Through the Hidden Door

by Rosemary Wells

  All the sounds were innocent. A wisteria vine tapped against a windowpane. Pingings came from the cistern. Birds were warbling in the bushes outside. Deep in the walls I heard the scurryings of the rats and mice who lived there. I edged out of the stall, through the barn entrance, and into the sunshine. Then I just stood there idiotically and gazed up at the school.

  “What the hell is the matter?” asked Snowy.

  I turned as fast as a jackrabbit. “Snowy! Where were you?”

  “You’re as white as a sheet,” said Snowy. “And your shirt is soaked through.”

  “Snowy, someone is on to us. Last fall I hid a pistol that my father gave me right in the dirt on the windowsill. It isn’t there! In the old kitchen where I come through after class there’s a calendar. Someone’s changed the page.”

  “Barney,” he said, “I’ve broken the code. The writing!”

  “But my gun!” I was still shaking. “The page ...

  Snowy spread my tracing of the little stone-carved figures out on the floor of the stable and knelt over it. “Exams have gotten to you, Barney,” Snowy said seriously. “The tension’s boiled your brains. Nobody’s going to bother us.”

  “But Rudy? Danny? The other three? Where are they?”

  “There’s a big cookout tonight and a dance with a busload of girls from Lexington Country Day. Barney, do you remember the Lexington girls at the Columbus Day dance? Half a dozen of them could model bikinis. Remember Rudy hanging all over that blond, blue-eyed tall one with a body like ... Snowy blushed. “Barney, these girls are playing softball in the quad in T-shirts. You think anybody in this sex-starved monastery is gonna miss out on that except us? Come on, man, you’re getting paranoid. There’s workmen and gardeners all over the campus. So one of ’em was down in the basement. So what? One of ’em probably found your gun and took it home. My listening monitor is on, Barney. If anyone was following us, I’d hear. Okay? Now look at this.”

  I settled my mind a little and stared at the puzzle in front of us. “How could you break the code?” I asked. “You have no other thing to go by. These aren’t like Egyptian writings in the pyramids, where they made little pictures of birds and things. These are just marks. Shapes.”

  “That’s what it looks like if you start from the beginning,” said Snowy. “You started to trace at random, in the middle of the circle, Barney. Look. Your first marking is a loop with two darts. Means nothing like that. But if you start here, see, with the single dart, then it’s two darts after that, then a triangle. Then a triangle and one dart, a triangle and two. Then a single inverted triangle.”

  “So?”

  “It’s a system of numbers. On the base of three.” Snowy pointed. “Every three digits the main sign changes. A triangle means three. An inverted triangle is six. A square is nine. A circle is twelve. A circle followed by a dart is thirteen, two darts fourteen, and then a new sign for fifteen, a cross.”

  I read the little signs over and over as Snowy smiled, seeing the sense they made to me. Then he added, “I wouldn’t have figured it out except it’s an arena,” he said.

  “What? I don’t follow.”

  “I thought at first it was word writing. Then I started wondering. Why should words be put on the sides of a stadium? Of course. They’re numbered sections! Just like Fenway Park.”

  I shook my head slowly. “Snowy,” I said, but I only thought what I wanted to say. That he was probably one of the world’s true geniuses. Like some kid who gets hold of a violin when he’s ten months old and starts playing Mozart.

  “What?” asked Snowy.

  “Let’s get going.”

  Snowy blindfolded me, and we traipsed off. The woods were now full of summer leaves and colonies of frogs. I felt summer and heard it and smelled it, although I could see nothing but the black soccer shirt over my eyes. Skunk cabbages crushed under our feet. Gnats clouded around our heads, sparrows argued, and every time we passed a flowering tree, I heard the fat bumblebees and yellow jackets humming like toy battery motors around the branches.

  “Do you still have your listening device on, Snowy?” I asked.

  “Yup. Nothing comes through but the birds and the bees.”

  Suddenly I said, “Snowy?”

  “What?”

  “Are we going a new way? A different way?”

