The Plague Dogs: A Novel Page 35

  “Help me!” cried Mr. Powell to the ranks of silent heads.

  They gave no sign of having heard him and he fell on his knees.

  “Help me! I’m ill! Can’t you see me?”

  “We can’t see you,” said a rabbit. “We can’t see anyone. We’re drafting a personal letter to the Secretary of State.”

  “I’ve brought you some tea,” said a dog with a slung tommy gun, entering the nave from behind him. “How are you feeling?”

  Mr. Powell sat up, coughed, spat yellow into his handkerchief and looked confusedly round the cold, darkening room.

  “Oh, fine. I’ll be all right a bit later, love,” he replied. “Sorry-I had a lousy dream—not too good at all. Must be time to draw the curtains, isn’t it? Tell Stephanie she’s a sweetie, won’t you, and I’ll try to be fit enough to read her some more about Dr. Dolittle tomorrow? I must aim to get back to work by Tuesday, I really must.”

  FIT 9

  Sunday the 21st November

  (From the Sunday Orator)

  AT LAST! THESE ARE THE PLAGUE DOGS! ASTONISHING PHOTOGRAPHS BY BELEAGUERED MOTORIST

  Windermere bank executive Geoffrey Westcott and his landlady, Mrs. Rose Green, returning home by car through snow which for the past twenty-four hours has held Lakeland in its icy grip, got a terrifying shock yesterday. The reason? You can see it here, for bankman Geoffrey possesses not only courage and presence of mind, but a camera in whose use he is expert, for which the public have much cause to be grateful to him.

  “You could have knocked me down with a feather,” said Geoffrey, depicted here recovering yesterday from his ordeal at his comfortable flat in Mrs. Green’s Windermere home, where he is a lodger. “I’d driven Mrs. Green over to Keswick to do some shopping and pay a visit to a friend, and on the way back we’d just got out of the car for a moment, about five miles north of Dunmail Raise, when all of a sudden I saw these mad dogs—and that’s what they were, make no mistake—rushing down on us. There were two of them, both as wild and ferocious as wolves on the Russian steppes. I don’t know if plague sends its victims mad, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it does—not after what I’ve seen. They tore every scrap of Mrs. Green’s shopping out of the car—meat, butter, biscuits, the lot—and ate it in about three minutes flat. In fact, they were so busy that I risked getting close enough to take some photographs. The car? Oh, it just about breaks my heart—my super-tuned Volvo sports—but I’ll just have to write it off. I could never bring myself to risk sitting in it again, whatever tests the local authority may carry out and whatever assurances they may see fit to give me. I mean, you never know, do you—bubonic plague?”

  Time for Action

  You never know—that shrewd comment of bankman Geoffrey, ace amateur cameraman and sports car driver, might well go for many other people in England today. You never know—where these dangerous brutes—themselves insane from the terrible disease they are carrying—may attack next: what harm they may do; and who may be their victims. SEE these ghastly photographs of wild beasts at large—supplied exclusively to the Orator by intrepid Geoffrey Westcott. HEAR what the Orator has to say about the danger to our fair land and its people. SMELL the stink of evasion and bureaucratic We-Know-Best which is still drifting, all-pervasive, from Lawson Park to Whitehall and back. Suppose your child were to TOUCH one of these dogs? No danger of that, you say? But how can you be sure? And others may well be less fortunate. The TASTE of danger is all abroad in Lakeland, and where its deadly flavour may next seep—

  “Yeah, well, all right,” said Digby Driver, throwing down his copy of the Sunday Orator with satisfaction. “And the photographs look first-rate. Lucky the bigger dog’s in front—it looks a lot fiercer than the little one. Tom’s touched out that cleft in the head quite a bit, too: good idea—some readers might have started feeling sorry for it. O.K., let’s get on the blower to old Simp, the agony king.”

  Digby Driver made his way to the hotel call-box and reversed the charges to the Orator.

