by Dave Butler
He hurt.
He had landed on his back, so he could see what was happening above him. The pale boy must have done something to the goats, because they came bounding down the crack, scattering in different directions as they went. Ollie and Bob stood on the shelf shouting at the pale boy, who leaped from crack to crack as nimbly as his goats, charging up the crevasse.
Charlie hurt, but he wasn’t angry.
He understood the pale boy. The boy knew he was a clockwork person and he was sensitive about it. Maybe it was a secret, or maybe it was a source of embarrassment or fear. Charlie had pushed him too far, and the boy had done what was necessary to escape.
The boy knew Charlie was clockwork, so his push probably hadn’t been intended to kill. That realization didn’t make Charlie hurt any less, but it helped him not be angry with the boy.
Frustrated, yes. But not angry.
He wished he knew the boy’s name.
Charlie rolled to his feet as one of the goats approached him. Raising his hand, he waved gently and made soft, comforting noises. The goat slowed. Charlie ripped up a handful of grass and held it out to the animal. When it came to him for a bite, he gently took the bridle and mounted the creature.
He needed to help his friends.
Charlie failed to collect the other goats because they charged away when he approached. One goat turned out to be enough. Bob rode it down from the mountain, Ollie let himself down in the form of a yellowish snake, and Gnat agreed to ride on Charlie’s back as he climbed down himself.
By the time they reached the shore of the lake, the sun had dropped beneath the cliffs to the west. Ollie came out of his snake form shivering, and all Charlie’s friends looked to him.
“It isn’t long until sunset,” Charlie said. “Let’s go as fast as possible, without anybody falling and getting hurt. I think we can get down off the mountain, or at least to Aunt Big Money’s burrow, before dark.”
Bob led the way on the single goat and set the pace. Ollie rode with Bob, curled in thin yellow snake form around the mountain goat’s enormous horns. The goat didn’t seem to mind. Charlie ran behind, with Gnat on his shoulders.
“Just don’t stab me with your spear,” he told her.
Charlie stopped to take one last look up at the cliff face. No sign of the nameless pale boy, or of his recluse father.
He sighed.
Then he turned and ran.
As Charlie followed Bob’s goat in a long leap down from a hump of stone, he heard the Hound howl. It was a throaty sound, full of hunger and despair. He couldn’t tell what direction it came from.
“HRAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
“That sounds like no dog I’ve ever heard,” Gnat said, right in Charlie’s ear. She rode him standing up, with her left hand gripping his hair and her spear in her right.
“For one thing, it’s much too loud,” Charlie said.
“Aye. And also, it has in it a touch of something else. The hateful wail of a lost soul, I think.”
That thought didn’t comfort Charlie. He jogged forward a little faster. Catching up to and running side by side with Bob, he struggled to keep his balance on loose stone and grass as the shadow in the valley deepened. “What do you think, Bob?”
“We ain’t making it to the bottom of this ’ere valley, mate!” Bob shouted. She held the goat’s reins in one fist and kept her other hand on Ollie, holding him steady as the goat shook and bounced. “We ain’t even making it to the rabbit ’ole.”
Ollie hissed.
“Ollie ’ere thinks ’e’s gonna bite the ’Ound an’ Bob’s your uncle.”
“And if the Hound bites him instead?” Gnat asked. “Remember the size of that paw print.”
Charlie shuddered. “Either way, I’d rather not have to find out.”
“HRAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
The howl this time came from directly behind Charlie, and it was much closer. He looked over his shoulder as he ran, slowing so as not to stumble.
A star or two began to twinkle in the deep indigo of the sky. The Hound was a shadow in Charlie’s sight, a darker blackness in the shade that now swamped the valley from cliff to cliff.
The Hound’s head and neck rose silhouetted against the stars. The beast’s head was enormous. It might have been Charlie’s imagination, but he thought he saw, low beneath the Hound’s forehead, a dull red glow where its eyes should be.
Charlie wondered for a moment where Lloyd Shankin was, but he couldn’t spare the dewin much thought.
