Mandie Collection, The: 4 (57 page)

The three quickly entered the tunnel and then paused to look around. This end was not as dark as the other one. They could see there were no exits in this part. Mandie moved slowly forward and Celia and Jonathan followed.

The light grew darker and darker as they walked along and examined
the walls for a door or some kind of cross tunnel. Then they rounded the bend where Mandie had fallen on the steps.

“There’s a door!” Mandie whispered to her friends as she pointed toward the right side of the wall.

The three paused to look it over. Then Mandie made up her mind. “Let’s open it,” she said. She reached forward and slowly pushed the door open. It swung wide on squeaky hinges. They could see a small room inside with another door at the far end. The room was empty.

“I don’t think we ought to go any farther,” Celia objected.

“Just one more door,” Mandie insisted as she walked across the room. Jonathan helped her push on the door. He tried so hard he lost his footing and banged his head on the old wooden facing as the big heavy door swung open. He rubbed his forehead as he and the girls looked inside. The room was full of wooden boxes.

“Let’s see what’s in those boxes,” Mandie said. She walked over to a stack and her friends followed. As they crossed the room the old door swung shut, cutting off most of the light in the tiny room.

“I’ll open it again,” Jonathan said. He pushed at the door but couldn’t get it to budge. Mandie and even Celia helped but they couldn’t get it to open.

Mandie looked around the room. The only light in it was coming through grills high on the walls like the ones they had seen in the tunnel earlier. But there was no other door to the room.

“We just have to get that door open,” Mandie insisted. She quickly tied Snowball’s leash to a handle on one of the wooden boxes. Going over to the door she pushed with all her might. Jonathan and Celia helped. The door wouldn’t move.

The three stood back looking at the door. Celia had a frightened look on her face and Jonathan shrugged. But Mandie was angry with the door. They just had to get that door open! There was no other way out. The door hadn’t seemed all that tight when they opened it. Could someone have bolted it on the outside when it had swung shut? And what was in all those stacks and stacks of boxes? Whatever it was, maybe someone would come to get some of the boxes and they could get out.

Mandie was really frightened but she tried to ignore it. Then Celia looked at her and said, “Our verse, Mandie.”

The three young people joined hands and repeated Mandie’s favorite Bible verse: “What time I am afraid I will put my trust in Thee.”

Mandie sighed and looked at her friends. “Now I feel better.”

“So do I,” Celia agreed.

Jonathan shrugged his shoulders and walked around the room. “We might as well start on these boxes and see what’s in them.”

“They look like they’re securely bound with those metal bands. I’m not so sure we can get them open,” Mandie replied as she bent to inspect the one Snowball was tied to.

“There’s no telling what’s in them,” Celia said.

“We’ll just find out,” Mandie said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE UNDERGROUND

Mandie and her friends focused their attention on the stacks of boxes in the room. Jonathan picked up several and found they were all heavy.

“They probably all have the same thing inside, whatever it is,” Mandie remarked as she, too, tried to lift a box.

“And whatever is inside is packed firmly because nothing shakes around or rattles inside when I shake them,” Jonathan added as he kept pulling boxes down from the top of the stacks and lining them up on the floor.

“Why don’t we drop one real hard and see what happens?” Celia suggested.

Mandie and Jonathan looked at her. “But, Celia,” Mandie said, “there might be something fragile inside and it would break if we slammed the box down.”

“But we might also get a box to pop open if we drop it enough, and then we could see what’s inside,” Celia insisted.

“You mean like this?” Jonathan said with his mischievous grin as he picked up a box, held it high, and then let it fall to the floor. It only made a loud thud and the box did not break open. He picked it up again and repeated this several times. Nothing happened.

“They’re awfully strong boxes,” Mandie remarked as she examined the one Jonathan had been dropping.

“Yes, and they’re all alike, good thick wood, bound with metal bands,” Jonathan added as he looked around the room.

Mandie suddenly gasped. “What is Snowball doing?” She ran to bend over the white kitten who was busy pulling straw out from between the cracks of the box he was tied to.

“Smart cat!” Jonathan exclaimed.