  “Desmond? Yeah. Yeah, I’ve seen it. Glad you’re pleased. Oh, fine, thanks. What now? Well, I thought Westcott might be good for a bit more, properly shoved and guided from behind, you know. What? Yeah, he’s stimulatable all right. Sure. A yibbedy yobbedy, ought to be clobberdy, up in the courts young man. What? Patience, Desmond. No, I said Patience. No, not patience, Patience. Oh, skip it! Oh, you don’t think he’ll do? You want it stronger? Stronger than that? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I see—force their hand, eh? But that’s a bit of a tall order, isn’t it? Well, dammit all, Desmond, I just got you the photographs, didn’t I? O.K., O.K., never mind. You say Sir Ivor wants a disaster? Something the Government can’t duck out of? Well, that is a tall order, Desmond, but I’ll do my level best. Yeah, that’s about it—pray for something to turn up. Never know what the dogs themselves might get up to, of course, specially if this snow goes on. Father forgive them for they know not what they bloody do, eh? O.K. Desmond, do my best. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.”

  Having rung off, Digby Driver remained musing in the call-box for fully half a minute, tapping his front teeth with his pencil. At length he once more, and resolutely, grasped the receiver.

  “The time has come the walrus said,” he remarked, and proceeded to put a call through to Animal Research.

  “Lawson Park? Yes, that’s right, duty officer, I said. London Orator here. Yes, of course I know it’s Sunday. Look, can you give me the home phone number of the young fellow I talked to at Broughton last week? No, not Boycott, no, his name’s—er—yeah, that’s it, Powell, Stephen Powell. What? You say he’s sick? Oh, is he? Sick, eh? What’s he sick with? You don’t know? I seel And you won’t give me his number? Right, thank you. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”

  “What is the mysterious illness afflicting young research scientist Stephen Powell?” muttered Digby Driver to himself. “ ‘Animal Station Preserves Suspicious Secrecy.’ Well, we’ll play it for what it’s worth, but it’s not really what Desmond’s after—not for a body-blow. It’s got to be bigger than that. What we ought to be praying for is something nasty, nasty—really nasty, oh yuck! Come on, Driver, get with it! But what, what, what?”

  Mr. Driver, smiting his forehead with an open palm, proceeded to seek inspiration in the bar.

  “I don’t think we shall ever be able to find the tod now,” said Snitter. “If I were a mouse I couldn’t even run as far as the gully in the floor.”

  He sat up, looking round uneasily at the sky. “I suppose the buzzards will come, but I hope we’re properly dead first. Tug tug, munch munch, I say, Beakrip, old chap, which d’you like best, Snitter or Rowf?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Have you ever thought, though, Rowf, we shan’t need food or even names when we’re dead? No names—like the tod—just the wind making those little whistling noises along the ribs, like that yow’s bones last night that had nothing left on them. Nothing—not even maggots. That’ll be us. Thank goodness we’re out of the wind here. It’s enough to blow a cat over the hill into the tarn. Here I come help miaow oh splash how did that happen?”

  Rowf said nothing, licked Snitter’s ear for a few moments and then let his head fall back between his numbed paws.

  “Rowf, do you—”

  “I can still smell that stuff you said the whitecoats put into the hole in your head.”

  “You weren’t cut open. All the dogs who were cut open smelt of it. If you’d been cut open you’d have it too and you wouldn’t notice. Rowf, d’you really think it’s because of us that the dustbins had been taken indoors last night?”

  “Probably. They’re all afraid of us, aren’t they?”

  “So they all know—every one of them—about me killing people?”

  A few moments later Rowf was asleep again—a light, wary sleep, in which exhaustion barely turned the scale against hunger and the fighting animal’s fear of being surprised and killed without the chance of a struggle. Snitter pressed himself deeper into the cleft between Rowf�
�s shaggy coat and the base of the crag and lay gazing out over the fell and the dark tarn below. The sun, which had been shining from a clear sky during the early afternoon, was now hidden behind a bank of clouds like an arctic sea. From height to height, across the bitter waste, the snow lay austere and silent, knowing neither hate nor pity for whatever creatures it would kill during the darkness of the coming fourteen-hour night.

