Through the Hidden Door (6 page)

I sat in the sand, my pants frigid and wet. “Don’t leave me, Snowy,” I wailed. “I’m sorry I didn’t rescue the dog like you did. I know I’m just a gutless wimp! I’m a rotten louse and I know it. But don’t leave me!”

Snowy didn’t answer, but soon there was a glow of light from a spot not so far away. It flared and illuminated the space all around.

We were in a vast sandy-bottomed cave, covered by a roof domed as perfectly as a planetarium’s. Down from the ceiling hung fat, drunken columns of tiered stone. They glistened in the lamplight and looked just like upside-down stacks of glass pancakes.

The floor of the cave, as far as I could see in all directions, was powdery mint-colored sand. I played with a handful of it but couldn’t tell if the greenish kerosene light altered the color. Somewhere beyond the reach of the lamp a river ran. Snowy loped toward me, swinging his lamp and marveling at the huge secrecy of the place just as I did.

When he came up beside me, he asked, “Still scared? Well, don’t be. We’re perfectly safe. I’ll take you home soon.”

“But how come ... I began. “There aren’t supposed to be any caves around Greenfield. We’d have a science trip to them if there were. We’d at least have heard about them. There’s tourist brochures on everything else around town. How—”

“The dog led me. I just followed her.”

“But why hasn’t anybody else—”

“Mr. Finney says it was the earthquake back in October. Right at the entrance to this cave is a rock that must have moved slightly. I can tell because there was a tangled-up bunch of dried moss over the slit where we crawled in. Just as if it had been pulled away. I’ve carefully stuffed the crack with new earth and moss. No one could find this place again, Barney. Even I couldn’t find it if I hadn’t marked it when the dog went in the entrance under the rock. All the wild places, rocks and hills and stuff, look alike out here. So I marked it secretly.”

“Then why blindfold me?”

“Because if we keep coming back here again and again, you might know where the entrance is after a while.”

“But so what? And why should I want to come back here again and again?”

“Barney, something’s down here.”

“What?” I shouted at him.

“You’ll see. But first, look around at the sand.”

“Okay. Sand is sand.”

“Right. You see my footprints. Where I’m taking you you’ll see my footprints and the dog’s from a couple of days ago. That’s all.”

“So what?”

“The rest of the sand is as smooth as a beach after a full tide’s gone out. See! The sand in here has a little crust. Nobody has been in this cave at all. If they had been, they’d have left footprints. You can’t go onto a beach and then walk back and leave no footprints. When I followed the dog here, Barney, there were only her footprints in the sand. Not a grain had been disturbed other than the dog’s paw prints.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my damp pants and looked into the darkness that lay around us. What had Snowy found? Why was he dickering around with me like this? I wanted to say “Get to the point!” but I didn’t. Instead I picked up a little crust of the sand where it lay untouched and broke it between my fingers like bread.

“How do we get out of here?” I asked him, my fears welling up suddenly again.

“Don’t worry. It’s easy. We walk out, practically, through another tunnel. The exit is in another part of the cave. But we’ll always come in by the slide down, Barney, because if you ever find out how we get here, if the blindfold slips, if anybody ever follows us, you’ll know how to get in, but not out.”

“How did you find the way out? You could have been trapped in this place forever!”

Snowy smiled but didn’t answer me. He turned around, and I followed him over to the bank of the river. The water ran as black as India ink. “There are fish in there,” he told me. “If you shine the light just so, you can see them swim.” We followed alongside for several hundred yards. The cave did not end. Was it miles big? Finally Snowy pointed to a spot in the sand where he’d left a garden trowel. “Look,” he said.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Wake up, Barney. I’m the one who’s supposed to be blind. Look there.”

I got down on my hands and knees. “Is this where the dog led you?” I asked. I couldn’t think of anything else to say because what I saw made no sense at all.

Snowy nodded. “I’ve dug all around here with the trowel. There’s nothing else but that. Maybe somewhere else there’s more. What do you think of it?”

Leading from where I was kneeling down to the edge of the water was a set of twelve marble stairs, each no bigger than half an inch high and two inches wide.

“This is impossible, Snowy,” I said.

“I know,” Snowy agreed. “But it is ... well, it
is
there and all.”

