The Midnight Folk Page 18

  “Good evening, Kay,” the Bat said. “I’ve come from my friend Tom Otter; we thought what fun it would be if we could persuade you to spend an evening with us. We live in an interesting old place which you might like to see, and I’ve brought you a suit of wings, in case you care to come.”

  “I’d love to come” Kay said “it is most frightfully kind of you to think of me.”

  “Hurray, he’s coming,” the Bat said. “We hoped you would. Now I’ll help you to put on the wings.”

  “Just try flying from the bed to the window-ledge,” he said, “and then fly back once or twice. You’ll soon get the hang of it. It’s really very easy.”

  Kay found that it was quite easy after the first attempt. “Come on, then,” the Bat said. “You keep by me. It isn’t far, really, to our place. I generally go this way.”

  Kay put on his pair of fox-eye spectacles and followed him. It was amusing to see his friends, the grocer and the carpenter, walking in their gardens, and to fly just over their heads and to hear them say: “The bats are very bold this year; that one nearly knocked my glasses off.” Then Mrs. Grocer said:

  “When bats grow bold

  We shall have cold.”

  Mrs. Carpenter said:

  “When bats fly low

  It’s going to blow.”

  Both the husbands said the same thing: “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if we did have it a bit cold, if we did have it a bit blowy.”

  Presently they came in sight of the river, at a point which Kay longed to spend days at, exploring, but was never allowed, as it was dangerous.

  Some twenty years before, there had been a mill there, with two wheels. The mill was now vanished to its foundations, but the mill-race head was still there in a quiet pool forty yards long, in which water lilies were spreading. The shoots of the wheels still dribbled water even in the hottest summer. Beyond the mill-shoots was a causeway or bridge, under which the main river ran over a lasher; at the further end of the lasher was the lock by which the barges had passed on their way up or down stream. The railway had now put an end to all this traffic.

  Above the mill and bridge, the river was a shallow basin, a hundred yards broad, broken up by islands and withy plats, where there were swans, kingfishers, many moorhens, sometimes a heron, and now and then wild duck, or duck that had escaped (these were the ones that Kay loved to think of) and gone wild. Below the mill, there was a deep, turbulent, foaming pool from which the current sped away upon its course. There was a big idle back-eddy at one side of it, where bubbles, like glass tea-cups upside down, sauntered back towards the lasher, and then either ran at once into the current or were driven back to saunter round again.

  The causeway was pleasant in calm weather. You could put in ships above the lasher, and watch them go down the falls and through the rapids, or round and round the wheel of the pool. But in times of flood it was wonderful, and terrible, when all the hatches were wide, and the roar of the weir could be heard for a quarter of a mile. Then you could imagine yourself beside the Maelstrom or Niagara, and the fountains of the great deep being broken up. It was there that he had seen Dr. Gubbins’s pig swept past, a cut-throat corpse, in the great February flood of two years before. Jane had said, “All pigs cut their throats in the water”; yet Kay could not understand how they could, as they never had any razors. Jane did not know how they could, either, but affirmed the melancholy fact.

  The Bat swerved down towards those foundations of the mill which overlooked the eddy. “Come in after me, through that hole where the big stone has fallen,” he said.

  The Bat led the way along the hole into what once might have been a part of the cellar of the mill. It was a rather damp, dark place, lit by a greenish glitter, which Kay did not understand. A hairy thing, which smelt very strongly of fish, rose up out of the gloom.

  “Come in, Master Kay,” Tom Otter said, “and welcome to our poor abode. Damp but pleasant, as we say. That greenish light that you see is the water. It comes right up here and the moon shines through it, which gives that effect. Would you like to taste a bit of fish? We’ve got very pretty trout. Or what you might prefer is to put on otter pads and a skin and come on down for a swim.”

  “I’d love that,” Kay said.

  The Otter produced an otter skin with pads attached. Kay put it on.

  “There’s really nothing like the water, is there?” the Otter said. “I’ll show you some queer things down there beneath the water. You’ll find that you’ll be able to see, when you get down.”