  “I’m a whitecoat,” murmured Snitter drowsily, looking down at the slate-coloured surface of Levers Water, like an eye-socket in a skull, surrounded by its white, still shores. “I need to find out how and in what way you two dogs are going to die under this particular crag. You’ll have noticed that I smell very smooth and clean, which is just as it should be: and that I cover everything up. You must understand that I’m not insensitive to the situation of my charges. My experiments have taught me great respect for all creatures. Your life certainly won’t be wasted. Even your bones will have a use—you should feel proud and interested. Let me explain. There’s a kind of buzzard that looks like a maggot—flying, of course—”

  A flock of gulls drifted into sight over the crag, sailing up into an aureate beam, high and remote above the deepening twilight below. Not a wing moved as they glided silently against the darkening blue, their out-stretched pinions and white plumage tinged with gold as often as they circled towards the west.

  “Whatever have I been dreaming about?” said Snitter. “That mouse has been chattering nonsense in my head again. It’s not surprising, really—I feel quite light-headed. We’ve come such a long way since the car yesterday morning, and not a mouthful, not even the lick of a dustbin lid. We’ll never be able to pull down a sheep again—never.” He dozed off once more, but started up almost immediately at the cry of a passing buzzard. “No more wading down becks for me. I spilt my brains into that beck, I believe; anyway, I could feel them running down inside my head, so there you are.” He looked upward. “Those birds—they’re beautiful, soaring round up there. They look just like this cold stuff the men have put down—silent and needing nothing. The birds lie on the sky and the white stuff lies on the ground. I used to lie on a rug, once. I wonder where they come from? Perhaps we could get there, Rowf and I. Perhaps that’s where Kiff is. If we don’t find the tod—and we never shall, now—we’ll starve all to pieces. Well, we’re starving now, come to that. Poor old Rowf—it’s worse for him.”

  All day they had been hoping against hope to come upon tracks of the tod. After the raid on the car the previous morning they had crossed the main road, rounded the northern end of Thirlmere and then wandered south-westward, up the forested slopes of Raven Crag, and so by way of the moor south of High Seat, to the lonely hamlet of Watendlath beside its little tarn. Here, although they had waited for darkness and gone most stealthily about their business, they had had no success and fled away empty, with the barking of angry dogs behind them. The sound of Digby Driver had gone out into all lands, so that here, as at many dwellings throughout the Lakes, even the dustbins had been taken indoors. The ducks and hens, naturally, were no less securely out of harm’s way.

  That they were both weaker and more exhausted than on that warmer morning, more than seven days before, when Rowf had killed at dawn above Bull Crag—pads sorer, courage and hope lower, energy much diminished and bodies more quickly fatigued—these things they felt continually. Later that night, at moonrise, they had searched the dismal, snowy fell, but found not a single sheep, save for a skeleton, long picked clean, lying among sodden hanks of old wool. Giving up all hope of a kill, they went on southward, crossing Greenup Gill among crumbles of snow and thin splinters of ice which dissolved even as they dropped into the biting water. It was when they realized that they were once more near Bull Crag that the thought of the tod had returned to Rowf. Impelled partly, perhaps, by that abused but still dog-like sense of loyalty and duty which had so often made him feel ashamed of his flight from Lawson Park and the drowning-tank, he had begun by blaming himself once more for the quarrel and then insisted that, somehow or other, the tod must be found and persuaded to rejoin them: it was possible that he might have returned, by himself, to the old lair. So they had set out, towards moonset, to retrace the way by which they had come from Caw and Brown Haw. By noon of the following day their hunger had become desperate. Above Levers Water they had lain down to rest and Snitter, in a kind of foolish, light-headed gaiety of privation, had spent the afternoon chattering about anything that came into his head, while Rowf slept and shivered in the lee of a tall crag.

  “Shall we be ghosts, Rowf, d’you think?” asked Snitter, wriggling like a puppy. “I say, Rowf, shall we be ghosts? I don’t want to be a ghost and frighten other dogs. Look, there’s a pink cloud drifting over now, right above those white birds. I’ll bet Kiff’s on it. I wish we could go wherever those birds have come from. It must be warmer there, and I expect their tobacco man gives them—I say, Rowf, I can pee backwards on a rock, look—” He tumbled head over heels and got up crowned with a helmet of freezing snow. In the act of shaking it off, he suddenly stopped and looked about him in surprise.

