Snowy wouldn’t tell me. I knew it was straight out of the pages of Soldier of Fortune, and Soldier of Fortune was worse than the National Enquirer to me.
I was about to say, “Forget it. Take me home,” but I thought flickeringly of Rudy and the boys. Some afternoons there were no sports practices. Special assembly days we got out at three thirty and had free time to ourselves. Weekends with no away games the untouchables were around campus. They were biding their time. If I wasn’t in the cave, they’d find me. They’d find me sure as hell. Besides, just supposing Snowy found something and I wasn’t there to see it. “You felt the steps,” I said slowly. “Supposing we walk around in our socks. Maybe we’ll step on something else.”
“Let’s be organized this time, Barney,” said Snowy, his voice happy again. “We walk in squares, okay? Maybe ten yards on a side. Then we walk in rows up and down, filling in the square. The way you mow a lawn. That way we miss nothing.”
We padded over the sand in oblong patterns, marking the crust with our sock prints and coming back every few minutes or so to warm our feet by the kerosene lantern. “Why don’t we build a fire? It’ll be as warm as a stove,” I said. “The cave’s high enough so the smoke won’t bother us.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Snowy, shambling along in a careful line. “That’s all we’d need to drive the bats crazy.”
“Just how many bats are there?” I asked, trying to sound neutral and unafraid.
“Hundreds,” said Snowy. “Mr. Finney says bats often spend the day in caves. They have very sharply hooked claws so they can hang on to the stone ceiling.”
“Bats!” I repeated. “I don’t like bats! I don’t like sharply hooked claws either.”
“Well, don’t look up. They’re asleep. Have you found anything with your feet yet?”
“No. Just sand. Freezing sand.”
Chapter Seven
SNOWY AND I PACED off our squares for three days in a row, starting at a corner and walking in smaller and smaller squares at each go-round. It was every bit as much fun as vacuuming an Astroturf football field. Each time we came up empty. Then, on Sunday afternoon, I suggested to him that we go across to the other side of the river. As neither of us had rubber boots, we rolled up our pants and ran barefoot through the water, which was so cold it seared like boiling fat.
We paced out the same squares on the other side. The river water had been so unbearable that even the freezing sand felt warm. We hadn’t brought our stove across and so could only walk for about five or six minutes before we thought our feet would solidify and frostbite would set in.
“No good doing this anyway,” said Snowy. “My feet are like blocks of ice. I wouldn’t feel it if I were walking on broken glass.”
I agreed. I took off my socks and tried to rub some blood back into my toes. Then my hands got so cold I had to hold them under my armpits again to warm them up. The socks were frozen from putting them on my wet feet after we’d run through the river. I didn’t have the heart to put stiff, icy socks back on. I jammed them angrily in my parka pockets.
“Let’s go,” said Snowy, and he made a mad dash, splashing through the river to the stove burning invitingly on the other side.
I followed him. “We’re doing something wrong,” I said sadly. “I don’t know what it is, but we’re not going at this the right way.”
Snowy mulled this over. Neither of us had an answer. “Next time we wear duck hunter’s boots,” he muttered. I pounded and rubbed and kneaded my poor feet and only managed to anesthetize my hands again. When I jammed my hands in my pockets, wiggling my fingers for circulation, my legs froze next to the pockets.
The next day, in Army issue jungle boots supplied mysteriously by Snowy, we hauled the stove across the river and marked out areas that must have amounted to nearly an acre with orange-topped surveyor’s stakes. Snowy had stolen two dozen from the site of the Karlo V. Damascus Memorial Pool. Snowy had also brought two pairs of hunter’s socks that he’d no doubt also ordered from Soldier of Fortune. They were wired to heat up like electric blankets. The socks were wonderfully warm, but neither Snowy nor I stepped on so much as a single pip in another three acres of the frigid, softly crusted sand—that day or on any other day that week.
Miserably I tramped back to the stables, blindfolded and led by Snowy, on Friday afternoon.
“What are you thinking, Barney?” Snowy asked.
