Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  This play on his ears and snout was intoxicating enough, but the impression of the great tunnel he was in was only completed by its awesome size and evident age. Its wall and roof towered above him, giving the immediate impression that it had been burrowed in some long-distant age, when giant moles roamed the earth. The walls were hard and a little chalky, the floors smooth and well packed, while the curves of its roof and corners, and where subsidiary tunnels joined it, were subtle and sinewy.

  Set into the walls at irregular intervals were the grey-white roundels of enormous flints, plump with curves and hollows, which added not only to the curious flowing appearance of the tunnels but created a feeling of great antiquity as well.

  It occurred to Bracken how extraordinary it was that moles had been able to move these great stones so that they might fit the tunnel—so deliberate did their setting seem—but then he saw that, by some miracle of orientation, the tunnel had been burrowed to fit the existing position of the stones. It was as if, in some way, the ancient moles had taken their cue not from any desire to impose a pattern on virgin soil but from the pattern set by whatever power it was that had first placed the stones. The feeling of age and venerability the tunnel gave him was such that he almost tiptoed along so he wouldn’t disturb the ancient peace.

  What he did disturb, however, was the deposit of fine white chalk dust that had settled through time on the floor and rougher parts of the walls. The first big drift he came to he mistook for a rise in the floor, and went unthinking into it so that particles rose about him in a great choking cloud of dust, and he backed away from it, sneezing and gasping, his fur all white.

  After that, he watched carefully for the thicker drifts, gradually getting used to the fact that the chalk tended to be deposited on alternate sides of the great tunnel, creating a winding path of clearer floor down the centre of the tunnel—which added to the impression the tunnel gave to a mole travelling down it of dancing or weaving along past the immovable stones of time.

  Bracken did not enter any of the subsidiary tunnels that ran off this bigger tunnel on his first two days of exploration. He was too tired and too cautious. His explorations of the Westside, Barrow Vale and the slopes in May and June had taught him that exploration is best done carefully until a mole has a grasp of the orientation of the tunnels accessible from it.

  He quickly established that what he had come to regard as the peripheral communal tunnel of the Ancient System ran, at this point anyway, parallel with the cliff’s edge and roughly one hundred moleyards in from it. It ran on up towards the top of the hill where he and Hulver had lain hidden before Midsummer Night, and back down towards the easternmost side of the slopes. There was only one other tunnel running back to the cliff’s edge as did the first one he had found himself in—and this, too, fell sheer to the void below.

  On the third day of his new exploration, Bracken travelled a little way down one of the tunnels that branched off towards the centre of the Ancient System, which was the part he most wanted to reach. The tunnel was smaller than the communal one from which it led out, just as elegantly burrowed, and flints still lined its walls.

  He was only a few moleyards into it when he saw ahead of him the well-rounded entrance into a burrow. He approached with heart beating rapidly and breath held, for in any system it is the burrows that bring home the fact that moles actually once lived and ate, slept and fought there. He entered it a little nervously, automatically sniffing at the entrance for the scent of life, though he knew that there could be none there. The burrow was bigger than those in the present system, and oval instead of round. Its soil was the same grey-white of the tunnels, the walls were smooth and held no flints, and on its floor lay the dusty fibres of some long-since-perished nesting material. The whole effect was sparse and cold, and try as he might, he could not imagine moles living there in some past time; he felt the age of the burrow, but no warm sense of its past life.

  It was the same further on—the same oval burrow, the same sparseness, the same disappointing inability to reach back to the moles who must once have lived there. Quite what Bracken expected he didn’t know, but ever since he had first heard of the Ancient System the idea of its past life had excited his imagination. Now he was here—well, he wanted more than he could have.

  He explored down all the subsidiary tunnels leading towards the centre of the wood, which were within reach of the base he had established for himself in his original tunnel. He gradually got used to the rich sound and by association and deduction was able to start to interpret it. At the same time, and without knowing it, he built up his strength again so that when he was ready for more ambitious exploration, he was fit enough for it as well.

  It was the second week of August when he made the decision to press forwards to where he reckoned the centre of the system would be, and not try and return in one day but to make do with whatever burrow he could find. By now, the great communal tunnel that had so impressed him at the start was familiar, its curves and twists still mysterious and beautiful, but the initial awe he had felt was replaced by a certain proprietorial confidence. He felt there was nothing more it could tell him and that having conquered it, so to speak, he might as well move on to better things.

  With this dangerously complacent attitude, Bracken left what was in fact no more than the periphery of the Ancient System and struck westwards towards its very centre. He took the biggest of the subsidiary tunnels and, ignoring all side turns and burrow entrances, pressed on down it, anxious to see if he could find something like a centre to the system.

  Bracken’s sense of direction was, as ever, very accurate, for the tunnel went directly west towards where he was certain the Stone itself stood.