“Faster, Bob!” Charlie spun his own face about and pushed his legs.
“Tell it to the goat!” Bob yelled. “I’m already going as fast as I know ’ow!”
“Veer right!” Gnat shouted.
She pointed with her spear. Charlie saw a cliff face, ghost white in the moonlight, with a boulder leaning against it.
He turned toward it anyway. Instead of running downhill, they were now running perpendicular to the slope, toward the wall of the valley.
“What do you see?” he yelled.
“ ’Tis a big-folk gate!”
Charlie knew what that meant: an entrance into a pixie realm that was big enough for humans to fit through. Though the one big-folk gate he had seen, in London, had also been big enough to accommodate a hulder.
“And the Hound? Will it fit?”
“I’ve no idea!” Gnat shouted. “All I can do is read the signs!”
Charlie looked back over his shoulder and saw the Hound, closer than ever.
They weren’t going to make it.
He reached back and plucked Gnat from his shoulders with both hands.
“What are you doing?” she yelped.
He didn’t answer, just placed her on Bob’s back. She grabbed Bob’s chin straps like reins and glared at Charlie.
“Charlie Pondicherry, don’t be doing anything stupid now.”
“Right.” Charlie wished he had a weapon. “You don’t either. Get inside that gate and stay down until morning.”
He stopped. There were rocks at his feet, so he picked one up in each hand and turned to face the Hound.
It was enormous, and it bore down on him with the speed of a train. Charlie threw the first rock.
The Hound was so big it wasn’t possible for Charlie to have missed, but if he’d hit it, the Hound didn’t show any sign. It rushed onward.
He could hear its heavy breath.
“Clock off!”
Charlie crouched and threw the second rock. This time he was sure he hit the Hound, and squarely in the middle of its big head. But the monster just shrugged and shook itself, the way Bap would have done when he was bitten by a fly.
From a rocky outcropping, the Hound leaped into the air, straight at Charlie.
“HRAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Charlie sprang forward from his crouch, right at the Hound.
They collided in midair, claws raking Charlie’s chest, and crashed together to the stony ground.
Charlie and the Hound rolled.
The Hound stretched its powerful jaws wide and strained to close its mouth on Charlie’s head.
Charlie was tough, but he wouldn’t survive having his head bitten off.
He punched his fist into the Hound’s nose.
The inside of the nose was warm and wet. Charlie didn’t think about what he was touching. As he and the Hound rolled again, and rocks pummeled Charlie’s back and neck, he just shoved his fist in deeper.
The Hound yelped.
Its yelp was not as terrifying as its roar.
Charlie pushed his arm in as deep as he could go.
Then he scratched.
Charlie dug his fingers into the walls of the Hound’s nasal passages and scraped.
“SKYEEEEEEAAA!”
The Hound squealed. It was a high-pitched sound that still managed to have in it a rumbling bass note of menace. The Hound lurched sideways onto its shoulders, stopped their collective roll, and kicked Charlie in the chest wit
h both its hind legs.
When the legs hit Charlie, three things happened. First, he noticed something that surprised him. The Hound’s face was flesh, bone, and blood. The inside of its nose was the inside of a flesh-and-blood nose. Its teeth were the bone teeth of an immense animal that wanted to feed on flesh.
But its hind legs were metal. They were covered in fur, and beneath that fur springs and steel.
Second, Charlie was thrown from the Hound and through the air. The stars spun over his head and in front of his eyes and then reached down to punch him to the ground like a thousand tiny, glittering fists. He rolled again, this time alone, and bounced up the low incline of a small rock ridge.
Third, Charlie hurt.
“Ow…”
Charlie staggered to his feet, shaking his right arm to try to fling off the sticky fluids that had come out of the Hound’s nose. He wished he had his friend Grim Grumblesson’s Eldjotun, the immense hand-cannon that could, the salesman had assured Grim, put down any beast in Britain.
But he didn’t. He had nothing but himself, and he was facing a ferocious dog the size of a horse, with metal body parts.
What hope did Charlie have?
