“Mr. Silks, are you making a deal with me?”
“Exactly. We’ve made deals before. Haven’t we?”
“Yes, but I didn’t do the deal.”
“Well, this time you will, won’t you?” He glanced jumpily out the window at the party. Girls and boys were dancing wildly. The music was too loud for me to think.
“I tell you where the boys are, and you get to keep your job, right?” I asked him.
“And you get to go to Hotchkiss,” he said, “and with high honors, as valedictorian of your class, may I add?”
I squinted at him as if he were hard to see. “You put in the letter that I had a four-point-oh average. Exams haven’t been corrected yet.”
Silks grinned. “Hotchkiss won’t double-check,” he said. “We’re two of a kind, Pennimen.” He extended his right hand. “It’s the way the world works, boy.”
I looked at his hand. I was listening to my own voice hanging in the air from other days. Oh, how I had hated “If.” But the words of the first verse rang, singsong, in my ears and took on the beat of the rock drummer outside. Stupid, sappy, worn-out words. I despised them because Silks had made me say them over and over, but the poem haunted me in my own voice. “Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies.”
“Barney,” Silks repeated, his hand still outstretched to mine, “it’s the way the world works.”
“No, it isn’t,” I answered. The letter drifted from my hand to the floor.
Silks’s voice became its usual sharp bark again. “All right, Pennimen. You stay put. I’m going to call the cops. I’m going to tell them you had something to do with the disappearance of five young men. Believe me, they’ll get it out of you.”
I did not stay put. While Silks went to the telephone I opened the window, the one Finney’d let me out when Rudy and his friends were at the door, and walked out into the middle of the party. A girl asked me to dance. I stared right through her. I wandered down to the stable again.
The sounds of the dance floated downhill from the school. “You rotten, dirty scum!” I yelled to the pattering rats and empty stalls. “You deserve to die, Sader. All you’ll ever do in this world is destroy things.” I called them names. I swore words I’d never said before. Then I got up and kicked in the partition between two of the old stalls, as if my feet and legs were axes and I were chopping down the building.
Finney found me, asleep on a pile of straw, at ten o’clock.
“Barney,” he said, jogging my shoulder, “are you all right?”
I lifted my head and wiped the filth from my face.
“What? What happened?”
“Barney. Snowy is gone. He has taken Rosie and her two babies with him. I don’t worry about him. I know he’s hiding someplace. But the five boys are missing. They were not at the cookout or the dance. They are not in downtown Greenfield. The police have been called. Where are they, Barney?”
My mouth was full of chaff. “Mr. Finney,” I said, “I will not tell.”
I saw the moonlight wink off Finney’s glasses. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. “I see,” he said at last.
“Everything,” I repeated. “They wrecked everything. Our little houses, the sheds. Everything. They were laughing, Mr. Finney. They thought it was more fun than a circus. They thought Snowy and I ... Here I nearly retched. “They thought we had built the place. Thought we were playing, like kids. Make believe.”
“And what did you do?”
“I ... my father gave me a gun, Mr. Finney. Early in the year when—”
“What? What gun? What did you do, Pennimen?”
“I shot out their flashlight. The kerosene lights. Then we left. Snowy must have gone off somewhere in the middle of the woods. I don’t know. I was blindfolded. I couldn’t see. I kept asking Snowy what we were going to do. See? And he didn’t answer. I didn’t even know he’d taken off until I got practically to the stable. The boys are still down there. When you go in the cave, you have to slide down a chute, sort of. It’s too slippery and steep to climb up. Only Snowy knows the way out.”
“You shot out their lights!”
“Yes.”
“Did you want to shoot the boys instead?” he asked in a voice so low I could barely hear it.
I waited a minute to answer, “Yes,” I said.
“But you did not.”
“No. I should have.”
“Where is the gun now?”
It was still in my pocket. I gave it to Finney. The silver peacock on the handle flashed a little in Finney’s hands. A full moon was shining right in the hayloft window.