  “I’ll just take a cruise above the falls,” the Bat said. “The gnats are at their best in this weather.”

  After he had gone the Otter led Kay into the water. In a moment he found himself in the eddy, from which he could see the current of the stream running away in glittering streaks.

  “Dive now,” the Otter said. “There’s nothing so lovely as the water at the foot of the fall, where it comes down all white and goes up as bubbles. And stuck there in the crevices of the hatches you’ll find all sorts of odd things.”

  Sure enough, Kay did see all sorts of odd things: the bones of Dr. Gubbins’s pig, the skeleton of a pike with his teeth still fixed through the web-foot of the skeleton of a duck, two addled swan’s eggs, bits of old branches as white as bone and the bow half of a tin gunboat, which had once been the joy of his heart, now sunk beneath the wave fast by her native shore.

  “Of course, things are quiet now,” the Otter said. “We don’t get the fishing nor anything else that we used to have. The river used to be much wilder, but still in a flood it’s wild enough for anyone. A thing that you’ll like is to dive down here and come up in these little twists and eddies and then dive down again. Of course, we can’t do that when the spates are on.”

  When they were weary of this happy pastime, the Otter said, “Now I’ll show you another thing. Those beastly otter hounds have been after me more than once. They never can make out where I go to. I go to a place here, which they have never suspected. The entrance is a spring in the river-bed. Come on down with me.”

  He dived down into the heart of the current into an upward eddy of water far colder than the water of the river. Kay could see a fissure in the rock of the river-bed, from which this cold water gushed. Some little fish, which were tickling their bellies with the chill of the eddies, darted away as they drew near. Kay shuddered at the cold of the spring, and had to strike out hard against its force. It was pitch dark down there in spite of his glasses; Otter seemed to be taking him down a deep well. Suddenly he shot upwards into a glimmery cave, and clambered up onto rock strewn with river-drift.

  “Here is a place,” the Otter said, “which no hound yet has ever come near. There’s light, if one feels the need of that, from the chink in the rock there. There’s nearly always a fish or two where the spring comes up, at the place where we dived. I could live here all the year round, only that one misses the noise of the falls. Take a look about you, Master Kay. It’s a snug little place. I’ve dodged the hounds here twenty times, if I’ve dodged them once.”

  Kay saw that he was in a little cave or hollow among rocks. The floor of it sloped a good deal. A sort of glimmer showed from a fissure in the rock, but one could not see through the fissure from either side. At one end of the cave the wall seemed to have been cut or wrought by men; there was a sort of shelf in it. Over the shelf, fixed to the rock, was a very old broken bone cross. “I know what this has been,” Kay thought; “a hermitage. It’s the cell where old St. Alpig lived. That is his bed or his altar; and then, I suppose, the steps or passage he used fell in. There seems to have been a fall of rock there. I say, Mr. Otter, did you ever come across any bones of men here?”

  “No,” the Otter said, “all men have been gone from here for years.”

  At this moment, they heard a strange scraping and scratching noise in one corner of the cave; it seemed to come from beyond the fall of rock. “Someone digging,” Kay whispered. “Is it a rabbit?”

&nbs
p; “No, that’s not a rabbit,” the Otter said, showing his teeth.

  “No rabbit ever dug like that.”

  “Can it be men?”

  “No,” Otter growled. “Men clink when they dig, and stop to talk, and then pass round a bottle and begin again. No . . . I don’t know who this could be. It’s big, whoever it is. It might be Stoat. I don’t exactly want Stoat coming round here. He may be all very well; but he hasn’t the name for it. Down here we often get blamed for things we’d never dream of taking. But Stoat never dug like that.”

  “Could it be Badger?”

  “Badger?” Otter said. “Well, I hope not. But that isn’t Badger’s digging. Badger growls and grunts as he digs, and sings his beastly digging song.”

  “What is that?” Kay asked.

  “Mind, I say nothing against Badger. To see him go for a wasps’ nest is to see real courage. Then his teeth are simply superb; there’s no other word for them. But he is rather a joke. He growls down into the ground before he begins—‘I’m as good a man as you are, and so I’ll show you.’ Then he scuffles out the earth and sings to it.

