The Plague Dogs (4 page)

This ancient saw was, at any rate, certainly true this evening as far as number four-two-seven, a mongrel cairn, was concerned, for Tyson found him dead in his kennel. Four-two-seven had been one of three dogs taking part in an experiment commissioned by a firm of aerosol manufacturers, who were trying to develop a spray harmless to dogs but lethal to their fleas and other parasites. It had been obvious for some days past that the particular preparation at present being tested, known as Formula KG2, had the undesirable property of penetrating the skin, with adverse effects on dogs' health, but the firm's laboratory, though informed of this, had been reluctant to accept the finding, particularly since the directors were afraid that certain of their competitors might be successful in introducing a rival product to the market ahead of them. Dr. Boycott had decided that the simplest retort to their time-wasting pertinacity would be to continue the applications to their foreseeable conclusion, and accordingly four-two-seven had been duly sprayed again on the previous day. He had certainly settled the hash of Formula KG2 and its obstinate protagonists, and had released not only himself, but also valuable working time for the station's staff to devote to more profitable pursuits. Tyson, remarking

"Ee, th'art poor lyle boogger," removed four-two-seven's body to the cold slab cupboard for examination by Mr. Powell in the morning and returned his food packet to the pail unopened. Before knocking off, he would be obliged to carry it back to the ration issuer and get it struck off his list—a further troublesome delay before he could be done. He now believed himself to have only three packets left, and was so near the end of his evening chores that he actually began to whistle "The Quartermaster's Stores" through his teeth (and without removing his pipe) as he picked them up. These packets he had deliberately left until last. Each was wrapped in bright yellow paper marked with a black skull and cross bones, to indicate that the food within contained a poison, infection or virus capable of harming human beings. The contents of these he emptied, one by one, carefully and entirely, into the specially lidded, non-spill feeding-bowls of the eager recipients, took the wrappers outside to the incinerator and made sure they burned, washed his hands under the tap with carbolic soap; and then and only then noticed a fourth, not-yellow packet lying in shadow on the floor. This, held up to the light, proved to be marked 732. He had overlooked it. Tyson felt irritated. The oversight was of no importance, but he was as close to being in a hurry as was possible for one of his temperament and besides, he did not like seven-three-two, which had more than once tried to attack him. He had in fact suggested that it ought to be chained to its kennel, but the matter had been forgotten by the staff member he had spoken to (who did not, of course, have to enter the dogs' pens and in any case had no direct concern with seven-three-two) and no chain had as yet been supplied.

"Ah'm noan gettin' chain mesen, tha knaws," Tyson had said on the second occasion when he mentioned it; "any rooad, sooner they drown you bluidy thing t' better." And thereafter he had simply carried a stout stick whenever he had to enter seven-three-two's pen. Now, however, he could not be bothered to go and fetch the stick from over by the tap. Picking up the packet, he placed it flat on his hand, unwrapped it, strode down the cage-line to the far end, opened the pen door, and had just tossed the whole thing inside when a voice from outside called, "'Arry?" Tyson raised his head. "Ay?"

"Didst tha say tha wanted lift inf Coniston? Ah'm joost off."

"Ay, aw reet." He stepped back from the pen, turned and came to the side door of the block, wiping his hands on his trousers. "Packet 'ere t'and back in—dog were dead. Else for that Ah'm doon."

"Coom on then, owd lad. I'll roon thee round by issuer's place, and then we're off."

The voices receded, and then the sound of the car engine. The returning silence gleamed gently with noises, as a night sky with stars. A drop of water fell from the tap. An owl hooted once—twice, in the oak copse five hundred yards away. The clanging thud of a body against the side of a pen was followed by diminishing vibrations of the not-quite-taut wire. Straw rustled. A mouse scuttered along the concrete, in and out of the drainage gully, pausing and listening. The wind had veered into the west and there was a distant rustle of fine rain blowing in from the Irish Sea. The sick retriever, his food untouched, muttered and stirred in his sleep.

