Through the Hidden Door

by Rosemary Wells

  “I just do.”

  “A better answer, please.”

  “The school Dad wants to send me to is Monterey Academy in California. It’s not ... like Winchester.”

  “I know of the school. It has a certain reputation.”

  I waited to see what kind of reputation, but Finney seemed to take my answer for what it was and did not blast Monterey out of the water. He clucked for his collie.

  Like a shadow unfolding, the dog crept out from under her table and, slicing me with her eyes, put her muzzle on his good knee. “I’ve had boys do bad things, Pennimen,” Finney said, staring at the fire and petting the dog. “In the old days here at Winchester new boys were made to drink ink by the seniors. Then they had to piss blue in front of everyone. Boys have run cheating rings before, they have stolen the way you did, and sneaked in liquor and played pranks just the way you did. Most of those boys grew up to be decent men. But no boy I’ve ever had in thirty years would have attacked my dog like young Mr. Sader and his friends.” Finney shook his head. “They’ll try to get you, Pennimen. You should listen to your dad. Go to Monterey. Go away from here. You’ll make your way back into a good school the following year.”

  I traced the pattern of the Persian carpet with a poker and tried to think of something to say. The fire hissed and popped. The collie purred, much like a cat. In Finney’s intelligent eyes the orange reflection of the flames danced. “It’s the cave, isn’t it, Pennimen?” Finney asked.

  I nodded.

  “Tell me what you’ve found.”

  “I can’t. I promised Snowy. If I say anything, he’ll never take me back there.”

  “You mean you don’t know where this bloody cave is? I thought you were down there every day working like an Egyptian hod carrier!”

  “I am. But Snowy blindfolds me and walks me in circles first, so I don’t know where the entrance is.”

  Finney digested this and another macaroon for a minute. “Poor Cobb,” he muttered at last. “Doesn’t trust a soul. He’s had a tough life. I expect you know about it.”

  I wanted to know more, so I said casually, “His mom’s living in a foreign country?”

  Finney gave the collie a macaroon. “His mother ... travels,” he said. “The father was a career Army man, I think. Stationed in the East somewhere. Been missing seven years. Cobb thinks he’s alive and working secretly for the CIA. The Army says he’s dead. Cobb has an uncle who brought him here. Dorothy and I have taken him in, you know. Cobb needs a home. He came to Dorothy and me because he was petrified of your former friends.” Finney said this with a half smile and a direct look in my eyes.

  “I wish you were back as headmaster, Mr. Finney,” I said.

  “Do you mean that, Pennimen? I punished you rather hard, as I remember.”

  “I deserved it.”

  “Do you mean that too?” His eyebrows rose, and I could feel the human lie detector again.

  I nodded, catching his gaze.

  “I’m too old to get another job as headmaster, you know,” he said sadly. “They want young blood out there. Not old academic fools like me.”

  Sleet bristled against the windows, and the wind wailed like a far-off horn. I could feel the sadness in Finney, as I sometimes felt it across the room when my father was thinking of my mother. “Mr. Finney?”

  “Yes, Pennimen.”

  “What do you suppose will happen to those boys? Especially Rudy and Danny? What kind of men will they grow up to be?”

  “Ha ha ha ha,” Finney laughed sourly.

  I waited. There was no answer but the tumbling of a log onto the hearth. Then, quite suddenly, Mr. Finney spat into the fire.

  Chapter Nine

  SNOWY AND I HAD nearly two weeks of full days. We began at seven in the morning and left in the evening, when the bats flew out at five thirty through their roof window. It took two hours of digging with large spades to get to the bottom of our hole without the sand caving in. This time we made it big enough for both of us to get into. We created another waste mountain in doing this and promised each other we’d take turns hauling it away.

  At the very bottom was the surface I’d felt with the tips of my fingers.

  I straddled it and shone the flashlight down on it. There below me, the size of a domino, was a white stone block. It had been cut in a perfect rectangle. Beyond it was another, just the same, and three more.

