A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  I took a pile of the less portable books out with me to look at after I had made a fire on the porch between the heavy columns. I sat with Jip and paged through the larger books as the rabbits cooked, feasting my eyes on the colourful pictures that were still bright on the page after more than a century. I ate my rabbit while it was still hot, and Jip waited until his was just warm and then took it out onto the steps to eat slowly in the privacy he always favoured. Jess was different. She always ate fast, but kept looking up at you and wagging her tail, as if including you in the fun. I felt a pang at the thought of her and hoped Brand was feeding her properly and that she was safe, wherever she was. And then I remembered her chained to Saga and knew she wasn’t.

  As Jip ate, I carefully unbandaged my arm and inspected it while the light was still good. I decided it looked a little better. I put some more honey on it and equally carefully rebandaged it. If it didn’t actually look better, I told myself, it didn’t look worse. That was something. In the morning I would refill the two water bottles from the river I had seen, so I drank most of what I had left, pissed as I watched the sunset from the top of the steps and then went inside for the night.

  You would have thought it was a very early time to go to sleep, but then you had electric lights to keep the rhythm of your day as you liked it, not as the sun dictated. And it had been a long walk, as far as I had ever walked in one day and my feet were sore, my arm was still throbbing and the pack straps had rubbed a blister on one shoulder. I closed all the doors behind me and laid out my bedroll in front of the lady in the yellow dress, and lay down. Jip patrolled the edges of the room, ever hopeful for a rat, and then came and went to sleep beside me. I looked into the eyes in the painting and tried to think what her life had been like. There was kindness and intelligence and even a sense of humour in her face, but I wondered if she could ever have imagined while the painting was being made what would come of it, what would become of her. I didn’t think she would have dreamed that her strong gaze would go on to outlive her many-greats-grandchildren, and end up looking at Jip and me as we slept on the other side of the end of the world.

  And sleep I did. Long and deep, right into the heart of the night.

  And then I was awake, and very still, listening to the low growl coming from Jip.

  It was the kind of noise you definitely don’t want to wake up to. It put a cold chill right down my spine.

  It was pitch-dark, but when I put my hand out I felt he was standing rigid, hackles raised, quivering.

  I sat up and found my knife.

  I let my other hand stay on his back, telling him we were okay by touch and not sound. I wanted to listen for whatever it was that had roused him. He stopped growling, but he stayed on his feet and the bristle of fur at his shoulders remained erect.

  There was something moving outside the windows, down on the ground. I could hear a kind of rubbing and moving noise—nothing specific like footfalls or breathing, just the noise of movement, faint and almost inaudible, more like a disturbance in the air than an actual sound. But it was definitely there and it was the noise something larger than a rat or a squirrel would make. I edged to the window and tried to look down and get a sight of whatever it was, but the angle was too steep and I couldn’t have seen what was there, even if there had been more light. All I could do was sense that the noise seemed to be travelling towards the front of the building. The front of the building with the unlocked door.

  I went and got my bow and arrows as quietly as I could and took Jip with me out on to the stairhead. I told him to stay close, which is one of the suggestions he knows to follow from our time hunting on the island. He sat next to me as I knelt in the dark, facing the main door below. I nocked an arrow without thinking and laid the others where I could grab the next ones without looking, and then we both did a very good job of mimicking the stillness of all those statues and reached out into the night with our ears.

  The thing (or the person—Brand even, because I was half thinking he had tracked me) scuffed its way up the steps and on to the portico. I swear I heard sniffing, and immediately knew they were examining our campfire and discarded rabbit carcass. There was a horrible sound of bones crunching and then silence, after which came more of the general sound of something moving, this time closer to the front doors. Then there was more silence, so long that I had to switch knees to stop getting cramp, and longer still until I began to wonder if we had imagined it all and relaxed enough to rest both knees by sitting on the top step of the stairs instead of kneeling.

  Then there was a loud bump and a creak as something barged the front door and Jip took a step forward, fur bristling again, his warning growl rumbling low and unmistakable and I had the bow drawn and ready for whatever was coming in.

  And then nothing did.

  Just nothing and more nothing and then the sound of some bird hooting in the distance, a noise I knew was an owl, a noise so perfectly recognisable that even though I had never heard an actual tuwit-tuwoo there could be no mistake. And then more silence.

  I don’t remember relaxing, though I do know that Jip sat down after a very long time. And I certainly don’t remember going to sleep in such an awkward position.

  I woke with sun in my eyes and a bad crick in my neck from where I had slumped against the wall and slept half sitting, all crooked and folded in on myself.

  I thought I would go and see that it was safe before I let Jip out, but the moment I opened the inner glass door he bolted through my legs and darted out onto the porch, casting left and right.

  I felt strangely foolish peering out of the half-open door, bow held ready as I scanned the square for the night visitor, trying to see if he was lying in wait for us.

