by Darren Shan
I think about calling him back, making him sit down and listen to me. But it wouldn’t be fair. Better to let him get a good night’s sleep, then tell him about it tomorrow. Besides, I don’t feel too rough at the moment, not as bad as I felt last night. I don’t want to jinx myself, but I think I might be over the worst.
Dervish’s snores rock the house to its foundations. I don’t want to sleep. I want to keep a vigil, stay focused on my breathing, alert to any hint of a change. But I’m exhausted. All the energy that went into the party… lack of sleep last night… walking and digging this afternoon. My eyelids refuse to stay open. Even coffee—which I hardly ever drink—doesn’t work.
I undress and slip into a T-shirt and boxers. Slide beneath the covers. Lying there, I think that maybe I should get a rope, tie it round my ankles and the bedposts, maybe tie up one of my hands too. That should hold me in the event that I change during the night. A good plan, but it comes too late. Even as I’m gearing myself up to get out of bed and fetch a rope, my eyelids slam down and I’m out for the count.
Harsh breathing. Thumping sounds. Cold night air.
I come to my senses slowly, the same as last night. I see a pair of hands lifting a large rock out of the ground. They throw it overhead casually as if it was a pebble. They stoop, start clearing more earth away… then stop as I realise they’re my hands. I exert my will and look around.
I’m standing in a hole, dressed only in my T-shirt and boxers. Bare feet. Dirt-encrusted fingers. It takes me a few seconds to realise I’m in the hole where we were digging earlier. The reason I didn’t recognise it instantly—it’s about four times deeper than when we left it.
I look up. I’m a couple of metres below ground level, surrounded by rock. In a sudden panic, afraid the rocks are going to grind together and crush me, I grab a handhold and haul myself up. A couple of quick thrusts later, I’m standing by the edge of the hole, shivering from cold and fear, staring around with wonder.
There are rocks and dirt everywhere. I don’t know how long I was down there but I must have been digging like a madman. The weird thing is, I don’t feel the least bit tired. My muscles aren’t aching. Apart from some scared gasping, my breath comes normally and my heart beats as regularly as if I’d been out for a gentle stroll.
I walk over to one of the larger stones. Study it silently, warily. I bend, grab it by the sides, give an exploratory lift. I can shift it a few centimetres and that’s it, I have to drop it. It weighs a bloody tonne. Under any normal circumstances I doubt I could lift it higher than knee level, not without throwing my back out completely. Yet I must have. And not only picked it up, but lobbed it out of the hole too.
Back to the rim of the mini abyss. Staring down into darkness. What brought me here? I’d like to think I was just sleepwalking, that I came here because I’d been thinking about the hole all evening. But there’s more to it than that. My senses are on high alert, animal-sharp (wolf-sharp), and I don’t think it’s any accident that I wound up here, digging as if my life depended on it.
As much as I don’t want to, I sit, turn and lower myself into the hole. When I’m on the floor, I allow a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, then take a really good look. The hole isn’t any wider than it was earlier—the rocks on the sides run down smoothly, like a mine shaft. The angle which we were following has continued, so although it’s a steep slope, it’s easy to climb up and down.
I bend and touch the next rock in line for removal. It’s jammed firmly in the earth. I tug hard and it barely moves. Yet I’m sure, if I’d tried a few minutes ago, while asleep, I could have ripped it out and…
Whispers.
I frown and cock my head. The sound has been there for a while, maybe since I regained my senses, but I thought it was the wind in the trees. Now that I focus, I realise it’s not coming from the trees. It seems to be coming from the rocks.
A jolt of excitement cuts through my confusion and apprehension. Maybe I’m close to a cave and the noise is the wind whistling between earth and rock. I flash on an image of Lord Sheftree’s treasure and the glory of being the first to discover it. With renewed enthusiasm I grasp the rock again and pull as hard as I can. I might not be able to toss it out of the hole, but if I can budge it slightly, maybe I can…
A flicker on the rock. A slight bulging. A shadow grows out of it, just for a second, then disappears.
I fall backwards, stifling a scream, heart racing.
