The Treasure Beneath the Hill, chapter 3

The school playground, the outhouses, the churchyard and the church itself were all taped off with yellow-and-black plastic tape, and there were notices up here and there to warn people off. When Grandpa Jack mentioned to Sylvia Pouncer that he'd left some of his sheet music inside the church on the seat of the organ, she said don't worry, she'd already noticed it and collected it all together, and it was at her house, and she'd bring it round in the morning. When he mentioned to her about all the dead bats she said Oh yes! Wasn't it terrible! The poor little creatures! There must be some new virus going around - in fact she thought she might have seen something about it on the news - she was sure it was something to do with global warming or pollution or one of those horrible things. It was such a shame!

There was no more sound of heavy machinery from the school playground; instead there were the clinking noises of trowels. Archaeologists in big woolly jumpers with beards and wild hair - or girls in dungarees, also wearing big woolly jumpers - were the only ones allowed beyond the yellow-and-black tape. They worked out of sight behind the corner of the old school. Sometimes you could hear the suave voice of Abner Brown giving them their instructions. Sometimes you might catch a glimpse of him, striding across the churchyard in his cashmere overcoat with the collar turned up.

Dora was woken that night by a scurrying noise in the corner of the room, and opened her eyes in time to see a little dark shape slipping along the base of the skirting-board, and out through the gap under the door. She hopped out of bed and followed it. On the landing it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust, but then she heard another movement and thought she saw the little dark shape again, this time at the base of the door into the old school. She went back into her room and fetched the key from the drawer of her bedside cabinet.

The old school looked startlingly different when he got there - much larger and more cavernous. After a second Pan realized, with a slight shock and a change of perspective, that this was because he was now much smaller and closer to the floor. In fact - he looked at his small agile front paws, then glanced round and admired the snaky shape of his tail - he was a mouse. The school was darker by far than it had been last time he visited, but he could see everything in the darkness perfectly plainly. His hearing was incredibly sharp too - not with the same sense of three-dimensional mapping as when he was a bat; but he could hear the spiders moving on their webs in the dusty corners of the school, and woodlice trundling through the darkness beneath the floor.

And he could smell with exquisite precision - the damp crumbling plaster on the walls, a distant faint tincture of bread and fried egg from the kitchen in Grandpa Jack's house - and something else, a tangy wild smell of droppings, like mouse droppings but different. Was it rat? No, it wasn't quite rat.

He was expecting the mouse he had followed through the door to be a long way off by this time, but she was waiting for him on the balcony above the school hall.

'There you are,' she said. 'Come along, we've got to get a move on. We've got a long away to go.'

'Why,' said Pan, 'where are we going?'

'The church, of course,' said the mouse. 'You'll be quite worn out by the time you get there. Yards and yards and yards of tunnels. But that's where you want to go, isn't it?'

'Well, yes,' said Pan. 'But how did you know that?'

'I was sent to fetch you, of course. You needn't think I would have bothered coming into your room otherwise. I would have found my way to that nice kitchen instead, with that lovely foody smell.'

'Who sent you to fetch me?'

'The pig! Who else?'

'The pig?'

'Yes, yes! Now come along!'

But Pan had noticed a rustling and fidgeting in the ceiling of the school hall.

'What's that up there?'

'The bats. The ones that have been forced out of the church. They've all had to come in here instead.'

Hanging upside down from the ceiling, like a collection of diminutive broken umbrellas, was a small disconsolate crowd of refugee bats. The smell of droppings was coming from the floor beneath them. But in addition to that smell they also gave off an atmosphere of intense wretchedness. They were displaced, homeless, ill at ease. As he followed the girl mouse along the balcony, they popped their heads out from under their wings to stare at him with gleaming eyes. He stared back, to see if he could recognise his friend the girl bat from a couple of nights ago, but there was no sign of her. He hoped she wasn't lying dead in the churchyard.

'How were they forced out of the church?' he said.

'Some kind of poisonous smoke,' the girl mouse replied. 'Made by those new people. The old people were bad enough: they used to clump around and talk in loud voices, and play the organ and ring the bells, but they never poisoned us. The new people don't seem to care about anything but themselves. They're pulling up the church floor! And they made this poisonous smoke. It was unpleasant for us mice, but it went up into the roof and made the bats sick. It made their heads ache, and they couldn't fly properly. I think some of them died.'

'Yes,' said Pan, 'some of them did.'

'Well,' said the girl mouse, 'we're only little creatures. We know we die easily. We're used to the idea: we don't make a big fuss about it, like people do. But when they start poisoning us and driving us out of our homes, it doesn't seem right.'

