Wild Blood (6 page)

‘Who is it?’ Orla asked.

Tess shrugged and went out to the landing, Orla close behind her. The window there was above the front door, but it was already too late. Whoever had come was directly below, now, and too close to the house to be seen.

There was a knock at the door. Tess stood at the top of the stairs and listened as Aunt Deirdre answered it. She hoped that it wouldn’t be Kevin. Not yet.

But it was. Tess knew it even before he spoke, by the length of the silence while he waited for Aunt Deirdre to say that she had been expecting him. When, instead, she said, ‘Well? What can I do for you?’ Tess heard him stammer into life.

‘Oh … Oh, well … em … I was wondering …’

‘What were you wondering?’

Tess cringed. She knew she ought to try to rescue the situation and she was on the point of going down when Uncle Maurice came around the side of the house and took over the proceedings from his wife.

‘What’s going on?’

There was no way, now, that Tess could help. She closed her eyes and crossed her fingers.

But Kevin was thinking on his feet. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘whether you might be having a problem with rats? There’s a lot of them about this year.’

‘Are you from Pestokill?’ said Uncle Maurice.

‘No. I work for myself.’

‘Oh yeah? And whose rats have you got rid of so far?’

‘Oh, loads,’ said Kevin, vaguely. ‘Mostly in Dublin. I thought I might be more use down the country.’

There was a silence and Tess could imagine Uncle Maurice examining Kevin, weighing him up.

‘Where’s your gear, then?’ he asked.

‘On my bike.’

There was another long silence, and Tess felt she could almost hear her uncle’s mind, calculating away. She knew what the next question would be before it came.

‘How much?’

Kevin didn’t hesitate. He had already discussed it with Tess over the phone. ‘A hundred quid. Results guaranteed.’

There was another silence from Uncle Maurice, but it was shorter this time.

‘How long will it take?’

‘Not long,’ said Kevin. ‘I have a special technique. If you take me on, you’ll have no rats here tonight.’

‘And how will I know if they’re gone?’ he asked.

‘How do you know you’ve got them?’

‘Hmm,’ said Uncle Maurice. ‘Smart, aren’t you? I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a chance, all right? No money up front, though. I’m not thick. But if all the rats are gone from the house and buildings by this time tomorrow, you’ll have your hundred quid. How does that sound?’

‘Sounds fine,’ said Kevin. ‘I’ll start now, if that’s all right with you?’

‘Fine by me. What do you need?’

‘Just for you to put the dogs away. I’ll do the rest.’

Tess turned back to the window and watched as Kevin scrunched across the gravel to where his bike was leaning against the wall. She noticed that the white cat had appeared again and was sitting on a low branch of the apple tree beside the feed-shed.

Kevin began to rummage in a small, dingy rucksack. At the corner of the house Colm, still clutching the sod of turf, stood staring at him, open-mouthed. Kevin winked at him and pulled out the thing he had been looking for. It was a small tin whistle.

Up at the window, Tess cringed. That was going too far. If this didn’t work, Kevin was going to look like a complete idiot. For a moment she was glad that she hadn’t acknowledged him. Below her, Uncle Maurice said to Aunt Deirdre, ‘Pure nutcase.’ Beside her, Orla was staring, wide-eyed.

‘Who is he?’ she said. ‘What is he going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tess. But the next moment, Kevin demonstrated. He began to play the whistle, fairly tunelessly, and at the same time he began to call.

The part of Tess’s mind that was and would always be rat tuned in instantly to the powerfully projected images; images that no ordinary human mind could receive. She was reminded that before Kevin reached the age of fifteen and lost the ability to Switch, he had spent more of his time being a rat than being a human being. His mastery of their visual language was total; far better than hers, and the messages he was sending were compelling.

‘Out, out!’ is what he was saying. ‘Men coming with poisons, gases, traps. Rats dying in this place, rats dying in pain. Usguys leaving this place, huh? Huh? All of usguys leaving.’

Colm began to dance, clumsy in his Wellingtons, curly locks flopping over his eyes. A moment later, though Tess had not noticed she was gone, Orla appeared beside him and began to dance as well. Infected by their enthusiasm, Kevin started to hop and skip, and Tess was sure that his playing became better; even tuneful. But she didn’t listen to it for long. Beneath its cheerful tootling the more serious communication was continuing.

