Arcadia

by James Treadwell

  Rory’s stomach goes liquid, turns. He throws up. Everyone’s screaming—men, women, dogs, monsters. The angel’s screaming too as it wheels above, a guttural black scream, wrraaaakk. Loudest of all screams the yellow-coat man, but his scream is like thunder. “I.” Each word is louder than the last. “Am.” The third is a peal which shakes the earth. “Inviolate!” Rory’s trying to stand up, spitting bile from his mouth. A maddened dog thrashes into the gorse bush, howling as the thorns scratch bloody furrows in its hide. Men and dogs are running everywhere, in every direction. Rory breaks his cover to run as well, so witless with terror he doesn’t even know what he’s trying to run from. A dog crashes into his legs and sends him sprawling into another man, who trips and falls. In the next instant there’s a growl like concrete shredding and the beast which used to be the foreign man leaps over Rory and lands on the fallen man’s back, swiping down with open jaws; in the next instant its muzzle comes up oozing red and Rory’s hands are flecked with warm dark spots. Someone shouts his name. It’s Ellie. She’s on her knees, bending over Soph who’s flailing around on the ground. A man runs past them, knocking her over. Lots of men are running up the ramp, trying to get inside the building. Rory crawls forward through the carnage towards the only faces he knows. There’s a blistering eruption of breaking glass: the beast has jumped straight through the glass wall. “Rory!” Ellie yells again. He realizes he’s still got the knife in his hand. He’s clutching it so hard he can’t feel his hand. He starts sawing through the ropes around Ellie’s wrists. The body of a big man crunches onto the ramp above them, flung out from the building through a halo of splintering glass. His slack head lolls over them, seeing nothing. Ellie’s saying something and so is Soph but he can’t hear what it is, his eyes are misting up and all he can hear is things being killed. A dog runs straight into the fire, arching in hideous pain as it becomes smoke. He loses his grip and drops the knife. He scrabbles in the mud and picks up something else instead, a small shining thing: the crucifix, Amber’s talisman. Ellie’s got her arms free now and has picked up the knife instead. Someone leaps over their heads. Soph’s screeching in pain and Ellie’s trying to hold her still, cutting her free. A man lands beside them, stares for a strange breathless instant in sad confusion, and then crumples like empty clothes as the beast springs at his face. There’s a wet gurgle and a ripping noise. The beast flings back its blood-matted head and howls again, a sound which obliterates every single thought and feeling beyond the last-ditch instinct to run.

  Clutching the crucifix, Rory runs.

  * * *

  He can’t stop. It’s like his legs have a mind of their own, with only one idea in it, which is go faster or die. He’d never known before what it actually means to run for your life, but it turns out his legs do. No matter how often he stumbles, no matter how the rough ground of the heath tries to slow him down, they won’t stop. His laces come undone: they keep running. His lungs burn and his eyes water so badly he can’t really see: they keep running. There are people running past him sometimes, big men clothed in the skins of dogs with knives in their belts and boots: he takes no more notice of them than they do of him. Each time one of them drops in despairing silence under a grey-black snarling blur and doesn’t get up again his legs just make him go even faster. Once a man tries to grab him as their paths converge, not in rage but with the frantic helpless clutch of a toddler seeking its last comfort. Rory ducks away from the desperate hand. The man trips in the treacherous heather, falls, and there’s a tearing crunching sound, and maybe the faintest ghost of a moan.

  His legs keep running.

  The ground under them turns from heather to tussocky yellow grass pocked with soft snagging holes. He tumbles down, pushes himself up, runs. There’s a ditch shin-deep in foul icy water. He sprints into it and scrabbles up the far side and keeps running. He crosses a road and runs into a waste of ivy and nettle, each step a struggle with snarling undergrowth. His heart feels big as a balloon and heavy as water and it’s going to burst soon: his legs won’t stop. He’s running on and down, whichever way allows him to keep going, over or through a stony hedge into a field of dry bracken and tall weeds, stumbling now with nothing but slaughter behind him and no one beside him except the rasping pounding echo of his breath, but still his feet forbid him to slow down. At the far end of the field is a line of trees. Everything’s blurry and spotted with phantom stars of pain but the trees look like shelter. His legs are about to shake themselves into pieces and he’s got the worst stitch in history but still he keeps going across the field towards that promise of an end, until he senses a black shadow at his back and the conviction that he’s going to die now locks his legs at last: he drops.

