Through the Hidden Door (19 page)

In a straight line, on my hands and knees, I inched ahead. All my muscles and every cell in my brain focused on my hearing. I heard nothing. Then the sound of cloth, just cloth wrinkling against a shoulder or a leg. Where? Was it my own shirt I heard?

There were a hundred places in the old kitchen for someone to conceal himself. If I wanted, I could crouch unseen myself, soundlessly, behind a cabinet or under a sink—if I was lucky—but then I would be cornered like a rabbit in a hole. If somebody was in here, what were they waiting for?

I began trying to make myself see in the dark. Listening was seeing in the dark. My skin took on a way of listening. There were hairs on my forehead and the knuckles of my fingers that I hadn’t known existed. I could feel if I was close to a wall or an object because the sense of solidness instead of open air warned every hair on my body whether I was near something or not.

The distance from the kitchen to the beginning of the long passageway was normally a ten-second stroll. I made it, counting seconds to steady myself, in eleven minutes. If they were here, why didn’t they pounce on me? If they were here, why didn’t they turn on a light?
Because,
said the god of logic, who was close by my ear,
the electricity is turned off down here, and they don’t have flashlights.
I knew just where I was. Beside a row of water casks that sat on the pantry floor. To my left was another sink. Then I remembered the crunchy Styrofoam packing bubbles. I was careful not to step on them. It took me another six minutes to stash my own flashlight behind the casks. Then I padded on. Out toward the long brick passageway, out toward the door at the end. A distance of a hundred and fifty yards. I began to walk. If they were anywhere, they would not be here. They would not yet know where I was. They were blind and I was blind, but I was not as blind as they because every bit of me but my eyes was seeing, and I knew the territory. As quietly as a bird gliding I went farther and farther toward the exit.
“In the country of the blind,”
ran Mr. Greeves’s words in my mind,
“the one-eyed man is king.” I am the one-eyed man,
I added to it. I reached the stairs at the far end of the tunnel. Now at least there were two minutes between me and the kitchen. I tiptoed the last set of steps, my legs aching in the effort not to make them creak, and fit my key into the crumbling lock. It turned, and I was outside, in the sun, in the wind, in the blowing flax and rye grass.

I shivered and could not stop.
You dumbo,
I told myself.
There was no one there.
“Snowy!” I yelled, walking into the stable. There was no answer. I saw something move from the very corner of my eye. A small brown rat tumbled into a hole beneath the straw.

I stood quite still for a moment. Nothing was wrong.
Just an old page on a calendar,
I said to myself.
Doesn’t mean a thing.
I went into the stable. Into the first stall. I plunged my hand deep into the humus on the windowsill for my gun. It was gone.

Time lingered and spun by with no sounds in it, no movements. In my hand were two useless keys. Useless because if Rudy or Danny decided to jump me and fight me, I wouldn’t have a chance in a million of getting away, fighting back, or being heard. I watched a spider make its way down a sun-frosted bit of web into a cistern in the corner. The cistern was full of ancient rainwater and fermented oats. It was about ten feet deep and would be a nice place to throw me after they’d finished beating me up.
Get out of here,
I told myself, but I could not will my legs to move. Where was my gun? Who had taken it? I leaned softly against the wooden wall of the stall.

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.”

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.