him again, even if we do have an extra (unwanted) passenger in tow.
“We’ve found a few bits and pieces over the years,” Bill-E explains as we give up on our third trial dig and refill the hole. “Old coins, scraps of clothes, half a knife.”
“Anything worth money?” Loch asks.
“Not really,” Bill-E says. “One of the coins would have been valuable if it had been in better condition, but it was very worn and part of it was missing. Dervish let me keep it.”
“Why were they buried if they were worthless?” Loch asks.
“They weren’t,” Bill-E says. “The level of the ground’s constantly changing. Things fall or are thrown away. Grass and weeds grow over them. They sink when the ground’s wet. New earth blows over them. In no time at all they’re half a metre underground… a metre… more. The world’s always burying cast-offs and stuff that’s been forgotten. Heck, even the giant Sphinx in Egypt was half-buried once and almost lost forever.”
“Nonsense,” Loch snorts.
“It’s true,” Bill-E says. “We did it in history. And there are loads of important places in Egypt today—burial chambers and the like—which are covered up. In some towns they know where they are, but people have built houses over them, so they can’t excavate.”
“I never learnt any of that in history,” Loch says suspiciously.
“Well,” Bill-E replies smugly, “maybe if you were in the
Loch’s starting to tire of the wandering and digging. I’m glad. Apart from the fact that I’m weary and grumpy, it’s late afternoon and it won’t be much longer before the sun starts to set and an even fuller moon than last night’s rises over the earth like a plum dipped in cream. Maybe Dervish is back already. If so, I want to sit down with him and have a long talk about what’s going on in my life and what we need to do about it.
“This studying,” Loch grumbles, studying his hand where he cut it on the last dig.
“One more try,” Bill-E says. “We’ll quit after that.”
“Why not now?” Loch says. “This is stupid. We’ll never find anything.”
“It’s an old superstition of ours. When we decide we’ve had enough, we always dig one last hole. Right, Grubbs?”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
“And look where it’s got you,” Loch snorts, but goes along with the plan, not wanting to be the one who quits first.
Bill-E leads us further into the wild bushes of the forest, trying to pick a good spot for the final dig of the day. Briars catch on my trousers and jacket, and one scratches deep into my neck, drawing a few drops of blood and a loud curse. I’m about to call an end to the farce and demand we go home immediately, regardless of superstitions, when something about the landscape makes me pause.
We’re in the middle of a thicket, lots of natural shrubs and bushes. It looks much the same as any other part of the forest to the untrained eye, but when you’ve spent a few years exploring a particular area, you see things differently. You get to know the various types of trees, flowers and weeds. You make mental pointers so you can find your way around easily and quickly. I’ve been here before, I’m sure of it, but I can’t remember when…
The memory clicks into place. It was shortly before Bill-E turned into a werewolf, before Dervish told me about the Demonata and Lord Loss. Bill-E and I were on one of our treasure hunts. We’d started to dig around here when Bill-E spotted Dervish and went all mysterious. He made me hide, so Dervish didn’t see us, then we followed him. That was the day Bill-E hit me with his theory about werewolves. The day my destiny fell into place and I started on a collision course with Lord Loss and his vile familiars.
“Let’s dig here.”
“I’m not sure,” Bill-E frowns, studying the ground. “The earth looks hard.”
“No,” I say, casting around. “There’s a soft patch somewhere, between a couple of stones. At least there used to be…”
I find it and give a grunt of satisfaction. I can still see faint marks from where I began to dig previously, a minute or so before Bill-E went weird on me and the world of werewolves claimed me for its own.
“How’d you know that was there?” Bill-E asks.
“Magic,” I reply with a laugh, then drive my shovel into the soil.
Half an hour later, nobody’s laughing. We’re surrounded by three fresh mounds of earth and stones, digging deeper by the minute, cutting down at an angle. There’s a large rock buried just beneath the briars and grass, under the shelter of which the earth and stones lie. There’s rock to either side too. It’s too early to tell for certain, but this looks like the entrance to a tunnel or cave.
“What’s that?” Loch says suddenly, stooping. He comes up holding something golden. My heart leaps. Bill-E and I crowd in on him, jabbering with excitement. Then he holds it up to the dim light and we see it’s just an orangey-yellow stone. “Damn!” Loch hurls it away.
Bill-E pulls a face and resumes digging. He’s working on the sides, clearing the rock faces, while Loch and I dig straight down. Bill-E pauses after a while and strokes the rock. “Hard to tell if this fissure is natural or man- made. The sides are smooth, as if they’ve been ground down. But I guess they’d feel just as smooth if nature had done the grinding.”
Loch hits a larger stone and winces. Scrapes around it to find its edges, then inserts the tip of his shovel under one corner and tells me to help him. Together we lever it out, then lift it up on to the bank around us. We’re knee-high in the hole (based on my long legs, not Bill-E’s stumpy pins) by this stage.
Loch clears the gap left by the removal of the stone, then scowls. “There’s another one. Looks even bigger than the first.”
“It’s getting rockier the further down we dig,” I note.
“That’s always the way,” Bill-E says. “The heavier stones sink deeper than the smaller ones.”
“Is it worth carrying on?” Loch asks. “I don’t think there’s any treasure here.”
“How do you figure that?” Bill-E sneers.
“Common sense,” Loch says. “This Lord Sheftree miser would have wanted easy access to his treasure so he could dig it up whenever he liked. This ground’s too rocky. Too much hard work. It would have been easier for him to do it somewhere else.”
“Hey,” Bill-E says, “this is a maniac we’re talking about—the guy fed a baby to his piranha! Who knows what he might or might not have done? Maybe he hired men to dig this hole, then killed them and left them to rot with the treasure. Maybe he had others dig it up every few years so he could put more treasure down there, then killed them too. Heck, there could be dozens of skeletons down there.”
Loch and I share an uneasy glance.
“I don’t know if I want to go digging up skeletons,” Loch mumbles.
“Afraid of a few old bones,
“No. But if there are corpses, we shouldn’t disturb their remains.”
“Not even if they’re sitting on a chest of gold coins?” Bill-E taunts him. “Five chests? Ten? Not even if we agree to cut you in on a slice of the profits?”
“A while ago you said there was nothing in it for me,” Loch snaps.
“You can’t expect an equal share,” Bill-E drawls, “but if there’s a fortune and you help us dig it up, we’ll see you right. Won’t we, Grubbs?”
“Too much talking,” I grunt, stabbing my shovel into the ground, trying to find a crack I can use to pry out the next big stone. “Dig.”
Almost sunset. Without discussing it, we come to a halt and study the fruits of our labours. The hole is thigh-deep now. It’s been hard going for the last twenty minutes—one big, awkward stone after another. At least the hole’s no wider than when we started, so we’ve only got to worry about digging down, not out to the sides as well.
“We could be at this forever,” Loch gasps, wiping sweat from his forehead. All three of us are sweating badly. “No telling how deep it goes.”
“What do you say, Bill-E?” I ask, glancing up at the setting sun, feeling the sickness and headache building within me again. “Time to stop?”
“Yeah,” Bill-E agrees. “We can’t dig in the dark. But we’ll come back, right?” He looks at me, Loch, then me again. “We could be on to the find of the millennium. Metres—maybe centimetres— away from Lord Sheftree’s
