Through the Hidden Door (9 page)

At the very bottom was the surface I’d felt with the tips of my fingers.

I straddled it and shone the flashlight down on it. There below me, the size of a domino, was a white stone block. It had been cut in a perfect rectangle. Beyond it was another, just the same, and three more.

Snowy slipped opposite me into the hole. He just fit. “My God!” we both said together, for the stones had all been perfectly chiseled and set in the soft clay around them.

“Somebody
made
this, Barney!” crowed Snowy. “Somebody made this just the way they made the steps. There
is
more here! There
is
!”

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“I don’t know! Looks something like a pathway,” said Snowy.

“I think so too.” I brushed it cleaner and cleaner. “Leading to the river. And the other way leading back into the cave.”

“Which way do we go?” he asked.

“Back, I think. If the road goes anywhere, it would be away from the river.”

Snowy wiped his sweaty face with his forearm. “Wait,” he said. “The steps on the other side of the river? They’re directly opposite this road. Maybe nothing’s here and it’s all on the other side?”

All, I thought. All. What was
all
going to be? A village? One little play hut? Was this a joke? Or a model? “Snowy,” I said, “you know what?”

“What?”

“Suppose we’re looking at something that no one has seen or touched since before the birth of Christ. Maybe since the Greeks or Noah’s ark. How do we ... not wreck it by mistake?”

“Which way, Barney?” said Snowy, unimpressed.

“Back,” I insisted. “Back into the cave on this side of the river.... Oh, no. Dammit,” I added. “Look what we’ve done. Just where we want to dig we’ve covered over the surface with the sand we’ve cleared from this hole.”

Snowy said nothing. He gazed at the sand mountain unhappily. He and I knew it would take a lot of work to get rid of it. And then what? Supposing we threw all that sand on top of another place that turned out to be promising? How were we going to deal with all the sand we dug up?

“We have to think about how to do this better,” said Snowy. “If only there was a way ... you know, when they send divers down to look at shipwrecks, they don’t just dump them overboard in the middle of the ocean. I’ve watched it on TV. They have a sonar or something that they beam at the bottom to see if anything’s down there.”

“But we don’t have a sonar or a periscope camera, and we don’t have a scientist to tell us what to do,” I said.

“Well, supposing we took something. I don’t know, like a broom handle. And we attached the blade of your pocketknife to the end of it.”

“A boathook. Finney’s got one in his garage. Under all those old tires. It’s heavy and long. The tip is rounded, but I can file it to a point.”

We called them “soundings” after the sonar on the ships. Altogether we made seventeen before we began to dig again.

“We still have to do something with the sand we dig up,” Snowy reminded me. “So as not to just throw it on top of another diggable place.”

“Put it in the river?”

“Supposing that floods the river, and the water ruins all our digging?”

“Will it?”

“I don’t know. We’ll just have to risk it.”

“Okay. Once we find something really big, we dig in shifts. Half an hour digging, half an hour hauling sand away, then switch.”

“That’ll double the time it takes to find anything,” said Snowy.

“We could hire high school kids from Greenfield,” I said.

Snowy was furious. “Don’t ever make jokes about bringing anybody else here,” he warned me. “You hear me, Barney? This is my cave. My cave.”

“Come on,” I answered, but I knew I’d never say anything like that again.

By this time Snowy had stolen all the remaining site stakes from the pool digging company, which had stopped work because of the frozen ground. We had placed stick markers in those soundings that had stone bottoms. There were four. The rest of the time the boathook had hit soft, dense clay.

“I wish we had a periscope with a light,” I moaned. “I wish we had an electric shovel, and I wish the cave were at least fifty degrees.”

“You giving up?”

“Of course not. I can wish, can’t I?”

“Okay. Let’s go. We’ve got four sites with stone.”

“But which one?” I said. “Wait a minute. Let’s do something smart for a change. Let’s take each of the soundings with stone underneath and make lots more soundings around it to see if we can find some other stuff that feels like something else. Otherwise we might just hit the road and more road.”

My imagination was flying. I couldn’t keep it from what t knew were idiot ideas. Finally I rested on the boathook after several jabs and asked point-blank, “Where did you read that story about the pygmies on the Pacific island, Snowy?” I was hoping, just hoping that he might say
National Geographic
or
The New York Times.

“I don’t remember,” he answered. “But it’s true.”

“How do you know it’s true?”

“My father told me,” he said solemnly.

I pried him a little. “Did your dad ... did he interview the guy who saw the—”

“My father does secret work for the government,” Snowy snapped. “I’m not supposed to discuss it.”

We made more soundings. And all the while I thought about the men, fuzzy and distant, that Snowy had circled with question marks in the
Soldier of Fortunes.
Was he looking for his dad among those strange men? Could his father actually be in one of those pictures?

“Here! Here! Here!” he shouted suddenly, after taking the boathook and turning it around the way a surgeon might explore with a scalpel—gently, lightly as a fly.

“What have you got? Another stone? What?” I asked.

“It’s a thing,” Snowy answered.

We scrabbled and gouged for what seemed six hours but turned out to be two. And then we stood over them.

“Jackpot!” said Snowy.

For a few seconds neither Snowy nor I moved. The squashed sand beneath our knees trickled stubbornly back down into the pit. I listened to the silence, broken only by the eternal dripping of the ceiling and the low roar of the underground river.

