were close enough together to act as stepping-stones across. The stream ran through a channel at least ten times wider than it, and Seth thought it was almost ten feet deep.
“Does it ever flood?” Angel asked as she gazed at the meandering stream.
“Not anymore,” Seth told her. “In the spring it might get to be four feet deep, but that’s all. Most of the water goes into a bunch of reservoirs, and they only let enough out to keep the fish alive.”
“Where was the ferry?”
“Back up that way,” he said, pointing upstream. “It was like a barge, and there was a rope strung across the river, and the barge guy would haul the barge back and forth.”
A few minutes later the cat turned away from the stream again, and the forest seemed to get thicker.
“Do you know where we are?” Angel asked.
“Pretty much,” Seth replied. “If we lose Houdini, I can find my way back to the stream. Then it’s easy.”
“But where are we going?”
“How should I know? I guess we’ll just have to follow and find out.”
Stepping over a fallen limb, he hurried after the cat. Angel followed him, and moments later they came upon what looked like a path, though it was so overgrown as to be barely visible. As they moved along it, the path narrowed and the trees crowded in, and Angel had to crouch low to get under several branches. The terrain began to get rougher, with granite outcroppings thrusting up, and twice the path disappeared completely.
“Are you sure we’re not lost?” she asked as they came into a small open space in front of a bluff of deeply fissured granite.
“I sort of know where we are, but there’s nothing out here,” Seth told her.
Angel scanned the area but didn’t see anything except a small clearing, and beyond that the granite face of the bluff. Still, she followed Seth as the cat moved across the clearing and picked its way over the mound of granite that had fallen from the face of the bluff over the centuries. Now there was no sign of a path at all, and Angel had no idea where they were anymore, even in relation to where they’d come from or even the stream. Then Seth stopped, and a second later Angel caught up with him.
At first she saw nothing, but then, below them and tucked so deeply into one of the fissures in the bluff that it was almost invisible, she spotted something that looked like a wooden wall. “What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Seth said. “Nobody ever comes out here but me, and I’ve never seen this before — I mean, I’ve been in the clearing, but I always thought the rock was just heaped up against the face of the bluff.”
They picked their way down the bank of rubble, to find Houdini scratching at a door that was barely taller than Seth and held closed by a simple wooden latch.
Both of them stared at the door, which seemed so out of place in the cleft of the granite that they could hardly believe it was real.
Finally, Seth reached out and tested the latch.
The door swung slowly open, and the moment the gap was wide enough, Houdini dashed through, vanishing into the darkness. Neither Seth nor Angel made a move to enter until the door had swung far enough that they could see what lay within.
It seemed to be a tiny cabin constructed entirely of great oaken logs, and their unevenness and the adze marks on them made them look to Angel like the hand-hewn timbers that supported the floor of her own house. The cabin was only a single room, but it wasn’t rectangular, or even square. Rather, it was oddly wedge-shaped, to conform to the shape of the fissure within whose confines it had been built; none of its four walls were the same length, and every angle where two walls met was different. At the rear there was a crude fireplace built of uneven chunks of granite that must have been gathered from the slag heap at the base of the bluff. The entire surface of the firebox was covered with a layer of soot, and a heavy wrought-iron pothook was mounted in one wall. To one side of the fireplace there was a stack of split wood and a small pile of kindling.
From the pothook hung a kettle that looked every bit as old as the cabin itself.
Glancing nervously at each other, so dumbstruck by what the cat had led them to that neither of them could say a word, first Seth, then Angel, stepped through the small doorway and into the peculiarly proportioned room. A slab of oak nearly four inches thick had been mounted along one wall to serve as a counter, and three worn wooden ladles hung from pegs in the wall. At the far end of the counter an immense block of granite, nearly two feet on a side, had been hollowed out to form a sink.
A sink that was full of water, the surface of which was shimmering even in the dim light that came in through the open door.
Angel stared at it, her heart racing. “Somebody must live here,” she breathed.
Seth’s eyes were also fastened on the sink, which was full nearly to the rim. But nowhere was there any sign of a faucet, or even a pump handle.
As they stood silently gazing at it, there was a soft
A moment later they heard the plinking sound again, and as the third drop of water fell, Seth finally spotted its source: high up on the wall above the sink, a small piece of wood protruded, and water dripped from the end of it.
“But where’s the water coming from?” Angel asked as they moved closer to the sink. Now they could see a notch cut in the rim of the sink, perhaps an inch deep, that let overflow water run out through a small wooden trough that also pierced the wall.
“It probably just seeps out of the face of the bluff,” Seth said. “There’s a spot up closer to the stream where it does that, even when it hasn’t been raining in weeks.”
They gazed at the water, which was crystal clear, then Seth took one of the wooden ladles off its hook, dipped it in the water, sniffed it, and tasted it.
“It’s good!” He offered the ladle to Angel, but she shook her head.
“Just because it tastes good doesn’t mean it’s safe. My mother says you should always boil water if you don’t know where it came from.”
“So does mine,” Seth said. “But I’ve been drinking water out of the stream all my life, and I haven’t gotten sick yet.” As if to prove his point, he took another deep gulp from the ladle, poured the rest back in the sink, then turned to look at the rest of the room.
There was something that appeared to be a small frame for a mattress in the corner behind the door, though there was no trace of rope webbing to support a mattress, even had there been one in the room. The ceiling was supported by beams low enough so Angel could touch them without stretching, and they had been hewn from the same kind of logs as the walls.
“This is too cool,” Seth breathed.
“Who do you think built it?” Angel asked. “It’s like nobody’s even been here in hundreds of years.”
“But there aren’t any water stains,” Seth said as he gazed at the low ceiling. “If it’s as old as it looks, how come the roof doesn’t leak?” Now his eyes roamed over all the other surfaces in the tiny cabin, all of which — the floor, counter, bed frame, even the rim of the sink, except for the notch that served as an overflow drain — were covered with a thick layer of dust that was undisturbed, except for the footprints on the floor where first Houdini and then Angel and Seth had trod. Even the firewood and kindling were almost lost under coats of dust. “It’s got to be as old as your house!”
“But if it’s that old, how come nobody even knows it’s here?” Angel asked.
His eyes fixed on the cat, Seth didn’t seem to hear her question. But when he finally spoke, Angel realized that he had. “You think maybe Houdini led us here on purpose?” he asked, his voice carrying a hollow tone that told Angel he’d already answered his own question.
“I–I don’t know,” she stammered. “I mean, I guess maybe sometimes dogs—”
“He led us to the book,” Seth said. He turned away from the cat and looked into Angel’s eyes. “He didn’t just get us to go down into the cellar — he was sniffing at the exact stair it was hidden in.”
Once more Angel felt the apprehension that had come over her when she and Seth stood at the head of the cellar stairs. “M-Maybe he smelled it,” she suggested.
Seth’s eyes went back to the cat. “You don’t know where he came from, do you?”
“N-No,” Angel stammered uneasily.
“He just showed up in the closet in your room, with the door closed.”
Angel nodded, and tried to quell the uneasiness rising in her stomach.
