Penny Dreadful (25 page)

“This way!” she called, opening her eyes and ducking into a passageway.

The others followed close behind.

A W
AY
O
UT

P
enny and Luella and Jasper and Duncan walked. They walked and hunted, and their invisible spelunking thread unspooled beside them. Their flashlights scoped the ground at their feet and bounced off the walls, and at last Penny and her friends found themselves at a fork, a place where the tunnel split evenly in two. To the left there was a small narrow tunnel that led slightly down, and to the right, a wider tunnel that led slightly up.

“Down!” said Penny, heading to the left.

Duncan stopped. “No,” he said. “I think we should go this way.” He pointed to the larger tunnel. “Down seems too … I don’t know,
down.
”

But now Penny could feel the pull of the treasure and knew they needed to go down. She was certain of this, or nearly certain, anyway. “No,” she said, “I’m going
this
way. The treasure is over here.”

“Suit yourself,” said Duncan a little grouchily. “But I’m tired of doing what people tell me to do. I’m going this way. We can meet back here in about an hour. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Penny. “I guess.”

“I don’t know,” said Jasper. “We’re already pretty deep into the caves, and we only have one spool of fishing line. Should we really separate?”

But Penny and Duncan were already heading off in their different directions.

“You keep an eye on that knucklehead!” Luella called to Jasper. “Don’t let him go far. Keep track of your turns, and come back after the tunnel splits three times. I’ll watch out for this one.” Luella followed after Penny.

Deep in her tunnel, with Luella behind her, Penny began to sing to herself. She didn’t like that Duncan and Jasper had gone the other way. It scared her a little, and singing made her less nervous. “
Somewhere over the rainbow …,
” she sang.

When Luella heard her, she joined in at the top of her lungs. “
Way up hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh!
”

Elsewhere, off in the cave, Penny could hear Duncan and Jasper singing too. Which made it feel like they were all still together, kind of. Nobody could be
too
terribly lost if you could hear them. Could they?

As the minutes ticked by, Penny felt less convinced she had made the right decision. Her fingers felt for holes and niches in the walls, and she scattered piles of rocks on the floor, hunting beneath them for a secret hiding spot. At one point Luella found a yellowish length of tarnished chain, which may or may not have been real gold, but was by no means Blackrabbit’s treasure. Once she stopped singing, she could hear the faint hiss of the fishing line unwinding.

“Luella,” she said finally, stopping. “Do you think we’ll find the treasure?”

“Eh, who knows?” said Luella. “But does it matter? Aren’t you having fun? What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is …,” began Penny. “Nothing.”

Penny
wanted
to tell her friend. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. Explaining that her parents needed money was one thing, but
this
was so complicated. How could she tell Luella that if the bank took the house away, all the tenants of the Whippoorwillows might lose their homes?

“No big deal,” she said instead.

“Well, it
seems
like it is,” said Luella in the darkness. “And also, why are you so sure we’ll find it today? You’re weird.”

Penny didn’t know how to tell her friend about her wishes or the signs. She wasn’t ready to show Luella the
note in her pocket. If she did, she would sound even weirder. “No reason,” she said as she continued to hunt. The farther she went and the deeper into the cave she got, the less certain she became. Both girls slowed down. Eventually Luella sat down to rest. “I
think,
” she said, patting the ground beside her, “we might need to call it a day and go swimming. I’m hot and I have dirt in my nose. Besides, Jasper and Duncan don’t have any fishing line. We should go meet back up with them. Come on!”

Across the room Penny was pulling and tugging at a stubborn boulder.

“Give it a rest, Penny,” said Luella. “We can come back anytime.”

“No,” said Penny. “We
can’t
. You don’t understand. Plus, I think I might have it. I think this might be it. If I can just—just—oof!” She tugged harder, trying to roll the boulder away from the wall, where there was a cubbyhole of sorts, blocked by the boulder.

Luella rolled her eyes. “Penny, you are
never
going to move that boulder.”

“I have to,” said Penny. “I will. I’m going to find that treasure if it kills me.”

“Whatever,” said Luella.

“No,
not
whatever!” cried Penny, tugging and straining and—just then the rock shuddered and moved. It slid
aside, rolled slightly, and revealed the cubbyhole behind it to be a tunnel. A small black hole in the rock wall. Penny pointed her flashlight and stared. “Hey, look,” she said. “Look at this, Luella!”

Luella got up and walked over. They peered through the narrow hole and into a tunnel together. “Well, would you look at
that,
” Luella said as Penny stuck a leg into the hole, then crouched down to wiggle the rest of her body inside it.

Penny disappeared into the hole as Luella shouted, “Hey, wait for me!” But Luella would not fit! She was only a few inches taller than Penny, but she was also a good bit sturdier, and no matter how she wiggled, she couldn’t get more than a leg or arm through the hole.

“Penny,” she called out. “Come back here! You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t have any fishing line! We shouldn’t all be splitting up! This makes me nervous. Hey!
Listen
to me!”

Penny turned around and called back behind her, “If you were me right now, would
you
come back? Would
you
listen?”

It took Luella a second to answer. “Well, no,” she said. “Probably not. But
I
don’t listen to anyone. Just ask my mom.”