“It must have been an Indian toy, a game, maybe an Indian ritual of some kind.... Just like Mr. Finney and the guy at U. Mass. said. Maybe it’s what kept the squaws busy when the braves were away hunting. Maybe they made sort of architectural models of things before they built them full-scale.”

“Maybe,” said Snowy. “Except Mr. Finney told me about the Indians who lived here before the white man came. They were Mohicans. They built wigwams. Nothing like this.”

“Another tribe. Before the Mohicans.”

“How about the bone, Barney?”

“Well, this explains the bone just the way the guy at U. Mass. said. The Indians made it by carving up a much larger piece of bone,” I reasoned, logical explanations darting around in my head like gnats. “You ever see how the Chinese can carve up a piece of ivory? With tiny castles and pagodas and dragons? The old ones are worth a fortune. You could carve any bone you wanted with your eyes closed if you took the time. It was probably part of some death ceremony.”

“Barney,” said Snowy, “feel the steps. Close your eyes and feel the surface of them.”

I did as he told me. “What of it?” I asked. “They’re stone. What am I supposed to feel?”

“Barney, the middles of the steps are worn.”

Needles of electricity frisked through my fingers. My heart was still and light, and I knew I would come back and back and back, though the cave would be like Antarctica in winter and I’d probably go through the tortures of the damned living up to Snowy’s strange rules. I would come back until I knew what else lay here deep under the sand and how a set of tiny steps had come to be built in a place that might not have heard a human voice since time began.

Snowy doused the light. In complete blackness he led me by the hand, then turned me and turned me until I had no sense of direction left. We walked over some sand, but then I felt rough stone underfoot.
No footprints,
I thought.
He’s making sure I don’t know the way out.
For five or six minutes we made our way on the uneven rock, until we slipped into a passageway at the edge of the cave. We followed a labyrinth that led on like a slimy-walled funhouse, Snowy gliding through the dark, me stumbling behind him. The tunnel seemed to lead around the perimeter of the cave, but I wasn’t sure. He blindfolded me at the last place we could stand up. Then we crawled out the way we’d come in.

Outside I could not see any better through the blindfold than I could in the cave’s darkest places, but I felt the weak sun on my face, and I grabbed hold of a piece of tree branch, just to make sure it was there.

“So what do you want to do, Barney?” asked Snowy.

I sucked in the deepest breath I could, let it out, and said, “Holy Christmas, Snowy. We’ve got to find more!”

E
XPLORING THE CAVE WAS
not going to be easy for me. Looming ahead was not a delicious winter of exploring but a dangerous one of after-school sports. Sader and Damascus controlled the hockey rink, Hines and Swoboda the basketball court, and Brett MacRea ruled wrestling. After my disaster paper was done, Silks had stopped me in the hall and said I’d better show up for winter sports if I didn’t want to become a lazy slob in addition to everything else I was.

Through the school grapevine everyone knew Snowy Cobb wasn’t expected to take sports because he couldn’t see a beach ball coming at him from ten feet away. I was healthy, but I knew my former friends well.

Someone had stolen Rudy’s cleats one year. Rudy waited till after football season was over. Two well-aimed pucks and a couple of bone-numbing checks with a hockey stick brought the cleats back and put the thief in a rubber neck brace for three weeks. Someone else had once got on Brett MacRea about his zitty complexion. Brett spiked him so badly on a slide into second base in a practice game the following day that the boy wound up with twenty stitches and played late-inning right field for the rest of the season. I didn’t want to imagine what Brett could do in a wrestling match. I took my chances with basketball. I also took my dad’s advice on being dealt a bad hand of cards. Bluff for a while, then fold and wait for the next deal.

Our first practice game was the day after Snowy showed me the cave. I bluffed, feinting, leaping, pretending to go for it like a rookie on the make for first string. Twenty minutes into the game Swoboda slammed me in the solar plexus with an elbow while I was in the middle of a jump shot. The coach’s back was turned. At first I couldn’t tell whether Shawn meant it, because he reached down to give me a hand to my feet, good-buddy style. Then his eyes lit up with a jewel-like gleam that said,
This is a warning, squealer!
I did not get to my feet.

