Free Digger Field by Damian Davis Page A

Uncle Scott and see if he’ll wait a bit longer.
    When I woke up everyone was out. I lay there, half awake, half asleep, wondering what had made that scratching noise under the floor in the deserted house.
    Every time I closed my eyes I could hear it again … scrape , scrape , scrape . I thought I was dreaming. Then I realised I was actually hearing scraping. One of Dad’s chickens was scratching the dirt outside my window.
    Someone knocked on the front door. It was Tearley.
    ‘We’re not going back to that house,’ I said.
    I told her about the noise coming from under the trapdoor.
    ‘Maybe it was Mr-Black-the-ghost getting dressed to go out,’ she said.
    She wasn’t taking me seriously at all.
    ‘Shut up, Tearley,’ I said. ‘There is someone trapped in that cellar and they’re trying to get out. And I’m not going back there.’
    ‘Then how will we ever know if the camera worked? You’ll have scared yourself for nothing,’ she said. ‘You need to harden up, Dribbler. Let’s get Wrigs and go down there.’
    I really hate it when she calls me Dribbler.
    We walked around the corner to Wrigs’ place. Wrigs was in the front yard.
    When I told him about the scraping noise I’d heard, he went inside for a minute or two. When he came back out, he was wearing a bright red bandana around his forehead.
    He went to his Mum’s rose bed and rubbed his good hand in the dirt. Then he smeared the dirt over his face like some kind of commando soldier.
    He looked ridiculous. Like a ranga Rambo.
    ‘What’s that for?’ I said.
    ‘It’s what the SAS do. It’s camouflage, and it’ll scare anyone off because they’ll think I’m armed and dangerous.’
    ‘You mean, it’ll give us a chance to run away while they laugh at you?’ said Tearley.
    When we got to the river, Wrigs set himself up in the bushes as the lookout. He would have been camouflaged except for the bright red hair popping out over the bright red bandana.
    Tearley and I crept down the path through the bushes towards the house. I grabbed the milk crate from its hiding place. My heart was racing.
    When we got to the old doorway Tearley called out, ‘Hello,’ but no one answered.
    When we got to the kitchen, I climbed up on top of the milk crate and took the memory card out of the camera.
    We went back outside into the vacant lot. We sat down on the retaining wall facing the river and Tearley fired up her laptop. She put the memory card in. A page popped up on the screen saying ‘Ready to download images?’ Tearley clicked ‘Yes’.
    The first photo was of me standing looking at the camera. The time said: 04.35.38. The next couple of photos showed me doing star jumps. The next showed me staring at the floor, looking shocked. In the one after that, I was running out of the room. The pictures were good. But luckily not so good you could see how scared I was.
    Just then, there was a noise. I looked behind us and spotted Mr Black striding out of the bushes towards us. Tearley snapped her laptop shut.
    ‘Hey kid, you’ve got something to hide, yeah?’ Mr Black said to her. He was dressed in his usual black suit and carrying his black briefcase, but he was also holding a small hessian bag.
    Tearley went bright red.
    ‘Just a school project,’ she said.
    ‘No worries, kid. I’m not your parents, yeah,’ he smiled.
    You could see he had a gold tooth. He didn’t look like the kind of person who smiled often. It was the kind of smile that looked like he was going to vivisect you, and enjoy it.
    ‘You like it down here, yeah?’ he said to me. ‘I see you throwing pebbles sometimes.’
    ‘Yeah,’ I croaked, ‘we’re trying to break the world record for rock skimming.’
    Mr Black’s eyes were so dark I couldn’t tell what part was the pupil and what part was the coloured bit surrounding it.
    ‘Cool,’ Mr Black said, but he didn’t look like the kind of person who said ‘cool’ often, unless he was holding you down in freezing water waiting