“Pennimen,” said Finney, “it could take a month with ten state troopers to find that cave. Will you go back? Will you save those boys’ lives?”
“I don’t know the way,” I said.
“If you did know the way, Pennimen, would you? Or would you leave them there to die?”
“Let them rot!” I said. “They’ll go out in the world and mug old ladies in dark alleys, or they’ll set a building on fire. They’ll grow up and experiment on innocent animals. They’ll beat their wives and kids. All those things you read in the papers. Mr. Finney, that’s the kind of boys they are. You know that too. Leave them. Let them suffer for a change. Let them be on the other side of the fence.”
“Why didn’t you pull the trigger on them instead of the lights, Pennimen?”
“Because I was a chicken, that’s why.”
“No, Pennimen.” Finney touched my shoulder firmly. “You didn’t do it because you are made of different stuff from them.”
Pulling his wooden leg under him, Finney lowered himself to the floor. He took my hand in his, ugly finger stump and all, and as he had in his office the day this all began, he locked his bird bright eyes on mine in the gossamer light of the early summer moon. “Go get them, Pennimen,” he said.
“I don’t know the way.”
“Yes, you do.”
Something I’d said that afternoon prickled at the back of my mind. I had asked Snowy why we were going a new way because ... it wasn’t the right way, it wasn’t the way we’d gone before. How had I known? The way out, a voice inside me insisted. You still don’t know the way out of the cave. The dog, my other self answered it quickly. Take the dog like Snowy did. The dog led Snowy out the first time he went down. The dog knows the way.
“What is it, Pennimen?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
“I’ll have a policeman come with you.”
“No.”
“The boys are dangerous, Barney.”
“I need Bonnie, Mr. Finney. All I need is Bonnie.”
He left, with one more glance at me. I found myself at the border of the woods. Dr. Dorothy had brought the collie to me. My eyes were open to the dark. The moon did not filter between the leaves. Being able to see, and with a flashlight in my hand, I had no idea which way to go.
My blindfold was bunched up in my back pocket. I put it on, and I went the way we always went, the collie trailing happily at my heels. I didn’t even feel out for trees. It took me no more time than it did following Snowy at the end of the string ahead of me.
I came to a stop at a certain point, pulled off the old soccer shirt, and opened my eyes. I turned on my flashlight. Embedded in the crotch of a tree, secured in the Y of the central branches, was a tiny strip of brightly colored striped silk, half the size of a stick of gum. I recognized it from Soldier of Fortune. A Distinguished Service medal. Snowy’s marker. Had it belonged to his father? I guessed it had. Pulling the dog behind me, I went in.
I walked the ledge and came to the head of the slide. Then I yelled down it. “Are you there?”
It took a minute or two. I think it was Brett who answered. “Yes! Help! Are you the cops? The first-aid people?”
“Are you hurt?”
“One of us has a sprained ankle. Another guy got his head ripped up by a bat. He better get a tetanus shot. Help us! Who are you?”
“It’
s Barney Pennimen,” I yelled, “and you better do just what I want you to do.”
Silence answered this. Then, “Okay.”
“I want to tell you something.”
“Okay.” Danny’s voice this time.
“I have the Finneys’ dog with me. Can you hear me?”
“Yes!” Echoing answer.
I am going to come and get you. Do exactly as I tell you. If you try anything, I’ll sic the dog on your throats. Understand?”
“Yes!” Five voices at once.
You dirty cowards, I said to myself, and pulling an unwilling Bonnie behind me, I went down the slide. I flashed my light on and off quickly. “Walk ahead of me,” I said. And then to Bonnie I yelled, “C’mon, dog, home! Out!”
She led me straight across the cave to a crevasse in the wall. There I found the tunnel Snowy had been so careful that I never find. I let the boys file out in front of me. They said nothing. They must have been as cold as men drowning in a winter sea, but I could smell them. I could smell their panic.
I led them through the tunnel, Bonnie straining at her leash. They said nothing. They filed out, only occasionally darting backward glances at the dog’s snapping and snarling.
