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

That’s when I discovered the bedroll. He’d taken the trouble to stuff it inside the kayak before torching the boat. I was glad to see it, but also strangely put out that he thought I was so soft that I couldn’t do without it or so useless that I wouldn’t have been able to vike the materials to make myself a new one if I wanted.

Patronised. That’s the word for how I felt. Like I was an annoyance and not a threat.

Still a monster, I said as I hauled the kayak higher up the beach, above the tideline. Still a monster.

The doors to the palace were warped and stuck, so they didn’t open until I’d taken a lot of my frustration out on them with my boots. Jip watched me patiently as I hacked at them, and then trotted inside with his dead rabbit friend, without waiting for me to lead the way.

The floors were covered in debris from the bits of ceiling that had fallen down, but it still was a magical, cavernous space. The lobby was pillared and big enough, and then when we followed a faded sign into the ballroom it was huge beyond anything I’d imagined. It had two layers of curvy balconies all around the sides, no straight lines, all scrolls and waves, some fragments of the original gold paint still picking out the details, though most of it was mottled and grey. The floor was buckled wood where it wasn’t rotted, and where it was rotted a few hopeful saplings had taken root, thin scraggly things reaching up out of the gloom towards the broken hole in the roof and the light beyond. Something had fallen through the skylight, and now the weather was getting in I saw that sadly the whole building would go before long. Dad used to say that all you needed to do to the old houses on Uist was make a fist-sized hole in the roof and they’d be down in two years.

It was the first time I’d been in a building like that, like something in a kid’s fairy-tale book. There was a stage at the far end with tall pillars on either side which framed it and supported an elaborately and even more curvy top. When I got close to it and my eyes adjusted, I saw there was a woman standing on it looking down at me.

Again, that was my first proper statue, so the cold chill that went down my back and froze me is understandable. Once I’d seen she was made of flaking gold plaster and was missing half an arm on one side and was holding hands with another arm that had broken off what I imagined had been a fallen sister on her other, I relaxed.

I still said hi.

Which got Jip’s attention, but not hers. He trotted over for a look and a sniff. There was enough of the lettering that had been carved below her for me to read “I WIL_ ENCHANT”. And for a moment she had cast a spell that had frozen me, so it wasn’t a lie. I felt her eyes on me as I picked my way back to the doors, through the debris of broken glass chandeliers that had fallen all around the saplings, as if put there to protect the fragile new growth.

I went back to the lobby and rubbed away at the signs until I found one pointing me to the right door for the tower. It took me halfway outdoors and we began to climb the steps that switched back and forth up the inside of the latticed metal body.

When things had worked, there had been a room on cables that must have lifted people up to the top, but without electricity it was leg-ache to the top, or nothing. And by the time I’d got halfway up the thing, my legs were definitely adding their complaints to the list which included the large cuts on my arm (not healing), my head (bruised, now throbbing all the way round to my ear) and my tooth (still aching in twinges). Even though I was inside the rusting cage of the tower, it still felt exposed and dangerous. And the higher I climbed, the more the cool breeze became a cold wind. I paused and listened to it whining through the metalwork around me. Jip had gamely climbed this far, but when I started back up the steps he just looked at me and went back to grooming his dead rabbit friend.

I was sweating and breathing hard when I got to the door at the top. It had a glass window claiming to be the “tower eye” through which I could see a big enclosed room with more glass windows all around. It was also locked, or if it wasn’t the catch had corroded and wasn’t moving a bit. It had been a bad enough day already. I wasn’t in any kind of mood to have a stupid door make it worse, not after pushing myself up all those steps. I braced myself on the handrail and kicked the handle, hoping the impact would unjam it. I kicked it really hard, several times. Then I tried it, giving it a really aggressive jiggle.

The lock held. The hinges didn’t. The door fell awkwardly out of the wrong side of the frame, twisting as it came down. I managed to get my arm up and protected myself as best I could, but it was a heavy door and it slammed me into the side railings, whacking my head as it fell past, going end over end and smashing down into the angle of the landing below.

I shouted all the worst words I knew. But when I got myself to my feet and checked for any permanent damage, I found it wasn’t as bad as it felt. I now had a bang on the other side of my head to balance the black eye, and when I put my fingers there to touch it they came back with enough blood on them for me to know I’d got a graze to match. But again my pride had taken a bigger hit than my body, and I made a mental note that I was just going to have to be more careful from now on. Whatever happened next, I was definitely going on a long journey and nobody else was going to be around to stop me doing stupid things to myself.

I then immediately betrayed all that sensible thinking by walking up the last steps and stepping into the room above, looking out at the huge view beyond the wall of glass. If I had ever seen a bird’s-eye view before, I’d have paid more attention to the floor.

I had both feet standing over thin air before I knew it and when I looked down there was nothing between me and five hundred feet of air, straight down to the hard sand on the seafront. My survival instinct kicked in and my legs flexed and I stamped down, throwing myself backwards with a yelp of horror. I landed hard on my tailbone, scrabbling with my feet until my back hit the door-frame and then I stopped. And only then did my mind click in and start to flail around, trying to understand the miracle of how I had pushed hard against nothing but thin air and yet still managed to power myself back to safety.

I crawled forwards and looked down. The outer strip of floor was glass. Just like the windows, except where the windows had taken decades of weather head-on, not to mention the streaks of seagull shit that striped them, the floor—protected and pointing straight down—was relatively clear. I reached forward and tapped it. It was really thick and rock-solid. Looking straight down through it gave me my first real experience of vertigo, much stronger than the queasiness I’d felt on top of the rollercoaster. I decided not to tread on the middle of it again. Although the glass was obviously designed to be trodden on, I had just seen how treacherous the metalwork of the frames holding it in place might be.

I walked round the room and found the other side of the central block. Someone had once camped out here. There was a pile of blankets, a couple of chairs and even a table with a camping lamp and an old music player with speakers. There were empty green bottles, neatly lined up along the glass wall. The lamp had corroded into uselessness, but there was also a plastic box. The catch snapped and the hinges cracked off when I opened it, because most old plastic gets brittle and shards really easily, but inside there were four candles. They and the blankets had survived so long because the room at the top was basically a sealed glass and metal box and no rats or mice had been able to get to them. Candles were a real rarity. There was also a pair of crutches, which I thought was odd. The climb was tough enough without needing to crutch your way up there. I decided at the time that whoever had come here must have really wanted to see the view. I was strangely cheered by the fact that people had once camped out here in the sky, listening to music and drinking. It seemed a life-enhancing thing to have done, presumably as the world was dying around them. I pocketed the box of candles and hoped they’d had the time of their lives. It didn’t occur to me until much later that the reason they hadn’t needed to take the crutches with them when they left is that they wouldn’t have needed them if they’d taken the short way down after the wine was gone and the music stopped.