A further fragment from the found writings of Nevin Wraithwhistle, humbly reproduced by P.W. Burrow, First Publication August 1934

This account was recovered from the first chest, folded twice around a dented brass button no larger than a huckleberry, the kind that might once have fastened a ceremonial sash. I reproduce it here largely as found, save for regularizing Nevin's spelling of "whiskey," which shifted no fewer than four times across these pages.

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The bell in the ventilation shaft does not ring so much as it screams, and it had never once in my memory screamed for anything worse than a fox with more curiosity than sense. So when it went off in the black hours before dawn, I did what any sensible gnome does with an unfamiliar emergency: I assumed the worst and moved twice as fast as necessary.

Breeches, boots, helmet — in that order, always in that order, because Willa Trundlespark once put her boots on before her breeches and has never lived it down. I snatched my pike off the wall pegs where it had hung untouched since the badger business of forty-one and was out my door before I'd finished deciding whether I was actually frightened.

The corridor outside was chaos in the organized sense — gnomes moving with purpose but without conversation, because we had drilled this a dozen times against nothing more dangerous than raccoons and once, memorably, a confused owl. Poppy caught my elbow at the junction, already armed, already calm in that magistrate way of hers. "Something's in the outer tunnels," she said. "Big. Wrong-footed. Tam heard it three turns back before the wire tripped." "Fox?" I asked, without much hope. "Foxes don't mutter to themselves," she said.

We split at the Storage Room, as the drill demanded. Tam Willowget and Merrin Thistlebarrow took the low trail that loops around behind the mine access corridor — Merrin unhappy about it, as Merrin is unhappy about most assignments involving the word "behind an unknown intruder," but going anyway, because that is what Merrin does. Poppy and I took the direct route to the Long Drop.

Albrecht's engineering notes call it a Varmint Redirect, Mark II, built bigger and meaner after the badger business made it clear the old design wouldn't hold anything with real weight behind it. The floor of the lower corridor pivots on a buried stone axle, balanced so that a gnome — or several — standing at the near end keeps the whole plank level and solid-feeling underfoot, same as any honest tunnel floor. Remove that weight, or fail to match it, and the far end drops like a trapdoor, which of course it is. Poppy and I planted ourselves at the near end, pikes low and steady, and waited to be the reason the floor stayed where it was.

We didn't wait long. Something crazed came shambling down that tunnel like it had a purpose — a scrabbling, lopsided gait, a mutter that occasionally sharpened into words in no language I recognized, and, underneath all of it, a sour reek of stomach acid. Tam and Merrin came around the bend a good ten paces behind it, pikes up but doing nothing at all, because the thing needed no encouragement whatsoever to keep moving forward. Merrin later swore they hadn't so much as raised their voice. They hadn't needed to.

It saw us at the same moment it hit the far end of the plank — a hunched, crooked shape, robes gone ragged at the hem, a staff clutched in one fist like it meant to do something terrible with it. It raised that staff toward us, and for one very long half-second I had time to consider that perhaps a see-saw and two pikes were an insufficient plan against whatever was about to come out of the end of that stick.

Then the trap did what it was supposed to do to creatures who arrive at it uninvited and unbalanced, and it was gone. Not a scream, exactly — more a startled, furious bark, swallowed almost immediately by distance and dark. The plank slapped back level under our boots with a hollow thud that I felt in my teeth.

We didn't celebrate. Poppy had the trap pinned and locked within the minute, and the four of us were at the warren's main door before the echo of the fall had properly finished, barring it and stacking stone behind it the way we'd only ever practiced. Nobody slept the rest of that night. Nobody much wanted to.

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The following evening, once cooler heads and a strong argument from Gretchen Formwhistle about "not knowing what we're dealing with" had worn off into simple curiosity, a small party went out to the lower culvert where the Long Drop empties into open hillside, well below and well away from anything we'd call home.

There wasn't much to find. Scorched leaves in a rough circle, as if something had paced there a while before giving up and moving on. Deep, ordinary gouges in the dirt that might have been a walking stick, dragged more than planted. And, half-shoved under a root, a satchel — leather, cracked, reeking powerfully enough that Merrin gagged from four paces off — containing nothing but two bottles of whiskey, both shattered, their contents long since soaked into the hillside.

We never did learn what manner of creature stalks a gnome warren with a staff in one hand and a satchel of spirits in the other, nor what it wanted with us badly enough to come muttering through our tunnels in the dead of night. Gretchen's theory is that it was drunk and lost. Poppy's theory is that it was drunk and looking for more. I have no theory, only the memory of a raised staff that never got the chance to do whatever it meant to do, and a healthy new respect for Albrecht's engineering.

We doubled the watch for a month just in case. The bell has not screamed since. But I still check my breeches are on before my boots, every single night, and I sleep with the pike within reach.