Doofus, Dog of Doom

by Emma Laybourn

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I tried to tell them,” she said to Clive next morning. “But when Dad came back outside with me, Doofus had trampled all over the footprint. Dad thought I’d just imagined it. He said I was suffering from shock and getting over-wrought, and he made me come home.”

  “Never mind,” said Clive. “Even if nobody else saw it, that proves the killer wasn’t Doofus. There must still be a wolf on the loose – a big one. I wish I could find it.”

  “I don’t,” said Holly with a shudder, remembering Joey’s wounds. “And that bit of fur that Lucinda found wasn’t grey.”

  “Wolves aren’t grey all over. They’re sometimes sandy, particularly underneath; and their bite can be quite different to a dog’s. Tell me again what Lucinda said about the DNA,” commanded Clive. “Try and remember the exact words.”

  Holly tried. But she could not remember precisely what the vet had said about the wolves’ DNA, except that it was archaic.

  “Early Upper Paley something,” she said.

  Clive’s eyes gleamed. “Upper Paleolithic. Unbelievable! That means more than twelve thousand years ago. Possibly much longer.”

  “Those wolves can’t have been hiding for twelve thousand years,” objected Holly.

  “Possibly much longer,” repeated Clive, happily. “Could be fifty thousand years. The Paleolithic Age went on for a long time. So I agree, it’s impossible that they’ve just been hiding. Somebody must have bred them specially. Genetic engineering, I expect.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “To see if they could.”

  “And then they let ancient wolves loose on the moors?”

  “Maybe they escaped,” said Clive. “Or maybe it’s some crackpot millionaire genius trying to bring old species back into the countryside.”

  “Do you really think that?”

  “Well, it’s the obvious explanation.”

  It wasn’t obvious to Holly. The obvious explanation was blaring like a beacon, setting off sirens and flashing lights inside her head.

  If they were an ancient type, it was because they were ancient wolves. Doofus was an animal of ancient legend; why shouldn’t the wolves be, too? And now, somehow, they had re-emerged from the past.

  She remembered that cleft where she had fallen underground, and had felt the presence of… whatever it was. The unknown beast for which she had no name, although the memory made her skin rise up in goose-pimples.

  What if the cavern was a passage from somewhere else entirely? Not another place – but from another time? And the wolves had slipped through into the present; and then slipped back again. That would explain why only a couple of their bodies had been found.

  Now the gap had been filled in. Nothing else could come through.

  Holly tried to find comfort in this thought. But she decided not to tell her theory to Clive, because it all sounded far too weird, and he would mock; or worse, fall out with her again.

  Clive had plunged into his shed. Now he emerged waving an antique tape recorder.

  “Bird song!” he said.

  “What about it?

  “For your Nan’s birthday present. A tape of the dawn chorus that she can listen to. Bird song is very soothing.”

  “It’s a nice idea,” said Holly. “I think she’d like that. Is that what’s on the tape?”

  “Not yet. I’ve still got to record it.”

  Holly saw a drawback. “Dawn’s about five o’clock in the morning, Clive.”

  “Four forty-nine. That’s all right,” he said. “I’m being nocturnal tomorrow night: I’m camping out in Ailsa’s barn, up in the loft, to look for bats. I’ll record the birdsong early in the morning.”

  “Oh, you lucky thing! Your mum’s letting you go?”

  “I told her I was going with you,” said Clive. “So you’d better ask your mum.”

  Holly ran inside to ask. She had always wanted to camp in Ailsa’s barn, which had a high, airy loft: a platform reached only by a ladder. But Mum was reluctant, and not just because Holly was still supposed to be grounded.

  “Camping? With a possible wolf on the loose, or at least a nasty dog?” she said.

  “But it’s not really camping,” pleaded Holly. “We’ll be sleeping up on the loft in Ailsa’s barn. You know how high that is. It’s like being upstairs in a house. We’ll be quite safe.”

  Mum looked sceptical. “As long as you don’t fall off,” she said.

  “We won’t. We’ll be careful. And I can’t be grounded all holiday, that’s not fair.” Holly was desperate to get out of the house. She was stir-crazy from going no further than the park; and while she certainly wouldn’t want to go camping in a field just now, the barn was truly as safe as any house from wolves – unless wolves could sneak through barn doors and climb ladders.

  So after a phone call to Ailsa, Mum allowed it, on condition that on no account were they to leave the farmyard overnight.

  “Can we take Doofus?”

  “No,” said Mum decidedly. “Not with all that livestock around. Doofus can stay here.”

  Holly hurried off to plan her packing. By the time she had everything ready the next evening, it felt as it they were going on a major expedition. When they finally set off to Ailsa’s, they needed Matt to walk with them just to help them carry all their stuff.

  Holly had two sleeping bags, because she thought Clive probably wouldn’t have one (she was right); two pillows, a torch and her Dad’s camera, and a rucksack full of spare clothes and food – a flask of tomato soup, cheese, bread rolls, blueberry muffins, bananas and apple juice. Clive, as well as his tape-recorder, had a tin of baked beans and two hard-boiled eggs, wrapped in a blanket.

