Fraser's Voices (12 page)

The hole through which the oldest of the cubs had pulled the skull was much too small for Fraser to crawl through. So he walked round the heap of stones looking for some other way in. On the south-east side, facing the point where the sun rises at mid winter, he found two huge upright stone slabs half buried in rubble, like doorposts, and resting on top of them an enormous boulder which, he thought, must have weighed tons.

There was very little space between this capstone and the debris that filled the doorway, so Fraser began to pull away the looser stones and clumps of heather to make a space big enough for him to get through. It was a slow business and soon his hands were bruised and bleeding. Worse still it was getting late and he knew he would soon be missed from home. But he knew that he was on the track of something; so he pulled and heaved until he had made an opening into which he could just crawl – hands out in front, body wriggling like a snake after them and legs pulled through last of all.

Then he was inside, on a rough floor of earth, under a roof of stone slabs which had partly collapsed so that they were tilted at crazy angles and there was barely room between them and the floor for him to crawl.

It was almost dark with the light coming from behind him from the entrance he had made. He wriggled forwards, stopping every few moments to get his breath back and hoping his tumblings of the mind wouldn't come back when he was in such a tight spot.

Then he found it in a pit a foot deep and as long as a dead body – a headless skeleton.

He moved a little to one side to let in more light. Did the bones move too?

“Rubbish,” he told himself. “Just imagination.”

Then, as his eyes grew more used to the light he saw something gleaming.

“Gold!” he gasped; everywhere there was the glint of gold. Little round discs, like pieces of a collar round the neck where the skull should have been; rings and bracelets and amulets on the hands and arms. Hardly believing what he was seeing Fraser stretched out a hand towards one of the bracelets to see if it was real.

At once there was a hiss, “Sstay.”

Then he made his mistake; he snatched his hand away quickly; but not quickly enough. A flat head flashed like a dart, teeth like fine needles pricked the back of his hand and he felt the warm, sticky sensation of blood oozing over his skin.

* * *

Seti the adder had only wakened from her winter sleep in the warmth of that afternoon. She was still drowsy and, being deaf like all snakes, had not been aware of Fraser's approach until his white hand had stretched out in the darkness towards her. She would have crawled away if she could, but she felt trapped and struck instinctively, the poison flowing from her fangs.

“Sstay,” she repeated. “Ssoon you will ssleep.”

Fraser had never met an adder before, though he had heard about them and knew that their poisonous bite, which would kill a mouse in thirty seconds, could make humans very ill and was sometimes fatal. But he was more surprised than frightened, for this was the first time a wild animal had ever hurt him.

“Why did you do that?” he exclaimed in the kind of accent he would have used towards frogs or toads.

Seti crouched back in the crevice in which she had been hibernating; it was her turn to be surprised.

“What are you?” she hissed.

“I'm a human boy, but I speak like you and I am a friend. Why did you strike?”

Seti rolled in her coils. “How was I to know? I have just wakened after my sleep through the Dead Time and I've never heard of a human with a snake's tongue. When you sleep as I do you have to be very careful. Now, if you had been a badger…”

Fraser knew that any animal can make a mistake and strike before it sees what it is striking at and he had heard of cases where they had apologised afterwards.

“But,” he wondered, “how can a poisonous snake say, ‘I'm sorry?'”

He looked at the small puncture marks on the back of his hand. “What have you done to me?”

“You will fall asleep. All those I touch become still. You will be like these bones.” With a dart of her tongue she pointed to the skeleton in the pit. “What has been done cannot be undone.”

“Did you kill
him
?” Fraser glanced at the skeleton in the pit.

“Not me. He fell asleep before my mother's mother was as small as a headless worm.” She slithered quickly away among the gaps and hollows in the stones and Fraser was left alone with the venom in his veins.

“At least,” he said to himself, “I'll get out of here with some of the gold before the poison gets to me. Rona will come and find me and Sandy will tell all the animals that I am dead.”

He stretched out his bitten hand again and lifted a bracelet from the cold arm in the pit and placed it on his other wrist.

“That will be proof,” he thought. “They can come and dig the rest out for themselves.”

Getting out was more difficult than coming in. In that narrow space he couldn't turn round and crawling backwards is much more difficult than going forward. He pushed backwards with the palms of his hands on that clammy clay floor and lifted his body on knees and elbows, and as he worked he gasped the stale air of the tomb.

Then, as in the thunder storm, came the tumblings of his mind; crash, crash, crash like fireworks in that subterranean cell. Flick, flick, flick, flick – like the darting of an angry snake's head.

When he wakened it was cold and dark without the slightest glimmer of light from any direction. Where was he? Where was the way out? Then he remembered; trapped in a tomb with a headless skeleton whose gold he had stolen. A skeleton which had seemed to move when his shadow had flickered over it.

He had held its skull in his hands. What if the rest of the bones should rise to claim it back from him?

The phone rang in the vet's consulting room. Rona answered it.

“Can I speak to Rona… this is Fraser's dad… He's gone missing, didn't come home last night… Any idea where he might be?”

“Yes, I think I know… Yes I'm sure it'll be all right to get off work… Pick me up here… We'll bring Sandy; he's more likely to be able to sniff him out.”

* * *

The car shunted to a stop outside the vet surgery. Rona dashed out. Fraser's dad stopped once to pick up the dog; then drove as fast as possible up the Range Rover Track till he came to the place where it had been washed away in the previous year's flood. Then Rona led him and Fraser's mum along the Goat Trail to where Sandy had found the skull.

“A human skull and a gold ring were found round about here just recently,” she said. “Fraser was most anxious to find out where they came from. I'm sure this is where he would come looking for them.”

There was, of course, nothing at all for a human being to see or hear or smell.

“I'll let Sandy off the lead. He'll maybe pick up Fraser's scent.”

