Through the Hidden Door

by Rosemary Wells

  For a half an hour we made soundings with the boathook. We pushed it down as far as it would go, pulled it out, and tried to measure the depth of the sand in different places. The boathook hit stone only in the middle of the circle. We squared off that portion and began digging at the edges. What we discovered was an oblong roof. The little trench we dug along one edge showed columns, also made of stone, but delicately carved with vines and leaves twining around them. In the vines were tiny birds.

  Under this, like a layered wedding cake, was another slightly larger platform, and under that more columns. These had different vines carved on them, fruit-bearing ones. “What we have, I think, Snowy, is the top of the biggest building yet. It’s in the middle of a forty-foot circle of stone steps leading down. Its foundations are sitting in a deep pit. There’s an awful lot of sand to clear away. Is it worth it or should we go on with the village?”

  Snowy had cleared away more sand from the second layer of roof. He had exposed the side of a third platform and began freeing up a third set of columns. These columns were not twined with grape or rose vines. They were wrapped around with silver snakes. If my math held, the third-down story of the building would be about five feet by two and a half with a column every foot along each side. Fourteen tapered shafts of marble stood in that encrusted sand, each with a gleaming cobra, its pin-small forked tongue extended and its hood full out.

  “What do you think, Snowy?” I asked, giving him a hand to his feet.

  He’d dropped his glasses. He retrieved them, cleaned them on his shirttail, and said with his beady little eyes almost sightless, “Worth it, Barney? Are you kidding? It’s worth more than everything so far put together. Do you know what this is?”

  “No.”

  “This is the big find, Barney. The main event. I’m going to figure out the code you traced if it kills me.”

  Two buckets and two boys do not make sand move fast. After three days we had exposed the whole rim of the circle, which was about a hundred and twenty-five feet around, and cleared the sand for twenty steps down. We could see silver snakes, beautifully worked, embedded in the marble steps now, all leading down toward the center of the pit. The beginning of the next week we changed tack and began digging a two-and-a-half-foot-wide trench down the stairs, following a winding silver snake body to see how far the steps went down. The S-shaped back curved out of our digging range sometimes, but we always hit the next bit of it three or four steps down. The farther we went, the wider our trench had to be at the top, and as we got close to the center it was nearly twenty feet across at the surface. After a week of digging we hit bottom. There were eighty steps down, and the pit was ten feet deep in the center.

  Dr. Dorothy caught me alone at breakfast the next morning while Snowy (and Rosie) were in the bathroom.

  “Barney,” she said, putting a healthy ounce of heavy cream into her coffee, “I have been looking at your drawings carefully. Why are there no stoves or fireplaces or ovens in any of the houses?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think there would be if they had been used?”

  “There’s the huge fire pit.”

  “But why use that?” she asked. Her spoon made a marbled swirl of black coffee and white cream.

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “I have. It’s not such a mystery, Barney. Have you ever seen the model villages they have in natural history museums? Everything from Eskimos to Zulus to Babylonians? All with everything exactly in scale?”

  “Yes, I have. On last year’s class trip to New York we went to the Museum of Natural History. The year before to the Museum of Science in Boston.”

  “Did you notice that all the models have some cooking or heating or even clay-firing facility?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so. They make it look real with red glass for embers, and they put a tiny red spotlight in the corner of the case, beamed right at it to make it glow like real fire.”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Dorothy. “But there are no primitive stoves or ovens in the models you’ve found. There are fired clay pots but no kilns to fire them in.”

  “They must have been fired in the fire pit,” I repeated.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “If it were a scale model, even a very, very old one, surely the model maker would have included provisions for fire, life’s great necessity, along with all the other carefully carved objects. There’s only one reason I can think of that he didn’t.”

  “What’s that?”

  Dr. Dorothy brushed some crumbs into her napkin. “Because,” she said, “fire is fire, and it is the size it is no matter what. It is the only thing you cannot have in small quantities. It cannot be miniaturized. A fire to scale in one of your buildings would burn out and be useless in two minutes. Therefore a very large fire pit, just as you have found, would have to be used for heat, baking, and so forth.”

