C Fletcher - A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

I thought this was a thing I would do better on my own.

So. Cleverness. Hubris. And the sketchiest of plans.

What could go wrong?

Later I found the name of the bay I had anchored in on some old charts, but from the water it didn’t look significant enough for anyone to have bothered giving it one. I could hear Jip’s reproachful growling behind the cockpit door as I slipped the kayak over the stern and held it there in the darkening water while I carefully got aboard and pushed off. I’d decided to leave the gun because there was no guarantee that even if I was forced to pull the trigger the bullet would fire. The ammunition we have was made long ago, and about half of it hangs fire and just goes click. I decided that if I took the gun I would be risking going click at someone who might well then take it amiss and retaliate with something more than clicking.

I was not interested in violence. The worst stories I read were the ones that ended in violence. When I was little I had a stash of old illustrated magazines about superheroes. I loved them for a bit, because they were so bright and drawn with a real joy for movement and design, some so vividly that the people seemed to be about to burst out of the page and into my world. They tended to walk around in really tight clothes and however much the writers tried to hide the fact, and however much they appeared to fret about what to do, all the stories ended up in a huge fight. Dad said they were written for younger boys really. I liked them despite that, until I didn’t. And when I realised I didn’t, I also knew that it was because everything was always a set-up for a punch-up. As if the only way you could solve a problem was by hitting it. Maybe your world liked fighting so much that it thought it had to prepare kids for that by telling them those kind of stories. Or maybe it was the other way round and your world liked fighting because those were the stories you were given when your minds were young. I didn’t want this story to end with a fight. I just wanted my dog.

I didn’t feel much like a hero, super or otherwise, as I pushed off from the flat stern of the Sweethope and began to paddle around the rocks lining the curve of land. My mouth felt sticky and my heart was thumping so loudly it almost drowned out the noise of the wind in my left ear as I paddled. My bow, which normally hung across my shoulders so naturally that I never noticed it, now seemed to be digging into my back with every stroke, like a sharp-boned elbow trying to remind me of something I’d forgotten.

My eyes are good in the dark, better than Bar or Ferg’s ever were, but the light was failing fast. I could see the obvious things to avoid, but I scraped the kayak on a rock lying in wait just below the surface as I cautiously rounded the low headland. The tides had luckily worn it smooth enough that there were no sharp jags of stone to tear the bottom out of the boat and end my plan before it had begun. I paddled on for a few more strokes and then let the incoming tide take me round into the channel without doing anything more with the paddle than keep myself upright. I didn’t want any splashing to alert Brand to my presence if he was on the lookout over the small bay that was revealing itself to me as I quietly drifted into it.

He wasn’t, and the bay turned out not to be there either. Instead I saw a deckled channel of water separating the smaller island from the larger landmass that loomed on my right. I could see no sign of his boat in the water. My first thought came from a fear, and it was that he had fooled me by sailing straight through the channel and then turned back up the other side of this smaller island. I had a moment of panicked clarity in which I knew he was aboard the Sweethope right now, laughing at me and stealing Jip too, and my muscles had begun to turn the kayak before my mind kicked in and told them to stop, because my eyes had seen something.

If Brand had not gone ashore, I would have never seen the boat in the darkness. As it was, I caught a strange splash of light from within a building as he explored, and the light was strange because of the window that framed it. It was big and old, old not in a hundred years or just before the Gelding way but old in the way of many centuries past. It looked like a castle window I’d seen in books, not just because of the tall arched shape of it, stark against the night, but because of the stone walls and high-beamed roof I saw for a brief instant as Brand splashed the light of his lantern over it. It wasn’t a castle of course. It was a church. An abbey even. But right then it was more than that. It was an opportunity. Because the other thing that this moment of light appearing like a shape cut out of the darkness with a pair of sharp scissors did was silhouette the mast of his ship on the foreshore. He’d sailed in beside a stone jetty and made fast to it, tucked in so tight that I could easily have paddled past in the blackness and never seen it.

But now I felt my spirits rise. I could see he was off the boat, and all I had to do was paddle across, tie off to his taffrail and get aboard quickly enough to get Jess out of the cabin where I was sure she must be locked up, then get back to the Sweethope without him knowing what had happened.

I moved fast, not needing to think much. The kayak moved easy and quiet across the water. Truth is the thing was so much a part of me that I didn’t really think about how to make it go where I wanted any more than you would have thought how to swim or run.

I slipped in beside his boat and held myself there, soft and quiet, balancing the tug of the tide with my hand flat against the hull. No sound other than wave-lap and wind riffling through the rigging above. I put my ear to the hull, but could hear nothing below decks either.

I carefully walked the kayak hand over hand to the stern of the boat. Making sure not to have it bang noisily against the hull. And then I tied it off with a knot I could release with one quick tug.

Walking onto his boat was strange. It felt wrong. Uninvited. Unwelcome. Even though he had stolen from us, this was his home. I pushed the feeling as far away from the front of my mind as I could, crept across the cockpit towards the companionway and put my ear to the hatch, which was closed. There was no noise inside. Not a man’s, not—and this was what I had been hoping for—a dog’s. My fear had been that Jess should get a smell of me and start whining or—worse—barking. I popped my head back up and looked over the cabin towards the island, just in case Brand was silently on his way back, but the light in the church window was still there, and so, I figured, was he.

I risked a low whistle through the door. There was no answering noise from Jess. Which was not surprising, because once I had eased open the hatch and ventured a look inside, there was no dog, no Brand—but plenty of everything else. The cabin was jammed with things—boxes, bottles, lumps of machinery and sacks that, from the smell and size of them, contained our dried fish. There were bags hanging from the ceiling. The only clear space was a chart table. I would not have liked to be stuck in this cabin on a frisky sea. I ducked below the bags and made my way to the fore-cabin, behind a small door in the bulkhead. The thought came to me that if I was going to pen up a stolen dog while I went exploring on the island, that was exactly where I’d do it. On the other side of that thin wood door with its slatted metal grill.

I whistled again but there was no noise or movement on the other side. He must have taken Jess ashore with him. My fingers found a padlock with a key in it but it was unlocked, and when I lifted it clear of the hasp the door swung open into more darkness and a worse stink. I could see nothing at all, and something in that deeper stench made me unwilling to blunder in and feel my way around. I dropped the padlock back in the hasp and crouched in the darkness, feeling the soft rise and fall of the sea beneath me, trying to ride out my disappointment. My easy plan was sunk. I couldn’t yet see what to do next. In fact I couldn’t see anything much, deep in this unfamiliar, crowded cabin with a moonless night outside. Could have been the smell of the sacks of stolen fish, but I felt like what’s-his-name in the belly of the whale. Did you know that story? Not the Bible one—the better one. He was a toymaker, and his little boy wasn’t what everyone thought he was. He was a wooden puppet. Pinocchio. That’s what the boy’s name was—not the old guy’s in the whale’s guts. He was a liar and his nose got longer every time he told one. He wasn’t bad though, the boy-not-quite-a-boy. Not mean. Just not grown enough to have a heart yet. I liked that story when I was little. Bar said it sort of fit me, especially after Joy was gone and we did what we had to do to adjust.