Vote at Toad Hall

by Eddie Saint

  Despite the very real danger I felt I was in, I couldn’t help but get up and join him. The Hornworms were pulsing, their tight green skin quivering like a sack full of cats, and Vulpine’s gaze was almost ecstatic.

  ‘Are you familiar,’ he asked, ‘with parasitic wasps?’

  Of course I was. I’d done my homework. It was one of the most disgusting things I could imagine.

  ‘I know that they look for the biggest, juiciest caterpillar they can find to lay their eggs into, and that the larvae hatch inside it, and keep it alive but paralysed while they slowly eat it from the inside, leaving only its vital organs intact.’

  That made Vulpine smile. Maybe he saw me as a fellow fan of macabre insects.

  ‘Top marks, Cottontail. And do you know what happens next?’

  As he said that, a small wound appeared in the skin of one of the Hornworms. Vulpine literally gasped with delight, and we observed, mesmerised, as a tiny larva wiggled its way out. It was sickening to watch.

  ‘Ah, how utterly perfect!’ said Vulpine.

  I guess we were not on the same page.

  A second larva wiggled free, then a third. Vulpine placed both his paws on top of the case and drank in the scene unfolding before him, a look of sheer delight on his face.

  In a short space of time all the Hornworms were covered in a wriggling mass of larvae. The caterpillars’ heads moved slightly but as far as I could tell, in their paralysed state they had no idea what was going on behind them, as their living bodies were sucked dry, kept alive only until they had nothing left to give.

  ‘You know, Cottontail,’ said Vulpine, never once taking his eyes off the Hornworms, ‘when I was a young recruit I pioneered digital espionage, but my Commanders couldn’t see the value in it. I have spent my life working my way up to the top, and now I run the finest disinformation network in the world! Any news story, any election, anything at all that might affect the way the world runs, I can get my paws on it and push the news to my advantage.’

  There it was again. Confession time. Somebody call me a hearse.

  To be fair to him, Vulpine must have picked up on my mood. He tore his gaze away from the caterpillars and looked me straight in the eyes. It was a chilling stare.

  ‘Are you afraid of me, Cottontail?’ he asked.

  Dumb question.

  ‘Of course I am. You are a Fox. I’m a Rabbit. The feeling runs pretty deep.’

  ‘No, not Foxes. I mean me.’

  I knew exactly what he meant. I’d be a foolish bunny not to be scared from my tail to the tips of my ears.

  He gave me a jovial smile.

  ‘My dear thing, you have nothing to fear. This time tomorrow you will be sitting back in Chandler’s drinking milky coffee and typing one of your entertaining blog posts.’

  That was too much, too soon. How did he even know what I drank, let alone where?

  ‘You won’t let me go though, will you? Not now I have your confession.’

  He laughed, actually laughed at that.

  ‘Look around you, Cottontail. Do you see any witnesses?’

  Aside from the caterpillars and the portraits we were alone.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he continued, guiding me back to the bench. ‘I will tell you everything you want to know. You are a good journalist. You’ll find out eventually. I want to make it easier for you… to make up for the tranquiliser.’

  That didn’t make sense.

  ‘Even without witnesses, that’s a bit risky isn’t it? I have a pretty trustworthy reputation.’

  He gave me a patient smile and laid a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Cottontail, first of all let me say I admire your wild optimism, that you think you can use ‘truth’ as a weapon.’

  He had a point. Folks will believe anything these days.

  ‘And second,’ he said enigmatically, ‘you were never here…’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  THE INITIAL FLURRY of ideas soon petered out. Weasel and Stoat had listed all the animals who lived just beyond the borders of the LEAF League and decided they could try immigration posters with most of them. Then they looked again at what they could spend the money on if it didn’t get sent to the League.

  With Stoat at the computer making posters, and Weasel sucking the end of his pen and dreaming up wild claims and slogans, the pair had got through an hour of ‘not-supposed-to-be-campaigning’, but as the morning turned to afternoon their enthusiasm levels had started to drop off.

