Through the Hidden Door (21 page)

“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 belongs 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.

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.”

Among her bestselling picture book titles are
Voyage to the Bunny Planet
,
Noisy Nora
, and
Read to Your Bunny
. She is best known for the Max and Ruby series, which depicts the adventures of sibling bunnies. Many of her series also feature animal characters, including McDuff (illustrated by Susan Jeffers), Edward Almost Ready, Yoko, and the Mother Goose books edited by Iona Opie. In addition to her picture books, Wells has written several historical fiction and mystery/suspense novels for young adults.

In 2002, the Max and Ruby series was adapted as an animated television series, and has become a popular show for young children. Her picture book
Timothy Goes to School
was adapted for TV in 2000, and several of her other books have been produced as short films. Wells’s work has also been recommended on innumerable lists, including the
New York Times
annual Best Illustrated Books round-up and several American Library Association Notable Book lists. She has won countless awards, such as the Parents’ Choice Foundation Award and multiple School Library Journal Best Book of the Year awards.

In addition to being a prolific writer and illustrator, Wells is a keen advocate of literacy programs. She was a speaker for the national literacy initiative the “Read to Your Bunny” campaign.

Wells has two daughters: Victoria, who is now an editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, and Marguerite, an organic farmer who teaches at Cornell University. She also has five granddaughters: Zoe, Eleanor, Frances, Phoebe, and Petra. The girls are sources of unending fun and inspiration for the never-ending stories that come out of the Wells studio.