Through the Hidden Door (15 page)

“I can’t tell either, Dad. I made the same promise to Snowy. It’s Snowy’s cave.”

My father munched a piece of pork chop. “Like father like son,” he said, washing it down with a swig of beer. “I’m a treasure hunter, and you are too. You’ve found something. Someday, tell me.”

“It’s a deal, Dad. Someday.”

“Are you going to be able to resist going back to whatever it is that’s down there?”

I placed my little finger joint on the table between us. The skin at the end of the stump was pursed like a pouting mouth. I hoped in time this would get less ugly. “The difference between me and Snowy is that Snowy is an idiot and I’m not. The thought of fifty baby coral snakes or pit vipers or whatever they are down there, hiding in the sand ... wild horses couldn’t drag me. Are you kidding?” I attacked my spareribs.

The night before Dad left, he took an envelope out of his coat pocket and pushed it across the restaurant table to me. It was a letter of acceptance from a prep school in Geneva, Switzerland for the following year.

“But I don’t want to go to school in Switzerland,” I blurted out.

“Barney,” he said so sadly, “do you want to go to a military academy here?”

“No!”

“Well, then.”

I played with the plastic netting that covered the candle glass between us.

The next afternoon, in the school driveway, my dad hugged me before he left for the airport. “Now, you promise? No more caving?”

“Dad, do you think I’m crazy?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Dad,” I said, “I’ve been having nightmares about snakes and snake-worshipping preachers since I woke up in the hospital.” I buried my face in his shirt front.

Dad stood with his arms around me for ten minutes, roughing up my hair with his hand. He cried quietly. Then he blew his nose, fixed his tie, and said, “The Swiss aren’t that bad, Barney.” He drove away, waving sadly.

It was Saturday. March was almost over. Sunday night the other boys would be corning back from spring break. A long day spread before me. I had missed nearly a month’s work. I had three papers due. I headed for the library.

By noon I’d finished enough note cards on Lincoln’s cabinet to get a fair paper out of it. I had to prepare sketches on Roman architecture and research the uses of uranium in industry.

In the science stacks I passed by the ancient Latin encyclopedia of natural history that Snowy and I had pored over with the little bone in hand. Lazily I fingered the gold-stamped spines. Then I picked out the
S
volume.
S
for
serpentes.

There were pictures of puff adders, fer-de-lances, and pit vipers. My hands sweated at the sight of them, slithery and deadly, even on the pages of an old book.

For the heck of it I tried reading the Latin text on venom and snakebite cures. It was not as difficult as I’d thought. After all, I’d had two and a half years of Latin. I began to enjoy it. I learned that snakes were milked for their venom and that the venom was injected into horses. The horse-converted serum, which contained antibodies to the venom, was what they’d put in my IV drip. Snake venom was extremely expensive and had to be stored at zero degrees centigrade.
“Toxicum post mortem serpentis indefinite permanet.”

I stared at the brightly hand-colored inset of cobras. The leading figure was the
Naja naja,
king of snakes, supple, risen from its coil with its little tongue peeking out of the cold lips and its hood thrown up like the mantle of a ghoul.

Like the cape on the strange black glass god. A chill rippled over my skin. There was also a picture of a snake charmer with a flute.

On one page, the only one in color was a full-size picture of the cobra’s fangs. The
Naja’s
were about an inch long, curved like a tiny tusk, needle sharp, and down the center of the tooth lay a dark pillowed venom sac.
“Dentibus nolite tangere,”
said the Latin inscription. Do not touch the teeth!
“Toxicum post mortem serpentis indefinite permanet.”
I translated aloud: “The poison lasts indefi—”

There was a slight noise behind me. I jerked my head around. Standing there was Snowy Cobb, covered with mud and smiling. “Are you ready, Barney?” he asked.

S
NOWY HAD BROUGHT DOWN
half a dozen kerosene lamps. One by one he lit them for me. Each lamp showed a new turn in a street, new buildings, carefully brushed clean of their sand. Soon a whole town spread over the floor of the cave, like a Christmas village in the glimmering lights.

I knelt there, tightness in my throat, fighting tears. “All by yourself, Snowy?”

“All by myself,” Snowy answered. “For you, Barney. I thought you were a goner for a while.”

I let his words fill the cave around us. Then we dove in.

The street leading away from our first house, the potter’s shed, twisted on, lined with more impressive and complete buildings.

There was a house that appeared to be a carpenter’s shop, with metal tools, saws, hammers hanging from the walls. Tiny nails, the size of a quarter of a straight pin, lay strewn around. Beyond that was what seemed to be a fish store, for a painted sign hung above it on the outside, a perfect shape of a fish in red and blue, and inside were long wooden tables, knives, and clay bowls set into the tables.

“Plumbing,” said Snowy.

“What?”

“Look. See that clay bowl? That’s a sink. Look under. There’s a pipe leading from that to a bigger pipe under the street. I’ve dug it up a little. The whole place has thick fired clay pipes running down every street and into every house. They had running water.”

There was a miller’s shop, we guessed from a grindstone and a grayish powdery kind of flour that still remained in a wooden storage bin the size of a coffee can behind the back wall.

Most of the buildings had simple picture signs outside. We could understand a few but not all. There was a boot maker, a weapons shop with spears and arrows pictured in black and gold. Beyond the shops began the houses.

Snowy had excavated four. They were not full of furniture. They were not fancy. Only simple wooden board tables or maybe beds stood near the walls, and a few overturned half-barrellike stools for chairs. A jar or two leaned in the corners. There was straw in tiny pieces on some of them. Our kerosene lamps burned, and shadows crossed and recrossed the walls and sand that lay piled outside, where Snowy had carefully banked it so it would not fall back.