  ‘First I’ll dig a this way,

  Then I’ll dig a that way,

  Then I’ll dig a criss way

  Then I’ll dig.

  Then I’ll dig a one way,

  Then I’ll dig a two way,

  Then I’ll dig a run way,

  Then I’ll dig.’”

  The scratching noise continued.

  “Don’t tell me that that’s Badger,” the Otter said. “Badger never dug like that. I don’t at all like that snuffling noise, that sort of woofing noise.”

  “Why, what do you think it is?” Kay asked.

  “I hardly like to say,” the Otter whispered, “but it’s that beastly kind of woofing noise that the hounds make when they go blowing along at the holes on the river bank. If they find a way in from that side, which they never have before, this place won’t be safe. He’s coming nearer, too.”

  Presently the unseen digger stopped from his scratching and scrabbling. He cleared the earth from his muzzle and began to sing in a most unmusical voice.

  “When the afternoon’s quiet brought peace to the soul,

  I spied a white duck on a pond,

  I asked the sweet creature to come for a stroll,

  And, though she did peck a bit,

  I wrung her white neck a bit,

  Ho says Rollickem Bitem.

  Then, strolling along in the field by the mill,

  I spied a grey gosling at grass,

  Who found me all hungry and left me all still,

  For a goose in digestion

  Solves every harsh question.

  Ho says Rollickem Bitem.”

  “It’s Bitem,” Kay said. “Is that you, Bitem?”

  “Yes,” said Bitem on the other side of the stone.

  “Is that you, Kay?” Nibbins’s voice asked. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m in here with Otter,” Kay said.

  “Well, look here, Kay,” Nibbins said. “Do please shove this stone aside, if you can get at it from your side. We’ve been having adventures, Bitem and I, and we’re dead beat. Can we get out your way?”

  “You’ll have to swim for it,” Kay said.

  “Well, shove the stone aside, Kay, and let’s have a look. Even a swim is better than what we’ve been having.”

  With a good deal of trouble Kay managed to get the stone to one side; Bitem and Nibbins came pushing through into the cave. Both were out of breath and covered with earth. They lay down panting.

  “They’ve turned poor old Bitem out of his quarry-earth,” Nibbins said. “Roper Bilges sent the news of it to the hound master, who had it all stopped up for the season, just as poor old Bitem had got it all into order with all the bolt-holes bored. So I told him that I knew of a place near the old lime kiln here, a place that I’ve sometimes come mousing in. I did a bit of batting there too, when I was young, but we won’t mention that to Bat. Well, we came along to look at it and prowled around in it. Then, while we were grubbing for a bolt-hole, suddenly, bang, the floor gave way beneath us and down we came. I never saw such a place. We fell fifty yards, I should think, by the feel. We couldn’t get back through the hole that we fell from; we couldn’t reach it, or near it. Then we both thought that our only chance would be to dig down to the river this way and then swim for it, but the stone was so hard that we’d almost—at least, I’d almost—given up hope. Of course, it takes a lot to make old Bitem give up hope.”

  “You’d both be the better for a bit of fish,” the Otter said. “Would you like it fresh or some that’s been hung a bit?”

  “I like it well hung,” Bitem said. “But Nibbins here would like it fresh, I’m sure.”

  “Well, I’ll bring you a bit of both,” the Otter said.

  While Otter was fetching the fish, which took a minute or two, Nibbins said, “I’m not at all sure, Kay, that you oughtn’t to have a look at what is beyond there. There’s a very queer smell.”

  “Do you think it’s treasure?” Kay said.

  “Well, it’s a very rich smell,” Nibbins said, “a cellary smell. You ought to smell it, anyway.”

  “What sort of thing is it that smells?” Kay asked.

  “There’s round things and there’s square things,” Bitem said. “Neither is good to eat.”

  “You’ve got things like that,” Nibbins said, “in the cellar, Kay. Take a look.”

