A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

The lane ran between two walls of living green.

Not ordinary hedges — not the thin, clipped kind you find along roadsides. These were Devon hedges: great earth banks, shoulder-height and ancient, topped with hazel and blackthorn and bramble, layered so thickly with growing things that they were less like boundaries and more like the edges of a forest. Yellowhammers threaded through the stems. A slow worm slipped from a warm stone as Benji passed. The air was thick with the smell of damp earth and dog violet and the particular Devon green that comes from so much rain and so many centuries of growing in the same place.

Benji had walked lanes in many counties. He had never walked anything quite like this.

He slowed — not because of anything he could name, but because something in the hedge to his left had changed. A quality of attention, perhaps. The sense that something inside that great earthen bank was listening.

He stopped.

His red collar caught the morning light.

There it was — rising from the bank itself, not from the roots above but from somewhere deep inside the earth: a soft, shivery sound, like someone brushing fingertips across dry leaves.

Shhhrrrff… shhhrrrff…

Benji pressed his nose to the bank.

Warm fur. Dry grass. Nervous excitement.

And beneath it all, something older: the deep mineral smell of Devon earth that had been settled and lived-in for a very, very long time.

"Hello?" he said softly, because that seemed polite.

The bank didn't answer. But something inside it moved.

A tiny rustle. A flicker of shadow near the base of the bank where the old stone and earth met the lane floor. And there — just visible — a small dark entrance, worn smooth at the edges by the passage of many small bodies over many generations.

Benji crouched and peered in.

Two bright eyes stared back at him.

He yelped in surprise and fell backwards onto the lane. The eyes blinked. Then a tiny creature stepped into the light.