............Well, this is better! I feel pretty safe here, with all the kids around us. See what I meant about the big windows? Now I want to tell you the whole story, but I will need to speak very softly because HE has big ears, and we don't want him coming around to listen.
OK. Let's sit down. Good. You see, it all started with a classroom game my class and I called The Cellar Adventure. It was a lot of fun, and we did very well in exploring some of the traps and mysteries involved with the game. See, we had formed ourselves in to a team of intrepid explorers armed with good equipment for actually exploring the dark, dark basement you and I just came out of. It began with the trapdoor down in the council meeting room downstairs, of course, and went on from there.
See, what we didn't count on was that it WAS NOT REALLY A GAME! We learned very slowly AND IN A TERRIFYING MANNER that there was actually a very strange, very powerful, and very vengeful creature dwelling far, far back in the darkest depths of our basement, which we also discovered went MUCH farther back into the hillside than we had ever imagined! And, making inquiries at the State Library, we were allowed to look at the very ancient manuscripts kept there that record the actual happenings from the earliest history of the explorations of Hendrik Hudson's ship, The Half Moon. Yes, that's right. It goes that far back.
What we learned from the translations that have been made of these manuscripts and kept for the eyes of serious scholars only, was that when Hendrik Hudson sailed up the great river and anchored by what is now known as Albany, but which was not even at that time designated as the Dutch Fort Orange. things went very wrong. It was the first encounter the Dutch had had with the inhabitants of that region, and it turned into a massacre!
For yes, there was a tribe of Indians living by the river's edge, living very peacefully, fishing and planting. They were at first delighted by this strange great bird with its white wings, and thought the men whom they saw on her back were gods! But they quickly became disillusioned, because the men thought of nothing but to kill them all off! Well, some of them, anyway. They had been told that American Indians were all killers of white men, and so, they began shooting their muskets the moment they saw them, and the Indians, who had come down to the shore to greet them, either fell or fled.
So Hendrik Hudson and his men came ashore and began exploring the banks of the river until they found a splendid site on which to found their new colony. And of course, no better site could have been found than the one which is now The Free School! The soil was fertile and well-drained, and there was water flowing down in a bountiful stream nearby. It's still there, but it flows underground now. Ask Chris and Nancy. They know.
Ah, but there was a catch to this happy tale. On board Hudson's ship was a sort of dwarf, bent and ugly but amazingly gifted and intelligent, who had been acting as a guide to the pilot as the ship sailed up the river. Now, this man, this wizard (for he was actually a wizard of great power!) was a member - a sachem, actually - of the very Indian tribe whose braves had been shot by the Dutch sailors! This strange man, whose true name was Doggoniwonta, was the evil brother of the great statesman of the Onondagas who was later to establish the Iroquois Nation. But the sailors couldn't say his Indian name very well, so they called him Schlechtlopen, which means "bad walking" in Dutch. Because, you see, this man had a great hunched back from a curvature of his spine that bent him almost double - and one leg was shorter than the other, so he walked with a kind of hitching gait or hobble. And later on, of course, the Dutch nickname was changed into English, and became H-h-h-hob-b-ble. Brr. Is it cold in here?
Well, I'll go on. When the tribal braves got shot, this man - oh, I guess I can say his name - Hobble - swore he would find his revenge. From that moment on, he began taking steps to get it. The first thing he did was to hide himself from the rest of the shore party up behind the thick growth on the hillside. Then, when night had fallen, he crept downhill to where the crew had stored their food, weapons and tools, and helped himself to as much as he could carry. Of course, he already had his medicine bundle - from which he was never parted - which held all his magical elements and the artifacts with which he cast his spells.
The Dutchmen stayed in the area for a month, digging deep into the earth and erecting a couple of log buildings as the beginning of a future outpost, from the trunks of the huge evergreen trees that grew on the hillside, then filling the crevices in the walls with the local clay that is now known as Albany slip glaze, which created a fine, silvery finish to the interiors.
During all this time Hobble lived farther up the hillside, and survived by digging edible roots and trapping small game and birds which he ate raw so as not to give his presence away by the smoke from a fire. As he thought, the men soon put him out of their minds, figuring he had gone back to his tribe.
But he stayed close to watch the building of the post, and he laid his plans. The moment he finally saw the white sails of the big ship unfurled and watched it begin to make its slow way downstream, he jumped up and down shaking his fists and shouting to the wind that he would get even, no matter how long it took, even if he had to live FOREVER! Then he got to work inside the biggest building, and began digging down into the sandy soil of its cellar.
The story shifts now, back to The Free School and the Cellar Adventure. You see, it was not really possible for us in the class to visit - physically, I mean - Hobble's huge laboratory rooms far back in the old basement, because he had put all those rooms under a spell! But we had a way of working through a kind of spell of our own that enabled us to go into that realm in spirit, leaving our physical bodies waiting quietly behind in our classroom. And it worked! Oh, it worked. As the days went by, we were able to travel slowly from one room to the next, gradually solving the many puzzles and traps contained in each room.
Day after day, week after week, we were able to explore more and more of the hundreds of rooms of Hobble's extensive domain! Once we even caught a quick glimpse of the sorceror himself, just as he made himself invisible! Scary! He gave us such an evil look, it seemed to freeze our blood! But that was not the last of it, believe me!
One Christmas, when we were all sitting in a circle in the Big Room singing Jingle Bells and waiting for Santa Claus to come up the stairs (that was before we had Father Christmas to bring us our presents), suddenly there was a racket in the back hall, a noise of voices and things being crashed around - yelling and banging. We were all pretty scared, I can tell you! Then out into the room backed a tall figure with long hair down to his shoulders and a soft beard. He was all dressed in a long white robe, crowned with green leaves, and carrying a long staff, and was being pushed gradually backward farther and farther into the big room where we were all sitting, striking out at a figure behind him, his staff raised in the air. Behind him came a short, bent figure all dressed in long rags, carrying a lantern and a raised axe, which he was chopping at the staff of the figure in white, and shouting in some foreign language in a hoarse, gravelly voice like the turning of a rusty wheel!
The two of them seemed to be fighting, the one in white evidently trying to keep the other one from entering the room. We all started shrieking in panic, and for a moment, it seemed as though the tall figure, who was clearly the Christmas Spirit, might lose to the other, who those of us in my class who knew the story suddenly realized was Hobble himself! But very soon the tide turned and Hobble turned too and fled, pounding down the stairs and yelling as he ran, pursued by the Christmas Spirit! Whew! It was some time before we could get ourselves together again to celebrate our Christmas party. Santa did not come into the school that year, and I can't say I blame him! But he did leave his big sack downstairs filled to the brim with toys, games and books for the kids!
So that was how we discovered that Hobble still lived in the basement of the school. He came up through the trap door in the Council meeting room a couple of times on Hallowe'en, and had to be chased back down again. Then one year Chris and some of the kids actually chased him out the front door and down the street, where he disappeared around the corner! For a while we were afraid he might have run into Jerry's store, but Marco said no.
Why have I brought this story up? Well, I don't know if you've realized it yet, but the picture of the school on the index page of your website is enchanted! I didn't catch it myself for some time, but once, when I was clicking on the "contact us" link in the picture, suddenly, I caught a glimpse of EYES glaring through the bars of one of the windows in the basement! And when I shifted to the other window, his eyes flashed out again - this time, A DIFFERENT COLOR!!! THAT'S HOBBLE!! Only Hobble can change the color of his eyes that way! So now I know he's back! I wrote this to warn you, because I'm sure you didn't know it, or know about Hobble. How could you, after all these years? So let this story be a warning.
Hobble Lives!
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