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

thirty and had free time to ourselves. Weekends with no away games the untouchables were around campus. They were biding their time. If I wasn’t in the cave, they’d find me. They’d find me sure as hell. Besides, just supposing Snowy found something and I wasn’t there to see it. “You felt the steps,” I said slowly. “Supposing we walk around in our socks. Maybe we’ll step on something else.”
    “Let’s be organized this time, Barney,” said Snowy, his voice happy again. “We walk in squares, okay? Maybe ten yards on a side. Then we walk in rows up and down, filling in the square. The way you mow a lawn. That way we miss nothing.”
    We padded over the sand in oblong patterns, marking the crust with our sock prints and coming back every few minutes or so to warm our feet by the kerosene lantern. “Why don’t we build a fire? It’ll be as warm as a stove,” I said. “The cave’s high enough so the smoke won’t bother us.”
    “Are you kidding?” asked Snowy, shambling along in a careful line. “That’s all we’d need to drive the bats crazy.”
    “Just how many bats are there?” I asked, trying to sound neutral and unafraid.
    “Hundreds,” said Snowy. “Mr. Finney says bats often spend the day in caves. They have very sharply hooked claws so they can hang on to the stone ceiling.”
    “Bats!” I repeated. “I don’t like bats! I don’t like sharply hooked claws either.”
    “Well, don’t look up. They’re asleep. Have you found anything with your feet yet?”
    “No. Just sand. Freezing sand.”

Chapter Seven
    S NOWY AND I PACED off our squares for three days in a row, starting at a corner and walking in smaller and smaller squares at each go-round. It was every bit as much fun as vacuuming an Astroturf football field. Each time we came up empty. Then, on Sunday afternoon, I suggested to him that we go across to the other side of the river. As neither of us had rubber boots, we rolled up our pants and ran barefoot through the water, which was so cold it seared like boiling fat.
    We paced out the same squares on the other side. The river water had been so unbearable that even the freezing sand felt warm. We hadn’t brought our stove across and so could only walk for about five or six minutes before we thought our feet would solidify and frostbite would set in.
    “No good doing this anyway,” said Snowy. “My feet are like blocks of ice. I wouldn’t feel it if I were walking on broken glass.”
    I agreed. I took off my socks and tried to rub some blood back into my toes. Then my hands got so cold I had to hold them under my armpits again to warm them up. The socks were frozen from putting them on my wet feet after we’d run through the river. I didn’t have the heart to put stiff, icy socks back on. I jammed them angrily in my parka pockets.
    “Let’s go,” said Snowy, and he made a mad dash, splashing through the river to the stove burning invitingly on the other side.
    I followed him. “We’re doing something wrong,” I said sadly. “I don’t know what it is, but we’re not going at this the right way.”
    Snowy mulled this over. Neither of us had an answer. “Next time we wear duck hunter’s boots,” he muttered. I pounded and rubbed and kneaded my poor feet and only managed to anesthetize my hands again. When I jammed my hands in my pockets, wiggling my fingers for circulation, my legs froze next to the pockets.
    The next day, in Army issue jungle boots supplied mysteriously by Snowy, we hauled the stove across the river and marked out areas that must have amounted to nearly an acre with orange-topped surveyor’s stakes. Snowy had stolen two dozen from the site of the Karlo V. Damascus Memorial Pool. Snowy had also brought two pairs of hunter’s socks that he’d no doubt also ordered from Soldier of Fortune. They were wired to heat up like electric blankets. The socks were wonderfully warm, but neither Snowy nor I stepped on so much as a single pip in another