Blood Stained Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Adam was a cautious kid. The bullies called him scaredy cat because he liked to think about all the angles before committing himself to action. His dad just called him slow. But on that July day, running through the woods even though his pursuers had long ago given up, he'd done something brave and bold. Like his dad. He went into a cave.
    Not just any cave. This one was hidden. Secret. Its entrance blocked from view by a tall rectangular boulder. You'd never guess if you ducked your head and held your elbows by your side that two steps later you'd be in a wide open space, cool and sheltered and safe.
    That was just the antechamber. The foyer, Adam called it, liking the idea of his cave being a home. There was the master bedroom—his room—just off the foyer, the floor smooth and sloped up just enough so it was never wet even when it was storming outside, a rock the perfect size to use as a table or bed, natural ledges in the walls to store his stuff. 
    His cave wasn't as big or deep as Echo Cavern, but it was perfect for Adam. Beyond the foyer was a tiny stream. Depending on the time of year, anywhere from a trickle to wide enough you'd have to jump across the cold, fresh water. Crawl over and around some boulders and rock ledges and you could follow the stream down to a wider cavern inside the belly of the mountain. There were giantstalactites and deposits of zinc sulfide that glowed, making the whole place spark with magic.
    The stream was wider here, rushing and noisy, and a tiny bit dangerous—enough to make the journey an adventure. Cross over to the other side, scramble up through a hole in the wall, and there was a second entrance. This one shielded by a wall of tumbled boulders too high for Adam to climb when he traced the outside opening, but it was nice to have the additional sunlight coming in from above. Inside the second entrance was a sudden drop off, a trap for the unwary. 
    Adam spent most of one summer—his last summer in New Hope, although he hadn't known it then—exploring that pit. He'd been obsessed with it. With the possibilities of an endless chasm that could transport him deep to the center of the earth, just like in the books he loved to read, old ones by Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle and HG Wells.
    He'd been disappointed to find it was only around ten feet deep. Just a shimmy down a strong rope he eventually replaced with a ladder borrowed from Stolfultz's barn. That was okay. Other adventures waited at the bottom of the pit. He'd found a bunch of arrowheads, a mound of charcoal, the outline of a man's hand in what appeared to be dried blood, and a bone that looked just like the shinbone on the human skeleton in the science classroom at school. 
    Lying on the cold, hard floor of the pit, his head filled with amazing stories. Indians using his cave as their last outpost against a warring tribe. Or maybe settlers defending themselves against marauding Indians. Outlaws chased by a posse, only to starve to death down here when they couldn't climb back out. Adam dug for treasure, but the floor was hard, unyielding, and he did little more than scratch at it. 
    He never did find any other bones—another mystery that made the pit irresistible.
    Adam stockpiled his cave with survival necessities. He used his mom's Space Age Air Tite storage bags to protect his stash: a sleeping bag, matches, disposable lighters, a bunch of candles of all sizes and shapes, comic books and books and magazines, a whole bag of Hershey's miniatures he was saving for a special treat, cans of soda, bottles of water, cans of his favorite foods: tuna fish and Dinty Moore and baked beans and Spaghettios, a notebook and pencils, spare clothes, one of his dad's pocket knives, a couple of flashlights with spare batteries, and the neatest thing of all: a little radio/flashlight that you powered with a hand crank. The only station it got was one that talked about the weather and then only