The Treasure Beneath the Hill, chapter 5

Dora couldn't sleep that night. She tried to stop herself checking her profile on Blackbirds, but in the end she couldn't help it. She clicked the little black flying bird icon on her mobile phone, and immediately she found herself reading one message after another from Citrus.

'Nice meeting you today. You seem so nice n cute, who'd of thought you woz a THIEF?'

'What would these peeps who follow u online say, if they knew you were a THIEF?'

'Stealing books from churches, babes, that's NOT COOL you THIEVER!'

'Wonder what the cops will say when they find out U R A ROBBA!'

She switched off the screen, but the phone kept making little buzzing noises, which meant that new messages were still arriving. In the end she had to switch off the phone completely, which was something she hadn't done since she got it, a couple of years earlier. Her room suddenly felt strange, dark and empty. What was she going to do? She'd spent ages building up a following online. She could open up a new account with a new identity, but she'd have to start all over again from scratch. And if she republished all her old drawings, with the same tagwords on them and everything, wouldn't Citrus just find her again?

Maybe her real supporters wouldn't take any notice of Citrus. Maybe they'd think she was just a hater with some kind of grudge, and ignore her. But what if they didn't? And what if Citrus really did go to the police?

The thoughts kept going round and round inside her head, not getting anywhere. It was as if she was in the middle of a ring of grim little dancers who wouldn't let her escape. But then the dancers turned tall and thin, with close-cropped hair and black overcoats, and they stared at her with pale eyes.

She sat up. She'd been asleep, or half-asleep, but with the same worried thoughts still chasing each other around inside her head, mixed up with anxiety dreams. Obviously a couple of hours must have passed, because the lights were out and she could hear Grandpa Jack snoring from his bedroom. It was a thickly-overcast night, still as warm and humid as it had been earlier in the evening, when she met Citrus at the recreation ground; but now the wind was starting to blow.

She got out of bed and went to the window. There was a dark figure standing outside the front gate. Even though she could only half-see it, she was sure it was Thomas Mountford, and he was looking up at her window as if he was waiting for her to appear. Next to him was a pale figure with something bulky behind it, something on its back.

She went out and along the corridor, past Grandpa Jack's room and down the blue stairs. By the time he got to the bottom he was Pan. He quietly opened the front door and went out to the gate.

'There you are,' said Thomas Mountford. 'We have been waiting for you. I gather that you no longer have the book.'

'No, I haven't got it,' blurted Pan. 'They came and stole it back.'

'How did it happen?' said Thomas Mountford.

'I went out,' said Pan, 'and while I was out, three men came and searched Grandpa's house. They said they were making an inventory. One of them must have searched my room and found the book, because it was gone by the time I got back.'

'I blame myself,' said Thomas Mountford. 'I should have kept the book with me underground.'

'I disagree,' said the pale person next to him. 'We need to connect with the land of the living. We have been underground or hidden in dreams for too long. It was the right thing to leave it with Pan.'

'But now the book is in the hands of our enemies,' said Thomas Mountford.

'Yes, it's unfortunate,' said the pale person. 'But let's see what they make of it.'

For the first time, Pan looked fully at Thomas Mountford's pale companion, and saw that it was an angel. What had looked like a bundle on its back was actually a pair of folded wings. It seemed to be made from a mixture of stone and moonlight. It had long flowing hair that spread over its shoulders, and a classically serene face with a long straight nose. Pan had certainly never met an angel before - and yet he had a strong feeling of familiarity when he looked at this one.

'You haven't introduced us,' said the angel to Thomas Mountford.

'I beg your pardon,' said Thomas Mountford. 'This is my friend Pan. And this, Pan, is another friend of mine, called Pravuil.'

'Pleased to meet you, Pan,' said Pravuil.

'Pan turns into things,' said Thomas Mountford. 'He tells me he has turned into a bat and a mouse recently: and when I met him, he was a girl at first, but then turned into a boy.'

'Impressive!' said Pravuil. 'Then we have something in common, in a way. People often don't know whether I'm male or female. As a matter of fact I'm neither.'