  Jip had no such qualms as he raced back and forth, furiously intense as he tried to get the scent of it. He disappeared round the corner, and was gone for several minutes, then he came back looking much happier than when he’d left. He cocked his leg on the corner of the museum where we had heard the thing rubbing along, and then he trotted to the centre of the square, nose down, until he discovered a large pile of fresh shit. It wasn’t recognisable as human, which I felt relieved by, but I had also never seen its like. Jip didn’t seem to mind what kind of new and unseen animal it had been. He just cocked his leg and put his scent on it too.

  He seemed pleased with his work, and I too felt cheered up by his attitude. With that and the sunlight, the night’s fears seemed to disperse. If my arm hadn’t been so itchy and tight it would have been the perfect beginning to the day.

  Chapter 15

  The fever

  I said goodbye to the lady in the yellow dress, taking care to close all the doors behind me so weather and animals wouldn’t get in to bring the museum down before its time. When I was far enough away to look back and see more of the building, I did notice that there was already a pair of saplings sprouting from one side of the roof, so that time was coming. If I’d had the Sweethope, I think I might have taken the lady with me. I would have liked Bar and Ferg to see her looking at them. Dad would have thought it fanciful nonsense. Mum might have liked her smile for company.

  I didn’t have to find my way to the river to fill my water bottles because we crossed a stream running down the middle of a street, and the water there was fast and clear. Sometimes when it has been hot and dry for a long time and then it rains, the water slides right off the land and doesn’t have time to soak in as fully as it would do if it was landing on damp earth. I was bottling the rainfall from the thunderstorm I’d seen from the top of the tower.

  We walked up out of the city, back into the countryside, heading for the distant notch in the hills. The land here rolled gently up and down. We were walking cross-country now, not following an old road, though we did share direction with a railway line for a few pebbles, marching alongside it.

  Sometimes I lost sight of the notch as we dropped into a low valley, but it was always there when we climbed the other side. I gave myself landmarks that w
ere closer but still in line with it as we went, so we stayed on course throughout the morning. The landscape was lightly wooded with broadleaf trees. The open spaces between them which had likely once been farm fields had become heathland, criss-crossed with wide strips of thicket that had begun their life as hedgerows. My new trees book told me they were mainly hawthorn, beech or hazel. And where they weren’t, they were mainly bramble. Enough bramble for me to put my boots on. Though it was easy enough to negotiate the thickets because animals had worn their own paths through them over the years, and though I couldn’t help but look for a human footprint among the hoof and pad marks, I never expected to see one, and nor did I. In between there were wide spaces of grass and bracken dotted with low shrubs. Jip loved this open heath because it gave good hunting and all the rabbits he could dream of.

  He ran so hard I began to worry about him damaging himself. Dad said terriers could sometimes be so stupid they’d run themselves until their hearts burst, but I don’t really think that’s true. Now I’m far enough away, I realise Dad was a worrier who hid his fears in sternness and bouts of bad temper that blew in without warning or sense, like dark storms from out of a clear blue sky. Worrying about terriers having heart attacks was thinking out of fear, though fear of what I don’t know. Maybe he was just worried about losing a valuable dog. But Jip brought back three rabbits before he tired enough to just walk alongside me, and when a hare exploded from a gorse bush we were passing he took an instinctive couple of paces towards a sprint after it, and then stopped and looked back at me, wagging his tail, tongue lolling from his panting mouth. He was happy in the sunlight, and so was I.

  It was a hot day and the blister from the pack straps became uncomfortable by lunchtime, when the sun was at its highest. It was berry time of year and I’d been grazing and picking blackberries as we went. We stopped by a small pool and sat under a willow for a rest. I ate the berries I’d picked and some of the dried meat that remained. Jip drank noisily from the water, and disturbed something that splashed and then rustled off into the long grass and docks on the other side. Jip looked after it with his ears up, but then he dropped to his haunches and panted in the shade of a nearby hazel tree.

  I looked at my arm, which seemed fine to me, and thought about how to deal with the painful pack strap. I’d seen tufts of wool on some of the brambles as we passed, and now wished I’d picked enough off to make a pad to spread the pressure. I decided to do so as soon as we set off. Since wool on the thorns mean there were sheep somewhere around, I also wondered if I should shoot one if I came across them. Fresh meat would be good, and I could perhaps smoke some to carry with me. But there were plenty of rabbits and berries everywhere, and killing such a big animal and wasting the bulk of the meat seemed a waste at the time. I did not intend to be on the mainland for so long that I would need to lay in stores, let alone carry them. I could live off the land as we went, I thought. I didn’t know as much about hunger then as I do now. But at the time I thought I was moving fast and travelling light. I didn’t know that some journeys are best taken slow. At that point, I even felt guilty for resting in the shade of the trees and using my new book to identify them. I felt I should be up and walking every hour of daylight.

  I remember all these details about that stop by the pool very clearly. Even down to the bright colours of the dragonflies hovering and zipping over the water. I remember lying back and looking up at the blue sky through the pale green screen of willow leaves and thinking that rather than killing a whole sheep, maybe I could air-dry rabbit meat on my pack as we walked so that we had some food in the days when Jip might not be able to catch our dinner, or I shoot it. And then I remember we were walking towards the notch again, and I don’t remember much about the next couple of days because it turned out that my arm was not getting better at all.

