Mr. Small seemed to be thinking beyond what Thomas had told them. “You say you saw nothing?” he asked.
“I thought I heard somebody moving around,” Thomas said, “but that could have been you all in here. Or maybe it was the kids, come back to scare me.”
“Kids?” said Mr. Small.
“The Darrow children,” Thomas said. “I mean that youngest Darrow boy and that little girl he calls Pesty, that lives with them although she doesn’t really belong to them. She came riding around the house in her pajamas on this big horse, and M. C. Darrow was hanging on the horse’s tail. He was trying to get the horse to stop, but it wouldn’t. Only Pesty could stop that big horse, and she was so little, too.”
“What in the world …” said his father.
“Thomas, if you don’t stop it!” warned Mrs. Small.
“Mama, it’s the truth!” said Thomas. “There were these children, I’m not making it up! I can’t help it if this is the craziest place we’ve ever lived in!”
“All right now,” said Mr. Small. “Start over and take it slowly. You say there were children here?”
“Yes, they came from around the house just after I found the button and moved the steps.” Then Thomas told all about Pesty, the horse and Mac Darrow. He even managed to make his father and mother understand that the children had been playing with him, toying with him, as if he were the object of a game.
“They were not friends,” Thomas said finally. “They let me fall under those steps.”
“No, they weren’t if they did let you fall,” said his mother, “but maybe they didn’t know about that drop down.”
“No,” said Mr. Small, “they probably knew, but I would guess they had no real intention of causing Thomas harm. It was their joke on the ‘new boy.’ It wasn’t a very nice joke and it was a joke that might have not worked at all. They were playing with you, Thomas, to find out what you knew. They must have thought you knew more than they did. After all, you came from far away to live in a house that no child in his right mind in these parts would dare enter. I would think that by now you are pretty famous all over town.”
“I see,” said Thomas. “Because I dared go into ‘Mr. Pluto’s tunnel’!”
“Yes,” his father said.
“It wasn’t a human voice I heard,” Thomas said. “It wasn’t alive.”
They all fell silent for a moment. Then Mr. Small asked, “And you’re sure you heard nothing more than that sighing?”
“That’s all,” Thomas said. “It just kept coming at me, getting closer.”
Mr. Small got up and stood at the tunnel opening. He went into the long hall after a few seconds and came back with a flashlight. “I’ll go with you,” Thomas said.
“I’d rather you stayed here. I’ll only be a minute,” said his father.
Mr. Small was gone less than a minute. Thomas and his mother waited, staring into the tunnel opening, flooded with the light from the kitchen. A few feet beyond the opening, the kitchen light ended in a wall of blackness. They could see the light from Mr. Small’s flashlight darting here and there along the ceiling of the tunnel until the path descended.
Mr. Small returned by way of the veranda steps. His white shirt was soiled from scaling the brick wall. As he came into the kitchen, muddying the floor as Thomas had, he was thoughtful, but not at all afraid.
He walked over to a high cabinet on the opposite wall from the tunnel. Beneath it, a small panel in the wall slid open at his touch. The panel had been invisible to the eye, but now revealed what seemed to be a jumble of miniature machinery. Mr. Small released a lever. The tunnel door slid silently down, and the patterned wallpaper of the kitchen showed no trace of what lay hidden behind it. Lastly, Mr. Small removed a mechanism of some kind from the panel and put it in his pocket.
“Did you see anything?” Thomas asked him. “Did you find my flashlight?”
“I didn’t see anything,” Mr. Small said, “and I didn’t hear any sighing.”
“Well that’s a relief,” said Mrs. Small. “Goodness, if you’d found somebody … I’m sure my nerves would just give way.”
“Your flashlight must have fallen in a crack,” said Mr. Small. “I couldn’t find it. Oh, yes, I removed the control from the panel. Without it, a giant couldn’t raise that tunnel door.”
“But you said there wasn’t anything in the tunnel,” said Thomas.