‘Rats waking up, quick, quick! Rats coming out into the daylight, escaping deadly danger behind, yup, yup.’

Tess could hear her aunt and uncle snickering downstairs inside the front door, but a moment later they went deadly quiet.

Because it was working. Sleepily, shaking themselves awake, the rats were beginning to emerge. They crawled out of the subterranean world beneath the farm, and appeared by ones and by twos in the yard. They scrambled and slithered their way down through the walls of the house, making so much noise that for an awful moment it seemed to Tess that the house was falling down around her. They surfaced from the drains in lengthening columns until suddenly the yard was flooding with rats, all blinking in the bright daylight and making their way towards the source of the urgent message.

Orla and Colm pointed and squealed in excitement, but they seemed unafraid and didn’t stop dancing. Their views on rats, however, were clearly not shared by their parents. There was a blood-curdling shriek from the hall below as Aunt Deirdre realised what was happening, and a moment later, Uncle Maurice was striding across the yard, waving his arms around and making loud shooing noises. He swept Orla up under one arm and Colm under the other and carried them over to the oil tank, where Brian was already set up, enjoying a grandstand view of the action. Colm wriggled and kicked so hard that he lost one of his precious Wellingtons, but once he was parked up on the tank beside his brother and sister, he soon forgot about it.

For now Kevin had begun to move off; still playing his strident and unmusical trills, still repeating his urgent warnings in Rat, but adding now a bit of more encouraging information.

‘New homes, happy rats. Green woods, rats rolling in hazelnuts, fat and healthy.’

In the shed where they were locked, Bran and Sceolan howled and scratched and rattled the door. From his perch on the apple tree the white cat watched intently as the rats flowed along the ground behind Kevin like the train of a royal robe. Now that they were fully awake they were more organised, though still extremely perplexed. Kevin stopped for a moment to get his bearings, trying to remember Tess’s description of the crag from their conversation on the telephone. As soon as he saw it he recognised it, and took the most direct route towards it; straight over the wall and into the first of the meadows. The rats surged over behind him like a single, slithering creature, and then they were gone, leaving the yard empty except for Colm’s fallen boot.

The three children had jumped down from the tank and were heading off in pursuit when Uncle Maurice intercepted them at the wall.

‘It’s dangerous,’ he said. ‘Them rats could get nasty.’

So they clambered back up on to the tank and watched as the boy from nowhere receded towards the grey hills, dragging a strange brown carpet behind him. Not until he had disappeared beyond the furthest wall of the farm did they come down, and look around, and find to their amazement that life was exactly as it had been before he came.

Tess was in the kitchen garden, helping her aunt with some weeding when Kevin came back to collect his bike and his gear. He waved across and held out his arms in a questioning shrug.

She communicated with him in Rat so that no one else would know what she said. ‘Morning, huh?’

‘Morning, yup, yup,’ Kevin returned. ‘Tent in the trees, near the road, near the hump-backed bridge. Us two drinking tea together.’

Aunt Deirdre was looking at Tess in a quizzical manner.

‘That boy’s back,’ said Tess.

‘So I see,’ said her aunt.

They both looked across at him again and, without her aunt seeing, Tess winked.

‘Maybe it was something he had on him in the way of a smell or some such,’ said Uncle Maurice over dinner that evening. Since Kevin’s visit he had been in great humour, and if he remembered the incident with the wild goats, he did not mention it.

‘I think it was that whistle,’ said Aunt Deirdre. ‘You know the way there are some notes only dogs can hear. Maybe it’s the same with rats.’

‘Could be, I suppose,’ said Uncle Maurice. ‘Where is he from, would you say? Do you think he’s a traveller?’

Aunt Deirdre had no opinion and the conversation ended. Tess looked around at her cousins. Beside her, Colm was putting his dinner away with no fuss or mess, taking the business of eating extremely seriously, as usual. Opposite, Brian was engaged in his daily ritual of hide-the-vegetables; a wasted effort, since soon his mother would notice and begin the daily ritual of eat-the-vegetables. Beside him Orla, the special child, the sickly one, could get away with eating or not eating, whatever she chose. What she was doing with her food, however, was of no interest to Tess. Orla’s face was lit up with an inner light; she wore an expression of almost saintly bliss. Tess looked away before her cousin could catch her eye. She understood Orla’s feelings but they made her uncomfortable nonetheless. For Orla, without doubt, saw Kevin’s removal of the rats as a demonstration of magic; further proof that there was truth in fairy tales. And Tess had no way of letting her know the plain and simple truth.

