The Treasure Beneath the Hill, chapter 9

They met their first ghost almost as soon as they left Tesco's car park. It was a little girl carrying a nondescript wooden animal, painted white with blue spots, with a tail made out of string. It had a pointed head on the end of a long thin neck, so perhaps it was meant to be a giraffe; but apart from that it looked more like a horse; except that neither a horse nor a giraffe is white with blue spots.

She was standing and staring all around as if she was lost. Her clothes looked very old fashioned, and all her colours were bleached and washed out as if she was in an old photograph that had faded with age - but there was something else that was odd about her too, and at first they couldn't identify what it was.

'Are you all right?' said Grandpa Jack. 'Are you lost?'

'I'm looking for my Daddy,' said the girl.

'You ought to get out of this rain,' said Grandpa Jack.

'It's all right,' said the girl. 'I'm not getting wet.'

It was only when she said it that they realised this was the odd thing about her. The raindrops weren't touching her.

'That's true,' said Grandpa Jack. 'How are you managing that?'

'I'm a ghost,' said the little girl, as if she was explaining something that should have been obvious.

'Are you?' said Grandpa Jack.

'Yes, I am,' said the little girl. 'I got run over by a car.'

'Well, I'm buggered,' said Grandpa Jack.

'That's rude,' said the little girl. 'You're not allowed to say that.'

'You're quite right,' said Grandpa Jack. 'I'm very sorry. But you gave me a shock.'

'Why did I?'

'I've never met a ghost before.'

'That's silly,' said the little girl. 'There are lots of ghosts.'

'Yes, but they're normally fast asleep under the ground, aren't they?'

'I went to sleep under the ground for a bit, when the car ran me over,' agreed the little girl. 'But then I woke up. Look, here's my Daddy.'

'There you are, Sally,' said a tall thin man with dark hair. He approached them with rapid strides, and as soon as he reached Sally he picked her up and span round with her in his arms, then gave her a kiss on the cheek. 'I was hoping to find you. I'm glad to see you've still got the giraffe.'

'He's not a giraffe, Daddy, he's a horse,' said Sally.

'No, darling, he's meant to be a giraffe.'

'He's not a giraffe, he's a horse.'

'Well I'm the one that made him,' said her Daddy, 'and when I made him he was meant to be a giraffe.'

'But you gave him to me, and he's always been a horse,' said Sally. 'He's called Horsie,' she added, just to prove it.

'All right,' said her Daddy. 'He's a horse.'

'His back leg comes out,' said Sally; and she pulled it out to demonstrate. His legs were really just painted lengths of dowelling that slotted into holes in his tummy, and the back left one was rather loose.

'I know it does,' said her Daddy. 'That's how you got run over.'

'Oh yes,' said Sally. 'It came out and rolled into the road.'

'That's right, and you ran after it. That was silly, wasn't it?'

'Yes, Daddy.'

'I bet you were playing outside on the pavement,' said Grandpa Jack. 'We all used to play outside on the pavements in those days. Nobody ever does that any more.'

Sally and her Daddy both stared at him. 'Don't they?' said the Daddy.

'No, nobody plays out of doors any more,' said Grandpa Jack.

'Well, they do a bit,' corrected Dora.

'Hardly ever,' said Grandpa Jack. 'They're all indoors on their x-boxes.'

'On their what?' said Sally's Daddy.

'Their x-boxes,' said Dora.

'What are those?' said Sally.

'You wouldn't like them,' said Grandpa Jack.

'Actually, you probably would,' said Dora. 'They're like little magic boxes, that you can play millions of games on.'

'Ooh,' said Sally.

'And they cost a fortune, and once you've got one you never go out of doors any more,' said Grandpa Jack.

'That's sort of true,' said Dora.

'Everything was better in the old days,' said Grandpa Jack.

'No it wasn't, Grandpa,' said Dora. 'Not everything. They had world wars. And everybody used to smoke all the time.'

'I was in the war,' said Sally's Dad. 'And I was a smoker, too. When you were in the war, smoking cigarettes was one of the things that kept you going. But it wasn't the war that killed me in the end: it was the cigarettes.'

