The Plague Dogs (39 page)

It's like blinding her, thought Snitter angrily. The dirty brutes! He went on quickly, "It's just that I've never met a bitch quite like you before. Let me have a sn—I mean, let me have a look. Why, my goodness, they've starved you as well, haven't they? Or is it with living out here? Haven't you been able to find any food?"

Still the bitch made no reply. She was, indeed, dreadfully thin. Each staring rib showed along her sides, and her eyes were sunk so deep in her head that they seemed almost to be looking out of a skull.

"Come on, my dear," said Snitter, "what's up? I dare say you're thinking I can't help you or be any good to you, but it's no use just saying nothing, now you've led me all the way up here. What's the trouble—apart from everything, I mean?" Suddenly faint, he lurched where he stood, and lay down on the moss. When the humming in his head had cleared he heard the other saying, "—my master, so I stayed."

"Oh, you had a master?" answered Snitter. "So did I, once, but Rowf—that's my friend—he never had one, you know. I'm not sure he's not better off in the long run."

Stiffly, as though with difficulty, the bitch began to walk away. "So will you come? Perhaps—"

Quite apart from her fearful thinness, there was something so eerie about her whole manner and appearance that Snitter was once more seized with misgiving. "Come—where?"

"My master, I said—my master! Weren't you listening?"

"Your master? Why, where is he? Not here, surely?"

"I told you!" The stranger sounded less angry than desperate. "I'm very sorry," answered Snitter humbly. "I'm not altogether right in the head, you know, and I've got one of my dizzy spells coming on.

They maimed me almost as badly as you, I'm afraid. Tell me again and I'll get hold of it this time."

"My master's hurt."

"And he's out here?"

"Over on the other side of the water. We were walking along the top when he slipped and fell. I went down after him, but he was hurt. He can't move."

"Oh, my life," said Snitter, "that's bad! But couldn't he shout or wave or something? Men quite often walk along the top—-the tod said so. Besides, I've been up there myself and it's littered with bags and packets. There must be people who'd come down and help—"

Without answering the bitch jumped awkwardly across the beck in the yellowing moonlight.

' She's not very polite,'' thought Snitter. ''Still, I can't honestly say that this is much of a place for manners, or that I'm a very deserving case either, come to that. She told me about her master and evidently I didn't hear most of it. If only my head weren't as full of holes as a tomtit's nutbag! How on earth can I help her?'

Then the idea occurred to him: ''I could take a message. I suppose she's too stupid to do that herself. At least, she may not be stupid but she seems very much confused arid—well, sort of dazed.

But if I go, the men down in the valley will— Helvebyn and Red Tarn oh dear, oh dear! Well, I'd better go and see this master of hers first, anyway.'

He overtook the bitch and they ran on together, across the bog and round the lower, eastern end of the tarn. Once round, she left the shore and, going faster now, covered the short distance to the boulders and stones about the foot of Striding Edge. Here they came into deep shadow—almost darkness—and Snitter stopped to accustom his eyes.

He peered up at the abrupt and perilous rocks above.

' My dam!'' he said to himself. ''Did her master fall from there? He must be badly hurt! And this poor fool's been hanging round when he must have wanted her to do anything but that. But why couldn't he shout? I suppose it only happened this afternoon, and there's been no one along the top. He must be starved with the cold. Oh—I never thought! If I can help him, perhaps he might take me—me and Rowf—take us back to his home when he's better!''

"I say! D'you think your master—"

He stopped. In the near-darkness, the bitch was gazing at him with so sombre, so wan and foreboding a look that instinctively he shrank away from her. There was not a sound all around them.

At last he said timidly, "I'm sorry. I only meant—I—where is your poor master?"

She led the way round a crag standing a few yards out from the foot of a great, over-hanging face. Snitter followed her, his pads rattling lightly over the loose stones, and at once saw the dark shape of a man lying face down beside a patch of bog myrtle. He went up to it and pressed his muzzle against the shoulder.

