All that summer the children kept their secret. It wasn’t exactly that they didn’t want to tell their parents about the thing in the cave. They agreed that their parents wouldn’t have been believed them anyway, so it was ok. Each day they would trudge through the woods, past the old McLeary barn, over the creek and through the hole in the fence behind the abandoned dairy. It wasn’t exactly dishonest, keeping it to themselves. After all, nobody had even asked them about it, and if somebody doesn’t ask you about a thing, then it’s not lying if you don’t talk about it.
The most exciting discovery was that the thing could talk to them. At first both Jenny and Peter each thought that the voice was something inside their own head, like if you had a dream and you start to remember parts of it the next day. Then, when they discovered that the voice was saying the same thing to both of them, they began to understand that the thing was talking, in its way.
They would bring it little presents, sometimes scraps of food smuggled from dinner, which it would noisily devour. It didn’t have very good table manners, but that’s to be expected from a thing you find in a cave. Then it would go right back to building its contraption, tinkering, hammering, moving things here and there in what seemed like random order.
One day Peter brought it a little spool of copper wire from dad’s shop. He just knew that was what it needed, although he couldn’t have said how he knew. That was an exciting day for the creature. It turned the spool over and over in its long bony fingers, peering at it every which way, before starting to bite off short lengths of wire and place them here and there in the contraption, winding the ends around some of the little knobs that stuck out everywhere. In their heads the children could hear that their little friend was almost done, and they were very excited to see what would happen next.
By the end of the summer Jenny and Peter had gotten much better at silent talk, and they could even do it when their new friend wasn’t around. They would wordlessly tell each other jokes over dinner for practice. Sometimes they would both giggle out loud at the same time, and their parents would give each other worried looks. But Jenny and Peter knew there was no reason to worry. Soon there would be nothing for anybody anywhere to worry about. Not anymore.