The Plague Dogs: A Novel Page 37

  “Yeah, more or less, I think,” replied Mr. Powell. “A bit post-influenzal, you know, but it’ll pass off, I dare say.” In point of fact he felt dizzy and off colour.

  “Well, work’s often a good thing to put you back on your feet, as long as you don’t overdo it,” said Dr. Boycott. “You should certainly go home early tonight, but I’d like you to be familiarizing yourself today with the details of this new project that we’ve been asked to set up. I shall want you to take entire charge of it in due course.”

  “What’s the present position with those dogs, chief, by the way? Are they still at large?”

  “Oh, yes, the dogs—I’m glad you mentioned that. Yes, they’re still very much at large, I’m afraid; they seem to keep turning up all over the place. On Saturday, apparently, they actually robbed a car of a load of groceries. There’ve been a lot of phone calls, and I dare say you may very well get some more today. Mind you, we’re still not admitting that those dogs are ours. Ours may be dead long ago.”

  “What about Whitehall?”

  “Oh, they’re still blathering away. There’s going to be some sort of debate in Parliament, I gather. That Michael What’s-His-Name was up here last Friday, as you know. He wanted to see Goodner’s laboratory and then he was pressing me to give an assurance that the dogs couldn’t have been in contact with any plague-infected fleas.”

  Mr. Powell made an effort to show interest. “Did you give it?”

  “Certainly not. How could I? How could anyone? Anyway, we’re scientists here—we don’t get mixed up in politics. We’ve got work to do, and we’re not to be run from Westminster or Whitehall or anywhere else.”

  “That’s where the money comes from, I suppose.”

  Dr. Boycott waved the triviality away with one hand.

  “That’s quite incidental. This work’s got to be done, so the money’s got to be found. You might just as well say the money for water-borne sewage comes from Westminster and Whitehall.”

  “It does—some of it, anyway.”

  Dr. Boycott looked sharply at Mr. Powell for a moment, but then continued.

  “Well—well. No, I think the principal thing that’s bothering the Ministry is having to admit that bubonic plague’s being studied here at all—as a Ministry of Defence project, that is. It was secret, of course. No one was supposed to know—even you weren’t supposed to know.”

  “I didn’t know-well, hardly.”

  “I still can’t imagine how it got out,” said Dr. Boycott. “But I suppose the press will continue to make all they can of it. And talking of the press, that reminds me. I’ve agreed to see this Orator man, Driver, tomorrow afternoon at three. I’d like you to join me. If I’m going to talk to a fellow like that, there ought to be a witness, in case he misrepresents us later.”

  “O.K. chief, I’ll be there.”

  “Now, this new project I was starting to tell you about,” said Dr. Boycott. “It’s a pretty big one, with American money behind it—another defence thing, of course. We’re going to construct a specially large refrigeration unit, the interior of which will simulate tundra; or steppe-like conditions, anyway. There’ll be a wind tunnel, too, and some means of precipitating blizzard. These will be near-arctic conditions, you understand. There’ll be food and some kind of shelter situated in one place, and a built-in escalator whose effect will be that the subject animals have to cover the equivalent of anything from thirty to sixty miles to reach it. We may install certain deterrents—fear-precipitants and so on. Actually, we’re not quite agreed yet on that aspect of the work, but—”

  “What subject animals, chief?”

  “Dogs, almost certainly. Much the most suitable. Now as to timing—”

  Mr. Powell closed his eyes. He had come over faint and his head was swimming. He began to realize that he was more post-influenzal than he had thought. As he made an effort to concentrate once more on what Dr. Boycott was saying, there came from outside a sudden burst of tommy-gun fire. He started, sat up quickly and looked out of the window. Tyson’s boy Tom, emerging with a pail of bran mash from the shed across the way, was idly running the mixing-stick along a sheet of corrugated iron which had been used to patch the wall.

  “—As to timing, Stephen, I was saying—”

  Mr. Powell hesitated. “I—I—it’s kind of—I wonder, chief—only, you see—look, do you think you could possibly put someone else on this? The thing is—”

  “Put someone else on it?” asked Dr. Boycott, puzzled. “How d’you mean?”

