Читать книгу Secret Summers - Glynda Shaw - Страница 10

Back in my room, Monique, seeming very happy with the costume, left it on, and it seemed sort of impolite to spoil her fun, so I left mine on too. We slid the suitcase onto the floor for future reference and sat together on my bed. ”What about this poem thing on that box? What does it mean?”

Monique shook her head. ”That’s what we’re supposed to find out. I’ve had some ideas but nothing very coherent.”

“I thought you’d never seen the box before.”

“Since we saw it last,” she corrected. ”Before we had the lemonade?”

“Ohhhh.” To do her credit though, she did proceed to quote the entire verse from memory.

“Wait a minute,” I grabbed for a pencil, then chose an art pen instead, red, fine tipped. I thought that would look more poetic, more proper.

“’The key to things without is that locked safe within,’” I read. ”Seems that’s just backwards. Isn’t the key usually outside, and isn’t it used to get what’s within?”

“I suppose,” Monique nodded, “that would depend a lot on what’s being unlocked. It could also mean that whatever’s in the box might unlock a bigger secret or mystery on the outside.” She thought a minute, then said, “Let’s have a look at the second line.”

The thread that runs, however far,

Must tie yet end to end.

”I’d say,” I said, writing the while, “that no matter how far you have to go to get an answer, you find it close to where you started. That’s usually how my teacher makes it seem when I ask a question.”

Monique smiled. ”Still … ‘The open hand alone can grasp the things unknown.’ That would mean that we have to keep an open mind in order to understand something very new or mysterious… .”

“That’s sound enough,” I admitted. And not to be outdone, I finished, “’No question lies upon the tongue with no answer nearby to be shown.’ I read somewhere that if you ask a question right and in enough ways, you can’t help but find the answer to it.”

“Hmmm,” Monique wrinkled her nose. ”Maybe we’re working it backwards. We have to ask a question as many ways as we can. We have to maintain a totally open mind. We’ll find the answer near to our starting point. We’ll find a key to something important, to something outside, within the box since that’s where the verse is written,” she concluded. ”On the box.”

“But how do we get inside it?” I persisted. ”Should we break it open or something?”

“I suspect that would not be correct,” Monique answered gravely. ”I don’t imagine she would approve of that.”

Again, that assumption that someone else was here, sharing my room with me!

”What about taking it apart?” I hazarded again. ”Sometimes there are screws in the bottom or you can take the hinges off.”

“There’s no …” Monique began, then more deliberately, “I didn’t see any way to open the box. When we were up there just a while ago, I mean.”

“We didn’t try to turn it over or anything,” I countered.

“No,” she replied serenely. ”You may go and try if you wish. Still, I think we’re apt to be barking up the wrong tree.”

“Ladder,” I said.

“Ladder.”

“’The thread that run, however far,’” Monique recited again, “’must join yet end to end.’ If we wish to open the box, if the box should be opened, we might start with an external mystery that the writing on the box might refer to. If we can solve that mystery, perhaps that will lead us back along the thread to the core of the box mystery.”

I imagined loops growing outward and circling back before my eyes, and my head began spinning. ”What sort of mystery?”

Monique obviously wasn’t finding this easy either. ”Well, has anything unusual occurred lately?” I thought about that, and yes, I supposed there’d been lots of unusual things since, well, last week, but not all of them did I feel like mentioning just then.

“There’s you,” Monique said.

“Me?”

“Yes, your coming here last night and us seeing you in the picture.”

“It isn’t me though,” I told her as if maybe she didn’t know that.

“But it could have been,” she retorted. “Can you think of anything else unusual about your arrival yesterday?”

I started to deny anything significant, but I’d grown up with a pretty strict prohibition against lying. Mom wasn’t the kind of person who gave you a line about clearing your conscience but punished you anyhow. Coming clean usually meant the end of things. ”I guess,” I said, “something weird happened today, well, yesterday. I just didn’t know about it till this morning.”

“What weird thing?”

“I got my suitcase switched, my clothes and everything, with another girl’s stuff because of the airline.”

Now left to myself, I would not have touched that strange girl’s things, but with Monique’s enthusiastic urging, soon the bed was covered with blouses, skirts, pants, underwear, socks, scarves, sandals, and a little pink comb, brush, and nail-care set. The suitcase was empty almost. In the pocket of the suitcase lid, we found a card of hair barrettes of various colors and insect shapes, some of those fabric-clad rubber bands for pigtails and the like, and a tiny diary much faded with age and locked.

