uldn’t notice all the noise. They followed the celestial markers. There were stars of all different types, and even a few constellations carved into the trees and rocks, but at last one symbol stood apart from the rest.
“This is it!” said Harry. He was kneeling in a clearing, brushing away some scattered leaves from the earth as Uma approached. Over his shoulder she read the words TOPS EHT SKRAM X deeply scrawled into the hard-packed dirt.
“Is it telling us to scram?” asked Harry, reading the text. “I do feel like getting out of here. That fortress gives me the creeps.”
Uma shushed him. “It must be here. This is the spot. There’s an X! Pirates love them. It’s highly piratical.”
“Yen Sid is a sorcerer, not a pirate. And this is a bit clichéd, if you ask me,” Harry said.
“I didn’t ask you,” Uma replied, looking around, trying to discern what import the message held.
Harry stood and put away his sword.
Gil wandered over from the other side of the clearing and looked at the message upside down and backward. “‘X MARKS THE SPOT’!” he declared.
“You’re a genius!” said Harry.
“Let’s not go that far,” said Uma. “It’s written backward. Even brats can figure out this code.”
“But you guys didn’t,” Gil pointed out.
“Who cares? It was hard enough just finding this thing—let’s start digging,” said Harry, removing the shovel that he’d strapped to his back. He whistled for the rest of the crew, who came running, clanking through the jungle, picks and shovels at the ready. “We found it!” he told them. “Dig!”
“Where?” said Gil.
“On the X, just like it says,” said Harry. “Makes sense, right?”
They dug, shoveling dirt and stone, and the pit grew larger and deeper. Harry and Gil were down in the hole as it grew in width as well as depth, but they didn’t find a treasure chest.
“I knew this was too easy,” said Harry as he climbed his way out of the hole. They had dug exactly on the spot the X had marked, but they’d found nothing. “There must be more to it. I mean, any random goblin could wander through the forest, find the X, and dig this thing up.”
“You’re right,” Uma acknowledged. “The professor would never have done something so obvious. He hid his symbols well, so clearly he hid the chest just as well.” She looked down at the symbol. “Wonder why he wrote the words backward. I mean, it’s not much of a code.”
“What if it’s not a code?” Harry offered.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if it’s a direction of some sort,” said Harry.
Gil was already ahead of them. He had turned around backward and walked to a place where two trees grew at strange angles. One tipped to the right and the other to the left. Together they formed an X.
“There it is!” Uma saw the X formed by the trees. If she turned so the hole was at her back, this tree was exactly in line with where the carving had been. So once more, they drew shovels and thrust them into the earth, digging as fast as they could.
Harry dug furiously by the X-shaped trees, forming a pit that was too small for anyone else to stand in when the sound of steel striking wood echoed in the hole. “I think I found it!” he crowed, his entire body covered with mud.
Uma ran to the edge of the pit, Gil at her shoulder. “You found it?” she asked, sounding as if she didn’t quite believe it.
“I did!” he said, hitting the shovel on the ground again, this time with an extra-strong wallop. That was when the ground gave way underneath his feet and he tumbled down into the darkness.
Harry flailed in the air, barely hanging on to his hook. He was falling, the wind blowing in his face. He nearly retched. His stomach heaved. He was weightless and then he wasn’t. With a great splash, he struck water. He had fallen a good distance, and he did not hit the water lightly.
“It might as well have been concrete,” he mumbled, splashing around.
He was in a great underground lagoon, black as night and as still as ice on a frozen lake. Harry frantically tried to keep his head above water. A pair of light trousers and a thin shirt would have been useful in such circumstances, but pirates wore neither, and Harry’s heavy clothes threatened to draw him down. He threw off his jacket and paddled to the shore. At least he did know how to swim.
Harry checked for injuries—water can break bones after a fall from such heights—but he was intact. His back stung from when he’d struck the surface, but that pain would fade. Only his pride was truly damaged—he’d landed in the ultimate belly flop. Luckily, no one had been around to see it.
His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, but there wasn’t much to see. He could not even make out the far side of the lagoon. Harry looked up and found only an enveloping darkness.