Then came the roar of thunder.
Ki-ya, Beacon and Dart lay silently among the grass. They did not see dark shadows, only an animal. An animal that stood upright upon two legs. They felt no excitement at the approach of this strange, grey, gnarl-skinned creature. Only apprehension, distrust and fear: that simple, inbred fear that told them of all dangers. Its presence was enough to hold them to the ground, to make them instinctively hide themselves away, in the hope that hiding would be enough to save them.
Thunder roared again, lightning was thrown carelessly about the sky, and the creature began to cry out loud. But even as the claws of the shadow held her mind, Bryna knew enough to wonder. Surely this thunder was all wrong? Can it thunder without clouds, when the skies are clear blue? And what was the sour reek, like some foul thing burning, that came with it and stung her nose? It was as if the thunder and the lightning were coming from inside the man. Somehow the thunder was the man.
And then, at last, Bryna saw the truth of it. Saw through the shadows as the figure cried out again, like a man. Like a man. Not a man. Not quite tall enough, not quite straight enough. Too frail-looking somehow; the shallow features of its face hardly hinted at. And a deep, a terrible scar disfigured its head; long since healed over, it pulled the skin too tightly across the bones of its skull.
And if the shadow-hunter was not a man . . . what was it?
Dread Booga had stepped out of Bryna’s dreams. And if ever death stood upon two legs, this creature was it.
For a third time, lightning flashed and thunder roared, and the dogs ran on and on. Khan was almost upon the Booga, bounding gleefully, barking with joy. Heedless of the truth he could not see before him, of the terrifying noise and blinding light.
He did not take another step. His body fell heavily at the Booga’s feet and did not move again.
Dread Booga squealed, not with delight, but with a kind of anguish, of fear even.
The dog pack stopped running, stood transfixed. They could not run away, or use their voices to plead.
Then another uncontrolled squealing flash, another bang. And a strange laughter mixed with even stranger words, came from the mouth of the Booga. If there was any meaning to it, it was beyond the sense of any animal there. “Etsa clow es, sai for ma I—” Crack! “—Pro farr a? Pro farr a?” Crack! Crack! Crack!
Out across the Town Moor a Great Dane fell over and lay quite still; then another dog, and then another. Each of them dropped without so much as a whimper.
And if among it all no animal saw the streak of light that fell clumsily between the Booga’s unpractised fingers, scorching the grass, turning poor Beacon’s body from under her, it’s little wonder. Sadly, not even Beacon’s own eyes were sharp enough for that.
When, at last, the thunder fell silent the Booga lifted up Khan’s body. Not yet frozen in death, the dog’s mouth snapped open and shut, open and shut as the creature moved, as if even now – in death – he was calling out to the Dread Booga.
But this was not the worst of it. The Booga stooped down a second time and lifted up the smaller body of a cat. A cat whose markings were burned black and unrecognisable. With that, it began to stalk towards the heart of the town, its long, clumsy legs jarring its body like a bag of loose bones as it moved across the open ground . . .
Long, long after the Booga had gone there was a deathly still upon that Moor. Nothing moved. Nothing dared move.
Maybe they were all dead, thought Bryna. The whole world had gone mad, and they were all dead. And death was a place. Yes, of course, they were dead. Why else would Grundle be standing over her now? And there too was Dexter with Fat Blossom at his side, looking anxiously on.
But she was not dead. The shadows inside her head began to lift, the ghosts faded away and became a living dog. A shivering, cowering dog, trailing blood as it moved – but no less a real live terrier for that. Yip-yap dragged himself slowly past her without a look in her direction.
Ki-ya and Dart found Bryna there, and led her away to safety.
Not Beacon though. There was no more Beacon.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Field of Stones
How many times over the next days and weeks did Bryna’s mind turn back to her old life with Mrs Ida Tupps? Where all was order, changeless and sure. Where meal followed sleep followed meal as certain as night followed day. Where death did not come stalking in disguise, and if there were enemies to avoid you knew who they were.
