A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  Jip sat on the ground and looked at me, the remains of his rabbit still in his mouth. He always loved rabbits after he’d killed them and would carry them around for ages as if he was as proud of them as he was for having caught them. He’d lick them, like he was grooming them. Sometimes it could get a bit macabre.

  Eventually he whined at me. Or maybe he’d been whining, trying to get my attention for a while. Shock had put me in a sort of stunned cone of temporary deafness. He wagged his tail and nudged the rabbit with his nose.

  Good dog, I said. We’re going to have to do a lot of hunting from now on.

  Something had eaten the day without me noticing the passing of time. The threatened rain had never arrived and the sun had swung across the sky and was dropping into some new ominous looking clouds towards the horizon.

  All my dried meat and fish and oatmeal was burned away with the rest of the boat. I had enough food for a couple of days in my pack, and of course I had the hare.

  Watching Jip with his rabbit reminded me of this, and that made me get up on legs that were no longer rubbery but now stiff and unhappy to be moving after such a long time spent sitting still. I made myself go across to the smooth roof of one of the buried cars and use it as a table to spread out the contents of my rucksack so I could take stock of what provisions and tools we had for whatever was ahead of us.

  I had the map and my notebook—the one I’m writing in right now. And I had the picture of you, of course. And I had more food than I’d expected as there were some oatcakes at the bottom I’d forgotten about. I had a waterproof and a folding knife, fire steel, binoculars, extra socks and a sweater. I didn’t have my bedroll and I would definitely miss that. I would also miss the big compass on the boat, but I had the small brass walking-compass that was always pinned to the flap of the pack instead, so that was fine. North is north, no matter what size your compass is. And I had my first aid kit. So I had the map, a compass, provisions, tools, dry clothes and, with you and Jip, a couple of friendly faces. I told myself things could be worse.

  Things could be worse, I repeated for Jip’s benefit. He thumped his tail on the sand and kept licking away at the rabbit.

  I looked around. The new incoming rain clouds. Still no sign of Brand. No sign of a red-sailed boat. I looked up at the tower.

  Come on, boy, I said. Let’s get some perspective.

  Before we went into the red-brick palace to try and find the way up the tower, I thought I should pull the kayak further up the beach in case the tide took it while we were exploring.

  That’s when I discovered the bedroll. He’d taken the trouble to stuff it inside the kayak before torching the boat. I was glad to see it, but also strangely put out that he thought I was so soft that I couldn’t do without it or so useless that I wouldn’t have been able to vike the materials to make myself a new one if I wanted.

  Patronised. That’s the word for how I felt. Like I was an annoyance and not a threat.

  Still a monster, I said as I hauled the kayak higher up the beach, above the tideline. Still a monster.

  The doors to the palace were warped and stuck, so they didn’t open until I’d taken a lot of my frustration out on them with my boots. Jip watched me patiently as I hacked at them, and then trotted inside with his dead rabbit friend, without waiting for me to lead the way.

  The floors were covered in debris from the bits of ceiling that had fallen down, but it still was a magical, cavernous space. The lobby was pillared and big enough, and then when we followed a faded sign into the ballroom it was huge beyond anything I’d imagined. It had two layers of curvy balconies all around the sides, no straight lines, all scrolls and waves, some fragments of the original gold paint still picking out the details, though most of it was mottled and grey. The floor was buckled wood where it wasn’t rotted, and where it was rotted a few hopeful saplings had taken root, thin scraggly things reaching up out of the gloom towards the broken hole in the roof and the light beyond. Something had fallen through the skylight, and now the weather was getting in I saw that sadly the whole building would go before long. Dad used to say that all you needed to do to the old houses on Uist was make a fist-sized hole in the roof and they’d be down in two years.

  It was the first time I’d been in a building like that, like something in a kid’s fairy-tale book. There was a stage at the far end with tall pillars on either side which framed it and supported an elaborately and even more curvy top. When I got close to it and my eyes adjusted, I saw there was a woman standing on it looking down at me.

  Again, that was my first proper statue, so the cold chill that went down my back and froze me is understandable. Once I’d seen she was made of flaking gold plaster and was missing half an arm on one side and was holding hands with another arm that had broken off what I imagined had been a fallen sister on her other, I relaxed.

  I still said hi.

  Which got Jip’s attention, but not hers. He trotted over for a look and a sniff. There was enough of the lettering that had been carved below her for me to read “I WIL_ ENCHANT”. And for a moment she had cast a spell that had frozen me, so it wasn’t a lie. I felt her eyes on me as I picked my way back to the doors, through the debris of broken glass chandeliers that had fallen all around the saplings, as if put there to protect the fragile new growth.

  I went back to the lobby and rubbed away at the signs until I found one pointing me to the right door for the tower. It took me halfway outdoors and we began to climb the steps that switched back and forth up the inside of the latticed metal body.