  The shadow passes over his head, perfectly silent, and glides away out of sight beyond the line of trees. It’s the angel.

  Fighting for breath, Rory looks over his shoulder. No one. On the horizon behind him the satellite dishes are veiled in a pall of smoke.

  It turns out he can’t stand up. He grits his teeth and crawls through the shoulder-high weeds. The hedge at the far end of the field is submerged in bramble but he finds an old gate wreathed in bindweed, trumpet flowers all turned south to the sun. Beyond it there are woods, a long domain of silence. Its floor is all undisturbed leaves. He can’t manage to get over the gate but he forces himself between its bars. He drags himself as far as he can under the canopy of autumn branches. There at last he has to stop.

  III

  Fairy Tale

  24

  He’s prodded out of a reverie of exhaustion by a scampering noise among the leaves. The thin undergrowth parts nearby and a little russet animal scoots out, sees him, and stops on the spot, pointy ears twitching. A matching one runs out behind the first, snapping at its bottlebrush tail until it too catches sight of Rory slumped between the roots of an old tree and skids to a halt. Foxes, he thinks, slowly. (Slowly’s the best he can do.) Baby ones. Identical, except that the second one has a torn ear and a small but nasty wound in its fur below it. They look at him. He looks at them. He’s been doing nothing for a while except waiting for his heart and lungs to feel like they fit in his chest again, so he’s not thinking about danger, in fact about anything at all, but he does (slowly) remember that baby animals are fine but you have to be careful because whenever you see babies that usually means somewhere close by there’s—

  The straggly saplings twitch again and a tall fox prances into view. The first little one twists around.

  “Mum!” it says. “Look!”

  The adult lunges forward and nips its tail. “What have I told you two about running ahead?” it says. It lifts a forepaw and cuffs one of the babies, knocking it over. Both small ones slink behind their mother, keeping their keen little eyes fixed on Rory.

  He’d been starting to think about getting to his feet and moving slowly away. Now he’s just sitting there. His mouth might have dropped open.

  A fourth fox steps lazily into the clearing around Rory’s tree. It’s bigger than the female, lean, high-shouldered. It pauses when it sees Rory, then steps around the other foxes and sits down in front of him. It licks its nose, exposing for a moment a muzzleful of nasty teeth.

  “Sometimes, Sharon,” it says, “I despair of these children.”

  “It’s only a little one, Dad!” squeaks one of the babies.

  “It still might be dangerous,” the female says. “You’ve got to be more careful. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  The words are all quite clear. They’ve even got a foxy sort of accent.

  “But Mum—”

  “And don’t answer back.”

  “Hello there, young fellow,” the big fox says. He says “fellow” fella and “hello” ’ello.

  “Why’s Dad talking to it?”

  “Hush!”

  “But we’re hungry, Mum!”

  The big fox glances round at the babies. “Would you remove that child, Shaz, if she can’t keep quiet while I’m trying to have a
conversation?”

  “I’ve told you a hundred times never to interrupt your father,” the mother whispers, cuffing the baby with the torn ear again.

  “Sorry about that,” the big fox says to Rory. “Kids. You try your best.”

  Rory’s not at all sure what would happen if he tried to use his throat and mouth to make a sound, so he just stares.

  “You’ll be too young for all of that, of course,” the fox goes on. It scratches its chin with a hind leg. “My mistake. We don’t see a lot of juveniles around here, as a rule, that’s what threw me off. Can’t think of any, in fact. Shaz? Have we ever had a juvenile in here before?”

  “What about that one with the thing on its head?”