The streets, the gardens, the roads, the riverside paths, and the open fields of the Town Moor became deserted. Dogs and cats alike, too scared to move, hid themselves away. Stayed out of sight. Only when an empty belly cried louder than the roaring thunder that haunted them all did any animal chance to venture out. In the end what choice was there? They could not stay hidden forever. Even the innocent victim must eat sometime or else meet his death anyway.
When forced to the hunt animals stalked warily and silently. Never alone, but never in packs. Too conspicuous. Don’t want to be conspicuous. And if old friends or kin were met upon the way, they said little or nothing to each other, and passed by hurriedly. Even where dogs and cats met, as they turned the same street corner or chased down the same quarry, no call or threat was made. Each would check themselves, turn tail and run away, or else look purposefully ahead – as if the other was invisible – and pass on.
As time passed there were those who were foolish enough to forget; but they were found out soon enough. Dread Booga always found them out. Day or night, in sleeting rain or blazing sunshine, made no difference to the Booga. There was to be no rest from its murderous thunder. As its roar was heard across the town any animal foolish enough to be caught out in the open stanced stricken with fear, until the dreadful noise passed away. Then they would move quickly into cover, only thankful not to have been its latest victim.
For Ki-ya and Dart it was different. It was the loss of their mother that rested most heavily upon them. They spent endless hours skulking about the wood. They fretted, or stalked aimlessly from tree to tree as if they were searching for something. Something that had left an aching unfillable hole deep inside of them. Something they must surely find in the end if only they kept on looking.
And Bryna? Scared, perplexed for herself, worried for them, followed them about, like a silly lost kit.
They took to spending all their time together and would not be parted, slept flank to flank. Bryna on one side of Ki-ya, his sister on the other. But even in sleep there was to be no escape, no rest for Bryna. Shadows still stalked in her dreams. Not Dread Booga though. No. The Booga was out there in the real world . . . now it was the dead who worried her sleep. Dexter and Fat Blossom, Brindle and Maxwell, and old Lodger. At first they would simply sit and watch her. But as the nights passed, the ghosts became restless and they began to whisper urgently to one another.
“I can’t hear you!” Bryna called out to them. “I can’t hear what you’re saying!”
“Treacle . . .” Lodger seemed to say. “Treacle . . .”
“What? What are you saying?”
“Treacle . . .” repeated Fat Blossom, desperate for her to understand.
“But Treacle’s dead – he’s just a ghost. A ghost like you!”
“No, Bryna . . . alive . . .”
But you wake up from nightmares and dreams, don’t you? And neither are true.
The days turned, but the changing seasons did nothing to lift the darkness of their mood. Poor spring became a poorer summer. All clouds and rain. The sun, when it shone at all, was too cold to warm a moggie’s back.
Forever on edge, unsettled and fearful, life was one long threat. The smallest of things could spook Bryna. A windblown leaf falling from a tree, or the first splash of rain before a shower. Her fears became her frustration, turning to anger, burning her up inside. Until, at last, she could stand it no longer. She felt that if she did not just get up and do something she would surely burst.
“Ki-ya, I want to go and look f
or Treacle,” she found the courage to say. For a long moment Ki-ya stared ruefully at the house-cat. In a way it did not surprise him. What, after all, had he and his sister been doing ever since the death of their mother, but brooding over a ghost?
“Treacle’s gone, Bryna. Drowned,” Ki-ya said simply. There was no easy way of saying dead.
“No. No, it’s not true. The ghosts told me. They told me. And I’m going to find him.”
“Bryna, he’s dead, as dead as . . . as dead as Beacon.” Ki-ya’s words came slowly, as if there was something in them that he too was seeing only for the first time. Dart turned her head away, and raked the earth with her open claws.
“I had another dream—” began Bryna.
“Pah,” spat Dart, “you and your ghosts and your stupid dreams. The dead are just dead and that’s an end to it.”
“No, there was a field, a field full of stones growing up out of the ground. They were beautiful flat stones, line upon line of them, going on forever.” She paused, expecting Ki-ya’s denial or at least Dart’s abuse. But there was none. “And there was a cat standing in among the stones. A small rusty-orange-and-white cat. If there was ever such a place, then that is where I will find Treacle.”