'I think I'm a boy really,' said Pan, 'but I've spent most of my life being a girl.'

'I was telling Pan that I believe transformation to be one of the secrets of nature,' said Thomas Mountford.

'Don't I know you from somewhere?' said Pan to the angel.

'You've probably seen me in the church,' said Pravuil.

'Oh!' said Pan. 'Yes! I remember!'

Pravuil was the angel from the carving on the bell-tower wall: the severe-looking one with a book and a quill pen.

'You're that angel on the wall!' said Pan.

'I was asleep inside that sculpture,' said Pravuil. 'Many of us that were asleep are now waking up, thanks to the way the earth is being disturbed.'

'Pravuil is the Recording Angel,' said Thomas Mountford.

'I'm one of the Recording Angels,' corrected Pravuil. 'There are lots of us.'

'What's a Recording Angel?' said Pan.

'It means that I keep a tally of the good and evil in a person's life,' said Pravuil. 'And when the time comes, I declare whether there is a reward to be given, or a debt to be paid.'

'Oh!' said Pan. 'You mean, whether somebody's been good or bad.'

'Yes,' said Pravuil, 'although it's a bit more complicated than that.'

'What can you tell about me?'

'I can't tell anything about you.'

'Can't you? Why not?'

'Pravuil's not your Recording Angel,' said Thomas Mountford.

'If you can see me, then I can't be yours,' said Pravuil. 'Nobody can see their own Recording Angel, until the moment when their tally is complete.'

'Then whose Recording Angel are you?' said Pan.

'I'm not allowed to say.'

'Now,' said Thomas Mountford, 'Pravuil is going to take us to find the book.'

'Are we going to get it back?' said Pan.

'Perhaps or perhaps not,' said Pravuil, 'but at least I can take you to it. Books are a speciality of mine. I can usually find them.'

'Isn't it at the vicarage?' said Pan.

'Not any more,' said Pravuil. 'It was there earlier, but they've taken it far away. Hold my hands.'

The angel held out one hand on either side. Pan grasped one, and Thomas Mountford grasped the other. The angel spread its wings, and moments later they were whirled up into the air above the town.

Shops and housing estates spread out below them in a jumbled glare of artificial lights, and beyond the edges of this jumble the dark countryside was laced with roads that glittered like frosted spiders' webs. Even at this hour of the night they could see traffic shuttling through the darkness in every direction - big rumbling lorries and little whizzing cars, with white headlights and ruby-red tail-lights; and overhead, the winking lights of three jet planes were visible in different sections of the sky.

'Where are we going?' shouted Pan.

'London,' said Pravuil; and with great thumping wing-beats, the angel set off at a speed that made the wind roar in their ears, and the hills seem to be rolling backwards beneath them.

The middle of London is dominated by towering modern office-blocks. But when you stand on the pavement, the majority of the architecture that surrounds you is still at least two centuries old, full of old fashioned windows, panelled front doors with glossy paint, brass letterboxes and railed steps. A tiny apartment in one of these buildings would cost you more than a million pounds. Ordinary people can walk through here and admire the architecture; they may even work here, as cleaners or night-guards, nannies or nurses, or employees of some other description; but they are shut out from the wealth and privilege that lies at the heart of the city. It was outside one of these big posh old buildings that Pravuil landed.

'They're in here,' the angel announced.

'How are we going to get in?' said Pan.

'We don't have to,' said Pravuil, and waved an arm. Immediately the front of the building opened up like the front of a doll's house, and they could see all the rooms packed inside, like chocolates in a chocolate box: entrance halls, dining-rooms, studies, kitchens, sitting-rooms, bedrooms, committee-rooms, libraries, stairways, bathrooms and cloakrooms - some of them dark and some of them lit up. Then it was as if the building expanded or surged towards them, and they found themselves gazing into one particular room lined with books, lit by red-shaded lamps, where Abner Brown reclined in a leather armchair, while Sylvia Pouncer and her niece Citrus perched on the front edge of a sofa.