  The big fox’s ears twitch. “ ‘Thing on its head’?”

  “You remember. Tasted of clover.”

  “Oh, that one. No. No, that one was fully grown. Just naturally small. They vary quite a bit.”

  “Is it OK to eat the joo-viles?”

  “Juveniles.” The fox stretches its neck towards Rory. “Do excuse the missus. Yes, perfectly all right. Though they can be a bit bland.”

  “I’m hungry,” one of the little ones whines.

  “Cyrus!” The mother nips at its neck.

  “Don’t eat me,” Rory says. It’s the first—in fact, the only—thing he can think of to say. Habit compels him to add, “Please.”

  All the foxes stare at him.

  “Why on earth not?” says the father.

  Rory’s having vague thoughts about getting to his feet and running away, but even in his current state he can see there’s no point. The fox is surprisingly big up close, and it’s planted itself near enough to him that they’d be in the same room if this was a house. “I haven’t done anything to you,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I haven’t done anything. I’ll just go and leave you alone. I swear.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” It doesn’t sound at all angry. If anything, it has an air of being rather pleased with itself. “It’s just food, isn’t it? What do you eat, normally?”

  “Er,” Rory says. “Fish.”

  “There you are, then. None of them fish ever did anything to you, did they? There they are, swimming around minding their own business, and you just up and snap them out of the water and bang, munch away. It’s nothing personal, is it? Just how we all get on.”

  “I hope you’re listening to your father,” the mother says, in a foxy stage whisper.

  “Nature,” the big fox goes on. “Nothing sentimental about it. That’s the problem with your poetry and all that.”

  “How come you can talk?” Rory blurts.

  The fox angles its head and then answers, “How come you can?”

  “But normally—” Rory can’t tell whether he’s more frightened, tired, or just plain confused. “I thought it was just people.”

  “I wouldn’t like to say what’s normal from where you’re sitting. Though they do say there’s different conditions as obtains hereabouts. Different from what, now, I couldn’t tell you. All relative, isn’t it, when you think about it.”

  A thought drops on Rory like it’s grown on the branch above and now wants to demonstrate gravity. “Is this the Valley?”

  “Sharon?”

  “Yes, dear?” The female’s been nosing the cubs, who are getting fidgety.

  “The Valley? Sound familiar at all?”

  “Some of them call it that, don’t they?”

  “I think you’ll find I was asking you.”

  “Sorry, Phil.”

  “Never mind.”

  “Are you going to be much longer? The kids are getting—”

  The big fox silences her with a glare, before turning back to Rory after a suitably dignified pause.

  “It’s certainly a valley, if that helps. Characterful little spot. Not too many of your sort crashing around these days either, which I must say counts for something. Used to dribble in in ones and twos but not so much anymore. They never seemed to last long anyway. Much like yourself in that respect.”

  “Phil?”

  “Now what?”

  “You’ve upset it.”

  “Please,” Rory says. “Can’t you just let me go?”

  “Well,” the big fox says, doubtfully, “I could. But it wouldn’t be very sensible.”

  “It’s not fair to spin it out, Phil.”

  The big fox whirls around and snaps its jaws. “Excuse me! I’d actually prefer to be allowed to speak, thanks very much.”

  “Do get on with it then, there’s a love. It’s only a little one.”

  “Sharon, I’m disappointed in you. What do you think little Persimmon’s thinking, listening to you twitter on about whether her lunch is getting upset? Did that big oaf yesterday give anyone else a moment’s thought when he pegged our cub with a bloody great stone? Might have knocked her brains clean out.”

  “I’m hungry, Dad!” wails the one with the torn ear, but the father has already turned back to Rory.

  “I ask you,” he says. “All the poor little nipper wanted to do was watch. Lucky to be alive, is Persimmon, after the clout that stone fetched her. An inch or two the other way and . . .” The fox shivers. “I don’t like to think. My fault, really. I shouldn’t have let them get that close. But we were quite enjoying it, until that lummox started flinging missiles. Weren’t we, kids? Wasn’t that fun, yesterday? Watching all the people go by, sitting on them horses?”