Eyes fixed to the rock, waiting for it to change again. A minute passes. Two.
I get to my feet, legs very shaky, and climb out of the hole, not looking back. I make for home quickly, head down, striding through the forest, ignoring the twigs, stones and thorns that jab at my bare feet.
Trying hard not to think about what I saw (or thought I saw). But I can’t block it out. It keeps coming back, rattling round the inside of my skull like a rabid rat in a cage.
The flicker… the bulging… the shadow…
It might have been a trick of the light or my skittish mind, but it looked to me like a face was trying to force its way up through the rock from the other side. A human face. A girl’s.
HARD WORK
No sign of Dervish in the morning. He’s normally an early riser so I guess he’s still suffering from his binge-drinking on the weekend. I want to wake him, tell him about my inner turmoil, the magic, the howling, what happened at the hole. But instead I decide to let him sleep in and get his head together. We’ll discuss it when I come home after school, when he can think and focus clearly.
Scrubbing hard in the bathroom. The dirt doesn’t want to come off. Especially bad under my nails. Without wanting to, I think about gravediggers—their hands must be stained like this all the time.
Looking up when I’ve scraped them as clean as I can. My reflection in the mirror. Remembering the face I saw/imagined in the rock. Something about it niggles at me. It’s not just the fact that there shouldn’t have been a face in the rock at all. There’s something more… something else…
I’m on my way out the front doors when it strikes me. The face looked ever so slightly like my dead sister Gret.
The day passes slowly, as if I’m experiencing it second-hand, watching somebody else’s body going through the motions of a normal school day. Chatting with Charlie, Leon and Shannon. Greeting Reni with a big smile when she arrives with Loch. Making light of my friends’ compliments about the party. Shrugging off the incident with the bottle—“A good magician never reveals his secrets.”
Bill-E turns up. I know he’s itching to discuss the cave with Loch and me, but we can’t speak of it in front of the others, so he slides past silently. Loch yells an insult after him, cruder than usual, perhaps to cover up the fact that he’s become Bill-E’s secret ally.
Lessons don’t interest me. The teachers could be ghosts for all the impression they make. Fading in and out of conversations during break and lunch. The major part of my mind fixed on the twists of the last few nights, the hole I’ve dug, the face in the rock, the beast I’m apparently becoming.
Heading back for class after the lunch bell. Loch and me are by ourselves. Bill-E hurries up to us and says quietly, “Still on for this evening?”
“Sure,” Loch says.
“No.” Both stare at me. “Dervish wants me home,” I lie. “Not sure what it’s about. Maybe something valuable got smashed at the party.”
Loch winces. “Bad luck. Guess it’s just me and Spleenio then.” He pinches Bill-E’s cheek.
“Get off!” Bill-E yelps, pulling away, rubbing his cheek. “That hurt.”
“Sue me,” Loch laughs.
Bill-E turns his back on him. “Maybe you can come later?” he asks me.
“I doubt it,” I sigh.
Bill-E looks worried. “Perhaps I’ll cancel too, leave it till tomorrow.”
“No you don’t,” Loch grunts. “If you back out now, you stay out. This is a joint venture. If you don’t pull your weight—and I know that’s a hea
vy load to pull, you chubby little freak—get lost. We don’t need hangers-on.”
Bill-E’s fists ball up. The rage inside him froths to the surface. I think he’s finally going to go for Loch and I silently will him on. If he fights back, maybe that will be the end of the teasing and Loch will start treating Bill-E as an equal.
But then Bill-E looks Loch over, sizes up his height and muscles, and chickens out. His hands go limp and he turns away with a weak, “See you later then.”
Loch leans over and mock-whispers to me, just loud enough for Bill-E to hear, “Do you think anyone would notice if I took Spleeny out to that hole and made him disappear?”
“Shut up, you jerk,” I snap and march ahead of him, paying no attention to his theatrical gasp.
Home. No Dervish. A note on the kitchen table. “Gone to fetch my bike. Don’t worry about fixing me dinner—still not in the mood for solids.”
