The Door in the Forest by Roderick Townley Page B

Wesley. “We’d better copy this down.”
    “Do you mind?” said Daniel.
    “Go ahead.”
    Of the three of them, Wesley was the best sketcher, and so he did the drawing while Emily tried to hold still.
    “Don’t wiggle!” said Wesley, erasing several dots.
    “I got an itch!”
    “I can’t do this if you keep moving.”
    Emily cast a sidelong glance at Daniel.
    The result wasn’t perfect, but close enough. The question was how to use it. Daniel squinted at three little marks on three sides of a larger blotch (the island?) and thought about the original document. He turned to Wesley. “In your geography class, you studied maps, right?”
    “We’re doing a whole unit on them.”
    “What do you make of this one?”
    Wesley frowned. “Without any place names or longitude or latitude?”
    True, there were no place names, but Daniel remembered little spiral symbols on three sides of the central area—like seashells twisting three turns to the left. He described them.
    “I remember that,” said Emily. “I’d forgotten they curved to the left.”
    “Counterclockwise.”
    “Lefty loosey,” she murmured.
    “What?” said Daniel.
    “Righty tighty, lefty loosey. That’s what Grandma taught me about opening jars.”
    “I wish she’d said something about opening the island.”
    “What are you
talking
about?” Wesley demanded.
    They looked at the map again.
    “Do you remember the words around the edge?” saidDaniel. “I couldn’t make them out. Something about a serpent?”
    “I think I figured it out,” said Emily. “It said, ‘Cover the Serpent with Next Spring’s Earth.’ ” She looked around at the others.
    “That’s it?” said Wesley.
    “There’s a little more. It doesn’t make sense, either. ‘Three times Round for the Heart’s Rebirth.’ ”
    “You’re right,” he said. “It’s senseless.”
    “Cover the serpent,” Daniel murmured.
    “Maybe,” she said, “we should go back to that spiral. You say it goes three times to the left?”
    Wesley stood up. “Wait a minute. Is it anything like that mark in the back of the cave?”
    The other two looked at him blankly.
    “I’ll show you. Give me the flashlight.”
    The three of them crowded through the narrow opening. The flashlight cast strange shadows, but there along the back wall, among initials and chalked dates (some going back twenty years), was a deeply etched spiral, not an easy thing to inscribe in such hard rock. It curved three times to the left.
    “That’s it!” Daniel cried.
    Emily’s eyes shone.
    “Do you think,” she said as they stumbled outside, “this is one of the places on the map?”
    “One of three points,” suggested Daniel, pointing to strategic freckle-shaped marks on three sides of the island.
    Wesley looked him doubtfully. “Pretty far-fetched.”
    “The scientist speaks,” said Daniel dryly.
    Emily tossed her curls. “But where are the other two? And,” she said slowly, “do you think the spiral could possibly be a serpent?”
    They looked at one another.
    Emily’s mouth edged into a smile.

Wesley was the kind of kid who needed to do things right. “Before we go smearing dirt around in the cave,” he said, “let me get my county map. It’s a lot more exact than this thing.” He looked at the crude drawing he’d made.
    Daniel nodded.
    “But hurry back,” said Emily.
    So Wesley went up to the house for his map, protractor, compass, and, to be on the safe side, a pocketful of brownies his mother had made.
    While there, he told her about Daniel, that he was okay but wouldn’t be back for dinner or anything else until things cooled down with Sloper.
    Gwen Crowley was alarmed. She’d been alarmed since last night, when she came home to find the house stinking of smoke and Daniel’s room ruined. She paced around the kitchen clasping and unclasping her hands and wouldn’t sit down. She’d talk to the captain, she said, when he came in and get him to promise not to hurt her