“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!”
Chapter Six
EXPLORING 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.
All in all we dug over fifty holes in the sand without a crumb to show for it.
“There’s got to be something here,” said Snowy. “There just has to be more than those steps.”
I sat back on my haunches. “Next time we need a kerosene stove,” I said. “It’s so cold down here, my fingers are stiff.”
“I can buy one,” said Snowy. “I have money.”
“Okay. And five gallons of kerosene.”
“But what good will it do if we can’t find anything?” Snowy asked.
“I think we’re not going at it the right way. I think just digging holes here, there, and everywhere is probably dumb.”
“Well, what is the right way?” Snowy asked. “I mean, the whole place is sand. It goes on for miles, like a desert. There’s nothing to see on top of the sand. I’m not a dummy, Barney. I looked up in the library how lots of old cities and things were found.”
“How?” I asked.
“Different ways. Mostly there were big mounds on the landscape, you know? Sticking up. Some guys a hundred years ago just kind of went up with a bunch of camels and natives and chipped away and found all this fabulous stuff. Sometimes they just dug under cities that were already there. Like Jerusalem. Sometimes they had old maps and books by the Greeks that gave ’em an idea of where to look. Anyway, as far as I could tell, there was always a hump or mound or some clue to lead to the right place. All there is in this cave is just level sand. Acres of it. We could spend ten years.”
“How did you find the steps?”
“I just walked along the riverbank. I didn’t see them, I stepped on them. I looked down after I felt something hard under my foot.”
I spat. I took up handfuls of sand and let it filter through my fingers. Thinking.
Snowy went on. “I mean, we could dig forever and not find anything if we go on like this.”
One more time I tried to make sense of the little steps. “Supposing,” I said to Snowy, “the steps had a reason for being right by the river. What do you think steps next to a river could be used for?”
“Used for?” said Snowy. “I thought you said they were miniatures made by the Indians.”
“That’s what I mean. Why did the Indians put them there?”
“You mean, why were they put here, even as part of a model, sort of?”
“Yes. Why would they lead down to the water like this?”
“A dock, maybe.”
“That’s all I can think of. But a dock would have been carried downstream or disintegrated long ago.”
“So,” I said, “a cajillion years ago this might have been a toy dock. And now there’s nothing left. Nothing anywhere. Maybe everything but these stairs was made of wood and has gone pfffp! Snowy, why do you think there’s any more than this? This has got to be some kid’s game. So a kid carved up a set of stone steps. So what? Could have been done five years ago, for all we know. Maybe a kid found the cave and never told anyone.”
“Barney, I told you there were no footprints when I first came down here. You could see for yourself there were only my prints and the dog’s.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But the ceiling drips here, and it’s damp air. In five years, ten, maybe our footprints would settle in the sand and a crust would form from the moisture. That could happen in six months.”
“Until this October there was no cave entrance, Barney. That rock that moved in the earthquake is the only entrance to the cave.”
“How do you know? There may be other rock overhangs, other crevices ...
“I checked the inside of the cave, Barney. It took me four days. The way we come in is the only entrance. The way we go out connects to it. There’s a small hole in the ceiling about half a mile away, but no one could come in that way because it’s about a hundred-yard drop to the floor and the hole’s only as big as your fist. It’s the way the bats go out.”
“Bats!” I said, my skin popping out in a cold sweat.
“They won’t hurt you. They’re on the ceiling. The first day I was here, the dog barked for some reason, I heard them on the ceiling and I shone my light on them. Then I watched them fly out at about five thirty. They all go through that tiny hole like bees going into a hive.”
“Bats carry rabies!” I said, standing up and looking at the ceiling nervously.
“C’mon, Barney. Don’t be su
ch a paranoid. They’re harmless. As long as we don’t frighten them with loud noises.”
I still felt uneasy about them. I began pacing in a circle.
“Are you about to give up?” he asked. “Because you’re scared to death of a few bats like some geek who won’t walk under a ladder?”
I stamped, rubbed my chapped hands, and stuck them under my armpits for warmth. “It’s hopeless,” I said, dodging his question. “How are we going to find anything in this ... this freezing underground desert? Even in a parka and a vest I’m cold.”
“It’s not hopeless,” Snowy said. “We just have to keep at it. Boy, I’d hate to be with you in a lifeboat.”
“Why?” I asked.
“A little cold and a few perfectly nice bats make you a quitter,” said Snowy. “We’ve got a chance to make the find of the century here, Barney. Something nobody’s ever seen before. And you’re going to quit.”
“Snowy, at best it’s just some toy thing made by Indians. If there was anything else, we’d have found it long ago.”
“It’s not a toy thing, and it wasn’t made by Indians.”
“How do you know? What do you think it is?”
“If I told you, you’d laugh.”
“I promise not to.”
Snowy too was stamping and rubbing his hands. “Forty years ago, Barney,” he said between his teeth, “some guys, some U.S. Marines, landed on an unoccupied island in the Pacific. Okay? The island wasn’t even on a map. Only one guy survived. The island was inhabited by a race of pygmies.”
“Come on, Snowy.”
“This is the truth!”
“Okay, okay.”
“The people were no bigger than up to your knee.”
“Okay, what happened to them? How come National Geographic didn’t go out there and take pictures, huh? How come they haven’t been on TV?”
“Because the Japanese bombed the place to pieces, that’s why. The one American guy who survived and told about it had a piece of shrapnel in his head this big. No one believed him.”
“So how come you believe that story? Where did you hear about this?”
Through the Hidden Door Page 5
