Duncton Stone

by William Horwood

  The last word became almost a hysterical high-pitched scream before, disconcerting only to those who had never seen such a performance before, Squelch modulated his tones into the perfect pitch of his falsetto singing voice, and he sang a song of how green spring leaves held the glory of summer sun for too short a time and then withered, and were scattered by the autumn winds.

  Quail beamed with pride. Whatever else his strange son might be, however disappointing, he had a genius for song, and when he sang, inappropriate though the moment so often was, he touched the hearts of those who heard.

  Yet he had spoken a truth of which both Quail and Skua were well aware: whatever else Chervil was or might be, he was Squelch’s friend, perhaps the only friend he ever had. They had been raised as youngsters together and shared in those secret talks and games that good friends know while they are innocent and incorrupt. How often had young Chervil defended his awkward friend; and how often had young Squelch turned the sound of skylarks and the hum of bees into the music of his lovely voice, and lulled the stronger and sterner of the two towards a gentler world that Thripp’s harsh testing ways might otherwise have stolen for ever from Chervil’s black and glittering eyes.

  It had been Chervil who had pleaded Squelch’s case to both Thripp and Quail, saying that he could never hope to be a disciplined brother as the rest of them would be, but that he had a gift for song and melody that was, surely, of the Stone. This was a little before puberty, and just before the harsher training of the youngsters was to begin.

  “Training will kill him!” Chervil had said to his father and his tutor. “He’s not made for it... there’s something better for him than that.”

  It had been the last time Chervil had been able to fight for his puphood friend. Soon after he had begun his own rigorous training, while Squelch had been allowed – uniquely in the Caradocian order – to roam, to dream, to indulge, to sing.

  “Is it what you truly want’? Eh, mole? Is it?”

  So had Thripp asked him one day, when Quail was there. And Squelch, already approaching adolescence, had darted an intelligent glance from one to another, and then smiled and said, “Elder Senior Brother, may I speak to you alone?”

  It was a surprising request, for Squelch had never before stanced against his father, but Thripp, not entirely willing, granted it. The two talked all morning, though what about none ever knew but Brother Rolt, Thripp’s attendant. Afterwards Squelch was granted leave of absence from training as and when he wished, and was given the task of creating songs for Newborn rituals, such as those brilliantly performed at the Convocation. In all other matters he was to be free to do as he wished, answerable only to Quail.

  Soon after this Chervil began his training, and later still he was sent off to Duncton by Thripp. Now he had returned, and one of the minor curiosities of Caradoc was to see how he treated his former friend – the one a mature and impressive leader in the making, the other a corrupted obesity who had grown into a monster who despoiled male and female youth, yet made songs of a beauty moledom had never heard before.

  The answer had been that Chervil had far outgrown his former friend, and did not talk to him or show him respect. This was an aggravation to Quail, who regarded it as part of Chervil’s disrespect to him. Yet still Squelch wanted Chervil’s esteem and love, and reacted to any threat, real or imagined, to his old friend and protector, violently and with dismay.

  So... “I will not hurt him, as you put it,” Quail had to say. “Why should I? He’s a mole who will lead the Caradocian order one day!”

  “We hope,” insinuated Skua.

  “We do,” said Quail. “If he behaves himself, and demonstrates his loyalty to me rather more than he has so far done.”

  Which he certainly soon would, and in a most cruel and terrible way.

  And then, most auspiciously, the mole Rooster was caught once more.

  “And others too, I hear,” purred Quail, smiling on Fagg.

  “Three others. Elder Senior Brother. Two youngsters of no consequence named Whillan and Madoc, and a third, the female scribemole and librarian from Dunction, Privet.”

  “Ah, yes...” whispered Quail, “I think my good friend Snyde knows that mole.”

  “I do, Master,” said Snyde, “and warn you against her. Whillan I would kill without delay. A troublemaker. Ignorant. As for Madoc, never heard of her.”

  “I have made enquiries, but...”