'I'm so sorry to drag you away from your meeting, Abner dear,' said Sylvia.

'Not at all, my love,' said Abner Brown, who was swirling a glass of brandy in his right hand. 'The people in that meeting are the great and good of our society. They are people of power, wealth and influence. They are connoisseurs. I have been describing our explorations to them. They can quite appreciate the value of what we're doing, and what we hope to find beneath your little church.'

'I don't get it,' said Citrus. 'I don't get all this fuss about books.' She looked around the room, at the book-lined walls, and pulled a face. 'Books are boring.'

'This particular book,' began Abner.

'Yeah, but if there's something buried under the church, why don't you just dig for it till you find it? Why d’you want to read about it first?’

Abner laughed. 'How refreshing!' he exclaimed. 'The directness of youth! And of course you're so right, my dear. We must dig until we find it. Yet at the same time, the treasure itself, the object itself, is only part of what we seek. Provenance counts for a great deal in these matters. The value of an ancient artefact is greatly enhanced if we can establish its age and back-story. The church commissioners will be much more forgiving if we can prove the historical importance of our find.'

'Okay,' said Citrus with a shrug. 'Whatever.'

'And there's something else,' said Abner. 'The treasure seems to be protected in some way. We may need to solve certain riddles in order to recover it.'

'What, you mean like a secret combination or something?'

'He means the curse!' said Sylvia Pouncer.

'Curse?' said Citrus. 'What curse?'

Abner frowned and waved his hand. 'Let's not be superstitious. One of the rhymes in the book said something about a curse. I certainly don't believe in anything of the sort. Hundreds of years ago, if people didn't want something disturbed, they would invariably call down a curse on anyone that touched it: it was a mere convention. On the other hand, it certainly is the case that some of the buried treasures of ancient Egypt, for example, were protected by traps and devices that could be lethally dangerous to the unwary; and as regards our own treasure, our attempts so far do seem to have triggered one or two rather peculiar occurrences.'

'That enormous pig!' said Sylvia Pouncer.

'Pig!' exclaimed Citrus.

'A pig or a wild boar,' said Abner. 'Yes, that was most disturbing. It certainly looked and behaved like an enormous boar, or a wild pig, although I really don't see how an actual pig could have suddenly appeared in the church. It was quite alarming. Worse still, it distracted us from the book, and that was how the book went missing.'

'That's pretty random,' said Citrus.

'It was certainly disconcerting. And we also seem to be being spied on,' said Abner.

'You mean that Dora kid?' said Citrus. 'She's nothing to worry about. Forget about her. I've messed her up.'

'I don't think it's just her,' said Abner. 'However - she was certainly the one that had the book. And I can't thank you enough for finding it and getting it back.'

'Isn't Citrus clever?' said Sylvia. 'She knows all sorts of things about social media that I simply don't understand at all.'

'Don't thank me,' said Citrus. 'Thank the Thin Men.'

'I'm curious to meet these Thin Men,' said Abner. 'Who exactly are they?'

'The Thin Men of Haddam,' said Citrus. 'They're brothers: their names are Vretil, Raqib and Atid. They're famous for turning blackbirds into gold. They invented this social media site called Blackbirds, which is really really popular with kids. And the thing is, once someone's on Blackbirds, the Thin Men can find out everything about them. Everything and anything. So when Aunty Sylvia said about this kid Dora, I thought she's bound to be on Blackbirds, and because I work in tech I thought I'll ask the Thin Men, and next thing you know they found the book. Simples.'

'Do you have the book with you now?' said Abner.

'Yes, the Thin Men have got it. They're waiting outside.'

'Then by all means, let's have them in.

Citrus went to the door and opened it, and a moment later there entered three tall, thin men, with dark overcoats and closely-cropped grey hair: the same three men that Pan has seen outside the vicarage a few hours earlier.

One of them was carrying the old book that Abner Brown and Sylvia Pouncer had found hidden in the wall of the vestry: the book written by Thomas Mountford's pupil, Bridget.

'Thank you, my friend,' said Abner Brown, taking the book. He placed it on the coffee-table in front of him.