  “Yes?” I answered.

  “Well, it seems to me that if Mr. Finney is right and all you have found down there is the work of a clever hermit, or a bunch of snake worshipping cranks, they would have to have been very clever indeed not to put in little hearths and chimneys and cooking facilities. That’s too clever.”

  “Do you mean,” I asked, “that you think it was actually used, lived in? That there was a race of six-inch-tall people during the Pliocene?”

  “I have said what I’ve said,” said Dr. Dorothy, clearing her place. “And that is all. I’m a scientist, Barney. I can’t tell you any more without proof.”

  Snowy came jouncing down the stairs, Rosie in hand. “That’s all,” Dr. Dorothy whispered and added in a louder voice, “Have a good day in school, boys. Don’t break any rules!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  SNOWY PUT ROSIE IN her laundry basket. He had retired the grapefruit crate. It was too confining. Rosie was a very pregnant guinea pig. He had made her a soft bed of velveteen strips from an old pillow. She sat in there snuffling her pink nose and closing her eyes, which were small and beady, just like Snowy’s.

  Hours of sand bailing lay ahead again that afternoon. I had calculated the volume of the buckets, the volume of the sand we had to clean, and the time it took us to dig, carry, and dump each pailful. It was now April 18. If we could work every single schoolday from two thirty to dinnertime, and every weekend day, we might get it cleared by the third week in May. That would give me a good three or four hours to study at night so I would be ready for review week before final exams.

  Mondays through Fridays we cleared the sand from around the building, which grew cheeringly larger and larger. Weekends we worked on the circle of steps. So far there were only bodies of snakes, no heads. The cobra hoods and heads were still beneath the surface. The bottom level of the building would have to be about ten by five feet, I figured, given the progressively larger stories on each level. We had by now uncovered most of six floors. The columns wound with snakes continued down for another level, to the fourth level from the top. Then the walls were solid but with windows every foot or so. The windows were in the shape of drops of water or pears, we couldn’t tell which.

  During school hours I kept to myself. I did not show the boys in school my chopped-off finger anymore. I did not want anyone to ask why I had calluses like a dirt farmer on my hands.

  The week before finals classes would be given over to review. Afternoons and evenings would be spent cramming. If I did not cram, I would not get above a B average. No one could, except for Snowy, who seemed to know the work that he liked by heart and settled for a C plus for the rest. On my last day for two weeks in the cave, I dug like a starving dog in search of a marrowbone.

  If you can picture a round swimming pool, about ten feet deep and forty feet across, the bottom covered with sand, stairs sloping down the sides, as in a stadium, and in the middle a building like a wedding cake, that is what we faced. The floor was still hidden from view by the sand, and on the floor was what we sought, I knew. Whether it was proof of the age of
this whole civilization we’d discovered or an explanation of what it was about, I didn’t know, but I knew it lay there because this was the center of everything in our secret small world of the cave.

  By six thirty on the Sunday evening before review week, we’d cleared a little of the floor, enough at least to reveal the hood and eyes and mouth of one of the silver cobras that adorned the steps. What lay around it and under the rest of the sand would be Snowy’s to find. I would have to be content with seeing it after he’d uncovered it.

  I had to be able to write three intelligent paragraphs on the motives of any of the main characters in The Merchant of Venice and David Copperfield. I had to be prepared to explain the conversion by chlorophyll of sunlight to energy in leaves, to translate any three pages of Caesar’s Gallic Wars from the Latin, to deal with any of a year’s worth of geometry problems, and to give a fair account of what went on in the administrations of Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

  No one whispered to me in the library. No one asked me for my notes. At night when Snowy came back to the Finneys’ from the cave, I begged him to tell me what he’d found, but all he ever would say was “You’ll see when exams are over.”