  ‘This isn’t as easy as I’d imagined,’ said Weasel, wiping his lip where he had chewed too hard on his pen and the ink had come out.

  ‘We don’t have to carry on, if we don’t want to,’ said Stoat. He brought up a stats page. It showed that their morning’s work had already developed a life of its own as the posters were shared with friends of friends of friends and out into the big beyond.

  Weasel looked at the figures and marvelled for a moment.

  ‘And all that’s just from us this morning?’

  Stoat nodded. Weasel thought of Pincer and his team of twenty Dogs all as gifted as Selina, pumping out messages around the clock. He marvelled at the scale they must have reached, and it gave him a moment of deep understanding: Data really was the new Gold.

  They sat in silence for a while, watching as the ‘sharing’ figures updated in real time. It was like watching their kittens grow.

  ‘Ok, that does it!’ said Weasel eventually. ‘Let’s keep pushing to the finish line. By this evening we’ll have earned our round in The Stump.’

  They turned back to the wall full of scribbled ideas, hoping for new inspiration, but try as they might nothing new leapt out at them.

  ‘There must be some angle we haven’t tried,’ said Stoat, tapping his paw on the desk and flicking his tail at the legs of his chair.

  ‘It’s no good,’ said Weasel, shaking his head. ‘I’m not sure we can wring anything else out of this lot. We are just going to have to go off piste.’

  Stoat gave him a confused look.

  ‘Don’t worry, princess. You just type up what I say. Now, let me see…’

  Weasel went over to the window and gazed out at the traffic.

  ‘I know! How about ‘Let’s keep our money and assure everyone gets a job’.’

  Stoat dutifully typed the sentence, then looked at it and scratched his chin.

  ‘Is that… right?’ he asked, looking carefully for typos. Weasel looked over his shoulder and read it carefully too.

  ‘Looks right to me,’ he said.

  ‘No, hang on, I’m not sure,’ said Stoat. ‘Is it ‘assure’ or ‘ensure’?’

  Weasel cocked his head on one side and looked as Stoat typed out both words next to each other.

  ‘I reckon it’s ‘assure’,’ said Weasel finally. ‘And anyway, if it’s wrong and someone points it out we can just say that our ordinary bloke has had enough of so-called educated folks telling him he isn’t talking proper.’

  They both chuckled, and Stoat worked on a graphic to go with the slogan before sending the new poster out into the ether.

  ‘Do you know what, princess?’ said Weasel. ‘That’s just given me an idea…’

  ‘WHAT DO YOU mean, I was ‘never here’?’ I don’t mind confessing I was pretty scared at that point. I was way out of my depth, and defenceless, at the mercy of a Fox who could make me disappear without trace whenever he wanted.

  ‘Oh it really is quite simple,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘You might choose to publish your account of whatever we talk about here today. Folks might even begin to believe it. But if they do I’ll simply prove, categorically, that you were somewhere else all day. You will be known as the young journalist who tried to convince the world she had taken a personal, voluntary confession from President Vulpine, when all the while she was sightseeing around the city.’

  At the time that made no sense to me. I knew exactly where I was, and if something is true isn’t there always evidence, som
ewhere, to back it up? Turns out there is a good reason Foxes have that reputation for being cunning.

  He left me trying to work out the meaning of his enigmatic riddle and skipped back to the Hornworm case, mesmerised by the wriggling larvae.

  ‘Your Toads are parasites, don’t you agree?’

  I shrugged. It was hardly breaking news.

  ‘Everyone knows that Wild Wood has power,’ he continued. ‘It has status on the world stage. It has money. But do you feel rich?’

  It was a fair, if obvious, point. In my lifetime, banks and businesses had collapsed and been rebuilt - Tarquin Toad the Third had seen to that - but everyone I knew seemed to have less than ever.

  ‘Your Toads have been hoarding. They have been hiding money, washing money. Really, their greed has been quite something to behold.’

  The visual clue of the Hornworm wasn’t lost on me: the poor, green caterpillar, paralysed, hosting parasites that sucked it dry from the inside, and all the while being totally unaware of how crippled it was.