Hellfire! Of all the times in my life, why does Dervish pick these few days to be Mr. Impossible To Pin Down! I wish now I’d hit him with the news as soon as he got home—would have served the old sozzle-head right.
Too itchy-footed to wait for him. Better to be active than hang around here, struggling to kill time with homework and TV. So a quick change of clothes, a hasty sandwich, then it’s off to the hole to find out what Loch and Bill-E make of my late-night digging marathon.
They’re gob-smacked. Standing around the pit when I arrive, jaws slack, staring from the rocks and mounds of earth down into the hole, then back again. Both are holding shovels limply and look like you could knock them over with a fart.
“Bloody hell!” I gasp playfully. “You’ve been working hard.”
“We didn’t do it,” Loch says numbly.
“It was like this when we arrived,” Bill-E mutters.
I force a frown. “What are you talking about?”
“We haven’t been digging,” Loch says, becoming animated. “We only got here a few minutes ago. We found it like this.”
“But who… how… what the heck?” Bill-E mumbles.
We spend ten minutes debating the mystery. The simplest solution, which I offer shamelessly, is that somebody discovered the hole after we’d left and did some more digging themselves. Bill-E and Loch dismiss it instantly—there are no shovel marks in the newly excavated sections, and no footprints except our own. (I didn’t leave any barefooted prints in the night. I must have been extra light on my feet. Padded softly… like a wolf.) Besides, they argue, who the hell would go digging in the middle of the night?
“An earthquake?” I suggest as an alternative.
Snorts of derision. We don’t get earthquakes here. Besides, even if we did, that wouldn’t explain the earth and rocks piled up around the hole.
Loch wonders if a wild animal is responsible.
“What sort of animal do you think that might be?” Bill-E sneers. “A troll or an ogre? Or maybe it was elves, like in the fairy tale with the shoemaker.”
Eventually Bill-E comes up with a theory which satisfies all three of us, at least in the absence of anything more believable. “Lord Sheftree,” he says. “If this is where his treasure’s buried, maybe he booby-trapped the entrance with explosives. When we were digging, we set them off, but because they’d been buried so long, they didn’t ignite straightaway. It took them a few hours to explode, by which time we were safely home, clear of the blast radius.”
“I dunno,” Loch mutters, examining the rocks around us. “These look like they were pulled out cleanly, not blasted.”
“Maybe it was a catapult-type mechanism,” Bill-E says, warming to his theory. “He had all these rocks loaded on a platform, which was set to shoot them upwards when the trap was sprung. They’d crush anyone nearby.”
We discuss it further, trying to pin down the exact workings of the trap, wondering if there might be more than just one. I advise caution and propose retreat—we should report this and leave it to professionals to mine the dangerous hole. Bill-E and Loch shout me down.
“We’ll go slowly,” Bill-E says.
“Carefully,” Loch agrees.
“If there are other traps, they’re probably slow-burners too,” Bill-E argues.
“But I doubt if there are more,” Loch says. “What would be the point? One’s enough. If it was set off, old Sheftree could have simply cleaned up the remains of the bodies, then set the trap again.”
In the end, despite the dangers, they decide to proceed. Since they can’t be swayed and there’s no profit in cutting myself off from them, I reluctantly grab a shovel and all three of us climb down into the hole.
For an hour we work doggedly and fearfully—me fearful of faces appearing in the rocks, Bill-E and Loch fearful of running afoul of the dead Lord Sheftree.
We pause every time there’s a rustling in the trees overhead, or when a heavy stream of earth trickles down into the hole, me anticipating whispers, Bill-E and Loch thinking it might be the grinding gears of Lord Sheftree’s next weapon of mass destruction. But gradually we adjust to the natural sounds of the forest and stop flinching at every minor disturbance.
Bill-E and Loch are more convinced than ever that we’ve unearthed the final resting place of Lord Sheftree’s buried treasure. Not me. There’s something magical about this hole. It drew me to it last night, sang out to the moon-affected beast I’d become and lured it here, turning me into a conspirator, using me to clear the way for… what?
