Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

They halted. Half heartedly Steff put the pipes to his lips. They were Ridiki’s. He’d never expected to use them again. The sharp notes of the alert sounded along the tunnel. Hector rose, puzzled for a moment, but then eagerly, as if glad to perform for his master.

“Well, I’ll be busted!” said the man, laughing aloud as Hector responded to the next two calls. “Ten years and more it’s got to be since he last did that. I’ve never had call to learn the signals. Well done, old boy. Now sit. Steff’s got something to ask you.”

Obediently Hector rose again to his haunches. Steff knelt to bring their two heads level. He took Ridiki’s collar from his pocket and held it forward. Hector gave it an investigating sniff and then smelt it carefully over. To a dog, another dog’s smell is its name. He would know Ridiki if he met her. Only he wouldn’t—she was dead.

When he’d sniffed enough, Steff leaned back to ease his posture. The movement caused the shadows on the wall to shift, as the two shadows of Steff’s head, one thrown by the lantern in the man’s hand and the other by the lantern on the opposite wall, detached themselves from Hector’s shadow, so that it now seemed as if the shadows of three heads rose from the shapeless mass of overlapping shadows cast by the two bodies.

The shadow world had returned in all its strange certainty, and Steff knew that he now spoke through Hector to his shadow self, the monstrous guardian of the underworld.

“Oh, Cerberus, please . . .” he whispered. “Please can you let Ridiki come back home with me? . . . I don’t expect you can, but . . . anyway, please look after her. Thank you.”

He rose, and his two shadows now hid the dog’s and the shape on the wall meant nothing. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and when he looked again he saw, towering over his own double shadow, the single shadow of the man, cast by the lamp on the opposite wall. The lamp the man was carrying shone directly on the wall, making his shadow almost too faint to see, but it was there, reaching up to the tunnel roof and arching over them because the man was standing closer to the light source.

“You know you mustn’t look round until you are out?” said the man, amused but sympathetic.

An echo floated back, toneless, a shadow voice, whispering out of the rock of Tartaros.

“. . . until you are out.”

“Yes, I know,” said Steff. “Thank you. I’ll go now. I’ll turn left at the river and try and climb up that way. Then I won’t run into your friends with the mules.”

“Easier that way, any case,” said the man. “There’s a bit of a track. And look. Wednesdays Mentathos runs a truck down to the town, so the women can do their shop. I’ll be waiting for you after school. Don’t let on you know me—neither of us wants anyone asking questions—just follow where I go and I’ll take you to meet Sophie. Better tell someone you’ll be late home. OK?”

“OK. See you,” said Steff, and turned away into the unceasing stream of the invisible dead moving in the other direction. The lantern glow dwindled behind him. Reluctantly he switched on his hand torch. Its sharp, white, modern beam banished the shadow world. The tide of dead ceased to exist, a remembered delusion. None of that had been true. He’d taken a crazy risk for a silly, childish hope, and been extraordinarily lucky. Ridiki was dead, buried under the fig tree.

And yet she was there, trotting silently behind him. He’d always been able to tell, just as he could tell exactly where his hand was if he closed his eyes and moved it around.

Oh, nonsense! Kidding himself again, the way he’d been kidding himself all through the adventure because he so longed for it to be true. All he was doing was making it worse for himself every step he took until he reached the open air and turned round and she wasn’t there. Torturing himself with hope. Grow up, Steff. Get it over.

No, he told himself. This was another test, the hardest of all.

Somehow it was now far further up the dark and empty tunnel than it had been when he’d been stealing so cautiously in, and all that way he fought the compulsion, grimly forcing himself into the gale of the rational world as it blew every shred of its shadow counterpart away. All he had left of it was this one last tatter, that when he at last looked back and saw nothing but the rock-rubble floor of the cleft he would still at least know that he had kept faith with Ridiki.

He reached the wooden barrier, opened the door, closed his eyes and held it for long enough for her to slip through before he shut it. Still with closed eyes he set his shoulders against the barrier to check his direction and purposefully walked the few paces more to bring himself clear of the cave before he opened them.

There was no need to look round. She had slipped past him and was already there, waiting for him in the last of daylight.

Ridiki, eyes bright, ears cocked, tail high, delighted to see him. She was wearing her Sunday collar. He dropped to his knees and held out his arms. She pranced towards him, but stopped just out of reach. He shuffled forward and she drew away. Her ears twitched back a little and hackles stirred—not a threat but a warning. There were no footprints in the patch of dust where she’d been standing

“I mustn’t touch you . . .?” he whispered.

Her ears pricked, her hackles smoothed, and the look of anxiety left her eyes.

“Can you come home with me—part of the way at least? The man—Charon, I call him—says I’ve got to get out before the men come with the mules. I suppose they move the silver after dark.”

He’d always talked to her when they were alone together, telling her his thoughts, explaining what he was up to. He didn’t expect her to understand, but now for answer she turned and trotted off down the cleft. He followed. At the river she turned confidently to the left, but stayed on the track further than he’d have done. But she seemed to know what she was doing. This was a much easier climb than the route he’d taken down would have been, and towards the top they slanted to the left and so reached the crest of the ridge very close to where Steff had started down, but on the other side of the cleft.

The moon was rising, near to the full. He was interested to see that Ridiki cast a shadow, dark and definite enough, though somehow less so than the hard-edged black shadows of the rocks around. The shadow of a shadow, so to speak, for she herself was a shadow, a shadow somehow made solid. For him at least. He wondered whether anyone else would be able to see her.

As soon as they started down the moon was hidden by the mass of the ridge behind them, but Ridiki still seemed able to find the way. He could just pick out her yellow rump as she led him down twisting animal tracks till they came out on one of the many shepherds’ trails that crisscrossed the mountainside. From here on he knew the way, and without being told she dropped back to her usual place close behind him with her muzzle level with his left knee.

His heart lightened. So she hadn’t just been making sure he reached a point from which he could get safely home. She was coming with him.

Tired though his body was he strode home so happy that he barely noticed the journey. Even then it was well after midnight when he scratched on Papa Alexi’s shutter. The old man must have been sitting up waiting for him. He opened the door almost at once, a pale, stooped figure in his long nightshirt.

“Not bad,” he said. “I thought you’d be later. Get done what you wanted?”

“Yes. I was very lucky. It was all right. You didn’t tell anyone?”

“Waiting till morning. Good night, then.”

“Good night. And thank you very much.”

Over the next weeks he slowly became used to Ridiki’s strange existence, learning to think of her as his dog, there, real, as she always had been, though no one else on the farm could see her. Nor could any of the other dogs, though old Hera, stone deaf and almost blind, sniffed interestedly at her when she greeted her and thumped her scabby tail on the ground. She knew. Ridiki seemed to mind about the dogs not seeing her far more than she did about the people, and made a point of visiting her every day.