'How did cigarettes kill you, Daddy?' said Sally.

'They gave me a cough, darling, and the cough killed me. First it made me very tired, and puffed me out, and then it killed me. But there was one thing about the old days,' he added, looking around. 'There were a lot more trees and a lot more fields. I hardly recognise it round here, with all these houses and roads.'

'No, they've ruined it,' said Grandpa Jack.

'And what's happened to all the birds?' said Sally's Daddy.

'You wouldn't believe it,' said Grandpa Jack. 'Almost all the birds have gone. And almost all the butterflies. And almost all the bees.'

'I'm scared of bees,' said Sally.

'And almost all the hedgehogs,' said Grandpa Jack.

'I like hedgehogs,' said Sally.

'Well,' said Sally's Daddy, 'we'd better get a move on.'

'Where are we going?' said Sally.

'Up the hill.'

'Why are we going up there?' said Sally.

'I don't really know,' he admitted. 'But that's where everyone else is going.'

It was true. As they had been talking more and more ghosts had started to go past them. They were all dressed in old-fashioned clothes, some of them evidently hundreds of years old - frock coats, knee-britches, wigs, smocks, tunics and cloaks - but some of them were from just a few years ago. They were all unaffected by the rain; some of them were talking to each other, but most of them were silent; and they were all moving in the same direction, up the slope towards the top of the hill. Sally's Dad lifted Sally up onto his shoulders, then strode off up the lane.

'I don't know where all these ghosts are coming from,' said Grandpa Jack.

'I think it's all the digging they're doing,' said Dora. 'I think it's disturbing everything somehow. Waking up everything that's supposed to be asleep.'

'Well, I don't like it,' said Grandpa Jack. 'It's a bit end-of-the-worldish.'

'You don't think it's really the end of the world, do you, Grandpa?'

'I bloody hope not,' said Grandpa Jack. 'I haven't had a decent meal in ages.'

They set off up the hill too, but in the gateway to the Vicarage they met Citrus. She was sheltering under a bright yellow umbrella decorated with eyes and ears to make it look like a Pokemon character. Behind her, in a row, stood the three Thin Men of Haddam in their black overcoats. They looked even taller, wider and flatter than they had done before, as if they were in the process of turning into cutouts made from black card.

'Hallo, Dora,' called Citrus. 'Going anywhere nice?'

Dora said nothing.

'Is this your grandpa?' said Citrus. 'Is this the one that plays the organ in the church?'

'That's right,' said Grandpa Jack. 'Who are you?'

'I'm Citrus. Hasn't Dora told you about me? I'm Sylvia Pouncer's niece. I've been following Dora online, only she doesn't seem to be going online any more. Hasn't she even mentioned me?'

'No, I don't think so,' said Grandpa Jack. 'But I've got a very bad memory for names.'

'Oh, you would've remembered me, for sure, if she'd told you about me. Deffo. How come you never told your Grandpa about me, Dora?'

'Well, I'm always glad to meet Dora's friends,' said Grandpa Jack.

'Yeah, that's me all right,' said Citrus. 'I'm one of her closest friends. I probably know more about her than anybody else. I bet even you don't know some of the stuff about her that I know.'

'Perhaps you should come to tea one day,' said Grandpa Jack.

'Ooh,' said Citrus, 'that'd be nice. I could bring my auntie Sylvia.'

'Well, we'd have to see,' said Grandpa Jack. 'I'll check my diary.'

'Come on, Grandpa,' said Dora. 'We've got to get to the church.'

'Oh, you're going up to the church, are you?' said Citrus. 'What, you're going up there to steal another book, are you? Or maybe steal something else? Does your Grandpa know about all that? Does he know about you being a stealer and a robber?'

'What's all this?' said Grandpa Jack.

'Just a little something you might not know about Dora,' said Citrus. 'Just, she robbed a book out of the church, a valuable antique old book that didn't belong to her, that's all.'

'That doesn't sound like Dora,' said Grandpa Jack.

'True story,' said Citrus.

'But not the whole of the truth,' said another voice, 'as I can well attest, since I was there myself when it happened.'