“That’s so, but I don’t want you wandering around in there,” his father said. “The walls and ceiling are dirt and rock. There hasn’t been a cave-in that I know of in a century, yet I think it best we don’t take chances. I also removed the gears that control the front steps.”
All he had to do was tell me not to go into the tunnel, Thomas thought. Give me a good reason and I wouldn’t go … he knows that’s all he has to do. He saw something or he heard something, and he’s not going to tell anybody!
The twins had sat calmly through the commotion of Thomas’ coming through the wall and their father going back through it again. Now they scrambled down from their chairs and slapped the wall with their hands. When the wall didn’t move, they kicked it. They were crestfallen when the wall wouldn’t slide up, as it had for Thomas.
Thomas had to laugh at them. “See? It’s just a wall,” he told them. They shook their heads.
“It’s just a wallpapered wall with a pretty design to look at.”
“I’d better get them ready for bed,” Mrs. Small said. “They’ll make themselves sick trying to get through the wall the way you did.
“Why is it you have to do just like Thomas?” she asked, teasing them. “Are you going to get into everything, just like Thomas, and cause me trouble?”
The twins laughed. Mrs. Small swept them into her arms and carried them out of the room.
Thomas sat at the table. He didn’t look around the kitchen. He still wasn’t ready to see the inside of the house, for he hoped to get the outside fixed in his mind first. When he heard his mother upstairs with the boys, he ate quickly. He glanced at his father, who sat across from him filling his pipe.
“It’s still light out,” Thomas said.
Mr. Small paused with the pipe. Thomas hadn’t needed to say anything more for his father to understand his wish.
“Maybe you’d better wait until tomorrow,” Mr. Small said. He glanced out of the window. There was still no clear sign of dusk in the sky.
Thomas picked at his food. He would not look around at the kitchen. The twins were making a lot of noise upstairs.
“Do I get to have a big bedroom for myself?” asked Thomas.
Mr. Small nodded. “Your room looks over the front lawn,” he said.
“Does it have a secret door?”
“We thought it best that you and the boys have good, solid rooms. Mr. Pluto chose rooms that I would have chosen,” his father said. “Better not tamper with the walls until you see how the tunnels and passages fit together.”
He could at least let me have a secret closet, Thomas thought.
Still, he was eager to see the room, to put his possessions in order.
He thought, If that Satan, Mr. Pluto, has made it stiff and cold, I won’t sleep there until it’s fixed the way I want it.
Thomas’ anger at old Pluto flared up and cooled. His thoughts shifted to what his father had said a moment before about the secret tunnels and passages.
“Papa, how do the tunnels fit together?”
His father explained that they were all of a plan. “Eventually, they lead in the same direction, to the same place,” he said.
“But what if an enemy of the slaves knew that?” Thomas said. “He could just wait at that place, because sooner or later he was bound to catch somebody.”
“No, Dies Drear knew what he was doing,” said Mr. Small. “Let the tunnels meander like a maze, with subpassages and dead ends. Have the same sign or symbol marking the main passages, a sign that only the slaves would understand. And let the slaves reach that one place where there wou
ld be people waiting to carry them quickly in many directions going farther north. No, it wasn’t likely that at the time anyone knew for sure what was going on in this house.”
“Papa,” Thomas said. He gulped down his milk to show that he had eaten. “It’s still light out. I just want to see how the house looks all the way around. I won’t go far.”
His father smiled and said, “What is it you’re looking for and why are you in such a hurry?”
Thomas wanted to tell his father exactly how he felt, but how could he say it? He didn’t want to pry.
Papa, I feel you are keeping something from me.
Could he say that?
Papa, I see on your face that you are worried. You didn’t like it either, that Mr. Pluto arranged our house.
“I’m not looking for anything,” Thomas said at last. “I just want to try to figure out which rooms have the passages, after I’ve seen the outside. Like now, I know this kitchen isn’t right. I haven’t looked at it good, but I can tell something’s wrong.
