Through the Hidden Door by Rosemary Wells Read Free Book Online Page A

Snowy!”
    “Not yet.”
    “Tell me why not!”
    “Because this is only the entrance, Barney. There are other ways to go after this tunnel. I don’t want anyone to know which way it is. If you take the other ways, you can get lost in here forever. I found the cave and I want it to stay secret. Don’t worry. I know just where we are. I can hear where we are by the sound of the water.”
    “God save me.” I choked on my words and a clayey mouthful of soil. I heard water too, but what it meant or where it was gushing and dripping from I couldn’t begin to imagine. The tug of the string in my hand told me Snowy was moving. “Let’s go,” he said.
    “Turn the light on, for God’s sake!” I begged him.
    “Wait. Follow me.”
    Snowy turned me twice around and then led me down a walkway. It turned out to be a ledge. I felt outward with my left foot. There was no ground, only air beneath it. “Snowy!” I pleaded, clinging with my fingernails to the wall beside me and balancing on my right foot. “In the name of God will you put the bleeping light on!”
    “I was just going to,” said Snowy. He flashed it on the ceiling of the tunnel.
    Above us twinkled a thousand iron-colored icicles of rock, dripping water like faulty shower heads. Twenty yards or so beneath my dangling left leg identical red-brown icicles grew pointing up.
    I had come within a hair of tumbling sixty feet down, smack onto a grove of sparkling limestone bayonets. When this registered in my brain, I peed straight down my leg.
    Think of springtime, Barney, I told myself. The ledge we crept along was as narrow as my shoulders. I needled myself with singsong advice. Which are the stalactites and which are the mites? Don’t look down — you’ll fall off. Don’t shake — you’ll fall off. And remember to breathe or you might as well fall off right this minute.
    Drip drop, drip drop went the ceiling. The slithery rock wall beside us was as comforting as a dead man’s arm. Suddenly the path ahead ended in a hole.
    “Slide!” Snowy shouted. I did, with my stomach just behind my teeth. I counted the seconds that my backside bumped down the chute. Seventy-five seconds. “Snowy! Snowy!” I cried. “How will we ever get out of here? We can’t climb back up this. It’s too steep and slippery!”
    “Another way!” echoed Snowy’s voice.
    We bumped to a stop on a patch of soft sand. It felt like a beach at the North Pole.
    “Stay there,” Snowy said. He untied the string from around his waist and let it fall. Then his flashlight dipped and weaved farther and farther away from me as he moved deeper into the cave.
    I sat in the sand, my pants frigid and wet. “Don’t leave me, Snowy,” I wailed. “I’m sorry I didn’t rescue the dog like you did. I know I’m just a gutless wimp! I’m a rotten louse and I know it. But don’t leave me!”
    Snowy didn’t answer, but soon there was a glow of light from a spot not so far away. It flared and illuminated the space all around.
    We were in a vast sandy-bottomed cave, covered by a roof domed as perfectly as a planetarium’s. Down from the ceiling hung fat, drunken columns of tiered stone. They glistened in the lamplight and looked just like upside-down stacks of glass pancakes.
    The floor of the cave, as far as I could see in all directions, was powdery mint-colored sand. I played with a handful of it but couldn’t tell if the greenish kerosene light altered the color. Somewhere beyond the reach of the lamp a river ran. Snowy loped toward me, swinging his lamp and marveling at the huge secrecy of the place just as I did.
    When he came up beside me, he asked, “Still scared? Well, don’t be. We’re perfectly safe. I’ll take you home soon.”
    “But how come ... I began. “There aren’t supposed to be any caves around Greenfield. We’d have a science trip to them if there were. We’d at least have heard about them. There’s tourist brochures on everything else around town.