Through the Hidden Door (16 page)

“Dr. Dorothy!”

“I see you’ve got your paints out,” she said. She chuckled. “I thought maybe you’d like some chocolate with whipped cream? It’ll put more weight on you, and you’ll sleep well. I’m sure you have a lot of work ahead of you at the library.” In her hand was a Sheffield plate tray with two cups of cocoa, steaming away.

“I ... well, thank you,” I said, mumbling and shuffling backward toward my desk.

“May I come in, Barney?”

“Well, sure.”

She sat on the bed, placing the tray on a chair. I shoved most of the drawings into a binder while she was doing this and scattered papers over the rest.

“Drawing again?” she asked, chirping in her always bubbly voice.

“I was just now doing sketches of Roman architecture for Latin class. I’ve got a month’s work to make up.”

“I am sure you’ll do splendidly, Barney.” She blew slightly on the surface of her cocoa. As usual Dr. Dorothy’s hair spilled out of the bun that she piled it in with a dozen hairpins. As always her skirt and jacket were heathery tweed, the good heavy kind my dad buys when he’s in London. She had taken off her lab apron. Under it was a silk blouse and a strand of pearls. Her glasses hung on a red ribbon over her massive bosom, and she gazed at me as if she could see right through to the cells of my brain: “Drink your cocoa, Barney. I must talk to you.”

I swallowed a hot mouthful of it too fast. I felt the whipped cream stay on my upper lip. She handed me a napkin embroidered with forget-me-nots.

“Yes?” I said, my tongue still burning.

“I must ask you something without telling you much at all. I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I am not free to say anything. What I can tell you is that I know you went back to the cave. You must not do it again. You gave your word to your father, and your father placed you in our care for the rest of the school term. If Mr. Finney finds out you went back to the cave, the consequences will be very bad for you, Barney.” She paused and straightened out the ribbon that held her glasses. “When a boy gives his word, Mr. Finney takes it very seriously.”

“I ... I know,” I said, feeling myself go the color of a Delicious apple.

“You were there today, weren’t you, Barney?”

“I ... I was in the library today,” I said, my voice sliding up and then cracking a little.

“You’re too clean for the library, Barney. You have scrubbed yourself like an acolyte. That can mean only one thing.”

“Dr. Dorothy, there are no snakes in that cave. There are snake fangs but no snakes,” I blurted out.

“Snake fangs? What on earth are you talking about?”

She examined my drawings for a very long time, her cocoa cooling and forming a skin in the cup beside her.

“A cobra?” she said at last. “A cobra here in Massachusetts?”

“How can I put this?” I said. “The antivenins they used on me didn’t work. There’s a whole list of antivenins in an encyclopedia of natural history in the library. I looked it up. A cobra bite has to be treated with an antivenin they make up in India. They didn’t use that one on me because they didn’t think I could have been bitten by a cobra. Besides, the fangs in my drawings are exactly like the cobra fangs in the book. The snake’s called a
Naja naja.
It has one of the most deadly venoms in the world. Those little prongs, I thought they were spears, ivory spears at first. They’re cobra fangs.”

“That’s preposterous,” said Dr. Dorothy. “Cobras live only in hot climates.”

“But, Dr. Dorothy, first of all, do you know what the climate was like here in Massachusetts, say a hundred thousand years ago?”

“No, but—”

“Well, could a cobra or a snake like a cobra live in a temperate climate, something like we have now?”

“Possibly. But you’re talking about cobras in freezing caves, Barney.”

“That’s exactly it.”

“What’s exactly it?”

“I believe the snakes lived here in the wild and were brought into the cave, where they died. A hundred thousand years ago. I don’t know how long ago. But that’s what I believe.”

“By whom, may I ask? A race of people six inches tall? Cobras get to be six feet long, Barney.”

“Dr. Dorothy, we spent months in sixth grade learning how the Egyptians made pyramids as big as New York City skyscrapers almost with their bare hands. Without any steam shovels or electricity or metal or anything. Amazing things have happened. How could trees have grown inside a cave without sunlight? We don’t know, but they did. I don’t know if the snakes were drugged or trapped or if they played the flute and danced for them, but somehow this happened too, thousands and thousands of years ago.”

