The Hole in the Wall (14 page)

Read The Hole in the Wall Online

Authors: Lisa Rowe Fraustino

Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #Mining, #Family, #Action & Adventure, #Environmental Science, #Mines and mineral resources, #Juvenile Fiction, #Family life, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #General, #Supernatural, #Science, #Twins, #Fiction, #Soil pollution, #Brothers and sisters

BOOK: The Hole in the Wall
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The tunnel stretched really tall in some places and almost narrowed shut in other places. We had to climb over a few boulders. Occasionally another tunnel would branch off, but there was only one vein of curlicue colors, and we all wanted to go that way. Especially Celery.
Every time it was my turn to have the glasses, the deposits of color seemed thicker and brighter. The air smelled more and more of that sweet aroma, too. But it was so quiet inside the tunnel, it seemed the world outside had vanished. All we could hear besides ourselves was water dripping. Until a rumbling noise came out of nowhere, and just as suddenly was gone. And then it came and went again.
Dynamite! Odum’s goons were mining here! Suddenly the tunnel crackled overhead. Dust fell in my eyes. Some small rocks thunked down around us. In my final thoughts I begged God to hurry up and forgive me for lying to Ma and let me get into heaven.
“Did you hear that, Seb?” Barbie said. “Sounds like cars whooshing by. I think we’re crossing under the road.”
Phew, reality.
In my head I drew a map of where we’d started and where we’d twisted and turned. “If there’s a road going over us, we must have gone past the gore.”
“Right,” said Barbie. “Otherwise there’d be no tunnel. ORC mined all the rocks.”
And then suddenly the tunnel branched again. This time the colors went both ways, according to Barbie (she had on the glasses). “Which way should we go?” She stopped at the Y to ponder, but Celery and the pebble didn’t need to think about it. They lurched to the right and sped me up as if we were going downhill, even though we were slanting upward.
At that I knew exactly where we must be. “We just rounded the pointy end of the gore!” I called over my shoulder. Barbie was pretty far back.
And then my sock gave up its heroic effort. The pebble burst out and did that spin-around ringing thing on the floor, like on the asphalt up at Kettle Ridge. Except this time it didn’t stop and sit still. It kept spinning in loops down the tunnel like it wanted to chase Jed’s Stupid Cat, and it was making that wind-chime noise! I tried to follow, but I felt like I’d just gotten off a carnival ride and was tripping over my own feet. The pebble wobbled around a curve and I lost sight of it in the darkness.
We had reached a huge cavern, from what I could tell by the tired flashlight. The light didn’t reach any walls. I couldn’t hear my pebble anymore, either, so gave it up for lost as Barbie came around the corner oohing and ahhing in the dark like it was the grand finale on the Fourth of July. “You have to see this! Seb, these glasses are magical. This
place
is magical!”
Maybe she was right. Because something in that cavern was giving me a funny feeling. My ears rang. My nose filled with that strong perfume smell. I trembled all over. I felt so hot and sweaty that I tore off my two hoodies. My hands shook as I held the glasses to my face, nervous about what I’d see when I got them on.
I didn’t make a sound, though, because no air could pass by the lump in my throat. Beautiful! It wasn’t just curlicue strings of light anymore. All the rock here seemed to be alive, swirling deep down with patterns just like the ones in Odum’s paintings. The whole cavern was drenched with moving colors. They were bright and they were everywhere, even the floor and the ceiling. It made me think of a fairy tale dragon’s lair filled with jewels.
For the first time since we’d entered the tunnel, Celery seemed happy to stay still. Everything felt right in the world. Solid. Permanent. I could have stayed in that moment forever.
“We like it here, don’t we, Celery?” I petted her head. “Whoa!”
This was the first time I’d looked at her through the glasses. She was one fancy bird! Her plumage looked alive with colors. Then my stomach started to tickle, as if Celery was moving her feathers. Wait—she was! She was actually moving! And all of a sudden, so was my stomach, on the inside.
“Ow!” I bent over doubled with the pain. Celery fell to the ground, but she didn’t hit like a rock. Her feathers fluttered and—holy bat cave! I couldn’t believe it!—colors swirled up out of them and curlicued their way into the floor.
