Dogsbody (23 page)

To his relief, the Moon had not yet risen. But he could feel it near, close to the horizon. He set off at a gallop for the cleared space, in far too much of a hurry to care whether or not his Companion saw him.

The cindery space was dark and quiet, but, from where the bulldozers sat like crippled monsters, a breeze blew a faint scent of ozone and jasmine. It was only faint. Nevertheless, Sirius bent his legs to a crouch and slunk like a dim white cat until he came to the shelter of the first clump of nettles. He slid this way and that among the weeds, hurried and low. And there, at last, was the black heap of rubble breaking in amongst the wheeling stars. He could smell the musky sap of elders. A white coat glinted among the bundles of new leaves. Bruce was there.

“Hallo,” Sirius said cautiously.

“Hallo, hallo, hallo!” The white coat surged and the branches parted this way and that. Bruce bounded to meet him. Dim white dogs spurted out of the thicket behind him. The place seemed crowded with milling dogs, all running around him and saying Hallo. Sirius touched noses with Rover, with Redears, with Bruce himself, and with Patchie. Patchie, because she had Rover there with her, was friendlier than any of them.

“What on Earth are you all doing here?” Sirius asked, running round and round with the rest.

“Bruce says there’s going to be a hunt,” said Redears. “What fun, what fun, what fun!”

“I opened their gates,” said Bruce. “Some queer people chased me and I got lonely. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” said Sirius, still hardly able to believe it.

The Moon slid softly above the houses.

The cleared space was suddenly new and strange. It was an enchanted mesh of blue shadows and white leaves, and the mounds
of rubble stood about in it like crusty old creatures. They looked as if they might wake up and stretch, and scratch where the bushes itched them, at any moment. Every living thing seemed ten times more alive. Patchie sneezed, and Rover growled. Ozone-jasmine and a green scent as strong as the elders flowed across the space,  almost drowning the flat white scent of the Moon. A large figure and a small one walked across the level ground. The light of the Moon met and clashed with the blue-green light around one and the pearly light around the other, so that they winked and stretched like candle flames.

“Keep running round and round!” Sirius said desperately.

The other dogs obeyed, rather bewildered. “Is this part of the hunt?” Redears asked.

“Sort of,” Sirius answered, running around him and then around Patchie. The two figures had stopped, but he did not think they would be confused for long. Now the Moon had risen, he could see that he and the other dogs were not identical. He and Bruce were indeed very alike, with their long legs and narrow bodies, but Rover and Redears were of a dumpier Labrador build, and Rover was distinctly chubby. Patchie was in between, narrow-bodied like Bruce, but shorter in the legs. Sirius knew that his Companion had only to look at his eyes to tell him apart from the rest.

“One of them must be him,” New-Sirius said.

“Don’t waste any more time,” said his Companion. “I can feel the Zoi near. You’d better kill the lot of them.”

New-Sirius raised an arm with blue-green rays winking and
stretching around it. At the same moment, there was a fierce fresh pricking from the Zoi. A great dim shape appeared out of nowhere. It might have been a man on horseback, or it might have been something else. Whatever it was, New-Sirius and the Companion were right in its way. New-Sirius turned and struck at it. At least, Sirius thought he did. Blue-green flared and vanished, swallowed up in dimness. Then the great shape knocked both him and his Companion aside and swept on its way.

Sirius was astonished. No creature, no child of Earth, ought to be strong enough to do that to two luminaries. But there was no time to wonder about it. That sound which was not a sound rang out in a noiseless fanfare. “Follow me, follow me, follow me!” It clamored through Sirius’s head, stronger and fiercer even than the tingling, spitting life of the Zoi. And the hunt was on.

Glimmering, frantic, frosty, the cold hounds came pouring into the open. Everything was helter-skelter, gleaming eyes, gleaming coats and the wild pattering of feet, as hundreds of white dogs raced after the dim shape.

“Come on!” said Bruce.

Uncertain whether they were following or pursuing, the five warm dogs bounded in amongst the cold hounds. The hunt took them up and swept them through the cleared space. A moment later, they were streaming pell-mell down the nearest road that led to the river. Sirius supposed New-Sirius and his Companion must be following, but he had no time to think about them.