The three men said nothing, but went and stood side-by-side against the wall at the opposite end of the room from Abner.

'Citrus!' whispered Sylvia, laying her hand on Citrus' arm. 'Don't they ever speak?'

'Not much, no,' said Citrus. 'Is there any wi-fi here?'

'Oh yes,' said Abner. 'They’ve got all of that. I know the place looks old fashioned, but these city people have to stay in touch with the financial markets and so forth.'

'Why do you ask?' said Sylvia.

'Well, they're gonna want to get online soon,' said Citrus. 'They can't be offline for long. It’s like they run out of energy.'

'That's no problem,' said Abner, off-handedly.

He was already starting to leaf through the book.

'Here we are,' he said. 'This is the drawing I found just before the disturbance in the church.'

Sylvia Pouncer and Citrus both leaned forward to see, and he turned the book towards them.

'What is it, my darling?' said Sylvia Pouncer.

'It looks like a sort of curled up snake,' said Citrus.

'A serpent biting its own tail,' said Abner Brown. 'I've seen similar emblems before. If we are to believe the rhyme beneath which this drawing appears, then part of the treasure beneath the church may be just such a serpent, fashioned from silver and gold. Possibly a pre-Christian item - Celtic, let's say. It could be absolutely priceless.'

'But what's this in the rhyme, about its venom curdling the ground?' said Sylvia.

Abner Brown waved his hand dismissively. 'Another of these curses, no doubt. If you touch our treasure, your crops will be poisoned. That sort of thing.' He leafed through the pages some more. 'Now, see here,' he said after a pause. 'The legend of the wyvern and the legend of the serpent. These seem to be two different stories, explaining how the serpent comes to be buried under the church.'

'I don't know how you can read that writing,' said Citrus. 'It does my head in.'

Abner Brown began to read. 'In the olden days - I'm paraphrasing - in the olden days, a wyvern, which is halfway between a snake and a dragon, was sent by the devil to live on our hill - "our hill" being, presumably, the Hog's Back on which St Bridget's is built. This wyvern terrorised the countryside for miles around, and destroyed all the crops with its venomous breath. The leaves withered on the trees, the apples turned rotten on the bough, the wheat perished in the fields, and even the rivers and streams were poisoned, so that all the fish died. The only way to appease the wyvern was to give it gold every year on All Hallows Eve - that's Hallowe'en, as we call it now - to give it gold, which it hid in a secret chamber under the hill -'

'That's the treasure!' said Sylvia Pouncer.

'Quite, my dear,' said Abner. 'Of course it is. So, they gave treasure to the wyvern every Hallowe'en, and every Beltane - which is the ancient May Day - they gave it a pig, which it would kill with its poisonous breath, then tear to pieces and devour on the spot. And I suppose the idea is, that as long as it got its treasure and its pig every year, the wyvern would leave the people's crops alone. This story probably memorialises some ancient tribute that people had to pay every year, many centuries ago.

'Now, it befel one year that the last pig left in the land belonged to a damsel called Bridget. She was a godly maiden of great beauty, with milk white skin and long black hair, and she lived all on her own with her pig, which was said to be a magical beast. The people said that it spoke to her like a human, and the touch of its hide would cure the pox, and if a baby was laid on its back then that baby would never catch the sleeping sickness, and if it passed through the doors of a house then no fire or thief would ever come there. So the people were reluctant for this pig to be given to the wyvern, but it was the last pig left in the land. So they went to Bridget in a body and said "Maiden, the wyvern on the hill must have a pig every year at Beltane, and your pig is the last pig left in the land, so therefore give us your pig that we may deliver it to the wyvern". And Bridget said "If my pig be indeed the last pig left in the land then he shall go to the wyvern, but not unless I go along with him." Then all the people lamented and begged her not to go, for she was a beautiful and godly maiden and well beloved in that country, but she was steadfast in her purpose, and at the end the pig went and she went along with him.

