by Piers Torday
I take a last look at my attempt, and swivel the game around so she can see. The girl studies it closely for a moment, and then looks up and shakes her head.
‘That is the stupidest story I ever heard. Talking animals? I’m not that gullible, you know. Even if they could talk, which they can’t, there’s none left. Sidney’s the last one left in the whole world, which is why she’s so precious. And you’re not precious, you’re just a dirty little boy.’
She stands up and points the gun, which is twice her size, right up my nose.
‘Now, tell me the truth about why you’re here. Or get out of my house.’
I can’t go back out there. I need a doctor. There’s no way to convince her, unless –
*Sidney!* I force the words out. *Sidney – you have to help me.*
The cat stretches and, eyelids half lowered, looks down her nose at me. *And pray why, exactly? I’m not just any cat, you see. I, my dear, am a prize-winning cat. Once upon a time I was Best in Show, Best in Section, Best Groomed–*
*Sidney!* I’m actually shaking with frustration. *None of that matters any more. Don’t you understand? I’ve come from the Ring of Trees.*
At this, Sidney leaps on to her front, hackles raised. The girl’s eyes dart between us, unsure what is going on.
*Impossible! That place doesn’t even exist. It was only ever a rumour.*
*It’s true. Ask the General.*
*Who?*
I point to the cockroach, who is now perched on the table above, idly nibbling at the edge of a dead fern in a scrapbook but listening with deadly attention.
*It is true, Cat. The last wild live there, with a great stag as their Wildness. We summoned this boy to help us find a cure for the plague.*
Sidney snorts. *Even if you expect me to believe this bug, what do you want me to do about it?*
*Tell …* I realize I still don’t know the girl’s name.
*You may call her Polly,* purrs the cat.
*Tell Polly I’m not a kidnapper. Explain how I can talk to animals, and that I need her help.*
Sidney is racked by more coughs. *How can I explain anything to her? She can’t talk to animals – thankfully. I’d never hear the end of it if she could – can you imagine?*
*Just prove to her that I can! Move pieces around on the board. Spell it out!*
Her red eyes oozing a little, the cat looks down at the board and sniffs. *Just because I win prizes doesn’t mean I do tricks, you know.* I’m about to throw the whole box of letters over her head, when she gives a flick of her tail and trots up on to the board.
*All right, all right, my dear. Keep your fur on.*
As coolly as if she had been playing the game with us all morning, Sidney starts to push the letters around with her paws. She moves a couple of tiles, stops and then adds a couple more, before stepping back to examine her efforts.
I look down, and shake my head. *Very helpful,* I say.
‘Those words aren’t in the dictionary,’ says Polly.
The cat has written:
*Well, it’s the truth, my dear. Like it or not,* says Sidney. *That’s cat spelling, anyhow.*
*Go on, Sidney. Please. Tell her.*
Sidney sighs. She swipes her paw across the board, scattering all the other pieces, and starts again, clawing more tiles out of the cardboard box, placing them in catspelt order, until the board is full.
As Polly reads what the cat has written, she looks no longer flushed with anger but white. Like she’s seen a ghost. ‘You’ve got the red-eye?’
Finally. Feverish and exhausted, I can only just nod.
‘You’re absolutely sure? Your animals have given you the virus? The same one as Sidney?’
Look at my sweating red face, I want to scream. Feel my forehead! I don’t know how much more ill I need to be.
I half expect her to run away, but instead Polly just purses her lips and shakes her head. She picks up the tiles and puts them back in the bag, drawing it tight and folding up the board before putting them both away neatly in the box. Then she lays the gun carefully on the floor, grabs a magnifying glass off the table and examines me closely, peering in my eyes and feeling my forehead and my wrist.
‘And you left these animals at the top of the valley? That’s where you came from?’
