“I don’t like this idea one bit,” said Snowy. Blindly I followed along through the woods behind him, string in one hand and cage in the other.
“It’s a rat, Snowy, not a guinea pig.”
“A rat has feelings.”
“Snowy, the rat has been given enough morphine by Dr. Dorothy to let it go through a nuclear bomb blast without noticing anything.”
“It’s killing all the same,” said Snowy.
“The rat has a brain tumor, Snowy. It’s going to die anyway very soon. It’s an old rat.”
“You better do the whole thing.”
“I told you I’d do the whole thing,” I said wearily. I had assured him of that at least seven times.
Snowy huffed and fussed all the way to the cave. He set to work by himself, not saying a word to me, way down at the farthest point of our digging. I took the wooden box and set it gently in the sand. The rat was beginning to come to after its morphine, and I wanted to hurry and not let it escape. Very slowly I stuck a piece of bacon in the far end of the box, watched while the rat smelled it and then shuffled over to it. While it was eating at one end of the trap I pulled out the removable bottom slat on the other. In one motion I slapped the whole box, rat inside, over one of the rings of cobra teeth. Then I dropped three pieces of bacon and two chunks of cheese right in the middle of the disk.
“Good-bye, rat,” I said, and left it there. It would probably scratch itself and be dead in two minutes.
For the next hour Snowy and I excavated what we called the Rich Man’s House, because of its garden and columns and paintings. There were eight rooms in this house. All empty and all decorated with miniature paintings of more fabulous jumping scenes involving weird-looking animals and smiling women. There was plumbing here all through the building. We found what seemed to be a pool, as the bottom was tiled and lined with a mosaic of fish. But what fish! Flying fish! Fish with legs, fish with horns on their heads. All no bigger than pictures on postage stamps. There were no signs of snakes in the paintings.
“Do you think the rat’s dead yet?” Snowy asked, not looking at me.
“I’ll see. Gee. It’s been an hour and a half.”
I wandered back to the rat cage and looked in the wire side. The rat was running around like a mechanical toy. It must have hit all the fangs by this time. The bacon and cheese were gone from the disk. There was no way this plump rat could have slithered between the fangs and gotten at the food. It had to have climbed into the circle of deadly points. But it was alive still. Why?
Poor thing’s probably cold, I said to myself. I opened the top hole of the cage and dropped more bacon and pieces of cheddar onto the disk, and this time left my lantern there to keep the rat warm.
“Still kicking,” I said to Snowy. We dug for another length of time and uncovered two outbuildings near the main part of the Rich Man’s House. Then I went back.
The rat lay dead in the back of the cage. Only one piece of bacon had been nibbled. The heat from the lantern had melted the cheddar cheese over the gold face on the disk. “Dead!” I yelled to Snowy.
“You pick up the body,” said Snowy. “I don’t want to see it.”
“Don’t worry!” Ï called back. I lifted the box carefully off the circle of fangs and poked the rat a couple of times to make sure he was dead. “Thanks, old man,” I murmured to the rat. It was funny ... the lantern had something to do with this.... But of course. I knelt in the sand. The venom must have been frozen solid until I left the light on top of the cage. Two months before there had been a lantern sitting there for half an hour while I’d traced the faces on the disks. Then I’d reached down in for my little tracing and cut my finger.... The heat had liquefied and activated the poison. How long would it have stayed frozen? Forever?
I could see Snowy’s back turned to me in disgust as he dug about twenty yards away. This was my chance. Hardly moving, I took my trowel, dug up one of the fangs, and shoveled it carefully into the box with the rat.
That evening I presented Dr. Dorothy with the rat’s body. While Snowy was doing dishes I brought out the tooth.
“You got one! Does he know?” she whispered, looking over at Snowy, who was fixing Rosie’s bedding.
“No. Don’t let him see it.”
Dr. Dorothy took the fang into her lab and, using a series of needles and a suction tube, emptied it of venom. The venom was dark yellow. There were only two drops. Then she withdrew some blood from the rat and told me to go upstairs for an hour.
