The Gift (18 page)

“Don't be an idiot, Dave!” shouted Ian.

Davy didn't hear him. He was already half across the yard. He could see only what Wolf was seeing, and there the shapes of the dark were almost obliterated by the storm cloud of fears and furies; but he sensed the rush down the lane, the hesitation at the shadowed tunnel between the hedges, the glimpse of the paler slope beyond the open gate, the outline of the ridge.

Davy paused at the gate.

“Dick!” he called. “Dick!”

The only response was that the storm cloud thickened, so that even the ridgeline vanished. Blind now, Wolf stumbled on.

Wolf was strong and quick, but he was tired. Davy's legs were used to the hills. They kept pace, stumbling among ridges and tussocks. The winter air rattled in Davy's throat. His blood thundered. He staggered on, following, like a hound on the trail, the frenzied center of that storm of darkness. He was reeling when, all of a sudden, like lightning against a thundercloud, a jagged prong of fire lanced through the black. He yelled with the felt pain of it. Ian's voice answered, somewhere down in the dark.

And then Davy's mind was clear, and he was still struggling up the hill through the ordinary dark. Ian called again, but Davy had no breath to answer. Perhaps the cloud layer had thinned, or the moon was up behind it, but now he could see enough to pick out bushes and boulders, and from the shape of the skyline tell that he was heading toward the slate quarry. Cautiously he dropped to all fours and crawled on, but even so he reached the cliff sooner than he had expected.

He gulped, and shivered in the night wind, as he knelt there staring down at the black levels below.

“Dick!” he called. “Dick!”

Nothing happened. He called again and again, working his way leftward along the cliff edge, pausing between shouts for any answer except his own voice echoing off the cliffs. All at once a little explosion of darkness rose in his mind, veined with red fire. It burst and was gone. But it meant that Wolf was not dead; he had fallen over the cliff edge and was lying down there in the darkness, hurt and unconscious. Davy looked over his shoulder down the hill, wondering whether to go for help.

A beam of light wavered by the farm, pointed down the lane for a moment, then swung and glared across the slope; faint against the wind Davy could hear the deep note of the tractor engine. He rose and walked back the way he had come, to where a small subsidiary ridge stretched sideways from the quarry lip, and walked out along it. When you were at the farm, this seemed to be the highest point of the hill.

The tractor rose from a dip which had hidden it and came weaving up the slope, its two fierce lights slasling from side to side. Davy waited till they were almost on him, then waved both arms above his head several times. The path of the tractor steadied, and it surged up the hill straight toward him. Ian jumped down and ran across, leaving the motor running.

“You're a blazing idiot,” he shouted. “Where's the bloke? I found his pistol. Dadda's driven down to phone for the fuzz.”

“He's fallen in the quarry,” said Davy urgently. “But he isn't dead yet. Can you get the tractor around to the bottom?”

“I'm not going down there if he's alive,” said Ian, “and nor are you. How do you know?”

“Like I knew he was at the farm,” said Davy, snarly with exhaustion.

“Okay, okay,” said Ian. “I'll run her onto that bit of slope and then she'll shine over most of it.”

Twice during the maneuverings Davy experienced the same momentary explosions of Wolf's consciousness, veined with fiery pain, but there was no point in trying to shout to him above the racket of the engine. And then, though the tractor was poised with chocked wheels on a sharp slope at the very lip of the cliffs, its lights only shone over half the levels.

Davy turned, determined to run along the edge of the quarry until he could climb down to its floor, but at that moment the black, fire-streaked turmoil rose in his mind, strong and persisting.

“He's there!” he said, pointing into the pitch-darkness where the highest level ran. “Dick! Dick!”

The rocks sent back the name, thinned by the breeze. The shadow of the cliff on which they stood ran in a jagged arc along the tumbled screes. Their own shadows, spindly with stretching, reached across the pocked gray slopes and flats. Davy stared at the blank arena through the blizzard in his mind.

“There!” he shouted. “There!”

“There,” wailed the cliffs.