  At first he didn’t answer. Then he said, “I didn’t think you’d know.”

  “Why are we going a new way?”

  “Just in case,” he said. “This is a noisier way. If anyone’s following us, I should pick up their sounds.”

  “Hear anything?”

  He snorted. “I don’t think this thing was made for woods in the spring. There’s too much other noise. Never mind.”

  Warm sunlight and soft cool shadows blinked over us. I could feel them as I never did when I could see all around me. “Snowy,” I asked him, “what are we going to do if we open up one of those little crypts and find a body made of bones the size of the one the collie found?”

  “We’re going to look at it,” said Snowy.

  “Yeah, but after.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Snowy, if it’s true, if there was once a race of human beings a half a foot tall who had a whole civilization, a city, you could be the most famous person of the century for finding it! You could be rich! You’d be on the cover of Time. You might even get out of going to school forever!”

  “Then it wouldn’t be my cave anymore, Barney.”

  “But, Snowy, you can’t keep something like this secret. It’s too important!”

  “Barney, no matter what we find today, you may take nothing out. Disturb nothing. And no blabbing about it.”

  Snowy had stopped walking. His warning was clear as the yammering of a blue jay that circled somewhere over our heads.

  “You got it, Snowy,” I agreed. I had no choice.

  We slithered through the mud tunnel and into the first chamber. Snowy removed my blindfold, and we made our way delicately over the catwalk ledge that led to the slide, then we coasted down the chute and bumped to a stop on the frigid sand below.

  Snowy lit the first lamp, I the second, and we walked in silence across the river and on to our last dig.

  Everything Snowy had described to me was there and more. The paintings around the inner wall of the arena were done in browns and reds and blues. He had cleared down to the bottom of the temple itself.

  “I think it’s a religious thing,” he said. “Look. All the columns have snakes except on the upper two tiers. Almost like a place reserved only for the gods at the top.”

  And there had been gods at the top. Their heads had all fallen off their pedestals, but they still lay in the bottom of the pit on top of a lake of inlaid silver cobra heads. They looked very much like our first statues, fierce and curly bearded, helmeted and terrifying.

  “They must have had something like bullfights here,” I said, squatting in the middle and feeling the delicate marble columns that held up the building. They were no bigger around than cigars. “Something like lion fights. Except with snakes.” I stood. The temple was nearly twice as tall as I was. My eyes lit on the stone coffins that ringed the building. “Dead warriors?” I said.

  “Looks like it.”

  “You mean it, Snowy? You’ll open one up? How about four-thousand-year-old mustard gas?”

  “I ordered two gas masks,” said Snowy. “They didn’t come yet. We’ll take a chance. Don’t breathe in.

  I hesitated, kneeling before one of the raised stone graves. “Supposing there’s nothing in it?” I asked.

  “Then there’s nothing in it,” he said.

  “Supposing there’s a skeleton in it?”

  “Then we leave it in peace.”

  He had brought a chisel and a jeweler’s hammer. He slipped the chisel’s blade against the seal of the tomb and tapped. I stopped him. “Wait,” I said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I heard something.”

&n
bsp; We had brought all five of our lamps around us. They gleamed like lights under water.

  Snowy knelt, listening like a cat, head to the side, for a moment. “It’s nothing, Barney,” he said. “The cave drips, you know.” He placed the chisel end against the tomb’s seal and reached for his hammer. He tapped again.

  But somewhere in the hush behind the dark I heard a giggle.

  They had one big flashlight. They waltzed across the sand like five drunks. When Rudy reached the pair of man-serpent statues, he tried to lift one and, not succeeding, kicked it hard with his boot heel. I heard the black glass breaking. Matt and Danny found the potter’s shed and tromped on it gleefully. “What have you been building, boys?” Shawn yelled. “A dollhouse village?”

  They began running up and down the tiny street of shops and houses, crushing, kicking, and yodeling.

