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important my Thinking Chair is. Do you want to stay for lunch?’
    ‘Can’t,’ said Muddy, with a gleam of excitement in his eyes. ‘I’m going over to The Horror House. I’m getting a guided tour this afternoon.’
    ‘You’re joking,’ I gasped. ‘How? Tellmetellmetellme!’ Obviously, I couldn’t see my own eyes at that moment, but I’m pretty certain they had a gleam of
excitement in them too.
    The Horror House was something of a local legend. If any building ever deserved a nickname, it was number 13, Deadman Lane. Imagine a spooky old house in a movie. Then imagine it much spookier
than that. Then add a bit more spookiness for extra effect, and you still wouldn’t be anywhere close to how utterly creepy this place looked.
    It was a large, looming house, with huge bay windows to either side of a squat-shaped front door, from which protruded an ornate, stone-columned porch. There were two upper floors, each with a
series of tall, narrow windows that gave an impression of gappy teeth. The roof was sharply angled, topped with a ridge of crested tiles, and a couple of dormers poked out of it, which looked like
narrowed eyes above the skull-like grin of the windows below.
    Nobody had lived at 13, Deadman Lane for years. The place was boarded up, set back from the road behind a high fence of corrugated metal sheeting. People started calling it The Horror House
because of its weird looks, and because it was an ideal reference point if you wanted to give someone directions to the shopping mall (‘You go straight past The Horror House and it’s
left at the traffic lights.’).
    ‘But how are you even getting in there?’ I said. ‘It’s all locked and barred.’
    ‘Not since Monday, it’s not,’ said Muddy, grinning. ‘Jack’s parents have bought it.’
    ‘Jack Wilson in our class?’ I said. ‘He kept that quiet.’
    ‘He didn’t even know himself until Monday. His mum and dad didn’t know if they’d get the money for it. They’re going to do it up, and turn it into a hotel. Jack
says his dad says they’re up to their eyeballs in debt until they can renovate the whole place. The electrics haven’t been updated since 1955, and it’s still got a heating system
dated 1937. A broken heating system, of course.’
    ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I take it they’re getting started straight away?’
    ‘Those heating pipes got taken out on Tuesday,’ said Muddy. ‘Pity. I’d love to get my hands on a bit of vintage machinery like that. They’ve been ripping stuff out
every day. Which is lucky, really, because otherwise they wouldn’t have found the secret parchment.’
    ‘Secret parchment?’ I said, intrigued.
    ‘Oh, Jack says his dad says it’s not a real one. But it sounds like fun, all the same. It claims there’s treasure hidden somewhere in that house.’
    I steered Muddy out of the shed and into the house. ‘I want to hear more about this mysterious parchment,’ I said. ‘You’ve changed your mind, you’re staying for
lunch after all.’

 
C HAPTER
T WO
    A S M UDDY AND I SAT at the kitchen table, scoffing our beans on toast, he told
me about the parchment.
    ‘Jack and his dad found it the other day,’ said Muddy, piling up beans on his fork. ‘They were ripping out some old wooden wall panels in one of the upstairs rooms. This
panelling had been put in when the house was built, about two hundred years ago, you can tell by looking at the wall behind, apparently. But the damp had recently got to it, and it was past saving.
Anyway, they were stacking up all these big pieces of wood, and Jack suddenly noticed a sheet of paper, wedged into a sort of slot at the back of one of the panels.’
    ‘A sort of slot?’ I said.
    ‘Jack’s dad took a look at it,’ said Muddy. ‘There was a removable section in that panel, quite low down, behind a spot they’d removed a radiator from. A kind of
hidden storage box, no bigger than a school lunch box. They’d never have found it