that, there was so much dust and mortar that he could hardly see the wall, and he had to hold his arm over his head against the rubble raining down on him. The heaving underfoot went fiercely on. The wall could take no more and fell, backwards from David, in three slow, sulky bangs, into the garden behind Uncle Bernard’s, and set loose even more dust as it went.
The next second, the gravel was covered with angry orange flames, pale and vicious-looking in the sun and dust. David backed out from them desperately, until his shoulders hit the hedge and held him up. But the flames had gone by then. They just flared through the dust as if someone had dropped a match in a pool of petrol, and then went out. David was sure his curse had punctured a gas-main. He looked the heaving ground over hurriedly, to try and locate the leak before going to confess and get help.
He saw a round thing, something like a pipe and at least as thick as his arm, writhing among the rubble, and he thought it was a gas-pipe. It was covered with an ugly mosaic pattern which glittered in the sun. There were others, too, further off, and if David had not known they were gas-pipes, he would have sworn they were snakes – snakes somehow swimming in the rippling ground, as if it were water.
Then the thing nearest David surfaced, shaking clattering small stones off its blunt head, and saw David. It reared up as tall as he was, hissing furiously. David found himself face to face with a very large snake indeed, with a head as flat as Mrs Thirsk’s feet, a forked flicking tongue and yellow eyes which seemed to be made of skin. He could see its fangs, and the poison sacs at the top of them, and he was sure there was poison dripping from those fangs.
David lost his head. He made a frantic sideways dash along the hedge and seized the spade from the compost. The snake struck after him and missed. It was still half under the gravel, which hampered its movements, fortunately for David and the ground was not heaving so much now. David turned round with the spade in both hands, and hit the snake a hearty smack with it. He did not kill it, but he made it recoil. So he hit it again. Meanwhile, at least two other snakes were moving towards him, slowly and with difficulty, as if the ground were getting harder every second. David hit the first snake again, and then aimed a swipe at the next two, to discourage them. But the first snake reared up again as he did so and he had to concentrate on that.
He would never have managed alone. But, while David beat away at the first snake, he heard somebody else busily battering at a snake in the distance. There was so much dust and confusion still, that he never saw the person clearly while the battle lasted. He assumed it was Cousin Ronald at first. Then he caught glimpses of a shape much taller and thinner than Cousin Ronald’s and he thought it must be Aunt Dot. But he had little time to think. The ground was hardening all the time and he simply hammered the snakes back into it. If he hit them often enough, he discovered, they went back under the gravel and stayed there. The real trouble was to do it before the next snake could reach him, and that was where the other person helped. It was not until David had smacked the last length of the last snake well and truly into the earth that he realised this person was a complete stranger.
They stood looking at one another in the settling dust, David leaning on the spade and the stranger propped on the hoe he must have fetched from the shed beyond the hedge. David was shaking all over. The stranger was panting rather, but not in the least upset. He looked jaunty. He even laughed a little, as if snakes were a bit of a joke. He was not as tall as David had thought – only about David’s height – and he seemed a year or so older than David.
“Thanks,” David said to him gratefully.
“Thank you,” replied the stranger, jauntily smiling. “I’m Luke. Who are you?”
“David Allard,” said David. “I live in that house there. Do you—?” He meant to ask if Luke lived in the house beyond the broken wall, but he turned to point as he said it and after that he could think of nothing but what a hideous mess it was. The wall was in three long heaps – an utter ruin, lying on the neatly mown grass of the neat and respectable orchard belonging to the neat and respectable house David could just see down among the trees. David thought it was a miracle that nobody had come out of that house – or Uncle Bernard’s – with loud shouts of fury. Or not yet. “Oh dear,” David said miserably.
“A bit of a ruin, isn’t it?” Luke agreed.
“Yes, and I did it,” David said. “I shall get into trouble.” Which was putting it mildly, he thought.
Luke laughed, and jumped on to the nearest heap of wall to look at it more closely. “Did you really do this?” he said. “How?”
David followed Luke over to the wall, thinking that Luke must be a trespasser and nothing to do with the neat and respectable house after all. He was wearing cast-off looking clothes, much like David’s, and he was covered with brick dust, cement dust and what seemed to be soot. And it was plain he did not care two hoots about the broken wall. He sat himself down on a convenient heap of bricks and patted another to show David where to sit too.
“Explain,” he said, and folded his arms, ready to listen, with a very engaging look of interest. Luke had a sharp and freckly face, under the dirt, and a burn or something on one cheek, probably from those sudden flames. His hair seemed to be red. At any rate, he had those kind of red-brown eyes that only go with red hair. David rather took to him.
“I did it trying to curse,” David confessed, and sat down too, though he could not help taking a nervous look at the respectable house first.
“Don’t worry. They’re out, or they’d have been up here raving half an hour ago,” Luke said, which proved to David that he was certainly only a trespasser. “Now, explain. Whom were you cursing?”
“All my horrible relations,” David said. It was a relief to talk about it. He told Luke how his relations did not want him, how they were planning to send him to Mr Scrum so that they could go to Scarborough, about Mrs Thirsk, the food and the chewing gum, and about the row at lunch. Luke listened sympathetically, but it was when David came to the cursing part that he grew really interested.
“What did you say?” he asked. “Can you remember?”
David thought, and was forced to shake his head. “No. It’s gone. But I suppose it was some kind of curse if it knocked the wall down.”
Luke smiled. “No. It wasn’t a curse.”
“How do you know? It brought out a load of snakes too, didn’t it?”
“But it wasn’t a curse, all the same,” said Luke.
David was a little annoyed. For one thing, Luke could not possibly know, and, for another, although it would have been a relief not to have uttered a curse after all, it was plain to David that his words had had a powerful effect of some kind. “What was it then?” he said challengingly.
“Unlocking words. The opposite of a curse, if you like,” Luke said, as if he really knew. David said nothing. He thought Luke was trying to make him feel less guilty about the ruin they were sitting on. Luke smiled. “You don’t believe me, do you?” David shook his head. “Oh well,” said Luke. “But they were, and I’m truly grateful to you. You let me out of a really horrible prison.” He smiled happily and pointed with one slightly blistered finger to the ground under the wall.
This was too much for David, who, after all, had been there to see that nothing but flames and snakes had come from the ground. “Pull the other leg,” he said.
Luke looked at him with one eyebrow up and a mischievous, calculating look on his filthy face. He seemed to be deciding just how much nonsense David could be brought to swallow. Then he laughed.
“Have it your own way,” he said. “But I am grateful, and I’ll do anything I can in return.”
“Thanks,” David said disbelievingly. “Then I suppose you can help me stand this wall up again.”
Luke looked at David in that shrewd and mischievous way again. “I might,” he said. “Shall we see what we can do?”
“Oh, do let’s,”