Through the Hidden Door (13 page)

I closed my eyes so that I could remember everything in order.

The first thing Snowy and I had discovered that afternoon was a graying and then blackening of the sand in our shovels. The white road had continued just as before, but next to it we gradually uncovered the beginnings of a fire pit. We gave over the next hour or so to staking out its borders. It was four feet deep under the sand in some parts, filled with hard, blackened charcoal that went powdery in our hands. Then we found the half-pot and next to that, where the clay rose in a small hill, the beginnings of a low wall.

“Work shift changes,” Snowy had said then. “You shovel, I’ll carry. This is where we can’t afford to dump sand on what we might want to dig later.” And so we began the shoulder-breaking work of carrying our sand away. The bucket handles cut into Snowy’s palms under the weight of the sand. After three stumbling trips down to the river he made a kind of yoke piece across his shoulders out of the boathook, carrying two buckets at a time that way. I dug the best I could with my splinted finger jolting me every time I touched the shovel against it, but it was better than carrying buckets.

After a little, Snowy joined me on his knees, for there was no hard digging here. I’d put down the shovel, gone to the trowel, and then, with just my fingers, removed, spoonful at a time, the sand that filled a small room, about twenty inches square. How long had it been there? Who had built it? There were no answers. No answers at all.

The roof had caved in under the sand. Carefully we removed the tiny curved tiles, setting them down beside us in a pile. After the sand was cleared, parts of the walls fell in toward the middle. But the room itself was intact, almost undisturbed, as if it had been abandoned very suddenly. And around the outsides of the walls were ten more strange splash-pattern holes in the clay soil.

“In the room?” Finney prompted me.

“Inside the room were parts of hundreds of more pots. There was a sort of tablelike board along one wall, and a wheel.”

“A wheel.”

“A potter’s wheel, Mr. Finney. Something like the one they have in the art room. Of course, it was only two and a half inches high,” I added.

“Barney,” Dr. Dorothy said from the kitchen doorway, “I want you to tell me what you think you have found down in the cave.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have any idea.”

“Somebody should go down and have a look,” she said. “Somebody from Harvard. Somebody from—”

“No!” I said. “That’s out of the question.”

“But this may be a very important—”

Finney cut her off. “Dorothy, I have a pretty good idea of what the boys have found. It’s a curiosity. I think what the boys have found is fifteen years old. Maybe thirty. Maybe five.”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, we are dealing with a scale model road, statues, potter’s wheel, and so forth,” said Finney. “Nobody would have had the knowledge to make this village you’re digging up before the sixties or seventies—or the fifties at the earliest. Proper excavations on Pompeii didn’t even begin until the 1950s. Very little was published before then. Only a serious archaeologist would have had the knowledge to recreate something like this. Who could have known about the root holes? What you’ve found, boys, is a magnificent joke. Probably constructed by a hermit or maybe an escaped madman hiding out with nothing else to do. It’s marvelous. But I’d bet my four-hundred-dollar handmade leg here that it’s modern.”

“Supposing,” I said, “that it’s a hundred thousand years old.”

“Pennimen,” said Finney, “there has never been any evidence of any human life in North America before the ancestors of the Indians, who date back at the very most to fifty thousand years ago. No human bones or sites have been discovered that are any earlier than that. Human life started in Africa, not here on this continent.”

“Mr. Finney, when Snowy and I first went down, there were no footprints in the crust of the sand. No one had been there before us. Besides, how can you say human life started only where they happen to have found bones so far? There may be zillions of buried bones in all kinds of places. Just because they haven’t been discovered yet doesn’t mean anything. There might have been people here before the Indians’ ancestors migrated over. They just haven’t been found up to now.” My voice had gotten quite hot.

“It’s ten degrees out, Barney,” chirped Dr. Dorothy. “And it’s late. I will drive you back to campus. If you walk, that metal thing on your finger will freeze and give you frostbite.”

In the car she was silent, like a great padded moose behind the wheel. Then all of a sudden she said, “Barney.” I waited while she spun out of a small skid without any alarm at all. “Please turn out the cuffs of your pants for me, Barney.” I placed one foot on the dashboard and turned the cuff inside out. “That’s it. That’s it,” she said. In the cold blue moonlight her fingers reached for something, snapped it up, and with a smile at the road ahead she pocketed it.