  ‘They even invited us in, once they saw how much money we needed cleaning. But then you know all about that, don’t you, because your brother did such clever digging.’

  That was when I remembered Dug. I’d left him at the safe house, but where would he be now? Deep underground, if the past few months were anything to go by.

  ‘Your Toads do like to go on about playing by the rules. It has amazed me, watching from the side-lines, to see just how gullible many Wild Wooders can be, swallowing that ‘All Animals Are Equal’ line.’

  Vulpine drew his gaze away from the Hornworms.

  ‘Which reminds me,’ he said, reaching for his phone. ‘There is something you must do.’

  He handed the phone to me, open at the app for digital voting. My ‘confidential’ voting number was already keyed in. I didn’t bother to ask how. At the top of the screen was the question about membership of the LEAF League, and underneath it were three big buttons: ‘Leave’, ‘Remain’ and ‘Don’t Know’.

  ‘The citizens must have their say,’ Vulpine said. ‘I don’t want to be seen to stand in the way of Democracy.’

  I cast my vote and watched until the wheel of death finished doing its thing and a cheerful message came on the screen thanking me for voting.

  ‘Good luck!’ said Vulpine, with a smile that said he knew that I knew the result would have nothing to do with luck.

  ‘TO BE FAIR, that’s not a bad angle actually,’ said Weasel, sticking a fresh piece of paper to the wall and selecting a barely chewed pen.

  ‘Er… ‘angle’ ?’ said Stoat.

  ‘Yes,’ said Weasel, ‘and it’s one we haven’t pushed nearly enough! Oh, how could I have been so careless?’

  Stoat’s vacant expression reminded Weasel that not every creature in Wild Wood shared his speed of thought.

  ‘Experts, princess! They are the angle we should be pushing.’

  ‘Um… are they?’

  Weasel took a patient breath and cut the other half of his campaign team some slack.

  ‘Look, imagine you are sitting at home now, or at work, and you are thinking of voting this evening. You are still undecided, even though for some unexplained reason you seem to keep getting our lovely campaign posters shared with you. With me so far?’

  Stoat nodded, and tried to picture the scene.

  ‘Now I reckon,’ continued Weasel, ‘that the biggest obstacle stopping you from putting your cross in our box, even actually getting out of your house to vote in the first place, is a thought you share with so many Wild Wooders. You reckon that, on balance, you just don’t have a clue what the vote is all about.’

  Stoat considered Weasel’s argument, and conceded its brutal honesty.

  ‘So you reckon yours truly might be telling the truth but, if you have half a brain you also suspect I might not be. Go on then, Stoatey, what do you do next?’

  Stoat considered the scenario until Weasel showed signs of impatience.

  ‘Maybe check the facts online?’ he ventured.

  ‘I think that’s a very fair assumption,’ said Weasel. ‘And would we like them to do that?’

  ‘No?’ said Stoat tentatively, realisation dawning painfully slowly.

  ‘No we would not!’ said Weasel, confidently. ‘Because a well-informed opinion, at this late stage, is exactly what will keep our voter out of our clutches. So,’ he said, brandishing his pen like a wand, ‘when they go online we need to remind them how experts are the enemy. They must vote with their gut, not expert opinion.’

  An echo of conversation from earlier in the week crept into Stoat’s memory. ‘We’ve had enough of experts…’

  ‘Ok,’ he said. ‘So what do we do?’

  Rubbing his paws together Weasel sat next to Stoat and started firing off a new line in slogans.

  ‘We don’t call them experts, we call them…’ he searched inside his head for the right word. ‘We call them ‘Doom-mongers’. Yes, that’s it! Doom-mongers pushing their ‘Vision of Doom’.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘So now you have voted, what shall we talk about?’

  It would have been weird just standing next to any old Fox, but when he is the most powerful Fox in the world, and he wants to make small talk, that takes weird to a whole new level. I handed the phone back to him, and stalled for time to give myself a chance to think.

  ‘Who is the Fox?’ I asked, jerking my head towards the portrait of the elderly Fox on the wall.

  Vulpine’s face softened until he almost looked friendly. It was horrible to see.