My brain was as cold and useless as my frozen fingers. All it told me was Dead end. Give it up. Dead end. Give it up, as flatly as my little cousin’s Speak & Spell. “The hell with it,” I snapped. “We’re never going to find anything, Snowy. We’re beating a dead horse. Who knows what the bone is or what the steps are. We’d have to be scientists to find out.”
“Don’t quit, Barney.”
“Snowy, what good is it? We’re just a couple of schoolkids. We don’t know anything.”
“Barney, please!” Snowy’s voice was like a little boy’s. A far cry from the one in which he usually gave me orders like a sergeant.
I promised myself I’d call Dad that night. I was tired of hiding out from Rudy and Company in a bone-frosting cave. I was tired of Snowy and the digging. If Dad could get me into another school after Christmas vacation, it would suit me just fine. A semester of surfing in Monterey looked very good that afternoon. No Rudy or Danny. No Silks. No freezing, frustrating caves. Dad was right. Muddy water had dripped onto my head on the way out of the cave. My hair stood up in ice spikes. I looked like a unicorn—a multicorn. California would be a very good place to go to school, I decided. Chicken! said a voice in my head.
Mellor, who went skiing every weekend with his Boston family, had dumped in the hall enough filthy laundry to clothe five boys for a month. I took off my clay-streaked shirt and dirty socks and threw them in the pile. My pants had seen five straight cave trips. They were in terrible shape due to the slide and the mud tunnel. I turned out the pockets, because the laundry won’t do your pants unless the pockets are free of spitballs, chewing gum, and dead lizards. I threw the pants in the pile and remembered the dirty frozen socks, in the pockets of my parka, from earlier in the week. I tossed them in too and strolled down the hall to wash up.
My hands were filthy, with slight bleeding around the base of every fingernail due to tunnel crawling. I ran them under the warm water. Just before I reached for the soap, I noticed little pellets or nodules of something on my nails. I took the pellets off and automatically saved them on a wad of Kleenex, telling myself to toss them out.
I began whistling “California, Here I Come.” Then I opened the Kleenex and stared at the four reddish peas. I couldn’t figure out where they’d come from since no hard bits had shown up in the sand in the past five days. Our feet were warm and sensitive in the hunter’s socks. We’d even examined the bottoms of our feet with the flashlights after every turn around the squares.
Since it was Friday afternoon, most boys were gone for the weekend. Those who hadn’t left for home had all piled into a bus and gone to a Christmas dance at a girl’s boarding school forty miles away. Off limits for boys on probation like me. There was not much for me to do. Unwillingly I wandered down to the science room, all the while mumbling to the air, “Give it up, Barney. It’s just a couple of pebbles.” The first pebbles we’ve found, said the voice in my head.
So what? I answered.
It won’t hurt to try and find out what they are, will it? wheedled the voice.
Fine. But I’m not going back in that Siberian cave. Give me a break! the voice said.
I reached Snowy by phone at eight o’clock. Snowy met me at the stables first thing the next morning. On a sun-filled window ledge I spread out two wads of tissue and a magnifier I’d borrowed from the science room cabinet.
Snowy squinted through his awful glasses into the magnifier. “What are they?”
“What do they look like?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Tiny pieces of reddish-brown something. The top edge shiny
and with some bluish ... paint?”
“Right. Now look at this.” I put another chip next to the others.
“Same thing. Paint, or whatever it is, is black, though.”
I pocketed both. “You know that fake Greek vase in the main hall, Snowy?”
“Yes, I know the one. How do you know it’s fake?”
“Are you kidding? A forty-gallon amphora, black figures on red, in perfect condition? The thing would be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art if it were real. They keep it full of dried cattails and straw flowers. Even Silks isn’t that dumb. If it were an antique, the school could sell it and buy two swimming pools and a domed stadium.”
“How do you know?”
“My dad’s an antiques dealer. He knows all about that stuff.”
“My dad’s a colonel in the Marine Corps.” Snowy growled, as if I had challenged him to a fight.
“Okay,” I said gently. Snowy looked angry. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t, so I went on. “Well, I just chipped a little off the back of it with my knife. The vase chip matches these. They’re both baked clay. Snowy, somewhere in that cave are remains of glazed pottery.”