'I agree,' said Pan.

'You seem nice,' said the girl mouse. 'I've been thinking about getting a husband and starting a family. I'd like to have lots of little mouselings, perhaps about forty. Would you like that?'

'I haven't really thought about it,' said Pan awkwardly. 'I don't think I could really get married at the moment.'

'Why not? What's the matter - don't you like me?'

'I do like you,' said Pan. 'You're a very pretty mouse. But I'm not really a boy. I'm a girl.'

'You're not!' said the girl mouse. 'You're definitely a boy. I can tell.'

'Well, I'm a boy at the moment, that's true. But most of the time I'm a girl. And I'm not usually a mouse, either.'

'Oh, all right,' said the girl mouse carelessly. 'I thought there was something a bit unusual about you. But I don't mind that, personally: I'm not turned off by it: in fact I quite like it.'

Is this going to keep on happening to me? thought Pan.

They went down the steps from the balcony to the floor of the hall, and across the floor to the far side. Even though she kept insisting that they had to get a move on, the girl mouse stopped under the table to pick up a crumb of stale bread that had fallen on the floor from Abner and Sylvia's midnight feast.

'Do you want half of this?' she said to Pan.

'No, that's all right,' said Pan. 'I thought you were in a hurry.'

'Well, waste not want not,' she said, tucking the crumb into her cheek. 'I never like to miss out on a nice bit of food.'

On the far side of the floor, at the base of the wall, she guided Pan to a hole in the bottom of the skirting-board. He followed her through, and found himself inside the wall-cavity. The smell was quite different: mustier, dirtier and earthier.

They hurried on. The girl mouse had been quite right earlier, when she warned him that there were yards and yards of tunnels to get through. After a bit they weren't within the walls of the school any more: the tunnels wound and undulated through compacted earth, with the occasional root or fragment of broken crockery for decoration.

Then at one point they suddenly came out into an open space, which felt enormous after the snug tunnels. It was a mild and windy night. They seemed to be at the bottom of some kind of chasm or canyon. After a moment, Pan realised they must be in the ditch that had been dug across the playground - only now it was wider, less geometric, and there were signs of a less mechanised excavation. Areas were marked off with string and pegs. There was a trowel sticking out of a pile of earth.

'We had a perfectly good tunnel that went right through here,' complained the girl mouse, 'and they've chopped it in half. I don't like coming out into the open when I don't have to, especially when there's no food around.'

She scurried across to the other side of the ditch, but then she had to spend a minute or so running up and down, looking for the way back into the tunnel.

'Where is it? Drat those people! Always spoiling everything. It must be here somewhere. Ah! Here it is!'

After that the tunnels started to slope noticeably upwards, and before too long they were between two layers of masonry again. They ran along a narrow passage as straight as a rail, until a bright gap appeared on their right, and slipping through it they emerged into the church: a whitewashed wall behind them, and in front of them a towering structure of wood with a huge array of metal pipes at the top.

'Where are we?' said Pan

'Behind the organ,' said the girl mouse. 'Can you smell that?' There was a smell of wood, stone, and incense - but also the remnant of something heavy, chemical and super-pungent, which made Pan feel slightly nauseous and headachey as soon as he sniffed it.

'That's the poison that got rid of all the bats,' said the girl mouse.

'It's horrible,' said Pan.

'I don't think it's strong enough to do us any harm now,' she said. 'Hallo! Somebody's left some food.'

At the corner of the organ was an upturned jam-jar lid with some blueish pellets in it.

'I'm hungry after that long journey,' she said, hurrying forward to sniff the pellets. 'Do you want to go shares this time?'

'Don't touch it!' said Pan.

'What? Why not? It's a shame to waste good food.'

'It's not good food,' said Pan. 'It's another poison. The people have left it here on purpose.'

'Are you sure?'

He pushed himself between her and the upturned lid. He'd seen the pellets before, in somebody else's house.

'Yes, I really am. Don't touch it, whatever you do.'

'All right then. Come on, follow me.'

They crept round the side of the organ and into the choir. The floor was made of worn masonry slabs, some of them inscribed with the names and dates of dead people.

The church was dimly lit, and it all looked different. The first thing Pan noticed was a carving on the wall at the far end, of an angel with wings like a swan, bending forward to write something with a quill pen into an open book. The carving had always been there: Pan remembered it from when he was little: but tonight in the half-light it looked more alive than he remembered, and it seemed to be leaning forward more urgently.

