Sky Wolves (6 page)

That was all she managed to say before plunging through the door on the other end of Checkers’s lead. Checkers had just succeeded in dragging her through the outsize dog flap John and Freda had installed in their back door when he caught sight of Jenny and skidded abruptly to a halt.

‘What?’ he said, staring at Boris. ‘Who?’ Then ‘Why?’ And he was so surprised, he completely forgot to bark.

Boris was still grappling with the first of these questions, and Aunty Dot was still picking herself up, but Sam said, ‘This is Jenny, Checkers.’

Checkers pushed his nose forward and sniffed a scent
that, while dog-like, was like no other dog scent he had ever sniffed. He could smell stars in it, a whole universe of stars, and a vision came into his mind of a vast tree, its branches spreading into the sky. Then he found himself standing next to Boris, and gazing deep into the little dog’s dark and fathomless eyes, and a great calmness entered him. He felt as tall as a mountain and twice as still.

‘
Dear friend,’
said Jenny, ‘
you are a natural warrior, with the great gift of courage.’
Then she looked at both Boris and Checkers.
‘You belong together,’
she said,
‘and together you will accomplish great things.’

Checkers didn’t fully understand this, and Boris didn’t even try, but both of them felt that Jenny was speaking to the depths of their being, saying only what they had always already known. Boris felt himself grow strong and patient as a tree, while Checkers felt as though he came from a long line of the bravest dogs that had ever lived. He didn’t move or bark, but stood still as a statue, as one who has waited for his destiny to call and, now that it had, wanted only to know what to do with it. He could see that in other circumstances all his tremendous qualities, his keen sense of smell, his boundless energy, his reckless courage and determination, would win him praise rather than getting him constantly into trouble. He saw those other circumstances, and a whole other world, in Jenny’s eyes, and right then and there he gave her his heart.

John and Freda had never seen him calm before.

‘Look at that!’ said John, astonished. ‘Is he ill?’ For Checkers normally dealt with strange dogs by trying to eat them.

‘No,’ said Aunty Dot, smiling and petting Checkers. ‘He
isn’t ill. He’s just met Jenny, that’s all. And Jenny’s no ordinary dog.’

‘Can I walk Checkers,
please
?’ said Sam, and while John and Freda started to protest that if they couldn’t hold Checkers on a lead, then a child certainly couldn’t, Aunty Dot thought about it, then smiled and said he could give it a try. And Sam walked, holding both Checkers and Jenny, while Aunty Dot took Gentleman Jim and Boris, and Pico of course, who was in her pocket, and as long as he was walking with Jenny, Checkers behaved perfectly, just like a dog in a show. John and Freda watched, open-mouthed, as they disappeared out of the drive and on to the busy street.

‘Now,’ said Aunty Dot, ‘there’s only Flo.’

Normally, Aunty Dot wouldn’t attempt to walk six dogs together, but Flo’s house backed on to the croft, where they could all be set free, and since they were all behaving so well, and Jenny was having such a miraculous effect on them, she thought she might as well meet the last of the dogs she regularly walked.

‘Who’s Flo?’ Sam wanted to know, and Aunty Dot told him she was a poodle, though one of the bigger ones, standard-sized. ‘I haven’t introduced you to her yet,’ she said, ‘because she’s a very nervous dog. Very nervous indeed. But you never know,’ she added mysteriously. And there’s no time like the present. We’ll give it a try, shall we? We’ll go and pick up Flo.’

Flo peered nervously around the lounge doorway.

‘Easy does it,’ she said to herself. She stepped very cautiously into the hallway.

‘One step at a time,’ she murmured, then retreated in terror as she stood on a creaking board.

‘Forward and onward,’ she quavered, sidestepping the board this time.

‘Walk, don’t run.’

‘So far, so good,’ she encouraged herself as she reached the dining-room door and nothing untoward sprang out at her, and she remembered another of her owner’s many proverbs.

‘Fortune favours the brave.’

Flo was one of the very few standard poodles who had mastered the art of tiptoeing. She tiptoed now past the utility room and into the kitchen, where the smell of breakfast temporarily overcame her fear. She glanced nervously to left and right, then trotted swiftly towards her dish.