“Do you see that, Barbie?”
“See what? Your chick having a fit?”
I handed over the glasses and let Barbie watch while I held my stomach. Meanwhile, Celery’s feathers twitched and plumped. Her feet did a little dance. She squawked and tried to fly.
I was filled with a wondrous dizzy feeling from head to toe. Especially in my stomach. And my back. Which was starting to itch like crazy. I pulled off my last shirt, the one I’d been wearing when Celery got attached to me. Barbie started talking a mile a minute about the colors coming out of
me,
but I didn’t hear much because my head was filled with another noise of my own making. There’s no graceful way to say it. I lost my dough.
“Congratulations, Sebby,” Barbie said after it was done.
“Thanks,” I said, holding my stomach, scrunching my shoulder blades. The pain was gone! “Wow, I feel normal again.”
“Normal? You? Never,” Barbie said.
“I’m starving to death!”
“You’re definitely yourself. Hey, what’s that?”
A howling kind of noise came from the far end of the cavern, where we hadn’t gone yet. Barbie turned the flashlight that way. It was Stupid, sitting in the darkness trying to bark like a dog. Like he wanted to show us something.
Quickly me and Barbie walked over there. Through the glasses, it looked like Stupid was in front of a black hole surrounded by swirling colors. At first I thought it was the entrance to one of those dark tunnels without any curlicue veins, but as we got closer it became clear that the black hole was made of rocks. A pile of fieldstones had been stacked to fill the tunnel opening, just like back at the henhouse.
We also saw the shape of a small white rectangle coming into focus. It turned out to be an envelope propped on a rock. And it had writing on it.
SEBBY
&
BARBIE
We both recognized the handwriting. Our names were written in the block letters Jed always used. He had the neatest handwriting of any guy I’d ever met. It looked like the lettering in cartoon dialogue, or in the house designs Ma would cut out of the Sunday newspaper and hang on the refrigerator to show Pa what she wanted him to build on her dream lake.
“Okay, this is one of my fantasies, isn’t it,” I said, and pinched myself on the arm to wake up.
“You’re gonna have a bruise there tomorrow, goofaling,” Barbie said.
The envelope must have been there for a while. The damp paper wilted a little in my hand. The surface felt grainy with dust.
“You gonna open it?”
I turned the envelope over and looked for a spot to slip my finger under the flap. The glue had stuck so tight in the dampness that there wasn’t any place to fit my stubby finger. I had an urge to tear open the envelope, but I was afraid of ripping whatever was inside, too. I held the envelope out to Barbie. “Here, you do it. You have nails.”
I held the flashlight while Barbie carefully worked a fingernail under an edge until the flap peeled up. She pulled out a piece of folded notebook paper and read the letter out loud.
DEAR SEBBY (
&
BARBIE IF HE DIDN’T ESCAPE YOU),
IF YOU FIND THIS NOTE, THAT MEANS YOU HAVE FOUND THE WALL BEHIND THE HENHOUSE THAT GRAMPA OR SOMEONE BUILT TO KEEP PEOPLE OUT OF THIS PLACE. GO BACK HOME AND NEVER COME INTO THESE CAVES AGAIN! DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT. YOU WILL BE SORRY. BELIEVE ME, I AM. MAYBE SOMEDAY I’LL BE ABLE TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT. I HOPE SO. BUT UNTIL THAT DAY COMES, YOU’ RE JUST GOING TO HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME. ARE YOU LISTENING? I MEAN IT, YOU TWO! PUT THE ROCKS BACK WHERE YOU FOUND THEM, BOARD UP THE STORAGE CLOSET IN THE HENHOUSE, AND FORGET YOU EVER FOUND THIS PLACE. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT.
LOVE,
YOUR BROTHER,
JED
13
I couldn’t stop turning the flashlight to look at the looming wall of stones, and Barbie had to keep grabbing my arm to see the paper. By the time she got to the end of Jed’s letter, Barbie was practically hyperventilating. I couldn’t tell whether she was terrified or excited. Maybe she was both. I sure was, to see what was on the other side of that wall. I inched my fingers around the smallest rock in front of our faces, trying to make a window.
“Duh, Seb, didn’t you hear what Jed said?”
“Yeah, he said not to go beyond the wall. He didn’t say anything about just looking.”
“Oh . . . true,” she said. “But those stones are packed too tight to move any from the middle. We’ll have to take them from the top.” Which was out of our reach. So I got down on all fours to become a scaffold, with the flashlight propped beside me like a spotlight. Barbie climbed up on my back, and pretty soon the first rock hit the ground. It made plain white sparks and a big CLUNK!
