The Fangs of the Dragon (8 page)

‘OK,
THE FIRST LINE IS THE DATE
, let’s work on the second,’ I said.

‘What’s “it”?’ said Muddy.

‘What’s half a corner?’ said Jack.

‘If I’m correctly following Silas Middlewich’s way of working,’ I said, ‘half a corner probably means half a right angle. Forty-five degrees. Basic maths
again.’

‘What’s “it”?’ said Muddy.

‘So, by a bullet-line, do you think he just means a straight line?’ said Jack. ‘The line that a bullet would take?’

‘I think that’s highly likely,’ I said.

‘Hellooooo?’ said Muddy. ‘What’s “it”? And where’s its right eye?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Jack.

‘Neither have I.’ I shrugged. But suddenly, the answer hit me harder than a brick wrapped in concrete. My mind flashed back to the previous day, when Muddy and I had arrived in
Deadman Lane. Immediately, I knew exactly where this eye was, and what it belonged to.

Have you spotted it?

I dashed outside, the others following. At the edge of the pavement, I turned and pointed up at the windows.

‘It’s the house itself!’ I said. ‘Remember the way it seems to have a face? That window, up there, poking out of the roof. The house’s right eye!’

‘Bingo!’ cried Jack. ‘But . . . that’s its left eye.’

‘No, the parchment says “it sees a bullet-line”.
It
does the seeing. From the house’s point of view,
that
’s its right eye.’

We dashed back inside, and up to the room with the ‘right eye’ for a window. It was a small, cobweb-covered room, with a sharply angled ceiling and two floorboards missing from one
corner.

‘Now, a straight line from the window, looking down at a forty-five degree angle,’ I said.

Muddy almost yelped with excitement. From his rucksack he produced an ordinary protractor and the viewfinder mechanism from an old camera, on to which he’d stencilled the words
FlixiScope Model B
.

‘Will this help?’ he said.

‘Not pin-point accurate, but it’ll do,’ I said.

Muddy held the protractor, Jack judged the angle and, screwing up one eye, I looked through the viewfinder. Directly in the line of its crosshairs was an empty paper sack marked
DIY Warehouse
Readymix Concrete
, which must have been blown around the side of the house and got caught in the front garden.

‘We’re in luck,’ I said. ‘That bag marks the correct spot.’

We dashed back outside. By now I was getting out of breath, and telling myself I really ought to get more exercise.

We picked our way across the snagging, thorny jungle of a front garden until we found the empty bag. Muddy stood right in the centre of it, exactly where the viewfinder had pointed.

‘OK, Muddy, now look up at the house’s left-eye window,’ I said. ‘What do you see?’

‘Nothing,’ said Muddy.

‘What can “the canvas” be?’ said Jack. ‘A painting?’

‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘But I think it’s more likely to be something else. I doubt the trail would rely on having a particular object put in a particular place.’

‘Why?’ said Muddy.

‘Because something like that could so easily change,’ I said. ‘You’d only have to move this painting and the whole puzzle would fall apart. Silas Middlewich must be
referring to something that probably wouldn’t change over time. What
can
you see, Muddy?’

‘Nothing. Just the window.’

‘And through it?’

‘Just the wall opposite.’

‘Well, that’s it, then!’ I cried. ‘A big blank wall! You could call that a canvas, couldn’t you?’

We dashed back inside again. Now I was
really
getting out of breath and wishing I’d made more effort during PE lessons.

The far wall of the ‘left-eye’ room was tall and rectangular. The pale yellow paint that covered it was darkened with age around the edges, and there was a slightly lighter, sharply
defined patch to one side, where a heavy piece of furniture must have stood for many years.

‘Now what’s
that
supposed to mean?’ said Jack.

‘Bisect,’ I muttered. ‘More maths. That’s geometry.’

‘Yeh, bisecting means dividing in two, doesn’t it?’ said Muddy.

‘So we’re looking for an area of the wall,’ said Jack.

‘An exact point, rather than an area,’ I said. ‘It says “the needle’s mark”. The mark a needle would leave is a point.’

‘Right,’ said Jack. ‘“Bisect and again”, that must mean we divide it twice. And if we want to find a point, that means we have to draw the lines in opposite
directions, so they cross. But how are we supposed to do the dividing? Floor to ceiling? Corner to corner?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It must mean the dead centre of the wall. Whichever way you halve the wall, top to bottom or corner to corner, you’ll get the same thing.
The centre.’

Hurriedly, Muddy fetched a ball of string and a marker pen from his bag. Standing on a packing crate, I held one end of the string at the top left corner of the wall, Jack held the other end at
the bottom right, and Muddy marked the line. Once the second line was drawn, bottom left to top right, we had our mark!

We stood back from the wall. None of us said anything, but there was a tangible sense of nervous anticipation in the room, an eager thrill of discovery.

‘Logically, we must now need to go somewhere from the centre point we’ve just marked,’ I said. ‘And this next line on the parchment implies we go to the edge of a circle.
Or at least, I
think
that’s what it implies.’

‘With the centre point as the centre of the circle?’ said Jack.

‘But how big a circle?’ said Muddy.

We stood there pondering for a few moments. The late morning sunshine threw geometric shapes of light across the wall.

‘I wonder if this bit about Rome’s war-god is a measurement?’ I said, more to myself than the others. ‘A measurement of the size of the circle, maybe?’

‘Well, the Roman god of war was Mars,’ said Jack. ‘We know that from doing Ancient Rome in class last year. But we need a number, not a name.’