  Squelch giggled. “I know her,” he said. “She’s one of ours, of Bowdler, lovely, curved and Welsh. I’ll have her if I may, father, for my very own.”

  “You may,” said Quail with teasing ambiguity, and how they all smiled, and how their eyes and teeth shone in the evil light of their council chamber.

  Chapter Nine

  The arrival of Privet and the others at Wildenhope did not cause quite the stir among the Newborns that Duncton historians have subsequently liked to imagine, and not as much as Brother Adviser Fagg, wishing to advance his career, had hoped. Privet herself was then almost unknown to Quail and his Inquisitors and in truth she was more curiosity than threat, for how could a female threaten the mighty brothers – even if her ability to scribe, and her reputation as a scholar, aroused interest?

  Nor did Rooster’s return into captivity attract as much interest by that spring as it would have immediately after his escape. The years of winter had passed by, moles had moved on, and now the long-awaited spring Crusade absorbed the Newborns’ interest. In any case, those that remembered his confused and abject confession would almost certainly have failed to see the courage and pathos of it, marking him down instead as a mole past his prime. How could so strange and aberrant a mole be a threat to the Newborns?

  As for Whillan, he was a mere youngster, and the Inquisitors were well-used to the recalcitrance of youth, and knew that the right discipline applied in the right way moulded most wills to correct behaviour. Thus, whilst the danger they were in was great, interest in them was at first minimal.

  More obviously serious was Madoc’s plight, for she was Newborn-trained and had dared to escape Bowdler and go her own way. She who as a Newborn female had been almost worthless, was now worth nothing at all. But she was young and pretty, and having erred deserved punishment – and females such as she (as Thorne had rightly perceived) could be both punished and made use of if given as a reward to deserving brothers or guards. The fact that Squelch had already claimed her for “his own” boded ill.

  This terrible fate, from which moles never emerged without emotional as well as physical scars – if they emerged at all – was one already decided for her long before the unhappy party reached Wildenhope, and the question was simply whatmole might have her first. The second and third were of less import, and the last few of no import at all. By then all the hope would have long since fled from poor Madoc’s heart and eyes, and if there was life left at all in her used and abused body she would be cast out of Wildenhope and left to wander as a half-demented creature, and die lonely and afraid of the nightmare memories of a cell in which a succession, endless and vile, of corrupt males came to take their brief reward of her. Yet, though this was bad enough, there was a worse fate, and its name was Squelch. He had the run of such moles as Madoc, male and female, and if his lust was hungry, and his sadistic muse titillated, he might indicate that such and such a one be brought to him. This he had done.

  It happened that Madoc’s coming to Wildenhope coincided with a brief unwelcome lull in Squelch’s and Snyde’s symbiotic pornographic explorations. For only if Squelch did, could the other ken; Squelch the private doer was needed to service Snyde the secret fantasist record-keeper. But it seemed that nothing much had been doing of late.

  No normal mole, raised to love and natural feelings, who delights in the shared touch and caress that innocent love may bring, can begin to understand why moles such as Snyde and Squelch find pleasures in clandestine deviant performance and aberrant observation, let alone collude in so foul a thing. But so it was, and at
that time each was on the watch for the other’s secret pleasure. Certainly Snyde had let Squelch know that it would give him useful instruction to be able to witness for himself, and scribe down, the things that Squelch did to a mole unfortunate enough to fall into his power.

  So it was that just at the moment Madoc was brought to Wildenhope, Squelch was on the look-out for a mole who was deserving of fit punishment. We have no intention here of describing even in outline, let alone in any detail, what Squelch did to Madoc. It is enough to say that the very same evening of her arrival she was dragged to a cell rather different from the ones already described, in that it was down a deep tunnel that reeked of the odours of violent torture and death, made dreadful from time to time by the mortal moans and screams and helpless lost groans of moles brought to final confession and murder.

