Beasts of New York: A children's book for grown-ups

by Jon Evans

  9. The Bridge

  Patch reached the bridge on the tenth day of his journey across the Kingdom of Madness. He had grown very skilled at surviving in human lands; at navigating along the wire sky-roads, avoiding other animals, finding dark places in which to hide when dangerous shadows or smells appeared in the sky or the air, finding foods in the little patches of greenery or the seed-pods that humans jettisoned from their buildings. He had grown so confident that he had begun to think of his journey back to the Center Kingdom as a matter more of mere time than of difficulty.

  His optimism dimmed as he approached the bridge and began to understand is sheer colossal size. From far away it had seemed large but comprehensible. But as Patch grew ever closer, he began to realize that the towers of the bridge rivalled the mountains around his homeland for size, and its length was greater than that of the Center Kingdom itself. It would take Patch a full day to cross. And there was nothing green or growing on this bridge; it was solid metal and concrete.

  The bridge's anchor was a gargantuan concrete block surrounded by a green area that reminded Patch of his home. This area had grassy fields, trees, bushes, and hills; and it was divided by wasteland strips, home to several human buildings, and patrolled by snarling death machines. From the grassy heights above the edge of the great waters, Patch could see the mountains of the Center Kingdom glittering in the distance. The sight of his home warmed his heart, but also made him feel oddly small and adrift. He had never in all his life been able to stand on the ground and see so far. The vastness of the world spread out before him made himself and his home seem tiny and irrelevant.

  The air here was clear and free of any taint, the sun was warm, the food was plentiful, and the sparrows Patch chatted with briefly seemed perfectly normal. (They were unable to keep a thought in their heads for more than a few heartbeats, but for sparrows that is perfectly normal.) He seemed to have escaped the Kingdom of Madness without actually leaving the island. And there were squirrels here, he smelled them and saw them in the distance. It was a place that he could safely stay.

  But he knew if he did, he would see every day, in the distance, the mountains that surrounded his home, and the bridge that led to them.

  After taking in the wide hilltop view of the world, the great waters and the islands and the mighty bridge, and committing the view to his memory book, Patch turned back from his panoramic view and scampered towards the gigantic concrete stump from which the bridge extended. He assumed there would be some way a nimble squirrel could climb on to the bridge.

  But he was wrong. The more he investigated, the more impervious to squirrels the bridge seemed. The walls of its base were solid concrete, unclimbable. Wasteland strips full of grumbling death machines curved, and coiled, and led up and into the bridge, but while Patch was willing to cross wasteland if absolutely necessary, he knew that travelling along it would be suicidal. Even if Patch swam out to where the mighty towers of the bridge were sunk, even if he survived the huge waves and powerful currents of the great water, the towers too were unclimbable. There was simply no way up, much less any way across. He would have to stay on this island forever.

  10. Glaw

  On his thirteenth morning on the island of the Kingdom of Madness, Patch stood on a rock on the very edge of the great water, so close he could have wetted a paw, and stared at the shining mountains far away. The water smelled of salt. He was wistful, not foolhardy, and so he stood very near a waterfront bush he could hide in, and he often looked up to the sky, and around to the land, to check for dangers. Around him he saw only seagulls, circling in the sky, crying to one another in their plaintive voices:

  I'm so hungry! Where are the fish?"

  "Have you seen fish? I'm still hungry!"

  "I want more fish!"

  A pigeon, to Patch's surprise, drifted down from the sky, and landed on a rock beside him. "Excuse me," the pigeon said, "is your name Patch?"

  "Daffa!" Patch cried. "You remember me!"

  "Yes, of course. That is to say, I remember your face, and your name. I'm afraid I can't really remember anything we talked about. But I can take you exactly to the place where we met, I remember that perfectly. I'm looking for my home. Have I told you that?"

  "Yes."

  "I usually have," Daffa sighed. "What are you looking for? Fish? Do squirrels eat fish?"

  "No. I'm looking for a way home to the Center Kingdom. But I can't find a way up to the bridge."