An hour turned into two hours. I had plenty of homework to fill the time. But I fidgeted over it, trying to overhear if she was talking with Finney yet or still doing tests in her lab.
I did not know until morning. Then, when she’d driven us up to school and Snowy had left the car and raced ahead to class, she slipped a small ring box to me. “The tooth’s in there,” she said. “The venom was live all right. You knew that when the rat died, though.”
“Did you talk to Mr. Finney?” I asked. “Is he mad at me? Is he going to make me live in the dorm again?”
“You may stay with us, Barney,” said Dr. Dorothy. “He doesn’t want you back at the dorm with those boys. He promised your father he’d see you safely through the year.”
“Is he angry?”
“Yes. Of course, I told him I sent you back myself. To get the tooth. He was furious at me for doing that, because I didn’t really know for sure there were no live snakes down there. Mostly he was hurt that you just went galloping off with Snowy the day your father left. That you gave your word and broke it. You see, when your dad left you in our care, naturally Mr. Finney swore on a stack of Bibles you’d never set foot in the cave again. He gave his word. You broke yours, and that makes my husband look irresponsible.”
I slumped against the car seat. Her hands rested on the steering wheel, and she was staring straight out the windshield. The car heater hummed and coughed. “Mr. Finney is a difficult man sometimes,” she said gently. “He had great faith in you, Barney. He told me after Christmas break, ‘There’s a boy who’ll become a good man. He won’t lie or sneak for the rest of his days. I know my boys. And he’s a good one.’”
“And now he thinks I’m the same rotten kid he almost threw out?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Come on, you’ll be late for class.”
“Can I ... is it all right with him if I go back in the cave now?”
“Yes, Barney. He knows it isn’t dangerous. But for him it’s a matter of honor. Mr. Finney is not much interested in what you find anymore. He is now convinced that this silly snake group, these religious nuts who passed through with their boa constrictors and probably cobras five or six years ago, planted the whole thing, carved up the statues and the whole village you’ve found and did a good job of it too. He said they were just the type.”
“Do you think that too, Dr. Dorothy?”
“Barney,” said Dr. Dorothy.
“Yes?”
“Let it stay your secret. Yours and Snowy’s. As it began.”
But there was another secret. Something Dr. Dorothy was not telling me. I’d heard it in her voice the night before and saw it in the eyes that looked through the windshield, not at me.
Chapter Sixteen
WE ARE FREE, SNOWY, free at last,” I said to him at the beginning of that afternoon’s trip. “Finney’s let us back in the cave, even if he does think the whole thing’s a fake, and we’re in fat city.”
The woods had changed in spring. Where heavy fir boughs had once tossed snow in my face, they only brushed my head softly. Where we had slipped and crunched over ice and snow, only a soft bed of mud and pine needles lay underfoot. I could smell the newness of the green leaves. “Even the boys are nice to me now,” I said.
“Rudy? Danny?” Snowy asked with some amazement edging his voice.
“No. Not Rudy and Danny. The other boys in the class, though. They all love to see my finger. They can’t get enough of it. They keep asking me how big the snake was. W
as it under a rock? What happened? Most of them want to go out and find themselves a cottonmouth now. I told them I touched a dead snake’s tooth, that was all. Even Silks is quiet for a change. I don’t have to recite every morning in his office anymore.”
Mr. Silks, after inquiring about my finger silently by staring directly at the stump, had said only one thing to me since spring term had begun. He had been notified by my dad that I was to attend high school “out of the country,” as he put it. I had nodded vaguely, wondering if he would sabotage Geneva too. Apparently he had no intention of doing this but only smiled frostily and victoriously. Fixing his silver letter opener securely in the slot of its Lucite blob, he told me that the Lycée de Notre Dame in Geneva was run by a bunch of friars. Chapel attendance was required every morning at seven, and the whole school was conducted entirely in French, which I’d better go learn in a hurry. On balance he thought it would do me even more good than a military academy.
“What about the five boys?” Snowy persisted.