  However, he was over-optimistic about the speed he would make, for after two or three hundred moleyards, the tunnel’s condition deteriorated rapidly as it sloped upwards nearer the surface and entered an area of softer, blacker soil. There were frequent roof-falls to burrow through; they had cascaded down in the long-distant past and opened the way for superficial vegetation to send down its roots, winding and confused, into what had once been a perfect tunnel. At the same time, the roots of trees impinged on the tunnel, sometimes sending a root shaft vertically through it, so that he had to squeeze his way past, while more than once, an old root ran along the tunnel itself, melding into the soil around it and losing the tunnel in a debris of mould that he did not much like burrowing through.

  So his progress became slow, and his early hopes of a quick passage to the marvels that he hoped lay ahead were lost in the sweat and toil of pressing forward. The tunnel was not so deep in the ground as the big communal one from which he had started, and had a more temporary air about it, and somehow, somewhere, lost the awesome sense of the past he had felt initially.

  This feeling was accentuated by the fact that the marvellous richness of sound in the earlier tunnel was muffled and lost in the confusion of roof-fall and roots he was battling through. He began to feel isolated and cut off in a way he had not felt before, and to have a sense that he was lost for ever in the ruins of a system that was now empty of life and interest.

  So strong did this feeling become that more than once he was tempted to burrow up to the surface and press on across it to a point where the Ancient System might have more to offer. Only his desire truly to explore the Ancient System, coupled with a real fear of the dangers from predators on the open surface above him, kept him pressing on through the ruined tunnel. Until finally, and suddenly, he was tired. His left shoulder grew aching and heavy, throbbing where the wound had been, while the sounds in the tunnel seemed to fade and swell, whirling in a dizzy way about him, so that he knew he must rest.

  He chose one of the many subsidiary runs off the tunnel he had been going down and found a small burrow a few moleyards into it. It was dusty and infiltrated from above by the white fronds of roots, but at least it gave him a floor on which to sleep and a secure roof over his head. But he was too fatigued to fall into s
leep immediately, dozing instead, while listening to the muffled sounds about him.

  If he fell asleep, he did not notice it, for he awoke with a start and the crystal-clear conviction that the sound about him was different from any sound he had heard before in the Ancient System. It had a depth and resonance that suggested… that said… he couldn’t say what. He could hear, but he could not put words to it. But he was suddenly afraid in a way he had never known before—a fear not of possible hurt to his body, but of some wonder, some depth, that once felt or seen would strip away something from him and leave a routeway of vulnerability running to his very soul.

  But just as a pup may often face some danger so enormous that he cannot even comprehend it and innocently stand before it like an anemone in a gale, so Bracken now only briefly acknowledged this fear. He shook himself awake, got up, and was off down the tunnel with renewed excitement, convinced that the most gruelling part of the journey was over and that the deeper sound ahead heralded a discovery that would take him at last to the heart of the system.

  He was right. The tunnel began to enter a harder chalk subsoil and to drop down to still and ancient depths where all windsound began to fade, to be replaced by strange distant creakings and groanings.

  The tunnel ran deeper and deeper and then levelled off, the floor covered by dust and grime that had been disturbed by no creature for generations. The sound of his pawsteps was muffled by dust, and when he scratched his claws along the wall, the sound travelled ahead but did not echo back, rather losing itself in some great void at the end of the tunnel. He soon found out why. The tunnel emerged into a chamber, the size of which took Bracken’s breath away. It was so big that had his paws not been on solid ground, he might have thought he was floating in space itself. The chamber was full of the mysterious creakings and strainings he had heard before, coming from its far side. The walls actually stretched ruggedly to his right and left but appeared to stretch in a straight line and not in the curve he was used to from other big chambers he had been in. A curving wall, after all, suggests that a place has confines. A straight wall in a chamber hints at massive size.

  Bracken crouched down in the protection of his little tunnel entrance and began to feel his way mentally into the place. Its roof soared so high above him that its height seemed even further off than its unknown, unseen walls. He let out a brief call to test the echo, and it travelled away from him, falling into silence until he had almost given it up before far, far from the distance, the echo returned, small and lorn. As he was thinking about what this meant another echo came back from his call, this time from somewhere high above him. Then finally one more, from way off to the right.

  He explored first to the right and then around the perimeter to the left, stopping in each case only when he reached either end of the massive wall that towered darkly on the far side of the chamber.

  The wall cast fear into him, for it was curiously carved, with great swirling crevices and jagged embossments that gave it an eerie power to distort and amplify any sound that came up against it. The sound of Bracken’s pawfalls became the tramp, tramp, tramp of an army of great moles, causing him to peer furtively about him in the dark to see if these phantoms were really there. An intake of breath became a dark gasp of horror so convincing that it made him feel the fear it sounded like. As for a hum, which he tried, that turned into the deep chant of dark and malevolent moles.

  Such was the power of these echoes or sounds that Bracken was at first reluctant to progress to its very centre. But as it was from that murky and unseen depth that the creakings and stressings that vibrated about the chamber came, he knew that finally he would have to penetrate into it.

