by Bill Broun
The pines stopped and they found themselves wandering into a more open and varied oak and birch glade. This was the proper, ancient Wyre, before the great woodlands were turned into hunting chases. Here and there grew huge cherry trees and big-leaf limes. The air felt cooler on their faces, but it was trickier to walk. While many old footpaths traversed the forest, some of them trod for hundreds of years by locals, the two boys somehow managed to avoid them all. But it was growing darker, and Drystan seemed disorientated.
Cuthbert said, “We’re lost.”
“We’re bloody not,” said Drystan.
They were walking down into an enormous, strange furrow, about ten meters by one and another meter deep.
“It’s like a giant’s grave hole,” said Cuthbert, fearfully.
It was filled with yellow primroses and ferns taking off in the bowled moisture at its base. It was an old saw rut from the nadir of the deforestation days; indeed, decades before, brave boys roughly the same age used to crawl below the massive circular blade to clean sawdust out. Just when Cuthbert and his brother emerged from it, Drystan hissed, “Stop! Look!” About fifty meters away through a stand of young oak seedlings was an enormous fallow buck, grazing. The two children froze. The animal’s great rack spread like a huge bone map of anger, an inscape of worlds Cuthbert never knew. After a moment, a retinue of does finally appeared, sniffing carefully, nibbling leaves. The buck stared at Cuthbert with ruthless indifference, and the children were afraid and fascinated.
“Has he got a cob on* or summat?” asked Cuthbert. “’E looks like he wants to get us.”
“No,” said Drystan, shoving the anxious word out of his mouth, his voice trembling. “E’s just like a sort of horse or summat. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not scared,” said Cuthbert. He said then, in a rather serious tone, as if Drystan was supposed to note this for eternity in the scribbled annals of their youth, “This is the best day I’ve ever had.”
When one of the does ran off, it leaped through the forest with a silent but powerful grace and compactness, like a great red-brown stone skipping along a lake of green. The boys remain transfixed until it vanished. The rest of the bevy held in place, still as statues, like eternity broken into dun-colored pieces shaped like deer.
“I loik this Wyre,” said Drystan.
They took a wide circular path around the animals, crossing through painful nettles and holly patches and over several crisscrossed fallen logs. The forest grew very thick with red-berried rowan and silver-barked wild service trees. It slowed them down. Under the forest canopy spread many grotesque, splaying treeforms caused by the intensive coppicing over the centuries by peasants cultivating cordwood. The coppiced monstrosities looked like colossal flower-heads made of spindly sticks.
As they ambled along, Drystan, at one point, stopped moving, apparently paralyzed by fear.
“I stepped on a snake!” he cried to Cuthbert. “I killed it. It’s such bad luck!”
The two boys inspected the snake and buried it, but the incident obviously disturbed Drystan, and he refused to touch it. He wore an expression of real sadness. It was something Cuthbert never forgot—the death of the adder, before the tragedy, how it seemed to crush Drystan and how he couldn’t stop crying until Cuthbert threw a juicy chunk of coal at him.
They had picked up the pace then, and tried to forget the adder. Cuthbert was having fun, whacking hairgrass and ferns down with his condom stick, as if plying a Congolese rain forest.
After a nervous, exhilarating hour, the sunlight was beginning to fade. They started frankly to run; despite Drystan’s brave words, the prospect of getting caught in the Wyre after nightfall scared them. Worse, if too late, they knew there would be trouble once they got back to the cottage. The belt might come out.
As they ran through the Wyre, Drystan seemed more agile, humming to himself as he hopped over rocks and brush piles and lost antlers and the scat of badgers and stoats. “I’m a deer!” He flowed as a boy-sirocco, crunching down branches and grasses, as fast as the footwork of Roy Race on the football pitch, as dangerous as Dan Dare dashing across a Venusian no-man’s-land to do battle with the green Mekon. He was giggling, couldn’t seem to stop.
“It’s funny this—funny, funny, funny,” he cried. “Kill the Mekon, kill the Mekon!” he was yelling.