  Snowy slipped opposite me into the hole. He just fit. “My God!” we both said together, for the stones had all been perfectly chiseled and set in the soft clay around them.

  “Somebody made this, Barney!” crowed Snowy. “Somebody made this just the way they made the steps. There is more here! There is!”

  “What do you think it is?” I asked.

  “I don’t know! Looks something like a pathway,” said Snowy.

  “I think so too.” I brushed it cleaner and cleaner. “Leading to the river. And the other way leading back into the cave.”

  “Which way do we go?” he asked.

  “Back, I think. If the road goes anywhere, it would be away from the river.”

  Snowy wiped his sweaty face with his forearm. “Wait,” he said. “The steps on the other side of the river? They’re directly opposite this road. Maybe nothing’s here and it’s all on the other side?”

  All, I thought. All. What was all going to be? A village? One little play hut? Was this a joke? Or a model? “Snowy,” I said, “you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Suppose we’re looking at something that no one has seen or touched since before the birth of Christ. Maybe since the Greeks or Noah’s ark. How do we ... not wreck it by mistake?”

  “Which way, Barney?” said Snowy, unimpressed.

  “Back,” I insisted. “Back into the cave on this side of the river.... Oh, no. Dammit,” I added. “Look what we’ve done. Just where we want to dig we’ve covered over the surface with the sand we’ve cleared from this hole.”

  Snowy said nothing. He gazed at the sand mountain unhappily. He and I knew it would take a lot of work to get rid of it. And then what? Supposing we threw all that sand on top of another place that turned out to be promising? How were we going to deal with all the sand we dug up?

  “We have to think about how to do this better,” said Snowy. “If only there was a way ... you know, when they send divers down to look at shipwrecks, they don’t just dump them overboard in the middle of the ocean. I’ve watched it on TV. They have a sonar or something that they beam at the bottom to see if anything’s down there.”

  “But we don’t have a sonar or a periscope camera, and we don’t have a scientist to tell us what to do,” I said.

  “Well, supposing we took something. I don’t know, like a broom handle. And we attached the blade of your pocketknife to the end of it.”

  “A boathook. Finney’s got one in his garage. Under all those old tires. It’s heavy and long. The tip is rounded, but I can file it to a point.”

  We called them “soundings” after the sonar on the ships. Altogether we made seventeen before we began to dig again.

  “We still have to do something with the sand we dig up,” Snowy reminded me. “So as not to just throw it on top of another diggable place.”

  “Put it in the river?”

  “Supposing that floods the river, and the water ruins all our digging?”

  “Will it?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll just have to risk it.”

  “Okay. Once we find something really big, we dig in shifts. Half an hour digging, half an hour hauling sand away, then switch.”

  “That’ll double the time it takes to find anything,” said Snowy.

  “We could hire high school kids from Greenfield,” I said.

  Snowy was furious. “Don’t ever make jokes about bringing anybody else here,” he warned me. “You hear me, Barney? This is my cave. My cave.”

  “Come on,” I answered, but I knew I’d never say anything like that again.

&nb
sp; By this time Snowy had stolen all the remaining site stakes from the pool digging company, which had stopped work because of the frozen ground. We had placed stick markers in those soundings that had stone bottoms. There were four. The rest of the time the boathook had hit soft, dense clay.

  “I wish we had a periscope with a light,” I moaned. “I wish we had an electric shovel, and I wish the cave were at least fifty degrees.”

  “You giving up?”

  “Of course not. I can wish, can’t I?”

  “Okay. Let’s go. We’ve got four sites with stone.”

  “But which one?” I said. “Wait a minute. Let’s do something smart for a change. Let’s take each of the soundings with stone underneath and make lots more soundings around it to see if we can find some other stuff that feels like something else. Otherwise we might just hit the road and more road.”

