The Treasure Beneath the Hill, chapter 2

'Grandpa,' said Dora, 'it was the Pig Man's last day today.'

'The miserable buggers,' said Grandpa Jack sympathetically. 'It wouldn't have killed them to let him stay in his hut a bit longer, now that they've stopped the demolition.'

'Shh!' said Dora. 'Look!'

Grandpa had just come back from St Margaret's, where he'd been rehearsing with the choir. Dora had come out of the house to meet him, and they were standing next to his car in the front drive. At the top of the hill, beyond the old school and the playground, the church was steeped in shadow, except for the spire, which was still bathed in a golden glow from the setting sun. In the shadows, Sylvia Pouncer was just entering the church through the side door, accompanied by a tall dark man.

'It's the vicar,' said Grandpa. 'Who's that with her? I recognise him, don't I? It looks like that chap Abner Brown, the one that was there when Bill broke his ankle.'

'It is him,' said Dora.

'How would you know?' said Grandpa Jack. 'You've never seen him, have you?'

'I had a dream about him.'

'Did you? That's odd. Don't tell me he's the historical expert they've brought in to supervise the diggings.'

'Yes,' said Dora, 'he is.'

'Well I'm damned. Perhaps I should go and say hallo,' said Grandpa Jack.

'No, don't,' said Dora.

'Well, it wouldn't do any harm to be friendly. It doesn't hurt to get the right side of these people. And that was very good wine and cheese he brought with him that evening,' said Grandpa Jack. He hesitated. 'But on the other hand, bugger it, I can't be bothered,' he said. 'Life's too short to waste it sucking up to these smarmy types. And that Pouncer woman wouldn't fancy me sticking my nose in, if they're supposed to be having a private conference. She'd be as nice as pie if I turned up, and make me feel like a complete idiot in no time. She does that every time I speak to her. I wouldn't mind knowing what they're talking about, though.'

'Look at those bats, Grandpa,' said Dora.

The little shapes of bats were flickering rapidly round the outside of the church. You saw them momentarily outlined against the sky, then lost them again as they dived back into the church's silhouette.

'Yes, there's always lots of bats around here.'

'Do they live in the church tower?'

'Some of them do. They make a mess at times, but Bill always says it's lucky to have bats.'

'If I was one of those bats,' said Dora, 'I could fly into the church, and hear what Sylvia Pouncer and Abner Brown were saying.'

'Well,' said Grandpa, 'if you want to be a bat, be a bat. When you were little, you used to go up the red stairs as a girl, and come down the blue stairs as a lion or a crocodile or a hippo or something. I remember you spent the whole day as a dog once, and we had to serve your supper in a dog dish. You could change into anything you liked in those days. I bet you could still do it now, if you gave it a try.'

'Silly old Grandpa,' said Dora.

That night she woke up with an odd excited feeling. It was a bright night. She looked out of her window, and saw a bat go flitting across the moon. It was still quite early: Grandpa Jack hadn't gone to bed yet: the lights were still on downstairs. She went out into the upstairs corridor, and walked all the way along it, past Grandpa's bedroom, until she came to the blue stairs at the other end. Pan went down them, and before he reached the bottom he was a bat.

The front door opened, and Grandpa Jack came in wearing his black coat and furry Russian hat. He'd obviously been on one of his evening expeditions to the shop, because he had a bottle of red wine in one hand and a carrier bag full of snacks in the other. When Pan flew up the hallway towards him he jumped back against the wall and knocked his Russian hat sideways.

'Bloody hell! Bats in the house now!'

In half a second Pan flew out of the front door and into the night air. The moonlight was like honey. He opened his mouth and out poured a torrent of rapid squeaks, and immediately he got an incredibly vivid sense of where everything was. There was the big breezy vault of air, and then there were the solid shapes of the ground: the church, the slope of the hill, the stones in the graveyard and the old school. He could feel them all through his ears, mapped out as a pattern of resonance. He looped over the church and round the tower in a rapid figure of eight.

'You're new,' said a girl bat as she whizzed past.

Pan instinctively turned sharp right towards a furry dot in the night air, and snapped it up. It was a moth. He felt the burr of its wings and a quick crunch, then it was gone. Very satisfying.

'How do you get into the church?' he said to the girl bat as she passed him again.

'Follow me,' she said.

She seemed to be flying straight towards the stonework of the church tower, but at the last moment she pulled in her wings and popped through an empty black gap at the top of a lancet window. Pan followed and found himself in the bell tower. The spire narrowed to a point above his head. The bells hung up there amongst the wooden beams, almost as if they were huge bats themselves.