“But where did you find the four little chips? When? Last night on your socks?”
“That’s the thing of it. There was nothing on last night’s socks. I checked them carefully before we left the cave. I would have seen these bits right away. They’re a different color from the sand. I found them when I washed my hands and they fell off in the sink.”
Snowy blindfolded me. We began our trek.
“What did you do before you washed your hands?”
“Took off my clothes. Threw ’em in the laundry pile. Listen, nothing could have stuck to my clothes. Only my socks, and my socks were clean. Just sand. I shook them out. There wasn’t anything.”
“Go over it again.”
I let out an impatient sigh. “Okay. I took off my socks. Right? Then my shirt. Covered with mud from the tunnel. Then my pants. That’s it.”
“And turned out the pockets like a good boy?” asked Snowy.
“What? Sure. Wait a minute ... pockets ...
“Was that the last thing you did before you washed your hands? Turned out the pockets of your pants?”
“Yes! Damn!” I said. “Except for another pair of socks ... I took them out of my parka pockets. The socks from the first day across the river. They were frozen, and I didn’t put them on again. Snowy, they came from somewhere in our very first squares. We didn’t walk long that day. I remember about where we were.”
“We’re on our way, Barney!” Snowy said. I could hear the smile in his voice.
We plowed through our original squares for nearly an hour and a half. By that time we had piled up a dozen sand mountains as high as our knees.
“Look at that,” said Snowy, panting and exhausted. “We’ve thrown sand over where we might want to dig next. How do we get the stupid piles out of the way?”
Worse, every hole filled in as quickly as we dug it. The swiftly collapsing sides kept slipping back into the pits. “Another complete loss!” Snowy grumbled, throwing his trowel away. “We should have brought shovels.”
I was about to suggest that next time he should order an Army Corps of Engineers bulldozer from the back pages of Soldier of Fortune when the tip of my trowel touched something hard at the very bottom of the hole. “At least it’s ground, if nothing else. The sand can’t go down forever,” I muttered.
Then we both dug fast and deep. “My knees are freezing,” said Snowy. We realized that to get any deeper, we’d have to dig very wide around where we wanted to go, to keep the sandy sides from falling in on themselves.
We cleared away as much sand as we could. Then we started pushing back the huge mound that lay all around us. I stopped with the trowel, lay on my belly, and felt with my fingers. It was just possible as the hole was the depth of my outstretched arm. I pulled my pocketknife from my jeans and, stomach pressed into the frigid sand, I jabbed the blade into the bottom of the pit. I wriggled my hand, working the point deeper into the sand.
“What is it? A dirt bottom? Clay? What do you feel?” Snowy asked.
“Wait a sec. Stone, it seems like.”
“Well, the whole cave’s made of rock,” said Snowy. “Don’t expect too much. It’s probably just the floor of the cave.”
“Damn it. I wish I did have a shovel.” Sand began trickling back into the opening.
“We’ll never make a dent in all this,” said Snowy. “It may be just three feet deep, but you might as well try to move the Sahara.”
I didn’t answer. I forced my hand down as far as it would go. Then I groped around in the icy sleeve of sand and slid my fingertip back and forth, to make sure I was right, and yanked out my arm. The entire hole caved in as if it had never been dug.
“What did you find?” Snowy asked.
“Just stone. But there’s something different about it.”
“What?”
“It’s not the same bumpy stone that’s in the rest of the cave. It’s as smooth as marble. But the funny thing is, there’s a crack in it.”
“So?”
“Well, the crack felt like a straight line. As if it was cut against a ruler. You know? Not some zigzag crack like you find anywhere. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe it’s nothing.”
Snowy dived headlong into the sand. He stuck his hand down as far as it would go, but his arm was too short to hit bottom. He took it out, and we watched the hole fill right up again. “Still, we’ve got something to dig for now,” he said. “Next time we’ll bring shovels. And blankets too, to kneel on.”
“Next week,” I said gloomily, “is Christmas vacation. You’ll be here, I guess. Exploring away.”
Snowy set his trowel down and brushed off his hands. “I’m supposed to go to my mother,” he said slowly.
