Ghost Cave (9 page)

“I don't want you boys hanging around downtown.”

“Don't worry about that, we don't like hanging out downtown. And we've seen the movie, three times. We practically have it memorized.”

“Why don't you ask Mr. Daniels whether he has some jobs you could do this summer?”

That was the most Marc's dad had said to him in a long time, the most interest he'd shown in his son's activities or whereabouts since January. Part of Marc was glad; part of him wanted his father to keep ignoring him, at least until after they'd explored the cave.

“That's a great idea, Dad. I'll ride over tomorrow and ask.” Marc didn't know why he hadn't thought of it. He reached for another slice of fried Spam and piled his plate with corn niblets. It was a super idea. He'd like it much better than Mooney's paper route.

When dinner was over, his dad took his coffee into the living room and turned on the television, as usual. Marc knew he could leave any time without his knowing or caring—well, as soon as he'd done the dishes. He squeezed Ivory liquid into the dishpan and waited while the hot water made it foam into a pile of suds.

Everything was greasy, but he made fast work of it, even the skillet. Piling dishes into the drainer to dry, he looked in the freezer to see what else his dad had bought. Fudgesickles! Boy howdy, he must've sold a policy.

Marc had left his pack loaded with stuff from the morning, except for his lunch, which he'd taken to the swimming hole. Now he threw an apple and a peach into a bag and stuck it inside the top flap. They'd be home for breakfast.

“Let's try again, Bluedog.” Marc motioned for her to come with him. She smiled and was glad to trot along. She had slept all afternoon after a dip in the river.

They slipped away from Eddie's just as dusk was fading into night. The first star appeared. Marc wished on it for good luck in the cave. He had this sure feeling that the grave was going to hold something special for them.

“It's not safe to ride without lights,” Hermie pointed out as they got onto the highway. Hermie took spells of being cautious. Marc knew he was right, but hardly anybody drove far in Pine Creek at night.

“What can we do?” Eddie said. “Get out our headlamps and light the way? Stop acting like a sissy, Hermie.”

“We can pull over on the shoulder when a car comes,” Marc suggested. “There won't be that much traffic.”

The night was so quiet they could hear cars approaching. Twice they pulled off on the shoulder and huddled near the trees that lined the highway.
With our luck
, Marc thought,
a policeman will drive by and ask what we're doing out here
.

There was no moon, and it was harder to find the cave entrance than they'd thought. “Let's light our headlamps,” Marc suggested.

They sat down and poured water into their carbide lamps. Each popped as it blazed on. The air filled with a gassy smell. They had flashlights as well as their headlamps, but they still couldn't see very well—especially with the thick undergrowth.

“Are you sure we took the right turn off the highway?” grumbled Eddie, when a branch slapped him in the face, making his lamp sputter.

Cicadas punctuated the night air with their buzzing. Twice the boys heard the hoot of an owl, then the soft whispers of wings overhead.

“Some people think hearing an owl hoot is bad luck,” said Hermie.

Eddie and Marc ignored his remark. Small animals rattled through the brush at intervals alongside them as they made their way in a line toward what they thought was the entrance. Bluedog was no help, since she kept dashing off to sniff for rabbits. She loved wandering around in the woods in the pitch dark.

Finally Eddie literally stumbled into the rocks that bordered the hole. “Holy Cow, I could've fallen off the bluff with just a few more steps.”

“We'd have left you there,” Marc teased. “I've had it with delays.”

Quickly they lowered themselves and Bluedog into the cave. She wasn't any happier about going down on the rope a second time, but she tolerated the boys' helping her. Maybe she was getting used to it.

Once inside the tunnels they forgot it was night outside, since it was always darker than the blackest night underground. Marc boosted Eddie up to the overhead hole. They followed the same pattern as before, getting Hermie, Bluedog, and Marc into the large room.

Bluedog started to whine the minute they reached the end of the short tunnel that led to the grave. Marc felt icy fingers touch the back of his neck and tickle down his spine again.

“Stop that, Bluedog,” Eddie said. “You give me the creeps.”

