Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

It was so bad now that no one said anything, not even Mehmet. There was a long silence. And when John finally spoke you could hear the fear in his voice, however hard he tried not to let it show.

‘Okay . . . Well . . . we’ll . . . we’ll have to . . . to feel our way forward, then. I’ll go in front and feel for Def’s tracks. The snow’s stopped falling, hasn’t it, so at least the tracks won’t fill in. It’ll be slow, but we’ll manage.’

Well, there wasn’t any other choice, was there? We left the snow-boats behind and John went in front, feeling with his wrapped fingers for the dents in the snow where Def’s six feet had trod. He had to do it slowly slowly — Def’s wide feet didn’t make big holes like a human’s feet — and we had to hope that it wouldn’t start snowing anytime soon and fill them in. Slowly slowly we moved forward in a line, tied together by ropes, but most of the time holding hands with each other as well to make sure. Shuffle forward — wait — shuffle forward — wait — shuffle forward — wait. We were cold cold. You couldn’t get warmed up going so slowly. We knew it was only matter of time before we started getting the black burn and then the gang green like old Jeffo London did. We knew that most probably in another waking’s time we’d all be lying out here as dead as poor Suzie Fishcreek, meat for leopards just like she’d been. Tom’s dick, we didn’t even know that Def’s tracks were leading us anywhere we’d want to go. He might have taken Jeff right up to the top of one of the mountains, for all we knew. Woollybucks weren’t like people, were they? They were meant to live in Dark.

Shuffle forward — wait — shuffle forward — wait — shuffle forward — wait — shuffle forward — wait.

From near the back of the line Gela Brooklyn started to sing, an old song that they say was brought from Earth by Tommy and Gela and the Three Companions.

‘Row, row, row the boat, gently down the stream,’ she sang in her deep voice, ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream . . .’

And gradually everyone joined in, not loudly, not like we were singing round a fire, but like we were all muttering the song to ourselves inside our own heads.

‘Row, row, row the boat’ — shuffle forward, stop — ‘gently down the stream’ — shuffle forward, stop — ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily’ — shuffle forward, stop — ‘life is but a dream.’

That went on for one two three hours. One time someone in middle — it was Dave Fishcreek — slipped sideways into some sort of hole or crack in the ice, and we would have lost him if he hadn’t been tied on with ropes to the people in front and behind him. But they just hauled him back out, and muttered to the people following them to go a bit to the left, and shuffled forward again, taking up the song like nothing much had happened.

Another time, we heard the cry of a snow leopard, and it sounded far off — though how can you tell with snow leopards how near or far they are, or which direction? — but we just lifted up our spears a bit, and raised up our voices a bit more and kept on singing.

‘Row, row, row the boat . . .’ –shuffle forward, stop . . .

And then, some time later, John suddenly yelled out from the front.

‘Stop! Don’t come forward! Don’t push!’

So we all stopped and the song died out.

‘I think there’s an ice crack across our path,’ John called back. ‘I think I nearly fell down it. Let me just test.’

We waited. Some of us heard a faint splash.

‘Yes,’ called John, and, no matter how he tried to cover it up, his voice was all wobbly and scared. ‘It’s a . . . It’s quite a big crack. I just made a ball of snow and chucked it down. It’s a big crack there, with a stream down at the bottom of it. Five yards down, maybe. We can’t cross over it.’

Everyone waited.

‘I think,’ John said, ‘I think I must have taken a wrong turn a bit back there. I must have mistaken some other dent in the snow for Def’s tracks. I think we need to go back a bit and . . . I’ll try and find the place where I went wrong.’

Go back over snow that twenty people had trampled over and find where the shallow footprints of a woollybuck had branched off? In darkness? Who was he kidding?

But we all stood there, waiting.

‘Unless someone has a better idea?’ John said.

Lie down on the snow and sleep, I thought. Sink down into a dream and never wake up.

I knew if I lay down I’d soon be quite numb, and then I wouldn’t feel cold any more and I could dream I was back with Jeff and Sue all my other brothers and sisters and friends back in Family, cuddled by a warm fire.

‘No suggestions?’ John tried again. Normally he’d ask a question like that to shut up any complainers, but this time you could hear he was hoping that someone would say yes.

But no one said anything. Not Tina. Not Mehmet. Not anyone.

It was cold cold.

‘I’ll . . . I’ll walk back to the other end of the line,’ John said. ‘The rest of you just turn round, and then you can follow me the other way . . .’

No one said anything. No one moved. John walked down the line. Poor John, I thought. He’s failed us all and he knows it. I touched his arm as he went past. I felt disappointed in him — bitter bitter disappointment — but I felt sad sad for him too. He couldn’t just sink down into a dream and fade away. Not when it was him that had brought us to this. He’d have to struggle and struggle right up to the end.

And anyway he wasn’t like the rest of us: he had no one back in Family he could cuddle up with in his dreams. He never had any choice but to keep going.

‘Okay,’ he called when he’d reached the far end. ‘Now this is going to be a lot slower because I’m going to try to . . .’

He broke off. There was a cry from above and to our left.

Another leopard, we thought, and a moan went up and down the line. We knew we were just meat now. The leopard didn’t even have to take the trouble of killing us. Give us a bit of time and we’d have done that for ourselves.

But the cry came again, and this time we could hear it had muffled words in it.

‘Hey! Is that you down there? John? Gerry? Tina? Is that you?’

We looked up. There was a light high up on the snowy mountainside above us. In the centre of the light there was a buck, and on the buck’s back there was a strange shining being, its mask face lit up from below by the lantern on the buck’s head.

Candy cried out in fear — she thought it was one of the Shadow People come for us before we were even dead — but I laughed.

‘Jeff!’ I called out. ‘Jeff!’

It was my brother, of course, my clever brother. He hadn’t got lost at all!

‘I can see you now,’ he called down, while Def picked a way down the slope towards us. ‘I can just barely see you. Don’t go on any further, whatever you do.’

His voice echoed from rocks over the far side of the valley. We all strained to hear him.

‘The snowslug is all broken up down there,’ he called down. ‘Don’t go on that way. This is the way. Up here.’

He came weaving and zigzagging down the snowy slope.

‘There’s trees just over the far side of the ridge, and streams and lots of bucks. You’re walking right past them and you don’t know it.’

And some people started to laugh, and some to cry, and everybody to talk and talk.

‘Wait there, and I’ll come down to you,’ Jeff called.

‘Harry’s dick, Jeff,’ John said, as Jeff came up close, ‘are we glad glad to see you, mate. I thought we’d had it there, I must say. I thought we’d finally run out of luck.’

Jeff laughed.