“Thank you, Barney,” said Dr. Dorothy like a robin.

In my room five minutes later I turned out the other cuff. In it were six or seven pieces of charred wood from the fire pit.

S
ILKS SLIT OPEN HIS
mail while I recited “If.”

“What school have you decided on?” he asked me.

“Winchester, Mr. Silks. I’ve decided to stay on.”

Silks’s flush started at the jaw and worked its way up. He kept his voice low. “I will speak to your father myself,” he said.

“He isn’t home, Mr. Silks. He’s on the road.”

“Where on the road?” Silks asked, as if I’d said in jail. His letter opener was a tiny Excalibur, its home slot in a heavy lump of Lucite made to look something like an iceberg. He twiddled it in and out of the slot, trying it different ways.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “He said he may call me tonight.”

“Tell him to call me in the morning.”

“It won’t do any good, Mr. Silks. I’ve decided that I want to stay. Mr. Silks, I will not make any trouble for you.”

“You
are
trouble, boy,” said Silks.

“I will not make any trouble for you,” I repeated.

“Just what kind of trouble are you talking about?”

“Any kind. I will not open my mouth about anything I see or know.”

Silks slicked his tongue over his front teeth. “Something may happen to you, Pennimen. I have no control over that. I can’t throw boys out of school because they might do something.”

And if they do, that would lose you your job, wouldn’t it?
I thought.
One more incident will do it.
“I will be very careful, Mr. Silks. I will keep out of everyone’s way. Please let me finish out my year here.” Sweat sprang into my armpits and trickled down the soft hairs on my spine. “I’m ready for my history and math exams,” I added cheerfully.

Silks ignored this. “You will not go to Hotchkiss, Pennimen, or any other decent school in the country. I will see that you wind up in a military academy where they take bad boys like you and straighten them out. You might as well apply to Concord Military right now.

“I hope you’re good at drill, Pennimen. And pushups and getting up at four forty-five in the morning. I hope you like uniforms.” Here he pointed the silver tip of the sword at me just so. “The cadets drill hours a day, Pennimen. Study halls are supervised. Every waking minute is supervised. Room inspections are daily. If you can’t bounce a silver dollar shoulder-high off your bed every morning, the commandant rips the whole bed to pieces and you remake it till it’s tight as a drum. You get a foot locker, and if that isn’t neat, you do Saturday drill. Marching around in a circle for three hours in the hot sun or the freezing sleet. You open your mouth to a senior classman and he’ll put his knuckles in it. The uniform collars are high and tight, Pennimen. Wool. Thick, hard gray wool. They itch. You scratch your neck and you get latrine duty for a month. I know. I went to Virginia Military Academy and I’m proud of it. It made a man of me.”

“Mr. Silks, I am going to stay.”

Silks looked at me, and I caught his eyes dead on, which he didn’t like. He cleaned an ear with a pinkie finger and studied it. “It might do you some good, after all,” he said with a smile. “Yes, when your father calls, I will tell him I am recommending you for Concord Military Institute, where you can be a little cadet for four years. I will do that for you, Pennimen.”

“May I have my exams now, Mr. Silks?”

“Take care of that finger, Pennimen.”

At two thirty I took Finney’s first key from the chain on my belt. No one was near the music room. No one in the hall. The door was partially hidden by a plywood and canvas set from last year’s senior play. The key worked, and I slipped in and down a stairway, soundlessly closing and locking the door behind me.

For a few moments I nearly forgot about the cave. I flashed my light on the walls of the old kitchen. In front of me was a stove with twelve gas burners and four ovens. It was made of white enamel with blue flecks. I touched the surface—dust lay there, and grease. I figured the stove was big enough to cook a hundred meals, which of course it must have done every night for years. A couple of ten-gallon iron kettles still sat on the sink’s wooden drainboard. On the wall above the kettles hung a girlie calendar from December 1951.