The clothes were sodden, cold as the stones, rotten through and through. But more dreadful still, they were void, without firm content and yielding as an old, empty sack. Despite the horror that gripped him, Snitter pushed harder, desperate to give the lie to his fear, to prove himself wrong by encountering the resistance of the flesh-and-blood shoulder beneath the coat. The cloth, breaking open in a long rent, revealed the sharp, grey edge of a protruding bone. At the same moment the hat, jammed awry along the side of the head, fell off to disclose the dome of a skull, streaked with wisps of hair still adhering to the yellow skin of the scalp. One black eye socket stared up at Snitter and clenched teeth grinned in a stilled grimace. There was not the least smell of carrion. He saw, at a little distance, the scattered bones of one hand lying separately—no doubt where they had been dragged and dropped by the ripping, tussling buzzards.

Shaking, salivating, urinating with shock and fear, Snitter ran out from among the rocks.

"She's more mad than I am—she doesn't know! She's gone crazy and she doesn't know! Oh, how dreadful—I shall have to tell her!

What will she do! How can she not know? That man must have been dead three months."

He limped tremblingly back to the terrier, who had not moved and did not look up from the body as he approached.

"Your master—your master's dead! He's dead!"

The brown terrier, where it sat on the stones, raised its head. And now, as Snitter realised with a terrible certainty, there was no question either of his own madness or of his own eyesight. He was seeing what was there to be seen. The bitch, open-jawed, emaciated, glimmered faintly in the dark, turning upon him blank eyes that contained no speculation, that neither blinked nor followed his movement as he cowered away from her. The tongue was black and dried, the teeth decayed almost to the gums. It answered not a word. It could not, since, as now he perceived, it possessed no life, no substance but that which might be attributed to it by some unsuspecting creature who had not yet seen it for what it was; a phantom, a nothing, a dried, empty husk of old grief suffered long ago.

Snitter turned to fly; and in so doing saw, plain in the moonlight beyond the shadow of the precipice, the figure of a man, hunched in an old overcoat and carrying a stick, striding away towards the tarn. He raced after it but then, terrified that the horror behind might be following; looked back.

Both dog and body had disappeared. So, when he turned again towards the tarn, had the figure in the moonlight. He was alone.

Ten minutes later Rowf, who had made his way by scent up the beck, carrying an entire leg of lamb with a fair amount of lean and gristle left on it, found Snitter wandering on the shore, crying like a dog at the mercy of devils. Twice during their return he seemed to lose his wits altogether, plunging in frenzy into the stream, first in terror of a blundering sheep and then of the glitter of a streak of limestone quartz in the moon. But when at last, back in the shelter of the ruined flue, he had pushed, like a puppy, deep under Rowf's side, he returned almost at once into a sleep even deeper than that in which his friend had left him upon setting out at nightfall. Friday the 19th November Mr. Basil Forbes, M. P., the Parliamentary Secretary, was a pleasant enough young man and, even if regarded with a degree of amusement by the higher civil servants on account of being something of an intellectual lightweight, was, on the whole, reasonably well liked in the Department. He had the advantage of a prepossessing appearance and, despite the reputation for imprudence which had earned him his nickname of Errol the Peril, was nevertheless free from the higher lunacies (such as a conviction that he was a godsent political genius, or a tendency to resent the activities of other Departments and instruct his civil servants to have rows with them) and above all, was well-mannered and open to persuasion. In a word, there were plenty of worse people that a civil servant might have to civilly serve.

On a chilly morning of London soot-shine and grime-gleam, sun-sift, cloud-strain and light-rack, he greeted affably the Under Secretary and the Assistant Secretary as they were shown in by his personal assistant. He switched on the lights in the tropical fish tank, ordered lukewarm coffee all round and graciously treated them to fully five minutes' small talk. At length the Under Secretary, glancing surreptitiously at his watch, contrived to mention the Lake District.

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Forbes, as though tearing himself with reluctance from the pleasures of civilised conversation, "the Lake District; and these frightful-frightful dogs. What d'you think we're going to have to do about these dogs, Maurice?"

"Well, Parliamentary Secretary, I think by all sensible standards it's really a non-problem—"

"But none the less a shade awkward, eh?"

"None the less awkward indeed—politically speaking. Still, at least there's no actual health risk to the public—"

"That's certain, is it?"

