Secret Summers. Glynda Shaw

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СКАЧАТЬ like screwing a plug out of a hole, but it wouldn’t move any more in that direction. I tried to screw it back the other way, and in a few seconds, I heard another clunk. ”I’m getting somewhere,” I whispered down to Monique, who of course clambered immediately up beside me. By twisting back and forth from release to release, I eventually worked loose what I’d come to think of as the locking plug and suddenly the box nearly leapt up off the floor, so much lighter had it become.

      I gently turned the box over. There was a hole in the bottom, perhaps the size of a silver dollar. From the floor where the box had recently rested, was an inch or so of wooden peg projecting, the same size as the hole. The peg went down into a hole in the attic floor. The hole was square, not round like the peg. I took hold of the top of the peg and clamping my fingers about it, pulled upward. It came up a fraction of an inch but snapped back with a “clock” sound. There was obviously some sort of spring down at the base of the peg.

      “Woo,” Monique said suddenly not troubling to whisper. ”Move the light closer. Look at that!” she pointed, and I saw the square head of a key just protruding from the top of the peg. This one was brass and more businesslike than the one from the suitcase, but when we tried the lock, it made no more headway than the silver key had on the diary.

      “Why would anybody put a key in there if there’s no way to open the lock?” I demanded.

      “’The key to things without,’” Monique said, “‘is that locked safe within.’ Maybe this isn’t the key to the box. Maybe it’s the key to something else?”

      “To what then?” I asked. ”And just because it’s a key to things without, does that mean it doesn’t somehow open the box?”

      Monique’s head wagged back and forth in the flashlight beam.

      “’The thread that runs, however far,’” I tried, “’must tie yet end to end.’” I stared more closely at the peg. It had threads on it like a jar, sort of but not all going in one direction; rather they zigzagged back and forth. We had the box off the peg, but all we had for our trouble was a one-inch hole in the bottom of a hardwood box and a weirdly threaded peg sticking up out of the attic floor.

      Another survey of the box showed that no screw heads or nails showed, no way to disassemble the thing.

      “If only the open mind ‘can grasp things unknown’ … Grasp new things, I suppose that means,” Monique mused. ”Maybe we should think about locks for a while. What do we know about locks?”

      “Well,” I said, “there’re lots of kinds of locks, but with a key lock, you put a key in a hole in the bottom or on one side and turn it, and it pushes something out of the way and lets the lock open.”

      “And we can’t get the key in this side of the lock,” Monique supplied. ”What about the other side, I wonder.”

      At first I didn’t get her. ”What other side?”

      Monique tapped the top of our inscribed wooden box near its lock plate. ”This side,” she said. She turned the box over and poked her finger up through the hole in the bottom. An object inside shifted, thumping as she did so. ”Other side,” she said. My mouth hung open. ”Can I have the flashlight please?” I handed it over.

      She played the light around the attic. ”Thought so,” she said. A length of dowel, grimed with age had been lying there on the floor, perhaps three feet from us, along with some ancient tools, mostly rusted, all of them dusty. ”I can’t see enough up here,” she said. “Let’s take this down the ladder.” Handing me the piece of dowel, she picked up the box and shook it. Again, a soft shuffling thud issued from within. ”Something in there,” she said.

      Back down in my room, Monique laid the box on my bed, bottom up, exposing the hole again. It had a metal ring within it. Evenly spaced teeth pointed inward. These had obviously slid along the screwy grooves in the attic floor plug, which traveled only a little way, then doubled back on themselves.

      “’The open hand alone,’” Monique said as if following on the heels of my own thought, “’can grasp the things unknown.’” She reached for the dowel I still held and studied it, turning it over. Slowly she slipped the square head of the brass key into a slot cut into one end. She shook the box again, dislodging whatever was inside, out of the way of the hole and slipped the dowel, key foremost, through the hole in the bottom of the box. Furrowing her forehead with concentration, she twisted the length of wood, adjusting back and forth, up and down. ”I feel something,” she declared, and a moment later, there was a metallic sproing and the box sprang open.

      “’No question lies upon the tongue …’” I nearly shouted.

      “’… with no answer nearby to be shown!’ Yes,” she laughed, clapping her hands. “We asked what a lock was and what it did, and since it didn’t work the way other locks we’ve known work, we found a whole new way of opening locks!” She was bending over the open box now. ”A book!”

      A weathered, brown, leather-covered volume lay in the open box next to a pile of what looked at first sight like trash of some kind, material scraps, perhaps, rags at the extreme end of existence. Monique seized the book. The title on the front cover was all but obscured. She gently opened the book. Dust wafted from inside. The Watchful Eye, the title on the first page read. I stood behind her to read along. It appeared to be a story about a girl coming to live in a strange, dark house by the sea. From what I could gather, the girl didn’t appear all that happy being in this locale. There was something very frightening to her about it, though her grandfather, who seemed to be either a woodworker or a wizard—it wasn’t clear which—was kind and, within the means available to him, made this strange place comfortable for her.

       When the huge waves batter the rock faces below my garret where the shore slopes toward the black water, I curl up with Miss Anabelle and shiver, straining my eyes through the window for any hint of light. Black are my thoughts until The Orb, the friendly watching eye, should top the scrub trees by our house and once more, companion me till dawn—

      “What are you two doing in there?” Aunt Claire’s voice suddenly jolted us back to this day and this place overlooking the very sunny and rather self-satisfied looking Pacific Ocean. Reflexively, Monique slid the book under my pillow, and I slammed the box closed, noting as I did so the shreds of blue denim and tatters of another fabric, once white perhaps, inside the box. I pushed the box under my bed. ”Heavens to Betsy!” Aunt Claire expostulated. ”What a mess the two of you are.” She brushed at my dress front. ”You look like a ragamuffin. You’ll need a wash and some tidying.” To Monique, she said, “You’d best run along home. The party will be in a couple of hours. Your mom will want to scrub you too.” Monique frizzed up her hair like a madwoman’s and made a ludicrous face at my aunt.

      “I shall go roll in mud to prepare for the festivities,” she said. Claire swatted at her as she scampered out of the house.

      Divining Tea and the Dark Intruder

      “Now,” Claire said to me, “has that girl been filling your head with stories of ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the attic?”

      I nodded somewhat sheepishly.

      She harrumphed, said “You’re as safe here as you could be anywhere,” then returned to scrutinizing my clothes. ”You’ll want a petticoat under that,” she decided. “Go clean up and I’ll see what I can do with the dress.”

      I’d determined to object about the СКАЧАТЬ