Snitter, alert and continually moving his head under its canvas cap, could discern other, still slighter sounds—the trickling of the beck, a larch cone falling branch by branch to the ground, movements in the fern and roosting birds stirring on their boughs. After some time the rising moon began to shine through the glass of the eastern hoppers, its beams slanting first upwards to the exposed kingpost roof trusses and then, as they moved transversely downwards and across, falling at length upon the nearer pens. An Alsatian began to bay the moon. Perhaps it felt it had rather be a Roman and contaminate its paws with base bribes, than such a dog. Snitter, becoming more restless, began padding up and down his pen, agile and watchful as a trout in a pool. Intuitively, he had become aware of something out of the ordinary, something commonplace but full of import, some small alteration to the familiar as slight but disturbing as the discovery of a stranger's urine against one's own garden fence.

But what exactly could it be? As the first beams of moonlight touched his pen he stood on his hind legs, resting his paws on the wire separating him from Rowf. Suddenly he tensed, staring and sniffing, and so remained for perhaps thirty or forty heartbeats; but nostrils, ears and eyes all continued to affirm nothing but what they had originally conveyed. First, he had perceived that the source of the tobacco smell left by Tyson's fingers—that is to say, the door of Rowf's pen—was in slight but unmistakable movement—stealing and giving odour, as it were. Next, his ears had caught the well-nigh inaudible, higher-than-bat's-pitch squeaking of the concentric hinges as they pivoted a quarter of an inch back and forth in the draught. Lastly, he had made out the moonlight moving on the wire as it might on a spider's web—a kind of irregular, minute sliding back and forth limited by the frail force of the draught that was causing the door itself to oscillate.

Snifter dropped on all fours and, after a pause to smell and listen specifically for any signs of human proximity outside the block, began scrabbling at the length of loose wire between the two pens.

Soon he had pushed it high enough to get his head underneath. Points protruding from the border of the mesh pricked his shoulders and then his back, piercing here and there; but he ignored them, continuing to whine and go round and round with his head in the hole like a gimlet. Finally he succeeded in forcing his way through into Rowf's pen with nothing worse to show than a thin but fairly deep scratch across his rump. Once inside, he pattered quickly across to the kennel.

"Rowf! Rowf, come back! The tobacco man's left my head open! Let me explain—" The next moment he was knocked flying as Rowf bounded out of the kennel and leapt towards the pen door. His jaws snapped at the wire, biting and worrying, and the catch which Tyson, when interrupted by his friend, had omitted to fasten properly, clicked open off the jamb. After a few moments Rowf fell back, blinking and staring like a dog awakened from a bad dream. "What?" said Rowf. "The tobacco man?

Not the white-coats—it can't be the whitecoats—it's still dark, isn't it? It's not time for the tank yet! I'll fight—I'll tear them—" He stopped and looked at Snitter in surprise. "What are you doing here, Snitter?"

"Heave-ho, the loose wire. You know, there was an old lady two gardens away who had a trap-hole made for her cats at night. In and out they went, in and out; but if ever they came into my garden, what-ho!"

"You're bleeding!"

"Rowf, the moonlight, the door, I've come to tell you, it's come loose on my head. The tobacco man forgot that it's not. How can I explain? The door's not a wall any morel Oh, my head aches!"

Snitter sat on his haunches and began scratching and grabbing with one paw at the canvas cap, which remained, as it was intended to, resistant to his claws. In the moonlight Rowf looked at him grimly, but said nothing.

"My head!" muttered Snitter. "The tobacco man lit it with his matches. Can you smell it burning?"

"When did he?"

"I was asleep. The whitecoats put me on a glass table and I went to sleep. How the flies go round today! It's so hot, even in the garden. I think I'll go to sleep. If the lorry comes, Rowf—" He yawned and lay down on the floor. Rowf got up and began to sniff at Snitter and lick his face. The effect was apparently something like that of smelling salts, the odour of his friend recalling Snitter to reality.

"The wire swing!" said Snitter, sitting up suddenly. "The door, Rowf! That's why I came! The door of your pen's unfastened!"

The Alsatian had stopped howling and for some moments the only sound in the block was a sudden dripping from the tap, plangent on the convex edge of the overturned bucket beneath it. "We can go through it, Rowf!"

"What for?"

"Rowf, we might be able to get out of here!"

"They'd only bring us back. Dogs are supposed to do what men want—I've never had a master, but I know that."