I nod. Although who knows where they could be by now. But Polly seems satisfied with this answer. She scans me all over one more time before rummaging in her pocket, pulling out a pair of tweezers, leaning forward and plucking a piece of muck off my cuff. She holds the scrap of muck up to the light with the tweezers in one hand and studies it with the magnifying glass in the other. She nods to herself, as if answering a question no one has asked, raises an eyebrow in my direction and says –
‘You don’t have the virus.’ She picks up the gun and digs it in my belly. ‘And I’ll show you why.’
The kitchen of Wind’s Edge is bigger than any I’ve ever seen and messier too. In the light squeezing through the shuttered windows I can see pans, mugs and dishes piled up in a sink full of water. Bundles of spoons dangle from wooden bars, hanging low on ropes attached to the high ceiling, along with bunches of dried leaves and blackened twigs. The walls are lined with crooked shelves, crammed with jars of powders and seeds and glass bottles holding puddles of oily liquids.
‘Sit down,’ says Polly, simultaneously pointing the gun at a chair and tossing the word game on to the table. As I collapse on to the seat, the General whizzes off down my leg.
*Right!* he barks. *It is essential that I carry out a reconnaissance for any possible enemy armies.*
*You mean the kind of ‘enemy armies’ that you can eat?* I mutter.
*Do not interfere in military matters,* he snaps back, before scuttling off over the rubbish-strewn floor.
Ignoring him, Polly leans her rifle against the wall and pulls a notebook out from underneath a tottering pile of newspapers, sending the whole lot flying – and Sidney running.
The book is old and covered with wrinkled black leather. As she flicks through the pages I peer over her shoulder. It’s full of drawings and diagrams – of plants, and petals, and leaves. Trees, from diagrams of their tangled roots to close-up sketches of their crinkly bark. Bunches of berries, nuts and weeds. More plants than I’ve ever seen, every kind, there must be – drawn this way, then that way, cut in half, and covered with scribbled notes.
Polly finds the page she wants, begins to study it – then senses me watching and whips the book away. She stamps over to the sink and fills up an old kettle, setting it to boil on a stove in the corner. Standing on a stool, she reaches up to pull at the dangling bunches of twigs, examining and sniffing each one until she has a carefully selected pile in her palm.
She crumbles them into a stone bowl, followed by a scoop of powder from a jar and a squirt of some oily green liquid. She takes a wooden spoon and bangs and pounds the different ingredients together, until a bitter smell rises into the air, making my stomach turn. The kettle begins to hiss and scream on the stove – and rinsing out a mug from the pile in the sink, Polly tips the crushed mess in, before topping it up with boiling water and plonking the cup down in front of me.
I take one look at the steaming potion and gag, pushing it away.
Polly shakes her head.
‘Headache?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘Stomach cramps?’
I nod again.
‘Feeling sick and dizzy?’
I just close my eyes, to try and stop the spinning.
With a look of triumph she brandishes the tweezers holding the piece of muck from my sleeve and drops it into my open palm. Except I can see that the piece of muck is in fact half a squashed berry. One of the berries the pigeons gave me, now blackened by mud.
I still don’t get it.
‘Briary berries,’ she says, sliding the notebook across the table. It’s open at a page covered with a drawing of berries – the ones I ate. ‘The woods you came from are full of them
. I made the same mistake once too – they’re so pretty to look at, and so juicy. But you can’t eat them.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘Well, humans can’t – they’re poisonous to us. Not enough to kill you, but enough to make you very sick.’
I look at the potion and feel the bile rise in my throat, but Polly pushes it towards me. ‘This will make you feel better. Charcoal and flaxseed tea. But you have to drink it. Every last drop.’ She folds her arms. ‘You haven’t got the red-eye. Trust me.’
I see the General watching us from the floor. *How was I to know you couldn’t eat them?* he bristles.
I look down into the steaming mug, close my eyes, pinch my nose with one hand and take a gulp. It’s black and claggy, and every mouthful makes me want to retch, but somehow I get a bit down.
I shudder at the taste, but my stomach feels calmer already.
‘It was only luck that I saw that berry really,’ Polly says. ‘It could have been anything. The woods round here are full of poisonous things you mustn’t eat. But I always knew it wasn’t the red-eye.’
