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
The Hole in the Wall (18 page)
“Barbie, not you? Barbie?” Ma sounded so surprised, she could barely choke the words out.
“Sorry, Ma,” the Shish said, running behind me. Over her shoulder she called, “I’ll make him do the homework when we get back, though. I promise!”
“Where are you two going?” Ma called out the door. I was already on my bike.
“Don’t worry, Ma, we’re just taking over the world!” I cackled an evil laugh as I headed up Kettle Road.
“What’s this about?” Barbie huffed, pedaling hard to catch up. “I thought we decided the commune was not an option. We’re supposed to be taking the hens to your Hole in the Wall.”
“Decoy,” I said. “We can’t let her see us go into the henhouse or she’ll follow us. I’d follow me if I was her.”
Ma was already out in the middle of the road with her hands on her hips watching us.
“You and your big mouth,” Barbie said.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
After we rounded a corner and Ma couldn’t see us anymore, we steered off into the woods and waited there behind a pine tree until she came by in her car. Then we looped back, got the chickens we’d packed up before church, and entered the gore through the only bike-sized gap that existed in the big wall of boulders posted with shiny white AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY signs.
Barbie had stuffed a bunch of stiff hens into her school book bag, and I had loaded the rest into the large wicker backpack Pa used to carry when we went camping. Sometimes when I was really little he’d carry me in that backpack along with the bedrolls and the cans of baked beans. He’d tell the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, pretending he was the giant taking me home to eat. That was fun. Anyway, the stiff wicker felt good against my stiff back and actually made it easier to carry all that weight.
With all the unusual activity in the gore today, we had to be extra careful not to be seen. First we took the back way, cutting to the end of the first rib road, then straight across the rear of the mine to the oasis. Then we had to walk the bikes because the dirt between ribs was so loose, and in the really wet places it practically yanked us down by the feet.
“You didn’t tell me we had to go through quicksand,” Barbie said accusingly, as if she wouldn’t have come here had she realized.
“I didn’t know,” I said, and it was mostly true. I knew the dirt was loose and soggy, and I was always afraid it might suck me down into the middle of the earth if I stepped wrong, but I never thought before to call it
quicksand.
quicksand.
Eventually we rounded the last slag pile before the Hole in the Wall, and my heart caught in my throat the same as always. The ravine would have been pretty anywhere, but it looked like a work of art sitting where it was. The forsythia bushes blazed yellow under the budding maples. Tucked into a hill at the back, my little hideaway stood like a wide welcoming smile. I guess that made the plywood door a big nose.
Barbie said “Oh!” behind me. “Wow. It’s adorable, Seb!” She shaded her eyes and looked around, taking in the mossy clearing, the trees where squirrels chased each other, and the boulder with the dip in the middle where birds took baths. Then she lifted her eyes to scan the looming wall where bulldozers had stopped cutting away the surrounding mountain in a sheer drop. And she looked scared.
At that moment, I saw it like new myself. The cliff face had changed in the two years I’d been coming here. The trees at the top edge had gradually lost their grip on the eroding soil. Some of them had toppled over completely and were hanging upside down by their roots. A few were even clinging to life, by the looks of the green haze of buds at the ends of their limbs.
Dark jagged stripes marked the rock where water had run down and washed dirt away. Water still trickled now from yesterday’s rain. The moat around my hideout had overflowed its banks with frothy colors. And now dark clouds were gathering overhead again.
“We should hurry up and do what we came for,” Barbie said. “I want to get home before the storm hits.”
16
We went into the cave and set down the chickens. “Nice place you have here,” Barbie said, looking around approvingly.
Once you were inside, the cave got tall enough to stand up in for about the size of Jed’s castle, and then it tapered down very quickly to the floor. My shelves framed the shallow edges so it felt like an attic room. I kept the stone floor swept clean and covered with a raggedy old quilt for a rug.
“So that’s where that quilt went!” Barbie said. “You rotten thing. Grum accused Pa of throwing it in the garbage.”