"The suffering, Rowf, the misery you've endured—"

"As dogs we're born to suffering. It's a bad world for animals—"

"Rowf, you owe them nothing—nothing—they're not masters—"

"Canine nature—the whole duty of Dog—"

"Oh shit in the sky, give me patience!" cried Snitter in agony. "There's a dog with a red-hot nose sniffing me over! The lorry's coming, the lorry's coming!" He staggered, and fell on the straw, but picked himself up at once. "Rowf, we're going to escape! Both of us—through that door—"

"There might be something worse through the door," said Rowf, peering into the dismal confines of the concrete huts close surrounding them.

Snitter's jaws worked convulsively as with an effort he converted and brought his mutilated mind in frame.

"Rowf, the water—the metal water! What could be worse than the metal water? Hours and hours of struggling in the metal water, Rowf, and in the end they'll drown you! Think of the whitecoats, Rowf—what you told me—peering down into the tank and watching you. They aren't masters, believe me; I've had a master—I know. If we could only get out of here we might find a master—who can tell?

—a proper pack leader. Isn't it worth a try?"

Rowf stood tense and hesitant in the straw. Suddenly, from somewhere up the fell outside, there came the faintest sound of rocky splashing as a yow, or Lakeland sheep, scrambled its way across a beck. Rowf gave a short, snapping bark and pushed his way through the door. Snitter followed and together, in silence save for their clicking claws, they trotted quickly down the line of pens to the, swing doors separating the canine shed from the next. It took Snitter some time to get the hang of the doors. They were light; indeed, they were portable, constructed of thick asbestos sheets on white-painted wooden frames, for Lord Plynlimmon had thought fit, when designing the block, to provide for flexibility in the subdivisioning by enabling the various sheds to be made larger or smaller at need; and accordingly not only the doors but also the pre-constructed modules of the party walls were capable (with a little trouble) of being removed and re-fixed further up or down the building, to increase or diminish the various floor areas. The doors, however, were fitted with fairly strong return springs, of the kind that cause such doors to jump back and hit smartly on the knee or in the face a man following another who is not particularly heedful or considerate.

Rowf hurled himself at the right-hand door, which swung open about six inches, and then, the spring coming into its own, threw him back across the concrete floor. Growling, he went for it again, harder this time and higher up. Once more it gave and, as he dropped to the ground with his head through the narrow opening, closed upon his neck like a trap, pinning him between the two forward edges. He struggled back in silence and was about to try to seize the frame in his teeth when Snitter stopped him.

"It's not alive, Rowf! It's—it's—you scratch it to be let in; but there isn't a man on the other side, you see—"

"There's some creature on the other side pushing it back! We'll have to kill it—or chase it away, somehow—but I can't get at it."

"Wait, wait. Let's have a smell round."

Snitter pressed his wet nose to the narrow, vertical chink between the two doors. The draught coming through bore smells, certainly, but nothing more alarming than birds' droppings, feathers, grain and bran—all strong and at close quarters. He could hear, too, no more than a few yards away, the rustling and soft movements of roosting birds.

"Unless it's a creature that has no smell, Rowf, there's nothing but birds in there."

A sudden, high-pitched yapping sounded from behind them. Snitter turned to see the occupant of the nearest pen, a cross-bred Pekinese, standing wide awake in a patch of moonlight and looking at them with obvious surprise. He went quickly across to the wire.

"Don't make a row, Flatface," he said. "You might bring the tobacco man back here."

"What are you doing?" asked the Pekinese, nose pressed against the wire. "Why are you loose?

What's that on your head? It smells of that stuff the whitecoats put over everything."

"It's to keep the frost out," answered Snitter. "My head's a bird-table, you know. The whitecoats cover it with bread every morning and then watch while the birds come and eat it."

"Oh, I see." The Pekinese looked sagacious. "But how do they keep you still?"

"With chicken-wire," said Snitter. "I dote on it, actually. My friend here dotes on it, too. He takes over when I need a rest. We're both bird-tables through and through. Do the whitecoats go through and through? Those doors there, I mean? How do they do it?"

The Pekinese was clearly puzzled. "They made me better," he said. "First they made me ill and then they made me better. I've been ill, you know."