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

Music—even that wonderstruck violin music—is just as bad a place to be lost in as anywhere as it turns out, because if I had kept my bearings I might have heard the thing that crept up behind me before it snarled and barked and hit me between the shoulder blades, knocking me forwards into the immoveable end of the open church door, sledgehammering me into darkness before I could do more than grunt in surprise.

The world came back, and it was on its side and it hurt. There was a great weight pressing my hip and my knee to the stone floor, and it was this pain as much as anything else that hooked me back out of the dark and laid me sideways, staring into the firelight, my cheek flat on the paving stones. I had a throbbing tightness in my forehead where it had hit the edge of the door, in just the same place that the boom had smacked it earlier. It felt as if my skull had cracked.

When I tried to feel it and see if there was any blood, I discovered my hands were stuck behind my back and I couldn’t move them. That’s when I did panic, and I thrashed around trying to get up and free them, and then the great weight—which was of course Brand—finished tying my wrists to each other and stood up.

The relief to the side of my knee and my hip was good, but the look he gave me as he stepped sideways wasn’t, not a bit. It was cold and fierce and as dangerous as the knife he picked up off the chair by the fire. I knew it was razor-sharp because it was mine and I sharpened it every time I used it.

Where are they? he said.

Who? I said. Before I could think better of it.

The others, he said. Your father. Your brother. The rest of you. You wouldn’t have come alone.

The fire crackled. My blood thumped in my ears. My head felt like it was going to split open.

They’re outside, I said, now having had that time to think better.

He looked at me.

You stole my dog, I said.

How many came? he said. And don’t lie and don’t call out or I’ll cut out your tongue.

Given that choice, it seemed like a good idea to do neither of those things. So that’s what I did.

How many? he said.

You shouldn’t have taken my dog, I said.

He looked at me some more, but his head was cocked and I could tell he was listening for something outside.

About then was when my head cleared enough for me to remember what had happened on the other side of the blackness I’d just been hooked out of and I began to wonder about who exactly had hit me from behind while I was watching Brand play all the sad magic into the night air. The Brand in front of me now seemed like a completely different person from the self-contained musician lost in the dream of his own creation. This Brand was on edge, all his nerves raw on the outside of himself, listening with more than his ears.

He suddenly put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Loud. Shrill. Twice.

There was an answering noise from out of the darkness beyond the doors. A bark. But not Jess or Jip. Not a bark like a terrier barks, sharp and hoarse at the same time. A deep bark, as much rumble as woof. The noise a big thing makes.

Something big enough to hit a person in the back and knock them hard into the edge of a door.

Brand looked at me.

You stay. You don’t move. You don’t shout. Do that? Maybe you keep your tongue, he said. And then he slipped out of the church in a low ducking kind of run and left me staring up at the fire shadows dancing across the great vaulted ceiling overhead.

Liar, I thought. Thief and liar.

His dog was not dead at all. But where was Jess?

It didn’t make sense. He’d stolen her. But she wasn’t on the boat. And she wasn’t here. She’d have barked if she smelled me. I wondered if they’d done something terrible to her. Or had she jumped overboard and tried to swim home and drowned? Had I been so set on following the distant red sails all day that I’d missed a small and loyal dog’s head in the waves as I passed it? Had she barked in relief as I got closer to her and then watched the Sweethope sail past, leaving her alone and bewildered on the wave waste as the cold took her?

All of those thoughts kept repeating in my head, images that got worse and more detailed every time they came around. And the more I tried not to think of her last moments, the closer I seemed to get to them. I could easily have missed a dog’s barking in the sound of the wind. Jip could have missed her scent. As my head whirled round and round on it, I became more and more convinced. We had betrayed her. But me most of all.

It hurt like losing Joy all those years ago, worse really because that loss had not been my fault, and by the time Brand came back after what felt an hour or more I had persuaded myself that she was dead and had died in the terrible way I had imagined.

He walked in taller than he had left somehow. Slower, calmer—not ducking any more. A big dog padded in at his heels, a dog with thick grey and black fur and a white face and the least doglike eyes I have ever seen. They were blue as Brand’s own eyes, but not then nor ever after did I see them go warm in the way his could; they were always cold, and would never look away from you. Dogs don’t like holding your gaze. Saga was different. Saga could outstare a rock.

Good dog, Saga, Brand said. Sit.

The dog sat in front of me and watched. Brand had made his fire out of chairs. He had a good supply of this firewood. There were lots of them in rows behind him, waiting for a crowd of believers who would never come again. He picked the nearest one up, stomped it to kindling and used it to feed the fire that had gone to embers and ash in his absence. There were lots of matching red books stacked on a shelf on the wall and he tore the pages out of one and fed the coals with them, using the empty cover to fan the fire back into crackling life. Then he kicked another chair to bits and added that to the new flames.

He took a chair and brought it close to the fire so he could sit over it and warm his hands and watch me at the same time.

You came alone, he said. Didn’t expect that.

I kept quiet.

Don’t need you to tell me I’m right, he said, nodding at the dog. Saga and I criss-crossed the island. It’s not big. And she’d have smelled them if they were there. The others.

I don’t know if you ever had your wrists tied together when you were alive. It’s a horrible feeling, especially when they’re trapped behind you. You’ve lost your hands and everything about you is open and exposed. It makes it hard to breathe normally. Brand looked at me and did the unnerving thing he could sometimes do, which was seem to hear what your head was saying to you. He smiled. Not a nasty smile, one of his good ones.

You can talk, he said. He took my knife from his belt and stabbed it into the seat of the chair beside the one he was sitting on so that it stood there, stuck in the wood, reflecting the firelight at me.

Not going to cut your tongue out, he said. That’d be a horrible thing to do to a person. Just said it to get your attention. Needed you to keep quiet.

I stayed that way. Like I said, hands tied behind you makes you feel powerless and the only thing I did have control of was my words, so I looked away and clenched my teeth to stop them getting out.

Was just a threat, he said. Don’t take it bad. It’s like when you tell a lie, it’s always better to put a grain of truth in it to make it stick, eh? Thing with a threat is you have to put a little picture in it, something specific so that it catches in the head. You add that little picture, the person you’re threatening has more to chew on in their imagination, and chewing makes them digest the threat properly and then before they know it it’s a part of them and they believe it much more than if it’s just words outside them, you see?