When I’d gotten them outside at last, I could hear them gulping for fresh air. I half expected them to scatter into the woods, but they didn’t. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Go on home. Or go into Greenfield. I got you out. Now you’re on your own.”
Three of them whispered together. I couldn’t see in the dark which three. But then it was Sader who spoke. “Don’t know the way back, man,” he said gruffly.
“But you followed us here.”
“Yeah, well, we just went after you, like. Didn’t pay too much attention to which way. Come on, man. You’ve gone this far. We don’t know where the hell we are. I’ve gotta get a tetanus shot fast.”
“And we gotta carry Danny,” Brett added. “He can’t walk on that ankle.”
I decided to take them the most roundabout way I could think of, just to make sure they didn’t ever come back. Bonnie tried to pull me the quick way, the regular way, but I held her leash tightly as she strained against it. I led them up in the hills and over a stream Snowy and I had never crossed. I backtracked and circled for an hour, losing myself and them in a maze of trees, swamps, and brier thickets. They swore at me and yelled over and over that Danny could not make it.
“Sweat a little, boys,” I sang over my shoulder.
Finally, standing in the middle of an open spot of ground, waiting for the boys to catch up, I decided to take them back. “Okay, Bonnie, home!” I whispered. She took off like a rocket. I was not holding the leash properly, and it flew out of my hand. I heard her plunge into the underbrush ahead of us. And so did they.
I wasn’t quick enough. I had tried to fade into the darkness of the trees. Rudy caught my leg. I struggled free and ran in the opposite direction. I was cornered against a boulder. I saw him coming at me. I edged my way sideward along the boulder. The moonlight was too bright. There was no hiding. Shawn came at me from one side and Brett from the other. I sagged against the rock. “I saved you!” I shouted. “I saved your stupid, miserable lives. Leave me alone!” They kept coming. Rudy giggled. Then I felt it.
In the bottom of my back pocket was the jewelry box. I never had found the right moment to sneak the little fang back into its ring in the cave. I yanked out the box and held the empty cobra tooth up. I stood straight and shined my flashlight on it. The boys stopped for just a beat.
“Watch it, guys,” I said. “Go on home now. This is a snake tooth. Inside the venom sac is poison. I lost a finger to one of these. Everybody knows it. If you come one step farther, I’ll let you have it. You can break my neck, but if I get you with one scratch of this thing, your heart’ll stop and it’ll be all over. Be careful. Just be real, real careful of this tooth. Hear?”
I sat slowly, legs crossed, and watched them. They melted away into the woods like snow in spring.
I sat against the rock for a very long time, until the sounds of the woods returned to normal and I was sure the boys were gone.
Then, with only a flashlight in hand, I let the forest swallow me up for the last time. I knew that Snowy would go back to the cave very soon. I wanted to put the tooth back. I wanted to see what was left. And I wanted to open the crypt because I had to know what was inside.
I retraced my circles and stream crossings and found the entrance to the cave again without much trouble. For the last time I crawled through the tunnel and padded carefully along the ledge and slid down the chute, as if it were a slide on a playground. Then I took off my shoes and sloshed across the river.
The boys had wrecked almost all of our carefully uncovered town. Their footprints were everywhere, but they had not found the gold disks or the temple of the snakes.
I replaced the tooth perfectly next to its mate in its ring. Then I made my way to our last dig.
The chisel and hammer were right where Snowy’d dropped them. I propped the flashlight on the first level of the temple, between two columns so that it shone just where I wanted, on the top of one of the tiny crypts.
I picked up the tools and, as gently as if I were prying open a sleeping baby’s closed fist, I began to work.
Something stopped me. In the damp air I was certain I’d heard a faint sighing. A mist of silver ash crossed the beam of my light. There was no one else in the cave, no one at all. Of that I was certain. But was there someone in this small grave? The remains of a man from so long ago that the time in between his time and mine was like the mass of a huge mountain? Like Mount Everest. Like the enormity of an ocean. I put the chisel and the small hammer down.
