Through the Hidden Door (20 page)

“Get them, Barney. Get them!” He was crying for the village, for our secret, like a mother animal whose young is being tortured in front of her.

I slipped the little emerald on the gun’s handle down and over.
Aim. Aim right, you fool, I told myself.
KAPOW! The glass of Rudy’s flashlight shattered. Then I did the same with our five kerosene lamps.
Kapow!
The lamps exploded one by one. They went down the way penny arcade ducks fall, and the cave resounded with the shots in its sudden darkness. From the ceiling there was a great whirring. The piercing shrieks from squadrons of panicking bats filled the air all around like a thousand dog whistles.

Snowy took my hand in his and led me out. We slipped away, ourselves like snakes. À bat brushed my ear with its velvet wing. I heard the click of its steel-sharp nails as it flew by.

I
DID NOT TALK
to Snowy on the way back. He’d blindfolded me as usual but sobbed so horribly, there was no good in my doing anything but being quiet. I did not cry. I was too angry. After a bit Snowy’s crying died down, and I supposed he was thinking the same thoughts I was. About the bats ripping the hair off the boys. About them starving there for a week, about them running into the cobra teeth or just plain dying of fear and cold. I pictured Rudy on his hands and knees pleading. I pictured them calling for help and help not ever coming. I called him the filthiest name I knew.

I did not say anything until the turf underfoot turned to soft pine needles and I knew we were at the edge of the woods near the school.

“Snowy?” I said.

No answer.

“The hell with this!” I grumbled, and ripped off the black cloth over my eyes.

Snowy was gone. How long had I been walking alone?

I stumbled into the stable. What had happened and what was going to happen gurgled and milled and juggled around in my brain like a ten-colored pinwheel.

The boys would be missed whether I said anything or not. The police and fire rescue squad would spend the next month looking for the cave. Snowy would never give anyone a clue where it was. And where was Snowy? I knew he would disappear for a while. Then suddenly I knew very well where he was. He had seen me hide my gun, the first day I’d been in the stable. The old kitchen in the cellar was one of his hiding places. Snowy had changed the calendar. Snowy had stored his
Soldier of Fortune
mail order equipment down there. That explained all the loose Styrofoam. The Styrofoam couldn’t have come from 1951. It hadn’t even been invented back then. He had probably picked the locks to the old kitchen months before Finney gave me the keys.

I sat down on a dirty pile of straw and tried to think. I could not. My heart, stomach, and lungs welled up with anger like sickness. Again the image of a mother animal and her young returned clearly, this time of a mother raccoon, her cub shot dead at her feet by a hunter. I had witnessed that once. She had thrown herself on the hunter and bitten his leg to pieces. Up in the quad I heard faint music. I’d forgotten there was a dance and barbecue going on.

I wandered around the edge of the campus. My mind had emptied. The thoughts that wanted to start there couldn’t get off the ground. I didn’t have any idea what time it was until I realized that complete darkness had fallen, and because it was June, that meant it must have been somewhere around nine. I smelled food. I walked up to the quad, my hands in my pockets.

There was a rock band playing. Five musicians. I walked up to the grill and asked for a hamburger. The cook turned to face me. It was Silks.

The headmaster usually did the barbecue honors with a big chef’s hat on for effect. Finney had loved it. Finney always gave you a hot dog with a flourish, as if he were handing you a plate of cherries jubilee.

Silks’s eyes focused and saw me. He dropped his barbecue fork and whispered something to a woman tending a deep fry. Then he came around the table and placed both his hands on my shoulders. He began to push me.

He shoved me gently, without a word, into a dark corner of the main building, behind a pine tree. “Where are the boys, Barney?” he asked. I looked into his eyes. They were full of terror. Silks had never called me Barney in the three years I’d been at Winchester.

“What boys?” I said.

“Barney, Mr. Damascus is here tonight. He’s come for graduation. Mr. and Mrs. Sader too. Their sons are missing. So are MacRea and Swoboda and Hines. Where are they? They haven’t been seen for six hours!”

“How should I know?” I said, fascinated by Silks’s voice and eyes. I had never heard him speak softly or seen him afraid.