“Wait!” screamed Cuthbert, breaking into giggles that slowed him down. “Wait for me!” They charged up and up and up a worn-down red-sandstone escarpment, and dolphin-arched over it, and then they crossed to a half-dissolved railroad track that hadn’t been used for a hundred years, and they roved steadily downhill now, their knees wobbly and ticklish and bending so easily. They were laughing their heads off. The trees were centuries old, taller, the ground entirely grown over with vines and maidenhair and bracken of all sizes and shapes, and everything at heights never any less than their knees, and they ran and laughed and ran and laughed and it was as if they were beating a path through a flood of green and fields of glee that would go on into the millennia.
Then, Drystan disappeared.
Cuthbert foot-planted to a stop. He sucked air in great gobs, his tiny lungs heaving, still grinning. He said, “Wha?”
Where was Dryst?
His brother had simply dropped through the floor of the forest. That’s what Cuthbert saw. So overgrown was this section of the forest over the less acidic soils around Dowles Brook, that the tributary—coursing fast and wide and flush with rainwater from heavy recent storms—was completely obscured.
He ran a few steps more, and then Cuthbert was shouting out in pain and terror, smacking and rolling down a precipitous bank into a brook engorged and irate, the water pressing against him like icy stones. Neither city boy could swim. Little Cuddy grabbed at branches and grasses, but they were all too slippy or too slight or they cut into his tender boy-fingers. All at once, water rushed up his nostrils and into his mouth. It was sweet-tasting and cold but thick with flora and bugs.
He was immersed in five feet of freshwater, and he was scarcely four feet high. He tried to stand up, but he slipped and fell back, his arms winging. He could not find up. The water rushed into him in gales, in potent torrents, rotating him. His eyes opened wide. Suddenly, as Cuthbert remembered it years later, he was gazing upon a fluid face, a being of brown and white and green wearing a momentary smile, then anger, a pale hand—or a paw?—reaching toward him, desperately.
“Dryst!”
Was it Drystan, in Dowles Brook with him, drowning, or someone else? The visage let out a tremendous gurgling noise and vanished in the water. Ga go ga maga medu, the creature must have said. Isn’t that what was remembered? Surely, that was it—the being’s underwater code—the very voice of otterspaeke: Ga go ga maga medu.
Cuthbert had breathed deeply at that moment and felt the pain of deathly green-waters entering him—this was it. Drystan gone, and he was drowning, too, and it all felt freezing and it hurt, and darkness everywhere now—then abruptly, a force, some physical force seemed to throw him onto his knees, right-side-up, as if in prayer. Something pulled him out, and it wasn’t Drystan. It was rough and animal and very strong. The boy had been pushed up to his feet by an animal. Or was it by Dryst?
But now his brother was gone. He had reached for Cuthbert, and the younger boy had tried to reach back, and he had failed.
He began coughing the water out, struggling to his feet, falling against the brook’s bank. He was bleeding a bit from his lip. There were pink mallows across his forearms. Fly larvae cases made of sand grains and leaf pieces clung to his clothes like burrs.
“Drystan!”
There was no answer, and Cuthbert began to sob loudly and wetly.
The visible effects of his tumble seemed slight. Up the slick bankside was a provisional path through the hairgrass and broken reedmace where he had rolled down. A trio of white-throated dippers a bit farther downstream kept submerging their heads in and out of the water.
“Drystan!”
Gugga-hurr-gugcaacaa-hurr!
Poor Cuthbert, erstwhile brave boy, believed his elder brother had been spirited away by the Boogles and was being strangled by them. He was beside himself, a six-year-old in a new world of trapdoors through which older brothers could vanish.
He cried and cried for his brother, but he couldn’t see him.
And next, Cuthbert climbed the slippy bank, trying to make it fun, but he felt scared and worried about Drystan. Steaming green liverwort furred up everything, giving all the rocks and logs a coldblooded, snaky feel.
“Don’t cry, Dryst,” said Cuthbert. “I’m coming. I’m all right, you sprog!” This is what he must have said. This is what he needed to think he said—again, for decades to come.
Cuthbert sensed he was lucky—even blessed. Yes, that diamond-dotted, sacred sense—that, too, became a psychic imperative, a way for Cuthbert to face so very many coming years of despair.
When Cuthbert finally emerged from the green tunnel, it was as if he were rising from the floor of the forest.