“This box is cracked down the side,” Mandie commented as she watched her kitten steadily working on the straw. “If we just leave him alone long enough, he’ll probably get enough of that straw out so we can see what’s inside.”

The three stood back and watched. Snowball looked up at his mistress and meowed as though he thought she was going to scold him. He quit clawing at the straw and began licking his paws.

Mandie bent down to pat him on the head. “Oh, Snowball, why don’t you go ahead and get all that straw out?” She pulled at the strands sticking out through the crack in the box but it kept breaking off.

“Too bad we don’t have sharp fingernails like Snowball’s claws,” Jonathan remarked as he tried to help.

Mandie suddenly stood up. “This box already has a crack in it,” she said. “If all three of us stood on top of it, we might be able to split it open.”

Her friends agreed. Mandie tied Snowball to another box, and then they went to work. Since the box was not very large, they had to hold tightly to one another in order to have room to stand.

“Now when I say go, we will all jump up and down as hard as we can,” Mandie told her friends. “Ready?”

Celia and Jonathan both said, “Yes.”

“One, two, three, jump!” Mandie cried. The three jumped up and stomped heavily on the box. They paused to see if they had been able to accomplish anything. “The crack does look a little wider,” Mandie told them as she bent to inspect it.

“Then let’s do it again,” Jonathan said.

They kept jumping up and down on the box with little results. Mandie finally bent and began pulling on the straw again. Her friends helped.

“This stuff is scratching my fingers,” Mandie said, pausing to look at her hands.

“Mine too,” Celia said.

“What’s a few scratches? Come on, let’s get this done,” Jonathan told the girls. Then he suddenly stuck a small splinter in his finger and jumped up, dancing around the room.

“And what’s wrong with you?” Mandie asked.

“Here, get this out for me,” he said, holding out his right forefinger. “See that splinter?”

Mandie looked. “It’s awfully small,” she said as she tried to grasp the end of it. She squeezed his finger, trying to remove the sliver, but it wouldn’t come out. Then she had an idea. She stood up and unclasped the broach she was wearing.

“What are you doing?” Jonathan asked.

“I’m going to use the end of this pin on the broach to pick the splinter out,” Mandie told him as she reached for his hand. Before he could object she stuck the pin under the broken skin and then yanked out the splinter.

Jonathan immediately put his finger in his mouth and sighed with relief. “That tiny little thing really stuck,” he said.

Mandie held out the splinter to him. “Here, you have to put this in your hair so the place won’t get sore or infected,” she said.

Jonathan looked at her questioningly. “Put it in my hair? Then it will stick in my head,” he said, refusing the splinter. “Where did you get such a wild idea?”

Mandie thought for a moment as she still extended the splinter to him. “I don’t really know. I’ve heard that all my life. My father used to do that,” she said. “I suppose it’s some Cherokee remedy. But, here, it won’t hurt anything. I’ve done it before.”

Jonathan finally took the tiny splinter but he dropped it. “Well, I suppose that’s the end of that. I dropped it,” he said, looking about the stone floor.

Mandie looked at him and sighed. “Never mind. Let’s work some more on this box,” she said.

As the three turned back to the box, Mandie saw Snowball once again at work on the straw. The box she had tied him to was near enough that he could reach the cracked one.

“Move back and don’t say a word. Snowball will do the work for us,” Mandie said softly to her friends as she motioned them back.

The three watched as Snowball began getting large clumps of straw
out from between the crack in the box. He meowed a little, growled a little, and fiercely clawed at the straw.

“I wonder what he’s growling at,” Celia whispered.

“He does that when he’s angry,” Mandie said softly. “But I don’t know what he’s angry about unless the straw has some odor on it he doesn’t like.”

The three sniffed the air and then laughed.

“I can’t smell the straw from here,” Mandie said.

Jonathan quickly reached behind Snowball and snatched a few strands of the straw he had removed from the box. He held it up to his nose and announced, “It smells like fish.”

“Fish?” Mandie questioned. “I don’t think there could be fish in those boxes. They’d be all rotten. The boxes might have been on a fishing boat and picked up the odor from that.”

“But we can’t smell the boxes in here. There is no fish odor in this room,” Celia remarked.

