Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Oo-er, there's a Boogle in my passage!
Today I ran out of fresh water. It rained heavily the other week and caused a bit of flooding down here in the tunnels beneath the old castle — but at least I had a nice, steady flow of trickling ice cold water to drink. I don't think it's rained since, and this morning I woke to find my favorite little rivulet dried up. Now, I can't start the day without a good cup of tea, so off I went to find some fresh water to fill up my trusty little kettle.
Armed with a small kettle, a Wallace & Gromit mug, a sachet of sugar, and one of many teeny-tiny individual servings of milk stolen from a hotel room a while back, I headed along the tunnel and ignored the many ominous passages leading off to the sides. One could get hopelessly lost in this 'ere labyrinth, if one isn't careful. The main tunnel is about four feet wide and surprisingly high, tapering to a point some ten feet or more above my head. The floor is fairly flat, occasionally sandy but mostly rocky, and often a little slippery with moss. My flashlight (or torch!) has a strong beam and I can usually see ahead at least thirty feet unless the tunnel bends one way or another.
About an hour into my trek I was starting to get worried. All the little puddles had dried up, and I couldn't find a single ice cold trickle from the rocky ceiling. Normally these tunnels are awash with puddles and trickles, and the sound of dripping water is normally all you can hear when you stand still — but now it was dry and silent.
I stood still for a moment anyway, listening for the tell-tale drip-drip-drip of clear, icy droplets. Nothing. In the light of my beam, the moss-covered floor was dry.
But then I heard something. The sound had been there all along, but I hadn't been listening hard enough. Now I heard it — a very faint rushing sound. I guessed it was an underground stream of some kind, or a little waterfall, so I moved quietly, trying to follow the sound. After a few steps it seemed to fade away, so I backed up. There it was again. It was coming from an opening in the wall to my left. I say "opening" but it was more like a narrow crack, easy to miss. I shone my flashlight in and couldn't see much at all, just the walls of a crevice with about eighteen inches between them. I didn't relish the idea of squeezing through there, but the sound of rushing water was definitely coming from within.
I squeezed inside and edged along sideways. The crevice was angled, so I was sort of laying back a little — a very strange and unnerving experience. But it widened after a while and I found myself heading down a slope. The sound of rushing water grew louder and, all of a sudden, I turned a corner into a cavern. And there it was.
It was a secret waterfall, gushing out of a small hole in the cavern wall opposite me. It cascaded into a mini-pool of clear, frothing water, before turning and pouring out through another hole deep under the surface. This little cavern was like a stair landing, a place for the water to pause before heading on down. Well, now I knew where to come if my favorite rivulet dried up again!
But I wasn't alone. I got quite a shock when I suddenly noticed a bearded old man sitting on a rock just ten feet to my right, staring at me from the darkness. I trained the flashlight on him and he stared unblinking back at me beneath enormous shaggy eyebrows. It gave me a chill, the way he just sat there in the dark, without a flashlight of his own, or a lantern. But on closer inspection I realized he didn't need any light; he was as blind as a bat, his eyes white and foggy.
"Hello?" I asked timidly. It was actually the first time I'd spoken in a while. The waterfall probably drowned me out though, so I spoke again, louder this time. "Hello? Who are you?"
The old man seemed a little surprised to hear another voice, but he didn't move. Instead he dug into his pocket for something and began mumbling. "Ar, where's me baccie?"
I asked him again who he was, and finally he looked up with a disgruntled expression on his lined face. He held a long clay pipe but he didn't seem to have any tobacco left in his tin — not that he needed to be smoking at his age. I swear the guy must have been two hundred years old. He had no hair except a few white puffs around his ears, but he more than made up for his hair loss with a long, tangled grey and white beard.
"Ar, Boogle's the name," he said. "Ol' Jeremiah Boogle, tha's me. Old as the hills, I am."
"But what are you doing down here?" I asked. "Are you lost? How did you find your way in here?"
The old man shook his head. "That be a mystery," he said, and then had to pause for a moment while he coughed badly. When he had himself under control he pointed up to the rocky cavern ceiling. "Not needed any more," he said mysteriously. "Done my part, see? Now I's just a memory."
I couldn't understand what he was getting at. "Not needed by who?" I asked, wondering briefly if I should have used "whom" just then. "What do you mean, 'done your part'?"
At that moment my flashlight dimmed and flickered. I shook it and it brightened, but then dimmed again. I delved in my pocket for spare batteries while the old man let out an alarming groan. "Oooooh, me back. An ol' fellah like me should be sat in a comfy rocking chair in front o' the fireplace, with a dog at me feet and a bottle of rum by me side — not stuck down here in the cold and damp."
"I'm just going to switch this off for a moment," I said, waving the flashlight at him. Of course, I realized then the old blind man couldn't see anything anyway, so I switched it off and fumbled with the battery casing in pitch blackness. I'd done this several times before of course, but this was different; normally I was alone, not standing ten feet from a strange old man who had no earthly business being down in these tunnels.
As I carefully removed the old batteries and inserted the new ones, I heard the oddest sound over the rushing waterfall — a sort of tearing, ripping sound, like a page being pulled out of a book. With it I heard a gasp and a kind of clattering. I almost dropped my batteries in my hurry to get them inserted the right way up, and in that time I thought I felt a draft brush by my shoulder. It made the hackles on my neck stand up.
I replaced the battery casing and switched on the flashlight, half-expecting to see a ghostly white face right in front of my eyes. But no, the cavern was empty; the old man had vanished. All that was left was his clay pipe, lying in two pieces on the rock floor.
If it wasn't for the evidence left behind in the form of that old clay pipe, I'd have thought I'd imagined the whole thing. It was like the old man had been dismissed and forgotten, a used-up character from an old Famous Five book, no longer needed by anyone. If I hadn't come across him, perhaps he would have continued sitting on that rock for years to come; but finding him seemed to be a reminder that he existed — and a reminder that he shouldn't be here anymore. All I could think about was that ripping, tearing sound.
I filled up my kettle and skedaddled. I waited until I got back to the comfort of my little campsite before making myself a cup of tea. As I delved in my pocket for the individual serving of milk, I found a balled up piece of paper — a page from a book, in which Julian is buying tobacco for Jeremiah Boogle.
Now I'm wondering about those other sounds I hear from time to time down here in these tunnels — the echoing voices of children, the distant barking of a dog...
This post has 3 comments
Of course, the original tobacco-loving Jeremiah Boogle has been "torn out" of the books, to be replaced by a chap who is fond of sweeties! Perhaps all the rejected bits of Blytonia are destined to find their way into your underground tunnels, Keith!
Anita
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