Out of the black center of the arc crawled a shape. Its shadow looked solider than itself. It moved with a pain that Davy could feel fiery along his own nerves. It dragged one leg. It crossed the small ledge of level ground by the ruins of the big shed. Slowly it came to where the longest of the screes of spoil spilled down in one tumbled diagonal toward the further darkness. When it reached the edge of the scree, it crawled on without a pause.

At once it began to slither, head foremost. About twelve feet down it lodged for a moment against a projecting wedge of stone, but its weight shifted that and it went slithering on while the rocks of the scree, dislodged by the movement of the wedge, loosed themselves from where they had lain so long and began to tumble after it. Now the whole scree was sliding, freed from the very top, tearing back yards of the edge of the tip, avalanching into the dark with a low, harsh rumble. Over it all gray slate dust rose like smoke.

Wolf was invisible, but the storm of his pain filled the whole night, making Davy yell, stagger, and clutch at Ian to stay upright.

Then it was gone, wiped clean. He fell to his knees choking back vomit. A soft dark swallowed him.

11

DICK

“You can't expect everything to be all right, just like that,” said Penny. “It doesn't happen.”

Davy said nothing, but stared down into the quarry. The real snow had come, heavy and soft. Only the dark blue cliffs resisted the smothering whiteness, too vertical for the snow to settle, but even they were softened with mottling patches where a cranny or ledge had accepted the snowflakes. The levels below, and the roofless sheds, and the screes were all now remolded into peaceful, colorless, round-edged mounds and planes, except where the wind had carved the drifts into sharp shapes.

“There's more pluses than minuses,” said Penny. She started numbering them off. “Dad's better, and if the firm's really found us a new house, like the man said, it looks as though he's going to keep his job; I know Granny hasn't really made it up with him, but there's a chance of it now; and no one got hurt or killed, except Rud, and it might have been all of us. The only minuses are Rud and Wolf.”

“He thought he could trust me,” said Davy.

“It wasn't your fault. If you hadn't got his gun, he'd have killed Ian and you too, and probably the rest of us after.”

“He needed me. He had to have someone like me, someone who treated him as a person, and not just as a dangerous dog. I let him down.”

“But he'd always have been like a dangerous dog with other people, even if he was safe with you.
I
don't think doctors could have done much for him—not, you know, made him properly human. They might have been able to keep him stupid and sleepy, that's all.”

“He never had a chance,” said Davy. “We think we've had a rough time, Pen, being mucked around by Mum and Dad and never having a proper home and all that, but compared with him …”

“We all like each other,” said Penny. “That's what matters. Even Ian likes Mum and you and me—and there's been Granny and Dadda, too. I mean, look at Dad—he's done some crazy things, but people aren't only what they do. What they do's important, but they aren't only that.”

“He wasn't,” said Davy, gazing down at the white slant that hid the scree.

“Are they going to dig him out?”

“Too dangerous, that policeman said. I don't know. They don't really want to think about him. I mean, if he'd been alive and they'd caught him, they couldn't have tried him like Mr. Black Hat and the others. So now … well, it's easiest for them just to forget him. They're going to pretend he never happened. I suppose it was like that when he was alive. Nobody wanted to know, except Mr. Black Hat a bit, and then me.”

“I think they're right. You've got to forget him, too.”

Davy shook his head.

“There'll be somebody else,” said Penny. “Look, there might even be somebody with the same sort of trouble, something wrong with his brain like that but not so dangerous, and you could help him. If you could see what Wolf was thinking …”

“That's all gone,” said Davy.

“Are you sure?”

“I think so. He took it with him when he went down the scree. I felt it go. It was something to do with the pain.”

“It might come back.”

“No.”

“Well, that's another plus,” said Penny. “You've always wanted to get rid of it. Now you can be just like anybody else.”

“Nobody's like anybody else.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake! You know what I mean.”