I don’t understand. She reaches under the table and picks up Sidney, all bony and lopsided, with red eyes burning, holding her tight to her chest, burying her face in the white fur till Sidney wriggles free on to the floor, yowling with disgust.
*For goodness sake, boy, I’m ill enough as it is – can’t you make her stop?*
But I only have ears for Polly.
‘Can’t you see. She’s been sick for two weeks, and I hold her every day, but I’m as healthy as can be.’ I look at her, not believing what I’m hearing. ‘Facto are lying to you all. Humans can’t get the virus.’
Over more sips of charcoal tea, which begins to taste much nicer and more warming than I could ever have imagined, Polly tells me her story. Sidney falls asleep, stretched out across the game board, only mewing and coughing occasionally, but the General perches silently on my shoulder, not missing a word.
‘I was very little, so I don’t remember it starting,’ she says. ‘When they ordered everyone to leave the countryside, and declared it a quarantine zone, we stayed. Mum didn’t want to leave the house she grew up in, you see – anything could have happened to it.’
Looking around at the peeling window frames and filthy kitchen, I’m not sure what else could have happened to it.
‘We ate everything in the larder, in rations, and then we rinsed out the empty tins and packets and made soup from the scraps. When the formula came, we never got any. We weren’t meant to still be here, you see. They only gave it to people in the cities.’ I never knew that. ‘Facto destroyed the vegetables and crops, saying they were contaminated, so Dad said if we were to stay, we had to learn everything there was about the plants.’ She waves the leather notebook in front of me. ‘We had lots of old books in the library. Mum and Dad are historians, you see. Of the way we used to live – right back to the first human beings ever. We studied the books together. I know about all the plants in the woods around here – what mushrooms and berries are safe to eat, and which ones aren’t. Even soup made out of nettles – we ate anything we could get our hands on.’
I’m not sure that sounds much better than my charcoal tea, but I’ll take her word for it.
‘Even so, Dad always said that we must never let Sidney outside, in case she came into contact with any infected animals.’ She looks over at the coughing cat. ‘We just couldn’t keep an eye on her all the time, so she got it eventually.’ Polly rests her hand on Sidney’s belly and her eyes have a faraway look. ‘But I haven’t.’
She must read my face.
‘My parents haven’t either – at least, not as far as I know. She’s been feverish for ages, and they were fine when they left, which was just before her eyes went red. We ran out of nice things to make from weeds and bark, you see, so last week Mum and Dad decided to go to Mons to try and get some formula. They said they would only be a day. I thought you might be them, you see, and when you weren’t …’
Polly looks exhausted, her fingers propping up her cheek as she tries not to let her head drop on to the table, her dark hair coming down untidily all over her face. I realize we’ve been ‘talking’ for hours.
‘I’m starving,’ she says, and goes over to a large sack stuffed under the sink. Digging her hand in, she scoops out a pile of dusty looking biscuits and holds them out in her palm.
I look amazed. They still have real food left.
She sees my expression and laughs. ‘Don’t be silly – they’re not normal food. They’re Sidney’s cat biscuits. They’re very old, and have the worst taste in the world, but they’re all we’ve got. I’ve been living off them since Mum and Dad left.’
And with that, she chucks a handful in her mouth.
Just seeing her eat makes my stomach start to rumble again.
‘Want some?’ she says, with her mouth half full, offering me a pile.
Anything. Anything to eat.
It turns out cat biscuits do have the worst taste in the world, but as I crunch through them, I slowly start to feel like I might be able to move again. We’ve been up all night long, and now rays of light are beginning to slide in through the tops of the windows. Finishing my biscuit breakfast, I walk over to open the stiff shutters. Rubbing the moisture off the glass, I can make out the paved yard down below, the posh field and the crumbling pillars. I want to see a shadowy outline of a high back and horns, maybe some blurry dots flapping around in the sky above – but there’s nothing – just the empty wood of spiky trees beyond.
I wonder where they are.
‘Why did you leave them?’
I turn around. Polly’s rubbing her eyes and stretching out a yawn.