“Where do you think I found it?”
I felt in my pocket for the magic glasses. If the cave didn’t swim with colors like the cavern, our plan probably wouldn’t work. And I’d rather have the hens alive again, laying eggs, than spending eternity as garden statues.
“Yee-ha! Barney’s gonna be a happy cock-a-doodle-dude tonight.” I handed Barbie the glasses so she could see. The Hole in the Wall swam with colors, all right. If anything, the patterns shone brighter than in the big tunnel cavern. Or maybe they just seemed that way in the small space.
My back felt itchy all of a sudden. I tried to reach around and scratch myself, but I was too stiff. I stood against the wall and rubbed against the rough rock, but that made my back itch even more.
“Hey, Barbie, could you scratch my back for me? I can’t reach it.”
She started scratching over my shirt, but that didn’t do much for me. “It feels like bugs crawling all over me. Maybe they were in the wicker pack. Can you see anything?” I yanked up my shirt.
Barbie screamed.
I screamed back.
Then I said, “Why are we screaming?”
“Sebby,” she said. “You—your back. Have you looked at it in the mirror since yesterday?”
I wasn’t in the habit of looking at my front in the mirror, much less my back. “No,” I said. “What’s wrong?” I stepped closer to the daylight and craned my neck around, trying to see what she saw, which of course only gave me a sore neck. The panicky look on Barbie’s face got my heart beating faster.
“You know those colors from the paint that stuck to you in Odum’s studio? Well, some of them must have sunk through your clothes! The colors are on you. They look really pale under your skin. It’s like you have a tattoo!”
“But I thought you said you saw colors fly off me yesterday in the cavern!”
“I did!”
“Well, look through the glasses and tell me what you see.” I handed them to her and showed her my back again.
She gasped. “Wow! The colors look really bright, and they’re swirling beneath your skin. That must be what’s causing the itch.”
Her warm fingers made little wimpy pokes at my skin, like when she’s afraid to touch something. “Your magic tattoo feels cold and hard like the bathroom floor! Does it hurt?”
“Come to think of it, yeah! My back’s been killing me all day. And half the night. It’s stiff. I can’t move very well. I thought it was from you standing on me with rocks.”
“Oh my God, Sebby! You know what this means?” She turned me around to face her. I’d never seen her so big-eyed. “You’re petrified!”
“I was just thinking the same thing about you.” Heh heh.
“Stop joking. I’m serious. I mean your back, Seb. It’s turned to stone, like the chickens. And, yes, it scares me!”
Okay, her idea made sense, sort of, if the paint on my back was made of that stuff that petrified the eggs. Except . . . “Wait. Celery was cured in the cavern, and my cookie dough chunks came up. So why is the stuff still in my back?”
By now rain had started to sprinkle outside. We stepped deeper into the cave. Barbie shook her head. “I don’t know. But we do know who might.” She pointed in the direction of the ORC Onion.
“Boots Odum. Yeah. Maybe I should go show him my new tattoo! What do you bet he gives me lots of money?”
“No, Seb. You’re gonna show this to
Ma.
Let her deal with him. Your life may be at stake! Do you want to wind up like Miss Beverly’s poodle?”
Ma.
Let her deal with him. Your life may be at stake! Do you want to wind up like Miss Beverly’s poodle?”
Just then a bolt of lightning flashed outside the cave, and thunder crashed directly overhead, opening the clouds up. A sheet of rain came pouring down like a waterfall in front of the doorway, spouting inside the cave.
“We’re getting flash flooded!” I said. “No way can we bike across the gore in this. I’ll close the place up so we can stay dry until the storm passes over. You can light the candles.” I got matches out of a coffee can and tossed them to her.
“Fine,” Barbie said. “But as soon as the rain stops, we’re going home and telling Ma everything. Got it?”
“Oh, all right,” I said. I was pretty scared, to tell the truth. Grum would take that lightning bolt as a message from God. And it was His day. I figured I’d better pay attention.