The Hound rose again. Its squealing stopped and it looked straight at Charlie. Its teeth were enormous in the moonlight, and its eyes burned a low red color.
The Hound was not natural. It was a creature of sorcery or machinery or both.
Who could have made it?
That was a question for another time. Charlie braced himself. The Hound jumped forward again—
Charlie dropped flat on his back.
He watched the Hound pass, snarling, over him, a shadow blocking out the stars and stinking of flesh and oil. Then he rolled to his feet and jumped after the Hound.
He didn’t have to win this fight. If he could keep the Hound occupied long enough, Charlie’s friends could get through the big-folk gate and into the pixie habitat under Cader Idris and be safe.
Probably.
Charlie grabbed the Hound’s tail, as near its base as he could, and held on.
The Hound felt him. It whipped around and tried to pounce on him, but as the front half of the Hound moved, the hindquarters followed, and the Hound’s own motion yanked Charlie out of reach of the Hound’s teeth—barely.
The Hound’s tail was also not flesh and blood. It was wrapped in fur, but as the tail whipped side to side, Charlie felt ball bearings within the tail roll back and forth against each other.
The Hound snapped at Charlie again and missed. The stink of its breath made Charlie tremble, but he felt elated. The Hound had missed! Had Charlie found the one place in the world safe from the monster—attached to its own body?
Wham!
Charlie slammed into a boulder. He let go of the Hound’s tail and bounced in the grass. In an instant, a paw the size of Charlie’s head was upon him, pressing down into his chest and squeezing him.
The Hound didn’t need to bite Charlie’s head off. It could shatter him with its weight alone.
“HRAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
The Hound roared into his face, hot and wet. Charlie was trapped.
“De Minimis and Underthames!”
The last thing Charlie expected, staring gigantic canine death in the face, was the arrival of a billy goat. But just as the Hound opened its jaws, a goat hurtled in and butted the Hound in the temple with both horns.
The Hound shook off the blow, turned to roar at the goat, and saw the goat’s tiny rider, Natalie de Minimis—
who shoved her spear into the Hound’s eye.
The yelp of pain that rang from the Hound as the pixie’s spear punctured its eyeball nearly deafened Charlie. The Hound reared back, and the spear went with it, flinging both Gnat and the goat into the darkness. The Hound batted at its face, roaring and shrieking.
Charlie ran.
“Gnat!” he shouted.
The pixie popped up in the tall grass, and as Charlie passed, he scooped her up in both arms.
“Please tell me the big-folk gate is this direction!” he shouted. With Gnat in his arms and no need to slow his pace for Bob, Charlie unleashed the full power of his legs. He still had his small limp, but he flew over the grass and stone.
“Over there!” Gnat pointed, and Charlie adjusted his course slightly.
As he approached the cliff and its boulder, he saw Bob and Ollie. They stood on the top of the boulder—no, that wasn’t quite right: they stood in a seam of the cliff face just above the boulder. That must be where the gate was. The boulder made a sort of staircase that led up to it.
Ollie and Bob cheered.
“Faster, Charlie!” Ollie yelled.
Behind him, Charlie heard the heavy footfalls and the breathing of the Hound. Mixed in with those sounds now was a terrible, bloodcurdling whimper, punctuated every few moments by a dark “Yap!”
“Look over my shoulder,” Charlie said to Gnat. “Tell me exactly when the Hound pounces.”
She looked. “Not yet.”
Charlie sprinted.
The cliff came closer. The chimney sweeps crouched down and backed into the seam. Charlie could see the big-folk gate now. There was no way the Hound could fit through.
But could Charlie make it in time?
“Not yet.”
The cliff drew closer. Still Ollie and Bob disappeared into the seam.
Charlie was almost there. He saw the pits and striations in the boulder he would need to run up.
“Now!”
Charlie slid to the ground.
He protected Gnat with his body, fearing that the Hound might land on them and tear them both to shreds. But again the Hound passed over him, yowling its bafflement.
