Duncton Quest (83 page)

Reluctantly, Rowan agreed to go on.

“I remember the dark chill of that tunnel closing in on us as we picked our way down on to its bed, over which the stream of water found its way. Parts were dry and we again smelt rat and felt very nervous. I do not know why we went on. We marked the wall at the tunnel entrance and from then on made our mark regularly, as high as we could, for it was clear from deposits on the wall that sometimes the water rose. The walls were soft and crumbly and took our scrivenings well.

“Light came down from the surface above through distant holes up vertical tunnels in the ceiling. We moved from shadow to shadow and though the smell of the place was sickening at first we got used to it. We heard unidentifiable sounds and slidings all around. We went on quickly, the tunnel turning sometimes, but always sloping a little down and others coming into it. We continued to mark the course lest we could not find our way back again.

“Above us on the surface night came. We found access to a ledge above the bed of the stream, which was beginning to fill with rubbish and slimy filth, and our passage became easier. Night deepened but no real darkness came for the tunnels were lit by lights from the surface. It was in this orange-yellowness that we slept. That night Haize woke me, talons to my mouth. Below us a huge shape came by, brown-black and smooth, and then another. Then a third and fourth. Smooth they went and heavy, snuffling and squeaking. Rats. I could smell them in the murk. I was terrified even though the ledge we were on was too narrow and slippery for such large animals to reach us with effect. But they seemed to have scented us for they ran back and forth, snouting up towards where we crouched. Then they were gone, their shadows running darkly ahead of them. Later we heard rats fighting or mating, hard to say which. Then silence. Long silence. We moved on while it was still night, leaving marks now at every junction, but we were very hungry and resolved to get back to the surface.”

The moles found a smaller tunnel coming down into the river on its far side and scented fresh air riding on the dribble of water that came down it. They were able to cross the stream on rubbish piled in it and to climb up the tunnel.

“It led to the surface and we unexpectedly found dank grass, black sticky soil, and a shrub of a kind. All was grimy, all blighted by the Wen. The only clean thing was birdsong and that was distant. Dawn light struck walls high above us but it was a long time before the sun reached us. We saw we were entirely enclosed. There was a sparrow but no other life. More foetid worms for food, and then we rested.

“We resolved to end our journey there and return the way we had come. As we started back for the entrance to the small tunnel Heath paused on the grass. He sensed tunnels and burrowed and found one. A mole tunnel! Old, blocked by roots, barely passable, but undoubtedly made by mole. We went down it and it went straight for a time and then to a chamber. Just a tunnel and a chamber. Beyond that it was blocked by twofoot work. The other way the same. It was a fragment of a lost system.

“I wish we had not found it. It kindled Heath’s interest. But since we all felt better for the rest on the surface, he insisted we continue a little way back down the twofoot tunnels, arguing that perhaps we could find more of the lost system, and even some tunnels to lead us on.” Rowan paused and fell silent.

“Story-telling Sir, Mayweed awaits your next sentence with interest and curiosity, while thinking that headstrong Heath is, or was (you have not said, but Mayweed fears the worst) a mole after his own humble heart; which is to say an explorer, a searcher, a journeyer! So, bereft Sir, speak!”

“Er, yes,” said Rowan scratching himself and puzzled at Mayweed’s sudden, and excited outburst. “We found tunnels all right and not much further down than the point from which we had been able to get to the surface. Lots of tunnels, but quite deserted, all blocked off by concrete walls built by twofoots. The structure even covered them so that these tunnels werre cut off from everything.”

“Was there light?” asked Tryfan.

“Near the entrances, there was twofoot light, but deeper inside no light, no noise. Nothing but... nothing but the sounds our talons made if —”

“Yes?” said Spindle.

“Pitch-black, no wind, no sound, nothing. Very old tunnels they felt, and among them a chamber whose walls were rough and yet, if a mole ran his talons down them as Heath did, and then I myself did, why there was sound: extraordinary sound.”

“Dark Sound,” muttered Spindle, remembering the scribings at the Library entrance which he had used to try to frighten Boswell and Tryfan when they had first come to Uffington.