Dr. Dorothy sighed and glanced as if for God’s help at the ceiling light in my room.

“But the venom. It couldn’t possibly last that long.”

“Dr. Dorothy,” I said, “in the encyclopedia, even in a stupid pamphlet Mr. Silks gave me, it says venom has been tested and lasts on and on, indefinitely. Providing it’s kept at a below-freezing temperature. They haven’t tested it for long enough to know how long it does last. The cave is below freezing. The cave is the perfect temperature for storing venom, keeping it live. They store it in the medical labs at that temperature.”

Dr. Dorothy just stared. She clicked the string of pearls she was wearing between her fingers. Finally she said, “This puts me in an awful spot.”

“Why?”

“If you bring me one of the fangs you describe and I test it and the test is positive ... Her words stopped, and she stared again, at the light on my desk. “Mr. Finney will find this whole thing difficult to swallow,” she went on at last. “If you go back to the cave, he may be so angry that—”

“Dr. Dorothy,” I burst in, “I’ll take that chance. If Mr. Finney is furious, I guess I’ll have to live in the dorm again. He’ll kick me out of the house. But you can see my drawings for yourself, Dr. Dorothy. Please show them to Mr. Finney. Please convince him.” I put my head suddenly in my hands and just held it there like a heavy weight. “It’s not as if I’m doing anything bad, you know. We’ve found something wonderful down there.”

Dr. Dorothy picked invisible lint from the front of her blouse. “I am a scientist, Barney. I understand.”

“Well, do I have your permission to keep digging, then?”

“I’d like to see one of the fangs for myself, Barney. Bring me one of the fangs. Take it out ever so carefully by digging around it with a long-handled shovel. I can test it myself in my lab by injecting a tiny bit of it into a rat. If the venom is still live, I will talk to Mr. Finney myself on your behalf.”

“But Snowy won’t let me take anything out of the cave. If I even suggested it to him, if he caught me, he’d never take me back again.”

Dr. Dorothy sat straight-spined, her eyes skimming over my drawings. She inspected the cobra god and the tracings of the gold disks, and a drawing of a broken clay pot.

She went over my painting of the fresco we’d found on the wall that afternoon and my careful floor plans of each house. “Another thing I wasn’t going to tell you, Barney.” She stopped and looked at the skin that had formed on her cocoa and decided not to try it. “But since you insist on going back.... A couple of months ago I found a piece of charcoal in your pants cuff. I sent it off to a lab in Pasadena. Embedded in this charcoal were bits of molten glass, which were tested by a process called potassium argon dating.”

“Oh? How old was it?”

“Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand years.”

“Does Mr. Finney know?”

“Of course he knows. He said it could easily have come from a forest fire during one of the ice ages. Ninety thousand years ago the cave may not have even been formed. People find charcoal from trees struck by lightning aeons ago. He still says the other things you’ve found could be quite modern.”

“I wish I could bring you something,” I said.

“Do this, Barney,” she instructed, her eyes dreamy now. “We must get Mr. Finney back on our side. He may let you in the cave if he is sure there is no danger to you. Have you ever heard of a Havahart trap?”

“I don’t like this idea one bit,” said Snowy. Blindly I followed along through the woods behind him, string in one hand and cage in the other.

“It’s a rat, Snowy, not a guinea pig.”

“A rat has feelings.”

“Snowy, the rat has been given enough morphine by Dr. Dorothy to let it go through a nuclear bomb blast without noticing anything.”

“It’s killing all the same,” said Snowy.

“The rat has a brain tumor, Snowy. It’s going to die anyway very soon. It’s an old rat.”

“You better do the whole thing.”

“I told you I’d do the whole thing,” I said wearily. I had assured him of that at least seven times.