'Now when they came to the bottom of the hill Bridget offered up a prayer, and then they went on to where the wyvern lay in a coil at the top of the hill, with scorched earth and bones all around. And the wyvern opened its eyes, which were green and gold, and saw the pig. And no sooner did it see the pig than it lifted up its head, and reared up on its legs, and breathed on the pig with its poisonous breath. But the pig, being a magical pig, did not die. Instead it simply stared the wyvern straight back into its eyes. Then the wyvern screamed in fury and spread its wings to take to the air, and at that moment it saw Bridget, and it opened up its jaws to devour her. But Bridget prayed in her heart, and confusion fell upon the wyvern, so that it looked away, and instead of attacking her it attacked the first thing on which its gaze fell, which was its own tail. It bit its own tail, and its venom passed into its own blood, and it fell to the ground in an enchanted sleep, from which it has never awoken to this day.

'Then the people came up from their fields and buried the wyvern, still sleeping with its tail in its own mouth, within the hill on top of its mound of treasure; and Bridget and her pig lived on top of the hill from that day forward, and when Bridget died in the fullness of time, they built a church on top of the hill where she had lived, and called it St Bridget's.'

'That's a cool story,' said Citrus, 'but I don't see where it gets you.'

'Well,' said Abner - but before he could say any more, he was interrupted.

Until now, the Thin Men had been standing silently side by side at the opposite end of the room from Abner, with their backs against a bookcase. But now one of them came forward, pulled a chair up to the coffee table, and sat down in it. He took a mobile phone out of his pocket, switched it on and laid it on the table, with his two hands flat on either side of it, thumbs touching the edges of the phone.

'I told you they'd have to go online in a minute,' said Citrus.

The Thin Man closed his eyes and became completely immobile. He didn't even seem to be breathing.

'Oh my goodness!' whispered Sylvia. 'What's he doing?'

'Watch, and you'll see,' said Citrus.

Out of the Thin Man's left sleeve came a river of silver. When they looked again more closely, they could see that it consisted of tiny silvery spiders, their legs working so rapidly and smoothly that they seemed to be flowing rather than walking. They flowed across the back of the Thin Man's left hand, onto the screen on his phone, and then disappeared, as if into water, except there were no ripples. It was more like disappearing into oil. They passed through the surface of the screen and vanished.

A few moments later, a second stream started to emerge from other side of the phone. It flowed across the Thin Man's right hand and up into his right sleeve. The spiders in this second stream weren't silvery, they were dark, rusty-coloured, mottled with blues, browns, reds and greens; but they moved just as rapidly and smoothly.

The streams went on and on. The Thin Man kept his eyes shut and never moved. He seemed to be getting both larger and thinner.

'One of them does it on behalf of all three,' breathed Citrus.

'Does what exactly?' said Abner Brown.

'Those spiders fetch their information for them,' said Citrus.

The other two Thin Men, who were still standing against the bookcase, both had their eyes closed too: and they both seemed to be getting larger and thinner in the same way as their brother. It was as if the three of them shared a single existence.

Abner Brown, Sylvia Pouncer and Citrus all had their attention completely fixed on the Thin Man and his mobile phone. For the moment, the book was forgotten. Pravuil stepped forward into the room, reached down in front of Citrus, and picked it up. The angel reached right in front of Citrus's face, but Citrus didn't even notice.

Then the angel stepped back out of the room and handed the book to Pan. Moments later the three of them - Pravuil, Pan, and Thomas Mountford - were plunging through the night air again, with London falling into the distance behind them.

Pan crept back into Grandpa Jack's house, accompanied by the ghost and the angel. He fetched from his room the old iron key, the one the pig man had given him, and let himself and his two friends through into the school house. They gathered round the same table in the school hall where Abner Brown and Sylvia Pouncer had held their secret meeting before the digging at the church began. Pan switched on the anglepoise lamp. The bats hanging upside-down in the ceiling flapped and shuffled at the sudden light; and brown mice, who had been venturing out across the floorboards, went scampering rapidly back into the corners.

Thomas Mountford looked round thoughtfully. 'This place is much changed since my day,' he said.