“It was old sound, as of moles singing, deep and ancient. It was not frightening. Their song was an urging or a calling and I was never able to answer it.”

“Answer it?” said Tryfan.

“Yes, it was a calling to go on, and I knew as I heard it, and Heath sounded it again and again, that he would want to follow it. I knew that then. But that was not to be.”

Eventually, the moles went back out into the main twofoot tunnel in which the stream ran, and it was there disaster struck them. From their right three rats attacked, quite suddenly and without warning. They bore down on the three and in the confusion each seemed to run a different way. From then on all was panic and confusion for Rowan. He felt the pain of a bite as instinctively he ran back the way they had so fearfully come, and as he went he heard a mole screaming, though whether it was Heath or his sister he never found out. The rats turned from him back to that scream as a pack and he took the opportunity to flee, making his way, though wounded, back to the place on the narrow ledge on which they had rested two days before, and from where they had first observed the rats.

He reached the ledge as the rats returned and one tried to pull him back down. Somehow he climbed high, just out of its reach. There was no sign of his two companions, but several of the rats had blood around their mouths and claws as they clustered beneath him, scrabbling up the wall to get at him. They were so near he could smell their vile breath. He talon-thrust one in the eye, and he bit the paw of another. One climbed on another’s back to reach him and nearly forced him off the ledge, but he was able to pull himself out of its reach.

For two days he lived in a nightmare of fear and growing weakness as the huge rats tried to reach him, replacing each other in an endless relay of snarling and claws. If it had not been for the moisture on the walls, thick, evil-tasting condensation, he might have died, for it was the only nourishment he had. Even so, lack of solid food caused him agonies of hunger until, after two days, passivity and weakness began to overtake him. Yet, somehow, he fought off the rats’ attempts to take him, shuffling first this way and then that along the ledge, just out of their reach.

It was sometime in the evening of the third day, when Rowan’s world seemed to have reduced itself to feeble pushes at ever more powerful thrusts from rats whose teeth and red eyes and smell was all he knew, that the rats below him suddenly fell away and hunched on the floor below, snuffling at each other and hesitant, and then rearing back on their haunches and snouting the long way up the tunnel westwards, towards the direction in which Rowan and his friends had first come. Two suddenly ran that way and then came skeltering back. Then they all turned, and without a further look at Rowan disappeared down into the subterranean depths of the Wen.

There was a period of silence, then a rush of air down the tunnel from the west, and then an ominous roaring sound and Rowan knew a flood of water was coming. Ahead of it there flowed a sickening enfeebling smell, and even as it attacked his snout and eyes he saw coming towards him a great wave or rush of water, foaming and brown, thick and turbulent, running down the tunnel as high if not higher than the ledge he was on. He had barely time to take stance and find what grip he could upon the slippery ledge before the flood was on him, at him, pulling him, noisy, violent, vile in its suffocating stench, filthy in its touch, slithy in its effect.

The air was full of the racing roaring sound of it and he felt it swirl at his haunches and paws, loosening first one and then the next, lifting him bodily, swirling him, turning him, taking him, throwing him as parts of its brown filth forced their slippy way into his mouth and snout and he felt himself drowning, turning, thrown, thump!

“I was dislodged by it, then nearly drowned by it, and finally hurled by it into some eddy that pushed me back on to the same ledge I had been pulled off, but further down the tunnel. There I clung as near death as a mole can be, until the flood eased and then stopped as quickly as it had started.

“From there I fell, weak and gasping, on to the filthy floor, water flowing round me.” He paused, looked about them with a distaste so palpable upon his face that it seemed almost that he was covered again in the muck and excrement of that filthel’s flow. He shook himself with disgust, as if to be free from that memory.

“And what saved me? How did I escape? I heard then, from further down the tunnel, the same call or song that the scribings made in those lost mole tunnels we had found. I looked that way and saw, staring at me, the eyes of a rat, and then another, then a third. Red, bitter, greedy. I saw death in those moments. Yet the soundings went on and I knew it was Haize or Heath signalling they were still alive. I could not know which. Alluring was that call, most beautiful, and those rats, that had hidden in some foul place from the flood and had re-emerged to come for me once more, heard that sound too. First one, then another, then the third turned, their tails slithered in the light, their paws squelched, and they were gone.

