“Well,” Thomas said when he had finished, “that’s my Great-grandmother Jeffers, come to stay.”

“She’s a nice old lady,” Pesty said.

“She always is,” Thomas said.

“Bet she’s a lot of fun,” Pesty said.

“She gets just as excited as I do over things,” Thomas said.

Sitting there, looking at the kitchen wall, he felt good about everything. Great-grandmother Jeffers brings good luck, he thought.

All at once he stiffened. He was staring at the wall that could rise. He gazed from the wall to the doorway and beyond to the front hallway and the front door at the other end. A creepy feeling light as feathers curled down his back as he remembered a weird and ghostly sighing he’d heard in the tunnel behind the kitchen wall. That was months ago, he thought.

“Mr. Thomas,” Pesty said softly, “what’s awrong with you, staring like that?”

He sighed. “Well, you remember the front steps and the tunnel?”

“Yeah! And you fell down in there, under the steps,” she said.

“Uh-huh, and it leads to here,” he said, “to the other side of this wall.”

“Me and Macky just knew about it coming to an end,” she said.

“That’s because you can’t get into here from the other side. You have to lift that wall from inside, in this kitchen,” he said. “Otherwise, it looks just like the tunnel comes to an end.” There’s: nothing behind it, he thought, looking at the wall. Slowly he got to his feet. He tiptoed over to the high cabinet opposite the tunnel wall. “I’m going to do it,” he said.

“Do what?” Pesty asked.

“I’m going to raise that wall,” he said.

“With your bare hands? I’d sure like to see that!” Pesty said.

Thomas laughed. “Watch the magic!” he said. He opened a cabinet drawer. The house was quiet about him, with no Billy or Buster running and banging around. It felt empty without his mama’s voice rising like summer light on the air. When Thomas listened hard, he imagined he could hear the limestone earth beneath the house seeping and percolating with snow-melt.

Don’t let it drip in the great cavern. Don’t let it cause a cave-in.

Thomas remembered seeing his papa take a mechanism from the machinery that raised and lowered the trick wall. His papa had put the mechanism in the drawer. Thomas opened the drawer and took it out. He next looked under the base of the high cabinet above the counter. There was a hidden panel. It slid open at his touch.

Pesty was there at his side. “Wow-wee!” she whispered.

“I saw Papa do this,” Thomas told her. But he had never done it himself.

Inside was the machinery for the trick wall. He placed the part in his hand in a section of the machinery where he thought it might go.

“Doesn’t seem to fit,” Pesty said.

“You’re right. I have to look for an empty space.”

“Try it here,” she said, pointing.

He tried it. “No,” he said, “but maybe … here? No. Here? Here!”

“Push the underpart in,” Pesty said.

“That’s where it goes. Now I’ll pull the lever.” Gently he pulled it.

They watched the trick wall. Pesty’s eyes were huge. Her mouth gaped.

Thomas’s scalp tingled as the wall rose.

“Thomaaas! Thomaaas!” A plaintive, distant voice called to him.

They were transfixed by the wall rising. The black hole of a tunnel entrance was exposed. It seemed to attack them with its damp and dark. A dank smell invaded the kitchen. But there was nothing at all that he could see beyond the tunnel opening. “Thomaaas!” came the voice again.

“Oh my goodness!” Thomas said. He flicked the lever, letting the wall slide back down.

“It’s just your great mother calling from upstairs,” Pesty said. But she had been frightened, too.

“I know it is,” he said. Now why do you upset yourself? he thought. You were sure it was somebody calling in that tunnel. “What is it, Great-grandmother?” he hollered. “I’m coming!” He remembered to close the cabinet drawer before he rushed out of the kitchen, down the hall and up the stairs.

“Great-grandmother? I’m coming!” he called again. He bounded up the steps, taking them three at a time. Pesty was right behind him.

He rushed into Great-grandmother Jeffers’s room, only to find it empty.

Where?—Thomas hurried to his room, then, the twins’ room. She wasn’t in either room. “Great-grandmother,” he called, “where are you?”

“I’m here, Thomas” came the reply from a distance away.

“Well, man, she’s in the back bedroom we never use!” Thomas said.

“In here, Thomas,” he heard Great-grandmother say again.

Pesty was on her way down the hall first. “She’s in this room,” she said. The end of the hall was at the very rear of the upstairs.

The rear of the upstairs ended at a big window that looked out over the veranda, the rear yard, and the hill rising beyond. There was a room on either side of the hall, with windows also facing the back of the house. Thomas’s folks had dusted and polished the floors and then had closed the rooms. They hadn’t found any further use for them.

He opened the door, with Pesty at his elbow. At once he felt the chill air; he could smell the floor polish. There was a slight odor of stale dampness. It reminded him of the dankness that had come from the tunnel opening in the kitchen.

“What is it, Great-grandmother?” he said, coming up to her. “What are you doing in here?” She was standing facing the wall directly across from the door with her back to him. She was dressed for the day.

“Thomas,” she said, reaching out across him as he came up to her, as though to shield him. “Well,” she said, and sighed, “it’s hard to say what it is. But it is why I am in here.”

He took a step forward in order to see her face, but she pulled him back.

“You mustn’t go any closer,” she told him.

“Wh-why is that?” he said.

“Well. That—that … wall.” That floor was what she had first thought and at once had thought better of saying it. “Er, there was someone here.”

“There—there was?” Thomas managed to say, as the creeps came over him.

“Oh yes,” she said. “You see, I had come out of my room into the hall. Heard you-all in the kitchen. Thought sure I felt someone behind me. I turned around, yet all I saw was an empty hall. But after talking to Martha last night, I knew how she kept the unused rooms closed because of the twins. Well, I went to close one of the doors I saw was slightly open.” She sighed. “Just as I reached in to put my hand on the doorknob, someone reached out from inside that room and put a hand over mine.”

Thomas sucked in his breath. “No!” he said.

Great-grandmother nodded. “Just out of nowhere, someone put a hand over mine,” she repeated.

“Great-grandmother, who was it?” Thomas asked.

“Someone big, very big. That’s all I know,” she said. “Scared me! Almost had heart failure, too!” Great-grandmother Jeffers laughed nervously.

“Well, I came on in here. Managed to see it go— huh!” she said. “It left behind its motion, it felt like. Well. What I saw of it was the shape. A long, leggy shape, darkness. How strange! I was so taken by surprise. Who would expect something like that to happen in broad daylight?”

Silently Pesty walked around them, up to the wall.

“Pesty! Don’t!” Thomas held her back, but she shook loose from his grasp.

She stood there, just where Great-grandmother had warned Thomas not to stand, and knocked on the wall, as if she were knocking at the front door downstairs.

She knocked, pong, pong, pong. It made a hollow sound. She seemed to push the wall. She knocked a second time, pong, pong, pong.

The wall began to move; the floor in front of it commenced to turn.

Thomas couldn’t believe his eyes. A half circle of the floor with a section of the bedroom wall behind it was turning slowly to his right. At once Pesty stepped out of the turning part of the floor.

“You knew about this wall!” Thomas said to her.