“Where?” I asked.
“Out of the country,” he answered. “But I can always tell her I’m going to my uncle.”
“Where’s he?” I asked.
“I could tell my uncle, of course, that I’m going to mother’s. Neither of them would know, you see. They haven’t spoken to each other in years. So they won’t check. I’ll stay here,” he said, satisfied with this arrangement. “How about you?”
“I’m spending Christmas Day in Denver with my dad. On the twenty-sixth I’m supposed to go on to Aspen, where my cousins are skiing. My dad can’t ski because of his back, so he’s flying straight on to Europe for a big auction in London. Months ago, when my dad arranged this, he told me to bring a friend for two weeks of skiing. I was going to ask Rudy or Danny. Isn’t that a laugh! I think I still have to go skiing, though. I mean, my dad won’t be home, and there’s no place else for me to go.”
Snowy messed with some more sand, building a little castle. “I thought you hurt your back,” he said with a bland smile.
I grinned back broadly. “I forgot about that,” I said. “It’s not as if I’d disappoint anyone if I didn’t go skiing. My cousins are all older than I am. They think I’m just a cute little kid.” I cleared my throat. “Would the Finneys take me in too?” I asked.
“I’ll see what they say. I’ll drop a note in your box.”
Chapter Eight
ON THE SECOND NIGHT after Christmas the Finneys were polite but frosty. Finney himself watched me as if from a great height. I did the dishes, I brought in firewood, and I even walked the dog. I combed my hair three times an evening, made sure not to put my elbows on the table, and stood up like a jack-in-the-box when Dr. Dorothy came in the room.
On the fourth night I offered to strip and refinish a Georgian drum table. Finney said I should stop acting like a valet, as he was not General Zia. Then he showed me his wooden leg.
“It’s beautiful!” I blurted out before I thought about what to say.
Finney chuckled proudly. He’d pulled his pants leg up to the knee to display it. The leg was made of laminate—slivers of different-colored woods cemen
ted together. They made as nice a calf, ankle, and foot as any cabinetmaker’s prize piece. “I had it done by a ship’s carpenter I know,” said Finney. “Over my dead body would the doctors make me wear some ugly thing from a drugstore that sells trusses to people at death’s door. I lemon-oil it once a week. Polish it with a chamois cloth.”
“Does it come off?” I asked.
“Sure it does,” Finney answered, “but if I took it off to show you, Dorothy’d have my head. She thinks it’s vulgar.”
Dr. Dorothy and Snowy had disappeared these two nights, after the supper dishes were cleared, into her enormous laboratory at the back of the house. There Dr. Dorothy bred and trained guinea pigs for Harvard University. There were mazes and levers and colored lights and bells for all kinds of intelligence tests. She owned at least fifty pigs. They all had names. There were several white rats too, without names. They interested me on a level with the economy of Latvia.
Snowy’s Christmas present from the Finneys was a white-and-brown guinea pig he called Rosie. At the Finneys’ house Snowy had gone nowhere without Rosie. She sat in her grapefruit carton at the dinner table while we ate, chewing her lettuce. She slept in her box by Snowy’s bed and next to the tub when he took a shower. She curled contentedly in his lap, gently nibbling his caressing fingers wherever else he was.
“So did you have a nice Christmas, Pennimen?” asked Finney, helping himself to a macaroon and settling back in his chair by the fire.
“Yes. My dad and I had Christmas dinner at a big hotel in Denver. We had goose. I’d never eaten it before.”
“Your father called here, you know. Just to make sure everything was on the up and up.” Finney worried one of his molars with a metal toothpick. “He wants you to leave Winchester. He thinks Mr. Silks has treated you unfairly, and he thinks Rudy and the boys will hurt you one day.”
“I know he thinks that. It’s all we talked about, Christmas. I told him I want to stay.”
“I agree with your father. I also think Silks may find a way to keep you out of Hotchkiss even if you do nothing wrong from here on. From what I hear, Mr. Silks seems to think you are a ringleader and a troublemaker. Why do you want to stay here, Pennimen?”
Through the Hidden Door Page 6