In the center of our little pit the stone roadway widened into a perfectly paved circle, then continued off into the cave. But at the far side of the circle sat two glistening black figures.

They were about the size of jackrabbits. Heads of men, helmeted, with curly beards jutting out, had been carved onto the bodies of curled-up serpents. Each had a fiercely opened cape around his head and shoulders. Each had a squared-off beard and savage, staring eyes.

Later I drew one, exactly as we first saw him, sitting on a bed of sandy clay in the flickering light of our lantern.

Snowy and I both reached out at the same instant, hands trembling, and our eyes bugging out like kids in a toy store. We touched them. Then both of us went into a frantic dive action, squirming ourselves down to ground level, shining the light on every detail, caressing them as if they were alive.

“They’re sunk way into the ground,” said Snowy. “Can’t move ’em.”

“What are they made of?” I asked. “It looks like a kind of black glass.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, but what are they? What do they mean?”

“Some kind of ... well, gods or mythical demons. Some kind of guards? Beginning of something? A gateway! Maybe this part of the road leads to where the people lived who made these things. It almost looks as if they were put here to mark the road and scare people.”

“Scare people?”

“Well, say this is a scale model of some Indian civilization. Look at the size of the river steps. In scale that would make a person about six, eight inches tall. Okay? These things are over a foot and a half tall. They’d be terrifying full size, three times the height of a man. I wonder where the real thing would be?” I said.

“The real thing?” Snowy asked.

“The real road. The real statues. The real Indian civilization that this is a scale model of.”

“Barney,” said Snowy, “this is the real thing. This is no scale model.”

“How do you know so much?”

Snowy shrugged absentmindedly. I knew he was thinking about Pacific pygmies. Meantime he stared, calculating, from one to another of the man-serpents. “This is the way we go, Barney,” he said, pointing between them to the road that led into a bank of sand.

We said nothing to Finney that night or the next two. I was exhausted and fell into bed each night around seven. Snowy, who never talked much about the cave anyway, was entirely caught up in the birth of twelve new guinea pigs. We began getting up at six and would gulp down four eggs, toast, a quart of milk and orange juice between us, and pack an equally big lunch. Dr. Dorothy said she felt as if she were feeding two forest rangers.

We dug for four full days, finding nothing but more road. I paced off the distance we’d covered. Twenty-one yards. Little white brick followed little white brick. The only other things we came across were some odd black holes in the clay lining the pathway. We called them splash holes because they looked as if they were made by spilling, molten metal into the ground. We dug up several, but the holes were empty. Nonetheless I drew a few pictures of them.

“Supposing the dumb road goes for a mile,” I groaned, leaning on my shovel after one tough hour of digging.

“Then we dig for a mile,” said Snowy. “Wait. What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“Little white thing by the side of the road there. Looks like a tiny gravestone.”

“I think it’s a marker of some kind, maybe. You don’t put a grave by the side of the road.... Hey, Snowy, I have an idea.”

“What?”

“My dad ... I stopped to catch my breath, hunkering down on the sand. “My dad has some stone rubbings. From a cathedral in England. People rub ’em on paper right off the grave lids. You got the pencil and paper?”

“Somewhere,” said Snowy, climbing carefully out so as not to disturb our trench, which now measured about a foot and a half in width at the bottom, widening to six feet at the top.

When we got back to the stable in the failing winter light and Snowy had removed my blindfold, we had a good look at my rubbing. It was on lined paper from a notebook, and the pencil was not dark enough to make it pretty, but this is what was carved on the marker.

“It looks like a moon shape,” said Snowy. “Quarter moon. Then there’s the other odd shape and then four little darts.”

“We’ll never figure it out.”

“We might if we find more writing,” said Snowy. “It may be an Indian language.”

We walked slowly back to the Finneys. “Why don’t we show it to the old man?” I asked.

“You show it to Finney and you’ll never see the cave again,” said Snowy.

“Oh, come off it. Why not? You showed him the bone, didn’t you?”

“But this writing is important stuff. If we show it to Finney, he’ll want to give it to some language expert.”

“Look, Snowy,” I grumbled, getting angry, “where would you be without me? Huh? Nowhere. You’d be sitting in your damn cave fooling around with a petunia trowel.”

Snowy answered me just as, angrily. “We let other people find out about the cave,” he said, “and in a month it’ll be overrun with fifty clowns from Harvard. It’s my cave and it’s going to stay my cave!”

We walked on in an unpleasant silence. I broke it after about ten minutes. “Who the hell do you think made that stuff?” I asked. “And please don’t tell me about a bunch of pygmies the size of a G.I. Joe doll.”

Snowy shrugged and eyed the fast-setting sun in front of us. “In this part of the world it’s got to be Indians,” he said softly, “but somehow it doesn’t look Indian.”

“How much do you know about Indians?” I asked.

“Not much. The usual moccasin and birch bark canoe kind of thing.”

“Save me a trip to the library, Snowy,” I said.

Grudgingly he looked over at me.

“Let me ask Finney if he knows anything about Indian tribes, particularly from around here.” I went on. “Okay? Look, both of us have exam week coming up at the end of the month. It’ll take days to find out what Finney could tell us in a few minutes.”