  I walked in a sort of daze, counting paces and pebbles and sleeping under trees. I know we passed houses, lots of houses, but I don’t remember going into any of them. I do remember realising I had forgotten to transfer pebbles to keep track of my pace-counting, even though I had not forgotten to keep track of my steps. I drank a lot of water and stopped talking to Jip. My arm had given me a fever, I think. All I do recall is the notch in the hills that seemed never to get closer, and the counting. And then I went to sleep one lunchtime under an oak tree and when I woke I was shivering and it was dark and Jip was barking at me. I got into my sleeping roll and stayed there. For a couple of days all I could do was sleep, shake, stumble out of the bedroll to shit and then when there was no food left in me to come out, I swallowed the last oatcakes and lay there thinking this was a very stupid way to die. Jip just stayed beside me, giving me his warmth in the nights and his companionship during the day. He’d disappear and return with rabbits, but I didn’t have the strength to light a fire and so he ate them while I watched.

  I don’t know how many days I was sick, but I do remember when I decided it was time to go. I had crawled to the edge of the water to refill the bottles, and was doing so when all the noise in the world seemed to stop.

  The birds went quiet and even the breeze seemed to slow so that the leaves above us were silent. I turned to look at Jip who was standing rigidly, looking into the bank of woods opposite. All the hairs on the back of my neck went up. I saw nothing and the noise slowly bled back into the world, but just for an instant I had the absolute conviction that I was being looked at. And not looked at kindly. And even though I was still feverstruck and retching out most of what I drank, the thought of remaining in that place became impossible. I stumbled back to my lair and the first thing I did was string my bow and lay an arrow ready. Then, keeping my eye on the woodland opposite, I re-stuffed my pack and slipped out from under the willows and slunk away on to the rising heathland. My head was splitting with pain and all the joints in my body seemed to have grit in them, so that any movement was both stiff and painful. But despite that, the feeling I’d had by the water was so intense that I had to get away from it as fast as I could.

  Maybe there had been nothing there. Maybe it was the memory of the large unseen thing that had rubbed noisily around the corner below us in the night at the museum. Or maybe I had been looked at by something that saw me as prey, in much the same way that I looked at rabbits or deer. Or sheep.

  Sick, shaking and stumbling, I walked the whole day with the bow in my hand and an arrow nocked and ready. When I finally stopped at nightfall, my hand had frozen into position and I had to massage it back into life.

  I stopped at a house. I wanted doors and walls to be safe behind. It was brick-built with two floors and an intact roof, and it stood beside a big pond in the middle of a stand of trees which had overgrown whatever garden it had once been surrounded by. I climbed in a broken window on the ground floor and looked around. The trees had sprouted so close to the house that their leaves pressed against the glass that remained, making the interior dark and claustrophobic. The stairs were sound enough, and I carefully creaked my way to the upper floor where there was more light. There were two rooms and a bathroom. The bathroom had a fireplace. Strangely the bedrooms didn’t. I was feeling terrible and was realising that the full day’s walk was a mistake. I couldn’t stop shaking. Jip must have thought I was in trouble, because he hadn’t set off on the rat hunt that usually marked his entry into a new house. Instead he stayed close, looking up at me with his head cocked.

  Sleep, I said. Just need sleep. And fire. Cold.

  The sun had not set on what had been a warm enough day, but my teeth were chattering. I kicked a couple of chairs to bits and kindled a fire in the bathroom fireplace. The chimney drew well, and the flames took. I went back into the bedrooms and took the drawers from a chest of drawers and stomped them to more firewood, which I laid in a stack by the grate, and then I shook out my bedroll and, in a house with two bedrooms, lay down on the bathroom floor. I would have gone to sleep right there had my arm been itching as badly as it had been ever since I came ashore, but the very fact that it
had stopped began to worry me and go round and round like a worm in my head. I wondered if that meant it had got worse, that the infection had poisoned the arm so much that it had begun killing off the nerves. I wondered if I had come so far, so impulsively, only to end up another unnoticed tangle of bones and rags on the floor of a house no one would ever visit again, friendless, forgotten and far from the sea.

  I sat up and made myself unravel the bandage on my arm, painfully conscious I had not changed it for days. I think I expected to see blackened flesh and rot, but in fact the honey had begun to do its job. I knew I should boil the bandage before re-applying it, and while I was thinking about what to do and if I had the energy to in fact do anything at all, I did the only thing I actually was able.

  I fell asleep. And I don’t remember anything else except when I woke it was bright sunlight and my mouth was dry as old straw and something smelled dead and after a bit I realised that smell was me. I’d messed myself. I felt ashamed even though there was no one but Jip to see. He came over and licked my face to show he didn’t care and was glad I was awake, and then went out, presumably to go hunting.