“But we’ve got to find it first,” said Bean, with his last mouthful of carrots that he was trying to swallow without tasting. He found that holding his nose helped, but his ears popped when he swallowed.
“That’s the challenge,” said Mrs. Carver as she rose from the table and began to clear the dishes. “That’s where you prove if you’re real detectives, I’d say.”
The night was dark and clear, and the air was thickly scented with the sweet, pungent smells of summer, but all this went nearly unnoticed by Ab and Bean as they made their way up the back steps of the Moses Webster House. In the kitchen, the teakettle simmered lazily. Mr. Proverb must have fixed the old kerosene stove. Other than the gentle hissing and the rhythmic ticking of the dining room clock, all was silent.
A few soft lights had been left on, making islands of illumination amid the relaxing ocean of soft shadows.
“Where is everybody?” asked Bean as he fished the old flashlight from the drawer.
“There’s a concert at the church tonight,” Ab replied, opening the cellar door. “Remember? The whole town’s up there.”
Bean remembered seeing notices in the store windows downtown: “String Quartet in Concert.” It wasn’t the kind of thing he got excited about, but it kept the summer people off the streets. Of course, Ab was a summer person, too, but she was different. “Oh, yeah,” he said blankly. “Well, that’s just as good. Nobody to bother us.”
Truth be told, though, as Ab and Bean trod warily down the creaky cellar stairs, neither was comforted by the fact that no one else was in the house. But they put on a brave face, swallowed their fears, and followed the flashlight’s bright beacon to the little white-walled room.
“I still don’t see anything that could be a switch,” said Bean. He scanned the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and the comers with the light. He closed the door and inspected the strip of wall behind it as well as the door trim and rough molding. “It must be someplace else.”
All at once, there was a tremendous rushing noise accompanied by the faint movement of air in the still darkness. “What’s that?” Ab cried, her heart leaping to her throat.
Bean stood and listened. He knew that sound, but it was so out of place. “A fountain?” he hazarded.
It sounded like cascading water. “The cistern,” said Ab, reaching for the door. But before the words were out of her mouth, there was a shudder in the floor that, just for an instant, froze them in their tracks. “What did you do?” Ab wailed.
Bean shone the light in her eyes. “I didn’t do anything,” he said defensively. Suddenly, the floor began to rise. “Let’s get out of here,” he yelled.
The delay was costly. Ab grabbed the doorknob and yanked it. The door opened half an inch, then stopped, unable to swing farther inward because of the floor, which was rising steadily. “It won’t open,” Ab screamed, fear shaking her voice. “It won’t open.”
Bean flung himself at the grimy old window, although he knew it was far too small, even for Ab. He pounded on the glass until one of the panes cracked, then he knocked it out and began calling into the night. But there was no reply, and all the while the floor kept rising, inexorably, until their heads were just inches from the ceiling. He stopped shouting and Ab took his place at the window, screaming for all she was worth. Surely, thought Bean, someone would hear that.
At last she stopped. No response. None.
By this time they were on their knees, bending their heads in the three feet or so between the floor and the ceiling. “There’s the sound,” said Ab, holding up a finger. Sure enough, the counterweights could be heard in the walls above; they were a hundred times thicker and heavier than the window weights, but unmistakable.
It was all academic now. Within thirty seconds they would be crushed like bugs against the ceiling. They lay on their backs, panting, staring at the feeble glow from the flashlight as it got smaller and smaller and brighter and brighter as the ceiling came toward them.
“I’m sorry I got you into this, Beanbag,” said Ab hoarsely. “I didn’t know it would end this way.”
The ceiling was less than an inch from their faces now. Soon it would all be over, but Bean had something to say first. And nothing was going to keep him from saying it.
“Abby?” he said softly. He never called her Abby.
“Uh-huh.”
“I just want you to know something.”
“What?”
“Well, I just want you to know that I—”
With a sharp thud, the floor stopped moving.
