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“No,” I yawn.
Loch scowls, then switches his attention to Bill-E. “How about you, Spleenio?” He grabs the shorter boy by the waist and swings him round.
“Let go!” Bill-E shouts, kicking out.
“We’ve got a live one,” Loch laughs. He throws Bill-E to the ground, then falls on him and starts to tickle.
“No!” Bill-E gasps, face red, slapping at Loch like a girl, half-laughing from the tickling, half-crying.
“Leave him alone,” I mutter angrily—the noise is worsening my headache.
Loch stops and stands. “Sorry, Bill-E,” he says. “Let me help you up.” He lowers his right hand. Bill-E reaches for it and Loch whips the hand away. “You’re the sultan of suckers, Spleen,” he chortles, strolling towards the kitchen, shaking his head with amused disgust.
Bill-E glares daggers at Loch, then at me. “Gossel’s scum,” he hisses. “I don’t care if he is your new best friend. He’s the scum of the earth. Shame on you for hanging out with him.”
“Don’t take it out on me,” I snap. “You want to get Loch off your back? Then face him like a man, not a little girl. He bullies you because you let him.”
“No, he bullies me because he’s a bully,” Bill-E retorts, furious tears in his eyes.
I shrug, too exhausted and sore-headed to argue. “Whatever.”
Loch returns and Bill-E shuts up, but he glowers like an old man whose pipe’s been stolen, then storms off and returns with his coat.
“Going home?” I ask as he buttons it up.
“No,” he snarls. “I’m doing what I originally planned to do.”
“Huh?”
“You remember. My original plan. If there hadn’t been a party.” I stare at him blankly and he nods in the direction of the forest.
“Oh,” I chuckle. “Lord Sheftree.”
“What’s that?” Loch asks.
“Nothing,” Bill-E says quickly, shooting me a warning look which I ignore, still sore at him for having a go at me. (And sore at myself too, for not being the friend – the brother – he deserves.)
“You know the stories of Lord Sheftree, the guy who used to own this place?” I ask Loch.
“The baby and the piranha, yeah, sure.”
“Grubbs…” Bill-E growls, not wanting to share our secret with an outsider.
“There’s a legend about his treasure.” I take grim satisfaction from Bill-E’s enraged expression.
“Treasure?” Loch echoes, interest piqued.
“Apparently he had hoards of gold and jewels which nobody ever found. They say he buried it somewhere around here. That it’s still sitting there, underground, waiting…”
Loch squints at me, then at Bill-E. “This true, Spleenio?”
“Get stuffed.”
Loch’s face stiffens. “I asked if it was true,” he says, taking a menacing step forward.
“Yeah, maybe, so what?” Bill-E squeaks, shrinking away from Loch.
“Any idea where the treasure is?” Loch asks.
“Up your butt,” I chip in, and both Loch and Bill-E laugh, the tension vanishing in an instant.
“Nah, come on, really,” Loch says, facing me again. “Is this on the level or is Spleen-boy paying me back for all those false handshakes?”
“The legend’s real,” I tell him. “I don’t know about the treasure. We’ve been all over the forest, dug more holes than a pair of rabbits and found nothing. Right, Bill-E?”
“Yeah,” Bill-E sighs, resigning himself to sharing our secret with Loch. “But you bury treasure because you want it to be hard to find. There wouldn’t have been much point in Lord Sheftree sticking it where any passer-by could find it. It’s out there, I’m sure, and one day, if we keep trying…” He trails off into silence, eyes distant.
“I thought you were rich anyway,” Loch says to me. “Why are you bothered about a pile of buried treasure?”
“I’m not. But it would be exciting if it did exist and we found it. Bill-E and I used to spend a lot of our weekends searching for it. Even though we never found anything, the searching was fun.”
“You’ve given up?” Loch asks.
I shrug. “Bill-E goes looking every so often, but it’s been a while since I bothered.”
“He’s been too busy wrestling with lunk-heads,” Bill-E says sourly, but Loch lets the remark pass.
“I’ve never searched for treasure,” Loch says. “How do you do it—with a metal detector?”
