The Treasure of Dead Man's Lane and Other Case Files

by Simon Cheshire

“Hmm, s’pose so,” said Jack doubtfully.

  “Next, the year. ‘Solar revolutions’? Well, one revolution of the sun means one year, right? We did that in Science ages ago, right? So, twenty years from ‘Bonaparte’s fall,’ and then another nine. Napoleon was defeated in 1815, add twenty-nine to that, and you get 1844.”

  “Why not take away twenty-nine?” said Muddy.

  “Because you’d be dating your document before ‘Bonaparte’s fall,’” said Jack, “and that wouldn’t make sense, because you wouldn’t know about it.”

  “Right,” I said. “Do you believe me now? These words do mean something. I think they lead to something important!”

  “You may be right after all,” whispered Jack.

  “Maybe there’s a chest full of gold!” said Muddy. “A pirate’s hoard or something.”

  “I think 1844’s a little late for pirates,” I said. “But you never know.…”

  We stared at each other with our eyes bugging out, our jaws dropping, and our feet skipping around as though we were a bunch of overexcited horses. There was a secret treasure in The Horror House, a treasure that had been hidden away for many years, and we were going to find it!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next day was Saturday. Muddy and I arrived back at the house at 9:00 a.m., ready for a solid day’s treasure hunt. Muddy brought along a backpack full of assorted gadgets he’d designed. I wasn’t sure how useful the Whitehouse Silent Alarm Mark II or the Whitehouse Personal Reversing Mirror might turn out to be, but I thought having a few tools on hand was a good idea nonetheless.

  Izzy turned up at a quarter past nine. When I called her back the night before and gave her the full story, I also sent her a copy of the scroll. Jack’s parents had been given a pile of old documents when they’d bought the house: legal stuff, plans showing where the drains were, a certificate from when the plumbing was installed, that kind of stuff. None of it helped us decipher the scroll, and none of it recorded anything earlier than 1900. So I was counting on Izzy to come up with a find!

  Us boys were all in ratty jeans and sweatshirts, because we were expecting to get as dusty as Jack’s dad, but Izzy showed up in her usual get-up, all glistening curls and snazzy colors. “You’ll ruin those pants,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I’m not staying,” said Izzy. “I only came over to get a closer look at The Horror House. I’ve got tons of leads for information, but I need to go to the library and search the local records. Wow, this place is a dump.”

  “A dump with hidden treasure,” corrected Muddy.

  “A dump that might have hidden treasure,” corrected Jack.

  We trudged across the hallway, our boots kicking up delicate clouds of plaster dust. Various thumps and clanks and ka-chuggs echoed from other parts of the house: Jack’s mom was busy shoveling sand into the rented cement mixer in the backyard, and Jack’s dad was busy chasing the cat. As we all sat at the bottom of the staircase, I took out the photocopy of the scroll I’d made and read through it for the thirty-seventh time.

  “What’ve you got so far?” I said to Izzy.

  Izzy grabbed a printout from inside the plastic folder she was carrying. “This house was built in 1837, by a man named Silas Middlewich.”

  “SM!” said Muddy.

  “Originally, it was a workhouse, a kind of half prison where poor people ended up when they had nowhere else to go. They were terrible places. This street was originally called Mill Lane, but once the workhouse was here, everyone started calling it Deadman’s Lane, because it was said that nobody left here alive.”

  “And over time, Dead Man’s Lane became Deadman’s Lane,” I said.

  Izzy nodded. “I want to do a lot more research on this Silas Middlewich, but it looks like he was an A-grade Mr. Nasty. He packed more and more people into this place and forced them to work for him until he was the richest man in the district. He died in 1845; it’s said he was murdered by one of his workers, a woman named Martha Humble. Apparently he’d swindled her husband.”

  “Nice guy,” I muttered.

  “Still, someone like that is exactly the type of person who might’ve hidden his ill-gotten gains in a secret stash,” said Muddy excitedly.

  I wasn’t so sure. I thought back on my notes, about deductions that could be made from the scroll. Something didn’t add up.

  “You could be right,” said Izzy. “But there’s a vital point you’re all missing. Saxby’s theory about that secret compartment must be wrong.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said, looking up suddenly.

  “The wall paneling was built at the same time as the house. Which we now know was 1837. But you’ve worked out that the scroll is dated 1844. So the compartment was there for seven years, empty. Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Hmm,” I said, getting a sinking feeling. “I don’t get it. That compartment was perfectly sized for the scroll in both height and width.”

  “Perhaps the compartment was originally used to hide the treasure, but then it got moved?” Muddy guessed.

  “No,” I said. “The compartment was only an inch or two deep. Not big enough.”

  “Plus,” said Izzy, in a way that sounded reluctant, “why would someone like Middlewich leave a treasure trail for someone to follow? If he was as nasty as his reputation suggests, he wouldn’t want anyone getting their hands on his cash, would he?”

  “Ugh! Well, so much for a great start,” said Jack. “You really got up my hopes there, Saxby.”

