Delphi: Rad

It was one place we thought we could hide the thing that makes the horn work and not worry about it being found.

We didn’t want to hide it in either of our houses. For obvious reasons. Aside from the fact that my mom is a neat freak and Boo’s cleaning lady has an incredible knack for sniffing out anything you don’t want found, we just didn’t want to, you know, implicate our families in the Delphi crime of the century.

We had heard all about the caves for years.

From our parents, family friends, old people in town.

We didn’t really believe the caves went all the way under the river or anything. I mean, we weren’t that dumb. Although that would have been awesome! But we knew there were multiple caves up above the reservoir and that some of them were small and lesser used than the larger, more well-known and graffitti’d ones.

So, one day Boo and I hiked up there. It took us a long time of searching around before we found this one cave that was hidden by a bunch of bushes and a dead log. It didn’t look like anyone had been in it for years, except maybe for some snakes or animals or bugs.

So, now we had our hiding place.

The only thing left was to conduct our midnight operation: climb the borough building, rip out the horn innards, escape, and hide the booty.

It sounded simple enough, but we knew it was going to be tricky.

For one thing, it would involve us being -- shall we say -- less than honest with our parents. We would either have to sneak out of the house or say we were spending the night at each other’s house. The last was problematic, because it depended on our parents not checking with each other. But sneaking out could be trouble, too.

In the end, we decided sneaking out would be less risky than betting on our parents not talking with one another about the fake sleepovers. Since our house is a lot closer to the borough building, I would just ask my mom if Boo could sleep over. And she would say sure. So, that part was simple.

Then we would have to wait for her to fall asleep.

We would then climb out my bedroom window, which overlooks the garage, and hop down off the garage roof by swinging on a tree branch and land on the trampoline in the backyard. It made me feel like we were in Spy Kids or something.

The only drawback was that we really didn’t know how the horn worked. And what we would have to take out. We tried Googling about alarm horns but didn’t find much at first. Not even Wikipedia had anything on alarm horns. We didn’t want to go around asking questions, because that would have been too obvious. And people might have remembered afterwards that two kids had been asking strange questions about the horn, right before it disappeared.

We wanted this to be a professional job. Kind of like Fast and Furious.

One day I was home sick from school and spent a lot of time on the Internet trying to find out something about the kinds of horns that were on the tops of borough buildings or fire houses. Eventually I stumbled on “siren” as a term, along with horn, and then I started coming up with sites that seemed more promising. I mean, would you think there would be entire websites devoted to nothing but sirens, horns, and whistles? Well, there are. And a lot of them have not only photos from around the country – heck, around the world! – but audio files as well. Too weird! That’s how I finally found the Gamewell Diaphone.

We’re pretty sure now that the horn on top of the borough building is a Gamewell Diaphone. Or at least it sounds like one and looks like one. We have a whole file of stuff on Gamewell Diaphone horns and how they were used to alert volunteer fire departments about fires. We even have photos of the different components of the Diaphone from some dude who restores them as a hobby! I kid you not. The only problem is we still haven’t really figured out exactly how they work. And what we can do to disable one. Can we cut a wire? Or do we need to remove a key part? They don’t make these horns anymore, so they probably wouldn’t be able to get a replacement part. Unless they found this whacko dude who restores them. Maybe he welds new parts or something from scratch. I know he likes to shine up the old parts and post photos of them on the web.

Anyway, these horns were originally used for fog signals, but then the Gamewell Company, which was in Newton, Massachusetts (I read that on the Internet), started making them for fire alarms . They were really popular in New England. You could hear their sound from miles away, which was a good thing I guess, and different numbers of blasts could mean different things. Like five blasts might mean fire over at the Boswell farm. While three blasts might mean house fire down on Walnut Street. Or something like that. This was for the olden days, you know, before they had cell phones and pagers and stuff. And I guess people liked to know when there was a fire and where it was. Not really sure why. Did they maybe go over and watch the fires since they didn’t have TV to watch or something? Who knows.

We do know that the Diaphone is powered by pressured air. But we’re not really sure what that means. Or what we can do to alter the horn so it no longer works. Boo thinks there is a key component inside the horn and that that is what we need to steal – err, remove. I am not so sure, though. And I am not clear on just how we are going to unscrew or take apart the horn once we get up onto the roof.

And how we are going to get up onto the roof with nobody noticing is another thing. And then what if the damned horn goes off while we are up there? We would be deaf for life for sure!

This whole thing is starting to seem a lot more complicated than we first thought. Boo and I are going to do a recon tonight. Or at least plan how we would do a recon. You know, kind of brainstorm. We learned how to do that in Language Arts class.

When we first started M.A.T.H., it seemed like this was going to be a whole lot more simple.

Now I’m not so sure.