Monique picked up the diary and shook it. Nothing fell out. She went through the suitcase pocket again, then studied the lining, pressing all around the inside of the case with her fingers. Closing the lid, she studied the exterior similarly and flexed the baggage tags between her fingers. ”Here it is,” she said with self-satisfaction, yanking hard on the tag, breaking the string that held it to the suitcase handle. I saw then that the tag was actually a little envelope. Monique tore it open and drew out a small silver key.

She immediately inserted the key into the little book, twisting this way and that, turning the key over, trying again. ”Seems jammed,” she concluded. She went to the desk, rummaged the drawers, and found the brass letter opener and the solid-looking, little wooden mallet with a corkscrew set in it. She laid the diary on the table, placed the point of the letter opener in the lock, and began hammering.

“Should we be doing that?” I asked. ”It doesn’t belong to us.”

“It’s rusted shut or something,” she told me continuing to bang. ”We’ll buy her a new diary.”

The diary lay open and revealed. Most of the pages were blank, but on the first leaf in a childish yet very legible hand was printed

I can’t help but think that everything from now on will be very different. The summer is young, however, and there are many pages to fill.

There was the signature monogram “C.” at the bottom of the page.

Monique flipped page after page, and it seemed there’d be nothing else until she turned to the back cover of the diary. She scrutinized the page up close, then held it out, so I could get a good look. There was the same verse we’d been reciting to each other since we’d first read it this morning.

“Could this have something to do with whoever made that box?” I wondered.

Monique shook her head. ”I don’t know.”

I reached out for the diary. ”C,” I said aloud, turning back to the first page. ”That’s my Mom’s initial, Cloudia. Could she have had this book when she was little?” I looked again at the writing. The hand could’ve been mine maybe a couple of years ago when I was first learning cursive.

“But you said it wasn’t your suitcase,” Monique objected.

“Well, the stuff in it isn’t mine,” I said. ”The suitcase looks the same, but who’d switch clothes in somebody’s suitcase?”

Monique took the little diary again and scanned the four sentences under the back cover, moving her lips as she did so.

“If it’s not my mom’s,” I wondered, “then how could these verses be the same?” I waved a hand overhead, then pointed to the diary.

“Another mystery,” she agreed.

Recalling again the sounds from last night, I said, “I wonder if we should be messing around with these things.”

“A key was mentioned,” Monique reminded me. ”Now here’s a key. Besides we can’t spend all our time humoring some old specter!”

I’d always thought specter sounded a lot scarier than ghost did. ”I’ve got to sleep in here tonight,” I muttered.

“Oh, maybe your aunt will let you stay over at my place,” Monique said offhand. Thoughtfully she closed the diary.

As she did so, I recalled the lock on the chest and looked again at the tiny silver key laying there on the desk next to the burglary implements Monique had employed. I saw she was getting the same idea, but I picked it up first. The verse had appeared on the box and within the suitcase that had, mine or not, arrived with me in Oregon. Perhaps this key was never intended for the little diary at all. Maybe it was for opening something else.

“Help me get this stuff back in the suitcase,” I asked. We tumbled it all in except the diary, closing the lid. Feeling now as if I’d done this many times, I entered the closet and climbed up the ladder, the key clutched in my left hand, careful not to trip on my dress. Monique followed handing up the flashlight.

I studied the little brass plate set near the edge of the curving box lid, the edge opposite to the hinges. A keyhole-like opening looked a likely fit, but the key wouldn’t go in more than a quarter inch or so. I peered more closely at the lock and it seemed to me that there was no true keyhole, no hole for the key, just a kind of slot. Well, so much for the idea of a key opening this thing. Why would somebody build a box that couldn’t be opened? In frustration, I shook the box. It felt pretty heavy. I shoved at it. It gave maybe a fraction of an inch but wouldn’t slide. I braced myself and pulled at one end of the box back toward the opening in the attic floor. Something happened. The box turned slightly. I braced harder and pulled again. It turned a bit further. Then there was a little click or clunk, like something had dropped or sprung. I examined the lid, but nothing had happened except it seemed, when I again tried to lift the box, it was just a bit lighter, not light enough to lift off the floor though, and I’d gotten the idea by then that it was attached somehow to the floor beneath. I tried twisting the box some more, 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.