“Oh Bryna, Bryna, even if he was alive, how could you possibly find this field of stones?” said Ki-ya.
“I don’t know. Maybe the ghosts will show me the way. I don’t know – but I must try.”
“And what about Dread Booga? Have you forgotten the reek of its evil thunder? Have you forgotten Beacon so soon?”
“I don’t care. I don’t care!” Bryna mewed bitterly. “And anyway, I’m not asking any cat to come with me. I can take care of myself.”
An angry silence filled the space between them. Tails twisted and flicked.
It was Dart who spoke next. “You don’t need ghosts to show you the way to the field of stones, Bryna. I know this place.”
“What?”
“I’ve seen it. I’ve been there. It’s real enough . . . a place of strange feelings. A man-made place. They put things in the ground there, bury them in boxes, and then they plant the stones on top of the boxes. But they’re not like trees, they never grow.”
“Where is it, then? Tell me, Dart. Please, tell me!”
“It’s on our side of the river, but deep within the town. And it’s dangerous.”
“Well, if you’re too scared to show me the way, then I’ll go alone.” Bryna stood up and took off without another word, without heed of direction or threat.
Ki-ya and Dart moved cautiously along the street, keeping low and close to the garden walls of the empty houses, losing themselves in their short shadows.
Bryna was moving a little way ahead of them, lost among the same shadows.
“Of course we couldn’t let her go off on her own. Even if it is a wild-goose chase,” Ki-ya hissed under his breath.
“Ghosts, pah!” Dart hissed back with a look of disgust. “We aren’t safe here, and it would be a lot, lot quicker if you let me go first. She doesn’t even know where she’s going.”
“Shhh – or she’ll hear you.”
“I don’t care if she does. This is foolishness, brother. She stops and worries at every turn. Follows the wrong roads, jumps over the wrong garden walls. And it’s me who has to keep putting her right.”
Bryna had stopped at another street corner, hesitant, desperate to find the way without help.
“Turn left, cat. Turn left,” Dart spat under her breath. “And when you get to the iron gates, stop.”
Bryna turned her head to the right as if she was considering something, before grudgingly moving to the left.
The heavy, black iron gates were bounded by two solid stone pillars and a wall of almost two man heights. Bryna walked deliberately past the gates – just to annoy Dart and Ki-ya – then turned around again, sat down heavily, and waited for them to catch her up.
Dart might have said something rude, but she didn’t. The moment the three cats were in front of those gates their quarrel was forgotten. This was not a place for petty argument.
There before them, right in the middle of the town, behind the closed iron gates, stood the field of stones.
Bryna shuddered involuntarily. Whereas before, the unknown streets had merely smelled dangerous and forbidding, this place smelled oddly of something else, something she was never able to describe better than . . . old death. In its never-ending lines of mouldering grey-green stones, in its withering patches of overgrown grass, in its sickly, decaying, long-neglected flower borders, there was the same lingering odour. But not a scent. No. Scents come and go, windblown. This was something more; this was permanent, part of its very substance.
Against everything she knew, Bryna forced herself to stand up and edge towards the gates, just to find herself gripped by a cat’s teeth and pulled back forcibly.
“There’s something not right with this place, Bryna.” Ki-ya’s eyes were pleading.
“I didn’t ask you to come,” said Bryna, pulling herself free.
“It’s not a place for cats,” Dart cried.
“I must find Treacle,” Bryna thrust her head and shoulders between the iron bars of the gate. Instantly a crowd of shadows shrouded her mind, and a blackness fell upon her as surely as if she’d been blinded.
Then there was the weight of a sudden movement at her side. And before she could find her voice to protest, Ki-ya had leapt between the iron bars, and disappeared among the lines of stones.
“Stay, Bryna,” Dart snarled, forced to use her claws to hold her back. “Let him go. If there’s any animal alive in this awful place then he will find it.”