At first the dog ran about in circles, not understanding why he had been brought there and much more interested in tell-tale scents of rabbits and mice mixed with the strong smell of the foxes. Then Rona began to encourage him to range further afield, though she herself had no idea where they should be looking.

“Find,” she shouted and waved her arms in a gesture she often used when she had hidden a treat for the dog to search for. Off he went expecting to come across a hidden dog-biscuit.

But then he stumbled on something much more interesting and stopped dead. In front of him was a hole in the rocks, flanked by an enormous stone slab on either side and with a massive capstone lying across the top. From inside the hole came a scent that he recognised. A terrier would have dived through the hole head first, but labradors are not used to going underground; besides there was another scent coming through which he did not understand, but which reminded him of toads and frogs. So he sat back on his haunches and barked.

Rona and Fraser's dad clambered over the rocks to join him and told him he was a good dog.

Sandy felt proud of himself and barked out his message as clearly as he could. “Fraser's in there; he may be hurt. But there could be something else there too that I don't understand, and I don't like it. What's the use,” he thought. “They can't understand me.”

This was only partly true for Rona understood enough about dogs to realise that Sandy had found something which might be worth investigating.

She turned to Fraser's dad, “There's something in there. Maybe it's him”

“Let's see,” he said and crouched beside the opening. But it was far too small to let him in. “Can't get through that. Need to dig this lot away first.”

“Perhaps I could get in,” suggested Rona.

She put her head inside. “Phew! What a smell.” Then she pushed her arms straight forward as if she was swimming and wriggled her body through the hole, easing her hips and legs in behind her. She landed on a flat, earthy surface.

“You all right?” called Fraser's dad from outside.

“OK
so
far, but there's not much space.”

“Can you see anything?”

“It's pretty dark. Wait. There's something. Yes, it's him. Fraser!
Fraser!
”

“Is he all right?” Fraser's mum shouted from the Goat Trail below.

“I don't know. He's trying to say something. I can't make him out.”

She shook the boy and he muttered something about gold and snakes.

“He's saying something about a golden snake. I don't know if he can move. I don't know how I'm going to get him out of here.”

Fraser's dad hurled himself at the stones blocking the entrance, tearing at them with his bare hands till the nails broke and the knuckles bled. He had enlarged the opening by about a foot and sent several big boulders bounding down the slope onto the trail below when a sudden scream from his wife stopped him.

“No, stop!
Stop!
”

He followed her terrified gaze upwards and there was the massive capstone rocking like a logan stone as the whole structure below it shuddered and settled like a stag that has been shot collapsing in its death throes.

“They'll both be buried alive, “she screamed.

Fraser's dad watched in helpless horror as the ruin settled into a new position, but the door posts held and the entrance remained open.

In the pit Rona had a much less clear idea of what was happening, but she could hear the grinding of rock on rock as hundreds of tons of granite shifted above her.

“Rona!” Fraser's dad tried to make his voice sound matter of fact. “Can you hear me? You've got to be very careful. Take your time. Try not to knock against any of the stones. Do you think you'll be able to get Fraser out too?”

“I think so. He's conscious, but he's a bit confused and he's very tired.”

Inch by inch she worked her way backwards; inch by inch she edged Fraser after her. Slowly the light from the entrance grew closer.

But at the least jarring of the rocks above Fraser's dad would shout, “
Stop!
Don't move.” And the pair would lie, hardly daring to breathe, until the grinding stopped and they felt it safe to go on.

The most difficult part was actually getting back out through the entrance hole, for here it was almost impossible to avoid touching the unstable stones and the slightest pressure in the wrong direction would have brought the whole pile crushing down on top of them.

But at last they were out, flopping exhausted on the slope outside the entrance. And just in time. For, as if in anger at their escape, the great pile of boulders gave out a long, low growl and slowly crumpled before their eyes in a cloud of dust, blocking the entrance to the tomb forever.

Fraser couldn't stand without help and he was soaked in cold sweat. But he could talk; he babbled; he raved; he jabbered of gold and bones and snake bite, and he waved his right hand to show that it was bruised and swollen.

When Rona looked closely she saw on the back of that hand the marks of a bite and round the other wrist a bracelet of bright gold.

“I think he's been bitten by an adder,” she gasped. “We'll have to get him to hospital.”

For days Fraser flickered between consciousness and unconsciousness in the hospital, vomiting and sweating, while his mum and dad sat at his bedside and tried to make sense of the weird, nightmarish hallucinations he seemed to be living through.

Before his eyes and in his dreams there passed a cavalcade of headless skeletons stretching out bony fingers to reclaim their stolen gold, snakes coiled in burrows guarding, with their venom, buried treasure and skulls staring accusingly and demanding decent burial.

But eventually the poison slipped out of his system, the sickness, the sweating and the dizziness passed and he became aware of the chatter of the starlings and sparrows on the ledge outside his window.

The consultant compared case notes with the doctor in charge of the ward.

“Most extraordinary case I've come across,” he said. “The snake venom seems to have combined with the drug I was treating him with to attack the disease. If we can find a way of making a serum out of this we'll have a permanent cure.”

Rona came to visit Fraser when he was able to sit up and talk.

“The gold,” he said weakly. “There really was gold? I didn't dream it?”

“Yes,” she said. “The people at the museum at Kilmore say that the bracelet you were wearing when we found you must have belonged to a prehistoric chief in the Bronze Age.”

“So the skeleton and the snake, they were real too?”

“The museum people told me that the heap of stones you crawled under was the chief's grave. They found the skull; it's in the museum now.”

“One-eye didn't come back?”

“I don't know anything about One-eye. You'll have to ask your animal friends about him.”

But that was the one thing Fraser could not do for from the birds on the window ledge he heard only chirruping and chattering.