  I held up my hand for silence. I was trying to think. What Izzy had just said was absolutely right. There was another layer of mystery here: there was a strange difference between what I had worked out about the scroll and what Izzy had found out about this Silas Middlewich. We’d found a weird gap in history!

  One thing was certain. It was even more vital now that we decipher the scroll. There were more secrets here than buried treasure alone.

  I jumped to my feet. “Muddy, Jack, we’re getting to work on the scroll, right now. Izzy, to the library. Find out all you can, and get back to us as soon as possible.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Okay, 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 understanding Silas Middlewich’s way of working correctly,” I said, “‘half a corner’ probably means half a right angle. Forty-five degrees. Basic math 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?” wailed Muddy. “What’s ‘it’? And where’s ‘its right eye’?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” said Jack.

  “Neither do 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 at Deadman’s 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. “You know how 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 scroll 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 in 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 bac
kpack he produced an ordinary protractor and the viewfinder mechanism from an old camera, onto which he’d stenciled the words FlixiScope Model B.

  “Will this help?” he asked.

  “Not 100 percent accurate, but it’ll do,” I said.

  Muddy held the protractor, Jack judged the angle, and, squinting with one eye, I looked through the viewfinder. Directly in its crosshairs was an empty paper bag marked DIY Warehouse Readymix Concrete, which must have been blown around the side of the house and gotten caught in the front yard.

  “We’re in luck,” I said. “That bag marks the exact 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 tangled, thorny jungle of a front yard until we found the empty bag. Muddy stood right at its center, exactly where the viewfinder had pointed.

  “Okay, 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?” asked Jack. “A painting?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “But I think it’s probably something else. I doubt the trail would rely on having a specific object put in a specific place.”

  “Why?” said Muddy.

  “Because something like that could change so easily,” I said. “You’d only have to move the 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 facing wall.”

  “Well, that’s it then!” I cried. “A big blank wall! You could call that a canvas, right?”

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

  The far wall in the “left eye” room was tall and rectangular. The pale yellow paint that covered it was darkened around the edges with age, 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 math. That’s geometry.”

  “Yeah, 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 that 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 exact center. Whichever way you halve the wall, top to bottom or corner to corner, you’ll get the same thing. The center.”

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

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

  “Logically, we now have to go somewhere else, away from the center point we just marked,” I said. “And the next line on the scroll implies that we go to the edge of a circle. Or at least, I think that’s what it implies.”

  “With the center point as the center of the circle?” said Jack.

  “But how big a circle?” said Muddy.

  We stood there for a moment, pondering. The late- morning sun threw geometric shapes of light across the wall.

  “I wonder if this part 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 last year, learning about Ancient Rome. But we need a number—not a name.”

  “The Romans used letters for numbers!” Muddy suddenly cried. “Is that it?”

  “No,” said Jack. “The only letter they used in ‘Mars’ was M, and that equaled 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. Wait a sec, is it? Um…Mercury, Venus, Earth…yes, Mars is the fourth, definitely. There’s a possible number.”

  “Yeah, but four what?” said Jack. “What’s the unit of measure? Oh man, look at us—doing math 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 a step?” said Jack. “It all depends on how long your legs are!”

  “And how do we walk across the wall to measure them?” said Muddy.

  “It can’t literally mean steps,” I said. “Remember, this is a riddle. The word step must somehow translate into our missing unit of measure. Silas must’ve 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 mid-sentence. My eyes darted to Muddy’s backpack.

  “Muddy, have you got a ruler?”

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

  “Muddy,” said Jack, “that’s just a tape measurer with a label saying Whitehouse Measure-Tek 2000!”

  “Shut up!” 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. “Plain old feet and inches—how could I have missed it? The measurement is four feet! That’s the radius!”

  “Huh?” said Jack.

  “I told you, ‘steps’ must indicate a unit of measure,” I said. “What do you step with? Feet. Four feet to the circle’s edge. Stupid pun, but it works.”

  With the tape measure locked at the right length, and keeping one end of the tape positioned over the center of the wall, we drew a huge circle.

  “Hey, we’re really getting somewhere,” 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 center.”

  “Oh yeah?” 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-center compass. And suddenly, the answer was obvious.

  Can you see it?

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

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

  Jack groaned and slapped his face.

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

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

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

  “Awesome!” cried Muddy. “Demolition!”

  He rooted around his backpack and pulled out what looked like a metal cylinder fixed into a wire frame. “I only just developed this. It doesn’t even have a name yet. The digger is pushed forward by this spring, w
hich came from an old couch, and when you switch it on, it starts—”

  “Is this some kind 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 stupid with it,” said Muddy. “It was designed to cut holes in grass, for playing golf. But it should work okay on plaster. The only problem is, at the moment the battery lasts for just six and a half seconds. Needs some work.”

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

  Muddy switched his invention on, and the metal cylinder started to rotate inside the frame. Six and a half seconds later, the machine whined to a halt, 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 in. 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.”

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” giggled Muddy. “That must be the key to the treasure chest! There really is treasure at the end of all this!”

  I had to admit, things were looking good. I stared wide-eyed at the key, 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.

  “Come on, guys,” I said quietly. “Two more lines to go. We’ve got work to do.”