“Barney, answer me. Your friend Clarence Cobb is not at the Finneys’. He’s gone. Mr. Finney is very worried. Apparently Clarence had some kind of pet ... a kitten?”

“A guinea pig,” I stated flatly.

“Yes, well, Cobb and the guinea pig are gone. You know where those boys are, Barney. Please tell me.”

“I’m hungry,” I said.

Silks dropped his hands from my shoulders to his sides. “Go to my office. Please, Barney. I’ll see someone brings you a hamburger and a soda. Go to my office.”

I was unsure what to do. My intelligence was as feeble as a light bulb in a brownout. Where was Snowy? I stumbled over to the main building, went into the headmaster’s office, and sat and waited for Martin Silks. Over and over one idea spun itself around and around: that the five boys who had wrecked everything we had spent months uncovering were still in our cave. Would they find the way out? I doubted it. Only Snowy knew where the recess in the cave wall was. The boys would sit in that cave forever. They would starve, freeze, or scare themselves to death. I wanted that to happen.

I heard footsteps clatter down the hall. I knew I was in a dream. An evil dream that would soon be over. While I waited in an uncomfortable plastic molded chair, I dug my fingernails into my face to see if I could wake myself up. I could think only of Snowy. Snowy and Rosie.

Silks brought me a hamburger. Medium rare.

While I was eating he sat outside at his secretary’s desk typing something. When I had finished, he said only, “Barney, I will make it worth your while.”

“What?” I asked.

“Barney, you know where they are, don’t you?”

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t handle the “Barney” from Mr. Silks. But I was beginning to come out of the dream.

Silks sat on the edge of his big Danish-modern desk, not behind it. He showed me a letter on Winchester Academy stationery. It was addressed to the dean of admissions at Hotchkiss.

The letter explained that due to a last minute change of plans on the part of my father I was not to attend school in Europe, and it asked that I be admitted to Hotchkiss in September. It said that I was a “significant student.” It listed my grades for all three years as 4.0 including today’s exams, which could hardly have been corrected yet. It said I was valedictorian of the class.

I just stared at the letter. I was positive I was back in the dream. “We don’t have a valedictorian,” I said.

“We do now, Pennimen,” said Silks. “I thought I’d throw that in. These important schools like achievers. This letter is late, but it will get you in. Over the years more than a hundred boys have gone from Winchester to Hotchkiss.” He dangled his leg, smiled, and placed the letter square on the desk, delicately, as if it were a gold bullion certificate. “If you want me to put in anything else—other interests? Anything?” Then, when I said nothing, he added, “If the boys have hurt you, Pennimen, I will discipline them. Just tell me where they are.”

I didn’t answer. I tried to create my father’s voice in my head. I tried to listen to what he would tell me to do. Instead all I heard was the band outside the window and my own voice droning “If” for countless mornings in this office.

“Where are the boys, Pennimen?” he said sharply.

I said nothing.

“Would you prefer another school, Pennimen?” Silks asked anxiously.

“Mr. Silks?”

“Where are they? Pennimen?”

“Mr. Silks, are you making a deal with me?”

“Exactly. We’ve made deals before. Haven’t we?”

“Yes, but I didn’t do the deal.”

“Well, this time you will, won’t you?” He glanced jumpily out the window at the party. Girls and boys were dancing wildly. The music was too loud for me to think.

“I tell you where the boys are, and you get to keep your job, right?” I asked him.

“And you get to go to Hotchkiss,” he said, “and with high honors, as valedictorian of your class, may I add?”

I squinted at him as if he were hard to see. “You put in the letter that I had a four-point-oh average. Exams haven’t been corrected yet.”

Silks grinned. “Hotchkiss won’t double-check,” he said. “We’re two of a kind, Pennimen.” He extended his right hand. “It’s the way the world works, boy.”

I looked at his hand. I was listening to my own voice hanging in the air from other days. Oh, how I had hated “If.” But the words of the first verse rang, singsong, in my ears and took on the beat of the rock drummer outside. Stupid, sappy, worn-out words. I despised them because Silks had made me say them over and over, but the poem haunted me in my own voice.
“Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies.”

“Barney,” Silks repeated, his hand still outstretched to mine, “it’s the way the world works.”

“No, it isn’t,” I answered. The letter drifted from my hand to the floor.

