Jane Louise Curry, Children's Books Author
  A Backinprint.com Paperback   "Hi, what's this? " Dub clambered down from the stool, stepped across Stevie, and lifted down a book. "Liber Monstrorum. I never saw this one before. Mig, where did this come from?" "Don't ask me," she said, hardly looking and trying to sound uninterested. She had decided not to fib, but not to to give anything away either. "It's got some great pictures. Look, here’s a basilisk.” “A whosilisk?" Stevie asked. Arthur ignored the interruption. “And a sea serpent and a griffin. Gory oysters! Look at this.” He sat down on the carpet and spread the book open before him. Stevie walked over on his knees and looked at the indicated engraving. "Ick! What is it?" "Search me. Amphisbaena, it says. It’s Latin. So’s the description on the next page. It looks like the same stuff as Dad’s Latin books.” "You can't read it then?" Miggle was disappointed, for the book did look interesting. "Now if it was French…” Dub raised his eyebrows and looked so superior that the others scoffed. “No, really," he said, and pointed to the title. “Liber, I bet, is livre. That's 'book' in French. Hey, yes! Liber like in ‘library.’ So it's 'Book of Monsters' all right. Some of it’s in English, though." He flipped the pages. Here: Draco. That’s a dragon, see, and down here it says, ‘I Englond of old this beeft ...' This beeft? What on earth is a beeft? Miggle bent to look. "Those are old-fashioned S’s.” She laughed. "They made S both ways. See, they’re not exactly like f's. You ought to know. They’re even in the Declaration of Independence.” "Uh. I forgot. So it's, 'this beest was yclept wyrm, and this wyrm was beleeved to seek out gold buried in the erth and to take it for hys own.' Yclept maybe means ‘called’ or something like that? Do you suppose wyrm is the same as 'worm'?" "You mean they thought a dragon was a worm? " Stevie was skeptical. "Maybe 'worm' didn't mean just earthwormy things back then," Miggle offered, sitting on the floor beside Arthur and hiding her crossed fingers behind her back. "What else is there?" Arthur turned the pages. " Aha! There's the old Minotaur. And this one looks like Caliban. I like old Caliban. There was a great Caliban when they did The Tempest on TV." He looked up. "Why don't your folks ever get their television set fixed? We could get up early and watch the archaeology course and learn how to dig up Indian mounds and stuff like that." Miggle shrugged. "You ask Mother. I gave up months ago. But we hardly ever watched it except in winter. There's too much to do." Casually, she turned the last few pages. "Whoa! " said Dub. "Go back one. There's something fastened on that back flyleaf. A piece of paper with something on it. There." "Hoo, it's a map, isn't it?" said Stevie. "Looks like it. Looks pretty old, too. Faded old brown ink," Dub observed. What they saw at the top of the paper was this:  Should you afk where it would be Between the watters wide and narrow, The firft doth drowfe beneath the tree. Should you wonder where it lingers, Dig between the tall one's fingers, Where the arrow… The verse broke off where the bottom of the paper was discolored and torn. Miggle had thought that a very good touch if she did say so herself. The style of handwriting she had copied from that in an early entry on the flyleaf of the family Bible. "Gee whiz," said Stevie. "It sounds like something out of a book!" "It is in a book, dumbbell," said Miggle. "Oh, you know what I mean, Mig. It sounds like something out of an adventure…” "Where there are jewels," Dub prompted. "No, valuable documents! Buried on the estate and the rightful heir will be turned out in the cold if they aren't found in time. But--no kidding, it could be something important. Except this map might be of any place. It hasn't got any place names at all on it." “Except ‘A house.’ Which is kind of silly. You can see it’s a house,” said Stevie. It was impossible for Miggle to keep quiet. “But there’s a period after ‘A.’ Maybe that means something.” “It means there’s a period after ‘A',” said Stevie. “What do you mean, ‘What does it mean?’ ” Arthur turned back to look at the front flyleaf. “This book didn’t come from Grandpa’s library, that’s for sure, or I’d have seen it before. Where’s it from, Mig?” "I really don't know," she answered honestly. "Mother's the one to ask. I think she just went down to the basement, but she won't mind if we come down now. She fired a batch of stuff last night so the kiln would be cool before the blasting up at the Bane at noontime." Mrs. Arthur was an artist and had become well known as far away as Pittsburgh for her pottery—handsome stoneware vases and bowls and platters glazed in warm earth colors and blues. Several shops in the city and in Kennington carried her designs, but most of them were sold to the tourists who shopped at The White Rabbit, a tiny shop in the High Egg Village Inn. The coming of the strip mining had brought Mrs. Arthur more problems than noise and rattling windows. The first several weeks of blasting had broken dozens of pieces of greenware-- bowls and pots that hadn't yet gone through the first firing that hardens them into what is called bisqueware. Twice the explosions had gone off while the kiln was full of bowls going through their second firing. They had rocked off their stilts and bumped together, and the glaze had stuck fast, so that when the kiln was cool, Mr. Arthur had had to come to the rescue with a chisel and mallet to loosen the solid clump of bowls from the floor of the kiln. Now there were doors on the drying shelves, and Mrs. Arthur's firings were carefully timed so that noon could explode without catastrophe in the cellar. While the kiln finished it long cooling-off , Mrs. Arthur was mixing a new glaze for the next batch. When the children appeared on the stairs with their question about the old leather-bound book, she warned, "Don't come over here. There's clay dust all over the floor, and you'll track it upstairs." She covered the mixing pot with a piece of plywood to keep dust out of the glaze and went to the corner sink to wash her hands. "No, the book hadn’t been Grandpa Arthur's," she said, after taking a look at it, “nor Grandpa Griffith's." She had found it under a loose floorboard in the attic during spring cleaning and put it at the back of the bookshelves, thinking that Uncle Tim might be interested in it. "He's the only one in the family who could read it." She smiled, returning the book to Dub. "Whose book is it, then?" asked Dub. “Who left it in the attic?" "Probably the Hinkses. Or perhaps the Amples before them. According to Mrs. Hinks, the Amples built the house and lived in it for over a hundred years. Still, the book does belong to us now, Arthur. When old Mrs. Hinks moved to California to live with her son she signed the deed and said, 'There! You can have the lot! With old Mr. Hinks dead, I don't think she could stand the house, poor thing. Too empty." Knowing well how her mother could drift from one subject to another, Miggle headed her back toward the book. "What about the Amples? Weren’t the first ones pioneers? " Mrs. Arthur sat down on the bottom step. “ You probably know as much about it as I do, dear,” she answered. “I suppose you could call them pioneers, though the frontier had moved further west by then. As Mrs. Hinks told it, Nathan Ample cleared the land and sometime before 1820 built this house—or the main part of it, not the library and sun-porch end. We think they must have planted the big Douglas fir tree in the side garden. It’s at least that old." Arthur looked at the book thoughtfully. "But why would farmers have a book like this? " "To read, dear." She smiled. "It is an unusual book, though. There might have been a schoolmaster in the family--someone who could read Latin. There's a Mr. Ample at Thrale High School even today, come to think of it. Why? Is it important?" "Kind of. Somebody's fastened a map in the back of it, only it doesn't say where it's a map of." "Let me see. I don't remember seeing any map. Mmm, yes, I see what you mean. It is vague, isn't it?" The spidery handwriting had a suspiciously familiar backward tilt to it. She remembered that Miggle had borrowed her sepia drawing ink and wondered what sort of game it was that had such an ambitious and complicated beginning. But she was rather pleased with the riddle-like quality of the verse and thought to herself how nice it would be if Miggle were only as perceptive about people as she was about words and "things." Mrs. Arthur decided to let the game take its course and turned back to her work with a parting suggestion. "Why couldn't 'A. house' mean Ample House?" Arthur was at the top of the steps in a bound. "I bet it does! Thanks, Aunt Vi," he called back down the stairwell. “Come on, you guys.” Miggle and Stevie followed close behind Arthur, up into the hall and back to the library. There, Arthur eased the map loose from the flyleaf at the back of the old book and spread it out flat on the desk. “It sure isn’t much of a map. If it isn’tthis house, we’ll never find out where it is. There must