“I turned and ran, up that long tunnel, away from that place, leaving whichever mole it was had survived to his or her fate. One by one I found those marks Heath had made and used them to guide myself out. Sometimes I heard pursuit, or thought I did. I did not stop to see but eventually came back to the Wormwood Waste, and then made my way back to here. I had no courage to return, nor have I ever found it since. So I wait here now, hoping that the Stone may forgive me, or that one day a mole will come through that archway who I abandoned long ago.”

There was silence when he had finished and though each one of his listeners sought for words to comfort him none came, for a mole must first forgive himself if he is to truly accept the forgiveness of others.

Eventually he stared at each of them and said, “Do not venture there. It is not a place for mole and the wrath of the Stone will be upon you if you try.”

It was Mayweed who broke the silence, and by his question affirmed for all of them whatever the warnings old Rowan made they
would
venture on together.

“Stricken Sir,” said Mayweed, “this humble mole wishes to know for his own interest and pursuit, what mark your friend Heath made upon the walls which guided you back to safety.”

“Mark?” said Rowan in an abstracted voice as if he was still living the horrors he had described. “Yes, yes... I can make it still.”

With that he reached a worn talon forward and scribed a mark on the tunnel floor into the dirt there. Long it was and curved, and looped at one end.

They stared at it and Tryfan came round to Rowan’s side of it and snouted it, and then ran a talon gently along its line.

“Well, well!” he said in some surprise.

Spindle touched it and looked puzzled. Mayweed peered at it one way and then another and said, “Humble me, Sirs and delightful Miss, has learned a little scribing, but this is just a mark is it not, educated Sirs?” Starling ran a paw over it and looked enquiringly at Tryfan. She had not learnt scribing yet but could see the mark interested Tryfan.

“Tell me Rowan, was there scribing in Ickenham?” he asked.

“I was too young to know that. But scrivening, yes. At Longest Night and Midsummer we said a prayer or two, and made some marks. I never learnt them, but I think perhaps Heath, being the mole he was, did try.”

They all looked at Tryfan, sensing there was something behind his question.

“This “mark” your friend Heath made is not just a mark, it is scribing.”

“But I don’t recognise it as such!” said Spindle whose scribing by then was equal to Tryfan’s own.

“This mark is ancient, as ancient perhaps as those tunnels you found and sounds you heard. It is medieval mole and is the first scribing a scribemole learnt in the old way, when he was taught by a master as I was taught by Boswell. But more than that,” whispered Tryfan, staring at Rowan’s scribing as if he was seeing his own past, “it is the mark a White Mole makes to show he has passed that way!”

“Does it
mean
anything?” asked Starling in awe.

“Oh yes, it means a very great deal. It means almost everything. Scribing came first from ideas, and although moles make ideas complex yet all start simply enough. A mole does well to remember that! This scribing represents no more nor less than a worm, and a worm is food. In old mole this scribing represents a word, and that word is ‘life’.

“Your friend Heath could not have found a more potent scribing to mark a way through the tunnels of the Wen. However he learnt it – for I don’t think that he guessed it – and whether he knew its meaning, which I doubt, he chose a White Mole’s symbol for life itself. It saved your life, Rowan, by guiding you back out of the tunnels. Let us pray to the Stone that it saved Heath or Haize’s life by guiding them onwards.”

“But the rats...” whispered Rowan.

“Nomole can know, not yet. But when you scribed that word without knowing its meaning on this floor you gave me faith to want to go on. I think the others will come too, and that you, Rowan, will wait on here, but with faith now, and hope, for we will try to return or send you news that may free you of the horror you saw and heard, and from which you never escaped.”

“We certainly shall come!” said Spindle.

“Splendid Sirs, Miss, Mayweed is not filled with delight at the awful prospect but will go all the same.”

“Oh good!” said Starling. “When?”