At the end of the street, by the river, the noiseless noise rang out again and again. “Follow me, follow me!” The dark shape and the pursuing white ones turned upriver and sped along the muddy
towpath, strung out and struggling for position. Sirius and Bruce, being the lightest-built of the five, forced their way into the center of the pack and ran there, surrounded by chilly panting bodies, all of which gave off the stinging tingle of creatures that had been near a Zoi. But Sirius almost forgot the Zoi. He was simply glad the hounds were cold. He was hotter than he had ever been in his life. And the weird compelling fanfare kept ringing in his ears, telling him to
follow, follow, follow,
and think of nothing else.

Follow he did, madly, panting and jostling, along the towpath and through the dark railway yard, across railway lines and over jumbled old sleepers. Beyond the engine sheds, they raced beside an iron fence. Through it, Sirius glimpsed a grassy old bridge across the river. Their quarry was already flying across the bridge, with the hounds on its heels. It looked like a great black beast with branched horns. The sight made him want to bay with triumph. But the cold hounds ran silent, and he did not dare make a noise.

The next second, the same dim shape—surely the same: he knew there was only one—was at his side, right beside the racing, struggling pack in which he ran, urging them on to cross the bridge. “Follow me, follow me, follow me!” shouted the urgent fanfare. And Sirius, though he followed frantically, was suddenly terrified in case the great beast was caught. Yet he rushed across the old bridge and plunged after it between the houses beyond.

After the houses, they were in open country. And there Sirius found that the hunt up to now had hardly been in earnest. Out in the fields, they ran more madly still. They raced over sprouting corn with the white Moon over them and their black Moon-shadows flickering underneath. They poured around dark copses
where bats flittered and owls wheeled above them. They leaped fences, tore through hedges and struggled in and out of ditches, regarding nothing but that noiseless sound calling them on, on, on after the dim shape. Sometimes the sound was dim and urgent out in front. Sometimes it was at their side. Sirius ran in a daze and in a muddle. Once or twice, in the early stages of the hunt, he scented ozone-jasmine faintly. But it soon vanished. Sirius hardly noticed. He was trying too hard to understand whether they were with the quarry or after it.

The muddle grew worse. Sirius did not understand what he wanted. Their quarry raced and looped and doubled. It led them in a desperate circle around a black clump of trees, and they almost lost it. Sirius, with all the other hounds, cast about in a frenzy, afraid they had lost it for good. Yet, at the same time, he was overjoyed that it had got away.

It was Bruce who found the right scent. “Here! This way! Oh, I do hope we don’t catch him!” And he led the hunt streaming away over the silvery brow of a hill, hot on the trail of the beast, agog for its blood, and madly wanting it to escape.

The dim beast evaded them several times more. Each time they were after it quicker, pell-mell, more savagely, and each time Sirius hoped harder it would escape. Mile after mile, his feelings became more of a muddle. He wanted to stop and think, but he could not, because, each time he paused, the dim shape itself came dashing past the silent pack and the soundless noise shouted “Follow me, follow me!” And they had to follow. Sirius began to hate it with a sort of tender terror.

And at last, in the middle of a field, miles from anywhere, they caught it and pulled it down. It was a mad heap of white bodies and fighting black shadow, and Sirius ran around it, savage with sorrow and frantic with triumph. The heap subsided to a flat blot of milling dogs, all tearing and pulling at something. The soundless noise rang out again from underneath, only this time it said, “The kill, the kill, the kill!”

A queer cold lump of meat came to Sirius—he did not know how. He fell on it furiously and ate it guiltily. Beside him, Bruce, Redears and Yeff snarled and tore at lumps of their own. Then, when every scrap was eaten, they all lay down, cold and panting under the sinking Moon, because something had ordered them to rest. Sirius had never felt so wretched and so triumphant in his life.

“What does all this mean?” he asked the Moon.

“Hush,” said the Moon. “You’ll see.”

Of a sudden, they were up again. First up was the great dim shape. It went flying back across the field, summoning them all to
follow, follow
. Sirius saw—though he did not understand in the least—that Master and quarry were indeed one and the same. He knew they had just eaten him, yet there he was, and they were chasing him, cold dogs and warm dogs alike. Sirius raced after the dim shape, trying to see what manner of being it was. He could not tell. But, in an odd way, he no longer wondered why Earth had gone to such trouble to help this being. Sirius found he wanted to help him, himself. It was not the soundless call which made him follow so fast now: it was a peculiar fierce pity.