He waited for Drystan to run up to him, snorting phlegm. A dear boy in forever beauty, forever joy, and forever bluster. But Drystan never came.
“I’m not crying,” Cuthbert wailed. “That was good, that. Was it—” He wiped his arm across his runny nose. “Was it fun, was it? Are you all right, you shitehead?”
He swallowed the lump building in his throat. “I saw one of them Boogles,” he screamed. “I’d bet all the mu-nay in the world on it. It saved me!”
After an hour of waiting, Cuthbert backed away from the brook until he found the disused rail line and followed it to the right, back toward Bewdley. The line’s rails were long gone, but the path was partially marked with orange strips of cloth. It was in the preliminary stages of being turned into the Wyre Walk No. 3 trail by the Forest Commission.
Cuthbert was talking to himself. “It weren’t bad, Drystan. The Boogle, he was more wike an angel from God, but sort of a mardy angel.” He could not comprehend that his brother had drowned, and he kept talking to him. “Is there other things here, other than Boogles? There’s animals, isn’t there? There’s things with no names and all.”
When he approached a curve in the brook, he saw a farmhouse. A couple hundred meters away or so, the rushing Dowles Brook emptied into the Severn. Cuthbert felt great relief and real exhaustion.
That’s when he saw the creature again, the dark liquid swoosh of an animal flying out of the forest. It looked like a hyper little man with a chunky living rudder. It ripped through bracken fronds, low and unseen, but making the bracken wave and jerk like a hundred green pennants. It emerged again and plunged headfirst into the water.
It was a giant, Cuthbert saw, at least a meter long, with a head nearly as big as Drystan’s. Cuthbert knew that face instantly: it was the good Boogle under the water wot saved him. Or was it Drystan, become a kind of giant dark cat?
The creature vanished and a few seconds later popped up on the opposite bank of the brook, where it raced angrily back and forth, glowering at him and yikkering in its odd, squeaky manner. The lush vegetation on the other side of the brook, all blue with bugle and speedwell, seemed like a special effect of the sky itself, lowered down for the otter to try flying upon.
He had not seen or heard anything like it in his short life. He was speechless, and soon Cuthbert ran off, screaming and pure doolally. It was as if all the day’s events had finally rubbed the last trace of West Brom tough away.
Shadows were beginning to take over the Wyre. For ten minutes, he kept calling out and circling around.
“Where are you? Dryst!”
There was no answer. Cuthbert had cried out his loudest cries, and now he was sobbing, and then he began to settle down.
He would have to retrace his steps and bring back help. It would inconvenience the old relations and his mother. His father would kill him. He thought of his mad aunt Millie, petting her white cat, speaking of the King of Night. That seemed a kinder fate than his father’s thin black belt.
He started calling as loud as he could, “Bloody hell, Drystan!”
Cuthbert kept thinking he would find him, in some brambles, gulping for air and shuddering, but West Brom tough and proud. Drystan would hug him and pat his back hard. “Chin up, Cuddy,” Drystan would say to him. “You’re safe now. No blarting now, Cuddy. We’ve got to get back.”
“I saw Satan,” he would tell Drystan. “Or some Head Boogle or something.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
He could hear his brother now. “Of course. How often do you get that? Besides, you said it was more of an angel kind of thing.” Drystan would push his lips out, making a kind of snout the way he did. “Must be a bit of both.”
Cuthbert would smile, his pale cheeks still shiny with tears, and they would go home. And had Drystan not drowned, they would have done just that. They would have gallivanted home with wild yewsticks in their hands and otter scum in their nostrils, and God’s bow in the clouds above the Wyre.
three
two kinds of triangles
CUTHBERT STOOD UP HALFWAY IN THE ZOO SHRUBBERY and leaped forward. The process of getting in had been like being unwound into something; he arrived dragging a spool of wet vines and scratches with him, his head squeezed to a screaming red bolus. He tumbleswivled through the holly, away from the perimeter fence, holding his arms over his face.
He burst into the open now, immaculately inebriated, and poised atop a long, narrow bank where the bushes associated with the zoo’s main fence all ended and a picket of larch trees took over.
