Tunnels 02, Deeper

earth's core," Will said.
    "What does that mean?" Chester asked.
    "It means we should be toast by now."
    As Will and Chester followed Cal, wondering what exactly they were getting themselves into now, the light grew in intensity. It seemed to pulse, sometimes bathing the jagged walls around them, and then gradually diminishing so that there was only a bluish haze ahead.
    They caught up with Cal just as he reached the end of the passage. A large space opened up before them.
    A single flame, about six feet high, sprouted from the central point in the space. With a loud hissing, the flame grew, the blue plume elongating until it had quadrupled in height, spearing up and licking into a circular opening in the roof above it. The heat from the flame was too much to bear, and they were forced to back away and cover their faces with their arms.
    "What is it?" Will asked, but neither Cal nor Chester answered, all three boys bewitched by its sheer beauty. For at the base of the flame, as it emerged from the blackened rock, it was almost transparent, but it transformed through a spectrum of colors, into shimmering yellows and reds, to a staggering range of greens, until it became the deepest magenta at its apex. But the overall light, the summation of these colors, was the blue that it cast around them, and which had led them here. They stood together, their eyes reflecting the iridescent display, until the hissing subsided and the flame shrank back down again.
    As if they had all snapped out of a spell at the same instant, they turned to see what lay around them. They could make out a number of shadowy openings in the walls of the chamber.
    Will and Chester made for the nearest of these. As they cautiously entered it, the light from the orbs in their hands mingled with the blue of the residual flame to reveal man-sized bundles leaning against the walls, two or three deep in places.
    Wrapped in dusty cloth, each was bound several times around its girth with some type of twine. A few of the bundles appeared to be more recent than others, encased in a less soiled and stained cloth. But the older ones were so dirty as to be almost indistinguishable from the rock behind them. Closely followed by Chester, Will went over to one of these and held up his light to it. Strips of material had rotted and fallen away, allowing the boys to see what was inside.
    "Ohmygosh," Chester said, so quickly it sounded like a single word.
    Desiccated skin was drawn tightly across a skeletal face, which stared back at them from its empty eye sockets. Here and there the dull ivory of clean bone poked through the cracks in the dark skin. As Will moved his light, they could see other parts of the skeleton: Ribs protruded through the fabric, and a spiderlike hand rested against a hip covered with skin as tightly stretched as a piece of ancient parchment.
    "I suppose these must be dead Coprolites," Will mumbled as he and Chester followed the wall around, surveying the other bundles.
    "Oh. My. God," Chester repeated, slowly this time. "There are hundreds of them."
    "This has to be some sort of burial ground," Will spoke in a subdued voice, as if showing these amassed bodies respect. "Just like the American Indians. They left their dead on wooden platforms, on mountainsides, rather than bury them."
    "So, if this is some type of holy place, shouldn't we get the heck out of here? We don't want to upset these people, the Cupcakes or whatever they're called," Chester said urgently.
    "Coprolites," Will corrected him.
    "Coprolites." Chester pronounced the word carefully. "Right."
    "And another thing," Will said.
    "What?" Chester asked, turning to him.
    "The name Coprolites ," Will continued, barely suppressing a grin. "That's just what the Colonists call them. If you ever meet a Coprolite, don't use that name, OK?"
    "Why?"
    "It's not very flattering. It's dinosaur droppings. It means fossilized dinosaur poo ." Will smirked as he walked a little farther along the wall of mummified bodies, until his attention was caught by one whose shroud had all but disintegrated.
    He played his light on the corpse, passing the beam slowly down it length to its feet and then back up to its head again. Although the body was taller than either Will or Chester, it was so shrunken that it looked very small, and nothing at all like the cadaver of a fully grown adult. It had a thick golden bracelet around its bony wrist, in which were inset chunky rectangular gemstones of red, green, dark