be a million houses by roads with creeks somewhere near." Stevie pointed. "But if it is this house, that one on the left could be the Trickle and the other one would be Mishannock Run." "Right." Dub chewed at his lip. "But even that doesn't help much. They're 'watters wide and narrow' all right. But what tree? There must be loads of tall ones around. See, maybe those spots on the map are trees, but if this was written all that long ago, for all we know the right tree might have been cut down." They trooped outside by way of the sun porch. Trish and Kit followed from curiosity, and when they had seen the map and heard the riddle, Trish asked, very sensibly, what it was a map for. No one knew, of course, and under such a practical challenge, the boys' interest began to lag a bit. Miggle began to be uneasy, for, after all, the not knowing was to be the point of the whole thing—the finding out what the treasure was. Since she was sure neither what the key thing was nor whether it was valuable, she had been particularly careful to be absolutely fair and honest in the clues by calling it 'it.' Now she wished she'd made the first clue more tempting. The box was beautiful and a treasure even if the brass thing was a... a lamp finial. She shouldn't have put the other tree dots on the map. How, she wondered, could she let them know that the ancient fir in the side lawn was the right tree? Dub was saying, "O.K., say the map's really old, though it could have been stuck in there anytime before… When did the whosises--the Amples--move away from here?" Miggle roused herself. "I'm not sure. But old Mrs. Hinks told about moving here after the Johnstown Flood, and that was a long time ago," she said. "It was in 1936 or 1937. Unless she meant the one in 1889," offered Stevie. The Griffiths lived in Johnstown. "I don't think she was that old," said Miggle. "Anyway, it must be older than 1936," said Dub. "I'm sure people must have stopped making f's for s's a good long while before then. Right. Which means we're in a pickle. A hundred years ago the trees that are big now must have been pretty little, and the ones that were big then must now be gone for lumber and things. Dad says in the old days the whole East was forest, and a squirrel could travel a thousand miles without touching ground. If he wanted to, that is. But all that got cut down, and everything in the woods has grown up since."  The working end of the "treasure" key. "What about it?" "You mean we've got to go around looking at old tree roots?" Stevie frowned. "No," said Miggle, bravely taking the plunge. "But lots of trees around here don't have roots that look like fingers. Except our old pine tree. It's got lots. And it's a kind that doesn't grow around here naturally. Daddy thinks the Amples must have planted it. And look…" She pointed to the tree and then to the map, which Dub held. "That mark right there must be it." "Well," admitted Dub, "it is almost exactly midway between the Trickle and the Run. Maybe that's what the poem means by 'between'." "Yes, yes! " Miggle was delighted. "Let's look." "What'll we dig with?" asked Stevie. "Rover's spoons!" said Trish. "Mother gave him some big old spoons to use in the sandbox. I'll go get them." She ran to the sandbox at the side of the sun porch and was returning with three large battered serving spoons when Rover saw her. He pushed Trumpkin, the basset pup, back into the dog run and ran after her. "Mine! My spoons!" he protested. "Give 'em to me. They're mine." Miggle was about to scold him for being greedy, but Kit caught at his hand just as he was about to fling himself on Trish. "You can help, too, Rover," Kit soothed. "No, don't hit Trish. Trisha, give him one. Let Stevie and Dub have the other ones, and we can help Rover if he'll let us." She gave the offended Morton a hug, which he grudgingly acknowledged by accepting a spoon and following the others across the driveway and into the side yard. Trish handed the spoons to the boys reluctantly. “Are we going t' dig up the tree?" Rover asked. The tree was broad and thick and tall enough to be safe from serving spoons. It took Arthur and Stevie together, with arms outstretched, to measure around its girth. It must have been at least eighty feet tall, and its branches swept out thickly, the lowest ones sweeping the grass almost twenty feet away from the trunk. The shade underneath the branches made it seem like a large, cool room full of green light that was sunshine filtered through millions of fir needles. The ground was soft and springy, carpeted by all the layers of needles that had fallen since the tree was a sapling. No grass would grow there, what with the shade and the smothering needles. Gnarled and twisted roots humped out in all directions from the center. "They're all pointing somewheres," said Trish. "What's the bit about the arrow again?" "It fell to earth, I know not where?" Stevie offered. "Oh hush! What is it, Dub?" "Um... 