“They look at me the way they always have. Mean as guard dogs in a gas station. But they can’t do anything, Snowy. I disappear right after classes, and they can’t touch me at the Finneys’. They know it too.”
“If I were you,” said Snowy, “I’d order a few cans of Mace.”
“If we could fit it through the tunnel,” I said, “I’d order a leaf blower.”
“Why?”
“Snowy, we’ve got just these two months. Three weeks in April and then May. June fifth school is over. We don’t have much time. At least I don’t. You’ll be back next year. If we had a leaf blower, we could blow the sand right off half the buildings down there in an hour. You’re lucky, Snowy. You’ve got two more years here. You’ll probably find a trove of diamonds or something while I’m chattering away to a bunch of French monks.”
I could not see Snowy’s face. He was tramping on ahead of me, and I was blindfolded. Was I becoming more sensitive to sounds and voices, not being able to see? It seemed to me he had sighed, was just on the point of saying something, and then decided against it.
“Snowy, what is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Dr. Dorothy is keeping something from me. Do you know something I don’t know?”
No answer.
“Snowy, for crying out loud! Say something.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“No.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. “You have to tell me,” I said.
“I don’t have to tell you anything. Come on. We don’t have all day.” He yanked at the string I held in my hands.
I wouldn’t budge. “Snowy, I’m still here at Winchester, not just for the cave but because I wouldn’t sleep nights thinking the gang was after you. You owe me one now. Tell me.”
Snowy did not answer for quite a while. I could hear his boots scuffing the leaves underfoot. Finally he spoke. “Okay. Remember I said I sort of looked in their desk and all? Found the letter from the university saying the charcoal had been dated?”
“Go on.”
“There was another letter.”
“Who from? Come on, Snowy. Who from?”
“Exeter.”
“Exeter!”
“Finney’s been offered a job as dean of students. Not headmaster, dean of students. One rung underneath. Exeter’s pretty hot stuff, though. Toughest school in the country.”
Something began falling into place in my mind, like cards leaned end on end in a chain and pushed, falling one by one. Snowy had turned and had begun walking again. I followed him. “Did you read the whole of the letter?” I asked him.
“I glanced at it,” he answered stiffly.
“What did it say?”
“Oh, the usual formal junk and stuff about salary and housing and all, and they also said ... I don’t exactly remember the wording. Something about we would be pleased to include the boy you recommended so highly, providing his final grades are ... whatever.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I guess Finney wanted to pull somebody into Exeter. It couldn’t be me. I’m a sixth grader. Exeter starts in ninth grade.”
“What do you mean, wanted to pull, Snowy?” But I knew.
“Well, I don’t think he’ll take you into Exeter now, Barney. We went back to the cave. We broke our word. You promised him and your dad. You know how Finney is about honor and all that stuff. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you about the letter. I thought it was better you didn’t know anyway.”
I kicked angrily at a log in our path. We had reached the entrance of the cave. Lilac, sweet smelling as any living thing on earth, flowered somewhere. To me it might as well have been rotten eggs. I had wrecked my chances of going to the best school in America. My father would hit the ceiling when he found out.
I followed Snowy in silence to the entrance of the cave, choking back tears. Geneva loomed ahead. Four years of speaking nothing but French. Then what would happen? I could become a waiter. I’d rather go to cadet school. At least they might have hamburgers and potato chips once in a while.
Snowy turned and took my blindfold off at the entrance to the ledge. “You’re, um, crying, Barney. I guess we blew it.”
“I guess I blew it, Snowy,” I said. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “I only know one thing in French.”
“What’s that?”
“Ça n’existe pas.”
“What does that mean?”
“Basically it means, forget the whole thing.”
That afternoon we found the temple.
It was quite by accident. If I could have pictured a city with a center, with rougher, poorer buildings on the outside and richer, more elaborate ones as you worked your way inward, I would have expected it to be higher in the center than at the edges. But there was no upward in the cave. We noticed, though, that one of the roads led down. It was made of stone, the same cut blocks as before, but then it widened and became a set of steps.