  It was not so easy to take a look. Kay pushed through with Bitem and Nibbins into the cave, which was pitch dark, but very much more spacious than the one in which he had been sitting. He could see little there. There was hardly a ray of light. He groped with his hands and felt walls of rock. Groping downwards, he felt something like bales of sacking tied with strips of leather, further on were some small casks lying on their sides. A fragrance that was sweetish, heavy and rather sickly came upon him from these barrels. It was a little like the smell in the decanter cupboard of the sideboard, when the stoppers had been left out.

  “That’s the kind of thing that we came down on,” Bitem said. “However, Nibbins always falls on his feet, and I’ve been used to falling anyhow since those beasts in red first came after me.”

  “But where did you fall from?” Kay asked. “Do you mean to say that you fell through the roof?”

  “I should think we did,” Bitem said.

  Kay put up his hand, but could feel no roof above him.

  “It’s getting lighter, now,” Nibbins said. “You’ll be able to see in a minute. There. Perhaps you can see now. Yes, there’s the hole we fell through.”

  Far above their heads was a hole in the rock of the cave. Part of a broken and rotten ladder was still fixed to it: men must at one time have used the place as a cellar.

  “It’s a wonder you weren’t both killed,” Kay said.

  “I’d never suspected a place like this,” Nibbins said. It’s just a little ordinary sort of place up above, that you have to squeeze through.”

  By this time, Kay was able to see the cave; it was like a very dark old church, with stalactites dripping from the roof. In the lower end of the cave were tiers of barrels and cases.

  “I know what this is,” Kay said. “It’s the cellar where the Moonlight People put their brandy and tobacco, and those are some which they never removed. Now Piney Trigger worked the Moonlight business; supposing he brought the treasure here . . . Supposing it isn’t brandy but the treasure?”

  “I say,” Otter said, “it’s almost sunrise. You’d better be off, Kay, with Bat here. Slip off your otter skin and put on your bat’s wings.”

  Bat helped him to put on his wings. “Come quickly,” he said. “It’s a great deal later than I thought.” As he led the way up, through the hole by which Nibbins had fallen, Kay called to him:

  “How will Nibs and Bitem get out? They’ll be drowned if they try to swim, and they can’t climb.”

  “Otter will manage something,” Bat s
aid. “Come on quickly, I’ve only got a few minutes left. Creep along this passage here. Now here we are in the ruined lime-kiln.”

  They crept out over some fallen stones of the kiln (which still smelt of the warm, rank taint of Bitem’s passing) into the overcast summer morning not yet light. The leaves of the trees hung heavily, occasionally dripping; there was a good deal of mist about. Not far up the road, as they flew, Kay caught sight of the backs of four labourers, with pickaxes over their shoulders, shambling drowsily to their work. They were going very slowly. Two of them carried lanterns, one of them had a coil of rope slung about his neck, all four were plastered with the rather pale clay of near the river.

  “They’re going early to work,” Kay said.

  “They’re going from work,” Bat said. “They’ve been working by the river all night. Look how tired they all are.”

  Indeed, as he spoke, the four exhausted men sat down on a heap of stones by the road; one of them seemed to fall asleep at once. The other three were dazed stupid with tiredness and nodded forward as they sat. Kay knew them as he flew over them. Two were the knights whom Arthur had sent with Edward “to see if they could find the treasure,” only the night before; the third was Edward; the fourth, the sleeper, was poor little Brown Bear. Could they have been looking for the treasure in the river? They were sopping wet. They looked so utterly miserable and discouraged, that it was plain that they had found nothing. “That’s where the treasure will be,” Kay thought, “sunk in the river, deep in the mud, where no one will ever find it. I never thought to ask Otter about it.”

  “Oh, Edward,” he cried, “cheer up. And do come home . . .”

  Edward lifted his weary head and stared stupidly at him.

  “I’m Kay, I’m not a bat,” Kay cried.

  “Come on,” Bat said, tugging him with his hooked wing. “We haven’t got a weenit to weese.”

  “But I must speak to Edward.”