“But this is my task—”
“Stay,” Dart snarled again. But then softened her voice. “We’ll wait for him here, together.”
They sat at that gate and listened to the silence, watched anxiously the unchanging lines of grey-green stones. Just once they caught a glimpse of Ki-ya’s long ginger tail flashing between one distant stone and the next. But nothing more. So much had already disappeared from Bryna’s world . . . Mrs Ida Tupps . . . Dexter . . . Treacle . . . Beacon . . . and now Ki-ya too?
And then, without warning, the worrying ghost-shadows clouding her mind were blown away. Out there, somewhere among the gravestones, a cat squalled angrily. Its shriek filled the graveyard, as it flew between the stones, chased or chasing.
“Ki-ya?” Dart and Bryna stood up together, stanced to attack. “Ki-ya, is that you?” Another squeal. Shorter, sharper than the first; a different cat. Then, before either cat could move, Ki-ya was there, coming towards them. His three-legged limp exaggerated under the weight of the load he was carrying between gritted teeth. He was pulling something along the ground, something that did not want to come with him, something that was fighting back.
He let go of his struggling baggage just in front of the iron gates. “You’d best be Treacle, for your own sake. Or I’ll give you more than the back of my paw.”
“S-sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Pouncing on a grown cat like that—”
There was blood.
“But nobody ever comes into the graveyard. I-I thought you were—” Ki-ya didn’t let him finish.
“I should skin you alive. If it wasn’t for—”
“Treacle? TREACLE!” It was Bryna’s turn to interrupt Ki-ya. “Is that really you? And not a ghost.”
“Ghost. I should say he’s not a ruddy ghost. He nearly took the back of my head off,” snapped Ki-ya. “Jumping out on me like that.” Treacle sprang away to the side just in case the bullying wild cat changed his mind and decided to give him a scuffing anyway. There was blood on his shoulder.
“Treacle, you’re hurt,” said Bryna.
“Oh no, he’s ruddy well not. That’s my blood—” Ki-ya started, but he shut himself up again. A strange look had come upon Bryna, a look he couldn’t fathom, something that went far deeper than bruised pride. The thrum of her purr began to beat out loudly as she g
reeted her old friend . . .
That night there was laughter. Never in all the world could there have been four such happy cats. Finding Treacle alive seemed to breathe new life into them all. For Bryna and Treacle there was simple joy. They talked and they talked: by turns kittish, proud or boastful, happily rejoicing in the sounds of friendship. For Ki-ya and Dart a cloud had lifted, as if they too had somehow found among the gravestones something far more precious than a silly moggie. They sat silently with the house-cats, content to listen to their frivolous babble.
In truth, Bryna knew their silly words were simply filling a gap where for now they could not speak the deeper, hateful words of tragedy that must in the end be said.
It was Bryna who talked first of Dread Booga, the creature who haunted the town, of the evil thunder and of bloody, senseless killings. But it was several more days before Treacle finally spoke about the great flood that had brought the death of Lodger. His was a strange tale, not easily told: the words, the memories came hard to him.
“The flood took me too, Bryna . . . the water came up over my head, lifted me off my paws. Pulled me down into its depths. Drowned I was . . . good as dead . . . couldn’t breathe. Choked. No air . . . I-I don’t know how it was. How it happened. He was suddenly there beside me. In the water . . . He held me up. Lifted me clear.” Treacle pawed the earth slowly, as if he was trying to clear away the fogginess in his head. “And then I was moving again. But not through the water this time. I thought I was flying. I could see the streets around me . . .” He fell silent again, wanted to remember properly. Wanted them to unravel the puzzle as he had done. “He carried me a long way . . . stayed with me all night. Found us the field of stones where we could rest in safety. No dog would bother us there. No flood could rise that far. And he had food . . .” Suddenly he turned to Bryna, his eyes wide open, stricken. “I’m not mad, Bryna. He was there. He did come for me. He did.” And then his voice fell low again. “He told me we could wait together . . . for help. And we waited. I waited, Bryna, I waited for ever and ever . . . but nobody came. Nobody came!”
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