Open it! Go on! Open it and see! the voice in my head nudged me. But I felt a heaviness inside me that had a stronger voice. I already knew the truth. It had been proved beyond any doubt in my mind that at some point in that black hole of time that came before my own birth, this cave had been lived in, built in, and died in. But it was Snowy’s cave in the end, not mine. I didn’t want to be the first to see inside the little crypt. I hadn’t the heart to open it without him there.
“Good-bye,” I whispered to the dust of whomever might lie buried there and to the cave itself.
Putting out my light, I stood, unafraid, listening to the swirling of the river and the beating of my pulse, alone on an island of ghosts.
My father and I spent the summer in India and Thailand, looking for certain kinds of headdresses, statues, and mother-of-pearl fans that were not easily available in good quality in the States. I wrote to Snowy, again and again, at Winchester, at the Finneys’ with “Please forward” scrawled on the envelopes. I told him to write me care of American Express. As usual, Snowy did not answer.
My dad asked me, one night in a restaurant in Bangkok, if I was free to talk to him about the cave.
“I got the boys out” was all I told him.
“Ever find out where they’re going next year?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said. “So long as they’re a hundred miles away from New Hampshire, I don’t care.”
“Barney,” he said, “what was in the cave? Why did you go down there? What did you find?”
I shook my head. Toying with his fork, Dad let it go.
I figured Snowy’d disappeared, tough little soldier of fortune that he was. Then in late September, when the maples were red and orange and the New England afternoon as crisp as a new dollar bill, I opened my mailbox and found a letter with a Greenfield, Massachusetts, postmark. It said:
Dear Barney,
How is Exeter? I hear it’s a hard school. How are the Finneys? Guess what! My roommate is Snowy Cobb again. He and I are friends. He lets me have my stuff out on the shelves, and I let him keep guinea pigs in the room. I am his assistant. Every afternoon he blindfolds me and takes me to a place I have promised never to tell about.
The reason for this letter is that I found this on the chest of drawers. Snowy says it belo
ngs to you.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Mellor
Out of the envelope dropped Snowy’s tree marker, the little Distinguished Service ribbon medal. I popped it into my shirt pocket and loped down to the football field.
It was Saturday afternoon. The grandstands on the football field were packed. I caught sight of Dr. Dorothy and Mr. Finney, who were sitting near the fifty-yard line. They waved, and I waved back. The drums rolled, and the band began to play “America the Beautiful.” On the other side of the field sat rows of gray-uniformed cadets. Exeter was playing the Concord Military Institute.
I intended to yell my lungs out for Exeter. Rudy Sader was quarterbacking for Concord.
A Biography of Rosemary Wells
Rosemary Wells (b. 1942) is a bestselling children’s book author and illustrator. Born in New York City, Wells was raised in New Jersey. She grew up in an artistic family; her mother was a ballet dancer and her father was an actor-playwright. “We had a houseful of wonderful books. Reading stories aloud was as much a part of my childhood as the air I breathed,” Wells recalls. “It was also the golden age of childhood, now much changed for my grandchildren.”
Her love of illustrating also began at an early age, and she started drawing at two years old. When she was older, Wells attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She married Thomas Moore Wells in 1963, and the pair lived in Boston for two years while she worked as a book designer for Allyn & Bacon, a textbook publisher. The couple moved to New York in 1965, when Tom entered Columbia University for his graduate degree in architecture, and Wells went to work for the trade publisher Macmillan. Her first book, an illustrated edition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s A Song to Sing, O!, was published in 1968.
Since then, Wells has published more than 120 books, including 7 novels. In her picture books, she pairs her delightful illustrations with humorous, sincere, and psychologically adept themes. She was praised in Booklist as having “that rare ability to tell a funny story for very young children with domestic scenes of rising excitement and heartfelt emotion, and with not one word too many.” Kirkus Reviews touted her “unerring ability to hit just the right note to tickle small-fry funny bones.” The Christian Science Monitor called her “one of the most gifted picture-book illustrators in the United States.”
Through the Hidden Door Page 16
