Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze (17 page)

As they flew up the stable ladder Willy, who was currycombing Lorna Doone, inquired where the fire was.

“In an old shoe!” replied Oliver, over his shoulder. Willy and Lorna Doone shook their heads at each other, looking remarkably alike.

In the old right boot the clue, of course, was waiting for them.

“It's been here so long it's dusty!” said Randy. “Honestly, wouldn't you think we'd have looked in these?”

“Never mind, as long as we found it. What does it say?”

“It's short:

‘At midnight when the full moon's bright,

(One, two, three, and to the right),

    
Explore a cave well known to you.

    
(Remember cake crumbs: find the clue.)'”

“We only know one cave that you can really call a cave. It must be that one.”

“Yes, and when I was eight I had my birthday cake there, remember?”

“When's the next full moon, though?”

“Yipes. We just had one. Now we'll have to wait till March!”

“Randy! Oliver!” called Father from below. “Are we ever going to get started?”

When they joined him, he said, “What canaries have you two been eating this time?”

“No canaries, Father dear,” said Randy. “This time it's only little crumbs of cake!”

CHAPTER X

Explore a Cave

At midnight when the full moon's bright,

(One, two, three, and to the right),

    
Explore a cave well known to you.

    
(Remember cake crumbs: find the clue.)

“I do wish,” said Randy, “that they'd stop giving us clues that make it necessary for me to wake you up. I'd rather rouse a dormouse.”

“I'll wake up easy this time,” promised Oliver, with a confidence not based on past performance.

It was the date of the full moon. They had planned and arranged for the expedition, and luckily the weather was with them. The late afternoon was clear and still and the coming night promised to be the same. They had their flashlights and some chocolate bars (“to keep our strength up,” Oliver said), handily hidden away under the front steps, and Randy would again maneuver the alarm clock up to her bedroom.

“I'll wake you about eleven,” she said, “because it will take a while for you to come to.”

Cuffy seemed surprised, even alarmed, when they expressed a desire to retire immediately after supper. Father wondered if they were coming down with flu.

“We both feel fine,” Randy assured him, “but we've done all our homework, and we just think we ought to go to bed early.” (Goodness knows it was the truth.)

“Miraculous,” said Father, “but I can't help feeling that there's something behind it all.”

Randy smiled sweetly and kissed him on the brow.

The burring of the alarm clock at eleven was a horrid shock. Randy did not feel that she had had more than a moment's sleep and rose, groaning and reluctant, from her warm bed. Oliver proved just as difficult to wake as he always had on such occasions and was only brought to comply by a threat of cold water in the face.

But before very long they were on the way, gliding along the moonlit road on their bicycles. “Thank goodness the snow's gone,” said Randy. “We would have had to walk the whole way.”

The moon was hard and bright, high in the sky. The stars seemed smaller than usual: tiny, flinty specks. Fortunately there was no wind; the bleak and leafless woods hardly murmured as they rode between them. The two bicycle lights wavered along, side by side, like two unsteady fireflies.

“It's a little spooky, isn't it?” said Oliver. “Don't you think it's spooky, Randy?”

“Of course not,” scoffed Randy. “Just these same old woods and this same old road.”

When they had parked their bicycles at the roadside, though, she felt less confidence. It
was
spooky. The woods were so dark; moon-spangled only here and there, and the dead leaves made such a rustle as they walked. For some reason one does not like to make so much commotion in the woods at night.

Their flashlights were a help, sending beams along familiar vistas. Once they were frozen by the sight of two lighted amber eyes confronting them, but it turned out to be just somebody's house cat out hunting. Still, their steps quickened after that, and soon they were climbing the long hill on the other side of which the cave was hidden.

It was indeed a hidden cave, for when at last one descended to the sandstone ledge on the other side it was not to be seen. It lay concealed behind a wall of junipers and to reach it one must push one's way through this scratchy thicket.

First, though, the children paused on the shelf of stone and looked out at the moonlit view; wooded hills and then more wooded hills, and not a house in sight.

“What if we were the only people?” said Randy. “Just you and I and no one else. And no towns or cars or railroad trains or churches. Just more and more of that.” She waved her hand at the sleeping hills.

“We're not the only people, though,” said Oliver stoutly. He did not wish to be alarmed uselessly. “The Steinkraus's farm is over there and Mr. Cutmold's house is over that way. It's just that you can't see them.”

“But
if
we were,” said Randy. “If we were prehistoric, then, pretend, and this region was alive with dinosaurs, and the cave had pterodactyls in it!”

“Oh, Randy,” said Oliver, who was going to grow up to be a scientist, “I should think you'd know by this time that people weren't invented then. Only reptiles, all kinds, but no
people!
They didn't begin till millions of years later, when all the dinosaurs were dead.”

“Saber-toothed tigers, then,” persisted Randy. “Mammoths and things like that. People were alive when those were. Suppose we found a saber-toothed tiger in that cave?”

“I'd kill him with Rush's scout knife,” said Oliver, who had prudently armed himself with this weapon.

“You couldn't, you wouldn't have a knife; you'd be a prehistoric savage.”

“Then I would have thought up how to make a slingshot,” said Oliver. “I'd kill him with that. Now come
on,
Randy, let's go in. You go first; you're a girl.”

Randy ardently desired not to go in first. “In cases of this kind the boy goes first,” she said, and after a short earnest argument they reached a compromise and side by side, rather squeezed together, plunged through the scratchy juniper screen.