  My imagination was flying. I couldn’t keep it from what t knew were idiot ideas. Finally I rested on the boathook after several jabs and asked point-blank, “Where did you read that story about the pygmies on the Pacific island, Snowy?” I was hoping, just hoping that he might say National Geographic or The New York Times.

  “I don’t remember,” he answered. “But it’s true.”

  “How do you know it’s true?”

  “My father told me,” he said solemnly.

  I pried him a little. “Did your dad ... did he interview the guy who saw the—”

  “My father does secret work for the government,” Snowy snapped. “I’m not supposed to discuss it.”

  We made more soundings. And all the while I thought about the men, fuzzy and distant, that Snowy had circled with question marks in the Soldier of Fortunes. Was he looking for his dad among those strange men? Could his father actually be in one of those pictures?

  “Here! Here! Here!” he shouted suddenly, after taking the boathook and turning it around the way a surgeon might explore with a scalpel—gently, lightly as a fly.

  “What have you got? Another stone? What?” I asked.

  “It’s a thing,” Snowy answered.

  We scrabbled and gouged for what seemed six hours but turned out to be two. And then we stood over them.

  “Jackpot!” said Snowy.

  For a few seconds neither Snowy nor I moved. The squashed sand beneath our knees trickled stubbornly back down into the pit. I listened to the silence, broken only by the eternal dripping of the ceiling and the low roar of the underground river.

  In the center of our little pit the stone roadway widened into a perfectly paved circle, then continued off into the cave. But at the far side of the circle sat two glistening black figures.

  They were about the size of jackrabbits. Heads of men, helmeted, with curly beards jutting out, had been carved onto the bodies of curled-up serpents. Each had a fiercely opened cape around his head and shoulders. Each had a squared-off beard and savage, staring eyes.

  Later I drew one, exactly as we first saw him, sitting on a bed of sandy clay in the flickering light of our lantern.

  Snowy and I both reached out at the same instant, hands trembling, and our eyes bugging out like kids in a toy store. We touched them. Then both of us went into a frantic dive action, squirming ourselves down to ground level, shining the light on every detail, caressing them as if they were alive.

  “They’re sunk way into the ground,” said Snowy. “Can’t move ’em.”

  “What are they made of?” I asked. “It looks like a kind of black glass.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, but what are they? What do they mean?”

  “Some kind of ... well, gods or mythical demons. Some kind of guards? Beginning of something? A gateway! Maybe this part of the road leads to where the people lived who made these things. It almost looks as if they were put here to mark the road and scare people.”

  “Scare people?”

  “Well, say this is a scale model of some Indian civilization. Look at the size of the river steps. In scale that would make a person about six, eight inches tall. Okay? These things are over a foot and a half tall. They’d be terrifying full size, three times the height of a man. I wonder where the real thing would be?” I said.

  “The real thing?” Snowy asked.

  “The real road. The real statues. The real Indian civilization that this is a scale model of.”

  “Barney,” said Snowy, “this is the real thing. This is no scale model.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  Snowy shrugged absentmindedly. I knew he was thinking about Pacific pygmies. Meantime he stared, calculating, from one to another of the man-serpents. “This is the way we go, Barney,” he said, pointing between them to the road that led into a bank of sand.

  We said nothing to Finney that night or the next two. I was exhausted and fell into bed each night around seven. Snowy, who never talked much about the cave anyway, was entirely caught up in the birth of twelve new guinea pigs. We began getting up at six and would gulp down four eggs, toast, a quart of milk and orange juice between us, and pack an equally big lunch. Dr. Dorothy said she felt as if she were feeding two forest rangers.

  We dug for four full days, finding nothing but more road. I paced off the distance we’d covered. Twenty-one yards. Little white brick followed little white brick. The only other things we came across were some odd black holes in the clay lining the pathway. We called them splash holes because they looked as if they were made by spilling, molten metal into the ground. We dug up several, but the holes were empty. Nonetheless I drew a few pictures of them.

  “Supposing the dumb road goes for a mile,” I groaned, leaning on my shovel after one tough hour of digging.