  Finals were proctored by Silks himself, marching up and down the aisles of the class like a sentry, distracting everyone, throwing everyone into a cold sweat at the clomping approach of his tasseled loafers.

  I did well. I don’t know why I tried so hard. I guess because, in spite of the temple and all we had discovered, I kicked myself at night and lay in bed gnawing at my knuckles because I’d blown my chances of going to Exeter and my dad would one way or another find out. During the past six weeks Finney had been “away on business” most of the time. What that business was I knew well. He was getting himself settled at Exeter. But Dr. Dorothy never mentioned where he went, and there was no forgiveness for me. I guessed I deserved a bunch of French friars.

  And so, on exams I did well the way a machine does well. I could not have cared less if chlorophyll converted sunlight into energy in toothpaste instead of leaves, if Portia had run for vice-president of the United States, of if the sum of the sides of a parallelogram was equal to a pint of maple-walnut ice cream.

  Before we were allowed to leave each exam, Silks nearly stripped every boy to his underwear, examining shoes, feet, hand backs, palms, sleeves, and even hair before we were allowed to go. I knew he’d do something like this. I hadn’t even dared bring my blank drawing paper and pencils with me.

  At the last exam Silks called our names in alphabetical order. Fifty-three boys marched one by one to the desk. In a die-straight stack they piled their blue books next to Silks’s personal Bible. Once in the hallway they let out a combination of noises very like an invasion of a kangaroo pen by whooping cranes.

  I drifted through them, quietly making my way toward the music room, feeling my keys in my pocket. The night before, Snowy had relented and told me what he’d found while I’d been cramming. He’d figured out that we’d found an arena. He was taking first year Latin and had learned all about Roman gladiators, and something like a Roman gladiator arena was what we had found. But these gladiators had not fought with lions. They had fought with snakes.

  The silver cobra heads had all met in a circle on the floor of the stadium, their hoods evenly embedded in the stone at the base of the temple. The stairs had ended at a foot-high circular wall, which was removed by a small empty moat from the inner floor. All around the sides of the wall, he told me, were scenes of men fighting coiled and ready-to-strike cobras. There were men dying and men plunging spears into the snakes’ mouths. Women playing pipes at snakes. Men riding snakes and women holding snakes’ heads high in victory. He could not wait until I drew it, he admitted. But that was not all.

  Ringing the base of the temple were aboveground crypts. On each was another gold disk and the double fangs of the killer cobra set into the marble at the head. “Tombs, Barney,” he’d said, his eyes all afire and his hands gently soothing Rosie. “Tombs with lids. We don’t have to dig them up. We can pry a lid and look inside without disturbing them. I haven’t done it yet. I’ve saved it for you!”

  I’d wanted to hug him, but of course I didn’t. Instead, I high-and-low-fived him, as if he’d hit a grand slam in the World Series, met his sparkling eyes with mine, and gave him three Tobler bars without nuts.

  The lock to the old kitchen turned easily. I slipped in back of the play set and closed the door behind me. I’d saved a giant-sized Tobler bar and bit out a big chunk as I went down the stairs in total darkness. Then I realized I’d left my drawing paper and pencils in my locker. “Dummy,” I whispered aloud. Snowy would be waiting for me impatiently in the stable. I had to waste ten minutes running all the way to the classroom basement three buildings away where the lockers were.

  When I came back, I did my usual check that no one was in the hall near the music room. Then I opened the old kitchen door again. I’d forgotten to relock it, and it pushed in with a click from the hinges no louder than a single sound from a cricket.

  I stopped at the foot of the stairs and listened as I always did. There was no sound but the pummeling feet of newly released boys in the school above me. Satisfied, I ran my flashlight around the old kitchen, over the grease-encrusted stove, the sinks, the pantry beyond. I flicked it off. I stepped into the kitchen in the pitch dark and stopped. There was something wrong. I could see and hear nothing. But as my light had scanned the calendar above the drainboard for a moment I’d noticed the page had been changed to the month of June.