While she worked, I thought out loud. “He must’ve meant Grampa built the
other
wall to keep people out. Jed must’ve built this one to keep us away from wherever the tunnel goes. Then he left the letter, went out through the henhouse, and replaced that wall to seal the tunnel before he ran away.”
Barbie paused, with a big rock in her hands, I guessed from the weight of her. “Unless he sneaked back and did it recently.”
“After he ran away? You think Jed has been back home? And are you gonna drop that rock or are you trying to break my back?”
“I dunno, just an idea.” Barbie tossed the rock. “Okay, I think I’ll be able to see out now.”
I craned my neck to watch her poke her head out through the opening. I could see her silhouette even though the flashlight had fallen down and was glowing straight into a stone. That meant—
“Hey, there’s light on the other side, isn’t there?”
“Yeah, a sunbeam hits the ground up ahead a bit.”
I shimmied to shrug Barbie off my back. “Get down, Shish, I wanna see.”
She jumped off me, and I climbed up onto some rocks she’d thrown on the floor. While poking my head out through the opening I remembered something else and turtled back inside. “Thanks,” I said, grabbing the magic glasses off the top of Barbie’s head.
“Wish I’d thought of that. Now what do you see?”
“The blinking colors aren’t all over the place like in the cavern, but they do run along the tunnel in veins like we saw on the way down,” I told her. Then I couldn’t help it, I had to tear away more rocks.
“Uh, Seb? Supper is
that
way.” She pointed backwards.
“Don’t you want to find out what happened to Jed?”
I expected her to say, “What part of ‘Do Not, I Repeat, Do Not Go Beyond This Point’ do you not understand,” but she surprised me by climbing up next to me and helping to widen the opening. “It can’t hurt if we go a little farther and see where that daylight is coming from, can it?” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t look any more dangerous than what we’ve already been through. And Jed lived to tell about it. Or will someday.”
In a few minutes we had cleared a big enough hole in the wall to climb through. Breathless with effort, trembling with nervousness, we crept along. We didn’t know what to be careful about, but we were being careful.
As we got closer to the sunbeam, our eyes adjusted and we could see each gray lump in the walls. We turned off the tired flashlight to save the last of the batteries.
The crack of daylight grew longer and wider as we approached along the curving tunnel. Then there was a boulder to squeeze around. I squeezed first—and felt the ground give way underfoot as I stepped out into broad daylight. Dirt slid against dirt. A terrifying noise.
“Whoa, Barbie! Stop!” I screamed, reaching to grab her. One more step forward and I’d have gone over the crumbling edge. She pulled me toward her, my heart beating in my ears. I caught my breath, and then from the crack at the edge of the boulder we carefully looked out.
We had reached the end of the mountain, what was left of it. The beginning of the gore. Only that boulder stood between us and a long fall.
We looked down on a huge mossy green circle that could have passed for something natural if it wasn’t squatting in an unnatural churned up piece of ground.
Odum’s Onion. ORC.
“Oh! Jed!” Barbie said in gasps.
All of a sudden I was more worried about my brother than I could ever put into words. Because instantly I realized it probably wasn’t Pa he’d run away from after all. It probably had something to do with this place.
Had he fallen off the cliff and gotten hurt? But who would have found him? And why wouldn’t he have come home after that? Where was he now, and where was he calling from on those nights when the phone rang once?
In silence me and Barbie stood clinging to the boulder, staring out over the gore. From here it looked even more bare and miserable than from Kettle Ridge. At least over there you could turn your head the other way and see the land the way it ought to be. Kettle Ridge was a long way from here, a hazy line in the distance. All the land in between used to be connected, rolling hills and valleys, but Odum’s bulldozers had scooped out the triangle. There was just one small spot of green in sight, a natural ravine tucked between slag piles and bumping up against the cliff near the narrow point of the mine wedge. My Hole in the Wall.

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