  When things had worked, there had been a room on cables that must have lifted people up to the top, but without electricity it was leg-ache to the top, or nothing. And by the time I’d got halfway up the thing, my legs were definitely adding their complaints to the list which included the large cuts on my arm (not healing), my head (bruised, now throbbing all the way round to my ear) and my tooth (still aching in twinges). Even though I was inside the rusting cage of the tower, it still felt exposed and dangerous. And the higher I climbed, the more the cool breeze became a cold wind. I paused and listened to it whining through the metalwork around me. Jip had gamely climbed this far, but when I started back up the steps he just looked at me and went back to grooming his dead rabbit friend.

  I was sweating and breathing hard when I got to the door at the top. It had a glass window claiming to be the “tower eye” through which I could see a big enclosed room with more glass windows all around. It was also locked, or if it wasn’t the catch had corroded and wasn’t moving a bit. It had been a bad enough day already. I wasn’t in any kind of mood to have a stupid door make it worse, not after pushing myself up all those steps. I braced myself on the handrail and kicked the handle, hoping the impact would unjam it. I kicked it really hard, several times. Then I tried it, giving it a really aggressive jiggle.

  The lock held. The hinges didn’t. The door fell awkwardly out of the wrong side of the frame, twisting as it came down. I managed to get my arm up and protected myself as best I could, but it was a heavy door and it slammed me into the side railings, whacking my head as it fell past, going end over end and smashing down into the angle of the landing below.

  I shouted all the worst words I knew. But when I got myself to my feet and checked for any permanent damage, I found it wasn’t as bad as it felt. I now had a bang on the other side of my head to balance the black eye, and when I put my fingers there to touch it they came back with enough blood on them for me to know I’d got a graze to match. But again my pride had taken a bigger hit than my body, and I made a mental note that I was just going to have to be more careful from now on. Whatever happened next, I was definitely going on a long journey and nobody else was going to be around to stop me doing stupid things to myself.

  I then immediately betrayed all that sensible thinking by walking up the last steps and stepping into the room above, looking out at the huge view beyond the wall of glass. If I had ever seen a bird’s-eye view before, I’d
have paid more attention to the floor.

  I had both feet standing over thin air before I knew it and when I looked down there was nothing between me and five hundred feet of air, straight down to the hard sand on the seafront. My survival instinct kicked in and my legs flexed and I stamped down, throwing myself backwards with a yelp of horror. I landed hard on my tailbone, scrabbling with my feet until my back hit the door-frame and then I stopped. And only then did my mind click in and start to flail around, trying to understand the miracle of how I had pushed hard against nothing but thin air and yet still managed to power myself back to safety.

  I crawled forwards and looked down. The outer strip of floor was glass. Just like the windows, except where the windows had taken decades of weather head-on, not to mention the streaks of seagull shit that striped them, the floor—protected and pointing straight down—was relatively clear. I reached forward and tapped it. It was really thick and rock-solid. Looking straight down through it gave me my first real experience of vertigo, much stronger than the queasiness I’d felt on top of the rollercoaster. I decided not to tread on the middle of it again. Although the glass was obviously designed to be trodden on, I had just seen how treacherous the metalwork of the frames holding it in place might be.

  I walked round the room and found the other side of the central block. Someone had once camped out here. There was a pile of blankets, a couple of chairs and even a table with a camping lamp and an old music player with speakers. There were empty green bottles, neatly lined up along the glass wall. The lamp had corroded into uselessness, but there was also a plastic box. The catch snapped and the hinges cracked off when I opened it, because most old plastic gets brittle and shards really easily, but inside there were four candles. They and the blankets had survived so long because the room at the top was basically a sealed glass and metal box and no rats or mice had been able to get to them. Candles were a real rarity. There was also a pair of crutches, which I thought was odd. The climb was tough enough without needing to crutch your way up there. I decided at the time that whoever had come here must have really wanted to see the view. I was strangely cheered by the fact that people had once camped out here in the sky, listening to music and drinking. It seemed a life-enhancing thing to have done, presumably as the world was dying around them. I pocketed the box of candles and hoped they’d had the time of their lives. It didn’t occur to me until much later that the reason they hadn’t needed to take the crutches with them when they left is that they wouldn’t have needed them if they’d taken the short way down after the wine was gone and the music stopped.

  There was a last flight of steps up to an open viewing platform above the room, and the door to that was stiff but scraped open enough for me to slip through it and out into the wind. Once there had been high metal railings all around the walkway, metal bars that rose above my head and then curved back on themselves, but now almost a whole side—the one facing north—was missing. From the condition of the other metalwork, which was burst and shaling flakes as if the rust consuming it was a fungus, it had probably rotted off and fallen into the ballroom below. Maybe that was the thing that had broken the hole in the roof, and had let the saplings in.

  There was also another thing that made me feel sad in the same way the bundle of rags and bones on the rollercoaster did, though this pile of clothes was not especially ragged and there were no bones at all. There was a pile of surprisingly well-preserved clothes that had been neatly folded and placed under a pair of boots wedged beneath the bottom of the railings, right next to the gap above the distant hole in the roof. It may have been nothing more than a pile of clothes and a pair of old boots, but my imagination created a man—I think it was a man from the size of those boots and the red hooded jacket beneath them—stripping off like a swimmer and standing naked in the wind before taking a long final dive through the ballroom roof far below. I have that kind of mind, the one that makes fantasies from scraps of evidence. When we were little, Bar used to put us to bed, and after she had read or told us a bedtime story she would give us three things to weave our own stories about as we went to sleep. She always chose odd, unconnected things, like a seal, a mountain and an umbrella for example, and I would begin making a story that soon turned into a dream and a good night’s sleep.

