He struck bottom on his feet, but the momentum threw him forward and he landed face first on a patch of slimy sand. Picking himself up, he found his flashlight and pressed the button. Light bored through the pitch-blackness. The brick walls were slimy and green, and water dripped through the bricks and dropped to the floor. In places sand and earth had seeped through the cracks in the masonry and had formed mounds and valleys along the culvert floor.
He looked up and saw Bill and Phil peering down at him under the light from his flashlight. “What’s it like down there?” Bill asked.
“Kind of—kind of spooky,” he answered. He heard his voice come back to him from both ends of the culvert.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Bill called. “Shine the light along the way.”
Five minutes later both Phil and Bill had joined Ronnie in the culvert.
“Nice place to hold a Halloween party,” Phil commented. “I’m kind of glad now that I decided to come down to the village to see what you two were cooking up!”
Bill retrieved his flashlight from Ronnie and began to explore the culvert with it. “Wow!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Take a look over where the light’s pointing.”
Ronnie saw a crude shelf supported by sapling logs which rested on the culvert floor. The shelf ran for six to seven feet along the side of the wall, and on it were a number of wooden crates. Protruding from the excelsior with which the crates were packed, Ronnie could see a number of glass cannisters, goblets, decanters, and flasks of different colors.
“Oh, boy!” Bill exploded. He ran forward and removed one of the pieces, holding out a beautiful rose-tinted goblet of frail, delicate glass. Around the belly of the piece ran a band of men and women in eighteenth-century dress, etched into the surface like autumn frost.
The others had moved to the shelf, too. “Hey, pig,” Phil said to Bill, “how about sharing some of that light so we can get a look at some of this stuff, too!”