“Don’t get funny, kid.”
“My name’s Phil—or don’t you remember?”
“Look, kid, I don’t care one hoot what your name is. Now shake it up before I help you.”
When Phil’s head was below the level of the floor, Caldwell dropped the trap door into place. Ronnie and Bill stood together below the opening watching Phil descend, Bill holding the light for Phil to see by. Above, they heard Caldwell driving several nails into the trap door. Each blow echoed down the long lengths of the tunnel with a hollow boom. Then suddenly it was silent again, a deep silence that told them how far away from escape they really were.
Ronnie shivered. Behind him he heard the steady, rhythmic dripping of water against the culvert floor. He thought he heard Bill’s heart beating too. Or was it his own?
“Anybody got a deck of cards?” Phil asked suddenly and Bill and Ronnie laughed. For the first time in his life Ronnie appreciated his brother’s wisecracking.
They decided then that the first thing they should do was to explore the entire culvert in hopes that there might be some other way out beside the trap door. Before they left, however, Ronnie climbed to test the strength of the trap door, hoping that perhaps Caldwell’s nails had not been well placed. It was an idle hope. The trap door was as solid as the rest of the floor.
Their explorations revealed that one end of the culvert ended in a cave-in. The other end, sloping rapidly, ran to the river and was flooded. “And that water’s rising, too,” Bill said to Ronnie as they made their way back. “All this rain is flooding the river. And the higher the river gets, the higher the water backs up in here.”
Ronnie was almost afraid to ask the question that had come to his mind. “Do you suppose—could the whole culvert get flooded?”
Bill took Ronnie and Phil over to the wall and showed them several lines of dried slime which had impregnated the brick. “Each one of those lines,” he told them, “I’d guess was a water level mark. That means the water has risen pretty high. One thing we can be sure of, though, is that the water has never reached to the top of the archway—not yet anyway.”