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

The woods had swallowed everything on this side of the mainland in a way they hadn’t in the west. I don’t know why there was a difference like that—but it made it a strange journey. Often I’d look at a stand of brambles and realise it was the body of a house, and then look around and realise I hadn’t noticed we were weaving through a collection of buildings in a village or on the edge of a town, surrounded by houses that had collapsed into mulch, or become roofless shells out of which trees now grew to a height of a hundred feet or more. Often the clue was realising the thinner “tree trunks” were old street-light poles that had remained upright and unrotted. Brick and stone houses of course lasted better than the ones built with plaster and wood and plastic, but again most still had roofs that had fallen in and were now just shells full of healthy rot and vegetation.

On this side of the mainland in the great forest it was much harder to see the hard edges of your world.

One afternoon we found ourselves riding alongside an enormous cliff of dark green that I later worked out was a yew hedge, and when we came to a gap in it we saw the ash trees on the other side were growing around a pale stone church. The gravestones were mostly tumbled flat, and I only noticed the first one that gave the clue to what all the others were because my horse slipped on it. I looked down, saw the writing “Gone to my Father’s House” and knew it was a graveyard. The squat church still had its roof. It looked hunkered down somehow, like a squat blockhouse determined to fight the encroaching trees, most of which were at least the height or higher than its stubby tower.

Light was just beginning to fail, even though there were a couple more hours of visibility left in it, but John Dark was tired and made a noise and a gesture that indicated we might as well stay the night here, pointing at the door of the church. I was keen to get on, but not so keen that I didn’t, for a moment, think of agreeing. Even if we couldn’t force the door, the covered stone porch would have made a good dry cave to sleep in.

Then we heard Jip growling. The air went very still. John Dark suddenly had her gun in her hand, her head swivelling back and forth, trying to see what it was that Jip was reacting to. I unslung my bow and nocked an arrow. A purple butterfly went past between us, but apart from that, nothing else seemed to be moving in the wood. And that itself was ominous. It had suddenly gone very quiet. No birds sang.

It was so still that Jip’s growl seemed to vibrate the air around us.

I couldn’t see anything. But I had the same sense of something large, of something aware of us that I had had in that museum, when we’d slept with the lady in the yellow dress and had woken to feel as much as hear something rubbing round the corner of the building in the street below us.

Pa bon , said John Dark quietly, and backed the three horses out of the graveyard. We both kept our weapons ready and continued on our way, very aware of every noise and movement around us. After ten minutes or so, the ground began to rise and the birds began to sing again.

I don’t know what had alarmed Jip. I don’t know if it was something about the church, or if there was some animal watching us that he took exception to, but as we rode away he kept up a rearguard action, circling back and standing in our trail, staring down the way we came, hackles still raised and nose testing the wind behind us. It was unnerving in one way, but in another way it was comforting to know he was there to sense the things we couldn’t see.

Griz, said John Dark. I turned to see she had paused her horse beside a beech tree. She pointed at the trunk.

The grey-green bark had been shredded, and recently. Something had hacked and dragged sharp scratches through it, exposing the vigorous orange of the underbark and the paler sapwood below it. They were deep, angry gouges, and whatever had made them was not just strong but big, because even the lowest of the slashes were started about five or six feet off the forest floor.

Pa bon , said John Dark and made her hand into a claw which mimed slashing at the tree.

Gross griefs , she said. Pa bon do too .

And then she mimed keeping eyes and ears open, and led on. I paused by the clawed tree trunk and felt the gashes. They were deep and they were still wet. This had happened recently, which meant that whatever had done it was not far away. Maybe it was the thing we had sensed by the church among the ashes.

Jip peed on the tree in a defiant and matter-of-fact way, and we moved on. Maybe it was a boar like the one that attacked me, I thought. Maybe the gouges were tusk marks. But that would still mean a giant boar, which was not a cheery thought as the night came on. Even less cheery was my real thought which was that they were claw marks, and I had no idea which of the animals I had thought were native to the mainland could have made them.

Zoos. I’ve read about them and I’ve seen pictures. Places you put animals when their natural habitats got swept away by farms and mines and things. Were they good? Did you go to zoos? Did it feel like visiting the animals in a prison, or was it exciting? Do you think the animals knew they could never go home because home had been cut down and burned and turned into something else, full of people and machines and not them? Maybe they would have been grateful then, happy that you found somewhere for them to be instead of just killing them all. Or maybe they just went a bit mad. I saw a black and white photograph in a book and the chimpanzee was behind the bars and the look in its eyes was just like a person, lost and frightened, even though it seemed to be grinning like a maniac. Maybe it was just showing its teeth.

Anyway. Zoos.

I thought about zoos as we rode away from the church and the slashed beech trunk, and what I thought about them was this: what happened to the animals as the world slowly aged and died? Did you kill them in their cages, or did you let them go, to fill up the world that was slowly emptying of you? I thought a dying world would have had more on its mind than shipping wild animals back to the places they’d been taken from, but perhaps I’m wrong. I thought it was most likely that you let them get old like you and then die or maybe put them gently to sleep instead. But there was another thought that stalked me as we rode onwards, which was that maybe someone had let the animals out and left them to find their own way home. And if so maybe some of the animals had just decided to stay. After all, the world was hotter than it had been. The mainland had not been a good habitat for them when their ancestors had been stolen and brought north to the zoos in the first place. Maybe the climate changed enough to make it good for them. I was thinking of tigers and lions but it could as easily have been bears. I hoped if it was something it was bears because bears did not, as far as I knew then, stalk people and horses.

And, like Jip who kept looking back down the trail, I couldn’t quite lose the itch between my shoulder blades that told me something was watching them every time I turned my back.

John Dark had the same itch between her shoulder blades. She didn’t check behind her, but she looked from side to side much more often than normal, and she never put the gun back in the scabbard that hung from the saddle in front of her knees. I think she didn’t look back because she knew Jip and I were bringing up the rear, behind her and the packhorse. It was a kind of trust. The packhorse between us was also getting jittery. And again, it may have been because it was the end of a long day of travel, or it may have been that it could sense something out there stalking us, but the spooked horse made me more aware of the shadows lengthening around us as the light dimmed.