“What happened with the roots?” I asked him suddenly. “The plaster of paris you poured in? Did you take the molds to Dr. Dorothy? Mr. Finney?”

Snowy shook his head. “What could I do?” he asked. “Everybody thought you were going to die, Barney. The Finneys didn’t want to know beans about the cave. They think it’s full of African tree vipers. They told me I could never come back.”

“Where are the root molds?”

“Over there. Right near the farthest lamp. Near our stove.”

I held one of the molds up to the light. Sure enough, it looked just like a root all right. White plaster, of course, but knotted and gnarled like an old tree. It was as small as the root of a rose. “You see those little cut marks?” said Snowy, pointing.

“No.”

“I’ll show you in daylight,” he said.

“Well, what about them?” I turned the root form in my hand and squinted at it.

“You know Mr. Greeves?”

“Well, of course I know Mr. Greeves! Come on, Snowy, out with it.”

“Okay,” said Snowy, drawing up his shoulders. “I brought them in to Mr. Greeves.”

“Why Greeves?”

“Because one day I was in the art room after class, trying to replace the plaster of paris that I borrowed. He was working on his bonsai collection that he keeps on the windowsill.”

“Those little miniature trees?”

“They keep the trees small by docking the roots. That way the tree grows strong but never too big. Greeves was docking roots all over the desk. I brought these in to him. He said he only did Japanese pines. Never saw roots like this, but they were bonsai all right, or something like it. The next day he came back with a book for me. We went through it. These are bonsai’d apple, nut, and peach trees, Barney.”

I waited, kneeling in the cold sand, for him to go on. Knowing what his thoughts were.

“Barney, this is no fake. This is no model. This was real. This thing is over a hundred thousand years old. It goes back to the Ice Age. There were cobras here, Barney. Or something very much like them. And people, half a foot tall.”

“Snowy, how do you know that for absolute sure?”

“Because the bit of charcoal you sneaked to Dr. Dorothy came back from some lab in California, where she sent it. That’s how.”

“What? She didn’t tell me about it.”

“Of course not. She doesn’t want you curious about the cave. She thinks you’ll lose a leg next time. I found the letter in the desk. You sneaked the charcoal to her. You took something out of the cave and didn’t tell me you’d given it to her,” Snowy growled.

“I didn’t
take
anything. It fell out of my pants cuff in the car. She picked it up. Talk about sneaking, you went through their desk.”

“You’re damn right I did. I found the letter from the university and other things.”

“What other things?” I wanted to shake Snowy.

“Nothing,” he said lightly, but skewering me with a guilty look.

I knew I wouldn’t get much out of him. “What did the lab say?” I asked.

“That charcoal is a hundred thousand years old, give or take ten thousand years. The bone must be that old too, Barney.”

“The fire pit might be that old,” I argued very weakly. “It might have resulted from a natural fire. Maybe before the cave was formed. Anything. And the houses and all the stuff could still have been done by a hermit ten years ago. The bone still could have been a very old bone carved very recently. The snake fangs—they could be very ancient, but they could also be five years old.”

Snowy picked up a trowel and a paintbrush and handed me another paintbrush. “There’s a building near the last lantern there,” he said. “Bigger than the rest.”

As we scraped and flicked the sand from around three brown adobe walls, I said to Snowy, “Now we can’t talk to the Finneys about it anymore. If they find out we came back to the cave, I think they’ll have a joint heart attack.”

“It was your idea to talk to the Finneys in the first place, Barney,” said Snowy. “Did you bring your pencils and drawing paper?”

“Yes.”

“Look at that.”

We were scooping the sand out of the inside of what was the biggest house of all so far. As the sand fell away from the walls, we could see they were decorated with paintings, paintings of a dance or festival. The floor of this house was not packed dirt but tiled in a mosaic pattern, whorls, blue and white with a red one in the center. There were stone benches and in the middle of the room a marble thing that looked like a small goblet.

“Fountain,” said Snowy. “See the little hole it has in the bottom?”

We found a dozen more root holes. We decided we’d hit a garden of some kind, as the roof was open and made a courtyard. The house continued for many rooms beyond.

That night, when we reached the stable, Snowy took my blindfold off and filled a bucket of water at the tap in the old tack room.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

He showed me a new arrangement he had set up in a horribly dirty old bathroom at the back of the stable. He’d put a folding chair and a Coleman stove on the floor and rigged a makeshift burner over it by setting a barbecue grill on two cinder blocks. He lit the stove and put the bucket on the burner.

“Snowy, where do you get this stuff?” I asked. “Lanterns, stoves ...

“Out of a magazine,” he answered. “Some of it I keep here. Some of it other places.” When the water warmed, he gave me a cake of soap. We washed our hands carefully. He produced a bottle of Royal Navy intensive-care skin lotion, and I used that, following him. Then he washed his face, combed his hair, and brought out two complete sets of pants and shirts. We hung our muddy clothes on a rope to dry, and put on clean shoes. “They’ll never know,” he said smugly.

When I walked through the Finneys’ door that night, Dr. Dorothy greeted me with a pat on the shoulder. “You look as if you’ve been in church,” she said.

“Oh, I just spent the day in the library doing my papers,” I answered.

But she peered at me with eyes that said
I’ll bet you did.

I spent the evening in the guest room upstairs, coloring in my painting of the garden courtyard we’d found that day. I tried thinking what the wall painting must have meant. It was a picture of a woman smiling, her eyes closed, in a strangely layered dress. In either hand she held a wriggling snake. Was this a religion? Was it some sort of death ceremony? The woman’s smile made me think that whatever was depicted there was a symbolic ceremony and no one was about to be bitten, although I couldn’t be sure what she was up to.

The Finneys usually went to bed by ten. I figured I was safe as I’d said I wanted to go to sleep. It was eleven before my painting was finished. At eleven ten there was a knock on the door.