Blood Beast

I frown and cock my head. The sound has been there for a while, maybe since I regained my senses, but I thought it was the wind in the trees. Now that I focus, I realise it’s not coming from the trees. It seems to be coming from the rocks.

A jolt of excitement cuts through my confusion and apprehension. Maybe I’m close to a cave and the noise is the wind whistling between earth and rock. I flash on an image of Lord Sheftree’s treasure and the glory of being the first to discover it. With renewed enthusiasm I grasp the rock again and pull as hard as I can. I might not be able to toss it out of the hole, but if I can budge it slightly, maybe I can…

A flicker on the rock. A slight bulging. A shadow grows out of it, just for a second, then disappears.

I fall backwards, stifling a scream, heart racing.

Eyes fixed to the rock, waiting for it to change again. A minute passes. Two.

I get to my feet, legs very shaky, and climb out of the hole, not looking back. I make for home quickly, head down, striding through the forest, ignoring the twigs, stones and thorns that jab at my bare feet.

Trying hard not to think about what I saw (or thought I saw). But I can’t block it out. It keeps coming back, rattling round the inside of my skull like a rabid rat in a cage.

The flicker… the bulging… the shadow…

It might have been a trick of the light or my skittish mind, but it looked to me like a face was trying to force its way up through the rock from the other side. A human face. A girl’s.

HARD WORK

No sign of Dervish in the morning. He’s normally an early riser so I guess he’s still suffering from his binge-drinking on the weekend. I want to wake him, tell him about my inner turmoil, the magic, the howling, what happened at the hole. But instead I decide to let him sleep in and get his head together. We’ll discuss it when I come home after school, when he can think and focus clearly.

Scrubbing hard in the bathroom. The dirt doesn’t want to come off. Especially bad under my nails. Without wanting to, I think about gravediggers—their hands must be stained like this all the time.

Looking up when I’ve scraped them as clean as I can. My reflection in the mirror. Remembering the face I saw/imagined in the rock. Something about it niggles at me. It’s not just the fact that there shouldn’t have been a face in the rock at all. There’s something more… something else…

I’m on my way out the front doors when it strikes me. The face looked ever so slightly like my dead sister Gret.

The day passes slowly, as if I’m experiencing it second-hand, watching somebody else’s body going through the motions of a normal school day. Chatting with Charlie, Leon and Shannon. Greeting Reni with a big smile when she arrives with Loch. Making light of my friends’ compliments about the party. Shrugging off the incident with the bottle—“A good magician never reveals his secrets.”

Bill-E turns up. I know he’s itching to discuss the cave with Loch and me, but we can’t speak of it in front of the others, so he slides past silently. Loch yells an insult after him, cruder than usual, perhaps to cover up the fact that he’s become Bill-E’s secret ally.

Lessons don’t interest me. The teachers could be ghosts for all the impression they make. Fading in and out of conversations during break and lunch. The major part of my mind fixed on the twists of the last few nights, the hole I’ve dug, the face in the rock, the beast I’m apparently becoming.

Heading back for class after the lunch bell. Loch and me are by ourselves. Bill-E hurries up to us and says quietly, “Still on for this evening?”

“Sure,” Loch says.

“No.” Both stare at me. “Dervish wants me home,” I lie. “Not sure what it’s about. Maybe something valuable got smashed at the party.”

Loch winces. “Bad luck. Guess it’s just me and Spleenio then.” He pinches Bill-E’s cheek.

“Get off!” Bill-E yelps, pulling away, rubbing his cheek. “That hurt.”

“Sue me,” Loch laughs.

Bill-E turns his back on him. “Maybe you can come later?” he asks me.

“I doubt it,” I sigh.

Bill-E looks worried. “Perhaps I’ll cancel too, leave it till tomorrow.”

“No you don’t,” Loch grunts. “If you back out now, you stay out. This is a joint venture. If you don’t pull your weight—and I know that’s a heavy load to pull, you chubby little freak—get lost. We don’t need hangers-on.”

Bill-E’s fists ball up. The rage inside him froths to the surface. I think he’s finally going to go for Loch and I silently will him on. If he fights back, maybe that will be the end of the teasing and Loch will start treating Bill-E as an equal.

But then Bill-E looks Loch over, sizes up his height and muscles, and chickens out. His hands go limp and he turns away with a weak, “See you later then.”

Loch leans over and mock-whispers to me, just loud enough for Bill-E to hear, “Do you think anyone would notice if I took Spleeny out to that hole and made him disappear?”

“Shut up, you jerk,” I snap and march ahead of him, paying no attention to his theatrical gasp.

Home. No Dervish. A note on the kitchen table. “Gone to fetch my bike. Don’t worry about fixing me dinner—still not in the mood for solids.”

Hellfire! Of all the times in my life, why does Dervish pick these few days to be Mr. Impossible To Pin Down! I wish now I’d hit him with the news as soon as he got home—would have served the old sozzle-head right.

Too itchy-footed to wait for him. Better to be active than hang around here, struggling to kill time with homework and TV. So a quick change of clothes, a hasty sandwich, then it’s off to the hole to find out what Loch and Bill-E make of my late-night digging marathon.

They’re gob-smacked. Standing around the pit when I arrive, jaws slack, staring from the rocks and mounds of earth down into the hole, then back again. Both are holding shovels limply and look like you could knock them over with a fart.

“Bloody hell!” I gasp playfully. “You’ve been working hard.”

“We didn’t do it,” Loch says numbly.

“It was like this when we arrived,” Bill-E mutters.

I force a frown. “What are you talking about?”

“We haven’t been digging,” Loch says, becoming animated. “We only got here a few minutes ago. We found it like this.”

“But who… how… what the heck?” Bill-E mumbles.

We spend ten minutes debating the mystery. The simplest solution, which I offer shamelessly, is that somebody discovered the hole after we’d left and did some more digging themselves. Bill-E and Loch dismiss it instantly—there are no shovel marks in the newly excavated sections, and no footprints except our own. (I didn’t leave any barefooted prints in the night. I must have been extra light on my feet. Padded softly… like a wolf.) Besides, they argue, who the hell would go digging in the middle of the night?

“An earthquake?” I suggest as an alternative.

Snorts of derision. We don’t get earthquakes here. Besides, even if we did, that wouldn’t explain the earth and rocks piled up around the hole.

Loch wonders if a wild animal is responsible.

“What sort of animal do you think that might be?” Bill-E sneers. “A troll or an ogre? Or maybe it was elves, like in the fairy tale with the shoemaker.”

Eventually Bill-E comes up with a theory which satisfies all three of us, at least in the absence of anything more believable. “Lord Sheftree,” he says. “If this is where his treasure’s buried, maybe he booby-trapped the entrance with explosives. When we were digging, we set them off, but because they’d been buried so long, they didn’t ignite straightaway. It took them a few hours to explode, by which time we were safely home, clear of the blast radius.”

“I dunno,” Loch mutters, examining the rocks around us. “These look like they were pulled out cleanly, not