'between the tall one's fingers, where the arrow...' et cetera, et cetera. It desn't sound as if it's the fingers doing the pointing, but something else. Everybody look around and see if there's any shape or stone or anything that looks like an arrow." "Those old spoons aren't going to be enough if we really have to dig," said Miggle. "I'll go out to the chicken coop and get the shovel." Better, she thought, to be innocently out of the way and let one of the others find the arrow. "Not a shovel." Dub frowned. "We don't want to slice up any roots. See if there's anything smaller." "Yup! There's a trowel and a little spade, I think," agreed Miggle. She sped off under the branches and into the sunshine. Arthur was faintly surprised. Miggle usually argued before she did anything that hadn't been her own idea. He would have expected her to be leaping from one root to another, wanting to be first to find whatever was to be found. Heck, maybe she was reforming. Arthur shrugged and scanned the ground. Even unreformed, he supposed she was better than most girls. She was interested in the right things even if she was silly. He thought of Linda Vincent, a girl in his class. She smudged her eyes all up and ironed her hair and said, "Oh, reely?" all the time with her eyebrows up. Dumb. "That? That's not an arrow ," Kit was saying. "You want to bet?" said Stevie. "Dub, look here! See, where these two roots come together. The space in between is shaped just like an Indian arrowhead. What d'you think?" It did, in fact, look like a roughly shaped arrowhead of the type once common to the area. Arthur whooped, and he and Stevie joined Rover, who had begun digging as soon as Stevie had pointed out the spot. Pine needles flew, and the thick rich humus beneath came up in clumps. If there had been any indications of Miggle's tampering, the evidence would have been scattered by Rover's first efforts or overlooked in the enthusiastic scrabble of spoons that followed. About eight or so inches down, they struck earth and began to proceed more carefully. With their hands the girls scooped out the loose black humus of ancient pine needles, making one pile and beginning another for the soft clayey earth that followed. "Dub? What should we be looking for?" asked Trish dubiously. "Anything. I don't know. Anything people usually bury, I suppose. Money, or papers. I guess it wouldn't be jewels. Unless the Amples were jewel robbers on the side." Kit was carefully crumbling the dirt that Trish scooped from under the flying poons. Her fingers closed upon something flat and hard. "Could it be something little and flat? " she asked. "Why, what is it?" She rubbed the dirt off and scratched at it with a fingernail. "I don't know. It's all waxy and funny." She handed it to Arthur, who turned it over and peered at it. "It is wax, I think." He pulled out his pocket knife and opened the blunt-ended bottle-opener blade. The waxy coating scraped off easily, and with a soft ripping sound the rotten silk underneath gave and peeled away with it. Miggle returned to find Rover still digging and the four others, heads together, bent over Kit's find. She dropped the trowel and spade with a clatter that startled them all. "We found another clue!" said Trish, her blue eyes dancing. "Kit found it." "It's more poetry," Stevie said. "And screwy. There's something peculiar going on here," Dub said, puzzled. "Whatever it is we're looking for must be horribly valuable or important for anyone to have gone to such trouble and mystification. And it must have been meant to be found. If whoever hid it meant to hide it for good or to dig it up again himself, he wouldn't have bothered with clues. Here, take a look." He handed Miggle a dirty, battered piece of metal on which, when it was tilted to catch the light, there could be seen the words: And afk the mountains daughters. "What do you think it means?" she said, handing it back. "All I can think of is Mishannock Run," he said. "It's got to be that. The Trickle's too little for anyone to sit in the middle of it without damming it up." "Besides," said Stevie, practically, "the arrow points that way." Trish was hopping up and down on one