Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

Newman ran as he had never run before. He had made a critical decision during the moment succeeding his assault: that he should abandon his search for the Dinglian snake handler who would not, at all events, have been able to save him from the consequences of his attack upon the malefic Outlander. It made Newman sad to think that he had come so close to meeting the old Dinglian only to see his plan so thoroughly scotched by life-threatening circumstances. But the sadness was quickly displaced by the terrible fear that the danger had engendered within him.

Flinging open the rear door, Newman was met by the warmth and light of the strong summer sun. A pebbled path lay before him — a path immediately secured by his swift tread — a path which propelled him past pens of sunning giant tortoises and sunning, langourous crocodiles and sunning, sluggish snakes of all lengths and sizes. Newman had seen a rattlesnake or two in his short lifetime, but that was the extent of his personal encounters with dangerous animals of reptilia class. He ached to stop and view them, as would any boy of his age (for there has always been a curious affinity between boys and reptiles), but there wasn’t time for him to do anything now but run — run as if his life depended upon it (which he was certain now that it did).

There were children upon the path — the same children who had ridden the omnibus with him. Some were laughing and gamboling about; others had stopt to gawk at the penned creatures. There were others not from the omnibus — both children and adults — who stood pointing and observing and remarking, each oblivious to what had just happened inside the building that had first disgorged them. They will soon know, thought Newman, and the chaos and confusion that should ensue will help my cause. Newman wished that he could unlatch the wickets to the crocodile pens to unleash further pell-mell to better his chance for escape, but he knew not exactly how such a thing was done. Instead, he began to do that one thing that he was fully capable of doing to achieve similar results: he began to cry with the full force of his hardy, youthful lungs: “Snake! Murderous escaped snake on the loose!”

At first there was no reaction at all from the adults and the children round Newman, who only looked up with placid and indifferent glances at the silly child. Then, as the meaning of Newman’s words began to take hold, and as the manufactured sincerity in Newman’s dramatised cries began to touch that fearful place in every human brain, there came just the sort of concerted reaction that Newman sought. Someone took him seriously. Then someone else and then another and then another until complete panic took hold — mindless, terror-imbued panic. Some people stopped dead in their tracks. Others began to scurry all about without reason. Fathers lifted their little ones into their clamouring arms. Mothers stepped up upon benches, yanking their young children along with them. How easily the Outlanders frighten! thought Newman.

Then things turned quite ugly. There were scrambles and scuffles and veritable collisions as those who wished to go one way met up with those who wished to use the very same path to go the opposite way. A little girl was knocked down, her hand crushed beneath a rubber sole. A woman held her baby high above her head as if a murderous escaped snake might take an especial liking to any infant that wasn’t higher than a tree.

A little boy was flung into a fence, his eyeglasses flying off his face from the force of the impact. Newman noted in passing that the boy’s look was familiar to him. He was, in fact, the amiable and erudite Outlander Gregory. Newman reversed his steps and went to pull his scientific chum to his feet. “Don’t worry, Gregory. The fugitive snake is safe within that building there,” he said, pointing. Gregory squinted. Without his spectacles he could only kick his legs and flap his arms to keep away all the amassing poisonous snakes that he could not see. “This is merely a diversionary tactic that I have been forced by unfortunate circumstances to employ.” He spotted Gregory’s eyeglasses nesting in a tuft of grass, picked them up and put them into one of Gregory’s fluttering hands. “I have to go now, Gregory. Thank you for being so helpful to me and thank you for the tasty chocolate beads.”

Still speechless, Gregory returned his glasses to the bridge of his nose and watched with now corrected vision as Newman sprinted away.

What could easily have been dismissed as a young boy’s mischievous prank was instead taken for a legitimate admonition, and suddenly circumstances required Newman to say not another word to effect the sort of disorder and mayhem that he required. Hysterical, illogical panic now held sway over that morning’s contingent of visitors to Clive and Clare’s Reptilarium, one overwrought imagination feeding the next, the resultant turmoil escalating exponentially. A misinterpretation of a broken serpentine-shaped branch beneath a tree propelled a frightened man’s flailing elbow into the ribcage of a screaming woman, and obligated a fleeing girl to abandon the woman she had been pushing in a wheeled chair, now toppled upon its side, the girl herself soon tripping over the large stumblestone of a man who had been inadvertently knocked to the ground by an even larger man with ramrodding shoulders.

Newman stopped for a moment to admire his handiwork and then to feel quite guilty over it, and then was on his way again. A moment or so later he reached another building, this one much smaller than the one he had left. There was a sign on the door that read: “Infirmary. Employees Only. No admittance.” He ignored the written enjoinder, threw open the door, and ducked inside.

The front room was filled with cabinets and cages and tables upon which sat various pieces of medical equipment and surgical instruments, the look of the room being quite in keeping with its designation as infirmary for cold-blooded captive creatures. There was a young man standing behind a table, fumbling nervously with a hypodermic needle and a tiny glass ampule.

“What are you doing in here?” he cried with only the briefest glance up from his task. “Get out of here!”

“But there’s a deadly snake on the loose out there!” Newman replied in the same terrified voice he had used outside.

“How the hell did it — they told me it was contained inside the North Building.” The man now looked at Newman with fearful, goggling eyes. “You’re telling me you saw it in the open — you mean on the grounds?”

Newman nodded.

“Jesus!” The man set the ampule down and flicked his finger against the hypodermic. “Look, you better stay here,” he said as he dashed out the door.

Newman knew that he could not remain in this place. He knew that even if he were able for the nonce to lock himself inside, someone would eventually come for him and they would find some way to get him. He decided to look for a different door from the one he’d just entered — to go out that other door and then continue his search for some rear egress from the park itself. Surely there was some other way for the park’s employees to come and go that did not require one to pass so close to the main exhibits building, or the “North Building,” as the man had just denominated it. But Newman had to act fast. There were people who knew what he looked like, people who even should they not be aligned with the man who had tried to kidnap him, would want to take him away and punish him for what he had done to this generally tranquil reptile park.

Newman went through the door that communicated with a back room. There were even more cages in this room — much larger cages — and within them were other snakes and other lizards and other prehistoric animals that he had read about in the Ensyke— some of those scholarly descriptions accompanied by illustrations, but most leaving it only to Newman’s boyish imagination what such fantastical creatures should look like.