  Something moved in the breeze on the edge of the railing where it had broken off. It was a chain, like a necklace, made from lots of silver steel balls linked together. There was a pendant hanging from it and it was this, twisting in the wind and reflecting the light that had caught my eye. I unhooked it and looked at the pendant. It was a small rectangle with rounded edges, with a stubby tube jutting down off the bottom end of it. The tube was solid, but stippled with random holes of different sizes which dented its surface like tiny craters that caught the light. It must have been stainless steel to have lasted this long without tarnishing. It was an odd thing, and although I immediately added it to the story I had made of the final moments of my imagined naked diver—as he took it off and left it hanging there with the clothes he left behind—it did not feel like a sad or a bad thing. In fact I took it as a good luck sign, because the symbol pressed into the centre of the rectangle was my lucky number, 8. And the 8 was surrounded by a circle from which arrows radiated outwards to all the points of the compass. The little story I made up for myself about the pendant was that it was lucky, meant for me and as it seemed to be my special number inside a symbol that meant “you can go anywhere”, I should definitely take it and wear it. Not least because if I was to find Brand and Jess in this whole unknown world I was marooned in, I would need every scrap of good luck I could lay my hands on. So I took it, looped it over my head and put it under my shirt.

  Of course I know it’s foolish to be superstitious, and that in this world you have to work hard to make your own luck, but I was on my own then and in low spirits and was looking for something, anything to stiffen my courage. Even as I did it, the sensible part of me knew I was clutching at straws, but when you’re in danger of drowning you will grab at anything that might just keep you afloat.

  Behind the palace there had once been a town and that was where the burned smell that had been competing with the sea breeze all day was coming from. The sprawl of buildings and the vegetation which had re-colonised the streets between had caught fire, and done so quite recently, since there was no new green in the grey-black scar that stretched away inland. Sometimes, back on the islands, a lightning strike will set a fire among the heather, and then the wind will take the flames and blow them across the slopes, leaving dark wounds which green over the following spring and in a couple of years grow right back into the landscape, leaving a patchwork that time fades and adjusts and—after a while—erases. This had the same wind-fashioned shape and was new burn, definitely this season’s fire if not quite this week’s or this month’s. The blaze had stripped away the green covering that still blurred the outlines of the unburned streets which remained to the north-east, and it had revealed the pattern of the old roads and buildings that lay beneath the softening leaves and grasses like a hard skeleton. The long lines of houses marched up the slope away from the sea, following the billow of the low hills behind and snaking up the valleys between them. The procession of burned-out shells were too regular and straight for nature. And they also seemed determined to hold hands in a long chain. Like there was an extra strength in companionship as they hugged the land for comfort. That’s what I thought then, anyway. I had, after all, just taken a bang to the head.

  The streets had burned too. It must have been an inferno. Last year and the year before had been drier than ever, though Dad always said every year got hotter, which was the reason the old jetties on the islands were mostly underwater, whatever the tides. The rains came less often, he thought, but when they did they were harder. So on the one hand they were more violent, and on the other more or less the same amount of water landed on the islands every year. The burns ran and the springs sprung and the small lochans that lac
ed the island were still there. And though the heather and the grass might get drier sooner in the summer, the islands were almost as watery ashore as the sea they were surrounded by.

  Lack of water wasn’t going to be an immediate problem on the top of the tower either, because as I was looking out over the burn scar, trying to make sense of the landscape beyond, a matching dark cloud slid over us and began to spit and then pelt with rain.

  I retreated inside and listened to the shower lashing the windows. The sea below was beginning to stack up with long incoming white-topped rollers. I was pleased to be under cover. I had wondered if I could see all the way back up the coast towards home, but I couldn’t: it was too far and the shape of the coast and the islands didn’t correspond with what I remembered of them at sea level.

  A big gust of wind blew the door shut above and I got a shock from that, but as I sat there and felt the walls and the floor around me I was reassured by how solid it all felt. I’d begun to wonder if the tower might fall down because someone was moving around on it after all these years of rust and wind, but strangely the storm reassured me. The viewing room was waterproof and there was no hint of shake inside. If it had stayed up for all these years, more than a century since anyone painted it, I thought the likelihood of it falling down on this night of all the thirty-six and a half thousand nights in between was so tiny that it wasn’t worth thinking about.

  Also: tree houses. I had read a couple of books that had other kids having houses in trees to play in. I used to dream of sleeping in a tree, with the leaves moving around me in the wind, like waves. The problem with the islands is that there are no trees on them. Not really. The wind scours everything down to heather height, and those that do find purchase are seldom much taller than a person. And certainly not tall enough to climb, let alone build a house in. The viewing room seemed like the best tree house in the world.