  ‘Ah, that is my dear father,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be where I am today without his guidance.’

  He stared at the picture of the old Fox, as if basking in its glow.

  ‘Did you ever learn how I made my fortune? I owe it all to him, you know.’ He bowed slightly before the portrait, almost as if receiving benediction.

  Of course I knew the story. I dig deep, remember? But I needed time to think so I played dumb.

  ‘I’ve got a vague recollection of an acorn. Is that it?’

  That seemed to please him, and he launched into what felt like a well-worn anecdote. Not bad for a city Rabbit, pulling a few power levers on President Vulpine himself.

  ‘That’s right. Well done! When I was young he gave me an acorn, and I sold it for a profit and bought two more from a neighbouring farmer. I sold those acorns, and I bought four more, and the next week at market I sold those and bought eight more. By the end of the month I’d made enough for thirty two acorns. By the end of the next month my basket was too small so I bought a cart. And then do you know what happened?’

  ‘You cornered the acorn market and started extorting money from Squirrels?’ I asked. I make bad jokes when I’m nervous. Not the smartest piece of evolution, but at least Vulpine seemed in a forgiving mood.

  ‘Now that’s not a bad idea!’ he said. Then, turning to address the portrait he added, ‘She’s smart, this one.’

  I raised an eyebrow to acknowledge the compliment, but made sure I kept my wits about me. I didn’t want to get done by a cunning trick designed to get me off guard.

  Vulpine held a satisfied smile on his face and said,

  ‘Better than that, though. My father died and left me his millions!’

  I did smile at that. I already knew the punch line but, credit where it’s due, he’s got good timing. And, it had given me time to have an idea. I figured I might as well grasp the golden opportunity I had, even if I wasn’t ever going to be able to write about it later.

  ‘Ok, there is one thing I’d like to talk about.’

  ‘Ah, the wheels have turned! Anything, young Cottontail. To you I am an open book.’

  Even now I still find it hard to believe what went on between us in his office that afternoon.

  ‘I keep digging to find the truth. That’s why folks read my stuff. But you? You just make things up. I know why you do it. It’s just a power play, right? But you seem so very
good at getting away with it. So I guess if there is one thing I’d really like to know, it’s how.’

  He nodded and gave me a knowing smile, like I’d just given him the right answer to a tricky sum without using a calculator.

  Stepping over to the portrait of his father, he slid the lower edge of the frame to the right. A panel of wall moved an inch and he levered it open.

  ‘My den!’ he said, excitedly, and ushered me inside his secret room. I genuinely thought that was going to be it for yours truly. A Rabbit in a secret room, in a private house, with the President of the Fox Nation. Call the undertaker.

  The room had no windows, just a bank of monitors on one wall with a big black chair facing them.

  ‘Do sit,’ he said. The perfect host.

  He used his phone to control the screens.

  ‘Here’s Commander Reynard’s Alternative Army, skulking in the basement, hard at work.’ He brought up shots of a brightly lit room, taken from different angles, with rows of Foxes typing away at computers. There were maybe two hundred of them! Straight away I just knew that must have been where Buck Wildheart had sent me his Friend Request from. The memory gave me chills.

  ‘We have specialists in social media, boosting messages around the clock. There’s a section for our own academics and specialists, another for tame journalists and news outlets. A few other bits and pieces. No point having everyone connected to the web if you aren’t going to take full advantage, don’t you agree?’

  I didn’t, obviously. Right there on the screens in front of me was the reason it was so hard to get my own reports out into the world. I’ve got a fair few loyal readers who share my stuff around, but that’s nothing compared to the industrial scale Vulpine was working on.

  ‘I know Pride is unbecoming,’ he said, ‘but this unrivalled Army is probably the most powerful weapon currently operating in the world today, despite that rascal Pincer’s best efforts to rival me. Even so, some things are so secret I don’t even send them down to the Basement.’

  ‘Trust issues?’ I asked, and a vision of Mel came to me, waving goodbye from the top of the steps down to the river walk. I wondered would I ever see her again.