  “Rowf, listen, I’ve just realized where we are! Rowf! D’you remember that day—the first day after we escaped—when we chased the sheep—that shepherd man came—and those dogs got so angry with us? It’s the same place—remember, the water and these rocks, and look, that’s the beck over there? I wonder what made me realize it just now and not sooner? And come to that, I wonder where all the sheep have gone? Up in the sky, d’you suppose?”

  As he spoke, the sun shone for a moment through a rift in the clouds, glinting stilly on the distant water. There was the smell of a cigarette and a sound of crunching boots. A blue, moving shadow appeared and the next moment a man—surely, the very man of whom Snitter had been speaking—came striding round the end of the crag and stood still, his back toward them, looking intently out across the tarn. At his heels was following one of the two dogs who had so fiercely resented their chasing of the sheep. Seeing them, it stopped, with a low growl, and at once the man turned his head and saw them also.

  Rowf rose slowly and stiffly from the depression which his body had made in the snow, hobbled out of range of the man’s stick and stood uncertainly on the defensive. Snitter, almost as though at play with some chance-met stranger in a park, took a few gambolling steps towards the man, wagging his tail. At this the man immediately backed away, flinging down his cigarette, which quenched, in the silence, with a quick hiss like a tiny utterance of alarm. Then, as Snitter hesitated, he swung his stick, shouting, “Git out, y’boogger!”, turned quickly on his heel and disappeared at a run. Evidently he was too much startled and frightened even to remember his own dog, for he did not call it and it remained where it was, facing Rowf in the chilly shadow. At length, in a guarded but not altogether unfriendly manner, and looking at the depression in the snow, it said, “Tha’s bin layin’ there a guidish while, then. Art tha noan cold?”

  Rowf made no reply but Snitter, having cautiously approached the dog, stood still while it sniffed him over.

  “By, tha smells queer,” said the dog at length. “Where art goin’?”

  “Nowhere,” answered Rowf.

  The dog looked puzzled. “How doosta mean? Tha’lt noan be bidin ont’ fell the neet?”

  “We’ve nowhere to go,” said Snitter.

  The dog, plainly at a loss, looked from one to the other.

  “Wheer’s thy farm at? Tha’rt noan tourists’ dogs, Ah’m varra sure—tha’rt nowt but skin and bone. What art doin’ here?”

  There was a pause.

  “We live in a shed,” said Snitter suddenly. “There are pink clouds like rhododendrons. I know it sounds silly, but I’m going to clean the cobwebs off my eyes and then you’ll be able to see what I mean. Just for the time being I have to leave it to the mouse. Can you tell us why your man was afraid of us? Why did he run away? He did run away, didn’t he?”

  “Ay, he did that. Ah’ve nobbut seen t’ like once af
ore, an’ that were when he reckoned dog were sick wi’ rabies, like. It were yoong pooppy, an’ he reckoned it were in convoolsions—it were foamin’ an’ that.”

  “Rabies?” said Snitter. “What’s that?”

  “Doosta not knaw? A sickness—kind of plague, like—that kills dogs; but it’s noan common. Happen he thinks tha’s got it—tha smells queer enoof, an’ that head on thee like rat split oop belly.”

  “But you’re not afraid of us, are you?”

  “Nay. Ah’d knaw reet enoof if tha had plague or sickness like, but that’s whit t’ gaffer thinks, for sure. Else he’d not ‘a run.”

  “Where have all the sheep gone?” asked Rowf.

  The dog looked surprised. “Sheep? We doan’t leave sheep ont’ fell in snaw. Sheep were browt down yesterday, an’ damn’ cold work it were an’ all. That’s what we’re on with now—lookin’ for any more as might ‘a coom down off tops lasst neet.”

  “I see,” said Snitter. “So we shan’t be able to—yes, I see.”

  “So ye’re livin’ oop an’ down ont’ fell?” said the dog. “By, ye’re thin wi’t, poor booggers. An’ ye’re noan reet int’ head an’ all,” it added to Snitter. “Happen ye’ll die ont’ fell. Nay, cheer oop, poor lyle fella, it’s gan to thaw bi morning, canst tha not feel it?”

  Langstrath

  A sudden shouting—” ‘Ere Wag, ’ere Wag—” sounded in the distance and the dog, without another word, vanished like a trout upstream. In the view from the crag, the white fell stretched bare as a roof down to the tarn.