Through the Hidden Door by Rosemary Wells

mean you don’t know where this bloody cave is? I thought you were down there every day working like an Egyptian hod carrier!”
    “I am. But Snowy blindfolds me and walks me in circles first, so I don’t know where the entrance is.”
    Finney digested this and another macaroon for a minute. “Poor Cobb,” he muttered at last. “Doesn’t trust a soul. He’s had a tough life. I expect you know about it.”
    I wanted to know more, so I said casually, “His mom’s living in a foreign country?”
    Finney gave the collie a macaroon. “His mother ... travels,” he said. “The father was a career Army man, I think. Stationed in the East somewhere. Been missing seven years. Cobb thinks he’s alive and working secretly for the CIA. The Army says he’s dead. Cobb has an uncle who brought him here. Dorothy and I have taken him in, you know. Cobb needs a home. He came to Dorothy and me because he was petrified of your former friends.” Finney said this with a half smile and a direct look in my eyes.
    “I wish you were back as headmaster, Mr. Finney,” I said.
    “Do you mean that, Pennimen? I punished you rather hard, as I remember.”
    “I deserved it.”
    “Do you mean that too?” His eyebrows rose, and I could feel the human lie detector again.
    I nodded, catching his gaze.
    “I’m too old to get another job as headmaster, you know,” he said sadly. “They want young blood out there. Not old academic fools like me.”
    Sleet bristled against the windows, and the wind wailed like a far-off horn. I could feel the sadness in Finney, as I sometimes felt it across the room when my father was thinking of my mother. “Mr. Finney?”
    “Yes, Pennimen.”
    “What do you suppose will happen to those boys? Especially Rudy and Danny? What kind of men will they grow up to be?”
    “Ha ha ha ha,” Finney laughed sourly.
    I waited. There was no answer but the tumbling of a log onto the hearth. Then, quite suddenly, Mr. Finney spat into the fire.

Chapter Nine
    S NOWY AND I HAD nearly two weeks of full days. We began at seven in the morning and left in the evening, when the bats flew out at five thirty through their roof window. It took two hours of digging with large spades to get to the bottom of our hole without the sand caving in. This time we made it big enough for both of us to get into. We created another waste mountain in doing this and promised each other we’d take turns hauling it away.
    At the very bottom was the surface I’d felt with the tips of my fingers.
    I straddled it and shone the flashlight down on it. There below me, the size of a domino, was a white stone block. It had been cut in a perfect rectangle. Beyond it was another, just the same, and three more.
    Snowy slipped opposite me into the hole. He just fit. “My God!” we both said together, for the stones had all been perfectly chiseled and set in the soft clay around them.
    “Somebody made this, Barney!” crowed Snowy. “Somebody made this just the way they made the steps. There is more here! There is !”
    “What do you think it is?” I asked.
    “I don’t know! Looks something like a pathway,” said Snowy.
    “I think so too.” I brushed it cleaner and cleaner. “Leading to the river. And the other way leading back into the cave.”
    “Which way do we go?” he asked.
    “Back, I think. If the road goes anywhere, it would be away from the river.”
    Snowy wiped his sweaty face with his forearm. “Wait,” he said. “The steps on the other side of the river? They’re directly opposite this road. Maybe nothing’s here and it’s all on the other side?”
    All, I thought. All. What was all going to be? A village? One little play hut? Was this a joke? Or a model? “Snowy,” I said, “you know what?”
    “What?”
    “Suppose we’re looking at something that no one has seen or touched since before the birth of Christ. Maybe since the Greeks or Noah’s ark. How do we ... not wreck it by mistake?”
    “Which way, Barney?”