“Please, Papa,” he said. “When it gets dark, I’ll come inside.”
Mr. Small took a deep breath. “You have perhaps an hour,” he said. “Darkness has a way of falling down on you around here. It doesn’t give you time to wander home, as it will in the South.”
Thomas sat still for a second. He had a quiet vision of home. Springtime would be everywhere, and black crows sat all day, thick and shiny, in the fresh furrows of the fields. Just as the last sun slid out of the foothills, when you couldn’t tell the crows from the earth, the birds flew in a mass into the air. The tips of their feathers caught the last sun, Thomas remembered. Their wings were blue and silver sails, like pinwheels. Then, the crows grew quickly smaller. The light slipped off them; the sound of them slid out of the sky. And the coolness of dark flowed over the hills. Thomas would walk from the pines to home with the night coming like liquid behind him.
He left the kitchen without another word to his father. Outside, he felt ready to explore. But he was unsure of the night that could trap him, and he was sad that he would never again walk those hills of home.
Chapter 6
THE GRAY-PAINTED veranda closed in the house on all sides. As Thomas crossed it, back and forth, he felt it separate him and the house from everything beyond it. Many times he walked the veranda, looking for loose or trigger planks. He did find a few creaking boards. Stepping on them hard, pulling at them, jerking at them, he at last decided they concealed nothing.
Whoever old Pluto is, he thought, he sure takes good care of things.
Thomas made his way around the house. He took notice of every window, flower bed and what few bad pieces of siding there were. He missed nothing of what there was to see. There were fifteen windows on the first floor, and five of them were floor to ceiling. He counted six 5-foot window boxes loosely packed with fresh earth and seeded already.
What do you suppose he planted in them? Thomas wondered. He leaned over one of the boxes. He could see shoots of some kind, perhaps summer and autumn blooms, but he didn’t know much about flowers. He tried smelling the soil.
It smells sweet, he thought. Why did he have to do everything!
Thomas would have liked planting the boxes himself, carefully seeding them in evening, when soil seemed most fresh. He would have planted them with hyacinth, maybe, and pale green fern.
He might’ve planted them with poison, that Mr. Pluto, Thomas thought. Just a good-smelling poison. When you leaned over a box to see what was growing, you would get a whiff of it and that would be the end of you!
“Then he could be king,” Thomas said out loud. “That’s what he thinks he’s going to be.”
There were five entrances to the house. There was the front entrance, with the oak door and the steps with the tunnel beneath. There was one on either side of the house and two in the rear. One rear door led to the kitchen. The other looked quite old, was boarded up, and had been replaced by the newer one. Thomas examined the rear of the house more carefully. He had the feeling that there was something odd about it.
He backed away from the house to get a clearer view. Behind him, the land rose to the top of the hill.
There were trees up there—big, ancient trees, dense and wet with rain.
Just trees, he thought. If I climb one, I can see how the house looks from the roof down.
Thomas worked his way up the hill. Closer to the trees, he saw that they were a variety he didn’t know.
“Won’t be able to climb those,” he said eyeing the sharp needles. He looked behind him down the hill and was surprised to find he could see beyond the house to the stream below it. He saw that the house hadn’t been built directly facing the stream, but at an angle to it.
It looks like it faces the stream when you’re standing down there, he thought.
Thomas squatted down to study what lay before him. Then he stretched out on the damp ground with his head propped on his elbow. Slowly he grew calm and tired. After what had happened under the house, he was content to be where he was.
“The house doesn’t look so scary from up here,” he said. “It’s not pretty though, but that flat roof makes it look more graceful.”
Thomas stared a long time at the house and landscape, thinking of nothing in particular. He must have dozed. When at last he started and sat up, his legs were stiff. He got up, and his arms and face were cool.
He felt strange all of a sudden. He looked around him. The trees held darkness; below him, lights were on in the house. It seemed as though night had risen from the earth.
Thomas was ready to start down the hill as fast as he could go, when something rooted him where he was. He must have been hearing the sound for some time.