The girl bat had adopted a roosting position upside down in a corner, hanging from a ledge of stone with her clever little feet, with her wings wrapped around herself like a blanket. Pan went and hung upside down next to her.

'Is this where you live?' he said.

'I live in the church,' she replied, 'but not here next to the bells. Bats can't live here. The noise is horrendous when they start to ring. It makes the blood come out of your ears. I live in the roof above the middle part of the church.'

'Good,' said Pan. 'That's where I want to go.'

'Why's that?' she said. 'You're not moving in, are you? You can't just come in here and take up residence without asking anyone. We're a tight-knit community, you know. We'd have to have a meeting and vote. Someone would have to speak up in your favour.'

'No, don't worry, I'm not moving in,' said Pan.

'I could speak up for you, though,' said the girl bat. 'You seem nice. I've been looking for a husband.'

'I'm not ready for that,' said Pan

'Why not? What's the matter with me? Don't you like me?

'You're very pretty,' said Pan, 'but I came here to do a bit of spying.'

'Spying? Spying on who? Were you sent here from another clan?'

'No, nothing like that. Take me into the middle of the church, and I'll show you.'

'All right,' she said.

There was a round window that led from the tower into the main body of the church. They had to swoop down to go through it, then up again into the top of the triangular roof over the nave. They crawled along the central roofbeam until they were right in the middle of the church.

'There's nobody here to spy on,' said the girl bat. 'They're all out catching moths.'

'Not up here in the roof,' said Pan. 'Down there on the floor.'

In the central aisle were Sylvia Pouncer and Abner Brown. Abner was stooping over one of the flagstones and sweeping its surface with the tips of his fingers.

'What, those humans?' said the girl bat. 'What do you want to spy on them for? If it wasn't bats, I thought you must at least mean a rat or an owl or something. Not humans. What's interesting about humans? I can't see the point of them myself.'

'They made this church,' said Pan.

'No they didn't!' she retorted indignantly. 'It's always been here! If anybody made it I should think the old bats must have done, the ancestral bats, in the olden days when bats were the size of eagles - they probably made it to give themselves somewhere to live. Humans don't make things! They dig them up or knock them down. They spoil things and poison them, they don't make them.'

'Well, that's true a lot of the time,' admitted Pan, 'but they do make things as well.'

'Huh, I'll believe it when I see it,' said the girl bat. 'I thought you were nice, but I'm starting to think you're a bit wrong in the head. You've certainly got some funny ideas.'

'Shush!' said Pan. 'I want to hear what they're saying.'

'I don't know how you can make sense of it,' said the girl bat. 'They don't even talk properly. They never make any proper squeaking noises, it's more like cows mooing or dogs barking.'

'Shush!' said Pan again.

'Oh, shush yourself,' she muttered, wrapping herself tightly in her wings and adopting a sulky expression. But at least she kept quiet after that, and Pan could listen to what Sylvia Pouncer and Abner Brown were saying.

'This stone,' said Abner, 'is the oldest in the entire church. And you see this shape carved at the top.'

'Is that a carving?' said Sylvia. 'I thought it was just an indentation. You know, caused by wear and tear.'

'My dear Pouncer,' said Abner. 'Look at the shape of it. What does it remind you of?'

'I'm completely at a loss, my sweetheart,' trilled Sylvia Pouncer. 'I'm sure you must think me terribly stupid, Abner dear. Are you absolutely sure it's really a carving, and not a natural part of the stone?'

'Look at the shape,' insisted Abner, tracing it with his forefinger. 'Look! Doesn't it remind you of that artefact we discovered in the ditch earlier today?'

'That lumpish thing?' Sylvia Pouncer twisted her neck round to look at the flagstone from a different angle. 'Ye-es. I do see what you mean, my darling. But then one shapeless thing does tend to resemble another.'

Abner Brown gave an impatient sigh. 'Come come, my dear Pouncer -'

'But Abner darling!' cried Sylvia Pouncer. 'You said we discovered that artefact in the ditch - I thought you planted it there, as a means of getting rid of the builders, and starting an archaeological dig instead.'

'So I did,' said Abner. 'I planted it there, and then I arranged for it to be discovered. But I also found it here on this site, many years ago, when I was here for another reason. It's one of the things that brought me back. It's a clue to what lies hidden here. And this flagstone, with its obscure carving - which very few men living, other than myself, would ever be able to interpret - is another clue.'