Unfortunately, like most standard poodles, she had not mastered the art of glancing upwards for danger. If asked about this, she would probably say that she had enough to cope with at eye level. But in this case, not looking upwards was a serious mistake. Just as she reached her dish, her jaws opening in anticipation, the Thing from the Topmost Cupboard sprang.

It sounded like this: ‘YEEEOAWWWWOOEEEEEIOW!!!!’

And it sank all its claws into Flo’s back.

Flo tore up the stairs yelping, and belted back down them again howling, but the thing on her back only released its hold when she collapsed on the carpet and rolled over in an attitude of abject submission. Then it stalked into the kitchen with its tail twitching and calmly ate her breakfast.

Poor Flo! It was a while before she could even summon the courage to sit up. And when she did, she realized that she had widdled, in her terror, all over the carpet. It was enough to make a dog weep, especially a dog as naturally fastidious as Flo.

The thing had turned away from her dish and was glaring around suspiciously with its luminous eyes. Flo barely had the presence of mind to cower behind the dining-room door as it stalked past, radiating pure evil, its yellow eyes scouring the hallway as though still hungry for another chance of attack.

‘It’s just a cat, Flo,’ Gentleman Jim had told her one morning when Aunty Dot was walking them both and Flo had been particularly distressed.

‘It’s not a cat!’ Flo insisted. ‘It’s a horrible stripy –
thing
– and it’s got fangs and – and ’

‘It’s a
cat
,’ repeated Gentleman Jim.

‘Oh, no, it can’t be,’ Flo quavered. ‘You haven’t seen its eyes. Its eyes are – horrible – monstrous. They – they glow in the dark – like – like ’

‘Like cat’s eyes?’ queried Gentleman Jim, but there was no convincing Flo that the ferocious being that had taken over her household was, in reality, no more than a cat.

Gentleman Jim tried a different approach. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You are actually bigger than it is, you know.’

But Flo’s terror had apparently affected her eyesight.

‘Oh, no – I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘You haven’t seen it – it’s
huge! Much
bigger than me.’

In vain did Gentleman Jim point out that for a cat to be much bigger than a standard poodle, it would have to be a tiger, and though Flo’s owner, Myrtle Sowerbutts, was a renowned eccentric who dyed her pet poodle pink to match her own clothes, and had her clipped into unusual geometric shapes like a kind of abstract topiary, even she might draw the line at taking a tiger in.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘if a tiger had jumped on you from
the top of the kitchen cupboard, you’d hardly be here to tell the tale.’

Eventually Flo was forced to concede the point. ‘Well – it might not be
quite
as big as me,’ she admitted. ‘But it’s much,
much
meaner.’

Life had been fine, a little scary but manageable, before her owner, for no good reason that Flo could think of, had taken in this foul predator and assassin.

‘She calls it
Henry
,’ she said, as though this was like calling the Prince of Darkness Fred. ‘She says her sister
left
it to her. In her will!’

It was true that the Sowerbutts were notoriously eccentric. Myrtle’s sister, Holly, had left her house to the cats’ home and her cat to Myrtle, and though everyone, including Myrtle, thought that this should probably have been the other way round, there were no real grounds for contesting the will. And since it was the only thing she had been left, Myrtle seemed determined to keep it.

‘But it’s ruining my life!’ Flo said, almost in tears as they approached her home again. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this!’

And it was true that under the fantastically clipped pink and purple mane, Flo was actually getting quite thin. Whereas the cat was getting fatter and fatter, because it always ate Flo’s food.

While Jenny was being taken for her first walk, Flo was clinging to the skirting boards, feeling the reassuring texture of wallpaper on her back. If she could just make it to her bed and lie down for a little while, she might feel better. She was quite exhausted after the morning’s trauma. She
nosed the door to the front room open carefully and sniffed.

‘Feel the fear and do it anyway,’ she reminded herself – this was another of Myrtle’s favourite sayings. The coast seemed to be clear.

‘Lightning doesn’t strike twice,’ she remembered, as she tiptoed behind the back of the settee, towards her bed.

Nothing. The clock ticked; the shadows did not move. Vastly reassured, Flo reached her bed and was about to sink down gratefully, when the bed itself rose before her into a huge and monstrous cloud of ginger fur with staring eyes, making a noise like the snakes around a Gorgon’s head would make if they all hissed at once.