Then he saw that the middle of the church had been transformed. Once he took it in, he couldn't understand why he hadn't noticed it immediately. All the pews had been moved right back against the walls and piled up on top of one another, to leave a bare paved space in the middle. In the centre of this bare space one particular flagstone seemed to be sharply separated from all the others by a black outline. The mortar and dust and dirt of the ages had been scraped and chiselled and pried out down all four of its sides to a depth of about an inch. Abner Brown was standing next to this flagstone with a crowbar in his hand. Sylvia Pouncer was sitting a little distance away, on the end of one of the shifted-back pews.

'Abner darling,' said Sylvia Pouncer, 'I still feel terribly uneasy about this. The church floor's never going to look the same again. People are bound to notice. There's going to be a tremendous scandal about it.'

'Now now, my Pouncer,' said Abner Brown, 'you leave all of that to your clever old Abner. Don't you trust me, my dear?'

'Of course I trust you, my darling!' she cried. 'And I do know how clever you are! But all the same...'

'We're going to distract them with that little archaeological dig in the playground,' said Abner, 'while the real business takes place in here. We'll give them some pieces to find, a mixture of historical interest and monetary value, a gleam of pottery here and and glint of gold and silver there, and they won't spare so much as a thought for what's going on inside the church. By the time they notice anything, we shall have the real treasure in our hands, and of course they won't care about the silly old church and a few flagstones once they know about the real treasure.'

'But you're not going to give them the real treasure, my darling. We're going to keep the real treasure for ourselves.'

'We'll give them enough,' said Abner Brown. 'Enough to satisfy their greedy hearts and shut their sanctimonious mouths. In any case, society will benefit. Once we unearth these treasures, and thereby enrich society, then society as a whole is bound to benefit. What's the point of leaving them buried underground where they count for nothing? Bring them into the light! Enrich the church! Enrich the town! If you and I happen to be the ones that benefit the most, what of it? We're the ones that will be doing most of the work.'

'And are you absolutely sure, my darling, about what you'll find when you go digging beneath that slab?'

'Trust me, my dear Sylvia, trust me.' Abner Brown stooped to run his fingers over the surface of the flagstone again. 'The words on this flagstone are almost completely worn away, but look here - this word is definitely "hoard", as I told you before - and this other word at the end unmistakeably begins with an "h" and ends with a double "l" - and this word in the middle starts with a "b" and ends with what looks like another "h". I've spent hours deciphering this. The top line reads "Here lies the hoard beneath the hill", or something very like it.'

Sylvia Pouncer was sufficiently fascinated to get up off the end of the pew and stand next to him. 'Yes, I can see it,' she said. 'But what about those other lines?'

'Ah,' said Abner Brown, getting down on one knee, and running his fingers over the stone again. 'There you have me. It's a rhyme, I believe, so the last word of each line must rhyme with "hill" - you see the double "l" at the end of each line?'

'Oh yes! How clever you are! It's almost invisible, but once you start to look for it -'

'Precisely, my dear Pouncer. Now, in this old script an "s" and an "f" look very like each other - so this could be "fill" or "sill". They're all one-syllable words, I think. How many one-syllable words rhyme with "hill"? Fill, sill, quill, still, pill...'

'Ill.'

'Yes, well done. This one could be "ill" - it looks shorter than the others. But what's this in front of it? Walk? Work? Walk it ill? Work it ill?' He got up again with a sigh of exasperation. 'It defeats me. The surest way to find out what it means is to pull up the stone.'

With those words, he inserted the point of his crowbar into the deep crack that ran down one side of the stone slab, and began to apply his weight. There was a dry grating noise, and simultaneously a roaring, booming, rushing sound from the roof of the church. The stone fabric of the walls seemed to groan and tremble in the darkness.

'Abner!' cried Sylvia Pouncer, clutching his arm. 'What's that noise? What's happening?'

'It's just the wind,' he replied tersely, between his teeth, still levering the crowbar with all his might.

The sound from the roof and the walls grew louder and louder, the church seemed to shudder and founder like a stricken ship in a storm, and the lights flickered and dimmed as if they were about to go out.

'Abner! Abner! Stop! Stop!'

Abner Brown let go of the crowbar and it fell onto the stone floor of the church with a loud clatter. He stood up straight and mopped his face with a large white handkerchief. Slowly the roaring noises died down and the lights came back to full strength.

'Oh, Abner!' wailed Sylvia. 'I thought the roof was going to fall on us!'

'Rubbish, my dear. You surprize me. I never thought you'd take fright so easily.'

'But my darling -'

'Now now now,' he muttered. 'It's simply the weather turning a bit stormy. I'm going to have to knock some wedges into these cracks, it seems. A crowbar on its own isn't going to do it.'

