Darren Shan - Volumes 5 and 6 - Blood Beast/Demon Apocalypse

“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 blasted.”

“Maybe it was a catapult-type mechanism,” Bill-E says, warming to his theory. “He had all these rocks loaded on a platform, which was set to shoot them upwards when the trap was sprung. They’d crush anyone nearby.”

We discuss it further, trying to pin down the exact workings of the trap, wondering if there might be more than just one. I advise caution and propose retreat—we should report this and leave it to professionals to mine the dangerous hole. Bill-E and Loch shout me down.

“We’ll go slowly,” Bill-E says.

“Carefully,” Loch agrees.

“If there are other traps, they’re probably slow-burners too,” Bill-E argues.

“But I doubt if there are more,” Loch says. “What would be the point? One’s enough. If it was set off, old Sheftree could have simply cleaned up the remains of the bodies, then set the trap again.”

In the end, despite the dangers, they decide to proceed. Since they can’t be swayed and there’s no profit in cutting myself off from them, I reluctantly grab a shovel and all three of us climb down into the hole.

For an hour we work doggedly and fearfully—me fearful of faces appearing in the rocks, Bill-E and Loch fearful of running afoul of the dead Lord Sheftree.

We pause every time there’s a rustling in the trees overhead, or when a heavy stream of earth trickles down into the hole, me anticipating whispers, Bill-E and Loch thinking it might be the grinding gears of Lord Sheftree’s next weapon of mass destruction. But gradually we adjust to the natural sounds of the forest and stop flinching at every minor disturbance.

Bill-E and Loch are more convinced than ever that we’ve unearthed the final resting place of Lord Sheftree’s buried treasure. Not me. There’s something magical about this hole. It drew me to it last night, sang out to the moon-affected beast I’d become and lured it here, turning me into a conspirator, using me to clear the way for… what?

I don’t know. I haven’t the slightest idea what we might be digging our way down to. But I’m pretty certain it’s not a rich miser’s hidden treasure.

Loch and I work paired, chipping away at the hard-packed earth around the large rocks, prising them out slowly, often painfully, rolling and dragging them up the slope. Bill-E cleans up after us, removing the smaller rocks, pebbles and dirt. We’re an effective team, although as Loch tires from the hard work, he starts cursing and teasing Bill-E, taking out his irritation on him. At first I ignore it, but he keeps on and on, Spleenio this, fat boy that, dodgy eye the other, and eventually I snap.

“Why don’t you lay off him?” I snarl after an especially brutal remark about Bill-E’s dead mother.

“Make me,” Loch retorts.

I square up to him. “Maybe I will.”

Loch holds his shovel in both hands and raises it warningly. I grab the handle and we glare at each other. Then Bill-E slips behind me and whispers, “Do him, Grubbs!” It’s so flat, so vicious, so un-Bill-E, that I turn around, startled, releasing the shovel.

“What did you say?”

Bill-E looks confused, but angry too. “I meant… I just…”

“I heard him,” Loch growls. “He told you to bump me off.”

“What if I did?” Bill-E bristles, and now he tries to get round me, so that he can go toe-to-toe with Loch.

“Stop,” I say firmly. I lay my left palm against the nearest rock wall and concentrate. After a few seconds I feel or sense the vibrations of a very faint throbbing. A non-human throbbing. “We all need to chill.”

“Who made you the leader?” Loch barks.

“We’re being manipulated.” His forehead creases and I start to tell him there’s magic at work, affecting our tempers. But then I realise how crazy that would sound. “The soil,” I say instead, inventing quickly. “There must be some sort of chemical in it. Put there by Lord Sheftree. It’s making us feel and say things we shouldn’t. If we don’t stop, we’ll be at each other’s throats soon.”