“Mr. Thomas, when you come back, put the door in place from the inside,” she told him.

“Don’t you worry, Pesty,” Great-grandmother said. “We’ll take care of it.”

Now there began more of the tunnel. The room had been just like a wide place in a road, Thomas thought. “Do you feel funny, Great-grandmother?” he asked as softly as he could.

“Funny about what?” she said.

“About … being here. Finding the room. Don’t you feel it should be left the way it is, without us getting into it?”

“Well, Thomas, everywhere you walk, you are walking into it, into history, so to speak,” she said. “Always somebody’s walked before you. Something’s gone on with people before we were thought of. We can’t help that. And here Mrs. Darrow has found comfort in the history of that room, I suspect. It fits her mind, like the twists of the tunnels do.

“But I understand what you mean, Thomas,” Great-grandmother added. “It makes you feel foolish, walking around underground.” She chuckled. “It makes you want to bust out laughing. Who’d ever think of such a thing? But it makes you feel good, too, down here. Because you feel close to those who ran long ago, like you are tracing the footsteps of fugitives with your own feet.”

“Maybe so,” Thomas murmured. When we come back, I’ll take a good look, he thought. Funny, to put a door there. But I guess someone did want it to look like a room. Who do you suppose? Do I tell Papa about this?

The tunnel was deeply dark. Thomas’s flashlight was dim in the blackness. He could see Pesty’s back, but he couldn’t see Mrs. Darrow. The tunnel turned and snaked. They had to walk single file. Great-grandmother Jeffers was behind Thomas. He held on to her hand now, leading her. The ceiling was perhaps six feet from the floor, barely high enough for Pesty’s mother.

“You forgot and left that lantern burning back there, Pesty,” Thomas called.

“Didn’t forget,” she said. Her voice seemed to be right next to his ear. Tunnels could do that, could throw back and echo sound. “Turn it off when you go back,” she said. “It has a knob that you just turn and the flame goes out. I’ll let you do that,” she said.

He thought her tone of voice sounded different somehow. “You could burn up that room, leaving the light on,” he told her. “Look, where are we going? Where does this tunnel lead?”

Pesty’s giggle was all tinkly in his ear. “Mr. Thomas, you are so funny! I told you, I got to take my mama home.”

“Oh,” he said. Well, she had told him. Of course, they were going over to the Darrows. He just didn’t want to think about it.

“It’s going to be too far for you, Great-grandmother,” he said.

“Thomas, I’m doing all right,” she said. “I’ve got my coat and hat on, too. It’s not snowing on me in here; it’s not icy either. Long as I have hold of you, I can’t fall. Just keep on. I’ll be fine.”

“Pesty, how much farther?” he said as casually as he could. He didn’t want to disturb Mrs. Darrow there in the darkness.

“You sure are in a hurry.” There came Pesty’s delicate laughter again. “We’ll be there in a little while.”

They walked on. He thought of Mr. Pluto and how it happened he couldn’t take Great-grandmother to see him today.

Then they walked through standing water. “Did you get your feet too wet?” He asked Great-grandmother.

“No, no,” she said. “My feet are just fine.”

In a short time Thomas and Great-grandmother came up behind Pesty and Mrs. Darrow. The tunnel dead-ended. Set in the cave end was a makeshift door made from pieces of wood. Pesty placed the side of her head up against the door. Mrs. Darrow did the same, murmuring a meaningless sound of words.

“Pesty!”

“Shhhh, Mr. Thomas!” Pesty whispered. “We got to listen.”

They listened. And Thomas and Great-grandmother Jeffers stood still in the dark, about to jump out of their skins. Thomas had flicked out the light, for whoever could be on the other side of the door might see it. No telling what surrounded them in the blackness either. Spirits of the dead. The living, maybe, about to drag them off somewhere in the maze of tunnels.

“It’s okay,” finally Pesty said. Her voice remained low. “Come on, Mama.” Mrs. Darrow was humming now to herself. The sound was not unpleasant.

Guess she is happy, Thomas thought. I sure hope she is.

Pesty pushed on the door, and it slid to the right. There was enough light to see that there were clothes hanging.

“The back of a closet,” whispered Great-grandmother Jeffers.

“What?” said Thomas.

“You walk in the closet, and you walk out the closet. That’s it,” Pesty told him. She led her mother inside, pushing the clothing over to make way. Great-grandmother and Thomas followed.

Thomas paused, let Great-grandmother by. His heart thumped in his chest. “Do I close this—this opening?” he asked.

“Yes,” Pesty said.

He closed the back of the closet, sliding it into place with his hands. And he walked through the hanging clothes; then he pushed them into place again. No one would ever know there was a hidden door to a tunnel behind them.

This is the queerest day I’ve ever lived through, and it’s not even over yet. Can you believe what we’re doing? he thought. And that Mrs. Darrow? What would Papa say about her? Ohhhh don’t think.

Pesty led her mother to a brass bed across the room from the closet.

“My mama’s bedroom,” Pesty said, seeing Thomas and Great-grandmother looking wide-eyed all around. The brass bed shone with a pink glow. “Mama stays here most of the time.” She took her mother’s shoes off and helped her under the covers. She arranged the shawl around her. “Me and Macky will walk her some,” Pesty explained, “but not in the wintertime. In the snow time Macky don’t know she walks. She will walk in the tunnels, then, and nobody know about that but me.”

Pesty poured water from a pitcher on the end table into a glass. She gave Mrs. Darrow the pills she’d forgotten. Mrs. Darrow took her pills, drank the water, and at last sank down against her pillows. Pesty washed the stickiness from her mother’s face.

“Where is Macky?” Thomas asked. He was happy to be back in a house, even if it was the Darrow house, and out of the forbidding tunnel.

“Couldn’t say,” Pesty said. “Maybe he’s home. Keep your voice down. Don’t want them to know somebody’s here.”

“Who don’t you want to know?” Thomas asked.

“Anybody. Wouldn’t do, if someone’s in the house. How’m I going to explain something like that?” Pesty said. “If you speak low, they think she is just talking with me or to herself.”

“You mean ...” Thomas began.

“She means, nobody knows about that tunnel but her and Mrs. Darrow,” Great-grandmother Jeffers said. “How would she explain our being here when no one saw us come in from the outside? Isn’t that right, Pesty?”

Pesty nodded. She wet a towel in the washbasin. She wiped her own shoes off from the tunnel wet and dirt, then Mrs. Darrow’s. She handed the towel to Thomas. He cleaned off his and Great-grandmother’s shoes.

“Thank you, Thomas,” Great-grandmother Jeffers said. He handed Pesty back the towel; she put it in a hamper next to the stand.

Pesty patted Mrs. Darrow’s pillows. Her mother lay on her back, straight as an arrow, staring at Thomas. Now and then she would nod for no reason that Thomas could see.

“Once upon a time,” Mrs. Darrow said, grinning at him.

“She’s going to tell a story,” he whispered to Pesty.

“She might and she might not,” Pesty said. “Sometimes she will.”

Great-grandmother Jeffers sat in an old easy chair by the head of the bed.

They spoke in quiet voices so that Mrs. Darrow would stay calm and so they would not be overheard. Thomas settled in a straight chair on the other side, toward the foot of the bed. “Macky told me she likes to tell old kinds of stories,” he said.

“Is that so?” said Great-grandmother Jeffers.