  He thought about what he had found. Three tunnels on one side of the chamber, three on the other, all radiating to different parts of the system. Six in all, not counting the tiny tunnel that had led him here, and which he suspected had been burrowed in secret as a special way for somemole, or moles, in the past. Six tunnels. Was there, then, a seventh, leading through to the Stone clearing which must surely lie beyond this great embossed wall, and which must lie further along it?

  Slowly he set off, stepping out several moleyards from the wall so he could see ahead just a little better, and so his hums would not be quite so powerful.

  The sounds, when he briefly created them by a tentative hum—he did not want to provoke the same reaction as before—now evoked a feeling of vulnerable good spirits in him, less jerky than before but quite without the smooth gentleness of the first set of sounds. He felt that at any moment they would take him plummeting down to misery again, and stopped humming, though it was difficult to stop the feeling continuing and changing as he went on. He looked at the wall, whose carvings were clear but getting more complex again, the lines spiralling and looping from ground to shoulder height and sometimes beyond.

  He tried humming louder to see what would happen, and what happened was not pleasant. The sound had a dark quality to it. At first it was distant, coming from somewhere high up the wall some way beyond, hanging off the overhang and easily forgotten if he concentrated on the more pleasant sounds that came to him straight off the wall. But this became harder the further he went, and, despite himself and his fear of being caught up again in dark sound, he continued to hum so that the darkness in the sound grew blacker and its lightness fled behind him to where the more melodious patterns and wall carvings were. This black sound began to overwhelm him and he began to push and stagger forward as if losing his sense of direction, trying to catch up with his breath and stop his own throat sending out these unnatural sounds that pulled him onwards and on.

  In front of him, a great jag of flint, black and shiny, rose up from the floor, set solid in the wall and tapering down into the floor. Its top was so sharp and fine that it was translucent, and a mole could have cut a single whisker with it. Bracken staggered around it to face another jag of flint, bigger than the first, that appeared to thrust towards him. He ran on, whimpering with fear. The sounds were dark, blacker and more and more owl-like, and he struggled desperately with himself to stop making them, his paw rattling its talons against his throat, scratching himself to stop the noise, conquer the terror… Until there were no more flints and his breath came out shallower and he managed to twist his mouth to his paw and stop the sound, saliva running on to his talons with the effort. There was another set of the jagged flinty rocks beyond him, the same as the ones he had just passed by. They ran into the wall. His eyes followed their line upwards to the great beak of shiny cold flint that curved up to two massive roundels of black-silver eyes, all of which seemed to form the massive face of an owl infinitely evil to look on. Its black, shiny flint seemed to give it a shimmering light.

  The sound he had stopped making still echoed about the chamber, swirling blackly somewhere between him and the wall, caught between the flint talons that shot out on either side of him and seemed to draw him to the centre of the wall. His eyes fell slowly and fearfully from those of the great owl to the wall beneath, the part that lay under the beak and between the great black talons. The part that lay straight ahead of him.

  What he saw there made him gasp in horror. For there, ahead of him, was the start of the last tunnel, the seventh, the one he had been seeking; and crouched at the entrance, its head resting between its paws, the round, black voids of its eye sockets looking straight at him, was the blanched skeleton of a massive mole.

  Beyond it he caught the full blast of the straining, creaking sounds he had first heard when he entered the chamber. Sliding, rasping, slowly crushing and melding, the rasp of wood on living wood, a sound like old branches rubbing against each other on a wild night, only below ground.

  Then he knew what it was he was hearing: the sound of the roots of the great beeches that surrounded the Stone clearing and into which he now knew with terror this seventh tunnel must lead. As he listened, the sounds seemed to come to him through the gaunt holes of the skull’s eyes, or to be spat out at him from its vicio
us teeth, seeking to entangle him in the collapsed rib bones scattered on the ground behind the skull.

  To reach the centre of the system he would have to face the living roots he could hear but yet not see; and to reach them he would have to pass by this massive skeleton that seemed to carry the very essence of the root sounds themselves.

  But not now, not at this moment. The fears he had so far controlled exploded inside him and turning, breath gasping, he started to run from the mole body in panic, heading across the great chamber and making instinctively for the tunnel to the northeast, which carried the scent of oaks and worms, and of a life that was now and that he needed.

  Chapter Twelve

  August is an untidy month in Duncton Wood, when the leaves of the trees have lost both the virgin greenness in which they gloried up until June and their rich, rustling maturity, which was one of the pleasures of July. Now they are past their best. Here and there, passing August rain brings one or two leaves down, green but limp, on to the wood’s brown floor to die among the great blowzy fern and insinuating ivy into which they have fallen.

  Birdsong wanes down to the fidgeting of yellowhammer and greenfinch at the wood’s edge and along some of its more open paths and vales, while in its heart only the call of rooks, with the flapping of their wings, makes a noise that carries. Still, on the occasional hot day, when the sun forms warm pools of yellow light in the rich green undergrowth, a stag beetle may suddenly rise and buzz through the air, or ants rustle, or gall wasps drone. And then a mole in Barrow Vale may yawn and stretch and another may affect to ask what the fuss is all about.