'Oh, Abner -'

'Sh!' he said sharply, putting his finger to his lips and staring up the church in the direction of the altar. 'What's there?'

'What is it?' said Sylvia Pouncer, staring in the same direction. 'What have you seen?'

Abner Brown was staring up the church towards the choir. He was neurotically sensitive to any intrusion, like a spider sensing hostile vibrations in its web; and he also must have had eyes like a lynx.

'Spies,' he said. 'First it was the bats, and now this. I put down poison, but it hasn't done the trick.'

'Quick,' whispered the girl mouse to Pan. 'He's seen us!'

The two of them turned tail, and started to run back up the choir as fast as their legs would carry them.

'What we need around here,' cried Abner Brown, his voice suddenly rising to a shout, 'is a CAT!'

And as he spoke the words they heard the rising wailing throaty snarling growl of an angry cat, as if it had just materialised out of thin air at his summons. The sound of it was enough to make the hairs stand up on end on both their backs.

They flattened back their ears and ran for their lives. They could hear the cat coming after them, up the steps from the nave and then up the length of the choir, in a series of lightning-fast leaps on soft deadly paws. By the time they got round the corner of the organ it was almost upon them. They shot through the gap in the wall just as it came hurtling through the air towards them in a deadly pounce. Pan caught a glimpse of black fur, white teeth, blazing green eyes, claws - and then they were safe in the darkness.

'Gah,' said Grandpa Jack, 'you can't even open the local paper without seeing those buggers smirking at you from every page. Look at this.'

He threw the paper across the breakfast table for Dora to see. 'The Treasure of St Bridget's', ran the headline. There was a big picture of Abner Brown and Sylvia Pouncer standing next to each other with the church in the background. Church Historian Professor Abner Brown, said the paper, was holding up an earthenware mead cup, possibly Anglo-Saxon in origin, while next to him Vicar Sylvia Pouncer displayed in the palms of her hands a gold ring decorated with Celtic knotwork, and a silver brooch in the shape of a wild boar. These discoveries, according to the Professor, showed that although the current church was a relatively recent building, dating from the eighteenth century, there must have been worship of some kind on this site since before the Norman conquest, and possibly even earlier. Sylvia and Abner certainly did look extremely pleased with themselves.

'She never even comes to the church any more,' complained Grandpa. 'She's got herself a little curate called George, who does all her running around for her. She's far too important to actually take any church services nowadays. She's like a cat that's got all the cream. If she gets any more pleased with herself she'll eat herself up.'

Dora and Grandpa Jack went to see Bill at the cottage hospital. He was out of bed, sitting up in an armchair with a zimmer frame next to him, wearing a red dressing-gown and blue and white striped pyjamas. He looked pale and old: his nose and eyebrows seemed to have got bigger, but his neck and wrists were thin.

'I wish you'd get well and come back,' said Grandpa, 'so we can get things back to normal.'

'Will they even have me back, my dear?' said Bill. 'Things seem to have moved on so much while I've been in hospital. The new vicar's bringing fame and glamour to the old place, getting it in the newspapers and so forth, whereas I'm just a rather dull old chap who used to plod along never achieving anything much. I daresay the powers that be would rather keep me out of the picture. I think they'll probably try to pension me off rather than welcome me back with open arms.'

'Don't say that, you miserable old bugger,' said Grandpa Jack.

'Henry the pig man came to see me,' said Bill. 'He tells me they've got rid of all the bats and the mice from the church.' He shook his head sadly. 'It's not the church I know any more. I'd probably hardly even recognise it if I did come back. Perhaps I really should retire.'

Grandpa Jack moodily helped himself to a humbug from the half-pound he'd brought with him in a paper bag. 'Well this is turning into a right bloody cheerful visit,' he mumbled.

'Perhaps the old place really does need somebody new,' ruminated Bill. 'I hate the thought of them messing around with it, but it could certainly do with some repairs. That roof's been falling to bits for years. I expect it's leaking like a sieve in this weather.'

The weather had turned extremely wet and windy in the course of the last few days. Henry the pig man reported that he could see gaps in the church roof where a number of tiles had come off, and several more tiles had been dislodged from the old school and Grandpa Jack's house. There was a damp patch on the ceiling of Grandpa Jack's spare room, the one Dora's dad slept in when he came to stay. Out of doors, there were rivulets of rainwater flowing along all the paths, and the archaeological dig in the school playground had sprouted a jumble of green and grey canvas roofs, which flapped and shuddered in the wind, as if they were about to leave their moorings and whirl up into the sky above the church.

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