foot. "I know! I know what it is! I bet that old arrow is pointing right at it. It's that rock… Throne Rock. It is!" Miggle was surprised. She had not noticed before, but the arrow shape did seem to be in a direct line with the part of the Wood where Mishannock Run churned around Throne Rock and dropped over the little falls. She wondered how she could have missed it. "If it was a snake, it would've bit me," she muttered. "What?" "Mm, nothing." She hadn't realized she had spoken aloud. "Rover, stop digging," she snapped to hide her confusion. "We've found what we were looking for ." Arthur groaned. "But we can't go look. We'd have to cross the Bane if we went off in that direction, and it's almost noon and their blasting time." He was as interested and eager as the others but sat very still and straight, his dark eyes shining. Like a knight off to seek the Holy Grail, Miggle thought with a guilty twinge. She would have felt better if he were more… well, more like Stevie, itching to be off on a lark. After all, it was only a game. Even a real treasure hunt was only a game. She crossed her fingers. The box. That was treasure. So this was a real game. But then the words "real" and "game" went around and around and made a muddle in her head, and she couldn't make out what she was worrying about. Stevie did a headstand. "But we can go up after lunch. We'll have a race." "No fair!" Trish and Kit objected in unison. "We can't run as fast as you can," said Trish. "And besides, I guessed it. I say we all go together." "Me, too," said Rover. "No," Miggle answered firmly. "You have to take your nap after lunch, same as always." She began to dust off his overalls. As the others got up and brushed themselves off, they heard Mrs. Arthur ringing the old brass schoolbell for lunch. And then the ground shook beneath their feet. A flowerpot crashed down the front-porch steps and rolled into the driveway. The house shuddered lightly on its foundation, and the bell gave one more faint clang. It sounded as if hailstones were pattering through the thick branches of the old tree. "Crumbs! " Dub exclaimed. The roar of the blast echoed across the fields to High Egg Ridge and back. Stevie made his eyes wiggle as if they were vibrating from the shock. The girls took their fingers out of their. ears and dazedly followed Rover toward the back door. Mrs. Arthur was sitting on the backsteps, holding the bell in one hand and the handle of a shattered glass pitcher in the other. She gestured glumly toward a wide puddle on the sun-porch floor. "Have some lovely lemonade," she said.   Medallion, Ancient Abaloc The other Abaloc tales, The Daybreakers, Over the Sea's Edge, The Watchers, The Birdstones, The Wolves of Aam, and Shadow Dancers are at present out of print, but used copies can usually be found through online booksellers.  "...an involved but skillfully plotted tale of mystery and magic." --BOOKLIST "Reminiscent of the books of C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald….Imaginative children will find it poetic, wise and suspenseful." –CHICAGO TRIBUNE "It begins, personally, circumstantially, with a trick treasure hunt, and mounts to a harrowing confrontation of good and evil, as the make-believe treasure becomes more-than-real…. It has elements of Green Knowe and A Wrinkle in Time--fine company for any fantasy to keep." –KIRKUS REVIEWS "Beneath the Hill is a blissfully enjoyable book for any child of ten or upwards with imagination who also enjoys adventure. The children, Miggle, Arthur, Stevie, Trish and Kit are a splendidly real bunch and their excursion into the world of faery is so strange and yet inevitable that it carries the reader along in unquestioning suspension of disbelief to the end." –TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, London "The illogical, irresistible sweeping of the reader into a state of being not his own, not of his time--nor of any museum, either…. this is what Jane Louise Curry splendidly achieves in Beneath the Hill…. [B]eneath [the Arthurs’] hill an evil force strives to escape from captivity, using what means it can, including the greed and unscrupulousness of the earth-rapers, the strip-miners who desolate the countryside with their giant diggers. Nature itself is partly corrupted: weasels gang up against men: fog shepherds to destruction. The effectiveness of the story depends on its atmosphere, which changes from holiday breeziness to something super-charged, hallucinatory." –Philippa Pearce, in THE GUARDIAN |
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