I don’t know. I haven’t the slightest idea what we might be digging our way down to. But I’m pretty certain it’s not a rich miser’s hidden treasure.
Loch and I work paired, chipping away at the hard-packed earth around the large rocks, prising them out slowly, often painfully, rolling and dragging them up the slope. Bill-E cleans up after us, removing the smaller rocks, pebbles and dirt. We’re an effective team, although as Loch tires from the hard work, he starts cursing and teasing Bill-E, taking out his irritation on him. At first I ignore it, but he keeps on and on, Spleenio this, fat boy that, dodgy eye the other, and eventually I snap.
“Why don’t you lay off him?” I snarl after an especially brutal remark about Bill-E’s dead mother.
“Make me,” Loch retorts.
I square up to him. “Maybe I will.”
Loch holds his shovel in both hands and raises it warningly. I grab the handle and we glare at each other. Then Bill-E slips behind me and whispers, “Do him, Grubbs!” It’s so flat, so vicious, so un-Bill-E, that I turn around, startled, releasing the shovel.
“What did you say?”
Bill-E looks confused, but angry too. “I meant… I just…”
“I heard him,” Loch growls. “He told you to bump me off.”
“What if I did?” Bill-E bristles, and now he tries to get round me, so that he can go toe-to-toe with Loch.
“Stop,” I say firmly. I lay my left palm against the nearest rock wall and concentrate. After a few seconds I feel or sense the vibrations of a very faint throbbing. A non-human throbbing. “We all need to chill.”
“Who made you the leader?” Loch barks.
“We’re being manipulated.” His forehead creases and I start to tell him there’s magic at work, affecting our tempers. But then I realise how crazy that would sound. “The soil,” I say instead, inventing quickly. “There must be some sort of chemical in it. Put there by Lord Sheftree. It’s making us feel and say things we shouldn’t. If we don’t stop, we’ll be at each other’s throats soon.”
Loch’s frown deepens, then clears. “I’ll be damned,” he sighs.
“The sly old buzzard,” Bill-E hoots. “Chemicals to alter our dispositions and turn us against one another. Coolio!”
“I thought you were my enemy,” Loch says wonderingly, staring at me. “It came so suddenly, without warning. I believed you were out to kill me. The shovel…” He looks down at the sharp, grey head, then drops it and clambers out of the pit. Bill-E and I follow. We find Loch sitting by the edge of the hole, shivering.
“I don’t think we should carry on,” Loch whispers. “You were right. We should turn this over to someone who knows what they’re doing. Chemicals… That’s out of our league.”
“No way!” Bill-E protests. “We’re close, I know it. You can’t back out now. That would be real madness.”
“But—” Loch begins.
“There might be no chemicals,” Bill-E interrupts. “Maybe we’re just tired and edgy. It’s been a long day, we’re hungry, we’ve been working hard, it’s late… Combine all those and you get three sore-headed bears.”
“It was more than grumpiness,” Loch says.
“Probably,” Bill-E agrees. “But let’s say there are chemicals down there. It’s been so long since they were planted, their strength must have dwindled by now. I bet, if we’d dug fifty years ago, they would have blinded or killed us. Now all they can do is make our hackles rise. We should take a short break, clear our heads, then get back to work. If we find ourselves getting short-tempered again, we come up for another rest.”
“I’m not sure,” I mutter. If we were alone, I’d tell Bill-E about my fears—that this place is part of the world of magic. I’m sure he’d take more notice of my warnings then. But I can’t speak about such matters in front of Loch. “Why don’t we leave it for today. It’s getting late. Let’s go home and sleep on it.”
“Not yet,” Bill-E pleads. “Give it until dusk, like we planned. Since we’re here, we might as well make the most of the daylight.”
“Spleenio’s right,” Loch says. Now that the influence of the hole has passed, he’s his old self again, intent on getting his hands on the treasure, quickly forgetting his fears. “Let’s do what we came to, then go home and relax. It might be weeks before we dig all the way to the bottom. We can’t get cold feet every time we run into an obstacle.”