"Absolutely, Parliamentary Secretary," said the Assistant Secretary, opening fire from the left flank. "The dogs were never in contact with the bubonic plague laboratory at all."

"Then why can't we say so?"

"We think you can and should," said the Under Secretary, "but we'd like to confirm that a little later, when Michael here's been and had a look at the place. The newspapers can get it all wrong, of course. No one's going to mind that in the least; but we mustn't get anything wrong—even if no one notices."

"Ah right," said Mr. Forbes. "So there's no public health risk and we can say so and the papers'll have to go away and invent something else. But now, what about the by-products—secondary nuisance value and all that? You know next Thursday's a Supply Day and the Opposition have chosen to debate expenditure on Research Establishments. "

"Yes, we shall be briefing you, Parliamentary Secretary. Bugwash will probably start by resurrecting the matter of the planning permission for Lawson Park, then allege extravagance in the Government's implementation of the recommendations of the Sablon Committee, and proceed thence to allegations of mismanagement on the grounds that the dogs were allowed to escape, and that once they had escaped nothing was done."

"That'll be about the size of it, I expect, and normally it wouldn't be hard to answer. But I must confess, Maurice, that there's one aspect of it I don't terribly like, and I hope you're going to be able to tell me the answer. At the moment it can be made to look as though we thought we had something to hide—in fact, as though we'd been trying to hide everything we could, and very unsuccessfully at that."

"I know," replied the Under Secretary, nodding sagely to indicate that he, no less than the Parliamentary Secretary, had realised, as soon as the case got up to his level, the deplorable lack of perspicacity shown by their undertakings.

"I mean," went on Mr. Forbes, smiling matily up from the papers on the table, "first these dogs get out, you know. All right, so that could happen to anyone. But then, ; when they find the dogs are gone, the boffins decide to say nothing to anyone; and they go on saying nothing to I anyone even when they know the dogs are killing sheep and prowling about in a national park like a couple of jackals. Surely that was damn silly, Michael, wasn't it?"

"It certainly looks that way now, Parliamentary Secretary, but it's only fair to these chaps to point out that at I the time there was a certain amount to be said in favour of silence. It was a hundred to one chance against all this trouble brewing up. It was much more likely that the dogs would get themselves shot or that the whole thing would. evaporate in some way or other."

"Well, maybe," said the Parliamentary Secretary, glancing momentarily across at the tropical fish. "But what about the next piece of misjudgement? The station finally put out a statement to the effect that two dogs escaped; and this coincides spot-on with the Orator's published allegation that those dogs had been in contact with bubonic plague. Thereupon the station go silent again and don't deny it, so that it looks as though they deliberately. omitted it from their original statement.''

[' What's the an-"]

' That the allegation's too ludicrous to merit either mention or denial."

"H'm. All gone off at half-cock, rather, hasn't it?" [mused] the Parliamentary Secretary. "What's worrying me. is why we ourselves—the Department—didn't weigh in earlier. Why didn't the station tell us at once what had happened? Why did they go and put out a statement of their own before giving us any chance to see it? And why didn't we stamp on this plague nonsense earlier, and talk to Min. of Ag.

about placating the local farmers? Those are the sort of things the Secretary of State's going want to know."

Looking up, the Assistant Secretary again met the in-snt gaze of the Under Secretary. He waited for him to speak—it being now, of course, the moment for the captain of the team to weigh in on behalf of his subordinate. The Under Secretary, with an air of joining Mr. Forbes in waiting for a reply, continued to gaze and say nothing. A silence fell. Stupefied, incredulous, the Assistant Secretary groped for words. Floundering as though in deep water, he felt fixed upon him the eyes of one who might, if he chose, pull him out. Mr. Forbes waited courteously. The Assistant Secretary saw the Under Secretary look down at the table, draw lines and squares on a pad of paper and then once more raise his eyes attentively.

"Is there an agreed liaison drill?" asked Mr. Forbes, by way of kindly stimulus.

"We're—er—in the process of setting one up, sir."

"Well—well—it all seems just a little bit unfortunate, Michael," said Mr.