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

He was standing at the foot of a great slope, which was the top floor of a building that had collapsed. All the floors had been concrete and there had been no walls. I think it had been made to put cars in. Anyway, the floors had fallen in and were stacked on top of each other like a tilted spill of oatcakes. The grey of the concrete was cut up into car-sized boxes by faded yellow lines which immediately looked like a giant ladder the moment the fox turned tail and ran for it, loping up the slope as Jip gave chase. The fox disappeared into a door faintly marked EXIT at the top of the slope, and Jip would have followed him had he not heard the sharp whistle I gave, and stopped dead. He gave me a reproachful look, pissed on the side of the exit door and then trotted back down to the road beside me.

I was itching to go a-viking in the huge buildings I was passing but I had everything I needed in my pack or on my belt, and I didn’t want to distract myself from my plan. Or rather, I did desperately want to distract myself and go hunting through the lost bits of this new territory opening up all around me, but I wanted to get my dog back even more. I had worked out how far I would have to walk to get from the tower to the place on the other coast where I was sure—from the marks on the map—that Brand called home. If I could walk thirty klicks a day, I could be there in ten or twelve days. Twelve days was not so long. But I could do my viking on the way back, was what I told myself. Once I had Jess. I hoped that Brand was sailing straight home, and I believed he might well be as his boat had been loaded to the gunwales with things he had picked up on his travels. Of course I had no idea as to how I might rescue her, but I was sure that I would come up with one once I saw the lay of the land. There were a thousand things wrong with this plan, not least that I was basing everything on the map I’d stolen, and hanging every hope I had on the web of pencil lines that radiated from that single spot on the east coast.

So. No viking. And if I was to be true to the plan, I should have walked past the steeple and gone another five pebbles before making camp. But I was tired and the day of trees and then the mass of overgrown buildings was so new to me that I felt somewhere between stunned and dizzy with the novelty of it all. So I decided I could make up the distance tomorrow. I sweetened the decision by telling myself I should try and climb the tower that supported the steeple and check out the next landmark on the compass line. The church was easy enough to find, though I did have to lace my way to it through a maze of smaller streets where red-brick buildings were tumbling into the dense thickets of brambles choking the roadways between. When I got there, I found it stood on a sort of point, above what looked like a river of trees that forked away on either side of it. I could see a real river sparkling in the sunlight beyond that. What I didn’t know then, but now do know, having seen a lot of country, is that the river of trees was actually the old railway lines, and the reason the tops were level with me was that they were in a groove that had been cut down into the land for them to run along. Railways fill with trees faster than roadways, perhaps because the rails were laid on loose stones, instead of the hard skin of a tarmac road. What I have found is that if you try and follow a railway on an old map, you make better time walking beside it in the clearer fields than you do trying to wind your way through the undergrowth that has enthusiastically recolonised the tracks. They’re more like greenways than railways now.

The church doors were locked, or corroded in place. They were made of heavy wood that had seemed to have hardened instead of rotting. The iron railings around the church had corroded into an uneven and unwelcoming barricade, and the stone forecourt was buckling with weeds and saplings. But the windows were all intact, at least all the ones I might have reached were. There was a big round window at one end, like a giant stone flower with coloured glass panels radiating out from the centre. There were broken panes there, but no use to me in getting in.

I would have given up, but Jip chased something fast and sleek under the arch supporting the tower, and when I followed his excited barking I found he had chased the rat inside the building, through a door I had missed. The door was actually locked, but a gutter above had failed, so that water had striped down the side of the church in a years-long stain and pooled in a depression under the tower. That had rotted the bottom of the door, making a dog-sized hole that he had pushed in through. I pulled away at the wood until it was Griz-sized, and crawled in after him.

Inside was wonderful and awful. The windows that had looked drab from the outside radiated light and colour over the high-ceilinged interior. The glass showed bright pictures of bearded men in robes doing things and women with scarves over their heads looking up into the sky and holding babies. The ceiling was a complicated structure of wooden supports stepping up to the peak, and on every possible perch there were more statues of men in beards. When I was small, I read a children’s Bible that told all the important stories, so I’m pretty sure most of the painted women were the Mary because their faces were the same, only the colours of their scarves and robes and the things they carried were different. Some carried babies, some odder things like wheels and flames. All of the beards can’t have been the Jesus, but I know the naked ones nailed to the crosses were. The statues weren’t just up on the roof supports. They were everywhere, big and small, free standing or hanging from the walls. The church in Iona had had one or two, but this—this was what a crowd felt like. It was the most crowded empty space I’d ever been in, and I had the nastiest feeling that they had all been waiting for me, or someone, to disturb their peace and quiet.

Although one end of the church was pretty untouched by time, at the other end there was a jumble of long metal pipes where something that I think was a musical organ had fallen down. In the books I read, people came to church for peace, or to talk to a god, or just to be with all their neighbours. I didn’t think this was a comfortable place to talk to a god. There was too much pain in the statues, too much relish in the way they were made. I think relish is the right word, if it means a delight in something. It felt like the sculptors had made the statues with a real liking for the hurt of being nailed to that cross. Maybe that’s my ignorance rather than their fault. Maybe loving the pain was a thing that made sense if you believed in invisible things like this god. I just felt… disconnected from the meaning of all that enjoyment. Like someone was giving the punchline to a joke I hadn’t heard the beginning of. Maybe I should have read a grown-up Bible to see what the point of it all was, but we had no time for gods where I grew up. It had passed, they had passed, just like you all had passed. Gods are just stories now. Bar said that’s all they really were anyway: stories to make sense of lives of those who wanted someone else to take charge of them, rather than cut their own way.

Bar read different books to the ones I did. Books of ideas, not stories, and practical books about how to do things or make things grow. They never interested me as much as a made-up book about people. But I liked the way her mind worked.

I found a small door that led up to the tower. The confined space made me a bit breathless, tightness rising in my throat as I ascended. I had the strange feeling of walking up into a dead end. I began wondering how I would get out of this narrow twisting stone spiral if the door at the bottom slammed shut and the one at the top wouldn’t open. I would be stuck like a bug in a bottle. My calm mind knew the door at the bottom would not slam shut as the wind couldn’t get at it even if there was a wind, which there wasn’t, and there was no one else who would push it shut as the world was empty. My fear-mind had other thoughts. The door at the top did open, though I broke one of the hinges tugging and kicking at it. I stepped out onto a stone platform that ran round the base of the steeple. Looking up, I saw the height of it and the bent cross on the tip, and I felt the huge weight of stone balanced overhead like a threat. Did you ever go to the edge of a cliff and feel a kind of pull, something sinister but exhilarating making you want to jump? The mass of all those stone blocks seemed to hang there with a similar kind of tug.