  "Why not just fly? - oh, I see. Oh, you're just like me, Patch, you poor thing, looking for your home and knowing you'll never find it."

  "I will so," Patch said stubbornly. "And so will you."

  "That's very nice of you to say. Though I don't see how you can possibly get back to the Center Kingdom. But I'll tell you what, I'll go up and ask the seagulls if they know a way, they certainly understand these waters and bridges better than I."

  Daffa flapped up into the sky, and approached a few of the circling seagulls. A little while later, he returned, followed by a seagull.

  "Patch, this is Glaw," Daffa said. "He's very helpful for a gull. Glaw, Patch wants to know… Good heavens. I'm terribly sorry, Patch, I've forgotten what you want."

  "I want to get up to the bridge," Patch said.

  "Bridge?" Glaw asked. "Oh no. You don't want bridge."

  "What's wrong with it?"

  "No fish on bridge."

  Patch blinked. "But -"

  "No fish on land. You can't dive. For groundling like you, no fish at all."

  I'm actually -"

  "Fish on boat, maybe," Glaw said doubtfully. "With humans. Humans go into boat for fish."

  "What's a boat?" Patch asked.

  Glaw pointed a wing at a passing human monstrosity, a metal half-shell as big as a mountain, that was drifting beneath the bridge and out into the endless waters. "Like that. But small."

  Patch sat up straight on his hindlegs as he began to understand. "You mean get onto a human thing."

  "Humans pull fish onto boat. Sometimes they drop fish from boat. Sometimes they go away from boat and leave fish."

  "A boat. Go with the boat across the waters. Don't go on the bridge at all."

  "No fish on bridge," Glaw agreed.

  "Where can I find a boat?" Patch asked.

  Glaw said, "I'm hungry. I want fish."

  "Please, Glaw," Patch said. "Please. I have to find my home. I have to find a boat. Please help me if you can."

  "That's so terribly moving," Daffa said softly. "There's nothing sadder than an animal without a home. Oh, help him, Glaw, do help him."

  After a long moment, Glaw sighed with resignation and said, "I show you boat."

  11. The Boat

  The journey to the boat was difficult. It was not far away, and Glaw simply flew there, but between the bridge and the boat there stood a large, dense thicket of bushes and brambles like nothing Patch had ever seen before. There was no sky-road, he could not climb on their thorny branches, instead he had to run through their stalks. The bushes soaked up so much of the sunlight that the ground beneath was almost totally dark. Patch felt like a rat in an underground warren. He had to navigate by the contours of the ground, and by the time he finally emerged on the other side of the thickets, both Glaw and Daffa had tired of (or forgotten) his quest, and disappeared.

  But he saw the boat. In fact he saw many of them. Humans had lashed together a hundred dead trees into something like a very large, flat log that protruded from the land into the great waters, and leashed to this log there were a dozen boats. There was a smell of fish as Patch approached, but there were no humans in sight, nor any animals except for gulls high above and a few frogs. Patch would have quizzed the frogs about which boat was best, but he spoke no Amphibian.

  A rusting wire fence surrounded the pebbled field from which the boat-log extended. Patch climbed up and down it easily, although he had to take care while crossing the barbed, thorny strands of wire along its top. The air of the boat-log smelled of fish
and the salty waters. Patch ran along its length, pausing at each boat in turn. All of them were the length of a smallish tree. All of them smelled foul and were jumbled full of human-things. One of them, however, smelled more powerfully of fish than the others. Patch decided that this one would be best.

  The boat rocked back and forth on the waters, moving unpredictably, and Patch's leap onto it nearly went awry. He righted himself and looked for a hiding place. On either side of the boat, near its floor, tubular hollows ran up the length of the vessel. Near the front of the boat they disappeared into its interior walls, into spaces almost like dreys. These spaces seemed perfect for hiding - except for the foul, oily smell that reminded Patch of death machines.

  Patch waited a long time in this boat. He could not get used to its ceaseless trembling and rocking, or the way it sometimes bumped against the boat-log it was leashed to. It was like an earthquake that would not stop, and Patch wanted to get off, back to the boat-log or better yet onto land, even though this was his only way home. He was on the verge of giving up and abandoning the boat when he heard the growls of an approaching death machine.