“Now that’s a long popple ’round the Wrekin*,” he said, panting for breath.
He looked himself over—a mess, all torn and dirt-rubbed, bleeding underneath his clothes. He was tall and fat and befouled. If grimiest north London possessed an immense, snaking digestive tract, he resembled what it would disgorge. It wasn’t inconspicuous. He slapped a greenish-yellow dirt off his old bio-mesh trousers, which had a tendency to break down in rain, and his even older navy-blue Adidas weather-buffer, whose heat cells had long dried out. He took a few steps through the trees. As he moved away from the fence, an Opticall from the zoo’s own system appeared on his corneas:
The time is now a quarter past 6:00 p.m. The London Zoo will close in 15 minutes. Thank you for visiting us today. Come again soon!
He stopped again. On second thought, he wanted to take off the weather-buffer. It was nearly in shreds anyway, but the air was very cool. With its three white stripes partly ripped off one arm, it could be considered sporty only if the game were called Woe; and more practically, a torn weather-buffer would attract attention. He took the thing off, balled it up, tossed it down, and kicked it against a knot of tree roots. He had a reasonably clean, maroon pullover underneath, which he’d haggled for £12.50 at one of the back alley markets in Holloway Road. Printed on its front was a cityscape skyline and the unfathomable phrase “Manhattan 3000,” which apparently made sense to someone somewhere on earth.
He knew he had to mind himself. If a Watchman inside the zoo observed him swiftly walking away from the zoo fence, he would explain he’d needed to take a slash and couldn’t find the toilets. (His deeply wrinkled, century-old face, unsmoothed by pricey BodyMods, chewed by Flōt addiction, was more of a giveaway of his status than he grasped.) He was sorry, he would say, very sorry to look suspiciously like someone who had just broken into the zoo, ha ha ha ha! Naff, that!
He walked quickly down the rest of the bank, trying to look unruffled, but he was nearly jogging.
He stepped over one of the knee-high rails that ran beside all the footpaths in the zoo. About twenty yards ahead, to his left, was a woman in a glowing-pink nightcape stopped with a glide-pram—oh, a Nandroid, he saw, down from nearby Primrose Hill. The Nandroid—she had huge, soothing violet eyes and creamy-white, skintone-adjustable digital skin—was looking at a small pack of sleeping jackals bunched together in a corner of their pen. The canine pile looked like the discarded fur coat of the god of cyclones. Since they were among the only animals you could spot from outside the zoo in the park, few paying visitors took interest in them.
The Nandroid gazed at Cuthbert and smiled with a quavering pale chin and a cooing sound, but Cuthbert averted his eyes. He couldn’t see the silent baby, swaddled in its ovular glide-pram. He knew that the new aristocracy hired professional Indigent monitors who sat at desks watching dozens of infants through those purple Nandroid eyes, reporting anything suspicious to the Watch. (It was one of the highest-paid jobs an Indigent could get.)
Cuthbert felt uneasily excited. He could hear monkeys whooping, far off, from the other side of the zoo. Their aggrieved Borneo beckoning both charmed and bothered him, and he did not think he should stray far to search them out.
Suddenly the idea of letting any of the animals loose seemed nearly as idiotic to Cuthbert as it would to a normal, well-adjusted citizen. He made an audible whew! sound. “Natty, this is!” he said aloud. The baby began to whimper a bit, and the Nandroid started to rock the pram tenderly and sing, in Welsh. It was a song his own gran used to sing to him and Drystan: “Holl amrantau’r sêr ddywedant, ar hyd y nos,”* and the melody almost made Cuthbert faint with wistfulness.
“A hyd y nos,” Cuthbert sang quietly, with a slight slur. “Oh, Gran.”
The Asiatic lion terraces with their tiered cement hillocks and lily-covered moats were right beside the jackals. He’d seen them only once before, and he was struck now by their tranquillity. Had the lions ever, he wondered, truly ever spoken to him? They were nowhere in sight. The Sumatran tigers, the famous jaguar named Joseph, the black leopard, and all the birds of prey—all silent, too—were just beyond that. For several minutes, he seemed to comprehend that it wasn’t normal or even good to hear animal voices.