By the light of the electric lamp he looked more ghostly than he had done outside: semi-transparent and indistinct. Pravuil, on the other hand, looked more like white stone and less like moonlight-and-water.

'Where are we going to hide this book?' said Pan.

'Perhaps here in the school house?' suggested Thomas Mountford. 'You will have to do the hiding, Pan. I cannot pick it up or carry it while it is above the ground.'

'What about you, though, Pravuil?' said Pan. 'You could just fly off with it, and take it somewhere miles away.'

'No, not me,' said Pravuil. 'It's my job to observe and record, not to intervene.'

'But you picked it up off that table in London,' said Pan.

'That's true,' said Pravuil, 'but I probably shouldn't have done. It was one thing to take you there so you could see, but another thing to step in myself. But I couldn't bear it any more. I wanted to get away from there.'

'Why, what was wrong?'

'It was those Thin Men,' said Pravuil. 'I couldn't abide them.'

'No, they weren't very nice,' agreed Pan. 'And that was a weird trick he was doing with that mobile phone and those tiny spiders. It was a bit creepy.'

'For me it was more than just creepy,' said Pravuil. 'They're like a different kind of recording angel, a distorted kind. A poisonous kind.'

'Yes, I can see that,' said Thomas Mountford.

'I should have been more calm,' said Pravuil. 'We're not supposed to get upset. But I'd never seen anything like that before. It caught me off-guard.'

'Well, come now,' said Thomas Mountford. 'Shall we look at this book, now that we have the chance? Didn't they say there was another story in it, about the treasure under the hill?'

'Don't you remember these stories from when Bridget was writing the book in the first place?' said Pan.

'Only partially. She wrote a good deal of it by herself. Sometimes I helped her, but not always. And of course it was a very long time ago.' Pan turned the pages. 'Here we are,' he said. 'The legend of the serpent. I can't read this writing, though.'

'I can read it,' said Thomas Mountford. 'Do you hold open the book, and I will read the text.'

So Pan held the book for him, and Thomas Mountford read.

'In the olden days there was no church on the top of our hill, but instead there grew an enormous oak tree, and under the oak tree lived a maiden called Brigid, who kept a herd of sows and a magical boar. That boar could talk like a human being, and the touch of its hide would cure many ailments, and it could even foretell the future.

'Amongst the roots of the oak tree there lived a snake coloured green and gold, which Brigid treated as a pet, and in the summer the snake would come out of its hole and she would feed it a dish of milk, and it would climb up into the branches of the tree, or it would lay its head in her lap and she would sing to it.

'Now the boar and the sows fed on the acorns that fell from the branches of the oak tree; but sometimes the oak tree bore acorns of gold and silver, and those ones Brigid gathered up and rolled into the hole where the snake lived.

'So it went on for many years, until St Augustine came to the kingdom, and began preaching Christianity to the people. Then people left their fields and their herds and went to listen to him in great numbers: farmers and fishermen, blacksmiths and basket-makers, fullers and farriers, hunters and housewives, all went to listen to him, and his eloquence was so great that the birds themselves stopped singing and the moles put up their heads out of the earth when he began to speak; and all the people in the country far and wide began to renounce their old beliefs and profess Christianity instead.

'But when Augustine came to the bottom of our hill, and the people told him about Brigid and her pig and her serpent, his face darkened and he denounced them. He said that Brigid was a witch, the pig was her familiar, and the serpent was none other than the Devil. He said that the people could not love Christ and harbour Brigid both at the same time; they must choose between one and the other; and if they chose Brigid, then their souls would be damned; but if they chose Christ, then they must drive Brigid away and cut down her oak tree, and build a church instead.

'So then the people gathered together in a great crowd, and they went up the hill to see Brigid. At the bottom of the hill they were angry and determined, but by the time they reached the top of the hill they were thoughtful and quiet, because they remembered that Brigid had lived among them for many years, and there was hardly a family in all that land which had not had some ailment cured by one of Brigid's potions or by touching the skin of her magical boar.