“You’re right, so whatever is inside the boxes must have the fish odor on it,” Mandie decided.

“I can’t imagine what could be in the boxes and have a fish odor,” Jonathan said.

Suddenly there was a loud noise overhead as though someone were rattling heavy chains. The three young people froze as they listened. Then the sound stopped.

Mandie tried to see through a grill at the top of the wall, but it was too small and too far up.

She whispered to her friends as the noise continued, “This room must be under a building or a street, like a cellar. Maybe we could pile the boxes high enough to see out the grill.”

“Good idea,” Jonathan said, stepping over to the stack against the wall. “We can just add to these and make it high enough.”

“But we’ll have to make a few lower stacks so we can climb up on them,” Mandie said.

The three quickly worked together, lifting and stacking the boxes until they were near the grill overhead.

“I’ll climb up and look out,” Jonathan said as he stepped onto a lower stack of boxes.

“Be careful,” Celia warned him.

The girls watched until Jonathan had reached the top. Then he
tried to see through the grill. “I can’t see anything. There’s something blocking the outside.”

“Then let’s move the boxes over to another grill,” Mandie told him.

They again moved and stacked the boxes until they reached another grill in the wall. Jonathan climbed up on top of them.

“All I can see is a stone wall outside or something like that,” Jonathan called down to the girls. He twisted his head this way and that trying to look out.

“Let’s try another grill,” Mandie told him.

The three again moved the stack under another grill and Jonathan climbed up to the grill. “This is better,” Jonathan told them. “I can see what must be an alleyway.”

“An alleyway?” Mandie said. “Let me look.” She began climbing upon the boxes, and just as Jonathan reached out his hand to help her, the stack swayed and the two found themselves falling in the middle of all the heavy boxes.

The boxes landed with a loud bang on the stone floor. Jonathan and Mandie, holding to each other, managed to stay on top. Celia had run to a corner of the room to avoid the falling boxes.

She hurried over to them. “Are y’all all right?” she asked.

Mandie stretched and stood up on a box. Jonathan jumped down and helped her off.

“I think I’m all right,” Mandie said, shaking out her crumpled skirt and adjusting her displaced bonnet.

“I am, too,” Jonathan said. “But look what a mess we made. Now we’ll have to at least stack the boxes to get them out of the way.”

“But I didn’t get to look outside,” Mandie protested.

“There was nothing out there to see but a deserted old street,” Jonathan told her as he bent to pick up a box.

“Well, I’d still like to see it,” Mandie insisted as she helped with the boxes. “Let’s stack all these back under that grill.”

“If you insist,” Jonathan said with a shrug.

Mandie added, “I haven’t heard that clanking noise up there anymore.”

“Whatever it was we probably scared it away with all that loud banging when the boxes tumbled down,” Celia remarked as she grasped a heavy box with Mandie.

“And I wonder why some of these boxes didn’t split open when they fell,” Mandie remarked as she looked at each box they stacked.

“The metal bands hold them together and the wood is awfully thick,” Jonathan told her as he hoisted a box to the top of the stack.

“Mandie, I am worried about getting back to the hotel,” Celia remarked as they worked. “Your grandmother and the senator will be back and won’t know where we are.”

Mandie laughed a little nervously. “But we don’t know where we are either. If we could get up to that grill and attract someone’s attention, maybe we could get out.”

The three worked faster and were getting covered with dirt from the boxes and the stone floor where they had been sitting. The girls had pushed their bonnets back to hang on the strings.

Mandie suddenly remembered her kitten and almost dropped the box she and Celia were carrying. “Where is Snowball? Help me find him!” she anxiously cried, looking around the room. She and Celia set the box down, and they all began searching.

In the jumble of boxes, Mandie finally found the one Snowball had been clawing at. He was not there.

“I don’t remember seeing him when all the boxes came falling down,” Celia told her.

“He’s got to be here somewhere,” Mandie insisted as she continued searching. “Snowball, where are you? Kitty, kitty, kitty!”

There was a faint meow. The three stood still, listening.

“Over there,” Jonathan said, pointing toward the box Snowball had been working on.