But even so it wasn't true, Davy thought. You are what you are, and you are what you do, and you are what happens to you. Dick had happened to Davy, and by that alone he was different. The snow would cover the hills, and go; the screes of spoil would lie where they had been tipped year after year. Wolf would lie with them, spoil, too, a waste product, thrown away. The quarry was part of the hillside now, beautiful in its own strange way; it had altered the shape of the hill forever. Dick had done the same to Davy. There was no forgetting him.

Sound travels a long way over a winter valley. They heard Ian's shout from the farm, faint and clear. He was standing just above the lane in his red anorak, waving his arms, telling them to come home.

“That's all right,” said Penny. “They've found them all. I never thought there'd be any up here.”

(Some of the sheep had been out on the hillside when the blizzard had come. As soon as the weather had cleared, everyone who could move on the farm had trudged out to look for them, in case they had huddled into shelter where some trick of the storm had smothered them in a drift. Penny and Davy were supposed to be checking the ridge.)

“You go down,” said Davy. “I'm going up to the cairn.”

“Didn't you hear Dadda say? We can't go tomorrow. The lane won't be cleared for at least two days.”

Davy shrugged and turned along the lip of the quarry. It was tiresome walking. You either had to scuffle your feet forward through the snow or lift them right clear; and in places the snow had filled a dip in the ground where you could sink above your knees. The quarry edge curved away. He stopped to rest.

“Get on, Wenceslas,” said Penny.

The crunch and rustle of his movements had drowned the noise of hers; she had been picking her way along his footprints, taking advantage of his passage to make the going easier for herself. She stopped and looked back.

“If a tracker followed us,” she said, “he'd think we were a cow in boots.”

Davy laughed, not because of the joke but because she was taking the trouble to try and cheer him up. And in fact, when they did go on, he found it easier to bear his misery and his breaking of Dick's trust. Usually you could walk from the quarry to the cairn in a bit over thirty minutes. This time it took them more than an hour, but they found the snow shallower near the summit because the wind up there had been too strong to let it settle as thickly as it had on the sheltered slopes. A long tapering tail of snow had drifted sideways from the cairn itself. They shuffled around in circles on the bitter top, trying to feel for stones with their feet. Soon any hardened lump of trodden snow felt much the same as a chunk of stone.

“We should have brought them up from the quarry,” said Davy.

“Through this?” said Penny. “No thanks. I've got one here.”

The next two came quickly, but it took them ages to find the fourth. Davy wouldn't give up and Penny, marvelously, didn't suggest it, though she must have been very numb and hungry. She's right about people liking each other, Davy thought. That's what matters. Suddenly, fetching a wider circle away from the cairn, he stubbed his toe on something under one of the scrubby bits of heather that grew here and there on the otherwise bald summit. It took some time to work it loose with icy, unfeeling fingers, one of which was bleeding by the time he finished.

“Hey, that's marble!” said Penny when he stood up and heaved it into sight. It was almost as big as a man's head, blue gray, darker than a thundercloud. Across and through the mass of it ran jagged veins of white crystal. Davy rubbed more soil off it and the blood from his finger streaked both white and dark.

“It's beautiful,” said Penny. “We ought to take it down to show Granny.”

Davy said nothing but carried it to the cairn; they brushed away as much snow as they could, fitted the smaller stones into crannies and rearranged others at the top to make a sort of nest for the big one. “Dick,” whispered Davy as he settled it home. He sucked at his hurt finger. His blood was drying brown on the stone.

“Come on,” said Penny. “I'm cold.”

The stone was like a cloud, a cloud of peace or a storm cloud of fury and despair, all streaked with jagged pain. But it was only a stone; Davy, perhaps, might have to endure such things again, but Dick was free from them now. That was a sort of plus, too.

Halfway down across the hillside Penny said, “I've just thought of another minus. I bet Dad never insured half the stuff in the house properly, and now it's been blown up.”

“A lot of it was on credit,” said Davy.

“I expect that'll mean we have to go on paying the installments even though we haven't got the stuff anymore.”

“That can't be right. It's not our fault. It wouldn't be fair.”