  Once Rudy stopped and grinned at us. “You guys have fun making a little town here? I didn’t know you still liked to play! I like to play too!” He stomped hard on the fountain in the Rich Man’s House. “You two are really talented, boys! Talented and gifted! A miniature city, all made brick by brick by a couple of little cutie pies! What’s in that big pit you’re sitting in? You building a little church to go with the town so the itty-bitty pretend people can say their prayers? Or are you making it for Dr. Dorothy’s guinea pigs to live in? Better watch out! The poor little guinea pigs might catch cold down here!” Rudy danced in the sand. The Rich Man’s House was a shambles under his heavy boots.

  Snowy fumbled in his pocket. He drew out my gun and, before I could move, crouched in a trooper’s position, arms straight out, and fired it at Rudy Sader.

  The gun clicked.

  “Give it to me, Snowy,” I said. “You don’t know how to work it.” I grabbed the gun from him.

  “Get them, Barney. Get them!” He was crying for the village, for our secret, like a mother animal whose young is being tortured in front of her.

  I slipped the little emerald on the gun’s handle down and over. Aim. Aim right, you fool, I told myself. KAPOW! The glass of Rudy’s flashlight shattered. Then I did the same with our five kerosene lamps. Kapow! The lamps exploded one by one. They went down the way penny arcade ducks fall, and the cave resounded with the shots in its sudden darkness. From the ceiling there was a great whirring. The piercing shrieks from squadrons of panicking bats filled the air all around like a thousand dog whistles.

  Snowy took my hand in his and led me out. We slipped away, ourselves like snakes. À bat brushed my ear with its velvet wing. I heard the click of its steel-sharp nails as it flew by.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I DID NOT TALK to Snowy on the way back. He’d blindfolded me as usual but sobbed so horribly, there was no good in my doing anything but being quiet. I did not cry. I was too angry. After a bit Snowy’s crying died down, and I supposed he was thinking the same thoughts I was. About the bats ripping the hair off the boys. About them starving there for a week, about them running into the cobra teeth or just plain dying of fear and cold. I pictured Rudy on his hands and knees pleading. I pictured them calling for help and help not ever coming. I called him the filthiest name I knew.

  I did not say anything until the turf underfoot turned to soft pine needles and I knew we were at the edge of the woods near the school.

  “Snowy?” I said.

  No answer.

  “The hell with this!” I grumbled, and ripped off the black cloth over my eyes.

  Snowy was gone. How long had I been walking alone?

  I stumbled into the stable. What had happened and what was going to happen gurgled and milled and juggled around in my brain like a ten-colored pinwheel.

  The boys would be missed whether I said anything or not. The police and fire rescue squad would spend the next month looking for the cave. Snowy would never give anyone a clue where it was. And where was Snowy? I knew he would disappear for a while. Then suddenly I knew very well where he was. He had seen me hide my gun, the first day I’d been in the stable. The old kitchen in the cellar was one of his hiding places. Snowy had changed the calendar. Snowy had stored his Soldier of Fortune mail order equipment down there. That explained all the loose Styrofoam. The Styrofoam couldn’t have come from 1951. It hadn’t even been invented back then. He had probably picked the locks to the old kitchen months before Finney gave me the keys.

  I sat down on a dirty pile of straw and tried to think. I could not. My heart, stomach, and lungs welled up with anger like sickness. Again the image of a mother animal and her young returned clearly, this time of a mother raccoon, her cub shot dead at her feet by a hunter. I had witnessed that once. She had thrown herself on the hunter and bitten his leg to pieces. Up in the quad I heard faint music. I’d forgotten there was a dance and barbecue going on.

  I wandered around the edge of the campus. My mind had emptied. The thoughts that wanted to start there couldn’t get off the ground. I didn’t have any idea what time it was until I realized that complete darkness had fallen, and because it was June, that meant it must have been somewhere around nine. I smelled food. I walked up to the quad, my hands in my pockets.

  There was a rock band playing. Five musicians. I walked up to the grill and asked for a hamburger. The cook turned to face me. It was Silks.

