By the third day, when Bracken and Boswell had moved back to Barrow Vale to see if they could at least control the panic, leaving Mekkins and Rebecca in the Marsh End—the one because he wanted to be in his own tunnels, the other because she felt instinctively that that was where she could give most comfort—there were so many dead in the system that the living could no longer move them from where they had died. Dead, odorous moles lay in tunnels, in burrows, halfway out of entrances, some even lay in the very place they had been burrowing for worms before the plague crept up on them and took them away.
Each corpse was flea-covered, each carried the stench that the first two had had, and each showed the same grim progress of symptoms. And the stifling heat that continued seemed only to speed up the process of decay and spread the smell of death.
By the third day there was not a mole in the system who did not have a friend or close relative who had died. Some had lost each one of their siblings; some had lost each of their neighbours; many marvelled to find themselves alive. In one or two places—on the slopes and in parts of the Westside— hardly a single mole died and the moles marvelled at their fortune, seeking vainly for an explanation of it.
Then there was a lull for two days which brought sudden false hope, and the gossips in Barrow Vale, who chattered now more wildly and more desperately, started to say that the plague was over and Stone knows why they had been spared but… but on the next day the plague returned, in a new form. It was as if, unable to kill all the moles quickly, it had adopted a new guise to take them in a different way, one that was slower.
Moles broke out in sores under their bellies and on their flanks, painless but odorous sores, which came with the sweating. Then swellings and nodules of hardness under the skin appeared on their faces and snouts, blocking them and making their breathing laboured and terrible to hear. At the same time, the disease seemed to go to the lungs of the moles, causing them to cough and retch. And a mole that began to cough blood was a mole soon dead.
The system began to be filled with a strange moaning sound, the cries of moles in distress to whom there was none to minister, few to give comfort. Those that survived, untouched by the plague, seemed to wander about in a daze, unable to stay still in the face of such total tragedy but unable to help those suffering around them.
The system soon started to collapse around Bracken. Many of the moles who had been his executives and aides simply disappeared; others joined in the incessant talk that now took over the panic-stricken Barrow Vale, where moles seemed to find refuge in congregating together and discussing the latest plague news and noting with alarm and self-satisfaction why more moles seemed to die in the morning before sunrise than at any other time, while more moles seemed to develop swellings around the belly and groin which became sores after two or three days. Death from the new form of plague took up to four days and the only consolation that the moles could find was that not all the sufferers seemed to die, though most still did.
Not everymole panicked. At least one, Comfrey, stayed calm and left the pasture, crossed through the wood and began searching for something that he remembered Rose talking about a long time before. ‘If only I c-c-could remember properly,’ he scolded himself.
The talk in Barrow Vale soon concentrated on the idea that the plague came from the Stone and was its judgement on them, a punishment for a system that had let the old ways slip under the rule of Mandrake and Rune.
From this idea came the belief that the only way of combating the plague was to visit the Stone and touch it—eagerly accepted confirmation of which was that one of the moles who had recovered from the plague had previously been up to the Stone and touched it, living proof that the Stone worked.
‘Is it true, Boswell, or is it just another superstition?’ asked Bracken, making it more a statement than a question. He had noticed that several moles who had been to the Stone had subsequently died and was cynical about the ‘explanations’ offered by the Stone’s proponents that these moles had transgressed in other ways and so the Stone did not favour them.
‘In the sense you mean, it is untrue,’ said Boswell, breaking the silence in which he had been lost for most of the time since the plague came upon them. ‘These moles do not understand that the Stone is not a power by itself. Its power is invested in each one of us, whether it is a power for good or for evil. If you touch the Stone with faith, perhaps that does release a power, but only one that exists already inside you. For all your cynicism, Bracken, you have that power as well.’
‘Can I stop myself getting the plague?’ asked Bracken bitterly, thinking of the many who had died. ‘Could they have?’