At first Flo wondered whether she was having a heart attack, but then she realized it wasn’t her heart but the beast that was attacking. It flung itself at her face and she careered round the house backwards, totally unable to see, hear or think. The smell of it was enough to render her unconscious. And in fact she
did
seem to pass out for a moment, and when she came to she was somehow locked in the cellar, alone.

Poor Flo stayed in the cellar a long time, because Myrtle was out with a friend, and when she came back she was rather tipsy and had completely forgotten that she had a dog. She opened a tin of dog food for the cat and fell asleep with him on her lap. Eventually she woke out of a dream in which the cat was barking at her and looked at him in surprise.

‘Henry?’ she said.

At the same time there was a knock on the front door.

‘It’s only me,’ called Aunty Dot. ‘I’ve come to take Flo for a walk.’

‘Flo!’ said Myrtle, remembering all at once that she had a dog.

‘Just thought Fd take her out for an evening constitutional,’ said Aunty Dot, letting herself in.

It was part of Myrtle’s eccentricity that, though she had a dog, she wouldn’t walk. She didn’t like the outdoors at all – there was too much of it, she always said. She had an elderly chauffeur called Ryan who drove her everywhere, even next door, and she had hired Aunty Dot to walk Flo twice a day.

‘Well, where is she, then?’ said Aunty Dot, and finally Flo was extracted from the cellar.

‘How did she get down there?’ said Myrtle.

And ‘How did she lock the door?’ said Aunty Dot, and she looked towards Henry, who squatted with eyes like yellow slits, twitching his evil tail.

‘Well, never mind,’ said Aunty Dot, when Henry failed to speak. ‘Come along now, Flo dear, there’s someone I want you to meet.’

Poor Flo hung back, cringing and trembling. ‘Will it hurt?’ she asked, but Aunty Dot coaxed her to the door with dog biscuits, and then to the end of the garden, where she could make out her friends, Gentleman Jim and Pico, and a boy with reddish hair, who might have been alarming, but he was standing on the other side of the gate.

‘I’ve had the most terrible time,’ she started to say. ‘I’ve –oh!’

Because the boy had opened the gate and there was Jenny.

Instantly Flo cringed, her whole body clinging to the earth, as though fearing it might rock dangerously and
fling her off. There are not many dogs who close their eyes when meeting a potential threat, but Flo had an optical condition that made frightening objects appear five times larger than their actual size and so had discovered that it was best. She shut her eyes tightly and clung to the lawn.

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ said Aunty Dot, and Sam and the dogs tried to tell her that it was all right. But Jenny trotted right up to Flo and touched her nose.

Instantly Flo’s nostrils were filled with the scent of meadows and summer streams and, well, kindliness. It is not often that one female dog takes instantly to another, but the scent in Flo’s nostrils said ‘friend’. Very cautiously, she opened her eyes and realized that Jenny was not, in fact, the size of a pony.

‘
Dear friend
,’ said Jenny, in the voice that was at once strange and instantly recognizable, as though Flo had been listening to it for years,
‘you will be an invaluable companion through the peril that is to come.’

‘P-peril?’ stuttered Flo, getting ready to close her eyes again. ‘I’m not very good at peril. I-I’m a bit of a coward actually.’

‘Cowardice is just one of the forms of wisdom,’
said Jenny.
‘And it is your wisdom and perception that we need.’

‘Oh,’ said Flo. It was not often that she received a compliment and she was so taken by surprise that she forgot to ask, ‘For what?’ Instead she was remembering that poodles are in fact among the most intelligent of dogs, and that her great-grandfather had been a leading performer in a circus, and that Flo herself learned new tricks very rapidly. She felt suddenly aware of the vast possibilities of
her brain, and she raised herself up properly, feeling brave enough to look all around.

‘There you are,’ said Aunty Dot triumphantly. ‘Jenny’s even made friends with Flo!’

‘I told you she was special,’ said Sam, and Aunty Dot said she didn’t need telling that.

Between them they led all the dogs on to the croft and watched as they sniffed and explored, and Checkers ran round and round in circles, but sooner or later they all returned to Jenny.

‘It’s like they’re making a pack,’ said Sam, and in fact, this was exactly what they were doing.

‘
My friends
,’ Jenny said, ‘
I can see that all of you are sad, for one reason or another. That is because you are not leading the lives you were born to lead. None of you can live out your full potential. But all that is about to change. You are all members of my pack.
’