Snowy huffed and fussed all the way to the cave. He set to work by himself, not saying a word to me, way down at the farthest point of our digging. I took the wooden box and set it gently in the sand. The rat was beginning to come to after its morphine, and I wanted to hurry and not let it escape. Very slowly I stuck a piece of bacon in the far end of the box, watched while the rat smelled it and then shuffled over to it. While it was eating at one end of the trap I pulled out the removable bottom slat on the other. In one motion I slapped the whole box, rat inside, over one of the rings of cobra teeth. Then I dropped three pieces of bacon and two chunks of cheese right in the middle of the disk.

“Good-bye, rat,” I said, and left it there. It would probably scratch itself and be dead in two minutes.

For the next hour Snowy and I excavated what we called the Rich Man’s House, because of its garden and columns and paintings. There were eight rooms in this house. All empty and all decorated with miniature paintings of more fabulous jumping scenes involving weird-looking animals and smiling women. There was plumbing here all through the building. We found what seemed to be a pool, as the bottom was tiled and lined with a mosaic of fish. But what fish! Flying fish! Fish with legs, fish with horns on their heads. All no bigger than pictures on postage stamps. There were no signs of snakes in the paintings.

“Do you think the rat’s dead yet?” Snowy asked, not looking at me.

“I’ll see. Gee. It’s been an hour and a half.”

I wandered back to the rat cage and looked in the wire side. The rat was running around like a mechanical toy. It must have hit all the fangs by this time. The bacon and cheese were gone from the disk. There was no way this plump rat could have slithered between the fangs and gotten at the food. It had to have climbed into the circle of deadly points. But it was alive still. Why?

Poor thing’s probably cold,
I said to myself. I opened the top hole of the cage and dropped more bacon and pieces of cheddar onto the disk, and this time left my lantern there to keep the rat warm.

“Still kicking,” I said to Snowy. We dug for another length of time and uncovered two outbuildings near the main part of the Rich Man’s House. Then I went back.

The rat lay dead in the back of the cage. Only one piece of bacon had been nibbled. The heat from the lantern had melted the cheddar cheese over the gold face on the disk. “Dead!” I yelled to Snowy.

“You pick up the body,” said Snowy. “I don’t want to see it.”

“Don’t worry!” Ï called back. I lifted the box carefully off the circle of fangs and poked the rat a couple of times to make sure he was dead. “Thanks, old man,” I murmured to the rat. It was funny ... the lantern had something to do with this.... But of course. I knelt in the sand. The venom must have been frozen solid until I left the light on top of the cage. Two months before there had been a lantern sitting there for half an hour while I’d traced the faces on the disks. Then I’d reached down in for my little tracing and cut my finger.... The heat had liquefied and activated the poison. How long would it have stayed frozen? Forever?

I could see Snowy’s back turned to me in disgust as he dug about twenty yards away. This was my chance. Hardly moving, I took my trowel, dug up one of the fangs, and shoveled it carefully into the box with the rat.

That evening I presented Dr. Dorothy with the rat’s body. While Snowy was doing dishes I brought out the tooth.

“You got one! Does he know?” she whispered, looking over at Snowy, who was fixing Rosie’s bedding.

“No. Don’t let him see it.”

Dr. Dorothy took the fang into her lab and, using a series of needles and a suction tube, emptied it of venom. The venom was dark yellow. There were only two drops. Then she withdrew some blood from the rat and told me to go upstairs for an hour.

An hour turned into two hours. I had plenty of homework to fill the time. But I fidgeted over it, trying to overhear if she was talking with Finney yet or still doing tests in her lab.

I did not know until morning. Then, when she’d driven us up to school and Snowy had left the car and raced ahead to class, she slipped a small ring box to me. “The tooth’s in there,” she said. “The venom was live all right. You knew that when the rat died, though.”

“Did you talk to Mr. Finney?” I asked. “Is he mad at me? Is he going to make me live in the dorm again?”

“You may stay with us, Barney,” said Dr. Dorothy. “He doesn’t want you back at the dorm with those boys. He promised your father he’d see you safely through the year.”