The Hand on the Wall(68)

“Don’t you get sick of this place?” he snapped. “Who the fuck does this? Who builds all of these tunnels and fake grottoes?”

His words echoed around the cavern and bounced back on them.

Stevie found her body was starting to stiffen and shake from the cold. She had to keep it together. She had to be fine so that David would be fine. And she would be fine because David was there.

“You know,” she said, “Disneyland is built on a slope because it also has a vast underground series of tunnels.”

Nothing from David.

“They were built to keep characters in the right places. No one wants a space monster in Frontierland.”

“A space monster?” David said. “Have you been to Disneyland?”

“No,” Stevie said.

“Seriously?”

“Too expensive. But I spend my time planning my perfect Disney dream wedding, with the space monster and a . . . Mickey . . . something . . .”

They dumped their twenty bricks at the top of the ramp.

“Stop talking,” he said. “It’s not helping.”

On their second trip, they removed another layer from the depressingly small pile of bricks. There was no way this would be enough to do anything, but she dutifully opened her bag to accept some more. Her arms ached from the cold.

“Oh my God,” David said.

Stevie looked up. David was staring at the brick pile. Well—not at the pile. Something in the pool of light from his flashlight. Under the top layer of bricks there were several wooden boxes marked LIBERTY POWDER CO, PITTSBURGH PA, HIGH EXPLOSIVES, DANGEROUS.

“Ho-ly shit,” David said.

David removed a few more bricks from around the boxes. There were three in total. A bit more digging turned up a long coil of wire.

“You think this is real?” he asked.

“I think it’s definitely real,” Stevie said. “This is the treasure.”

“Treasure?”

“Francis—the one who wrote the diary—she must have been stealing dynamite and stockpiling it.”

“There was a student here who was stealing and stockpiling dynamite? And people bitch about a few squirrels in the library?”

They regarded the pile for a few moments. It was clear what was going to come next, though Stevie did not want to bring it up.

“I’m going to say something you won’t like,” David said.

Stevie said nothing.

“I mean, there is a lot of dynamite here,” he went on. “We don’t need that much. One stick is probably all we would need. Look at this. Blasting caps, wire. Everything but the plunger to set it off. I think all we’d need is an electrical charge. I probably have something in my bag . . .”

“We can’t set off dynamite,” she said.

“Sure we can. Haven’t you ever seen cartoons?”

“We’ll kill ourselves,” she said.

“No we won’t. We probably won’t. A stick or two? That’s nothing.”

“It’s dynamite,” she pointed out. “Old dynamite. It will blow up.”

“Dynamite,” he said, looking up at her, “is a high explosive. It produces a pressure wave. Imagine a sphere—an expanding sphere. That’s the pressure wave. As the sphere expands, the surface area increases by the square of the radius, therefore the pressure drops by the square of the radius. In addition, we have a wall, which means the pressure wave has to go around a corner, which it can do through diffraction, but it will lose energy in the process. I’m saying it won’t be that bad.”

Stevie was too stunned to reply.

“Janelle isn’t the only one who knows physics,” he said. “Got a few things in here that might work. Actually, the flashlight . . .”

He opened up his flashlight.

“Nine volts,” he said. “That might do it. So all we need to do is wire it.”

“Dynamite,” she said. “They used it to blast things open. To level the mountain.”

“Yeah, but you need a bunch for that,” he said. “One stick shouldn’t start an avalanche or anything. I don’t think so anyway.”

“You don’t think?”

“No!” he said. “No. Probably not. No. We’re not really on a slope here. There’s nothing to come down.”

“Except the rest of the mountain above us.”

“One stick,” he said. “Tiny dynamite. Cute little dynamite. I think I can do this. Do you trust me?”

The truth was, there was no real choice. It was getting colder and darker, and no one knew they were under the ground.

And deep down, she did trust him.

“How do we do it?” she asked.

The how was not completely clear, and it was distressing to Stevie how much of this plan really did seem to be coming from cartoons. They stretched out the wire first.

“That’s, what, twenty feet?” David said. “I mean, it’s not enough that we could rig the hatch and get all the way in here, where it would be safe. I’ll have to be closer.”

“We’ll have to be closer,” Stevie said.

“There’s no point in . . .”

“We,” she said. “I’m not dying in this dumb hole alone. We.”