“It stopped,” cried Ab. Bean waited. It could just have caught on something. But no, the water had stopped running into the cistern. “That’s how it’s done,” he said, bumping his head sharply against the ceiling as he started to get up. “Ow!”
“Lie still!” Ab admonished. “What are you talking about?”
“The mechanism is hydraulic.”
“Hydraulic?” Ab asked.
“Yeah. Powered by water. Did you notice how the floor stopped moving at the same time the water stopped flowing in the cistern?”
Ab suddenly realized that the water had stopped. She nodded.
“Somehow the force of the water, or the weight of the water flowing from one compartment to the other, is what runs the counterweights or pulleys that move the floor. That’s why the empty tank was so wet.” He studied the large slabs of granite that made up the walls. “There must be a huge holding tank of some kind outside the walls,” he speculated.
“But who made it work?” said Ab shrilly. “There’s nobody here. I know the Proverbs are at the concert. They went with my folks, and so did the rest of the guests.” She paused a moment. “What are we going to do now?”
“Wait,” said Bean.
“Wait?”
“What goes up ... , ” said Bean.
“Must come down,” Ab concluded.
For a minute or two they entertained their own thoughts.
“Bean?” said Ab at last. Her voice had lost its hysterical edge; just a faint tremor remained.
“Mm?”
“What were you going to say?”
Bean felt his face redden, and little prickles seemed to crawl up the back of his neck. He was glad his face was in the shadows. “What?”
She repeated the question.
“Oh,” said Bean, playing for time. There was nothing he wanted more than to say what was on his mind, but it would take another encounter with death to drag it out of him. “I don’t remember. It’s not important.”
“Not important?” Ab echoed.
Bean wondered if there was a trace of disappointment in her voice. Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows with girls?
The silence was suddenly broken by the sound of rushing water. Instinctively, Ab and Bean braced themselves. The floor should begin to go down, but what if. .. ?
Within seconds they relaxed. The floor shuddered once again and began to move away from the ceiling. Ab let out a relieved sigh and pushed against the ceiling, as if to assist the mechanism in its operation. A minute or so later, they were on their feet again. The instant the floor descended past the bottom edge of the door, Ab tugged it open and jumped out into the corridor, followed closely by Bean. He leapt to the cistern and shined the light in, just in time to see the last trickle of water leave the empty section.
“It’s like a big toilet,” he said, “divided into two parts. But there has to be a supply of water coming from outside somewhere.” He flashed the light across the earth and granite walls to the rear of the cistern.
“Why?” said Ab as she dusted herself off. What she really wanted to do was rush up to the church, find her mother and father, and throw herself into their arms and cry. But if Bean was going to stick around, acting as though nothing had happened, so was she.
“Because otherwise this would be a perpetual-motion machine,” said Bean learnedly. “And there ain’t no such animal. There.” He turned the beam on a two-inch-wide pipe at the back of the cistern. “There
’s probably a natural spring around here somewhere.”
“I’ve never seen one,” said Ab.
“You wouldn’t,” Bean replied. He handed her the light and began to brush himself off. “It’s underground.” He took the light again and trained the beam into the empty cistern. “All we need to do now is find the jigger.”
“Jigger?”
“You know, the jigger. The thing you flip to flush a toilet.”
“That’s called a jigger?”
“Yeah—what do you call it?”
Ab thought a second. “The flush button?” That didn’t sound right. “I don’t know. I’ve never called it anything—you just flip it. It doesn’t have a name.”
“Yeah, it does,” Bean insisted. “It’s a jigger. And somewhere around here there’s a great big one. And where there’s a jigger, there’s a float.” Once again he flashed the beam around inside the cistern. After a few seconds, it fell on a large glass ball connected to a long metal arm that disappeared through a slot in the tank wall.
“There it is,” he said.
“What does it do?” asked Ab.
“Shuts off the water supply when the tank gets full.”