I let my light play on the calendar. Christmas vacation had been crossed out. This room had stopped existing sometime in that month of that year, I thought idly. Probably closed after Christmas break. One day the whole kitchen was canceled and it doesn’t exist anymore. My thoughts dwindled away. The old kitchen was caught in time, just like the cave, just like a dead fly in a long-retired spider web. I had stumbled into a piece of time from long before I’d been born. I didn’t think I belonged in 1951. Did I really belong in the cave?

Snowy would be waiting for me in the stable. I shuffled through the room, my light glancing off dozens of glass-fronted cabinets, one with a dried wasps’ nest the size of a basketball in it. The pantry lay beyond. There were cardboard cartons under the counters. My feet crunched some Styrofoam packing material. I kicked it out of my way. I found the passageway, a bricked tunnel with a curved roof that led on for a quarter of a mile. Then, abruptly, the tunnel stopped. At the head of the stairway that ended the corridor little peeps of light shot through the second door.

The keyhole was gummed up with rust and dirt. I had to rout it clean with my pocketknife, but at last that lock turned too, and when I barged out into the light, I found myself, as Finney had promised, between two unused cold frames, their glass all splintered and broken, on the far side of the stable.

Snowy was covered with mud.

“Snowy, have you been in the cave already?”

“Sixth grade had a class trip today,” he answered. “Our exams finished yesterday. I didn’t go. I told them I’d lost my glasses. Nobody wants a blind boy on a trip to the art museum.”

“Have you been in the cave?”

“I filled the splash holes, the ones Finney says are root holes, with plaster of paris. They should be dry by now.”

We marched through crusty snow. I stumbled on, following Snowy’s string and wondering if he ever changed the route we took. The same pine boughs seemed to brush my face and the same nettles to catch at my pants. In the beginning I hated walking blindfolded, as I was afraid I’d trip or run smack into a branch at forehead level, but now I felt more like a horse trudging a familiar track with Snowy as my rider. “Find anything new this morning?” I asked, trying to be conversational.

“Yeah.”

“Well, thanks for letting me know,” I answered him. “You want to tell me what it is?”

“It’s better if you see for yourself.”

Snowy’s attitude and Snowy’s routine never changed. My blindfold didn’t come off until three complete turns in the entrance cavern after the tunnel crawl. Then, as we walked one slow foot in front of the other along the ledge, he turned the light on and I was permitted to see.

It would do no good, I knew, to hurry Snowy up. I knelt in the sand while he dug up one plaster-of-paris root mold. I took the other. There was nothing much interesting about them. When we’d cleaned the dark clay away from the sides, they just looked like ordinary white roots.

“How would you like to spend six months in the library trying to find out what kind of a root this is?” I asked Snowy.

He blinked. “What are you getting at?”

“Finney,” I said. “If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t even have known what the holes were. He’ll find out what kind they are too. Aren’t you glad we’re letting the Finneys help us a little, Snowy?”

He didn’t answer that. He just knelt in his mud-covered jeans and parka, looking off at the partly fallen-in little house we’d discovered the day before. “Barney, I found something made of gold.”

“What? Where?”

“Promise you won’t touch it,” he said without explaining. I noticed then that he had tossed his sweater over something at the back wall of our dugout potter’s house when he was in the cave earlier that morning. There was a new pile of sand beyond it. We hadn’t dug there before. Snowy waddled over to it on his knees and removed the sweater carefully.

“What do you think?” he said.

In the lantern’s smoky light, at the fire pit’s edge, was a humped disk of gold about the size of a fifty-cent piece. On it was embossed a man’s face, with wild curly hair and closed eyes. Fencing the disk all around were a dozen delicate ivory spears, tapered and sharply pointed, curving inward. They were set in pairs. My hand reached toward the middle and was slapped away sharply by Snowy. “Don’t touch!” he warned me.

“Why not?” I asked.

“What do you think those things are?” he asked me.

I brought the lantern a little closer. Once again I tried to touch one, and again Snowy slapped me back.

“Hey!” I said.

“Barney, be careful.”

“Of what? These things are just swords or sabers,” I said. “Sort of. What are you scared of?”

“You know what I think they are?”

“What?”

“Get your hands back, Barney. I think it’s a trap.”

“What kind of trap?” I said. “A mousetrap?”