As the Hound passed Charlie, Charlie rolled back up to his feet—
jumped, still holding Gnat—
passed over the head of the Hound—
which snapped at him and missed.
Charlie turned sideways just in time to dive into the seam of the rock, a split second before the Hound crashed against the opening, roaring and pounding at the stone.
Gnat wiggled in his arms, and Charlie let her go. They crawled into the darkness, anxious to get out of reach of any stray paw the Hound might venture into the cave. When he’d gone as far as he dared, crawling totally blind, Charlie collapsed.
For a few seconds, he lay in silence.
Then he heard a throat being cleared.
“Well, I ’ope the goat made it.”
“Gnat,” Ollie said. They still sat in total darkness. “Ain’t you got to defeat three big beasts to be able to go home?”
“That’s right!” Bob’s voice was enthusiastic. “I ’ad forgotten. Two more beasts to go!”
“Defeat,” Gnat said. “Not escape. And they don’t need to be beasts. But aye, I must perform three mighty deeds.”
“ ’Ow will your folk know you’ve done it?” Bob asked.
“Yeah,” Ollie chimed in. “How will they know you ain’t just pretending?”
There was a moment’s silence before Gnat spoke. “They’ll know.”
No one had anything to add to that.
“Well, I might as well be in a pig’s intestine, for ’ow much I can see.”
“Ain’t this a fairy kingdom?” Ollie added. “Where’s the, what do you call it, the glow-weed?”
“Gloom-moss. Aye, there was gloom-moss here, once. The stubs of it still cling to the walls. But ’tis shriveled up and dead many a year now.”
“What else do you see?” Charlie had forgotten that Gnat’s vision worked in complete darkness.
“This barony was called Giantseat.” Gnat’s voice was sad. “I can read its welcome signs. It ended in fire.”
Charlie shuddered.
“That’s cheerful,” Ollie said.
“ ’Ow about a way out? If we ’eld ’ands, an’ watched our ’eads, could you find us another road out?”
“Or we could lie right here,” Ollie suggested, “take a ni
ce little nap, and just walk outside the way we came in once the sun’s up and the Hound goes away.”
“Aye, if we knew for sure the Hound would go away with the sun, which we do not.”
“The rabbit said the Hound came with nightfall,” Ollie reminded them.
“First of all, just because the ’Ound comes with nightfall don’t mean the ’Ound leaves with sunrise. Maybe the ’Ound comes with nightfall an’ it don’t leave until it eats you. An’ second, Ollie, you’re putting an awful lot of weight on the words of a rabbit.”
“She seemed trustworthy.”
“She might be the most trustworthy witch rabbit as ever lived, mate. It just ain’t like you to do the trusting.”
“She’s interesting. She’s a witch, and I don’t think she’s a liar….” Ollie’s voice trailed off.
“I trust her, too,” Charlie said.
Another silence.
Something Aldrix had said to him was ringing softly in the back of Charlie’s mind, and he had to share it. “The Old Man lives in a maze.”
“ ’Ow’s that, mate?”
“Al—one of the dwarfs, the young boy, said the Old Man lived in a maze. I was imagining that it was some kind of building. You know, a maze on the top of Cader Idris.”
“There ain’t a maze on the top of Cader Idris,” Ollie pointed out.
“Right.” Charlie let it sink in.
“You’re saying it might be in Giantseat that he lives,” Gnat said. “In the old barony.”
“Maybe. Or maybe Giantseat, I don’t know, connects to the place where he lives. Think about the boy we saw up on the mountain.”
“I’m thinking about him,” Ollie agreed. “I’m thinking about me giving him a black eye for throwing you over that cliff.”
“Where did he come from?” Charlie asked. “He was awfully high on the mountain to be rambling. He lives up here, somewhere, but the only buildings I’ve seen are the crumbly old shepherds’ shelters made of stone. And what was it Aunt Big Money called it?”
“Mountain ’Ouse. I ’ear what you’re saying, Charlie. Them piles of rocks the shepherds sleep in to keep out of the rain just ain’t grand enough to quantify as Mountain ’Ouse.”