Bean shone the light on a large brass disk in the bottom of the cistern. The floor sloped slightly toward the disk from all directions. “There’s the drain. The water must run into some kind of underground system.”
An ancient arm and elbow arrangement of brass rods was affixed to the near edge of the metal disk. Bean explained the mechanism to Ab, who caught on quickly. When pressure was applied to one side of the disk, the other side lifted up to let the water out. Ab immediately took the flashlight from Bean and played it about the floor until she found the length of pipe they had discarded earlier in the day. Seizing this, she handed Bean the flashlight and began to poke at the depths of the full cistern.
Bean was perplexed. “What are you doing?”
“If this side has a plug like the one on that side, and I can somehow find one of the rods and push it down, it’ll flush. Right?” Once she knew what she was looking for, it didn’t take her long to find it. “There it is,” she said, and Bean flashed the light toward it. “Now all we have to do is ... ”
Using both hands, she pushed straight down on the rod. Immediately, water began to rush into the empty section and out of the full section in a swirling, hissing whirlpool. A heavy rumble added to the cacophony, announcing that the hidden mechanism was at work.
“Look,” Bean cried, shining the light into the little white-walled room.
Ab rounded the corner of the cistern and, with widening eyes and a thrashing heart, watched as the heavy stone slab—nearly four by eight feet—began to rise, revealing a deep, dark rectangular hole cut in the bedrock, like a tomb.
8
EVERYONE ON EARTH IS OUT OF TOWN
BY 2 A.M., MRS. CARVER WAS FRANTIC. Bean and Ab hadn’t been seen since just after supper. Of course, the first place she had looked was the cellars of the Moses Webster House, which she and Mr. Proverb ransacked by candlelight, because he couldn’t find his flashlight. But there was no sign of them. Not a sound. After that, Mr. Proverb called Constable Wruggles, who called Tiny Martin, chief of the volunteer fire department. The alarm went out until the whole town was out and about, searching the waterfront, the quarries, the woods, and the granite slag heaps.
By dawn, no one had turned up the least sign of Bean and Ab. It was as if the earth had opened up and swallowed them whole.
Which it had.
“Turn the light on again,” said Ab. Bean started to protest, but she cut him short. “I know we need to save the battery, but just a minute won’t make any difference. It’s so black in here. I have to see some light.”
“But—”
“Just for a minute, Bean,” Ab pleaded. “Come on.”
Bean relented. There was a soft click, and a feeble light filled the chamber with an eerie luminescence and huge, irregular shadows. Weak as it was, the light was such a stark contrast to the bottomless darkness they’d become accustomed to that they rubbed their eyes.
Ab glanced at her watch. It had been nearly nine and a half hours since they had stumbled down the steps beneath the floor and the huge stone slab had descended silently over their heads. They had panicked and hollered and screamed and cried and pounded the walls and ceiling until their hands were raw and their ears rang with the sound of their own hoarse voices. In that nine and a half hours, Ab had mentally kicked herself a thousand times for their foolishness.
Now they were tired and hungry, and the heart-stopping thunder of fear had given way to deep, tightening knots of despair in their stomachs.
Bean couldn’t stand to see the tear stains on Ab’s face or the hurt, hopeless look in her eyes. He shut off the light.
“We’ll never get out of here,” Ab said for the hundredth time. It had become a refrain that, after a while, Bean ignored. It did no good to argue. “This place has been hidden for a hundred years, and we found it only by accident.” Her voice trailed off into sobs, between which she choked out the words of prophecy. “One day, another hundred years from now, they’ll find us here. Dusty and moldy.”
“Oh, stop it, Ab,” Bean scolded sharply. “We’re tired and hungry and scared, is all.”
“Oh, thanks. I’d almost forgotten I’m starving to death,” Ab snapped. “Remind me again in a couple of hours.”
Bean felt a curious rage that he didn’t know what to do with, so he stifled it. No matter what he said, Ab would turn it on him somehow.
