The Smoky Corridor

47

“Well,” said Zack, “the middle part is obviously a warning, like a No Trespassing sign. But the rest? Maybe they’re Egyptian hieroglyphics or something.”

“No,” gasped Malik. “It’s code!”

They studied what someone had carved into the stone:

“It appears to be a diagrammatic cipher,” said Malik.

“Huh?”

“It substitutes symbols for letters instead of letters for letters as you might find on a decoder ring.”

“What’s it say?”

“Not certain. But I believe the coder is using what is called the pigpen cipher, a substitution code often used by the Masons. Each clustering of letters indicates a new word.…”

“How much time do we have until the bell rings?”

Malik checked his watch. “Not much. Perhaps I should take a rubbing of the inscription. That way, we can finish cracking the code at a more convenient time.”

“Yeah,” said Zack.

“We need a sheet of paper and a crayon of some kind.”

Zack scanned the room with his flashlight. On the wall he saw some rock concert posters and another one of those prints of Horace Pettimore. They might work. Then, on a rack, he saw a stack of brown paper grocery sacks. “There’s your paper!”

“Excellent!” Malik grabbed a bag and tore out a flat panel.

Zack turned his flashlight left. Saw more jars of pickled preserves. A pile of moldy potatoes. A stack of candles, some white, some black.

“Hey, how about a black candle for your crayon?”

“Perfect! I should be able to pick up the impressions using the same technique one would employ to do a gravestone rubbing.”

“Do you need the light?”

“No.”

Malik started rubbing. Zack moved his flashlight beam up to the jagged hole in the wall just past the spot where they’d found the secret message. The fieldstones circling the three-foot-wide opening were scorched black. Zipper sniffed the edges.

“Careful, boy,” said Zack. He didn’t want Zipper falling through the hole. There was some kind of chute, like an enclosed playground slide, on the other side. Maybe that was what the warning was all about: descending into whatever hell was down there in the darkness.

He couldn’t risk it. Zack scooped his dog off the ground. Cradled him in his arms.

“Finished!” said Malik.

“Great. How much time till the bell?”

Malik rolled up his paper and checked his watch. “Two minutes.”

“Okay, Zipper, under my shirt. We need to smuggle you out of the building.”

The boys made their way through the swiveling shelves to the janitor’s closet—shoving the shelf unit back into place.

And then, at the sound of the bell, they ran out the door faster than either one of them had ever run before.