Grandpa Jack and Dora both looked round, and there next to them in the lane outside the vicarage gate stood Thomas Mountford.

'Excuse me mate,' said Citrus, 'private conversation here, if you don't mind. Wierd looking old blokes can butt out.'

'Who's this?' said Grandpa Jack.

'This is Thomas Mountford,' said Dora. 'He used to be the schoolteacher at the old school, years and years ago. He helped me to get the book out of the church.'

'So you really did take a book from the church?' said Grandpa Jack.

'Yes,' said Citrus accusingly, 'she really did. And so did he. They completely stole it. A valuable old antique book that didn't belong to them.'

'It was written by my pupil Bridget, in the time of the Civil War,' said Thomas Mountford. 'It contained a collection of folklore and inscriptions, relating to the church and its parish. Sylvia Pouncer and Abner Brown discovered it, by smashing open a secret compartment in the church wall.'

'There you are,' said Citrus. 'It belonged to the church, not to you. Now shove off back to your grave or whatever you came out of, you old spook.'

'Smashing open the church wall?' said Grandpa Jack.

'They wanted this book,' explained Thomas Mountford, 'in order to help them with their quest for treasure beneath the church; for the sake of which they are now digging up the church floor; which is causing these floods, and fetching the dead from their graves.'

'Digging up the church floor?' said Grandpa Jack. 'Smashing open the church wall? The rotten buggers.'

'So what?' said Citrus. 'It's their church. They can do what they like with it.'

'We'll see what the parishioners have to say about that,' said Grandpa Jack. 'And as for you, young lady, I don't believe you're really a friend of Dora's at all.'

'Yeah, well I sure know some shiz about her, that's for definite,' retorted Citrus. 'See, Grandpa, she goes online, onto Blackbirds, with her little paintings and whatnot, and she friends all these people and all these people friend her, and she thinks everything's fine, hunkydory, all her secrets are safe. But as soon as she gets online, these guys here, the Thin Men, they can find out everything about her. Once she gets on Blackbirds it's out there, all her information's out there, and they can just hoover it up. And once they've got the information they sell it to whoever wants it. In this case they passed it to me.'

As she spoke, one of the Thin Men took his smartphone out of his pocket, and held it in front of him with both hands. As soon as its screen lit up, the stream of information-spiders began to flow: little silvery spiders coming out of his left sleeve and down his wrist, crossing his thumb and vanishing into the screen, while another stream of dark tarnished spiders came out of the screen, across his right thumb, up his right wrist and into his sleeve. The other two Thin Men looked appreciatively over his shoulders with their pale eyes. The three of them seemed taller and wider and flatter than ever. They stood shoulder to shoulder behind Citrus on the gravel in front of the vicarage, in the teeming rain, watching the little spiders coming and going.

'For example,' said Citrus, 'did you know she isn't even a proper girl? Not all the time. Half the time she isn't even a girl at all. Half the time she's playing make-pretend at being a boy. I bet you never even knew that about her, did you? Or perhaps I shouldn't say her. Perhaps I should say it.'

'Yes,' said Grandpa Jack, 'as a matter of fact I did.'

Citrus blinked. 'What?' she said.

'She told me all about it - or rather he told me all about it - while we were under the hill. And it doesn't make a blind bit of difference as far as I'm concerned, any more than if he decided he wanted to be a bus conductor instead of an artist. It's who he is that I care about, not what he wants to be.'

'Oh yeah?' said Citrus. 'Well I wonder how his dad's going to feel about it, when he finds out?'

'Exactly the same,' said Grandpa Jack.

'Thanks, Grandpa,' said Dora; and as she spoke, she found that she had turned into Pan.

'Oh he will, will he?' said Citrus. 'We'll soon see about that -'

But then she stopped.

The Thin Men had been getting taller and wider and darker and flatter all the while, until they spanned the gravel area in front of the vicarage from side to side, like big silhouettes, larger than life-size, cut from black card, except for their pale faces and hands, and the glowing smartphone screen and twinkling streams of information-spiders belonging to the Thin Man in the middle. And now suddenly a white figure simply stepped through them, as if they were curtains; and as soon as he stepped through them they vanished, the way a shadow vanishes when a light is turned on.