Once again they were entombed in silence.
“I’m sorry, Bean,” Ab whispered at last.
Bean made his way to her in the dark, sat down beside her, and put his arm around her shoulders. He’d been waiting a long time to do this, to give her comfort. She leaned into him and, burying her face in his jacket, wept silently. He sat stiff as a board, afraid to move for fear of breaking the bond between them. He patted her shoulder softly.
“It’s okay,” he said. “They’re looking for us. Mom knows we’re here. I bet we’ll hear them digging any minute now.” Inside he was wondering what was taking them so long.
“At least we have air,” said Ab between sobs. “That’s something to be thankful for.”
“What an idiot!” Bean cried, leaping to his feet.
“Who are you calling an idiot?” Ab replied, a heavy concentration of warning in her voice.
“Not you,” Bean explained hurriedly. “Me.” He clicked on the light again and, holding it close to the wall, played it carefully along the corners where the walls met. “Of course, air is getting in here somehow.”
“So?” Ab rose to her feet and pressed her nose into the halo of light.
“So, if air can get in, there’s a way out,” he deduced.
Ab’s heart sank. “If there was a place big enough for us to crawl out, we’d have seen it by now.”
“I know,” said Bean, who was sticking his face into comers and seemed to be sniffing. “But maybe something can get out. Like a wire or a stick—something big enough to attract attention. Look around and see what you can find.”
Abby shuffled her feet through the deep shadows. The floor was as bare as if it had been swept. “There isn’t anything,” she said morosely at the conclusion of her search. Then something occurred to her out of the blue. “Wait a second. I’ve got a piece of paper ... ” She felt frantically through the pockets of her coveralls. “And a pen. We can write a note and slip it through the crack.” She paused. “If we can find a crack, that is. What are you sniffing for?”
“I’m not sniffing,” said Bean quietly. “I’m trying to feel anyplace where air might be coming in.” He drew a quick breath. “And here it is. Put your hand up here.” He grabbed Ab’s hand and pulled it to a place in the far comer. “Feel that?”
Ab closed her eyes and mentally focused all her senses on her fingertips. “I do,” she cried. “I can feel it!”
“Here, you take the
light and write a note while I see if I can dig out the dirt to make the crack a little bigger.” He handed her the light, which was dying fast. She sank to her knees, spread the fragment of white lined paper against her thigh, and began to write. The instant she finished her note, the light flickered one last time and went out.
“Here,” she said, handing the flashlight to Bean. “Dig with this. It’s not good for anything else.”
With the aid of the metal casing, Bean was able to chip a seam of plaster from the corner. “That’s funny,” he said as the fragments fell to the floor.
“What?”
“I don’t see any light, but the air is coming in faster than ever.”
“What does that mean?”
Bean wasn’t sure. “Let me have the paper anyway,” he said, feeling for Ab’s fingers and taking the slip from her. “This opening goes somewhere, and if there’s someone on the other side, they’ll find the note.” The paper fit easily into the crack and, with a little tap, fell through to the other side.
Bean slid slowly down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. “Now, we wait.”
“And pray,” said Ab, sitting beside him. She put her head against his shoulder. When he put his arm around her, she felt less helpless.
A little less helpless.
Soon they were sound asleep.
“What was that?” said Ab, waking with a start.
Bean rubbed his eyes in the darkness. For a few seconds he forgot where he was. Then he remembered, and his stomach tied itself into a sickening knot. “Ab?” he said sleepily. “Did you say something?”
“Yes,” said Ab, scrambling to her feet. “I thought I saw something. A light.”
Bean stood up and tried with all his might to pierce the thick darkness. Nothing. “You must have been dreaming.”
“I’m sure I was awake,” Ab protested, though she wasn’t really sure. In that darkness, it was hard to tell where sleep stopped and waking began. “I’m sure of it,” she added, this time with a little less conviction.
The Secret of the Missing Grave Page 7