| Nero knew
the galleries there like the back of his paw. He knew
where every shaft began and ended, where the coal mines
started and where the lead mines interlinked with them
further up the hillside. Yet one evening, when he’d
gone to sing by himself after a rather hard day at
Squinkstown Town Hall, he heard a noise through the wall
of rock at the end of the tunnel he sang in. He was about to nail his music to an old pit-prop, to stop the score from blowing away when he tuned up, and he couldn’t believe his ears. He paused to listen, this time more intently. Sure enough, after a short interval the noise began again ... a sort of scrabbly, scrapy noise. |
 Cautiously he tip-toed nearer the rockface and gave it a long, hard look. The strange noise continued and he touched the surface gingerly. It seemed solid enough, yet he felt the smallest vibrations come through to the tips of his paw. There was something happening on the other side ... something very, very strange! |
|||||