“What do you think she sees?” Hermie asked. His voice quivered.

“The Thing.” Eddie curled his fingers towards Hermie, reminding them of the scariest movie they'd seen in their whole lives.

“Stop it, Eddie,” Hermie demanded. “You're a pile of horse pucky.”

“Bluedog can't see any better than you or me in here,” Marc said. “She senses something.” Marc did too, but he didn't say so. He was afraid Hermie would want to go back, and he was going to stick it out. It was probably just the idea of a grave. They were being silly.

Still, Marc couldn't get past the feeling that someone was watching them or was in there with them. Rubbing both arms to chase away the chill, he chalked it up to an over-active imagination and Bluedog's acting so funny. He had thought so much about what they'd find there that it made him imagine all sorts of things. Like people bringing a body down here to bury it. It certainly didn't get here by itself.

“Why do you think this grave is underground?” he asked, needing to talk.

“Maybe they wanted to hide it. From animals or hostile Indians,” suggested Hermie.

“Maybe they believed putting the body in here gave it some kind of supernatural powers,” Marc imagined aloud.

“You're giving me the creeps, too, Marc,” Eddie said.

“Maybe the Indian died in here. They just buried him where he died,” Marc said.

“I wish you hadn't said that,” Hermie complained.

Bluedog sat down beside the entrance, by the flowstone, just like she'd done before. When Marc shined his light back at her, she had laid her nose flat on her front paws and prepared to watch, but would come no closer. She whimpered.

“That's the way she acted when I first came in here,” Marc said. “You can see why it made me nervous. I know, maybe if this guy was buried here, his ghost couldn't get out. It's trapped down here.” Marc joked to stop being scared.

“Marc, stop it, or I'm going back.” Hermie moved closer to where Marc stood.

“Alone?” Eddie asked and grinned.

They tried to laugh at Bluedog, and got ready to dig, but Marc still felt uncomfortable. Maybe it was because he'd never dug up a grave before. He'd unearthed a few relics with his father, but even they hadn't found a whole grave. He sure didn't want to think he needed his dad along to do this, though. He took a deep breath and prepared to dig.

All three of them had brought small garden spades, the type used to set in bedding plants. Marc was glad they hadn't had big shovels with them when they were stopped by Mooney and Otis. Then those two would have followed them forever.

Scraping the dry dirt away carefully, they each worked at uncovering the grave. Marc dug at what he assumed from the position of the arrow was the top. Had the arrow belonged to the person who had died, or to the people who had buried him? Had they used it for a marker, or a headstone?

For a time the only sound in the shadowy darkness was the rasping of metal on dirt.

“Boy howdy, I've found something!” Marc's shovel made a hollow, thudding sound. “Probably a skull.” He said it matter-of-factly, but the thought of a grinning skull inside the grave sent shivers over him. Bluedog whined again.

“I'm going to get out of here.” Hermie dropped his shovel. He started backing up, then fell over his backpack.

“Go by yourself,” Eddie said.

Marc slipped out the paint scraper he had added to his pack at the last minute. Carefully he dug with the edge and scraped away the loose dirt with his fingers. Little by little the skull appeared. The grinning teeth and hollow eyes almost put him off, but he took a deep breath and kept dusting away the powdery dirt.

Hermie squatted on his heels by his pack. Eddie stopped working and watched Marc. He kept scraping, even more carefully.

“I didn't think about how a skeleton was going to look down here,” said Hermie.

“What'd you think you were going to find in a grave? Horse pucky?” Eddie started to giggle. They were all glad to laugh.

Eddie and Hermie began to help again. It took a long time to uncover the skeleton and sort through the things buried with the body. As the rib cage came into view, they scraped even more carefully alongside the body. Little by little they lost their fear, and their precaution about digging paid off.

Buried with the boy—they knew it was probably a boy because they found a bow and arrow and girls didn't usually hunt—was a small clay pot. To their surprise there was also the skeleton of an animal in the grave—a small dog, they decided, after looking at the perfect skull.

“Why do you suppose there's a dog buried with him?” Eddie said quietly, as if he were at the funeral.

