WHAT THE DIGGERS DIG AROUND

A Tale of Sogmarsh — House Delve, on manners.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

We are House Delve, and we have dug so deep and so long beneath the Weeping Granites of the Bogmoor that we have forgotten the sun the way you forget a song — not gone, exactly, just no longer something we could hum. We dig because stopping means thinking about why we started, and none of us fancy that. We are stubborn, and practical, and — this is the part the fables get wrong — we are polite.

You have to be, this far down. Because down here, the dark has opinions.

It started, as these things do, with small rudenesses from the rock. A pick would strike stone that had not been there the day before. A shaft we had mapped on the Tuesday would, by the Thursday, lead somewhere else entirely — once, memorably, into the cheese larder, to Old Mother Stilton's considerable displeasure. Veteran diggers took up the habit of talking to the walls, and then of forgetting, mid-sentence, what they had been saying. My own grandfather, Pa Delve, put down his pick one shift, listened to the black for a long moment, and said: "Lads. I'm not saying there's something alive down here. I'm saying the dark has opinions — and right now its opinion is that we ought to dig sideways for a bit."

So we dug sideways. Out of courtesy.

Any sensible house would have fled. We are not a sensible house; we are a thorough one. We had found something — something vast, and old past the meaning of old, and we understood three things about it very quickly. It did not want to hurt us. It did not want to be measured (the maps proved that). And it had been down here, in the lightless dark, entirely alone, for longer than there have been words for "long."

You do not, where I come from, leave a thing alone in the dark just because it is frightening. We have all been the thing alone in the dark.

So we did the only decent thing. We dug around it. Never into it — that would be prying, and prying is rude — but around and around, a slow companionable spiral, close enough that it would always have the sound of us: the chip and scrape of honest work, the bad songs, the worse jokes, the endless complaining about the damp. We keep it company. We bring it the noise of the living. When a new digger asks why we never break through to whatever it is, we tell them the truth: it isn't ours to open, and besides — it's been by itself long enough; the least we can do is potter about next door and make a bit of a racket so it knows it's not on its own.

The Cartographic Committee thinks we are mad. Lord Bastable thinks we are undermining his floors, which we are, but that is a side effect. The Turnips think we are brave, which embarrasses us. None of them have it right. We are not heroes and we are not lunatics.

We are just neighbours, to the loneliest thing in the world, and we have decided — stubbornly, practically, politely — that nobody, not even that, should have to sit in the dark with no one to overhear.

When the dark has opinions, the polite thing to do is dig sideways — and keep talking, so it knows you're there.