The hunt went streaming back toward town. Meanwhile, in Miss Smith’s house, Kathleen woke up. In her sleep, she had heard the dog-door thump and the gate whine and click as Sirius left, and she had been waiting, in her sleep, to hear the same again in reverse, meaning Leo was back. When she did not hear it, she woke up.

“Robin! I think Leo’s run away!”

Robin and Basil both jumped awake and stared around Miss Smith’s unfamiliar room, wondering why it had come there instead of their bedrooms. “He can’t have done!” Robin said sleepily, and Basil said, “Why would he?” while he tried to get the crick out of his neck.

“Because he heard me say I was going back home with you,” Kathleen explained impatiently. “He thought he was going to be destroyed.”

Robin accepted that without question and levered himself out of the chair. “We’d better go and look for him.”

“But he doesn’t understand that kind of thing!” Basil said crossly. He wanted to go back to sleep.

“Yes, he does,” Kathleen assured him. “He knew what Duffie meant after he bit her. And when I had to tell Duffie I was going to take him to the vet myself, he wouldn’t move until I told him I wasn’t.”

Basil believed her. He privately knew the Rat was exceptional anyway. But he still wanted to go back to sleep. “How could we ever find him?” he asked contemptuously.

“I think he’s gone with Bruce,” said Kathleen. “You saw Bruce earlier on, Basil. Take us to where you saw him.”

In spite of Basil’s grumbles, she borrowed Miss Smith’s pen and wrote her a note in case she was worried.
Basil and Robin and me have gone after Leo and Bruce down near the river. Love, Kathleen.
While she was writing it, Robin crept sleepily into every room in Miss Smith’s house, just to make sure Shamus was not asleep on a bed or somewhere. But he was not. So they let themselves quietly out of the house.

They were all three no more than half awake. What they were doing seemed as logical to them as the things you do in dreams. They were too sleepy to notice it was cold outside, and the empty echoes in the street simply added to the dreamlike feeling. So did the lit-up deserted shops, the late yellow Moon, and the way the street lights and the moonlight doubled and sometimes tripled the shadows stretching from their clopping feet. When their feet stopped clopping and crunched on cinders, and the only light was from the Moon, it felt like another phase of the dream. None of them was alarmed when they saw a man and a woman slip out of sight behind a bank of rubble. It was odd, but natural, the way it is in dreams, that the man was outlined in faint turquoise light and the woman in white.

“Those are the people the dog was barking at,” Basil remarked. “It was along here, where it’s all overgrown. I’ll show you.” He led the way beyond the bank of rubble. Weeds looped across their feet. They stumbled on concealed bricks and dimly noticed that they were being stung by nettles, but it was still all like a dream.

It was even more like a dream when the wild hunt swept toward them. They heard a furious frosty pattering and turned to look.
The great dark shape in front was bearing down on them. They got out of its way as fast as they could. But, before they could feel frightened, the shining white hounds came leaping and pouring after it, more and more and faster and faster. They watched, dizzy and fascinated.

“I think it means bad luck,” Robin remarked dubiously.

“There’s
Leo
!” shrieked Kathleen.

“Where?” said Basil.

“There! There!” said Kathleen. She stumbled forward into the whirling crowd of dogs. They simply divided and ran around her, cold and fast as a foaming river. But Kathleen saw a dog with a collar go by and managed to catch hold of it. Bruce went on running with the rest, and Kathleen was swept across the cleared space with him.

“That’s not the Rat,” Basil said scornfully.

The dizzying line was coming to an end. The last dogs were fewer and slower. Redears and Patchie came laboring by, footsore and draggled, only running still because the unheard fanfare was ringing out and making them follow. Robin seized Patchie’s collar.

“Catch hold!” he called to Basil. “We’ll find Shamus when they stop.”

Rover came last of all, limping, almost done up. Basil snatched hold of Rover’s collar and ran with him after the rest. It was probable that, without Basil to pull him, Rover would not have covered the last few yards. But he made it, and ran with Basil into nothingness.