'You clever old thing, Abner,' said Sylvia Pouncer, putting her delicate fingers to her mouth and stifling a tiny yawn. 'But what's it a clue to? What on earth does it all mean?'

'It means that this flagstone is going to have to come up.'

'Oh but darling!' cried Sylvia. 'You wild impossible man! Have you lost your mind? Of course you can't be serious! We can't start pulling up flagstones right in the middle of the church floor! The very thought! I'd be defrocked! The church commissioners would have a fit! Do be reasonable, my dear Abner!'

'There's an inscription below the carving,' said Abner, feeling the surface of the flagstone with his fingertips again. 'Of much lesser antiquity, but very old all the same - old enough to be almost completely worn away, and almost entirely illegible. But this word here, I believe, is "hoard".'

'Hoard!' exclaimed Sylvia. 'You mean, as in hoard of treasure?'

'Ah,' said Abner, 'I seem to have caught your attention at last.' He stood up straight, and as he did so he suddenly looked up, and shot a suspicious glare into the roof-space. 'And perhaps you're not the only one whose attention I've caught. Are there bats in this church, my dear?'

'I believe so,' said Sylvia Pouncer. 'Horrid dirty things. They fly down low, and tangle their feet in one's hair.'

'That's an old wives' tale,' said Abner tersely. 'But I share your distaste. The bat is a listening creature, a creature with very sensitive ears. We'd certainly be better off without them.'

'But they're protected,' said Sylvia Pouncer. 'I mean they're a protected species. We're not allowed to touch them. Jack the church organist told me so.'

'Rubbish,' said Abner Brown. 'We have the place entirely to ourselves, my dear Syvlia. We can do exactly as we like. I'll bring some camphor candles: that'll drive the little vermin out. No one will ever know.'

A couple of days later, the Pig Man came round the back of the house and knocked on Grandpa Jack's kitchen window. When they opened the door for him he held out in his cupped hands what looked like a little bundle of brown fur and soft leather.

'What on earth's that?' said Grandpa Jack.

Dora craned her neck round from behind him. 'It isn't a bat, is it?' she exclaimed.

'It is a bat,' said the Pig Man.

'It isn't dead, is it?' said Dora.

'It is dead,' said the Pig Man. 'I found it dead on the path. And I'll tell you something else,' he said, 'there's four or five others lying dead out there. Lying dead, they are. One here and one there. There's one on the roof of your car.'

'On my car!' said Grandpa Jack. 'Bloody cheek!'

'Well I don't expect as it really meant to drop down dead on the roof of your car. I don't expect as it was really intending to drop down dead anywhere.'

'No, I don't expect it was, poor thing,' said Grandpa Jack. 'But I don't fancy having to pick it off.'

'I'll pick it off for you, if it comes to that,' said the Pig Man.

'Oh, thanks. That's very helpful of you.'

'But what are they dying of?' said Dora.

'Ah,' said the Pig Man, 'that's the question, that is. That there is the question. What are they dying of? That's what we'd like to know, and we don't know it, do we?'

'No, we don't,' said Grandpa Jack.

'That's what we'd like to find out, but we don't know how to find it out, do we?'

'No, we don't,' said Grandpa Jack. 'At least, I certainly don't.'

'But I'll tell you my opinion and belief,' said the Pig Man. 'It's my opinion, and my belief, that they've been poisoned.'

'Poisoned!' said Dora.

'That's my opinion and my belief,' said the Pig Man. 'You might think they've died of natural causes. Maybe a bat disease or a bat viral or something of the sort. I expect bats do catch diseases and virals the same as other creatures. But I've been working in and around that there church for more than thirty years, and in all them years I've never seen more than one dead bat at a time, maybe once every few months. We've had plenty of bats living in the roof of that church for years and years, as you perfectly well know, but in all that time I've never seen more than one dead bat at a time. And now all of a sudden, along comes somebody new and shuts the church up and won't let anybody in there, and the next thing you know it's raining dead bats. Four or five I've seen this morning just on my walk over here. I bet there's a whole load more lying dead in that there church yard, if we was to go in there and look, except that we're not allowed to go in that church yard no more. So if you want my opinion and my belief, it's my opinion and my belief that those there bats have been poisoned.'

'The miserable buggers,' said Jack. 'When Bill hears about this he'll be furious. He always says that the bats are good luck.'

'I know he does,' said the Pig Man. 'I've heard him.'

'They can't all be dead, can they?' said Dora. 'They can't have killed all of them, can they?'

'I don't know,' said the Pig Man. 'I hope not, but I don't know.'

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