legends · 3 min read ·
The Echo
A tourist calls into a well and is answered, in his own voice, by the person he asks for.
You are supposed to say "hello" into the well. Everyone does. There is a brass plate on the cap that says *Listen*, and a leaflet in the visitor centre, and a woman in a fleece who tells you the water is two hundred and seventy feet down and that if you call you will hear yourself come back in about four seconds.
So I called. I was on a coach tour, the last stop of the day, a hillside in the wet with forty strangers in cagoules. I put my head over the stone lip and called down the shaft: "Hello!"
It was a very good echo. It came up out of the dark, rounded, clear, exactly my voice. "Hello."
The man behind me, a retired dentist in a green hat, laughed. He called "Cooee!" and the well gave him a lovely "cooee" back. We all had a go. A woman in a mac called out her husband's name. The guide, smiling, said, "Now, ladies and gentlemen, if we could allow other people to have a turn."
I was last. I leaned over. I said something. I don't know why. I said, quietly, a thing I have not said aloud in years. A name. I said, "Rosalind."
My sister's name. She has been dead since I was twenty.
The well was quiet. Four seconds. Six. The coach party shuffled behind me. I was embarrassed. I straightened up.
And from two hundred and seventy feet below, faint but unmistakable, there came back, not "Rosalind," but my own voice, saying quite clearly and calmly: "Yes?"
The guide said, "Oh, that's a nice one. Sometimes the acoustics do that."
I didn't say anything. I bent over the stone again. I said, hoarsely, "Is that you?"
And the well said, in my voice, "Is that you?"
I thought: of course. It's an echo. It is only repeating me. I have lost my mind a little because I am tired and wet. I leaned in and whispered, so that nobody else would hear: "I'm sorry."
The well was quiet. Then it said, still in my voice, but slowly, as if trying the words for fit: "I know."
I will not describe the rest. A voice from below, in the dark, that was and wasn't mine, that told me things. Small, specific, domestic things that nobody alive knows. Where I'd put a letter. What she'd said to me in the hall the night before. That she had never blamed me, and that there was a green coat in the attic I should have.
At the end it said: "Now you have to go. The coach is leaving."
And it was. The engine was turning over, the other passengers were climbing aboard, and the guide was beckoning with her clipboard. I went, and sat by the window, and did not speak.
I found the coat that Sunday. Green wool. In a trunk. It fitted.
The strange thing is the plate on the well. I went back last year. I took a photograph. *Listen*, it says, in brass. And underneath in smaller type, in letters I am quite certain were not there before, a second line.
*You may only ask once.*