‘The Romans used letters for numbers!’ cried Muddy suddenly. ‘Is that it?’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘The only letter in ‘Mars’ they used was the M, and that equalled one thousand. A thousand of anything would be too big a measurement to fit on the
wall.’

‘How about the
planet
Mars?’ I said. ‘Our friend Silas seems to like these little cross-references, doesn’t he. Mars is the fourth planet. Hang on, is it? Er . . .
Mercury, Venus, Earth . . . yes, Mars is fourth, definitely. There’s a possible number.’

‘Yeh, but four what?’ said Jack. ‘What’s the unit of measurement? Good grief, look at us, doing maths in our spare time! Mrs Penzler would be delighted!’

‘Four . . . “steps”, presumably,’ I said, frowning. ‘Rome’s war-god
steps
to the circle’s edge.’

‘But how big is a step?’ said Jack. ‘It depends how long your legs are!’

‘And how do we walk along the wall to measure them?’ said Muddy.

‘It can’t literally mean steps, as such,’ I said. ‘Remember, this is a puzzle. The word “step” must translate into our missing unit of measurement somehow.
Silas must have wanted to indicate something standard, something that would be meaningful to whoever was meant to follow the trail, something that in 1844 would be —’

I stopped in mid-sentence. My eyes darted to Muddy’s rucksack.

‘Muddy, have you got a ruler?’

Muddy quickly ferreted around in the bag. He pulled out a round, chunky object and handed it over.

‘Muddy,’ said Jack, ‘that’s just a tape measure with a label saying
Whitehouse Measure-Tek 2000
stuck on it!’

‘Shut uuuup!’ said Muddy. ‘It does the job!’

I pulled out a length of the metal measuring tape, and twisted it over to read the markings printed on its yellow surface.

‘Of course, feet and inches!’ I cried. ‘Old-fashioned feet and inches. We think of everything in metres, don’t we? But lots of people still use feet and inches, and
people in 1844 wouldn’t have used anything else. The measurement is four feet! That’s the radius of the circle!’

‘Eh?’ said Jack.

‘I told you, “steps” must indicate a unit of measurement,’ I said. ‘What do you step with? Feet. Four feet to the circle’s edge. Terrible example of
word-substitution, but it fits.’

Using the tape measure locked off at the right length, and keeping one end of the tape positioned over the centre point of the wall, we marked out a huge circle.

‘Hey, we’re really getting somewhere now,’ said Muddy with a grin.

‘I guess the next line tells us where on the circle to look,’ I said. ‘What direction to take from the centre.’

‘Oh yeh?’ said Jack. ‘How? The sky isn’t east, no matter where you are!’

I was on a roll! I spotted it at once. Standing back, looking at the circle we’d drawn on the wall, I was reminded of a slightly off-centre compass. And suddenly, the answer was
obvious.

Can you see it?

‘Look at the wall,’ I said. ‘We’re after a direction. “Eastward the sky” it says. Twist the points of the compass so that, as marked on
this particular wall, east is up. That places west at the bottom.’

‘Towards the earth,’ said Muddy. “Westward the earth”.’

Jack groaned and slapped his hand to his face.

‘Northward then points left,’ I said. ‘Follow that to the edge of the circle, and we arrive
here
.’ I tapped at the ‘northerly’ edge of the circle.

‘So what does “and beneath” mean?’ said Jack. ‘Where do we go now?’

‘Into the wall,’ I said simply. ‘If north is to the left, then beneath is thataway.’

‘Fantastic!’ said Muddy. ‘Demolition!’

He rooted around in his rucksack, and pulled out what looked like a metal cylinder fixed into a wire frame.

‘I’ve only just developed this. It doesn’t even have a name yet. The digger is pushed forward by this spring, which came out of an old sofa, and when you switch on it starts
—’

‘Is this some sort of drill?’ I said.

‘Yup,’ said Muddy proudly. ‘The lever here adjusts the —’

‘Isn’t this just the tiniest bit dangerous?’ I said.

‘Only if you’re silly with it,’ said Muddy. ‘It was designed to cut holes in lawns, for when you want to play golf. But it should work on plaster OK. The only trouble is,
the battery pack only lasts for six and a half seconds at the moment. Needs some work.’

Jack and I stood back a little. Then we stood back a little more. Muddy held the wire frame against the wall at the correct spot. Jack and I stood back a little more.

Muddy switched his invention on, and the metal cylinder inside the frame started to rotate. Six and a half seconds later, when the power ran out, the machine whined to a stop and a shower of old
plaster was tumbling out of a neatly cut hole halfway up the wall.

‘You know, Muddy,’ I muttered, ‘you really are a genius.’

I blew a layer of dust out of the hole and peered into it. Visible behind the plaster were a couple of thin wooden struts, and tucked behind those, almost out of sight, was something metallic. I
scratched at it with my finger, gradually pulling it free, and at last it dropped into the palm of my hand. It was a key, about the same length as my thumb. I held it up for the others to see.

‘I don’t believe it,’ gasped Jack. ‘We’ve been absolutely right, so far.’

‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ giggled Muddy. ‘This must be the key that unlocks the treasure chest! There really is treasure at the end of this!’

I had to admit things were looking good. I stared at the key, wide-eyed, amazed that this little object had been hidden away from the world for so long. For decade after decade, through wars and
winters and world events. I felt as if it had been handed to me across the centuries, from Silas Middlewich in 1844 to me, here, now, today.