  “Well, I can’t explain exactly, but—” Mr. Powell buried his face in his hands for a moment. When he looked up he said, “Perhaps I’m not quite back to normal yet. I only meant—well, you see—”

  To his horror, Dr. Boycott saw—or thought he saw—tears standing in Mr. Powell’s eyes. Hurriedly he said, “Well, we needn’t go into that any more just now. We’ll come back to it another time. You’ll want to be having a look at your other stuff. By the way, Avril finally finished off that hairspray thing while you were away yesterday. The stuff was absolutely hopeless—the second lot of rabbits all had to be destroyed. I can’t imagine how anyone ever supposed he could get away with marketing a product like that to the public. Just wasting our time and everybody else’s. We shall charge him for the rabbits, naturally. Anyway, if I don’t see you again before, we’ll meet at three tomorrow afternoon.”

  In a confused fantasy of mist and hunger, Snitter was hunting for the tod across the hills and rocks of dream. A bitter rain was falling and twice, as he topped a slope, he glimpsed momentarily but never winded, disappearing over the next, the familiar, grey-haired figure with yellow scarf and walking-stick.

  “Ah ha!” said Snitter to the vanishing figure, “I know better than to run after you! You look real, but you’re not real. I’ve got to find the tod, or else we’re going to die in this horrible place.”

  He knew now where he was; on the long, heathery slope that led down to the road winding up out of the green dale—the empty road that crossed the pass by the square stone post set upright in the turf. He remembered the post: he had lifted his leg against it for luck when the tod had led them across the pass on their way to Helvellyn. The wind was tugging in uneven gusts over the ling and up from below wavered the falling of the becks. A curlew cried, “Whaup, whaup,” in the hills and as he came down to the road a blackcock went rocketing away from almost under his paws. It was all just as he remembered.

  He paused, looking about him and sniffing the wet ground for some trace of the tod. Suddenly he saw, below him, a blue car ascending the pass, threading in and out of sight, steadily climbing the steep edge of the hillside, crossing the bridge and coming on towards the stone where he stood watching. As it reached level ground and drew to a halt on the short grass of the verge, he saw that the driver was a merry-looking, pretty girl, who smiled at him, calling and beckoning.

  Snitter ran up eagerly and jumped into the car by the near-side door which she leant across to hold open. She smelt deliciously of soap, scent, leather and femininity. He put his muddy paws in her lap and licked her face and she laughed, scratching his ears.

  “You’re a friendly chap, aren’t you?” she said. “Poor doggie, you’ve hurt your head, haven’t you? And where have you sprung from, mmh? I bet your master’s worried to death about you.” His old, original collar had apparently come back and she read it, twisting round the little brass plaque with two slim, cool fingers pressed against his neck, “Would you like me to take you home? D’you suppose there’s a reward, mmh?”

  Head close to hers, Snitter wagged his tail, smelling her hairspray and the trace of wax in one small, dainty ear. “I’ll give you a reward,” she said, and popped a toffee into his mouth. He bit it. It had no taste at all and he shook his head, teeth squelching in the sticky gluten.

  “It’s dream toffee,” she said, laughing and kissing him. “This is all just a dream, you know. Are you hungry? Poor old chap, then—it’s no good looking in the back of t
his car. There’s nothing there—only my bag.”

  She started the engine and backed to the road, leaving the still-unclosed passenger door to swing back and forth as she did so. “You can help me if you like,” she said. “D’you know what I’m looking for? I need a mouse—a live one.”

  Snitter found speech. “I’ve got a mouse; he’s in my head.”

  “Could he be injected? Only, you see, I’m overdue and of course my boy-friend and I want to know as quick as we can.” She looked at her watch. “Oo, gosh, I’d better be getting on. He’ll be home soon. We’re living together, you know.” She laughed. “Living in sin, as they used to say.”

  “Sin?” said Snitter. “I don’t understand, but then I’m only a dog, of course. A kind of house you live in, is it? The men have taken all the houses away, you know. I don’t believe there’s a house for miles.”

  She patted him, leaning across, about to close the door.