“Gee, maybe the dog died trying to save his life,” Hermie said, imagining the story of the boy's death. “Maybe he drowned in the river, and the dog died trying to pull him out.”

“Maybe warriors from a hostile tribe came in and killed him, or caught him and the dog out hunting and killed them both.” Eddie made up another story, warming to the game.

“Maybe they had a belief that everything that belonged to the dead person should be buried with him, even if it had to be killed.” Hermie picked up the dog's skull and looked it over carefully. “In old India, when a Hindu man died, his wife climbed onto the funeral pyre to die with him—she had to, whether she wanted to or not—and sometimes it's still done!”

“That's a bunch of horse pucky,” Eddie said, laying down the toothbrush he'd been scraping with. “You expect me to believe that?”

“I read about it,” insisted Hermie.

Marc had no explanation for the Indian boy's death, but seeing the boy lying there beside his dog touched him so that he couldn't speak. He didn't want to. He sat there quietly and listened to Hermie and Eddie making up their stories.

Eddie pushed Hermie aside and lay down beside the skeleton. “Look, he's just about my size. That's creepy.”

“Indians were smaller than we are. He might have been our size, but he was probably a few years older,” Hermie said. Then they got quiet again.

Marc had never thought much about dying, about turning into a skeleton under a mound of dirt. He'd bet Hermie and Eddie hadn't either. He didn't like thinking about it.

He jumped as something wet touched his hand. Bluedog had edged closer until she sat with them, pushing her nose into Marc's palm. He put his arm around her, and all four of them sat silently. It seemed the right thing to do, to sit there and say nothing, their lights on the grave, shadows dancing off the cave walls.

In the distance they could hear the drip of water. There was no other sound. Bluedog was warm under Marc's arm and made him feel less alone. He shivered, and she licked his face. He laughed, and the spell was broken.

“Well, let's finish uncovering it. There might be arrowheads or small things in here that we haven't found yet.” Eddie started brushing dirt away again. “This certainly qualifies for that reward money, don't you think?”

“Yeah,” said Hermie softly.

Marc still couldn't say anything. He went back to work, scraping and sifting through the dirt around the skeleton, uncovering the rest of the body and the pot.

When the job was done they'd found a tomahawk, two flint knives, a three-cornered flint spear, and ten perfect, creamy-white arrowheads. A few blue beads showed up. They'd have to sift the dirt to find them all. They arranged it all where they'd uncovered it, so they could see everything in place.

“Hey, it's four in the morning,” Marc said, when they had taken the mound down flat, and he looked at his watch.

None of them had noticed the passage of time. They had been so caught up in the digging that they hadn't remembered to be tired or sleepy. They'd forgotten it was the middle of the night.

“We'd better try to get home before Pops and Gramma wake up,” said Eddie. “They get up at dawn. It's a habit left over from living on the farm.”

“Listen,” Marc said, before they got up to trace their steps out of the cave. “Let's leave all our stuff here, leave the grave just like this, and think about what we've found.”

“Wait a minute. You mean not tell anyone?” Eddie asked. “Not call Mr. Beslow?”

“Right. Let's have it be our secret for a couple of days. The grave isn't going anywhere. We've got all summer.”

“Think what we could do with that money this summer, though.” Eddie just couldn't stop thinking about the money. “What if someone else stumbles onto the cave? What if Mooney and Otis search and find it? What if they followed us and we didn't see them?”

“That's almost impossible,” Marc reasoned. “And if they had followed us tonight, they'd be right here now. I know you don't understand why I'm asking you to do this. I don't even understand it myself. It's just a feeling I have. A strange feeling—like we've disturbed someone.”

“Horse pucky,” Eddie said. “We're supposed to back off this find because you feel funny about it? Because we bothered this skeleton? That's stupid.” Eddie couldn't believe what Marc was asking him to do.

“Yes, please …” Marc practically begged. “If you're my friends, you'll do this.”

They sat quietly, everyone thinking. Eddie thought Marc was crazy. Hermie—well, Marc couldn't tell what he thought. And Marc didn't even know why he was asking them to do it.