The steps themselves then fanned out, as though they were set in a large circle, like the steps in an amphitheater. On the third level of stairs, inset in the stone, was a tiny silver squiggle running downward like a streak of mercury. I cleared the next step down. The silver thread thickened and ran down the next riser and kept going. I followed it with my trowel and brush. The steps and silver inset became broader. I brought the lantern over. “Look, Snowy.”
He lay at eye level with it. “Can’t see a thing,” he admitted. “Looks like a trail of metal in the stone.”
“Okay. Trust my eyes. We have eight steps cleared here. This silver is a snake’s tail leading down. See? It gets wider as it goes. I bet anything that at the bottom it turns into a full hooded cobra, all made of silver. As soon as it gets wide enough, there will be scales tooled into the metal. In a pattern. Just like the black god’s cape.”
I lay on my stomach and tapped at the widest bit of gleaming snake body we’d uncovered. “It’s real silver, Snowy. I can tell. I can tell by the way it sounds and the way the metallic surface shines in the light.”
Snowy put out a finger. Closing his eyes, he said, “I can feel the scales. Just.”
“Do we dig out all the way around the whole circle of steps or dig straight down?” I asked Snowy.
“Down, I think. Let’s see how deep it is.”
“Snowy,” I said, “I have a feeling. I can’t explain—”
Snowy broke in, “As if the air ... or something were different?”
“As if something were almost alive here!” I whispered.
Digging down could have been as frustrating as our original bout with the endless road. But the silver snake body grew broader and more beautifully carved, and we knew it would lead to somewhere soon.
We had to go on bucket shifts to remove the sand. I calculated the circumference of the circle, based on the curve of the steps we had exposed. It looked to be at least a hundred feet around, probably more. How deep? How many cubic yards of
sand had to be removed? On one of my trips to the river with the buckets I thought about replacing the tooth, which sat ever in my pocket in its little box. I could slip it back in its ring around the disk without Snowy seeing me, but I broke into a new sweat considering it. If Snowy found I’d taken something out, he might get hideously, unreasonably angry. I might never see the finish of what we had started. The tooth stayed in my pants pocket. Snowy turned and called me. Not the time to go bending over the gold disks.
He had taken the boathook and jabbed it down in a spot toward the center of the circle. It sank all the way into the sand at his pushing. “The boathook’s five feet long, and it still hasn’t hit bottom,” he grumbled impatiently. “We’ll be digging these steps till kingdom come!”
Instead we decided to take one level of steps and follow it around its complete circle. This was only paintbrush work. The curve continued perfectly. Every few feet or so along there was a new part of the serpent’s tail, identical to the last. “All the tails lead down the same way. It’s a pattern. There must be forty of them. What could it be?” Snowy asked.
“What are these?” I asked. I pointed to a new marking that was carved into the stone risers, the vertical part of the steps, on the eighth level down, around the circle regular as a wallpaper design.
Because I couldn’t sink myself into the sand to get below them and have a look, Snowy crept around the circle and felt with his fingertips. “Trace a few, Barney,” he said excitedly. “I think we’ve found ... writing. Something like writing.”
Leaning over and placing my paper on the small designs cut into the stone, I traced twenty of them while Snowy went on clearing steps. When I had finished, I had a row of strange figures.
“It makes no sense,” I said, peering at it.
But Snowy stopped all work, spread my paper under a lantern, and stared at it, became lost in it, like an owl over a rabbit hole.
I took the boathook and, walking slowly, tracking it behind me, made a huge ring in the sand where I guessed the outer edge of the circle of steps lay. “It’s this big probably,” I announced to him, standing in the middle. “It must be forty feet across.” I jabbed the boathook down. “We don’t have time to ... I stopped. The boathook had hit something hard right in the middle of the circle. I poked again. Snowy heard it. He came running over with one of our big shovels. We dug at the hard surface until we had uncovered a little of it. Solid stone. White. Blank.
Through the Hidden Door Page 13