  Whatever instinct I had forced me down into a squatting position and three silent steps backward. There I waited like a catcher until I thought my knees would give out. Nothing happened. All right, my brain said logically. Someone has been here, but that doesn’t mean they are here now. Maybe it was just a caretaker. I breathed like a mouse. No one knows the kitchen like I do, I told myself several times, slowly. I began edging forward toward the pantry. If anyone was here, they would be hiding along the walls. My opening the door would have given them fair warning to hide. I didn’t dare go back up the stairs because they creaked a little. Had someone seen me go into the cellar? No, answered a logical voice. But someone saw you come out and go back to your locker. You were not careful. You didn’t look around. You didn’t lock the door again. Someone saw you come out. They went down here to see where you were going. Now you’ve surprised them. They’re hiding. Hiding someplace.

  In a straight line, on my hands and knees, I inched ahead. All my muscles and every cell in my brain focused on my hearing. I heard nothing. Then the sound of cloth, just cloth wrinkling against a shoulder or a leg. Where? Was it my own shirt I heard?

  There were a hundred places in the old kitchen for someone to conceal himself. If I wanted, I could crouch unseen myself, soundlessly, behind a cabinet or under a sink—if I was lucky—but then I would be cornered like a rabbit in a hole. If somebody was in here, what were they waiting for?

  I began trying to make myself see in the dark. Listening was seeing in the dark. My skin took on a way of listening. There were hairs on my forehead and the knuckles of my fingers that I hadn’t known existed. I could feel if I was close to a wall or an object because the sense of solidness instead of open air warned every hair on my body whether I was near something or not.

  The distance from the kitchen to the beginning of the long passageway was normally a ten-second stroll. I made it, counting seconds to steady myself, in eleven minutes. If they were here, why didn’t they pounce on me? If they were here, why didn’t they turn on a light? Because, said the god of logic, who was close by my ear, the electricity is turned off down here, and they don’t have flashlights. I knew just where I was. Beside a row of water casks that sat on the pantry floor. To my left was another sink. Then I remembered the crunchy Styrofoam packing bubbles. I was careful not to step on them. It took me another six minutes to stash my own flashlight behind the casks. Then I padded on. Out toward
the long brick passageway, out toward the door at the end. A distance of a hundred and fifty yards. I began to walk. If they were anywhere, they would not be here. They would not yet know where I was. They were blind and I was blind, but I was not as blind as they because every bit of me but my eyes was seeing, and I knew the territory. As quietly as a bird gliding I went farther and farther toward the exit. “In the country of the blind,” ran Mr. Greeves’s words in my mind, “the one-eyed man is king.” I am the one-eyed man, I added to it. I reached the stairs at the far end of the tunnel. Now at least there were two minutes between me and the kitchen. I tiptoed the last set of steps, my legs aching in the effort not to make them creak, and fit my key into the crumbling lock. It turned, and I was outside, in the sun, in the wind, in the blowing flax and rye grass.

  I shivered and could not stop. You dumbo, I told myself. There was no one there. “Snowy!” I yelled, walking into the stable. There was no answer. I saw something move from the very corner of my eye. A small brown rat tumbled into a hole beneath the straw.

  I stood quite still for a moment. Nothing was wrong. Just an old page on a calendar, I said to myself. Doesn’t mean a thing. I went into the stable. Into the first stall. I plunged my hand deep into the humus on the windowsill for my gun. It was gone.

  Time lingered and spun by with no sounds in it, no movements. In my hand were two useless keys. Useless because if Rudy or Danny decided to jump me and fight me, I wouldn’t have a chance in a million of getting away, fighting back, or being heard. I watched a spider make its way down a sun-frosted bit of web into a cistern in the corner. The cistern was full of ancient rainwater and fermented oats. It was about ten feet deep and would be a nice place to throw me after they’d finished beating me up. Get out of here, I told myself, but I could not will my legs to move. Where was my gun? Who had taken it? I leaned softly against the wooden wall of the stall.