“No,” Bill-E says. “We walk around with shovels looking for likely spots. Then we make trial holes. If nothing turns up, we fill in the holes and move on.”
“Sounds amateurish,” Loch says dubiously.
Bill-E laughs. “Like Grubitsch said, the searching is fun. You’d need proper, expensive equipment to go after it seriously. For us it’s always been a game.”
“What about it?” Loch asks, casting an eye at me.
“You want to go on a treasure hunt?” I groan, wishing I could just go back to bed for a few hours.
“It’d beat sitting around here doing nothing,” Loch says.
“But it’s raining,” I protest.
“A light drizzle. It’ll clear soon. C’mon, it’s something different.”
“Not for Bill-E and me.”
“But it is for me,” Loch presses.
“Why don’t you and Bill-E go by yourselves?” I suggest.
“No way!” they both exclaim at the same time, then share a look and laugh, temporary (very temporary!) allies.
“I’ll let him tag along if you come,” Bill-E says. “Otherwise I’ll go home. I still have some homework to finish.”
“C’mon,” Loch huffs again. “Don’t be a bloody bore, Grubbs.”
“OK,” I groan, rising reluctantly. “Give me a few mintues to change. Loch, you and Bill-E go get some shovels. Bill-E knows where to find them.”
“Cool!” Loch grins, slapping Bill-E on the back. “You leave it to the Spleenster and me—we know what we’re doing.”
“Just one thing,” Bill-E says stiffly. “On the very off chance that we find any treasure, it’s ours. You don’t have any rights to it, understand? I don’t want you going all Treasure of the Sierra Madre on us.”
“Treasure of where?” Loch frowns.
“It’s a black-and-white movie,” Bill-E explains as he leads Loch away. “I’ll fill you in on the plot while we’re fetching the shovels. It’s all about treasure hunters and the destructive nature of paranoid greed…”
→The fresh air clears my head a bit, but after an hour of aimless walking and digging I’d still rather be in bed. Loch’s loving it though, digging wildly, accidentally hitting Bill-E with clods of earth every so often to break the monotony. Bill-E doesn’t mind too much. He’s just glad I’m out scouring the forest with him again, even if we do have an extra (unwanted) passenger in tow.
“We’ve found a few bits and pieces over the years,” Bill-E explains as we give up on our third trial dig and refill the hole. “Old coins, scraps of clothes, half a knife.”
“Anything worth money?” Loch asks.
“Not really,” Bill-E says. “One of the coins would have been valuable if it had been in better condition, but it was very worn and part of it was missing. Dervish let me keep it.”
“Why were they buried if they were worthless?” Loch asks.
“They weren’t,” Bill-E says. “The level of the ground’s constantly changing. Things fall or are thrown away. Grass and weeds grow over them. They sink when the ground’s wet. New earth blows over them. In no time at all they’re half a metre underground… a metre… more. The world’s always burying cast-offs and stuff that’s been forgotten. Heck, even the giant Sphinx in Egypt was half-buried once and almost lost forever.”
“Nonsense,” Loch snorts.
“It’s true,” Bill-E says. “We did it in history. And there are loads of important places in Egypt today – burial chambers and the like – which are covered up. In some towns they know where they are, but people have built houses over them, so they can’t excavate.”
“I never learnt any of that in history,” Loch says suspiciously.
“Well,” Bill-E replies smugly, “maybe if you were in the upper set…”
→Loch’s starting to tire of the wandering and digging. I’m glad. Apart from the fact that I’m weary and grumpy, it’s late afternoon and it won’t be much longer before the sun starts to set and an even fuller moon than last night’s rises over the earth like a plum dipped in cream. Maybe Dervish is back already. If so, I want to sit down with him and have a long talk about what’s going on in my life and what we need to do about it.
“This studying,” Loch grumbles, studying his hand where he cut it on the last dig.
“One more try,” Bill-E says. “We’ll quit after that.”
“Why not now?” Loch says. “This is stupid. We’ll never find anything.”
“It’s an old superstition of ours. When we decide we’ve had enough, we always dig one last hole. Right, Grubbs?”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
“And look where it’s got you,” Loch snorts, but goes along with the plan, not wanting to be the one who quits first.