Silks’s voice became its usual sharp bark again. “All right, Pennimen. You stay put. I’m going to call the cops. I’m going to tell them you had something to do with the disappearance of five young men. Believe me, they’ll get it out of you.”

I did not stay put. While Silks went to the telephone I opened the window, the one Finney’d let me out when Rudy and his friends were at the door, and walked out into the middle of the party. A girl asked me to dance. I stared right through her. I wandered down to the stable again.

The sounds of the dance floated downhill from the school. “You rotten, dirty scum!” I yelled to the pattering rats and empty stalls. “You deserve to die, Sader. All you’ll ever do in this world is destroy things.” I called them names. I swore words I’d never said before. Then I got up and kicked in the partition between two of the old stalls, as if my feet and legs were axes and I were chopping down the building.

Finney found me, asleep on a pile of straw, at ten o’clock.

“Barney,” he said, jogging my shoulder, “are you all right?”

I lifted my head and wiped the filth from my face.

“What? What happened?”

“Barney. Snowy is gone. He has taken Rosie and her two babies with him. I don’t worry about him. I know he’s hiding someplace. But the five boys are missing. They were not at the cookout or the dance. They are not in downtown Greenfield. The police have been called. Where are they, Barney?”

My mouth was full of chaff. “Mr. Finney,” I said, “I will not tell.”

I saw the moonlight wink off Finney’s glasses. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. “I see,” he said at last.

“Everything,” I repeated. “They wrecked everything. Our little houses, the sheds. Everything. They were laughing, Mr. Finney. They thought it was more fun than a circus. They thought Snowy and I ... Here I nearly retched. “They thought we had
built
the place. Thought we were playing, like kids. Make believe.”

“And what did you do?”

“I ... my father gave me a gun, Mr. Finney. Early in the year when—”

“What? What gun? What did you do, Pennimen?”

“I shot out their flashlight. The kerosene lights. Then we left. Snowy must have gone off somewhere in the middle of the woods. I don’t know. I was blindfolded. I couldn’t see. I kept asking Snowy what we were going to do. See? And he didn’t answer. I didn’t even know he’d taken off until I got practically to the stable. The boys are still down there. When you go in the cave, you have to slide down a chute, sort of. It’s too slippery and steep to climb up. Only Snowy knows the way out.”

“You shot out their lights!”

“Yes.”

“Did you want to shoot the boys instead?” he asked in a voice so low I could barely hear it.

I waited a minute to answer, “Yes,” I said.

“But you did not.”

“No. I should have.”

“Where is the gun now?”

It was still in my pocket. I gave it to Finney. The silver peacock on the handle flashed a little in Finney’s hands. A full moon was shining right in the hayloft window.

“Pennimen,” said Finney, “it could take a month with ten state troopers to find that cave. Will you go back? Will you save those boys’ lives?”

“I don’t know the way,” I said.

“If you did know the way, Pennimen, would you? Or would you leave them there to die?”

“Let them rot!” I said. “They’ll go out in the world and mug old ladies in dark alleys, or they’ll set a building on fire. They’ll grow up and experiment on innocent animals. They’ll beat their wives and kids. All those things you read in the papers. Mr. Finney, that’s the kind of boys they are. You know that too. Leave them. Let them suffer for a change. Let them be on the other side of the fence.”

“Why didn’t you pull the trigger on them instead of the lights, Pennimen?”

“Because I was a chicken, that’s why.”

“No, Pennimen.” Finney touched my shoulder firmly. “You didn’t do it because you are made of different stuff from them.”

Pulling his wooden leg under him, Finney lowered himself to the floor. He took my hand in his, ugly finger stump and all, and as he had in his office the day this all began, he locked his bird bright eyes on mine in the gossamer light of the early summer moon. “Go get them, Pennimen,” he said.

“I don’t know the way.”

“Yes, you do.”

Something I’d said that afternoon prickled at the back of my mind. I had asked Snowy why we were going a new way because ... it wasn’t the right way, it wasn’t the way we’d gone before. How had I known?
The way out,
a voice inside me insisted.
You still don’t know the way out of the cave. The dog,
my other self answered it quickly.
Take the dog like Snowy did. The dog led Snowy out the first time he went down. The dog knows the way.