  “Why,” she said, “we both believe the very same. There’s no such thing as sin, is there? No such thing any more.”

  Suddenly Snitter realized that they were not alone in the car. The shining fur coat pressed against them began to writhe and hunch into folds, which resolved themselves into odorous, furry, fox-like creatures leaping past him into the back seat. On the instant there started up among them a great, brown lizard, with burnished neck of verdant gold, smooth, supple scales and forked tongue flickering in and out between its eyes. From the girl’s feet, pressed to the controls, two tawny snakes came writhing.

  The girl drew a knife from the top of her skirt.

  “You don’t mind blood, do you?” she said. “I was explaining, wasn’t I, it’s what I hope I’m going to see quite soon.”

  Snitter flung up his head, howling in terror.

  “What’s the matter now?” growled Rowf, startled out of sleep beside him. “Why on earth can’t you keep quiet?”

  “Oh, thank goodness! A dream! I’m sorry, Rowf—I suppose it’s the hunger. It’s more than three days now since we’ve eaten anything—not a beetle, not a caterpillar—”

  “I know that as well as you do. Well, then. Three days, four days. Go to sleep. I deserve it even if you don’t.”

  “I’d eat anything—anything, Rowf; if only there was—”

  The lethargy of starvation, returning, flowed over Snitter, pressing him down like a soft, heavy paw. He slept, dreamed of the dog shed and the tobacco man, and woke to find himself half under Rowf’s shaggy flank.

  “Lodo,” murmured Snitter. “I thought—yes, it was Lodo—”

  “The bitch, you mean—that spaniel-eared one? Always smelt of burning?”

  “Yes, she—was telling me—”

  “What?”

  “She told us—d’you remember?—the whitecoats made her breathe some kind of smoke, same as the tobacco man does. They put a thing over her face so that she had to breathe this smoke.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, she said she hated it to begin with, but then later on, when they didn’t give her the smoke, she wanted it.”

  Rowf turned his head, biting at a flea in his rump.

  “We’ll be like that, won’t we?” said Snitter. “When we aren’t here any longer, when we’re not hungry or cold, we’ll miss it. We’ll wish we were.”

  “When d’you mean?”

  “When we’re dead.”

  “When you’re dead you’re dead. Ask the tod.”

  From the misty gully above came a faint rattling of stones and the scramble of a sheep’s hooves. Two or three pebbles, pattering down the precipice, came to rest not far away.

  “Flies on the window-pane,” murmured Snitter drowsily. “There’s nothing to be seen, but they can’t get through it. Nothing’s very strong, of course—much too strong for us. Like black milk.”

  “Black milk? Where?”

  “It was in a lighted bowl, kept upside down on the ceiling. Very strong stuff. You couldn’t look at it for long or it boiled. Well, after all, rain, you know—that just stays up there in the sky, I suppose until the men want it to come down. If rain can stay up there, why not milk? Or Kiff. I mean, Kiff’s not dead, is he? There’s nothing at all strange, really, about black milk.”

  “I never thought of it like that.”

  For many hours past they had been dozing and waking, sheltered from the wind at the foot of the Dow Crag. Below them, beyond the tumbled screes, lay the narrow expanse of Goat’s Water, treeless, grassless, weedless—cold water and stones.

  After the dog Wag had left them, two days before, they had wandered aimlessly southward, up over Grey Crag, down into Boulder Valley and so round, below the eastern precipices of the Old Man, into this dreary vale, remote and sequestered, an open mouthful of tooth-stumps, a stone-grey muzzle asleep by a dead fire on a winter’s night: a place where appetite and energy—almost life itself—seemed futile, as though among the craters of the moon. Only the clouds and gulls, far overhead, maintained their effortless sailing; a moving sky above a still land.

  “The tobacco man will be round,” said Snitter, looking about him in the gathering dusk.

  “Not here.”

  “No, but it’s like that here, too, isn’t it? Whatever we were there for—you know, in the tobacco man’s shed—it was nothing to do with us—with dogs—no good to dogs. And this—whatever it’s for—this is nothing to do with us, either.”

