Bracken turned to look at the stone again, for he knew he must soon leave and he wanted to remember it. After all, this was the heart of the system he had sought so long to explore. He looked at it now (as it seemed to him) more objectively, from the illusory world of time he and Rebecca were so reluctantly reinhabiting, and it no longer seemed quite so smooth or quite so oval as it had before. There was a delicate whorl of interlocking shadows on it… not shadows, but carvings, or rather embossments, like those he had seen before on a cruder and grander scale on the wall of the Chamber of Dark Sound.
‘I know those patterns,’ he said, half to himself. ‘I know their power. If you hum, they will make a music back to you.’ He half reached out towards the stone, as if warming his paws at its light, and began to hum. The burrow was soon filled with sounds in return, some far lighter and more beautiful than the most wonderful he had heard from the wall, others far darker and more unbearable.
Rebecca began to writhe and gasp as the beginnings of a scream formed inside her, while Bracken felt fear and panic overtake him. He stopped humming and reached out involuntarily to the stone, as if trying to stop the sound coming from it, and as he touched it, the light plunged out once more, casting them not only into darkness but into a depth of despair—a sense of loss—that brought horror to them and made them both grasp for each other instinctively.
As Bracken’s paw left to touch Rebecca, the light slowly returned again and their sense of loss began to fade. This time Bracken could feel the impression of the stone on his paw, not smooth like moss, but more like an embossed abrasion, like a pain that had a shape to it. Yet when he looked, there was nothing there.
‘Come on, Rebecca, we must go,’ he said, and without looking back he turned out of the burrow, down the big tunnel they had dug, and away under the rising ceiling of the Stone. Rebecca followed, more distressed than he, and kept close behind, fearful that he would go too fast. But this feeling lasted only for a short time and when they had climbed the root path back to the hollow of the tree and the Stone was behind them, they stopped and looked around, surprised again at its size and beginning to wonder what it was they had seen, and felt.
‘Will we ever come here again?’ asked Rebecca.
Bracken whispered that he didn’t know, that he didn’t understand quite where they had been, and started again on the trek up the path. The sound in the tree hollow was now more stressed and great shatterings of straining noise cascaded about them, like the sound of lightning they could not see, great rumblings of a power so great that they felt they were nothing in the middle of a storm. There was windnoise, too, and the path ahead of them seemed to tremble or sway, not much but enough to suggest that out on the surface a morning wind was already awakening and stirring the tree that guarded the Stone.
As they reached the entrance to the hollow, they heard even more fearful sounds coming from the tunnel beyond, and as they ran down it, faster and faster, they saw that the roots of the tree were beginning to stress and strain. They ran and pushed, and Bracken herded Rebecca through the roots threatening to crush them, on and on now, anxious to get out. They felt they had stolen the sight of something sacred and the noise was pursuing them to take it back.
When they got past the outer roots of the great tree, they made their way down the rough tunnel back to the roots, but it was like running from the talons of an owl into the fatal rushing of a flood. For the Chamber of Roots was now filled with sinister slidings and pullings, terrible rackings and stretchings, crushings and stranglings, as the mass of roots, which had been so still when they first passed through them, started to respond to the wind on the surface.
Bracken looked up to the roof of the chamber, wondering if they could escape that way, by burrowing up somehow on to the surface—but it was too high, and the jags of thrusting flint too difficult to negotiate.
Rebecca ran forward to the heaving roots and Bracken followed to stop her. ‘It’s impossible!’ he shouted over the noise. ‘We’ll be lost forever in there.’
But Rebecca twisted away from his grasp and ran between the first roots, shouting back to him, ‘Think of the stone we saw, think of its protection…’ and she was gone among them.
He stretched a paw after her, hesitating for a moment, but then, feeling again the strange itching impression of the stone on his paw, he remembered the light of the stone and ran after her. They twisted their way among the treacherous roots—each movement forward just in time to escape the crushing behind them of roots between which they had passed, a path opening up before them as roots parted just in time for them to escape the opening of fissures in the ground or the crashing down of debris from above. On and on they went, Bracken following his Rebecca, Rebecca feeling that Bracken was pressing her on from behind, two moles as one, one mole escaping the roots. Always thinking of, and clutching on to, the memory of the stone and its glimmering light, always trying to hold that in their hearts to keep at bay the horror around them. Each moment held a terrible death for them, each moment was a miraculous escape, until their breathing came gasping and desperate and they felt they could not run on through the racking darkness of the roots. On and on until they were led forward by instinct and trust as a blind pup might find its mother’s teats.
Then they were clear, back to the entrance into the labyrinth of echoes, the roots reaching out at them from behind, trying to pull them back as Bracken led them out through the labyrinths into the sudden, unbelievable silence of the circular tunnel.
Without a word to each other they wended their way back to Bracken’s burrow, where they found Mekkins still asleep, paws curled to his belly and a contented purr coming from his mouth. They looked at each other in deep silence, there being no words to express the joy and then the dark they had experienced together.
In the peace and homely comfort of his own burrow, Bracken could barely believe that he had seen what he had, and the memory, both good and bad, seemed already to be slipping away. Remembering it was too much for him to want to face.
For Rebecca, however, the memory was clear and she guessed that they had seen something more wonderful than some moles ever dream of. She touched Bracken with her paw to tell him that it was real and that he must not let it slip away, but he only looked at her in a kind of dawning fear, compounded partly of a sense of loss of what he could not quite remember, partly from having faced for a moment a truth he could face no longer.
Then they slept the fitful sleep of the deeply tired, waking only to the sound of Mekkins’ singing as he groomed and stretched himself in preparation for leaving with Rebecca.
They said few words—indeed, Mekkins said most of the farewells. But they touched again and Bracken knew that Rebecca and he had, for a time at least, been at one with one another and that a part of himself was for ever in her heart, as part of her would always be in his.
He saw them as far as the Stone clearing where, for a brief moment, they looked up at the great Stone, leaning into the morning wind, the beech branches waving against a cold white sky above it.
When they were gone, he turned back to his tunnel and down to his burrow where he crouched in silence, a sense of wonder and disbelief mixing with a terrible feeling of loss. His left paw vaguely itched or burned, but when he looked at it, there was nothing there. But the irritation stayed with him and eventually, with his right paw, he tried to scratch the pattern that he had felt on the stone on to the burrow floor, an interlacing of lines and circles. Again and again he traced it in the dust, scratching it out with his paw until slowly it seemed to come right. Again and again, until, like the tunnels in the Chamber of Echoes, he knew it by heart. The itch began to fade and as it did so, he began to sink into a deep sleep, his right paw still extended where it was tracing the pattern of the stone yet again, before he finally slept.