  After the death machine fell silent, human footsteps clumped along the boat-log, along with the clicking sounds of something else. Patch waited anxiously. He nearly cried out when the whole boat suddenly tilted, then began to rock violently, as a human boarded the boat. He wondered suddenly what he was doing hiding in this horrible and horribly dangerous human thing. Had any squirrel ever done anything so mad and stupid before? Had the food and water of the Kingdom of Madness infected him as well? It would have been better by far to have stayed on the island.

  Patch caught a whiff of two new scents, along with those of salt and fish and death-machines. The first was that of a human. But the second made him go weak with terror. It was the scent of a dog. The clicking sounds he had heard approaching had been dog claws. There was a dog on the boat.

  An enormous, rattling snarl erupted from all around Patch, and the whole boat began to shake. Patch's teeth began to chatter, whether from dread or the constant, bone-jarring vibration he did not know. Then he sensed motion in his gut. They were moving out into the great waters, and moving faster than Patch had ever moved before, except perhaps when falling. The boat began to bounce choppily up and down, knocking Patch's head painfully against the ceiling of the hollow in which he hid. Patch curled up into a ball, closed his eyes, and trembled with fear.

  12. The Great Waters

  Eventually, after a period so nightmarish Patch had no idea how long it lasted, the motion and vibrations slowed and stopped. Patch felt like his brains had been scrambled and his muscles turned to mush, and his head hurt from the oily death-machine smells all around him. He could tell they were still on the waters from the way the boat continued to rise and fall. It moved more gently now, for which he was grateful.

  He heard a dog's voice in the very great distance: "What's this? What's this? What's this?"

  After a moment Patch realized it was not a dog in the very great distance. It was the dog very near to him, the dog on the boat. It sounded faraway because the awful rattling noise had driven Patch almost deaf.

  "Master, there's something!" the dog cried out. "Master, there's something! Something here, something here … "

  Patch froze.

  "Squirrel!" the dog howled. "Squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel! Kill it and eat it! Kill it and eat it! Kill it and eat it!"

  The dog's snout thrust into the opening of the hollow in which Patch hid. The dog's fangs gleamed in the dim light, less than a squirrel-length away from Patch, and it drooled with homicidal lust. Patch whimpered.

  "Kill you and eat you! Kill you and eat you!" it shouted at Patch, its voice a bit muffled, for it was half-muzzled by the hollow's narrow walls. The dog tried to push its head all the way into the hollow, and its fangs clashed together as it tried to catch Patch between them, but it was a large dog and its head was too big.

  The dog's head was suddenly pulled away. Patch heard the complex, pulsating sounds of a human voice. Then a human head was at the end of the hollow, and a human eye was staring at him. Patch tried to retreat even deeper into the hollow, but he was already at its end.

  The human head retreated. It was briefly replaced by that of the howling, blood-maddened dog. Then the dog was pulled away again - and a long metal branch was thrust into the hollow. The branch stabbed and slashed at Patch. Its end was dull but it was wielded with such force that Patch had only two choices; run away, along and past the metal branch, out of the hollow and into the open boat, where the dog and human waited for him; or stay and be battered to death.

  He intended to stay nonetheless - but the branch got behind him and dragged him out of the end of the hollow. And suddenly there was sunlight on Patch's face, and a human standing above him wielding the metal branch, and a large dog leaping at him, snarling with bloodlust, its fanged maw open wide as if it intended to swallow Patch whole.

  Patch jumped. There was no thought in this jump, only instinct. The jump carried him over the dog's head, so close that his paws grazed its ear, and onto a little platform, about the same height as the dog, made of a strange slick material. It was shaped a little like the benches of the Center Kingdom where humans often sat. Patch's second jump, as the dog turned its head to bite at him, carried him over the rest of the dog's body onto the floor of the boat. The human's foot lashed out and Patch barely sidestepped. His third jump took him onto another platform, at the back of the boat; and his fourth carried him onto the very edge of the boat, the thin wall of its half-shell, where he perched precariously for a long and dizzying moment.