  “’Simmon got pranged in her ear’ole!” squeaks one of the cubs.

  “Phil,” the mother says. “You’re going on again.”

  “Am I? I suppose I am. Sorry, young fellow. Sharon’s always telling me I’m a bit too fond of the sound of my own voice, aren’t you, Shaz?”

  The female coughs a short bark.

  “Right, then.” The big fox stands up, arches its back, stretches. “Let’s get on with it.”

  “Wait,” says Rory.

  “Best not to, in all honesty.”

  “No. Wait. Wait!” The fox has taken a couple of loping steps towards him. He pushes himself to his feet, his back against the tree trunk. “I saw that! Yesterday. I was there. Wolf, he was called. He chucked that stone.” The fox has paused, ears twitching. “I can . . .” Rory stammers, “I can tell you what happened to him. After. He’s dead. Wolf is. The man who did it.”

  “Dad?” says the fox with the damaged ear. The father is standing still. He smells of the woods, very pungently.

  “He got killed by the Pack. By their dogs. He got torn apart.”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” the big fox begins, “what the point—”

  “The guy who, who hit your—” Rory points shakily at the injured cub. He almost says that but corrects himself in time. “Her. With the stone. He got killed that night.”

  The fox’s tail twitches.

  “Horribly,” Rory adds.

  There’s a longish pause.

  “And?” the big fox says.

  A branch overhead dips heavily, rustling. Both Rory and the fox look up. The owl’s appeared there. It settles, opens its hooked beak, and makes its cry, not a hoot at all but a sort of repeated cough, worryingly close to laughter.

  “And,” Rory says, feeling a surge of deranged confidence, “and, God talked to me. Just now. This morning.”

  The fox sits again.

  “Dad!” yelp the cubs together.

  “This is all a bit deep,” the father says, ignoring them, and ignoring his mate as well, who’s slumped to the soft floor of decaying leaves in an attitude of resignation. “You’re not . . .” It cranes its neck very, very close to Rory’s chest, and sniffs. “Lying, are you?”

  “No. I swear.”

  “I can’t understand the trick of it, but they say you lot are born knowing how to. Like those thumb jobbies you’ve got.”

  “I’m not. I promise. It’s all true.”

  “Are you telling me that chap who nearly took Persimmon’s
ear off has just been eaten?”

  “Torn to bits,” Rory says, nodding overenthusiastically.

  “Hang on.” The fox pauses to lick a foreleg. “Would this be an example of . . .” It shifts around as if embarrassed. “That poetic thing. Poetic whatsit. What is it, what is it, poetic . . .”

  “Justice!” Rory almost yelps himself. “Yes. That’s it. Exactly.”

  “I see,” the fox says, very unconvincingly.

  “Phil? What’s going on?”

  “Put a sock in it, Shaz,” it snaps. “I’m trying to think.”

  “About what?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “’Course I wouldn’t. ’Cause it’s bollocks. Either kill it or don’t kill it, just do us all a favor and don’t stand there waffling like you know what justits is.”

  “Justice!” the big fox barks, losing its temper. “And I do know perfectly well what it is, which is not something every fox in the world can say.”

  “Well, what is it, then?”

  “It’s not a simple thing to explain. Quite tricky to put into words, in fact. It’s, how shall I put it. It’s . . .”

  “It means you have to let me go,” Rory says quickly.

  “Exactly! Wait!” The fox snaps its head back towards him. “Does it?”

  “Yes,” Rory says. “That’s how it works.”

  “Mum! You kill it!”

  The female lays its long snout on the ground. “If only,” she sighs.

  “You have to,” Rory says. “Because I told you about it. So it all evens out. And don’t forget.” His mouth is running away with him. “God.”

  “Right,” the fox says.

  “That’s the most important bit.”

  The fox eyes his family. “As you lot would know,” he says, “if any of you ever took the time to give it a bit of thought, instead of running around in the woods not looking where you’re going.”