The only thing that was left was the mobile phone, lying on the gravel in the rain. The raindrops collected on its surface in pearls, then linked themselves together into little pools, and slid to the edges and dripped off; and tarnished information-spiders emerged from within the surface of the screen, scuttled around for a few moments between the raindrops, then vanished back inside again, as there was nowhere else for them to go.

The white figure who had stepped through the Thin Men was Pravuil. Without saying anything he came and stood next to Citrus, and it was when she noticed him that she stopped talking. He held out an open book in front of her, and the words died in her throat.

'Speaking of books, and who they belong to,' he said, 'here's yours.'

Citrus looked at the book, then immediately looked away again, and the colour drained out of her face. 'What is it?' she said, but her voice came out as a whisper.

'It's your book,' said Pravuil. 'You know me: I've been with you all the time. I'm your recording angel, and this is the record of your deeds.'

But Citrus wouldn't look at it. She turned her face away. 'No it isn't,' she said angrily. 'I don't know you, and that isn't mine.'

'Yes it is,' said Pravuil. 'You need to look at it.'

'You can't judge me with a book,' said Citrus. 'Nobody cares about books any more. You can't write me down in a book of what I've done, and shut me up inside it, like I was a bookmark. That's not who I am. I can reinvent myself. It's what's online that matters. I can be anything I like.'

'You can't escape from what's written here,' said Pravuil. 'You can't escape from yourself.'

'Yeah I can,' said Citrus. 'Course I can! Why can't I? What are you, anyway? An angel? A recording angel? What's that? Nobody believes in that stuff any more. That's not what it's about. It's about moving on. It's about how you present yourself. It's all about the package. You're living in the wrong world, mate.'

'This is your book,' said Pravuil. 'If you deny what's in the book, then all that's left is what's online.'

'That's what I'm saying!' said Citrus. 'That's the only thing that matters! That's the only thing I'm interested in.'

'Then that's where you'll go,' said Pravuil.

And as he spoke, something happened to Citrus that was like the opposite of what had happened to the Thin Men of Haddam. She shrank and became flatter. At the same time she also became brighter, more artificial-looking. Within a few moments she was like a cut-out paper doll from a magazine or the back of a cereal packet, printed with brilliant flat colours. She was standing next to the mobile phone, and she stepped onto it. As soon as her feet touched it, the information-spiders came swarming out and covered her, all the way up to the top of her head - and then she slid into the screen, almost as if she was being posted into the mouth of a post-box. It was impossible to say whether the information-spiders were dragging her in, or whether she was sliding in of her own accord. In the blink of an eye she was gone, and the screen was dark.

'What's happened to her?' said Pan.

'She's gone where she wanted to be,' said Pravuil.

'Oh!' said Pan. 'Will she be all right?'

'I couldn't care less about her,' said Grandpa Jack. 'She was horrible to you.'

'Yes, but I still hope she's all right.'

'She chose where she wanted to go, and now she’s there,' said Pravuil. 'I expect she'll be all right in her own terms.'

'What are you going to do now?' asked Thomas Mountford.

'My duty is complete,' said Pravuil sadly. 'And perhaps she was right: perhaps there's no longer a place or purpose in this world for a recording angel. I watched over her all her life, and at the end, when I revealed myself, she wasn't interested in what I had to say. I'm going to take this book and throw it into the flood. After that I'll be free to do whatever I like. I think I may fly off and explore some other corners of the earth.'

With those words he spread his wings, beat them twice, and sprang into the air. They craned their necks to watch him. Within a short time he was a distant bright white shape under the dull clouds, like a soaring gull, carving an angled path through the rain-sodden air away from the hill and out over the floods, until they lost sight of him; and they never saw him throw down the book.

Abner Brown and Sylvia Pouncer were in the church, and at last they had reached the treasure.

The floor of the church was now covered almost from wall to wall with the mounds of dirt and rubble and soil that had been fetched up from down below by the Mine Weevils; but one mound, close to the dark slot in the floor where the great flagstone had been pulled up, was different. It gleamed. It was a mound of gold and silver acorns, and it was growing.