  The boat was deep in the midst of the great waters. The mountains of the Center Kingdom were nowhere to be seen. Nor were the towers of the great bridge. In the distance Patch saw a single strip of land; otherwise there was only water, extending forever in all other directions.

  "Kill you and eat you!" the dog bellowed as it sprinted across the boat. The human came behind it, swinging its metal branch back and forth with deadly strength. The dog crouched for a running jump, and its mouth opened for a killing bite.

  Patch had no choice. He leaped into the water. It was shockingly cold.

  "Kill you and eat you!" the dog screamed from the boat, as Patch paddled desperately away. "Kill you and eat you!"

  Patch swam. At first his only thought was to get away from the boat as fast as he could. But as the dog's maddened cries dwindled away, thought slowly replaced terror in his mind, and Patch realized he had to swim towards land. He could not see the land. He could not see anything but enormous waves ten times his height, and the cloud-streaked sky above. But sometimes, during quiet moments in the constant tumult of the waves, he heard the sounds of gulls, and he swam towards those sounds.

  He swam for a very long time. He floated naturally, his tail served as an excellent rudder, and paddling with all four limbs he made good time for his size; but he had so very far to go. He grew cold, and then freezing. He grew thirsty, and then desperately thirsty, but he knew he could not drink the salt water that shrivelled his lips and withered his tongue. He grew weary, and then desperately exhausted, but he knew he could not allow himself to rest, despite the shooting pains in all four of his churning legs. The sun began to sink. This aided his navigation but frightened him greatly. Patch knew he would not survive a night in the waters.

  The gull-sounds grew louder. He began to see gulls arcing through the air above him on the rare occasions when he raised his head from his fog of exhaustion. Then his right foreleg started to cramp so much it simply would not move, and he had to angle his tail carefully to avoid swimming in circles. The character of the waves that carried him changed, they grew choppier, topped with foam, more urgent and unpredictable in their movements, and though this meant he was coming closer to land, it also made it more difficult to fight his way through the ebb and tug of their currents.

  The clouds were red with a dying sun when Patch rode the crest of an
unusually high wave and saw land in front of him. When he finally staggered out of the water onto a sandy beach, on legs near total collapse, the sun had been almost extinguished. He barely managed the short walk up the sand, into the thickets of tough grass that grew in the dunes above the beach, and there he collapsed, too tired to be thankful for his life.

  Chapter 3

  The Ocean Kingdom

  1. The Beach

  Patch was woken by the rattling sound of wind in the dry dune grass. The sun was warm and the beach was swept by a wind so strong that it lifted little tendrils of sand above the ground. The grass around him was like none he had ever seen before; golden and brown, wide-stalked, the roots of its blades matted and woven together like an enormous spiderweb sunk into the sand.

  Patch was cold, and starving, and desperately thirsty. He had used almost all of his strength to cross the great waters. But there was no food on the beach. All he smelled was salt air and dry grass. He walked inland, moving slowly, so weak that it was difficult to ascend the sandy dunes. He had to rest for some time after climbing the small wire fence he came across, a fence he would normally have bounded across without thinking. Patch knew as he limped forward that if danger found him now, he would never be able to run away.

  As he continued inland the grasses grew thicker and were joined by bushes and vines. He came across a vine with shining leaves and bright, tasty-looking berries - but its smell made his tail stiffen, and he steered around it. As the sand turned into earth, he found a few moist shoots and flowers, and devoured them, but they were not enough to satisfy his hunger or slake his thirst.

  Then the wind changed, and he smelled two things. Fresh water, and a cat.

  Normally Patch would have avoided the cat-smell. Cats were bigger and faster than squirrels, and far more vicious and dangerous; and while birds, mice and rats were their preferred prey, squirrels were not so different. But there was fresh water near this cat - and, too, cats often lived near humans, and Patch was far more skilled at surviving in human lands than in this desolate wilderness.