By the time they got me to the infirmary, I was quite well again. As a matter of fact, when I’d gotten back my wind, I was fine. But why say so?
Every cloud has a silver lining,
I told myself, so I lay in my cot and moaned, remembering the details of what Dr. Feinstein says when my father throws his back out. All twelve Budweiser Clydesdales couldn’t have dragged me back on the basketball court.

The doctor came at eight. By then I’d had time to go over the whole nine yards of bad backs—sciatica, weak links in muscle chains, hateful rehabilitative exercises in the morning—as if I were preparing for a science test.

I complained of a knifelike throbbing in my lower back on the right side. I pointed where the shooting pains radiated down the sciatic nerve on the back of my right leg. I winced because my groin was involved and the entire pelvic cavity felt hot inside.

Naturally the doctor lifted each of my legs in an arc. At exactly forty-five degrees measured on any pocket protractor I screamed so loud the doctor jumped.

“You have a back spasm, young man. Do you know what that is?” the doctor asked.

“No! It hurts.”

“Of course it hurts.” He listened to my chest and took my blood pressure. “The human back is like a chain,” he said, a hand on my shoulder. “One weak link and the whole thing goes. You’re lucky you didn’t compress a disk.”

I rolled my eyes at him.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to give up sports for a while.”

“That’s not fair!” I said.

He left me with some pills and a booklet of exercise regimens.

Silks came by after that. I think he gave me a little test. “Anyone push you down, Pennimen?”

“Not on purpose, Mr. Silks.”

“Good. Good. No sign of that lisp creeping back, eh?”

“Oh, no!” I answered. “Thanks to you.”

“Good. Well, see you back on the basketball court soon, I hope.”

I prayed Mr. Silks would not have a cure for back spasms the way he had a cure for speech defects. “As soon as the doctor lets me,” I said as encouragingly as I could.

“Good. Meantime you’re still due to lose your private room. I’ve dug up a roommate for you. Sixth grader. Name’s Mellor. Used to room with Cobb.”

“What happened to Snowy Cobb?” I asked smoothly, wishing he’d found a larger and neater person for me to room with.

“Cobb’s a day student now. Moved into town. Night, Pennimen.”

Next morning at eight Peter Mellor spread his possessions all over my room. He owned a replica of every team’s football helmet in the NFL. Twenty-eight helmets complete with bulky face guards. Try as he might, he couldn’t fit them all on the shelves together, so he chose to display one conference at a time. This still gave me no shelf space, but Peter, unlike my senior classmates, at least talked to me and was a live body in the room in case Rudy or one of the boys had ideas about getting me at night. Peter even showed sympathy for my back, or maybe it drove him nuts that I was forced to miss sports. He told me gravity boots had cured a linebacker of the Miami Dolphins of a fused spine. He’d read it in
Sports Illustrated.
Gravity boots would get me back in basketball right away. I told him I didn’t think there were any gravity boots on campus. No problem, Peter answered. Krazy Glue a pair of ski boots to the doorway. Do a headstand on a chair. He would get my feet locked in, and I could hang for fifteen minutes. My back would fall into place. I said I had to do a five-hundred-page paper on South American agriculture. I told Peter it would take me all winter in the library. I was preparing him for my absences in the cave.

When I got Snowy’s note in my mailbox next morning, I was idiotically happy. At two thirty I limped conspicuously all the way to the caretaker’s shed and picked up two large flashlights and a heavy trowel, as the note specified. From there I made it unseen to the stables in half a minute at a sprint.

I didn’t argue with the blindfold. I took it as solemnly as medicine. I didn’t argue during our roundabout trip through the woods. I didn’t scream in the tunnel or wobble on the ledge. Snowy and I did not talk until we were in the cave and at the site of the twelve small steps.

Then, as in the days to come, I felt that the cave was half mine, anyway, even if I didn’t know its location. When we were working, Snowy and I were brothers. In the outside he was suspicious of everything.

Whatever else was in the cave, besides the steps, was hidden under a sea of sand. We dug at random, with garden trowels, all around where the steps were, as deeply as the soft green sand allowed. There was nothing. Snowy tried another place twenty feet away. I did the same in another direction. Again not so much as a pebble appeared in our trowels.