The Well and the Coward

In the same moment that I awoke I realised that I was cold. Colder than I have ever felt, save than in one of the terrible fevers that remain the last sign of my ordeals in India.

I was shivering, though that word scarcely describes the vast shaking and trembling of my numb limbs as I desperately fumbled in the near darkness for my trousers, my blazer and gloves. I knew that I must move about, and so generate some life-giving warmth if I could. I fell out of the mouth of my tent and scrambled to my feet. Immediately a heavy dew coated my face and body, dripping from my nose and from my brow as I stumbled around the sagging tent. At last my legs began to obey my will, and the shivering slowly subsided.

There was something of terror and dread in my mind; as if I had just awoken from a horrible dream; indeed the fact of the cold itself seemed uncanny, for, when we had all turned in for the night, the air had been balmy with the scents of hay and high summer. Now, however, a thick wintry mist lay in the hollow, swathing the tents, with only their peaked ridges showing clear, like sailing ships upon an unearthly sea. It seemed that we had not chosen our camping place with enough care; although the other masters had assured me that this was the traditional school site, and suitable in every way.

With warmth returning, the inchoate fear of my waking dwindled to an amused reflection upon the sort of spectacle I must have made as I flung myself into the night air! I surveyed the other tents; the single ridge tents of the masters, and the greater bell tents of the boys, curious as to whether anyone had been disturbed or been a witness to my silliness. All was still and quiet, but, what was that sound? I stood stark still and listened, and looking across the field, past the ancient granite stones of the alignments that breasted the low mist, I saw that which I had never seen that warm day, as we had arrived and pitched camp by the lines of stones.

There was some kind of structure there. A peaked roof, of thatch maybe? And as I slowly approached this seeming apparition I made out a ragged hole at the peak of the roof. And there... sparks. A puff of sparks and of smoke and billows of smoke rising straight up in the windless air, and spreading out high up, like a ceiling, at some invisible junction of cold and temperate atmospheres.

The sound I had heard was now recognisable as a kind of low but excited chanting, tuneless, but definitely made up of words, of repeated syllables, if such strange utterings could be presumed to bear any meaning more significant than the calling of birds or the lowing of cattle.

The moon slid from behind a cloud and I crept forward. I could now determine the shape and size of the rude hall, which had walls no higher than a man, made of woven branches and poles smeared with mud. It was circular, with an immense thatch roof, shaggy, and blackened with soot. Many chinks in the walls let little rays of red firelight out into the misty air, and, filled with wonder, I crept around it’s rough flank. I soon found myself at the low door and peered within.

A great fire blazed in the centre of the hall and around it shone a multitude of ruddy faces; wild-haired people clad in grubby skins; their forms brightly lit in front; their backs in deep shadow, as they gazed intently at the fire. Mixed with their chants I could now hear a creaking, as of wickerwork, wood and rope... and a whimpering. It was the whimpering of frightened things, of small things. The whimpering of children.

To one side of the fire gaped the mouth of a pit, a sudden lip of earth. How deep I knew not. And there, in the space above, slung from the rough beams of the roof by a hairy rope, slowly swung a wicker cage.

And now comes the horror; the awful sight that quite unhinged my mind, that from which I have never recovered my former calm, and in the avoided mirror I yet perceive the lines of disgust and sickness that will always mark my countenance.

Alas, the children! There were children in the cage. They were boys.

My boys! Five, maybe six, clad in the rags of their school pajamas, rigid with fear, as, to the quickening chants, they were lowered into the mouth of the well... That awful sight. That awful sound, as they cried out to me as they disappeared. They cried out to me, but their calls were muffled and distant as they dropped far into the dark. There came the sound of a distant splashing and then... nothing. The chanting ceased, and the only sound was the crackling of the great fire.

And I cried out. I cried out as I perceived that among the ancient dwellers of the moor were a few faces that I recognised; the faces of the other masters, smeared and begrimed it is true, and wearing skins that looked new and improvised somehow, but they were there. My colleagues of a year’s toil. My Common Room companions. And as I cried they turned as one and saw me standing!

Like a coward I screamed and fled; abandoning my charges. I ran blinded by my tears and by that vision of the pit that was forever seared into the starting nerves of my eyes. Never stopping nor glancing back to see my pursuers, or indeed whether I was pursued at all, I scrambled in darkness over rocks and heather, colliding against lichen hung trees and stumbling over streams of black water, all the while racked by sobs.

My next recollection is of awakening in the bottom of a little valley in a wood of rowans, with my feet lying in the water at the edge of a dark brook, and cradling my head in my arms. I struggled to my feet and walked in a stupor until I came upon a road and at last I found my way to Chagford.

Since that day I have returned to the home of my family and have been nursed back to some semblance of normality. Perhaps the writing of this account may help at last in the regaining of my reason. So many things. So many things I have lost.

My reports of this tragedy to the police and the authorities have never been taken seriously. Even my closest friends humour me with their concerned attention to my outpourings of guilt and self loathing, and when, after some weeks, I persuaded the oldest companion of my college days to accompany me to that boarding school from whence had set out our camping expedition, we found only a ruin, overgrown by briar and saplings of many years growth. In the nearby village the postmistress told us that it had burnt down twenty years before and that it was rumoured to have been set alight by the matron, who had gone mad one summer’s day.

Nothing, however, could ever induce me to return to that other place. That valley with the long lines of ancient stones and the Druid’s Well. That accursed valley on the moor.