  The three of them trudged up the road to Ailsa’s farm like beasts of burden. Doofus went with them for the exercise, although Matt kept him on his lead.

  “They’ve gone,” said Clive, looking up towards the hills.

  “Who have?” asked Holly.

  “All the camera crews.” He was right. At least, they weren’t visible. The moors looked wild and empty.

  “They all drove off today,” said Matt. “They went to Manchester, because of that footballer who punched his manager and drove his Lamborghini through a fish and chip shop. Mad footballers make better TV than invisible wolves.”

  He dropped his bundle with a puff at Ailsa’s gate.

  “Don’t you wish you were staying with us?” Holly said.

  “You can,” said Clive. “There’s a spare blanket. And two hard-boiled eggs.”

  “No, thanks,” said Matt, with a mock shudder. Holly thought that just a year ago, he would have said yes. Matt was growing away from her: the fault of baleful Time again.

  “You just want to slob around and play computer games,” she said sadly.

  Matt rolled his eyes. “I just don’t want to sleep on a plank and look for bats,” he retorted.

  At that moment Ailsa came out to meet them, which was probably just as well. While they began to sort out their things, Doofus slipped quietly away to explore the farmyard.

  “Go get him, Matt,” said Holly. Then she sighed and went to get him herself. She held his lead and let him nose around.

  First Doofus nosed around the barn, and then around the little clump of trees that Ailsa called her orchard: old, gnarled trees bearing baby apples the size of cherries. Seeming satisfied with that, he wandered through the farmyard, past the Landrover and trailers and the chicken run, and into the paddock.

  There was nothing in the paddock except a lame sheep. But Doofus became suddenly alert. He began to trot across the grass, nose to ground, as if following a trail. The sheep looked alarmed and limped into a corner. Doofus loped to the opposite corner and started to scramble up the wall.

  “No,” said Holly. “Stop it, Doofus. You can’t.”

  Doofus stopped scrabbling and stared over the wall. Holly could not see anything unusual. Sheep grazed peacefully in a rough pasture lined with trees and dotted with rocks
. The gorse bushes were still in yellow flower, and a rabbit lolloped carelessly amongst them. Behind them reared the bare back of the hill.

  Doofus sniffed the air. She had to tug at his collar to make him turn around. But at least he did not try to pull away, or jump the wall, or run off. He trotted back to the barn and had another sniff around it. He did not seem to be concerned by anything there; so Holly relaxed.

  In one way it would actually be quite nice, she thought, to have a night away from Doofus. She would be too far away to hear him howl. Not that he would howl. But she wouldn’t have to lie awake wondering it he would.

  “See you tomorrow. Have fun,” said Matt, and he led Doofus away. Once Holly and Clive had arranged their things in the loft, they helped Ailsa shoo her chickens into their coops for the night, and then Ailsa cooked them tea: sausages and mash.

  “No, honestly, we’ve got food,” Holly said, but she insisted.

  “Any problems, you just come into the house,” she said. “It won’t be locked. You can use the bathroom any time, of course. I’ll be up at six in any case. Will bacon butties do you in the morning?”

  “Yes, please,” said Clive, grinning. When they got back to the loft he ate most of the bread rolls and soup, and a banana. He was happy.

  The loft in Ailsa’s barn was wider than Holly’s living-room. She thought it might be wider than her whole house. It was a platform built of wooden planks with gaps between them big enough to wedge a finger in, so that you could see through them down to the floor and the piles of sacks and tubs that Ailsa kept below.

  It felt a very long way up, which pleased Holly. Even though much of the loft was stacked with straw bales, there was plenty of room to lay out the sleeping bags and what Clive had left of the food.

  He produced a pack of cards and they played snap and rummy on a straw bale for a while. Then, as dusk began to slowly draw layer on layer of deeper blue across the windows, they climbed carefully down the steep ladder and prowled around the barn, bat-hunting.

  “There’s one!” said Clive. There was a flutter of blackness, a flash of dark. The bats used the high, round windows of the barn to fly in and out. There were more dark flashes. Holly could not track their flight.

  “Why do they squiggle around so much?”

  “Insects,” said Clive. He took dozens of photos with Holly’s Dad’s camera, and Holly got caught up in his eagerness and tried to snap them with her phone, the white flashes vying with the darting blackness of the bats.

  Afterwards, when it was fully dark and they climbed back up the ladder to the loft, they leant against the bales of straw and scrolled through the pictures. Bats flitted at the edges. Half a wing here, a squashed nose there.

  “They’re a bit ugly,” Holly said.

  “That’s definitely a Brown Long-eared,” said Clive with satisfaction. “And I’m sure some of those others are pipistrelles.”

  Holly yawned. “What time do we have to get up for the birdsong?”

  “About four.”

  She set the alarm on her phone, and then crawled into her sleeping bag. An owl hooted in the distance. In the airy dark, she knew by the tiny, reappearing square of light that Clive was still looking through the pictures on the camera.

  It was warm and peaceful. She felt wrapped around not just by her sleeping bag, but by the scent of straw, the high walls of the barn: the night itself.

  She yawned contentedly, and closed her eyes.