  “Then we dig for a mile,” said Snowy. “Wait. What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “Little white thing by the side of the road there. Looks like a tiny gravestone.”

  “I think it’s a marker of some kind, maybe. You don’t put a grave by the side of the road.... Hey, Snowy, I have an idea.”

  “What?”

  “My dad ... I stopped to catch my breath, hunkering down on the sand. “My dad has some stone rubbings. From a cathedral in England. People rub ’em on paper right off the grave lids. You got the pencil and paper?”

  “Somewhere,” said Snowy, climbing carefully out so as not to disturb our trench, which now measured about a foot and a half in width at the bottom, widening to six feet at the top.

  When we got back to the stable in the failing winter light and Snowy had removed my blindfold, we had a good look at my rubbing. It was on lined paper from a notebook, and the pencil was not dark enough to make it pretty, but this is what was carved on the marker.

  “It looks like a moon shape,” said Snowy. “Quarter moon. Then there’s the other odd shape and then four little darts.”

  “We’ll never figure it out.”

  “We might if we find more writing,” said Snowy. “It may be an Indian language.”

  We walked slowly back to the Finneys. “Why don’t we show it to the old man?” I asked.

  “You show it to Finney and you’ll never see the cave again,” said Snowy.

  “Oh, come off it. Why not? You showed him the bone, didn’t you?”

  “But this writing is important stuff. If we show it to Finney, he’ll want to give it to some language expert.”

  “Look, Snowy,” I grumbled, getting angry, “where would you be without me? Huh? Nowhere. You’d be sitting in your damn cave fooling around with a petunia trowel.”

  Snowy answered me just as, angrily. “We let other people find out about the cave,” he said, “and in a month it’ll be overrun with fifty clowns from Harvard. It’s my cave and it’s going to stay my cave!”

  We walked on in an unpleasant silence. I broke it after about ten minutes. “Who the hell do you think made that stuff?” I asked. “And please don’t tell me about a bunch of pygmies the size of a G.I. Joe doll.”

  Snowy shrugged and eyed the fast-setting sun in fro
nt of us. “In this part of the world it’s got to be Indians,” he said softly, “but somehow it doesn’t look Indian.”

  “How much do you know about Indians?” I asked.

  “Not much. The usual moccasin and birch bark canoe kind of thing.”

  “Save me a trip to the library, Snowy,” I said.

  Grudgingly he looked over at me.

  “Let me ask Finney if he knows anything about Indian tribes, particularly from around here.” I went on. “Okay? Look, both of us have exam week coming up at the end of the month. It’ll take days to find out what Finney could tell us in a few minutes.”

  Snowy struggled silently for a few minutes. “Only if you make him promise not to tell. And I’ll be listening from the lab to everything you say, even with the door closed and the dehumidifier on,” he added sulkily.

  “Snowy, how come you don’t trust anybody? Even me? Even the Finneys? I’m your buddy, Snowy. I mean that.”

  Snowy said nothing. Peter Mellor was dead right about the rubber ice cube tray. That’s exactly what Snowy was. A rubber ice cube tray.

  “Rosie’s going to have babies,” he announced suddenly. “Dr. Dorothy’s going to breed her to the big fat black-and-tan pig, Charles. I get to keep one of the babies if I want.”

  This little trinket of information touched me in the heart. Snowy strode on beside me over the ice-pocked field. He held his head high, looking at the drab clouds and sniffing from cold now and then.

  My imagination had hopped far away to the sands of the cave and the people who had built the white stone road, who had carved the imposing man-serpent statues, and who had written a message on a piece of marble no bigger than my thumb.

  Chapter Ten

  DON’T MIND ME, PENNIMEN,” said Finney. As usual he’d settled himself into his armchair in front of the fire. He rubbed the side of his face deeply with his fingers and explained he was having an attack of neuralgia. My father did the same thing when he was thinking of income tax, or when he was afraid he’d bought a fake.