So Penny turned around and headed off down the
tunnel. She was determined, and she was certain again—and then she was gone. The last thing she heard was Luella yelling after her, “I swear, Penny Grey, if you don’t come back this minute, I’m leaving you here and going home! I’m going swimming!
SWIMMING!
Without
you
!”

Penny ignored her friend and headed off bravely, but once she was inside the tunnel, she felt less brave. She could tell that nobody had been there in a long time. The air was musty and still. Her flashlight filled the small space with dim light, but she almost wished it didn’t, because there were some bones in one spot—bones that could have belonged to anything, or anyone. She saw a shoe in another place, a very old-looking boot. Penny wondered if it was possible that the boot belonged to a dead miner. Behind her Penny could hear Luella calling out her name, but she just kept walking.

About fifty feet in, Penny came to a deep recess in the ground. The hole ran from one side of the tunnel to the other, so there was no way around it. Penny sized up the hole, which she thought was about five feet wide, and decided that if she took a running start, she could probably clear it. But what if she didn’t?

She pointed her flashlight down into the hole and discovered that she could see the bottom. It looked
forgotten and covered in dirt. When she directed her flashlight ahead of her, down the tunnel and past the hole, she saw nothing but more tunnel.
Surely there must be something there
, Penny thought. This tunnel was too well hidden, too carefully blocked, to be an accident. Pointing her flashlight beam behind her at the old boot, she thought,
Somebody was here, long ago, and sealed this place up on purpose. Why would they bother to do such a thing unless they were protecting something … a secret.… And why, if I wasn’t supposed to find the treasure, would I have found this passage? My wishes brought me here. It’s not just an accident. I can do this. I have to do this. In a book I would do this
.

As Penny saw things, she had only two choices. She could take a chance, keep going, and find the treasure, or she could admit defeat, rejoin her friends, and wait for her parents to tell her to pack her boxes again.

There was no choice.

Penny walked back down the tunnel a little ways, crossed her fingers, aimed her flashlight, took a running start, and then leaped.

For a moment she was airborn! She was flying through the dank air of the cave, holding her breath, waiting for ground to rise and meet her on the other side of the hole.

Then she plummeted.

Penny landed in the hole with the wind knocked out of her. When she took a deep breath, she sucked in dust. She coughed and choked but found herself surprisingly unhurt. She’d lost her flashlight in the fall, so everything around her was dark. Penny rooted through the dirt and rotting cloth beneath her and quickly found the light again. Then she looked around and gasped!

She was in a tiny makeshift room, which was wider than the top of the hole. The pile of old blankets she’d landed in were brown and rotting to dust, but they were made up to be a little bed, complete with a thin pillow. She shined her flashlight to her left and found that on the dirty rock floor was a pile of rusty cans, an opener, and a fork.
BEANS
, said one can.
SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK
, said another. Some mice or rats had made a home from a paper sack that sat beside the cans. Penny shivered and turned her light away from the nest. To her right she found a pile of neatly folded, moth-eaten clothes, all of them the same color—a shade halfway between gray and brown. The clothes sat on an old wooden box, about the size of a peach crate, with rusty handles at each end. Beside the clothes were a comb and a little tin. The tin said
HOBART
’
S HAIR BUTTER
. Wedged into one handle of the box was a squashed hat. Hanging inside the other handle was a toothbrush. Beside the box was a pile of
what looked like tools: a knife, a coiled rope, a hammer. Someone had been living here long ago!

Just beside the tools Penny spotted a magazine—nearly disintegrated, dark and unreadable, but she picked it up and found she could make out a picture on the front, a picture of a man riding a horse. Could it be a penny dreadful? Penny closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She let the magazine fall from her hands. In the darkness she felt like crying and laughing all at once.

When Penny opened her eyes, she forgot the magazine because something else caught her attention. Burned into the side of the wooden box, there was some writing. When Penny reached out and brushed aside the sleeve of a gray-brown shirt, she could make out the letters in the dim light.

BB
.

Penny gasped.

BB!

Briscoe Blackrabbit?

She leaned forward again to look. Yes. It had to be.
This
was why she’d come to the cave, after all.
This
was what she’d been meant to find today. This was the answer to her wishes, her happy ending.

Penny nearly fell over in the dark as she rushed to push the clothes, tin, and comb to the ground. When she tried to lift the box, she found it was heavy—very heavy. “Of
course
it’s heavy,” she said aloud in the darkness. “
Gold
is heavy.” Grunting, Penny managed to tip the box onto its side. Something inside it clanked. Then Penny squatted beside it to take a closer look. The box was made of very thick, heavy wooden planks, and it was sealed with nails that had long ago rusted into place. Penny picked up the knife from the floor and tried to pry out a nail. The blade was old and thin, and it broke, scraping Penny’s finger.

So, with her finger in her mouth, Penny stood up. She managed to lift one side of the box a few inches off the ground, but the walls of the hole were far too high for her to see over, much less heave the box over. What could she do?

Penny set the box down, then pushed it against the wall again. With a labored groan she turned it on its end so that it was taller than it was wide. When she climbed up on it, her head was only a foot below the top of the hole. She stuck her arm out of the hole, turned her flashlight back in the direction she’d come from, and began to yell.