  The headmaster usually did the barbecue honors with a big chef’s hat on for effect. Finney had loved it. Finney always gave you a hot dog with a flourish, as if he were handing you a plate of cherries jubilee.

  Silks’s eyes focused and saw me. He dropped his barbecue fork and whispered something to a woman tending a deep fry. Then he came around the table and placed both his hands on my shoulders. He began to push me.

  He shoved me gently, without a word, into a dark corner of the main building, behind a pine tree. “Where are the boys, Barney?” he asked. I looked into his eyes. They were full of terror. Silks had never called me Barney in the three years I’d been at Winchester.

  “What boys?” I said.

  “Barney, Mr. Damascus is here tonight. He’s come for graduation. Mr. and Mrs. Sader too. Their sons are missing. So are MacRea and Swoboda and Hines. Where are they? They haven’t been seen for six hours!”

  “How should I know?” I said, fascinated by Silks’s voice and eyes. I had never heard him speak softly or seen him afraid.

  “Barney, answer me. Your friend Clarence Cobb is not at the Finneys’. He’s gone. Mr. Finney is very worried. Apparently Clarence had some kind of pet ... a kitten?”

  “A guinea pig,” I stated flatly.

  “Yes, well, Cobb and the guinea pig are gone. You know where those boys are, Barney. Please tell me.”

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  Silks dropped his hands from my shoulders to his sides. “Go to my office. Please, Barney. I’ll see someone brings you a hamburger and a soda. Go to my office.”

  I was unsure what to do. My intelligence was as feeble as a light bulb in a brownout. Where was Snowy? I stumbled over to the main building, went into the headmaster’s office, and sat and waited for Martin Silks. Over and over one idea spun itself around and around: that the five boys who had wrecked everything we had spent months uncovering were still in our cave. Would they find the way out? I doubted it. Only Snowy knew where the recess in the cave wall was. The boys would sit in that cave forever. They would starve, freeze, or scare themselves to death. I wanted that to happen.

  I heard footsteps clatter down the hall. I knew I was in a dream. An evil dream that would soon be over. While I waited in an uncomfortable plastic molded chair, I dug my fingernails into my face to see if I could wake myself up. I could think only of Snowy. Snowy and Rosie.

  Silks brought me a hamburger. Medium rare.

  While I was eating he sat outside at his secretary’s desk typing something. When I had finished, he said only, “Barney, I will make it worth your while.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Barney, you know where they are, don’t you?”

  I di
dn’t answer him. I couldn’t handle the “Barney” from Mr. Silks. But I was beginning to come out of the dream.

  Silks sat on the edge of his big Danish-modern desk, not behind it. He showed me a letter on Winchester Academy stationery. It was addressed to the dean of admissions at Hotchkiss.

  The letter explained that due to a last minute change of plans on the part of my father I was not to attend school in Europe, and it asked that I be admitted to Hotchkiss in September. It said that I was a “significant student.” It listed my grades for all three years as 4.0 including today’s exams, which could hardly have been corrected yet. It said I was valedictorian of the class.

  I just stared at the letter. I was positive I was back in the dream. “We don’t have a valedictorian,” I said.

  “We do now, Pennimen,” said Silks. “I thought I’d throw that in. These important schools like achievers. This letter is late, but it will get you in. Over the years more than a hundred boys have gone from Winchester to Hotchkiss.” He dangled his leg, smiled, and placed the letter square on the desk, delicately, as if it were a gold bullion certificate. “If you want me to put in anything else—other interests? Anything?” Then, when I said nothing, he added, “If the boys have hurt you, Pennimen, I will discipline them. Just tell me where they are.”

  I didn’t answer. I tried to create my father’s voice in my head. I tried to listen to what he would tell me to do. Instead all I heard was the band outside the window and my own voice droning “If” for countless mornings in this office.

  “Where are the boys, Pennimen?” he said sharply.

  I said nothing.

  “Would you prefer another school, Pennimen?” Silks asked anxiously.

  “Mr. Silks?”

  “Where are they? Pennimen?”