T
HAT NIGHT, TESS TOOK
on rat form again and slid down through the walls of the house as she had done before. But unlike the previous night, the house was empty and silent. In the sitting-room a crumpled crisp packet smelt of heaven to her rat nose, but no one was there trying to get inside it. A few peanuts, dropped during the midnight movie, lay on the carpet beside the couch, untouched.

The kitchen was the same; empty and quiet. A new bar of soap sat beside the washing-up liquid on the draining board. Beneath the table half a dozen small cubes of cheese lay scattered on the floor, arousing a ferocious hunger in Tess’s rat body and a strong sense of suspicion in her mind. There was something just a bit too neat about those blocks, as though they had been dropped there on purpose. What better test, after all, if her aunt and uncle wanted to find out whether or not there were any rats still around? So Tess denied her hunger and backed off, slipping underneath the sink and down through the floor into the drains. A moment later she was outside and testing the night air with her nose and her ears and her whiskers.

There was no sign of the cat, and the dogs were safely locked away. Tess scuttled along the wall of the house, then crossed the moonlit yard to the buildings. In the feed-shed, the smell of the dairy nuts threatened to unhinge her. It was almost more than she could do to deny herself, and she might have Switched to avoid the temptation if she hadn’t encountered something unexpected. In the corner of the shed, close to the feed-bins, a single rat was snuffling around short-sightedly. Tess recognised him immediately as the old, one-toothed lad she had seen in the sitting-room the night before, having trouble with the fruit gums. Clearly he had missed Kevin’s call; maybe because he was old and image-blind, maybe because his sleep was just too deep.

When he caught sight of Tess, the old rat jumped, then ran forward delightedly to greet her.

‘Every place empty, huh?’ he said. ‘House empty, yard empty, heaps of food and no one eating it.’

‘Yup, yup,’ said Tess. ‘Rats gone, rats in new home in the woods.’

The old gentleman twitched his whiskers and sniffed the air.

‘Rats gone, huh? Us two all alone, huh?’

Tess’s heart lurched. She didn’t know how to answer. For it wouldn’t be the two of them staying behind but just him, abandoned and bewildered, completely alone for what remained of his life. It was too sad to think about, so instead Tess got busy, collecting the broken nuts that the broom had missed that morning and heaping them in a dark corner where her old friend could eat in peace. It was almost more than her rat mind could bear, to gather food and not permit herself to eat it, but it was vitally important that the old gent didn’t go chewing at bags or leaving any other sign that he had been there. She had to pull out all the stops.

When at last she had gathered all she could, she left her friend chewing away in quiet contentment, and slipped out under the door into the yard. Back in the house she became human again and, still in the grip of rat hunger, did a thorough job of raiding the fridge.

Tess dreamt the dream again; the one in which Kevin was a rat. She woke in terror and sat up in bed. It was already light and the birds were singing their loudest and most delighted songs, which they only did on bright, clear days. Tess sat up and looked out of the window, trying to shake off the fear which still gripped her heart. Everything out there was normal and safe. And she had a plan of some sort; some reason to get up.

When she remembered, enthusiasm rushed in and washed away the sense of dread. She had arranged to meet Kevin. Wasting no time, she slipped out of bed and gathered her clothes. It seemed that Orla really was asleep. But as Tess looked down at her in the bed, she saw something that brought the fear straight back. On top of the covers and wedged against the wall was a book which, presumably, Orla had been reading the night before. The title was
The Old Gods: Story or History?
Beneath the title was a picture of a man, or something like a man, with antlers on his head. Tess turned away, but curiosity compelled her to turn back. The picture was just like the shadowy form that she had seen drifting through the woods the first time she had been there. She had assumed that she was imagining things, but if so, it was clear that she was not the only person who had imagined the same image. Why? Was it possible that such a being really did exist? With a shudder Tess tore her eyes away from it and crept out of the room.