  That Wildenhope even had such a quarter has until recent years been in dispute, and in defence of the Elder Brothers few of them even suspected its existence; even the Governor himself, his being an appointment temporary and by rotation, often never knew. Yet culpability must be upon the souls of those most senior for never asking questions and investigating to discover what happened to certain unfortunates who disappeared, and why it was that of those that arrived at Wildenhope some were never subsequently accounted for. Or if these questions were too much to expect, some of the Senior Brothers might have wished to ask why it was that the bodies of moles, often young, often horribly mutilated, were found along the banks of the treacherous river that was Wildenhope’s western boundary. The river might at times be violent, as it was that fateful spring, but a river never put a mole’s eyes out, and a river never tore the talons from a strong mole’s paws; and no river ever ripped from a male... but enough is enough and of that we will scribe no more.

  Not only was Madoc’s cell in a less savoury place and nearer the tributary stream than those of her three friends, but it had a roof in which a vertical hole had been tunnelled straight to the surface, which allowed a curious round shaft of light into the centre of the cell. In addition, and disconcertingly, there were peepholes, just out of reach in three of the walls, which taken together meant that no part of the cell was free from being spied upon. That they were peepholes Madoc had no doubt at all, for the moment she came into the cell she heard a scuffling some way above her behind one of the walls, and looking up saw movement at one of the holes and an eye, black and shiny, staring at her. She moved out of its line of vision, and after more scuffling sounds it reappeared at another of the peepholes, as black, as shiny, and as filled with cold curiosity as before.

  But Madoc had more than prying eyes to worry about. Apart from a quick word of comfort Privet had been able to give her on their arrival at Wildenhope, and a final embrace from Whillan and whispered words of love, as despairing but undying as they were real, Madoc had nothing to cling on to but hope; and hope dies quickly in the heart of a mole brought to such a cell as that by guards who prod her obscenely, and mockingly tell her that some very unpleasant things will soon be happening to her; threats which were confirmed by the stains and desperate scrabbled scratchings on the walls and floor of her cell. But Madoc had no need of any of this to put mortal fear into her and widen her eyes and set her heart beating in a near-uncontrollable panic as she was pushed into the cell and left to wait – for she knew already Wildenhope’s reputation and had seen what was left of moles who survived the place, and had looked into the icy eyes of guards who had worked there. Madoc had no illusions – she knew that the chances of seeing Whillan again, or sharing time with Privet, or ever completing the journey to Duncton Wood, were now negligible. All life as she had known it was over, and her venture into freedom now finished.

  “Yet I did it, I did get away!” was all the comfort she could whisper to herself, “and I met moles who treated me as a mole should be treated! And I loved and was loved in the way the Newborns deny, but which all moles should know at least once. Oh Stone, you granted my wish to live, to love; now give me courage to face what comes without losing faith in you, or the memory of moles I have been proud to call my friends.”

  The eye at the peephole blinked at this prayer to the Stone “so sweetly sincere” as the watcher, Snyde himself, was to describe it in the scribing-down of all that took place in that cell.

  If the light in the cell brightened for a brief moment, and if the Stone gave the sense of its grace to that murky place, it was while Snyde blinked, which is why he never recorded it. Some things Snyde did not see.

  “Oh Stone, Privet said you would help a mole if a mole will only help herself. She said your power comes from faith, and that even a mite of faith, even less than a mite, if it is felt in the heart, and expressed with truth, will bring forth from you all the power a mole needs – so Stone, I have faith in you, I really have. Help me now. Help me be true to my friends. Help me find a way through the trial, and Stone be with me.”

  Privet! Snyde smiled with pleasure at this reminder of Privet and her current plight. Abandoning his secret occupation for a moment, he scurried down the tunnel to the main one from which the punishment cells radiated, just in time to find Squelch waddling along and peering pleasurably into each of the cells as he passed them by, to find his latest victim.

  “Brother Squelch!”

  “Ah, Brother Snyde! Welcome. But be peaceful, for such joys as you are going to watch and record are best taken slowly. Hunger is a greater pleasure than satisfaction; unsatisfied lust more joyous than fulfilment. Or did you not know that?”