Bill-E leads us further into the wild bushes of the forest, trying to pick a good spot for the final dig of the day. Briars catch on my trousers and jacket, and one scratches deep into my neck, drawing a few drops of blood and a loud curse. I’m about to call an end to the farce and demand we go home immediately, regardless of superstitions, when something about the landscape makes me pause.
We’re in the middle of a thicket, lots of natural shrubs and bushes. It looks much the same as any other part of the forest to the untrained eye, but when you’ve spent a few years exploring a particular area, you see things differently. You get to know the various types of trees, flowers and weeds. You make mental pointers so you can find your way around easily and quickly. I’ve been here before, I’m sure of it, but I can’t remember when…
The memory clicks into place. It was shortly before Bill-E turned into a werewolf, before Dervish told me about the Demonata and Lord Loss. Bill-E and I were on one of our treasure hunts. We’d started to dig around here when Bill-E spotted Dervish and went all mysterious. He made me hide, so Dervish didn’t see us, then we followed him. That was the day Bill-E hit me with his theory about werewolves. The day my destiny fell into place and I started on a collision course with Lord Loss and his vile familiars.
“Let’s dig here.”
“I’m not sure,” Bill-E frowns, studying the ground. “The earth looks hard.”
“No,” I say, casting around. “There’s a soft patch somewhere, between a couple of stones. At least there used to be…”
I find it and give a grunt of satisfaction. I can still see faint marks from where I began to dig previously, a minute or so before Bill-E went weird on me and the world of werewolves claimed me for its own.
“How’d you know that was there?” Bill-E asks.
“Magic,” I reply with a laugh, then drive my shovel into the soil.
→Half an hour later, nobody’s laughing. We’re surrounded by three fresh mounds of earth and stones, digging deeper by the minute, cutting down at an angle. There’s a large rock buried just beneath the briars and grass, under the shelter of which the earth and stones lie. There’s rock to either side too. It’s too early to tell for certain, but this looks like the entrance to a tunnel or cave.
“What’s that?” Loch says suddenly, stooping. He comes up holding something golden. My heart leaps. Bill-E and I crowd in on him, jabbering with excitement. Then he holds it up to the dim light and we see it’s just an orangey-yellow stone. “Damn!” Loch hurls it away.
Bill-E pulls a face and resumes digging. He’s working on the sides, clearing the rock faces, while Loch and I dig straight down. Bill-E pauses after a while and strokes the rock. “Hard to tell if this fissure is natural or manmade. The sides are smooth, as if they’ve been ground down. But I guess they’d feel just as smooth if nature had done the grinding.”
Loch hits a larger stone and winces. Scrapes around it to find its edges, then inserts the tip of his shovel under one corner and tells me to help him. Together we lever it out, then lift it up on to the bank around us. We’re knee-high in the hole (based on my long legs, not Bill-E’s stumpy pins) by this stage.
Loch clears the gap left by the removal of the stone, then scowls. “There’s another one. Looks even bigger than the first.”
“It’s getting rockier the further down we dig,” I note.
“That’s always the way,” Bill-E says. “The heavier stones sink deeper than the smaller ones.”
“Is it worth carrying on?” Loch asks. “I don’t think there’s any treasure here.”
“How do you figure that?” Bill-E sneers.
“Common sense,” Loch says. “This Lord Sheftree miser would have wanted easy access to his treasure so he could dig it up whenever he liked. This ground’s too rocky. Too much hard work. It would have been easier for him to do it somewhere else.”
“Hey,” Bill-E says, “this is a maniac we’re talking about—the guy fed a baby to his piranha! Who knows what he might or might not have done? Maybe he hired men to dig this hole, then killed them and left them to rot with the treasure. Maybe he had others dig it up every few years so he could put more treasure down there, then killed them too. Heck, there could be dozens of skeletons down there.”
Loch and I share an uneasy glance.
“I don’t know if I want to go digging up skeletons,” Loch mumbles.
“Afraid of a few old bones, Gosselio?” Bill-E cackles.
“No. But if there are corpses, we shouldn’t disturb their remains.”