He couldn’t move now if he tried, for the sound was dreadful, there in the dark trees.
“Ahhh, ahhh. Ahhh, ahhh.”
It came from behind Thomas. The night was still; he could hear the sound clearly. Moving ever so slowly, he turned toward the trees. He listened for a long time, and, standing there, he became hidden by night.
Thomas was afraid, but it wasn’t the first time today he had been afraid.
It’s my birthday, he thought.
Papa, don’t turn out the lights. Please don’t.
He slipped through the trees, so used to walking in woods he could calculate where the pine boughs would touch him and have his hands in position to push them away. He walked on his toes, with one foot in front of the other. Indian scouts had walked that way so they could be ready to run in an instant if they had to.
Thomas followed that steady sound. His eyes darted blindly. Soon he was over the crest of the hill and moving downward on the other side. He didn’t look back. He knew that by now the trees and hill blotted out the lights of the house.
“Papa, just keep them on,” he said to himself. “I don’t need to see them.”
“Ahhh, ahhh,” the thing went.
Thomas was getting closer to it. It was louder; there was something else—a crackling, sighing sound running beneath the ahhhing. The new sound was like dry leaves breaking under foot.
A lot of leaves, Thomas thought. A lot of them breaking together, with a wind coming up to blow them away.
The trees grew thicker. Thomas used his shoulders to get through them. He had the feeling he was moving too fast, and he tried to slow himself down.
You won’t see anything quicker if you hurry than if you don’t. You can’t see anything anyhow.
His heart beat hard. As long as he didn’t allow himself to think what the ahhhing might be, he could keep moving. Holding his mind as blank as possible made him less afraid. Finally he was able to slow himself down, but by then he had made his mistake.
The springy, slippery bed of pine needles Thomas had been walking on was no longer beneath his feet. His shoes clomped loudly before he could silence them.
“Boards!” he said. He was walking on wood. He still couldn’t see anything.
The wood moved. Thomas bega
n to slide. He was standing on a platform of some kind and the thing was rising. With his body off-balance, he had no chance to run.
Thomas slid to the ground in a crouch. He could see light coming from below the platform. The ahhhing had grown loud, with the crackling, sighing, under it, trying to catch it.
Then there was no sound. The light from the platform reflected an eerie red and orange in the trees. There was the smell of smoke. Thomas hugged the earth.
Ever so slowly, two doors in the platform opened. Thomas saw two hands and bright fire, which turned the trees a slippery gold. Out of fire and out of the ground rose a huge head, huge shoulders. Up and up the thing rose, with a head full of hair that was red and yellow with light. The hair hanging mosslike from its jowls bristled and tumbled gold and orange.
“Who’s that? What’s that!” called a harsh, loud voice.
The frightful head looked down. Thomas saw its angry face. The eyes of it caught the firelight and glinted emerald and wet. The eyes of it found Thomas holding on to the earth.
“What demon walks on Pluto’s house!”
“Devvvvil!” Thomas cried out shrilly.
He was breaking through the trees.
Devil!
Branches whipped at him; needles stung him. He fell twice. Once he got turned around, heading toward the fiery light again. He tripped and somersaulted, barely missing a tree. But he picked himself up and ran again toward his own house, up and over the hill. He was sure that the devil waited for him somewhere in the trees ahead.
“I’ve got to run,” he told himself. “It’s the nightmare! It’s just like the dream in the car!”
It seemed to him he was moving ever so slowly. “I’ve got to run and hit it hard!”
When he ran into it, he would hit it with his full force. That way, he would cause it to pause long enough so that he could get around it and away.
But the man or devil, that Pluto, whatever he was, had fooled Thomas. He had not moved fast enough to get in front of Thomas. He caught up with him from behind.
He caught Thomas in mid-stride. Thomas’ legs were still running when Pluto’s arms tightened around his chest and, with ease, swung him into the air.
The House of Dies Drear Page 5