  “I know it, I know it,” whispered Snyde impatiently, “your pleasure is a few cells down from here. Now, in saying her pathetic prayers Madoc mentioned a mole called Privet and I would like to learn what she knows of her.”

  “The same Privet of Duncton we heard mentioned before?”

  “The same.”

  “I may ask her of it.”

  “You must!”

  A brief look of displeasure crossed Squelch’s shining, benign face. “There is nothing I must do, Brother Recorder Snyde. But let us not squabble over titbits when a feast of pleasure lies before us. Back to your spyhole, mole, while I go to the portal of desire!”

  He made a flourishing gesture with his paw, if any gesture by so fat and greasy a mole could be called a “flourish’, and Snyde hobbled obediently back to his watch.

  We have already made clear that the foul details of Squelch’s intercourse with Madoc in that cell, fully recorded by Snyde though they were, will not be permitted to besmirch this text. We will say only this: Squelch heaved himself with some difficulty through the narrow portal of the punishment cell and presented himself to Madoc. She smelt, and knew, the greasy scent of his body even before he entered the place, and her nightmare came true when he did, and she screamed – a scream that only fuelled his lust, which fed entirely upon the fear of his victims.

  She looked into his piggy, smiling eyes and knew that her life was about to be forcibly and irrecoverably changed. He touched her as the guards had done and she shrank away until her rear was to the wall. Then foully and sickeningly he abused her, so that her body felt it had been tainted and stained for ever, even before from out of the odorous, sweaty folds of his flesh there appeared that pink and shining thing which was all, for now, his vast and shapeless form became. Trapped, nowhere to turn, she struggled violently against his slippery yielding bulk, unable to get a hold, unable to escape. Then she was turned by him and submerged under him, as he clumsily mounted her, and entering her, tried to steal her very soul and self-respect for ever.

  And all the while a solitary eye stared down from the peephole upon the sorry, murky scene.

  But just as Snyde had not seen the brief glimmer of the Stone’s Light when Madoc had prayed before Squelch’s coming, he was blind to the grace of light, of hope, and of insight that now entered into her heart.

  It is a fact of moles’ spiritual life that often when hope is let go, and the tunnels are at their darkest and deepest, the Silence is heard, and t
he way ahead to Light made clear. We must, it seems, give up the hopes and expectations that link us to the past, to move freely forward. Such moments may be rare, but they are always recognized, if not for what they truly are, then at least as something special which should be barkened to. Such a moment came to Madoc then, and the thought it prompted took her utterly by surprise. One moment she was pushed and shoved to the void of self-abnegation and the next she found herself thinking in wonderment, “I am going to have his young.”

  Oh yes, she knew with certainty that from this vile act upon her the very thing she had failed to achieve with Whillan would follow, and in knowing that all fear fled her, and she knew that Squelch could not, would not, harm her more, and she would be free of him. Knowing this, she felt a terrible pity for him, that he was so hideous and his act so unforgivable. It was what had formed him – much trouble and lacklove in his past – that made her feel pity.

  “Forgiveness is not so hard,” Privet had said once, “provided you can forget yourself”

  For better and for worse Madoc knew that this act would leave her with pups and they, for all their horrid paternity, would be more important for a time than anything. Above, about her, over her, into her, Squelch quivered and slobbered the climax of his stolen act. And all Madoc could think was, “One day I shall tell them what he was, except he isn’t this. Nomole is this. All moles are of the Stone and we must strive to see the Stone in them, however foul they are.”

  Many moles, and even some historians, insist on disbelieving that Madoc can have experienced such thoughts and feelings. Yet so she herself has scribed, but it helps that she repeatedly expressed utter astonishment at her final detachment from the horror of it all. “I can only say,” she said, “that I felt pity, and amazement that of all moles and all acts, this was the one to get me with pup!”

  Squelch finished, his voice a squeaky scream, his paws fat and flabby at her flanks, his shafting excitement shrinking back into the folds of furry flesh whence it had briefly come.