The Darkness and Dogs
Page 21
Chapter Forty-Five
Some time later he wakes, to a tremendous pain in his feet. His mind is a blur, his skin is burning, and as he opens his eyes the light comes through as an agonizing bright white through his unnaturally narrowing lids. With a great effort, he manages to lift his hands to his face, and registers dully the strange puffiness his fingers encounter as he traces his features. After several failed attempts, he manages to sit up and flails for a moment at his boots, desperate to remove them and relieve the immense pressure he feels from within. As he sits there, a succession of detached, indistinct thoughts filter through his mind, and each he ignores until, suddenly, one shines through with enough clarity that he can hold onto it. With a sudden, final surge of energy, Lowell heaves himself up onto his knees, and then to his feet. Swaying violently, he forces himself to focus on the doors of the barn and take two unsteady steps closer. As a new dizziness surges upwards to overwhelm him, and he feels himself falling backwards to the ground, he opens his parched lips and wills himself to shout aloud one word with the very last of his fading strength,
“Venus!”
Chapter Forty-Six
Away across the fields, in small copse by a frozen pond, Venus is lying down, chewing triumphantly on the carcass of the rabbit, her reward from a victorious hunt. Every few moments, she lets it drop to the ground, and then places one paw protectively over it and looks around proudly, her excited breath misting up and away into the cold air. All of a sudden, as she bends her head once more to her prize, the sound of Lowell’s last, desperate cry rings out, carrying clear and true across the silence of the snowbound landscape. Within a second she is on her feet and running, the rabbit lying discarded and broken, its dark red blood slowly seeping out and staining the snow where it lays. In no time she is through the hedge, and on across the field, racing with panicked abandon towards the barn.
As soon as Venus reaches the barn she sees Lowell, laying still on the floor, his body swollen, his arms outstretched on each side, and leaps over towards him. Ignoring the food on the floor, she moves straight to where he rests, and stretches her neck forward to lick him uncertainly on the cheek. Receiving no response, she stands over him, confused, and barking with a desperate insistence. After a long, anxious pause, Lowell’s eyelids flutter and open narrowly and his eyes, cloudy and dilated, seem to register her face for a second. Slowly, the fingers on one hand curl in, so that they are just in contact with the nearest of Venus’s forelegs, and gently tousle the soft feathers they encounter there. As she sees him awaken, Venus moves closer, and lies down next to him, resting her head gently onto his and laying one paw protectively across his chest. With each of his last rattling breaths, her head raises and lowers in time, as all the while she keeps her eyes fixed firmly on to his. As each of Lowell’s breaths grew ever more timid and insubstantial, she begins to whine; a melancholy note that rises and falls in pitch but increases in volume, and culminates finally with a single, long, howl as Lowell draws his final, ragged breath.
For the rest of the night, and on into the next morning she cries, a haunting wail that spreads out from the barn, and is perceptible from as far as the farmhouse across the fields and beyond. For most of the day, she continues to lie on his body, as it grows slowly cold beneath her, and then, as the second evening draws in, and the first flakes of a fresh snowfall begin to drift slowly down from the sky, she rises up, takes one last, prolonged sad look at Lowell’s body on the floor, and stalks away, alone once again, into the wild.
The End