates of loot that had been long ago hidden away in this secret cove and which begged to be discovered, collected, and catalogued in some museum somewhere. Behind him, a defeated Declan added the last of the wood from the broken crate onto the make-shift campfire and the room began to grow brighter, their shadows dancing on the walls again.
"Just a little bit longer," Mitchell insisted. Even last year he would have deferred to his older siblings, but lately he'd been seeing his opportunities to take charge and live a little outside of what Declan would call his life as a loser.
He returned to the crate of what appeared to be Spanish Conquistador-era weapons that had either been taken or left for storage and began sifting through the debris to find his next treasure. The history alone was enough to make his nerdy little mind spin, but the idea of bringing a long forgotten part of time to the light of day was exhilarating.
* * *
As the wood on their fire turned to embers, the light outside the cave began to fade into late afternoon. Two panicked parents who had mistakenly, naively believed their children were old enough and wise enough to explore on their own, began their own trek into the mountain's terrain. The utter dismay that their host had given them over the phone when they'd called to ask where they might find more flashlights had driven them into a level of fright they'd never experienced. Upon learning just where they'd sent all four of their children for a day on their own, their host had declared that they might never see their children again.
Mr. Stirling, in his panic, had almost vocalized the thought, but he reminded himself that it would be no good to find himself in another blowout fight with his wife and mother of his children. Nonetheless, the pervading thought that the host might have mentioned a deadly and dangerous adventure was, perhaps, not the most ideal family outing. A simple note in the villa's brochure would have been helpful.