Their flashlights illuminated the familiar cave, and there was nothing there to scare them: no saber-toothed tiger or leather-winged pterodactyl; just a couple of old Pepsi-Cola bottles left there by Rush and Mark, and a forgotten baseball cap that had been chewed by crickets.

Their shadows were enormous on the rough, curving walls.

“Now we must step—very carefully—to the right. One. Two. Three,” said Randy. They turned their flashlights toward the ground but there was nothing there: just sandy floor and old chokecherry pits.

“Perhaps we should dig,” suggested Oliver. He knelt down and scraped away at the sand with the point of the scout knife, but found nothing.

Randy flashed her light about the cave: floor, walls, ceiling; and then she screamed so piercingly that Oliver's hair stood up on end. (He noticed this in one corner of his mind, for he had always supposed it to be a figure of speech, not a possible fact.)

“Gosh, what's the matter?”

“The bats!” Randy was shrieking. “Look up at the ceiling; they're all hung up there, slews of them! I thought they flew south in winter like the birds!”

It was true: great numbers of bats were hanging upside down from the ceiling like little black umbrellas; to Randy worse than any pterodactyl.

“They hibernate, silly,” shouted Oliver, for Randy had precipitately left the cave. “They're fast asleep; they'd never hurt you, anyway. Come on back in.”

But Randy had had enough. Oliver, being a boy and a scientist, knew a lot about bats and didn't mind them very much. He returned to the cave door and again stepped three paces to the right, knelt down and scraped at the sandy floor. This time no clue, but an old penny came to light. A very old penny. There was an Indian's head on it, turned greenish with age, and its date was 1900. Oliver was very pleased.

“Gee whiz,” he called. “I found a penny older than Father is!”

“Good luck!” called Randy. “But no clue?”

“No. I'll try again though in a minute. Now I'm going to eat my chocolate, to keep my strength up.”

He tried several more times after that, taking first three small steps, then three very large ones, and finally just in case the clue writer had made a mistake, he tried three paces to the left. All without success.

“But what other cave is there?” said Randy as they pedaled home. “There's that crack in the rock back of our house, but you can't really call it a cave, and it hasn't anything to do with cake crumbs. Cake crumbs. Cave. A cave well known to us.… Does it make you think of anything at all?”

“Only about that cave in
Tom Sawyer,
and the piece of cake that he and Becky Thatcher ate when they were lost in it. But that's just a fictionary cave; it couldn't be the one.”

“But it could be, I bet. Oh, Oliver, it
might
be in the pages of the book, don't you see? Somewhere in the cave chapter! Oliver Melendy,” said Randy very earnestly, “you are much, much more intelligent than I am.”

“Wait till we see if it's right. Where is the book, anyway?”

“In the Office, I think. I'm not sure.”

John Doe growled from the kitchen when they came in, but they were able to reassure him before he barked. They crept up the stairs breathlessly, whispering to Isaac so that he'd know who they were and not bark, either.

In the Office the moonlight lay in bluish rectangles below the western windows, one rectangle bent and touching a part of the bookcase, but
Tom Sawyer
was not among the books that were silvered by its light.

“And of course it wouldn't be by this time,” said Randy sensibly. “An hour ago it would have been shining over here, about. Or here. Yes, and
here's
the book, third from the left-hand corner!”

“The cave chapter's toward the back—”

“I know, and here's the clue—wait, I'll turn on the light; yes, just where it should be, right next to the page about the cake—”

“What does it
say?
”

“Sh-h. Whisper. Come closer:

‘Well loved by one, by all well known,

As black as jet, as white as bone,

    
My voice, now silent, often soars;

    
And I have keys for many doors.

Among these keys is one for you.

A.B.C. Unlock the clue.'”

“I don't get it,” said Oliver.

“But I
do,
” said Randy, her eyes shining. And as Oliver watched, she walked straight over to Rush's battered upright piano and struck first the A key, then B, and last the key of middle C. Middle C gave a peculiar twang like a broken harp string, not at all its customary sound, and leaping onto the piano stool Randy lifted the lid of the old piano, reached down among the dusty strings and felts and drew out a blue paper; Oliver, meanwhile, hopping up and down in a dance of joy.

Before they could read that message it contained, however, they were interrupted by the appearance of Father and Cuffy, who came up the stairs in their bathrobes, much startled, to say the least.

“What in the
world
—” began Cuffy.

“Aha,” said Father. “I sensed a mystery in all that early-to-bed performance. Now how about an explanation?”

Randy and Oliver had a hard time making their midnight activities sound reasonable or even plausible; and Cuffy was little or no help. “Not only playing the piano at one
A.M
., Mr. Melendy; but searching people's pockets, if you please, and looking for Chinese statues in the middle of the night; breaking china, spending days and days in graveyards.
I
don't know what ails them or what they're after. I declare. I do declare! Now they'll be no good at all in school tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow night, children,” said Father, “you will go to bed the minute you get home from school. Is that clearly understood?”

Yes, they understood that; and when he spoke so firmly they knew there was no use in pleading.

“Is it for punishment or for our health?” whispered Oliver as they went downstairs.

“Both, I guess,” said Randy, “though he doesn't seem very cross. Not half as cross as Cuffy, and not half as surprised, either. Do you suppose he
knows?
”