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

How—”
    “The dog led me. I just followed her.”
    “But why hasn’t anybody else—”
    “Mr. Finney says it was the earthquake back in October. Right at the entrance to this cave is a rock that must have moved slightly. I can tell because there was a tangled-up bunch of dried moss over the slit where we crawled in. Just as if it had been pulled away. I’ve carefully stuffed the crack with new earth and moss. No one could find this place again, Barney. Even I couldn’t find it if I hadn’t marked it when the dog went in the entrance under the rock. All the wild places, rocks and hills and stuff, look alike out here. So I marked it secretly.”
    “Then why blindfold me?”
    “Because if we keep coming back here again and again, you might know where the entrance is after a while.”
    “But so what? And why should I want to come back here again and again?”
    “Barney, something’s down here.”
    “What?” I shouted at him.
    “You’ll see. But first, look around at the sand.”
    “Okay. Sand is sand.”
    “Right. You see my footprints. Where I’m taking you you’ll see my footprints and the dog’s from a couple of days ago. That’s all.”
    “So what?”
    “The rest of the sand is as smooth as a beach after a full tide’s gone out. See! The sand in here has a little crust. Nobody has been in this cave at all. If they had been, they’d have left footprints. You can’t go onto a beach and then walk back and leave no footprints. When I followed the dog here, Barney, there were only her footprints in the sand. Not a grain had been disturbed other than the dog’s paw prints.”
    I shifted uncomfortably in my damp pants and looked into the darkness that lay around us. What had Snowy found? Why was he dickering around with me like this? I wanted to say “Get to the point!” but I didn’t. Instead I picked up a little crust of the sand where it lay untouched and broke it between my fingers like bread.
    “How do we get out of here?” I asked him, my fears welling up suddenly again.
    “Don’t worry. It’s easy. We walk out, practically, through another tunnel. The exit is in another part of the cave. But we’ll always come in by the slide down, Barney, because if you ever find out how we get here, if the blindfold slips, if anybody ever follows us, you’ll know how to get in, but not out.”
    “How did you find the way out? You could have been trapped in this place forever!”
    Snowy smiled but didn’t answer me. He turned around, and I followed him over to the bank of the river. The water ran as black as India ink. “There are fish in there,” he told me. “If you shine the light just so, you can see them swim.” We followed alongside for several hundred yards. The cave did not end. Was it miles big? Finally Snowy pointed to a spot in the sand where he’d left a garden trowel. “Look,” he said.
    “I don’t see anything.”
    “Wake up, Barney. I’m the one who’s supposed to be blind. Look there.”
    I got down on my hands and knees. “Is this where the dog led you?” I asked. I couldn’t think of anything else to say because what I saw made no sense at all.
    Snowy nodded. “I’ve dug all around here with the trowel. There’s nothing else but that. Maybe somewhere else there’s more. What do you think of it?”
    Leading from where I was kneeling down to the edge of the water was a set of twelve marble stairs, each no bigger than half an inch high and two inches wide.
    “This is impossible, Snowy,” I said.
    “I know,” Snowy agreed. “But it is ... well, it is there and all.”
    “It must have been an Indian toy, a game, maybe an Indian ritual of some kind.... Just like Mr. Finney and the guy at U. Mass. said. Maybe it’s what kept the squaws busy when the braves were away hunting. Maybe they made sort of architectural models of things before they built them full-scale.”
    “Maybe,” said Snowy. “Except Mr. Finney told me about the Indians who lived here before the