‘I don’t understand. If there really are animals who are still alive, and who are your friends, why did you leave them? I would never leave Sidney.’
I don’t know now. I look at the floor.
‘Do you think you could rescue Sidney too? I think she would quite like that.’
I stand breathing on the glass, tracing an outline with my finger and thinking. I made a promise. I look at my watch again, hoping it will give me an answer. I flick idly through the pictures, trying to work out what to do.
And then the watch flickers again. Just like it did at the Ring of Trees.
The pictures of the animals I took judder up and down on the screen, and it’s like there’s another picture trying to get through – black and white, an outline of someone or something – but it’s no good. I shake the watch, hold it close to the window … and the interference clears. A single word appears. Just that. One word, black and white on my screen.
HELP
I stare at it. Then, just as quickly as it appeared, the word has vanished. No matter what buttons I press, or how many times I shake the watch, it doesn’t return. I don’t know what it means. But it’s helped me make my decision.
I turn around.
Polly stands up to face me, tired and unsteady. ‘What are you doing? Are you going to rescue us?’
I look at her exhausted face. She helped me. I look at Sidney, racked with coughs. I made a promise.
I grab the board, and begin to spell out Y-E-, but before I can even find the last letter, Polly has clapped her hands with excitement and is scooping all the tiles back into a bag.
‘An adventure! I love adventures. Now, we’ll take the game so you can talk to people as well, and I’ll get a torch. We won’t be long, will we? As long as we’re back by dinner, I’m sure they won’t mind –’
And she’s gone, out of the kitchen, clattering up some stairs, still talking as she goes.
Woken, Sidney stands up on the table, her shadow curling out behind her.
*I don’t think I want to die, my dear – there are so many prizes still left to win.*
I stroke her back and she flinches.
*You’ll have to ride on a stag,* I say.
*Is he terribly rough and uncouth and brutish?*
I nod.
*Well, that’s so
me consolation, I suppose,* she says, whisking her tail.
Scooping her up in my arms, I walk out of the kitchen, straight into Polly, who now has a bulging rucksack slung over her shoulder. She’s wide awake, her cheeks flushed, opening the bag for me to inspect it.
‘I think I’ve got everything. Your letter tiles, some extra cat biscuits to eat in an emergency, binoculars, and the magnifying glass in case we need to examine anything more closely.’ I feel the General prickle in my pocket. ‘And my notebook of course. We might even discover some new plants to eat! I’ve left a note for Mum and Dad in their bedroom – do you think we’ll be very long?’
But the words die in her mouth as we both hear the noise.
A noise I haven’t heard for such a long time – the noise of a car engine, pulling to a halt across the stone circle outside.
Polly and I freeze in the doorway of the kitchen, staring at each other. Barely daring to breathe, we listen to the steady hum of the engine from down below.
Then she is off again, flying down the passage, yelling – ‘They’re back!’
With Sidney over my shoulder and the General in my pocket, I run after her as fast as I can, through the maze of corridors and stairs. I find Polly at the end of a stone hallway, clutching a bunch of keys and straining to open about fifteen different locks on a very heavy door.
‘I should have got blankets or something; they’re bound to be cold after their journey. But they’ll have brought formula so we can probably have a feast tonight!’
A feast of pink Chicken’n’Chips slop. I wonder what her parents will make of the silent boy covered in mud who broke into their house with a cockroach.
Polly loosens a padlocked chain, draws a wooden beam back and struggles to pull the door open.
‘Don’t just stand there, Kidnapper! Help me!’
Together we force the heavy door open across the stone.
Polly rushes out, full of words. The sky is filling up with grey clouds, but there is no rain yet.
She stops dead in her tracks on the first step, looking at the machine in the courtyard, its engine quietly humming. It doesn’t look like much close up, all dented with scratches down the side, smoke pumping noisily out of the rusty exhaust. But there is no mistaking it. The six large wheels, ridged with mud, the purple panels, all painted with a yellow F in a circle – the machine the stag first saw in the Great Open.