  “We’ve been here before, Snitter, do you know that? With the tod. I chased the yow until it fell over and then we came down here and ate it—remember?”

  “It seems a long time ago. The tod won’t come back now.”

  “Snitter, there’s a cave up there, among those boulders. I remember seeing it that night. We’ll lie up there for now and find a sheep tomorrow. I’ll kill it somehow.”

  During the night it thawed, as the sheep-dog had said it would, and by first light almost all the snow had gone. Rowf, however, woke surly and listless, biting at his staring ribs and falling asleep again, head on paws. There was not a sheep to be seen and he could not be persuaded to hunt for one.

  During the afternoon Snitter limped down to the water, drank and returned. He woke Rowf and together they went to look for the remains of the sheep which they had driven over the precipice, but found only wool and bones at the foot of a sheer gully. They returned to the cave and passed a third night without food.

  It was on the following afternoon that Snitter suffered the dream of the girl in the car.

  “Nothing strange about it really,” repeated Snitter in the solitude. “Nothing strange about black milk. I dare say men might make black bread, or even black sheep if they wanted, come to that. They sometimes make black clouds when they want it to rain—I’ve seen them.” Then, with sudden determination, “Rowf, I’m going to look for the tod: and if I can’t find him, I’m going down to some farm or other and give myself up to the men. Anything’s better than starving to death—”

  Rowf, battered and hollow as an old kettle discarded among the stones, grinned up at him from his refuge of despair.

  “Your dignity! ‘I hope we die alone!’ ”

  “Oh, Rowf—”

  “Go on, then, off you go! I’m damned if I’m going to be taken back to the whitecoats’ tank. I’d rather starve here—it’ll be less trouble. And as for finding the tod, I tell you, Snitter, if you can do that, I’ll make some food drop down to us off the tops. There you are, that’s a bargain. One’s as likely as the other.”

  “Now the snow’s gone the men may have brought some sheep back up here. Couldn’t we try to find one?”

  Without replying, Rowf put his head back on his paws and shut his eyes.

  Snitter, wandering away through the stones and loose shale, came down to the northern end of Goat’s Water and splashed through the infall turbid with melted snow. The little tarn lay still, unruffled by any wind, grey water reflecting clouds and grey gulls sailing.

  I suppose there are fish in there, thought Snitter, like the ones in
the river where my master used to take me for walks: and I suppose they think they can swim anywhere they like. The gulls, too—those gulls up there must think they’ve decided to glide round and round. I wonder whether I’ve really decided of my own accord to go this way? If I have, I’m sure I don’t know why. I remember hearing that dogs often go away by themselves to die. Jimjam said he wanted to go away but of course he couldn’t get out of the pen, poor chap.

  He was climbing the south-west slope of Brim Fell and, as he came to the lower level of the mist, paused a moment before heading on into the thicker mirk above. The sighing, moving air, the gloom and solitude about him appeared more sinister and hostile than ever before. Both the sky above and the tarn below were hidden and now—or so it seemed—even his ears had begun to deceive him, for from somewhere below and beyond—somewhere distant—he thought he could hear the barking of dogs. Urgent and excited they sounded, as though the tobacco man had come among them with his pails.

  That must be it, thought Snitter. I keep on remembering feeding-time—not surprising—and now it even sounds real. Of course it isn’t really, any more than my poor master when I see him. I wonder where I’m going? And—and who—what sort of man is this coming? I don’t like the smell of him, somehow.

  He was thick in the mist now, high up on the starved, sheep-cropped turf of Brim Fell. He could hear a soft, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of approaching boots, sounds of creaking leather and steady breathing. Quickly he hid himself, crouching flat in a peat-rift as a dark, burly young man came looming through the mist, striding purposefully towards him—a young man all hung about with jolting tubes on straps and discs of glass and leather; with a long, narrow bag on his back, a scarf round his neck and a coloured paper clutched in the fingers of one hand. For one fleeting moment he turned his head in Snitter’s direction and Snitter, though he could not tell why, cowered close and let him go past. As he remained lying still, with closed eyes, the distant dog-sounds from below seemed muted, in his ears, to a kind of lullaby.