'Then Brigid spoke to them and said, "Good people, what does this mean? Why have you come to see me like this, all together in a crowd? Why do you avoid my eyes when I look at you? Is there something amiss?"

'And a young man who was a builder said, "We have been listening to St Augustine, who has been preaching the word of Christ all throughout this land. He is a wonderful man, and because of his preaching we have all become Christians: but he has told us that now we are Christians we can no longer be friends with you, and we must drive you away. He says you are a witch, and your pig is your familiar, and your serpent is none other than the devil himself: and he says we must cut down your oak tree and build a church here on top of the hill in its place."

'And Brigid said, "I have heard about St Augustine and his preaching, and I have heard about Christianity. The birds and the beasts have told me of his eloquence, and how things are changing across the land. The old order of things is passing, and my time here is coming to an end. I shall go away peacefully, good people, and leave you to build your church."

'After that the people were about to depart, but just as they were turning to go, the boar spoke. "Listen to me, people," he said, "and I will make you a prophecy. When you cut down the oak tree you must use its timbers to build your church, for this will bring you luck. Do not dig its roots out of the ground, for the roots of that tree bind this hill together, and when you cut down the tree the serpent will go to sleep amongst the roots with its tail in its own mouth. You must take all the silver and gold acorns that you find in the tree, and keep none for yourselves, but roll them all down into the serpent's hole. And as long as the serpent sleeps undisturbed with its silver and gold, and its tail in its own mouth, this land will prosper; but if the serpent is ever disturbed, and its silver and gold are plundered, the land will be poisoned. The crops will die in the fields, the leaves will wither on the trees, the apples will rot on the bough, and even the rivers and streams will be poisoned, so that all the fish will die."

'So the people did as the boar told them: they cut down the tree and used its timbers to build the church, and kept none of the silver and gold acorns for themselves, but rolled them all down into the hole where the serpent lived. As for Brigid, the next day she was nowhere to be found, and nobody could discover where she had gone. And as for the boar, he never spoke again, but lived in a sty next to the church, just like an ordinary pig; and the young man who was a builder took care of him.'

'Now we had better decide where to conceal this book,' said Thomas Mountford, after the story was finished.

'But what do you think it means?' said Pan.

'What does the story mean?' said Thomas Mountford. 'Well, I think that depends on your point of view. To our friends Abner Brown and Sylvia Pouncer, it means that there is treasure hidden beneath the church, and they ought to do their utmost to dig it up. Whereas from my own point of view, it means that what lies buried in the ground should be left there, and no good will come of disturbing it.'

Pan switched on the torch on his mobile phone, and by its light they explored the empty rooms that led off from the school hall. There were only three of them. On the side furthest away from Grandpa Jack's house there were two empty classrooms, with a few old desks and chairs in them; and to the rear of the hall was a disused kitchen, with a sink and some old ovens. In the end they decided that one of the empty classrooms would be the best hiding-place, mainly because they found a cupboard in it which was still solid and dry, containing some Dick and Dora reading books in good condition, so they thought Bridget's book would be safe from the damp there. This seemed like a particularly important consideration because it had started to rain heavily again outside: in fact the whole empty school building was soon full of a drumming-and-roaring noise as the rain came pounding down.

'We'll have floods, if this keeps up,' said Pravuil.

Pan felt a cold drop on the side of his face and looked up.

'This roof must be leaking,' he said.

He shone his torchlight onto the ceiling.

'Oh yes!' he said. 'Look! There's a big crack going across - it goes all the way into the wall.'

'This is an old building,' observed Thomas Mountford. 'And they may have disturbed the foundations with their digging.'

'Will the book be safe here?' said Pan.

'It will have to do for now,' said Thomas Mountford.

'It's nearly daylight,' said Pravuil. 'Mr Mountford and I need to be out of sight, and you need to be in your bed, before the sun comes up.'

The darkness was turning thin and hollow, as it does just before dawn. Pan let them back through Grandpa Jack's house; and Thomas Mountford and Pravuil went their separate ways in the pouring rain, while Pan - or Dora, as she was again now - went back to her bed.

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