Once I’d locked the plywood into its grooves, the rain drummed pleasantly against it, leaving us dry and cozy in the candlelight. I turned around, wiping my hands on my back pockets, and started laughing.
“Look, Barbie!”
Her book bag was jiggling. The first hen wriggled and started pecking her way out like a baby bird coming out of an egg. Barbie crawled over and loosened the strings so the others could free themselves. We laughed as the chickens came flying out of the two packs like popcorn.
Before long, the little cave was stage to a troupe of dancing chickens. But the last one still lay like a rock in the bottom of the wicker pack. I took the hen out and waved my hand back and forth before her eyes. They didn’t move.
“Aw,” said Barbie. “That’s so sad.”
I dug around in my snack stockpile and found some stale pretzels to toss to the chickens, but they jumped away like I was throwing hot coals at them. “Fine, more for me,” I said, popped a pretzel in my mouth, and chomped down.
“Aaahhh!” That pretzel was harder than Ma’s rock cookies. Or maybe it just felt that way to my four hundred new teeth.
I held a pretzel out to Barbie. “Sorry, they’re a little stale,” I said.
“No, thanks, I’m not hungry. How can you eat at a time like this? Aren’t you scared?”
“Gee, no, Shish. I’m looking forward to my future as a human mood rock. Maybe I’ll join the circus.”
Yeah, I was scared. But I didn’t want to talk about it. Or even think about it. So I pulled a bunch of blankets out of the garbage bags where I stored them and spread them out on the floor to make a mattress. “Hey, Barbie, you feel like scratching my back again?” I asked, trying to sound like I was doing her a big favor.
She scrunched her nose. “That tattoo gives me the creeps. I don’t want to touch it.”
“C’mon, you touched it before and it didn’t kill you. It itches!”
“Oh, all right. But you have to keep your T-shirt on. Lie on your stomach.”
She sat on the backs of my legs and gave my back a hard massage that felt so warm and good, I was almost asleep when the mudslide hit.
It was already noisy outside with all the thunder and pounding rain, but this was a different loud noise—a giant cracking and rolling that started above us, surrounded us, and vibrated through the ground. The candles flickered. The chickens took to the air squawking, and loose feathers rained down. Then the loud noise ended, and the normal storm noise all sounded muffled and distant, the way you can hear interstate traffic from our house during a really still moment.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this.” I jumped to my feet. Which sent Barbie flying backwards and complaining, but I didn’t listen. I was too busy pushing and trying to pull frantically on the plywood door. I even went to the back of the cave and ran at the door to give it a flying kick. But it wasn’t budging. It was bulging. And now my foot ached all the way up to my neck.
I turned to Barbie to tell her we were trapped, but the words wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t swallow either. I was terrified.
“Sebby, what is it? You’re scaring me.” Barbie ran to push and pull and kick on the door, too. And then she knew. “That noise was a mudslide. We’re buried in here.”
I was surprised she didn’t scream. Maybe she was just too shocked. She sank down on one edge of Grum’s raggedy quilt and stared at the plywood. Along the bottom and around the edges you could see a little bead of mud that had seeped in. In the gaps between rocks, thicker flops of mud had formed. They reminded me of the new mortar oozing between the stones behind the henhouse.
“Do you think the door will hold?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” With my finger, I wiped a bead of mud away from the bottom edge, then kept my eyes on the cleaned stripe of wood. “There’s no water coming in behind it. At least we don’t have to worry about drowning in here.”
Barbie crawled to my shelves and dumped the coffee cans, clawing around in the contents. “Don’t you have anything here to dig with?”
“There’s no use,” I said. “This cave is solid rock.”
“Well, we have to try, at least. Do you have any better ideas before we suffocate?” She went to the door and dragged a coffee can across the top like a shovel. The scraping was maddening. I could hardly stand how crazy I felt. This was no way to die.
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