The Mine Weevils were still scuttling and scurrying in and out of the hole. They seemed to walk up and down the vertical sides just as quickly and nimbly as they could walk on the flat; and now each one that emerged from the hole carried with it an acorn.

But something happened to the acorns as they were brought up. It was an almost imperceptible change. As they came up out of the darkness they were real acorns, gold or silver but real acorns from a real tree, dormant but ready to germinate if they were planted in the earth and watered. But as they crossed the threshold into the upper world, they died. They turned into beautifully wrought ornamental acorns made out of precious metal. As each one was added to the pile of treasure next to the hole, it gave a faint clink or chime as it kissed against the ones that were already there.

'Oh Abner!' said Sylvia Pouncer. 'My darling clever Abner! You were right all the time about the treasure! Just look at it!'

'Did you ever doubt me, my dearest?' said Abner.

'I hoped and feared, Abner! I must admit I hope and feared! But this is beyond our wildest dreams! How much are these acorns worth?'

'They are beyond price, my darling Pouncer, simply beyond price. The gold and silver alone would be worth a fortune, but when one adds in the antiquity and the craftsmanship... They must be at least a thousand years old, and exquisitely made... We will save two of them, my darling, to make you a pair of earrings.'

'Dearest! What a gorgeous idea!'

'And this is merely the preliminary, my Pouncer. Merely the appetizer. The real masterpiece, the prize exhibit of the hoard, the centrepiece of the entire feast, is yet to come: the snake that swallows its own tail.'

'Yes!' said Sylvia in an enthralled whisper. 'Yes! The most beautiful and valuable artefact of all!'

But it was just at that moment that the Mine Weevils all vanished. One second they were there, hurrying in and out of the hole in the church floor; and the next minute they were gone, just as if the program that drove them had been switched off. The acorns they had been carrying dropped onto the flagstones with little clinking noises. One of them rolled back to the lip of the hole, and fell into the dark.

'What!' cried Abner Brown. 'What's this?' His face darkened with fury. 'What's happened?' he shouted. 'What's happened?'

'Citrus!' gasped Sylvia Pouncer. 'The Thin Men! Something's happened to them!'

'I'll tell you what's happened!' snarled Abner. 'We've been tricked! Betrayed! They've double-crossed us! They want the treasure for themselves!' He ran to the church door, with Sylvia close behind him, and flung it open.

They both stopped on the threshold, taken aback by what they saw.

It was the first time either of them had set foot outside the church in daylight for more than forty eight hours, and the view they saw now from the top of the hill was dramatically different from the one they had last seen. Beyond the jumbled roofscape of the town, where there had once been a landscape of fields, hedges and roads, there were now ruffled grey sheets of water. In the distance, a row of electricity pylons straddled the floods in a slightly uneven diagonal. Closer at hand, a herd of lowing cows was stranded on a ridge of high ground.

And it was still raining. The air was dark and heavy with it. Little cascades of rainwater were pouring from the church gutters, spattering onto the flagstones. The churchyard path was a stream, with rivulets of water down both edges and broad ripples washing across the middle. The steps down to the school playground were a cascade. The archaeological dig in the playground itself was abandoned; the canvas tents that had sprung up to shelter it were in a state of ruin; and the trenches, what could be seen of them, were completely flooded.

On the far side of the playground, soaking in the downpour, was the smashed-up mess of masonry, timber and roof tiles where the end of the school had been. The rest of the school, and the whole of Grandpa Jack's house, was boxed in by scaffolding.

But that was only part of it. Even more unexpected was the fact that the churchyard in front of them was filled, from one side to the other, with a silent and oddly-assorted crowd: male, female and other; fair skinned and dark; young and old; crooked and hale; rich and poor; clean and dirty; from every walk of life; and seemingly from every era of history. They had only two things in common with each other. Firstly, they were all staring straight at the church door when Abner Brown and Sylvia Pouncer threw it open. And secondly, despite the fact that they were standing in the pouring rain, they were all dry.

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